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159 pages

English

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'Memory's Ransom' draws the reader into a world of intrigue and astonishing reversals of fortune populated by a cast of compellingly memorable men and women. Opening with an assassination, the story begins with a mysterious encounter on a dark, rainswept roadside in war-torn Italy and concludes with a shattering incident on a beach in Portugal.This remarkable novel is a haunting story of secrets, love, deep friendship, loss and longing, set against the background of Imperial Vienna reduced by defeat to the size and poverty of a small parish; the rise of the Nazis, the terrors of 'Kristallnacht'; a breath-taking escape from occupied Europe; and of the way memory clings relentlessly to us.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	01 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839784484
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

MEMORY’S RANSOM
Graeme Fife

Memory’s Ransom
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874
www.theconradpress.com
info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839784-48-4
Copyright © Graeme Fife, 2022
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The book cover uses an image by M-Verlag Berlin / Peter Cornelius supplied by Alamy Stock Photo.
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For Rudolf Strauss 1913 – 2001, my special friend, a generous man of wide culture, deep knowledge, wisdom and good humour and his wife, Hanna, an artist, whose practicality, plain-spokenness and slightly guarded charm gave me Sybille in this book.

*
T he table was laid like an altar with the sacred vessels for the rite of the blood Mass: on a pristine white lawn cloth, three pistols, three grenades, six cyanide pills.
In silence, each of the six young men pulled on black leather gloves and, left hand raised in pledge, right hand over the heart, spoke the Slavic words of the oath in a tone strained by excitement and fever to get on with the job.
‘By the Sun which shines on me, by the Earth that feeds me, by God, by the Blood of my forefathers, by my Honour and by my Life: Union or Death.’
Their priest stroked each forehead with the side of his thumb, making the sign of the cross, and muttering: ‘In nomine domini, et filii, et spiritus sancti. Amen.’
As they picked up the weapons and the capsules, their passage to oblivion, a trance between living and almost certain extinction took them over. Better not to feel. Better to disengage from the world. Their testament to those for whom they acted this day would be a world changed, a world they surely would not see but a liberated world of which they’d dreamed.
They walked out into the city, light-headed, stomach congested, all at once sick with fear: decision faced reality. But fear must not count. That they had talked about. Fear did not count. Of the faces in the crowd they saw the features of none. Of the murder written in theirs, how could that, the obvious mark of Cain, pass notice? Resolve and purpose would erase it. Of the voices in the crowd they heard none individually, only a muffled clamour, a dull buzzing in their ears, a vague concussion of sound.
By slow degrees, seriatim, they took position: one stopped, the others walked on. The second stopped, the others walked on, until the sixth was at post and they formed a relay, a gauntlet of six opportunities to obliterate, bomb gives way to pistol gives way to bomb gives way to pistol…
The agonisingly slow-moving hands of the clock plucked at their nerves. Impatience, they’d been warned, impatience is the spawn of purgatory.
The cathedral bell struck the hour, counted out the booming chimes to ten o’clock , a resonance that hung awhile in the still air and then vanished into ever fainter echo and silence.
The crowd on either side looked down the empty boulevard. Suddenly, a great cheering erupted somewhere unseen and there, at the end of the broad avenue, appeared the open car, inching forward, towards them. In procession behind it, other cars. Cheering rippled along, accompanying the cavalcade as it passed up the avenue between the banks of the people waving and shouting.
The first bomb missed its target and exploded on a following car. The detonation still resounding, the lead car lurched on at racing speed.
Half an hour later, as if nothing so shocking had happened, the car came back, the open car, its passengers in plain sight, improbably heedless of more bombs, and drove towards the sixth pistol. The last assassin, scarce believing his luck, raised the gun and fired pointblank at the passengers in the gleaming black, open Double Phaeton, two bullets: one to the man’s jugular, the other into the woman’s stomach and the foetus she was carrying.
The wounds were beyond any doctor. As death began to close over him, the Archduke, a treason of blood spreading across his white uniform tunic, whispered to his wife: ‘Sofie, don’t die. Live for the children.’

