Three Women in a Mirror (45 page)

A tissue of lies.

Hanna was raised by her birth parents, Maximilian and Alma. She knew this, I can testify to it; since I was ten years older I had known her from the time she was in her cradle.

She invented this fiction after the accident that cost her parents their lives.

After Maximilian and Alma died, she did everything she could to detach herself from them. Not only did she hardly mention her parents, but she erased all trace of them—photographs, portraits, favorite objects. Even the fortune they left her—the millions that my father, a distinguished accountant, managed for her until she came of age—was something she paid no attention to. Coming from them, it was gold that burned her fingers. You are better informed than I about the disastrous use she made of it, with her ruinous paperweight collection; in the end, she insisted on leaving you everything that remained when she went away from Vienna. From her last letters, I have gleaned that she attributed virtues to poverty, not for Christian reasons, but rather because through her austerity she was erasing the final traces of her parents.

What could have brought about such an attitude?

For years I have tried to understand, and I think that now I have found out why. In the letter I sent her in Vienna, I wrote not only the facts but also my theory. Her disproportionate reaction, and the amnesia that followed, tell me that I was surely right.

On a day in May when she was already eight years old, she read a book about Marie-Antoinette, the Queen of France. Why did she become so enthralled by such a dramatic life? I do not know. The succession of kingdoms, from Austria to France, and then Versailles, Paris, the Trianon, the carefree lifestyle, the luxury, the allure of beauty and entertainment, the extraordinary rise of an ordinary young woman—all of it must have impressed her far more than the ultimate beheading. Captivated by this enchanting female figure, Hanna went to her parents and informed them that she intended to be a queen. Initially they found this charming and they smiled, then they changed the subject, but when they saw how obsessed she was with the idea, they informed her that she could not become a queen if she was not a princess by birth.

“What? I'm not a princess? Why not?”

“Because we do not belong to the royal family.”

“Why not?”

“We do not have blue blood. Therefore, neither do you.”

Instead of accepting, Hanna went berserk. Her dream was collapsing. I had accompanied my father that day—he was the steward of the domain—and I must confess that, having no idea of the harmful consequences this childhood disappointment would have upon her, I smiled when I heard her stamp her foot and refuse to accept the truth.

To calm her down, Alma and Maximilian tried to explain the logic behind hereditary monarchies.

To no avail. Hanna continued her tantrum.

“Hanna,” concluded Maximilian, “you are very fortunate not to belong to the royal family. This way you will be free. If you were a princess, you would have duties and privileges, but no rights or autonomy.”

“I don't want to be free. I want to be a queen.”

Her parents began to rebuke her severely for her childish, obsessive anger.

The way she flew off the handle was most unexpected. She was at her wits' end, scowling with rage, foaming at the mouth, jabbing with her finger, when she said that in any event she knew perfectly well that she was not their daughter, that there had been a mistake at birth and she had been changed—she who was a true princess—with their own daughter, who was an idiot, and that her true family would soon realize and put an end to her ordeal. After that she added that she had never been able to stand them, that she hated them, that she was really very unhappy.

An intolerable scene, to be sure. And banal. All Hanna deserved was a good spanking. However, Alma and Maximilian, who had had great difficulty bringing this child into the world, took her puerile delirium very badly. Above all, they were saddened when she said she was unhappy. They were invited to a party and left the house without saying a word.

And we know what happened after that. As they made their way along a steep, rocky road, an enormous boulder hurtled down the slope and landed on their car. It crushed them. They died instantly.

That evening when my father, the first one to be informed of the disaster, came to inform little Hanna, she was still very angry.

“I'm glad,” she murmured, her only remark.

It was only the next day, when she did not see them at breakfast, that she understood that her father and mother would never come again.

The day of the funeral, she threw herself into the grave to cling to her parents' coffins. It was a wrenching moment I will never forget.

She wept continuously for three weeks.

Such extremes . . . Hanna exaggerated everything.

With hindsight, I believe that by sobbing in despair she was nursing a feeling of guilt. To have saddened and insulted her parents the last time she ever saw them must have filled her with shame. Perhaps she even felt they would have survived if she had been kind, if she hadn't wished for their disappearance . . .

In the years that followed she altered her behavior and stopped cultivating the memory of the deceased. She became colder. Almost unfeeling. Eventually, she acted annoyed if anyone spoke about them.

During adolescence, while speaking with a friend, she presented for the first time her theory that she had been adopted at birth.

At the time I didn't interfere, and I regret it. I was optimistic, and I saw something positive about this lie: Hanna did not mourn for her parents as much, and she placed her parents and her foster family—my father and me—on the same level. While her fabrication did reach my ears on more than one occasion, I confess that I was cowardly and never corrected her, as I was too afraid to arouse her grief.

Then I left home to marry Werner Bernstein. Several years later, Hanna married you.

I had underestimated the power of her lie. It had become a part of her life, a reality. Looking back, it explains why Hanna never fit in, either with herself or with others. She always felt like an imposter. She saw herself from a distance, and blamed herself, condemned herself.

In her letters she confided to me that to be happy in love, she needed to efface herself, to fall into anonymity and leave behind the person she was. But the person that she was fleeing from was not her, even though she believed it was. When she suffered from her identity, it was in fact a false identity she was suffering from. In her need to leave herself behind, there was a misunderstanding of which she was the source, but of which she was unaware.

Poor Hanna . . . no wonder her entire life became one of drifting.

 

Forgive me this long digression. My aim was not to tell you this, but rather to share with you what you undoubtedly have not heard about: Hanna's last days.

After seven years in Zurich she settled in Wallonia, a rich, prosperous, bourgeois region, where in order to survive she taught languages, and treated three patients using Sigmund Freud's method.

