Kubizek remembered that Leo had just been buried and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m being insensitive. Your loss is far greater.”
Angela grimly said, “Yes, it is.”
With few job opportunities in Linz and, as far as she could see, no available men with the fortitude to marry a widow with three children, Angela finally was forced to move the family to Wien in
1913, finding work as a chambermaid in a one-star hotel. She still had not seen her half-brother for a long time, and she’d received only one letter, and that one so formal and unfamiliar it had seemed a form of sarcasm.
But Paula was becoming a weekly rebellion, and the children needed the firmness and safety of a father, even if he was one as childish and hot-tempered as their uncle. So Angela finally did what August Kubizek had failed to do earlier, going to the central registration office at police headquarters in Wien where she discovered that Adolf Hitler’s last known address had been at Sechshauserstrasse 58, where he’d listed his occupation as “Writer.” But that was three years ago. The only other police form he’d filled out had a blank line after “Address.”
She went to Sechshauserstrasse, where an older woman in the building thought she’d seen Hitler sleeping on a park bench one night, and suggested Angela try the hostelries that served the poor.
She did that, going systematically from one to the other over the next few days before finding on Meldmannstrasse a hostel known as the Männerheim. A few of the homeless men there remembered Hitler well, for his offensive clothes were so ferocious with lice that they’d been forced to hold him down to his bed while they stripped him and scrubbed all he owned with kerosene. Others remembered him shouting venomously against the Habsburgs, singing “The Watch on the Rhine” as he shaved, chilled to the bone because he’d sold his winter coat in the fall, concentrating on watercolor postcards of famous buildings that he’d sell to tourists on the street, or hanging around an occult bookshop in the Old Quarter. And that’s where she went next.
She wanted to exit as soon as she entered the shop, for it stank of old food and dirty shirts, flecks of dust hived in the fusty air, and an insane chaos of books and pamphlets were heaped on the floor or sloppily jammed in close bookcases that seemed a jolt away from tipping. Charts for astrology and alchemy were on the walls, and there were framed photographs of weird and glaring people she hoped she’d never meet. She heard a man say from a storage room, “Who is it?” She gave her name, and immediately the owner hurried forward through the draped doorway and with both his damp hands held hers as he introduced himself as Ernst Pretzsche. A hunched little man far smaller than Angela, he seemed all too fascinated that she was Hitler’s half-sister, inching ever closer to her as he talked about his dear friendship with Adolf and her own beauty, while the only thing she could think was that his face was like a toad’s. She asked him where Hitler was, but he seemed not ready to tell her yet. Holding his hand to his heart, he exclaimed, “To have such a genius as a relative! I won’t pretend I don’t envy you, Frau Raubal. Young Hitler! That self-confidence, that passion, that force of will, those mystical eyes!”
“Have you seen him lately?”
Pretzsche simply wiped out a cup with his handkerchief and filled it with cold coffee for her, then offered Angela the stool behind his cash register as he told her his own history, saying he’d grown up in Mexico where his father was an apothecary and a weekend anthropologist who’d studied the magic rites and blood cult of the Aztecs. “But you don’t like the black arts,” he said.
“You can tell?”
His facial expressions swam from one to another, as if holding on to just one was a feat of coordination. “You need not patronize me,” he said.
“You haven’t told me yet where Adolf is.”
“You don’t believe I know him?” he asked.
“But I do.”
“Stay!” he said, and scuttled down an aisle. “I’ll show you a book he sold back to me!” And he produced a foxed and tattered old copy of Parsival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, telling Angela that Eschenbach was a thirteenth-century lyric poet whose famous legend about the Holy Grail had been the inspiration for the nineteenth-century opera by Richard Wagner.
She took the book from him and saw Adolf’s signature inside the front cover. And then she turned a few pages and was shocked to find Hitler’s handwriting all over them, filling all the white space as he commented on the text, corrected phrasings, cited other authorities, heralded a useful footnote with an exclamation mark and dismissed another with “NO!”
“Was this a favorite book?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Pretzsche said, “but so were a hundred others. Ancient Rome, yoga, hypnotism, astrology, phrenology, the Eastern religions, Wotan. Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford to buy books. So I took pity on the boy and let him borrow.”
“But why was he poor?”
Pretzsche fiddled with a fountain pencil in his shirt pocket as he looked to the front door. No one else was there. “Maybe he gambled, or lost it on women. Maybe he was paying a tutor. Who knows what happens to money?”
Angela gave him back his coffee cup and got up from the stool. “You haven’t seen him for a while?”
“A full year. Maybe longer.”
“Have you any idea where he’d be?”
A faltering smile squirmed onto his wide mouth as he inquired with quaint innocence, “Are you still unmarried, Frau Raubal?”
She headed for the front door.
“Wait!” he called. And when she didn’t, he called, “Bavaria!”
She turned. “Where?”
“Aren’t there artists there?”
Riding west through Austria with five-year-old Geli in a second-class railway car, Angela lifted up a picnic basket and got out a lunch of Wienerwürstl, rye rolls, sweet mustard, and white radishes. She told her daughter that München was short for bei den Mönchen, “at the home of the monks.” Cowled Franciscan friars had been brewing beer there in the twelfth century. And now there were hundreds and hundreds of breweries.