1
28 June 1914. Vienna.
T he architectural confection that is Vienna lies in the baking oven-hot sun this torrid June day like a tray of ornately iced cakes.
The air clings, heavy with heat, the lemonade sellers are doing brisk business, the pavements burn to the touch like a hotplate. Viennese society is at its business, being on show, idling in open-air restaurants, listening to brass oompah oompah from bandstands, flirting, gossiping. The youthful captain of the 3rd regiment of Infantry, in full ceremonial uniform of the royal and imperial Austrian army, leans fondly to the young woman holding his arm. She does not so much walk as float, an airy fantasy of sheer muslin. He, a proud member of the aristocracy of arms, has never seen war. She has never fastened one of her own buttons. They stroll down an avenue of linden trees in the Innere Stadt, making for an outdoor cafe. Nothing disturbs their poise. They flit through shade and sun. Time passes, decays, runs out, but not for them. They do not work, they do not do anything. They are .
Away from the city’s grand imperial core, in the tenements, the five and six-storey terraces of apartment blocks, the anonymous living quarters of Vienna’s anonymous thousands, Vienna’s face is haggard.
Into Vienna streams a teeming goulash of ethnic peoples from across the vast Austro-Hungarian empire dominating Central Europe and the Balkans: from Bohemia to Bosnia, from Poland to the Veneto. People from the central mountains and the valleys, from the Black Sea, Mediterranean and Adriatic coastlines. People from along the mighty Danube, the great waterway which speaks German as an infant, Hungarian in its maturity and delivers its dying utterance in Romanian. From farm and shtetl, village and town, they tramp the roads to Vienna, the city of God, and become that other, careworn face of Vienna where they learn the lesson of silence by the privacies of neglect.
In the late afternoon of this sultry day two young men and two young women, twenty one years old, walked gaily, arm in arm, along Hießgasse, near the canal. They’d just quit the stuffy room in the university after the last of their final degree exams. But, hot as it was in the open air, the suffocating closeness of the exam room had been more oppressive. Pillaging exam-weary brains for the last scrapings of their revision had been an added trial but, oh, the wonderful, exuberant relief when the invigilator called time and they handed in their papers, stripped off the academic gowns and with them the much-overrated (in their view) consolations of philosophy and walked out into the summer, free to enjoy it at last.
They swung along the street, buoyant and careless, chattering, laughing, joking. They were making for an apartment at number 27, home of Georg. Waiting for them there was a celebratory picnic hamper packed with good things.
The straps of their satchels made damp patches on their shirts and the women’s tucked blouses.
Katharina said: ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Pinch me, tell me it’s true.’
‘It’s true, it’s true,’ said Helga.
‘Do you know what I’m looking forward to most?’ said Georg. ‘Reading a book I do not have to read, that no one has told me I must read.’
‘Starting with…?’ said Felix.
‘Haven’t decided. A novel. What about you?’
Katharina laughed. ‘Felix will read a theological tract because he will soooooooo miss the long hours of study,’ she said.
‘Actually, I won’t miss them one bit, I shall read…’
‘Let me guess,’ said Helga. ‘Goethe.’
‘Wrong.’
‘Nietzsche.’
‘No.’
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales?’
‘Why not? Anyway…I don’t know. One thing I certainly won’t read is the time.’
‘Well, I shall not open a book. I shall listen to music,’ said Helga. ‘Just music, all day long. And I shall do…nothing, for sweet it is to do nothing .’
At which Katharina broke free and began to skip. ‘And I shall out-sloth the sloth,’ she cried. She pulled a lecture notebook out of her satchel and, with a whoop, ran across to the canal, and skimmed it into the water, the pages fluttering like a stricken bird. She ran back, laughing, her long copper hair tumbling about her shoulders. ‘Come on you lot,’ she said, linking into the line again. She squeezed her elbows tight to her sides, tugged the others into a run and shouted: ‘Hurray, hurray, hurray.’
The main room in Georg’s apartment, lit by a broad bay window, whose casement he flung up as soon as they arrived, was furnished with an oval dining table, spread with a burgundy velvet cloth, a tapestry-draped chaise longue, two armchairs and a buffet on which stood a radio.
Helga flapped the collar of her blouse to cool herself, Felix polished the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief. Georg started to unpack the hamper. ‘Wine in the cooler, Felix, corkscrew on the side there. Napkins and cutlery in the top drawer over there, Katharina, Helga, plates and glasses in the kitchen dresser, bread board on top, knife in the drawer, I think.’
He began to spread the table with the packets of food, wrapped in waxed paper – sliced ham, a rye loaf bought fresh that morning, a jar of gherkins, cheese and a box of the famous marzipan of Lübeck, to which he was partial. ‘Was it not Thomas Aquinas himself who declared that marzipan does not break the fast?’ he said, but no one was listening.
The sound of a popping cork announced Felix who came back into the room with the bottle of Gruner Veltiner. ‘Glasses?’
‘Coming.’ Helga emerged from the kitchen.
‘Anyone want water?’ said Katharina. ‘Jug, Georg?’
‘Kitchen shelf.’
Katharina made for the kitchen and called out:‘Tumblers?’
‘In the dresser. T