Oh, why didn't she go back to Austria? Or Germany? After the assassination in Sarajevo of our gentle Archduke Franz Ferdinand, she should have come back to the country of her birth. If she had, I would not be obliged to write to you now.

Hanna settled in Namur.

When, this summer, the Emperor declared war against Serbia to avenge his son —I do not believe the other explanations because I am a mother myself—Europe went up in flames. Because alliances had been made, countries have found themselves obliged to fight. Naturally, the conflict will not last, because our obvious superiority will crush the enemy, but in three months, this unrest has been the cause of many deaths.

As you may recall, our armies intended to stroll through Belgium, which is neutral territory, in order to reach France. Unexpectedly, however, The Belgians resisted. On the railway line leading to Brussels and Paris, one city, Liège, refused access, and bled our allies. And while the outcome was in our favor, thanks to the artillery and a Big Bertha—the Krupp cannon—we lost fifteen days and five thousand men. The German forces, surprised, vexed, and humiliated, legitimately determined the Belgians had violated their treaties.

Our soldiers viewed this Belgian opposition as illegitimate, because by serving France the Belgians had breached the pact of neutrality; therefore they embarked on a cleanup operation. Some people have called this a massacre, others a reprisal. As for me, I cannot express my views. As a patriotic woman and the mother of three children who have gone off to fight, I consider the operation was justified; as a woman, I regret the violence.

Hanna was killed by our own battalions. In the village of Gerpinnes where she had gone to visit a friend, she was shot down by retaliatory gunfire.

I later heard that she had not even tried to say she was Austrian, that she had not uttered a word in German, that she merely huddled together with the others in the group and shouted in French.

What was she thinking? What cause had she embraced? This was so unlike her, to become part of a community . . .

 

I am sending you the manuscript of the book she was writing. You will discover her final passion, Anne de Bruges, a beguine from the 16th century who also died in abominable circumstances, assassinated by the violence of her time.

In this forgotten person, known to her and her alone, Hanna had found a kindred spirit. When I read these poems—or rather the translations Hanna made of them—I can see my friend again—sparkling, hotheaded, generous, eager, inhabited by a great love she did not know what to do with. Moreover, on the pages where she describes this woman, Hanna has painted her own portrait. This will not surprise you: everyone knows a biography is a sincere autobiography. By thinking one is describing someone else, one can describe oneself openly.

With the help of psychoanalytic tools, Hanna tried to explain
The Mirror of the Invisible.
She identified sex and the surpassing of sex through mystical ecstasy, the nostalgia of union, but above all a premonition of modern theories regarding consciousness. I cannot explain all this to you here, because while I was under the impression I understood it as I was reading it, once I closed the manuscript my thoughts became confused, the arguments dissolved, and I found myself incapable of repeating them. Basically, Hanna reveals that Anne de Bruges was a precursor of Freud, because her quest led her beyond thought and beyond words in search of unconscious logic.

Although my role here is not to judge, I cannot help but mock her a little bit. Hanna's wild imaginings remind me of the game of look-alikes we used to play at my grandmother Pitz's house. In the picture gallery, we the living searched for our own features in the paintings of our ancestors. All that was needed was for a nose to tilt to the left for us to unearth the same characteristic in an ancestor from the 17th century; if the nose were turned up, another great-great-aunt would be called to the rescue. In short, every newborn child influenced his forebear, and every baby created a precursor.

In my opinion, Hanna was resorting to this same retrospective illusion by discovering Sigmund Freud's beginnings in Anne de Bruges.

It hardly matters.

I am entrusting you with this document, which she nearly finished. Hanna always praised you as a man of culture, with an interest in the arts, and I am sure you will make good use of it.

As for me, in these troubled months, I am no more than a mother and a patriot. My three sons are fighting at the front, and every day I wait for the newspaper with news of our victory. It will come soon. The war will be short, serious experts all agree on that.

With my respectful consideration,

 

Margaret Bernstein, née Pitz

She walked toward the square in Bruges where she would be executed.
The executioner went ahead, and as she stumbled over the cobblestones there were guards on either side.

The sharp, icy chill of springtime left her shivering. Her light linen smock did little to remove her impression that she was naked.

When she came around the corner, the crowd began to hurl insults at her.

She lowered her head. She could not help but hear them, but she did not want to see them. They were the ones, with their prejudice and obtuse certainty, with their simplistic ideas, who had led her to the stake.

Once they had arrived at the stake she lifted her head.

Is this how she was going to end? An ember among all those logs . . . Her entire body was shaking. She urinated on herself.

The executioner kept her from falling, then dragged her, almost inert, to the stake to tie her up.

She wanted to resist but her body suddenly went numb, and would not respond to either her will or her fear. She was already a corpse.

The executioner bound her to the stake.

She opened her eyes and was hit full in the face by the crowd's rancor, as if they were spitting at her.

She was suddenly aware of something crackling at her feet. A coil of smoke rose, then soon after, a long flame.

She screamed. The fear of death pierced her chest. She struggled, sobbed, called for help, sought a way out through the thickening opaque cloud, tried in vain to get away from the encroaching flames.

In vain.

Then she looked up at the sky and let out a final wrenching scream.

“Cut!”

A stuntman grabbed Anny in his arms to rescue her from the fire. Firefighters rushed over and extinguished the blaze.

The film crew paused to catch their breath after this unbearable scene. The extras took off their persecutors' masks and applauded the actress's performance. The cameramen and focus pullers put down their equipment to clap their hands.

In tears, Anny put on the dressing gown the wardrobe assistant handed to her, stepped into some fur-lined slippers, and reached for a hot coffee. She went to sit inside the tent where the director, his assistants, the producers, and the continuity girl were sitting among the control screens.