The face of war

Gary Koscinski and Choi Ha-yoon met each other for the first time in Vienna. He was a fifty-four-year-old lawyer from Vancouver, and she was a forty-year-old mechanical engineer from Busan. Two months ago, they each had received a letter from Öffentliche Notare Engels, Kaindl & Blatt Partnerschaft, informing them they were the sole heirs of Peter Weiszbaum, their maternal grandfather, who’d died last year at the blessed age of one hundred and four. Neither of them had ever been in touch with Weiszbaum; his existence was a well-kept secret in both families.

In the notary office, Herr Blatt read them his client’s will. Weiszbaum’s financial assets were uncomplicated. He held a savings account at one Austrian bank and an investment portfolio at another. After the liquidation of the investment portfolio, total financial assets amounted to 860,000 euro, to be divided equally between both heirs. Weiszbaum also had an apartment in the Köllnerhofgasse near the Schwedenplatz.

‘A nice place at a desirable location,’ Herr Blatt informed them. ‘It’s a five-minute walk to the Donau in one direction and a five-minute walk to the Stephansdom in the other. It’ll easily fetch a seven-figure price, should you wish to sell it.’

The apartment also contained Weiszbaum’s personal archive. Weiszbaum had been a war photographer for most of his life and had witnessed all the atrocities of the twentieth century since the Spanish Civil War.

‘The archive is yours to dispose of as you see fit,’ Herr Blatt said. ‘My client didn’t leave any instructions whatsoever concerning this collection.’

‘Doesn’t the city have a museum of photography that could be interested?’ Gary asked.

‘Yes, a prominent one,’ Herr Blatt confirmed. ‘WestLicht in the Westbahnstraße. I can point it out to you on a map if you want to. It’s my understanding that WestLicht did approach your grandfather on several occasions to acquire his archive. He always declined for reasons unknown to me.’

‘I’d like to see it before we decide what to do with it,’ Ha-yoon spoke up for the first time.

Gary nodded in agreement.

‘Naturally,’ Herr Blatt said. ‘This is the code to the building’s front door, and here you have the key to the apartment. It’s on the second floor. Feel free to visit.’

‘Thank you, we will,’ Ha-yoon said. ‘Could I trouble you for one more thing? We’ve never met our grandfather. I have no idea what he looked like. I searched the net for his picture and couldn’t find a trace of him. It’s as if he never existed. Would you happen to have a picture of Peter Weiszbaum, Herr Blatt?’

‘It’s funny you should ask,’ Herr Blatt chuckled. ‘The last time I saw Herr Weiszbaum, he insisted I took his picture and included it in the file. It’s as if he knew it’d come up in our conversation.’

Herr Blatt took a sheet of paper from his file and pushed it across his desk. It was a print-out of a photo he’d made with his mobile phone. It was a poor picture — underexposed, grainy, and slightly blurry — and he hadn’t printed it on photo paper. The colours were dull and bled into each other. Weiszbaum gave a fragile, even emaciated impression. His paper-thin skin was creased as if it was three sizes too big for his skull. The wrinkles, deep-set eyes, and missing teeth made him look like a mummy. He had high cheekbones and a narrow, sharp nose. Ha-yoon thought he had a cruel mouth.

Gary and Ha-yoon walked side by side, both absorbed in their own thoughts. They left the Grillparzerstraße, where the office of the notary was situated, in the direction of the centre. It was close to freezing. A chilly wind was blowing; there was snow in the air. February was probably the least attractive month to visit Vienna. They felt a bit ill at ease talking. Two months ago, they hadn’t even known of each other’s existence. It was all pretty overwhelming.

‘Could we eat something first before we go exploring the apartment?’ Gary suggested. ‘I overslept this morning and missed breakfast. I’m kind of hungry.’

Ha-yoon nodded and pointed at a typical Viennese restaurant across the street, Zum Schwarzen Kameel. Usually, one of the busiest restaurants in town, it was half-empty.

When they’d chosen what to eat, Gary said, ‘I tried to find out what I could about our grandfather from my side of the family. It’s sketchy. I couldn’t talk to my mother about her father; she died three years ago. My maternal grandmother was Spanish. Weiszbaum must have met her during the Civil War in her country. Blatt told us that was where his career as a war photographer started. My mother was born in 1939; that fits.’

‘What do you know about your grandmother?’ Ha-yoon asked.

