Monumental sculptors. It's a comical term when you think about it. You picture them, gigantic men with massive biceps and bulging pectorals and thews like ships' cables.
Stripped to the waist, agleam with sweat, striving away with maul and burin.
They're not like that, of course. More often they're elderly, bowed a little, in dusty apron. Craftsmen. And they don't sound so funny in German, unless you find German funny. Steinmetzmeister, "master stonemasons". You see the word on signs for a mile along the Simmeringer-Hauptstrasse as the tram nears the Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery.
Farther on, there will be the stalls selling flowers and candles guaranteed to burn for many hours. But the first intimation of the approach of mortality is the yards of the Steinmetzmeister. It's the same with all graveyards, isn't it? The tram stops just outside the main gate. A Max Hegele job, your guidebook would tell you, 1905, Jugendstil (translation: art nouveau). Two obelisks with various figures doing inscrutable things round their base. Beyond them, the principal avenue arrows straight into the metropolis of the famously and the insignificantly dead.
Seeking orientation, I turn to the plan on the wall of the gate lodge. It's a huge place, the Central Cemetery. I knew that already, even before I travelled out here. I'd studied it on the street map of Vienna, the big irregular patch of green and the grid of white avenues. But I have the numbers: 79, 29, 38. Section 79, Row 29, Grave 38. The last resting place of Col Alfred Victor Redl, late of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army.
It's no easy task I've set myself, it turns out. The sections and rows and graves are identified by little cast iron number-posts. Or some of them are. So many of the signs are missing now, rusted away.
But I persevere. I calculate, taking into account the missing markers, and finally I locate Row 29. Some cemetery workers are hoeing and raking nearby. One of them is a young woman. She smiles at me.
Can she know what I'm at? Am I merely the latest in a teborne come here before writing A Patriot For Me? That was about Redl. Did Istvan Szabo? Probably not. His 1985 movie opens with a disclaimer: "We have not based our account of Col Redl on authentic documents. The actions of the characters have been freely invented". No, it must have been Robert Asprey's "interpretive biography" that set me on this quixotic quest. I found it in a secondhand bookshop and was caught up. Asprey pursued Redl's story for seven years, until 1959, when his The Panther's Feast was published. (Oscar Wilde: "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.") The path between the grave rows, like all the rest, is overgrown with grass as I move along it, starting with a numbered grave and counting as I go.
No 38, there it is! But wait. Confusion. The grave has a quite new headstone on it, a family tomb bearing a different name altogether. I look to see if the cemetery girl is laughing at me, if her smile was an anticipation of my perplexity.
But she has disappeared.
I'm stymied all right, but only for a moment. Suddenly I notice it, the grave next to No 38. It's unmarked, just a long mound of sod. A wreath is laid on it, a wreath of pink "everlasting" flowers. I've seen plenty of them as I zigzagged my way among the avenues. The cemetery people place them on neglected graves, a gesture of cosmetic charity.
There's a wooden peg stuck aslant in the green turf. Printed on it is this legend in German: "This grave is under the care of the cemetery administration." This is it! This must be Redl's grave. My documentary source has got the number wrong by one digit.
It makes sense, this anonymous sepulchre. Alfred Redl was a traitor to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a registered suicide, and that in a Catholic country. Time was he might not have been buried in consecrated ground at all. No wonder his grave is neglected. He has simply been written out of his family's history.
Then slowly, delightfully, it dawns. The Central is a municipal cemetery, financed by local taxes. Without even knowing it, the citizens of Vienna are paying to maintain the grave of a man who betrayed them. The taste of irony is sweet in the mouth.
Between 1900 and 1912, this ambitious Galician was in charge of counterespionage, and then deputy chief of intelligence, in the Emperor's army. After his death it emerged publicly that he had been blackmailed by Tsarist Russia for his homosexuality and extravagant high living. And for more than 10 years he had been passing military secrets to St Petersburg, including Vienna's plan of action in the event of war with Serbia.
Late one Saturday evening in May 1913, four officers visited him in his hotel room in possession of damning evidence. "I know why you have come," said Redl. The officers advised him to take the course consistent with honour and left him alone with a loaded 6.35mm Browning revolver.
I went, earlier, into the National Library in the Hofburg and dragged the two big leather-bound newspaper files to the table in the reading room.
There it was in both the Zeit and the Neue Freie Presse, that dense black Gothic type: "Suicide of Col Redl. The Result of Overwork.
"One of the most diligent and hard-working officers of the General Staff... Col Alfred Redl committed suicide in a hotel in the Inner City during the course of Saturday night. This gifted officer, ahead of whom undoubtedly still lay a great career, shot himself in the head, probably while the balance of his mind was disturbed. Col Redl had reportedly been overworking, and it appears that the strain on his mind had taken its toll. The officer is also said to have been suffering from insomnia."
On another day, I looked for the Hotel Klomser in the Herren-Gasse, where Redl had been staying. It was gone - a modern office block stands in its place. So instead I follow his footsteps as he tries to shake off the two detectives tailing him, Steidl and Ebinger. In his pocket are two envelopes, addressed to "Herr Nikon Nizetas", which he collected from the poste restante just a couple of hours ago. The envelopes are stuffed with Russian secret service money and have been under surveillance by the police in the post office for many weeks. The detectives do not know Redl's identity yet, as he is in civilian garb.
Past the CafΘ Central in the Palais Ferstel, where much later that night the four officers will while away the hours before returning to the hotel.
When they do, they will find Redl lying on the floor of his room, the gun at his side and a trickle of blood from his left nostril staining the brown carpet. And orders will be issued for release of the official statement, already prepared, to the press.
But just now, he has reached the Konkordiaplatz, where, in an effort to distract his pursuers, Redl takes some sheets of paper from his pocket, tears them up and scatters them to the wind. The fragments will be gathered up and carried to the police station on the Schottenring, where his army comrades will piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle, and the handwriting will be recognised. Alfred Redl is doomed.
Standing here among the empty paths, I have to try and imagine that final furtive midnight scene as Redl's body is committed to the earth, this earth. No fusillade crackles into the air. No cornet sounds a valediction. No muffled drums beat. The buttery light from the storm-lanterns strikes a gleam from the lacquered flanks of the hearse as it emerges out of the darkness of the long main avenue.
But the horses' heads are bare of the customary black plumes, and the vehicle is not adorned with swags of crepe. Six cadets from the Wiener Neustadt military academy unload the plain pine coffin and lay it on the tapes. A young chaplain, his repeated throat-clearing betraying his unease, murmurs a brief benediction and departs, head bowed and at a pace not normally consistent with clerical dignity.
Elements of classic tragedy are gathered in the story of Redl - hubris, weakness, ambition, vengeance, honour. Myth, too. Is it any wonder historians and playwrights and film-makers and writers of "interpretive biographies" keep turning to it? On the way back into the city, I couldn't help but notice that one of the Steinmetzmeister yards was offering cut prices and easy payments. Disposal at a discount, now as then.
Oh, about the municipal wreath of flowers and all that "sweet irony" stuff. I got it wrong, I found out later. My documentary source was perfectly correct. Redl was interred in Grave 38 in May 1913.
What happened was this: burial plots in the Central Cemetery were rented from the city of Vienna, and the rent was payable every 10 years. In 1923, no one came forward to renew the army's rent on Redl's grave. His bones were dug up and disposed of who knows where, and the grave space allocated to someone else. Bathos, I think it's called.
