PERIPATETICS: Ghost

When Wilhelm Franz Josef Karl of Austria was a child, Johahn Strauss was in his heaven and all was well with the world. But Wilhelm’s youth was soon shadowed by death. First, Cousin Rudolf (the Crown Prince) committed suicide at Mayerling. Then Cousin Franz-Ferdinand (the Heir Apparent) was killed at Sarajevo. Suddenly everyone became terribly solemn and said that young Archduke Wilhelm, the descendant of Holy Roman Emperors, would soon occupy a throne.

In 1916, when the Central Powers’ victory seemed certain, an Austrian clique dreamed of welding Austria, Hungary and the Ukraine into a new tripartite empire. They picked blond, slender Wilhelm to be its sovereign, put him to studying Ukrainian. Soon he wrote nostalgic Ukrainian verse about the landscapes he had scarcely ever seen. He started wearing Ukrainian embroidered blouses and from them took his royal pseudonym, Vasily Vichivany (vichivany means embroidered). In 1918, he fought the Russians as colonel of a Ukrainian regiment.

Then the war ended with a whimper. Vasily-Wilhelm hid out in the Carpathians among the Hutzuls, a poor Ukrainian mountain people whom he soon captivated with his Viennese charm. Then he caught typhoid fever.

Friends rushed him to Bucharest, where he was thrown into jail and fished out again by “Cousin” Marie (the Queen of Rumania). A good many of his other cousins were driving taxis in those days, and Wilhelm became thoroughly disillusioned. When Ukrainian students in a Prague beer hall raised their glasses to him with the cry “Long Live Our Vasily,” he only muttered: “The fools. . . .” By that time, the Ukraine was a Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1924, Wilhelm went to live in a Paris suburb. One after another, his old friends dropped away. In 1935, he was sued together with a French actress for collecting money allegedly for the restoration of the “lost Ukrainian crown.” Hastily he left Paris, went to Switzerland, thence back to Socialist Vienna.

World War II found Wilhelm boarding with an elderly schoolteacher in the drabbened diplomatic district. He was now bald, with an impressive white mustache and a touch of TB. He managed to dress neatly, and some suspected that he was a black-marketeer. One evening last summer, he was seen dining in style at Vienna’s gay, expensive black-market Restaurant Charly. He had just been given a job as manager of a Viennese chemical concern. Then he disappeared.

Last week, Vienna’s police said that he had been arrested by Russian soldiers. Wilhelm Habsburg-Lothringen, would-be King of the Ukraine, was resting quietly in Wiener-Neustadt’s Soviet internment camp. The Russians, it appeared, were taking no chances even with ghosts.