‘I hardly knew her. Her name was Susana Olmo. She died young in 1967. My mother told me she came from a communist nest. She was born in Huesca in 1917, in the north of Spain. Franco’s Nationalists wiped her family out in 1938 when they were advancing towards Barcelona. She escaped from Spain with her child in 1940 or 1941. She arrived in Canada in 1948 after staying in Argentina, Mexico, and the USA. She remarried in Mexico, but her second husband died six years later. He never made it to Canada. After that, she never remarried.’

‘Did she marry our grandfather?’ Ha-yoon asked.

‘I found her Spanish marriage certificate among my mother’s papers. Weiszbaum’s name is on it,’ Gary confirmed, adding ‘My mother always used Olmo as her maiden name.’  

‘Our grandfather married her, made a child with her and then left her?’ Ha-yoon concluded.

‘Seems that way,’ Gary agreed. ‘My guess is that when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, he had to be there. A wife with a newborn would have been too much of a burden. He must have left them behind. My mother told me once that grandmother never wanted to speak to her about her father. That book was closed.’

‘It seems history repeated itself in Korea,’ Ha-yoon said. ‘My mother was born in 1953, the last year of the war. I was told my grandfather had already left by then. He never saw his daughter. It was a great dishonour for my grandmother and her family. My mother was raised by Catholic missionary sisters — the Sisters of the Precious Blood.’

‘What a shame. Your mother never knew her mother?’ Gary shook his head.

‘They met when she was a teenager,’ Ha-yoon said. ‘By then, my mother had decided she didn’t care to apply the Christian virtue of forgiveness to the person who’d abandoned her. The encounter proved to be cold and short, and was not repeated.’

‘Did she know her father was a Westerner?’ Gary asked.

‘Yes, the sisters told her the story when she was old enough to understand,’ Ha-yoon replied. ‘She never cared enough to go looking for him. As far as she was concerned, both her mother and father had failed her, and they weren’t worth the effort. My mother was a strong woman. I still miss her.’

‘Of course, she died as well,’ Gary realised. ‘Otherwise, she’d have been mentioned in Weiszbaum’s will too.’

‘Maybe, yes, I don’t know,’ Ha-yoon said. ‘My mother died in the Sewol ferry disaster five years ago.’

When she saw that didn’t ring a bell with Gary, she explained, ‘In 2014, a ferry from Incheon, near Seoul, to Jeju, an island at the southernmost tip of South Korea, capsized and sank. Three hundred passengers died. It was a huge scandal. The captain was charged for murder, and the crew indicted for abandoning ship. The owner of the company was sued as well, but he couldn’t be found. His body was discovered later in a field. Did you never hear of that incident?’

‘Honestly, I might have,’ Gary said, ‘but I don’t remember.’

Weiszbaum’s apartment was in a five-floor, late-18th-century building. Its spacious six rooms were furnished sparsely. The furniture didn’t match and looked as if it was bought in a thrift store. The walls were bare, except for old, faded wallpaper that curled at the seams. There was nothing personal about the apartment as if Weiszbaum never had cared to make it his own.

The archive room contained a rickety table and a chair, bookshelves, and a row of filing cabinets — all in impeccable order. On the bookshelves, magazines and newspapers in different languages were stacked chronologically. All of them contained pictures by Weiszbaum that documented the wars of the 20th century. Gary opened one of the filing cabinets at random and retrieved a file. It contained developed celluloid negatives, contact prints, and A-4-sized, black-and-white pictures. On the pictures’ backs, Gary found the dates, locations, and the names of the publications that had printed them. Weiszbaum wrote in a neat hand that reflected the meticulousness with which he had organised his archive.

Ha-yoon opened the top-left cabinet and lifted the first file. It was a heavy cardboard box with a label that said ‘Boxer Rebellion’. When she removed the lid, she understood why it was so heavy as the box contained several smaller boxes of glass plate negatives. The pictures showed soldiers of different armies, Chinese notables, and Yihequan rebels, all posing proudly for the camera. There were more gruesome scenes too: beheadings of rebels, explosions of railway lines, burning churches, Chinese junks loaded with wounded insurgents, field guns used in a siege, looting soldiers.

‘This can’t be right,’ Ha-yoon mumbled and started tapping on her mobile phone.

‘What’s the problem?’ Gary asked, leafing through a 1950s copy of Life Magazine.

‘This,’ Ha-yoon pointed at the box and then at the Wikipedia page on her phone. ‘The Boxer Rebellion dates from 1899 to 1901. If Weiszbaum made these pictures himself, it means that the Spanish Civil War was by no means the first conflict he documented.’

They looked at each other. It didn’t need saying their grandfather must have reached an incredible age.

Gary took the glass plate negatives from their boxes and looked at them one by one, holding them against the glare of the bare bulb that lighted the room.

