If you will bear with me for half an hour …”

He had motioned toward the deck chair next to him. I gladly accepted his invitation. We had no neighbors. Dr. B. removed his reading glasses, put them aside, and began:

“You were good enough to mention that you remembered my family name, since you are from Vienna yourself. But I hardly think you will have heard of the legal firm which I directed with my father and later on by myself, for we didn’t take cases you might have read about in the papers and deliberately avoided new clients. The truth is that we didn’t have a proper legal practice, but limited ourselves to legal consulting for the large monasteries with which my father, formerly a representative of the clerical party, was closely associated, and especially to administering their estates. We were also entrusted with managing the finances of certain members of the imperial family (I’m sure it’s all right to talk about this, now that the monarchy has passed into history). These connections with the court and the clergy—an uncle of mine was the Kaiser’s personal physician, another an abbot in Seitenstetten—went back two generations; we had only to keep them up, and it was a quiet, you could even say ‘silent’ employment that was granted us through this inherited commission, requiring little more than the strictest discretion and dependability, two traits which my late father possessed in the highest degree; in fact his prudence enabled him to preserve the considerable fortunes of his clients during the years of the inflation and the economic collapse that followed. Then when Hitler took the helm in Germany and began his raids on the property of the Church and the monasteries, we handled a variety of negotiations and transactions (some of them even originating abroad) to save at least the movable assets from being impounded. The two of us knew more about certain secret political negotiations of the Curia and the imperial family than the public will ever learn of. But the very inconspicuousness of our office (we didn’t even have a sign on the door), as well as the care with which we both pointedly avoided monarchist circles, provided the safest protection from unwanted inquiries. During all those years, in fact, none of the Austrian authorities ever suspected that secret couriers were collecting and depositing the imperial family’s most important mail right at our modest office on the fourth floor.

“Now the Nazis, long before they built up their armies against the world, had begun to organize an equally dangerous and well-trained army in all neighboring countries—the legion of the disadvantaged, the neglected, the aggrieved. Their ‘cells’ were tucked away in every office, every business; their informers and spies were everywhere, all the way up to the private chambers of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. They had their man even in our obscure office, as I unfortunately failed to discover until it was too late. He was admittedly no more than a miserable, useless clerk, whom I had only hired on the recommendation of a vicar in order to give the office the outward appearance of an ordinary business; in fact we used him for nothing but innocent errands, had him answer the telephone and file papers—completely insignificant and harmless ones, that is. He was never allowed to open the mail, I typed all the important correspondence myself without making copies, I took any essential documents home and shifted all confidential meetings to the priory of the monastery or my uncle’s surgery. Thanks to these precautions, the informer learned nothing vital; but some unfortunate accident must have told the vain and ambitious fellow that he was not trusted and that all sorts of interesting things were going on behind his back. Perhaps in my absence one of the couriers had carelessly spoken of ‘His Majesty’ instead of (as agreed) ‘Baron Fern,’ or the scoundrel disobeyed his instructions and opened some letters—in any event, he got orders from Berlin or Munich to keep an eye on us before I had time to become suspicious. Only much later, when I had been incarcerated for a long time, did I remember that his initial laziness at work had turned into sudden zeal during the last months and that on repeated occasions he had practically insisted on mailing my correspondence. So I cannot absolve myself of a certain carelessness. But, after all, didn’t Hitler and his bunch insidiously outmaneuver even the greatest diplomats and military men? Just how closely and lovingly the Gestapo had been watching over me for all that time became blatantly clear when I was arrested by the SS on the very evening that Schuschnigg announced his abdication, one day before Hitler marched into Vienna. Luckily I had been able to burn the most critical papers as soon as I heard Schuschnigg’s farewell speech on the radio, and (really at the last minute, before those fellows beat my door down) I sent the rest of the documents, including the all-important records of the assets held abroad for the monasteries and two archdukes, over to my uncle, carried hidden in a laundry basket by my trusty old housekeeper.”

Dr. B. paused to light a cigar. In the flare of light I noticed a nervous twitching at the right corner of his mouth, something that had struck me earlier. I saw now that it was repeated every few minutes. The movement was a fleeting one, hardly more than a flicker, but it gave his entire face a peculiar restlessness.

“You’re probably thinking that now I’m going to tell you about the concentration camp where all those loyal to our old Austria were taken, about the humiliations, torments, ordeals I suffered there. But nothing of the kind occurred.