The Eye of the Abyss Read Free Page B

his life in compartments. She listened, blonde hair falling in a loose wave over her face, dark-blue eyes brilliant and intense, her lips making continuous small flexing movements.
    You are beautiful tonight, he wanted to tell her, but the world went on and he said, ‘A Nazi is to come in.’
    â€˜Oh? I suppose it’s a great coup for Herr Wertheim?’
    â€˜It can be looked at like that.’
    â€˜How else?’
    He gave her a look. ‘Wertheims has always kept out of politics. This is a radically new direction. According to Wagner a radically wrong direction.’
    She pondered this. By upbringing she was thoroughly domesticated, thrived in the role, though her parents had sent her to Heidelberg to study the arts. She did read the Berliner Tageblatt, listened to the wireless, knew more than her husband about the reported affairs of the nation, and passed him pieces of information.
    He was feasting his eye on her. The loss of his other eye had shocked her. She’d been embittered, but seemed to have come to terms with it now. Out of the blue, he remembered the women in the crowd as the Fuehrer rode through the city in September: yearning faces. To shock him, Wagner had said: ‘Not a woman there with a dry pussy.’ Had he forgotten Helga was present?
    He sipped his coffee, put down his cup. She’d been watching him as though charting his thoughts. Her eyes were fond, but questioning.
    â€˜Politics, Franz? Surely it’s banking business? Where’s the dilemma?’
    â€˜You may be right. Though Wagner’s very upset.’
    â€˜Oh, not Wagner again.’
    She found Wagner too complex, too volatile for analysis
– an irritating subject. She didn’t approve of his bachelorhood. Nor would the Nazis. Schmidt smiled slightly. In contrast, she had this unworldly husband to face up to. He did live too much of an inner life, he knew, without any intention of changing it.
    After the meal he went to his small study, which was mainly furnished with pieces of his father’s, those his mother had so far released from her large apartment in an inner suburb. On the wall above his desk was a very old print of Durer’s Knight, Death and the Devil — a wedding gift from his father. He’d felt there’d been a special motive behind the gift. Grimly, watchfully, the knight rode through perilous times, a dangerous landscape. Had his father’s ancestor knight of the Teutonic Order resembled Dürer’s? Engulfed by the silence, he dropped into meditation, and didn’t pick up his Municipal Library research trails on the Teutonic Order, as this afternoon he’d not picked up those of his audits.
    He left the study. He stood in Trudi’s doorway listening for the tiny, efficient breathing. The darkish shapes of an orchestra of toys surrounded her. Could a dream transport her to anywhere more perfect than her everyday dominion?
    All quiet on the Western Front … he knew his colleagues, even his loyal Helga, considered he’d no sense of humour. He went on to the dressing room, and heard Helga moving in their bedroom. He’d told her of the new painting on Herr Wertheim’s wall. ‘Possibly Klimt, from Vienna,’ she’d murmured.
    Now for it. He took a glass and a bottle to the bathroom and mixed a salt solution. He bent his head, and expelled the glass eye into his palm. It shot out like a musket ball, he caught it adroitly. Better at this now. Carefully, holding his head back, he dribbled the solution into the socket, dabbed it with cottonwool. In a fresh glass of solution he washed the prosthesis. ‘A perfect match,’ Professor Hesse had said. He did this each week, and hadn’t let Trudi into the secret. He concentrated on the
tricky bit of getting it back in straight.
    Changed into pyjamas, he stood at the bedroom window hearing Helga now in the bathroom. The window was open onto the tiny, iron-railed balcony. The