‘Wow, you’ve got to have a look at this!’ he exclaimed, scrutinising a plate from the third box.

Ha-yoon peered long at the negative before she saw what Gary meant. The picture showed a street in ruins, with several dead bodies scattered among the rubble and crying survivors. After a while, a second picture seemed to emerge. It was a ghostly close-up of a young man’s face that overlapped with the first picture. There was no doubt that it was their grandfather’s. It showed a much younger version of the gaunt features they knew from the snapshot taken by Herr Blatt.

‘It’s a double exposure. It must be,’ Ha-yoon concluded. ‘He made a selfie and then used the same plate again to shoot the street scene.’

‘It’s damned eerie,’ Gary said. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Don’t know,’ Ha-yoon shrugged. ‘At least, we can be sure now that our grandfather made these pictures himself. I can’t get my head around that.’

The find motivated them to go through the entire archive systematically. Gary continued from left to right, while Ha-Yoon began with investigating the most recent files in the right-hand bottom cabinet. The first map she encountered was marked ‘Al-Aqsa Intifada’, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in September 2000. Weiszbaum’s pictures only documented the first four months of the conflict, which lasted until the beginning of 2005. The next file was labelled ‘Six-Day War – Uganda/Rwanda/Congo’. The pictures dated from July 2000. Gary moved from the Boxer Rebellion to the Second Boer War, and then to the Russo-Japanese War, the Mexican War, the First and Second Balkan Wars. Each time, in every file, they found one or two pictures where Weiszbaum’s face was spookily shining through a battle scene.

The First World War filled an entire cabinet.

‘I can’t believe this,’ Gary whistled.

Ha-yoon dropped her file on the 1998 Yemen Al-Qaeda insurgency and came over to have a look at what seemed to be baffling her companion.

‘Just look at this,’ he said, laying out nine pictures in a square on the floor. ‘Here we have, from left to right, top to bottom: the Battle of Dilman in current-day Iran, the Second Battle of Ypres in Flanders, the Siege of Van in Armenia, the landing of the Allies in Gallipoli, the Battle of Trekkopjes in South-Africa, the Battle of Gurin in British Nigeria, the German attack on Russian lines in Galicia, the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boot, and, finally, the re-conquest of Lviv by Austro-Hungarian troops.’

‘All right,’ Ha-yoon said, unsure what Gary was getting at, ‘Weiszbaum got around a lot. So what?’

Gary turned over the photos so she could read the dates marked on the back of them. The events in the pictures had all taken place from 15 April until 10 May in 1915.

‘There’s no way Weiszbaum could have been present at all of these events,’ Gary pointed out. ‘They happened quasi-simultaneously. Moreover, some of these pictures were taken from the Allied side, others from the Central Powers’ camp. And how could he have been on board of the U-Boot that sank the Lusitania, I wonder? It’s just not possible.’

It took them five hours combing through the filing cabinets. They ended up with over two hundred pictures showing Weiszbaum’s face strangely fused with scenes of war. Photographs of several of the larger international conflicts indicated him being present at different spots at the same moment, time and time again. Some pictures were utterly impossible. Weiszbaum had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atomic bombs were dropped on these cities. He couldn’t have made these pictures and survived.

Ha-yoon got up from the floor where they’d spread out their haul. She was tired and frustrated. As she was stretching, the wooden box on the table caught her eye. She flipped open the lid. On the inside, was a label saying ‘Faces of War’. The box was filled to the rim with portraits of young women of different nationalities.

They looked at them, one by one, until Gary exclaimed ‘That’s my grandmother!’

Somehow, Weiszbaum had caught in Susana Olmo’s facial expression the entire tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. It was a haunting picture of a beautiful woman, which told of pain, loss, and fear, intermingled with pride and hope. This was the woman Weiszbaum would marry, get pregnant and then abandon. There were hundreds of similar pictures, all equally evocative. In the second half of the pack, Ha-yoon pointed at the portrait of an Asian woman with sad eyes. Gary looked at his companion, and she blinked in silent confirmation.

They walked in silence to their hotel. It was dark already, and it began to snow. The afternoon’s findings raised more questions than they answered. For a century, their grandfather had been the avatar of war. What his true nature was continued to elude them. The box with women’s portraits left them guessing as well. Did Weiszbaum have children with all of them? Why were they the only two heirs contacted by their grandfather’s notary? What had happened with all the other children? How many grandchildren were there?

Over a cup of coffee in the hotel bar, Ha-yoon voiced the question that haunted them both most of all.

‘If our grandfather was the personification of war, then what are we?’