In Simmering, just beyond Vienna’s southern limits, lies a small, rarely visited cemetery. This is the Friedhof der Namenlosen, or the Cemetery of the Nameless, and it is the final resting place of more than one hundred people, the majority of them unidentified. For centuries, the Danube’s currents caused the corpses of those who had drowned in the river, or whose remains had been thrown into it for disposal, to wash up on a nearby stretch of the bank. In 1939, the construction of the Albern grain dock altered the currents, and the Danube’s dead were forced to make landfall farther down the river.

The old cemetery, which accepted corpses until 1900, is now hidden by forest and marked only by a sign among the trees. The new cemetery contains 104 bodies, their plots marked, for the most part, by identical crucifixes, some with candles or wreaths placed there by well-wishers or the fishermen of Albern, who gather to remember these unfortunates each All Saints’ Day. The named – Gutman, Molner, Kochinger, Behnken (‘aus Hamburg 11.12.1860 – 15.3.1923’) – repose largely on the left side of the cemetery, as though to distance themselves from those who remain anonymous – Unbekannt, Namenlos. A little church, the Chapel of the Resurrection, sits above the graves. To its right rise silos and industrial buildings, and to the left is a patch of wilderness, a place of weeds and dead or dying trees. Behind, but now some distance away, flows the Danube.

Anton Frend had never before set foot in the Friedhof der Namenlosen. He made a point of avoiding graveyards, and had last stood at a graveside seven years previously when his father had been interred in the family plot at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. He had not visited the grave since. If there was a next life, which he doubted, then the best of his parents was at peace there; if there was not, they were nowhere. Either way, he saw no point in making obeisance to moldering bones.