Rachel Berdach

Rachel Berdach

My grandmother's younger sister Rachel. She was a well-known writer: a novelist, journalist and poet. When Queen Elisabeth of Austria was murdered, the German Writers' Association held a memorial meeting and her poems were recited. Rachel married one of her cousins, Otto Bardach. (He was also from the Berdach family, but due to clerical misspelling of their name, they went by Bardach.) Because they were cousins they did not want to have children, and they did not have any. Rachel was a very beautiful, very graceful woman. She lived permanently in a hotel because she had a passionate affair with a man (I told you she was a journalist), and they agreed that they would leave everything behind and get married. They rented a flat, arranged it, furnished it beautifully with all sort of antique furniture and fantastic paintings. It was no easy thing at that time to simply move in together. They could not get married right away for the man was married and had two children, but they decided to live together until the divorce was final. Her lover said that he would move in to the flat ahead of Rachel in order to be there to welcome her in her new home. And so it happened. Rachel went to the flat, opened the door and as she stepped in she saw an enormous Turkish bakkara carpet, the size of this room. And on this enormous Turkish bakkara carpet lay the man with a bullet hole through his temple. There was a note lying next to him in which he wrote that he was unable to choose between his children and Rachel. We called that carpet Blutbakkara from then on: we never had it cleaned, and we never used it.
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