Prelu de
ij
It was in the middle fi fties, a short while before the conclusion of the so- called State Treaty which led to the withdrawal of the Allied Occupation forces and fi nally restored Austria’s independence, that a small item appeared in the local news columns of the newspapers. It concerned a fatal accident which had occurred in the country house of an American millionaire. A young American society girl who had been on a visit to her Austrian relations had died of gunshot wounds while inexpertly handling a gun. The gun had gone off and killed her. There had been one eyewitness of this unfortunate event and one only, the Jesuit Father Ignatius Jahoda, who had been able to testify that no other person had been implicated in the shooting, which had been purely accidental. Since it had happened in the American zone of occupation, in a house belonging to an American citizen, and
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E lisabet h de Waal
the victim had also been American, no Austrian being involved, it had been deemed wise by all the authorities concerned to treat the occurrence, perhaps rather irregularly, on a quasi- extraterritorial basis – so as to put no strain on Austro-American relations in this last period of the occupation which would soon be coming to an end. Therefore the incident was officially considered closed. This did not prevent the tabloid newspapers from sending their young reporters into the district, the Forest District of Lower Austria, to fi nd out what they could of the surrounding circumstances. For the mere mention of a millionaire and a ‘society girl’ gave the incident a succulent flavour bound to be relished by the bulk of their readers more interested in the ‘human angle’ of such a story than in the legal niceties which had been applied to it. Millionaires are glamorous, always interesting to hear about, as if the mere fact of reading about them cast a glint of their gold over the drab mediocrity of the reader’s circumstances, and especially if there is a pinch of sly satisfaction when something unpleasant or scandalous happens to them. And ‘society girl’ has somewhat similar connotations. Typists and young lady shop assistants enviously absorb the aura of expensive clothes, long manicured fi ngernails and total freedom from routine, crowded tramcars and cheap meals, but death from gunshot wounds is equally unlikely to come their way. What the young reporters did find out was the name of the owner of the house, a Mr Kanakis, and of the girl victim
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The Exiles Return
of the accident, a Miss Larsen; also that several young men had been staying in the house at the time, and that another young man, not a guest, had been seen in the park in the early morning, although they had not been able to track him down; anyway, he had probably had nothing to do with the affair. But they did fi nd out that the girl was supposed to have been engaged to be married to Mr Kanakis. The names, both foreign ones, did not mean much to the Viennese public, with the exception of one elderly taxi driver whose cab was regularly stationed near the Opera. Having chewed over the information for a while, he turned to his young neighbour and said, ‘Kanakis? Of course I know who he is. He must be the son – no, the grandson – of the Kanakis for whom my father was coachman. They lived over there, in that house on the corner of the Ring, opposite the Hotel Bristol. They had a huge flat, the whole of the fi rst floor, my father said. Greeks they were, very rich. They kept their horses and carriage in the courtyard. I remember sitting on the box as a small boy with my grandfather when the horses had to be taken out for exercise while the family were away. That was much more exciting than this thing.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder at the taxicab. ‘Kanakis, of course I know who Kanakis is.’ His young colleague was only mildly interested in these reminiscences. ‘In any case, he seems to have landed himself in a proper mess,’ he commented, ‘shooting his fiancée. But the Americans have quashed the whole affair, luckily for him.’
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‘But he didn’t shoot her. It was an accident. They say.’ ‘How do you know? I bet he did. She was probably carrying on with one of the other young men in the house, and he was jealous. Very temperamental, these Greeks. Anyway, who cares?’
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