The Reserve

Chapter One: The Man Who Wanted a Mother

The bicycle shop below opened at seven, and by five past, the sound of a wheel being trued came up through the floorboards like a small bird tapping to be let out. Anna Leitner had worked above that sound for eleven years. She no longer heard it unless it stopped.

The Vienna Tracing Service occupied two rooms on the first floor of a grey building on Zieglergasse, and the sign on the door had been painted by a volunteer in 1969 and never repainted. In the front room stood a table, two chairs, a gas ring, and a cabinet of card indexes that Anna had built up drawer by drawer, name by name. In the back room were the files: nine hundred and forty of them in March 1979, arranged not alphabetically but by the year the child had been lost.

Two hundred and eleven of those files were closed. Two hundred and eleven times, Anna had stood in a hallway or a railway station or a hospital corridor and watched two strangers recognise each other. She kept no photographs of it. She did not need them.

The rest of the drawers held the ones she had not found yet, and those were the drawers she opened at night.

She was thirty-five years old. She had arrived at a foster home in Sankt Pölten in the autumn of 1944, in a lorry with eight other children, wearing a knitted jacket with the buttons cut off. She had no papers. The woman who took her in had a sister named Anna and a husband named Leitner, and so the child had a name by dinnertime. There was no file for her in the back room. She had tried three times to open one and each time she had put the card back in the drawer, because a tracer who traces herself is no longer a tracer, only another lost person with a desk.

On the fourth of March, a Monday, a man climbed her stairs carrying a biscuit tin.

He was her own age, broad through the shoulders, with the permanently grey-seamed hands of a man who works with machinery. He had put on a suit for the visit and the suit did not fit him anywhere. He stood in the doorway holding the tin against his chest like a shield.

"Frau Leitner? My name is Franz Kofler. I am a mechanic with the tram company, Depot Nine." He said it as though presenting credentials. "They told me at the parish office you find people."

"Sometimes," Anna said. "Sit down. The chair on the left is the honest one."

He sat. He set the tin on the table and did not open it.

"My mother," he said.

"Tell me from the beginning. Not the beginning you think matters. The real beginning — the first thing you actually remember."

Franz Kofler considered this seriously, which she liked him for.

"A kitchen in Steyr," he said. "A woman with a blue apron putting a cup in front of me and saying, drink it while it's hot, Franzl. That was my foster mother. Marie Kofler. She was good to me. She died in 1971. My foster father in 1968." He turned his hat over once in his hands. "I never asked them anything. You don't, when they're good to you. You think it would be like handing back a present."

"And now?"

"Now I'm thirty-five and there's nobody behind me." He looked up. "I got married in September. My wife is expecting in June. I sat in the clinic and a young doctor asked me what my family had died of and I said I don't know, and he wrote something down, and I thought — my child is going to ask me that one day. And I will say I don't know. And then his child will ask him." He put a hand flat on the tin. "It stops with me or it doesn't stop."

Anna took out a fresh card and wrote his name on it, and the date, in the small upright hand she had used since she was seventeen.

"Show me what you have."

He opened the tin.

There was less in it than she expected and more than most people brought. A baptismal card from a parish in Steyr. A ration book from 1947 with a child's photograph gummed inside. A folded certificate of foster placement, dated February 1945, District Office Steyr. A birth certificate, yellowed, typed, with a raised seal.

And underneath all of it, in a brown envelope, a single sheet of headed paper with a purple stamp on it.

Anna looked at the stamp for a long time.

HAUS BRUNNFELD — MÜTTERHEIM — 1944.

She had seen that stamp before. Not often. Perhaps a dozen times in ten years, always on a stray page in a file that went nowhere: a transfer note, an inoculation record, a line in a district ledger. She had never been able to make it lead anywhere. In her card index there was a cross-reference card, and on it, in her own hand, the word she used for dead ends: *closed*.

"What is it?" Franz said. He had been watching her face.

"A maternity home," Anna said. "In Carinthia, on a lake. It operated from 1941 to 1945." She kept her voice flat, the way she had trained herself to. Hope was a drug she was licensed to dispense in very small doses. "It means you were probably born there, not in Steyr. Which is interesting, because your birth certificate says Steyr."

She drew the certificate towards her, turned it to the window light, and ran her thumbnail along the seal.

"Who signed this?"

Franz leaned over. "Some registrar. I never read it."

"Registrar Wenzel Maderna." Anna opened the cabinet, pulled a drawer, walked her fingers through it, and took out a card. "Maderna. He was the registrar in Steyr from 1938 to 1943. In 1943 he was posted to Znojmo and in 1944 he was dead. This certificate is dated November 1944."

Franz Kofler sat very still.

"It's a forgery," she said. "A good one. Real seal, real form, real signature style, wrong man. Somebody had access to the office and knew the dead can't be asked questions."

"Why would anybody bother?" he said. "For me? I'm a mechanic."

"You weren't a mechanic in 1944. You were a baby with no name." She wrote two lines on his card. "Now. The foster placement. Did your parents ever say anything about money?"

"Money?"

"Most foster families got nothing. It was a war and then it was a famine. Some got a small state allowance for a few years. Did yours?"

His face changed. "There was a payment," he said slowly. "Every month. My mother called it the Swiss money. It came through the post office. She used to say, that's the Swiss money, Franzl, that's for your shoes."

"How much?"

"I don't know. Not much. It stopped when I was — eighteen? Nineteen. I remember because she cried about it and my father said, well, he's a man now, they've finished with him." He stopped. "That's what he said. They've finished with him."

Anna put down her pen.

In eleven years she had learned that the shape of a file announced itself in the first hour or not at all. Most of them were the same sad shape: a mother who died, a train that went east, a column of refugees, a name misspelt by an exhausted clerk. Grief without malice. Those she could sometimes solve.

This one had a different shape. A forged certificate meant a hand. Money for eighteen years meant a purpose. Purpose meant someone was still alive who knew.

"Frau Leitner," Franz said, "you've gone pale."

"I've gone interested," she said. "It's similar."

She walked him through the fee — there was no fee, there was a donation box by the door, and most people put in fifty schillings and apologised — and she made him sign the form that let her write letters in his name, and she copied the Brunnfeld page twice on the trembling machine in the back room, and when he stood to go she found herself doing something she almost never did.

"Herr Kofler. If anybody comes to you asking about this — anybody at all, a lawyer, an insurance man, a helpful stranger — you don't talk to them. You come to me."

He smiled for the first time. It made him look like a boy.

"Who would come?"

"Nobody," Anna said. "That's why I said if."

He shook her hand at the door. His grip was careful, the way very strong men are careful.

"My wife thinks it's morbid," he said. "Digging. She says the dead should be left alone."

"They usually are," said Anna. "It's the living who get left alone."

She listened to him go down the stairs. Then she sat at the table with the purple stamp in front of her and the wheel turning below, and she pulled the cross-reference card that said *closed*, and took her pen, and crossed the word out.