by Eva Ibbotson
As I crossed the square, half an hour later, the unknown pianist was still playing. I stood for a moment, listening. It puzzles me, the way he plays: the strength, the vigour — and then suddenly the break in certain passages. I’ve seen the man with the sideburns a few times but he looks too tired, too dejected, to produce such a torrent of sound.
I’ll have to be brave and ask the ill-tempered concierge. Frau Hinkler has a deformity of one shoulder which makes it necessary to excuse her greed, her spite and her incompetence. She also has Rip. I suppose it’s part of the infinite wonder of the universe that the nastiest woman in Vienna should have the nicest dog.
Each year I can’t believe that there ever was such a spring! I can’t believe that the hyacinths in the Schumachers’ window boxes were ever so vivid, the buds on the lilac beside the churchyard gate ever so fat! The blossom on my pear tree was surely never so exquisite; never showered my courtyard with such abundance. Well this at least is true! My pear tree — I am certain of it — is ready now to produce an actual and undoubted pear!
With the end of Lent approaching, my customers seem to go a little mad. They call in incessantly to make certain that the outfit in which they mean to dazzle the congregation on Easter Sunday will be ready, and to order new ones for the regattas and garden parties that are to come. Frau Hutte-Klopstock (but I expected this) wants to go to the City Parks Associations Summer Ball looking like Isadora Duncan dancing barefoot to Beethoven. I wasn’t cross with her, however, because she told me of a disaster that had befallen Chez Jaquetta. Jaquetta, whose fashionable shop in the Kärnterstrasse is so stuffed with gold bird cages and hanging baskets that you can’t turn round, has done her best to make life difficult for me, and the news that a treble row of green pom-poms with which she had seen fit to decorate a client’s bosom had been eaten by a cab horse outside Sacher’s was balm to my soul.
‘No blame attaches to the animal,’ said Frau Hutte-Klopstock. ‘It simply mistook them for brussels sprouts.’
The first tourists are beginning to arrive. Poor things, you see them trailing round the Kunsthistorisches Museum behind their guides or rushing in and out of Birth Houses and Death Houses or houses where Beethoven is supposed to have poured buckets of water over himself. The Danube is a particular problem for foreign visitors: a yellow-grey river skirting only the northern industrial suburbs.
‘Someone ought to sue that Johann Strauss,’ said an exhausted American lady sinking into my oyster velvet chair. ‘The Blue Danube indeed! Though I suppose you can’t blame him for the dead cats.’
Did they tell you that it’s only blue when you’re in love?’
‘They did,’ she said grimly. A nice woman. Nini modelled the green-sprigged muslin for her and she bought it on the spot.
I’ve only been able to work on my rich cream dress in snatches, but there’s no doubt about it, it’s going to be my masterpiece!
I was woken on this glorious Easter morning by a timid ring on the doorbell of the flat. Outside stood Mitzi Schumacher in white organdie, holding out to me a straw-filled basket.
‘Mama said I could show you our eggs. We did them all ourselves — well, except Gisi. We helped her.’
I admired Mitzi’s own egg, decorated with multi-coloured bows, and Franzi’s, garlanded in leaves. Resi, the one who is always upside down or falling out of trees, had approached hers with such energy that she had cracked the shell and covered the cracks with yellow zig-zags, like lightning.
‘But there are six of you and seven eggs. Whose is the seventh?’ I asked.
Mitzi beamed. ‘It’s for the new baby.’ She handed me an extremely virile egg, very hard-boiled looking and painted with a bright red railway engine from whose funnel there erupted fierce black puffs of smoke. ‘Papa said we should do a train because boys like them best.’
‘Girls like trains too, Mitzi.’
‘Yes. But Papa is a good man and he works hard so God will bring us a brother,’ said Mitzi. And then leaning confidentially towards me: ‘We all have new ribbons for our hats. You’ll see in church. Mine’s blue to match my sash. It matches exactly!’
St Florian’s on Easter Sunday is an unforgettable sight. It was hard to believe that two days earlier I had come in to see Our Lady wreathed in black, Father AnseIm in inky vestments, and the very stones impregnated with the sorrow of the crucifixion. And today pasque flowers spilled out of vases, the altar glowed with gold, and white-petalled stars of jasmine wreathed the Madonna’s head.
Everyone in the square seemed to be in church. Old Augustin Heller, who almost never leaves his book shop, sat beside his raven-haired granddaughter in her sailor suit. Maia’s head was bent reverently over her missal, but between its pages I distinctly saw the indented contours of a map.
In the same pew as Heller was my neighbour on the other side, Herr Schnee. The saddler is a crusty man who seldom speaks, but is always willing to be helpful if it is deeds not words that are required. I confess that I often envy him his clients: gentle carriage horses, spirited trotters, not one of whom wants to look like Karsavina in The Firebird or Isadora Duncan in bare feet. Beside Frau Schumacher, like crotchets in a descending scale, bobbed the heads of the six little girls . . .
Father Anselm proclaimed the resurrection. Ernst Bischof (who the day before had stoned a ginger tomcat sunning itself on the sacristy wall) sang the Gloria as though lowered down from heaven for the purpose. And as the service drew to a close, I steeled myself to waylay the vile-tempered concierge, Frau Hinkler, and ask her who it was that played in her attic flat.
I had known she was in church because I had seen Rip outside on the pavement. Fastened to the pretty wrought-iron gate that leads into our churchyard is a notice. It says: DOGS NOT ADMITTED - and Rip knows that this is what it says. Father Anselm, who is so young that his Adam’s apple still juts out above his clerical collar, did not put up this notice; nor — I am entirely certain of this — was it countenanced by God.
But Rip — a law-abiding Austrian animal — never enters the churchyard and lies with his head between his paws, only emitting occasionally the despairing sighs of those who wait.
I had risen to my feet and was about to accost Frau Hinkler as she stumped down the aisle when I was hailed from behind by Professor Starsky. The Professor had taken great trouble with his toilette. His tussore suit was scarcely crumpled, his tie unspotted by hydrochloric acid — but his eyes were troubled.
And understandably, for the story he told me as we moved out into the sunshine was a heart-rending one. A ferocious anti-vivisectionist lady had arrived at the university on a tandem and had released three hundred white rats and two cages of guinea pigs from the zoology lab.
‘And she took my terrapins,’ said the poor Professor. ‘There was another lady on the back and they took the whole lot away in a bucket and dropped them in the fountain. The ducks have made mincemeat of them of course. And I wasn’t going to dissect them, Frau Susanna — there would have been no point in that. I was only measuring the effect of mashed spinach on their rate of growth.’
By the time I had comforted the Professor and invited him to supper the following week, the grim Frau Hinkler, with Rip at her heels, had disappeared into the apartment house and shut the door.
My closest friend in Vienna is Alice Springer. She’s three years older than I am, gentle and funny, and though she talks almost without stopping she never seems to say anything wounding or indiscreet. Alice sings in the chorus of the Volksoper — a hard life of dirndls and um-pa-pa — and I regard this as a shocking waste because she has a real gift for millinery. Hats come to Alice like dresses come to me and she has total recall for any hat that has ever caught her interest.
She’s not a person to complain, but I think of late things have been hard for her. Though she’s so pretty — one of those nut-brown women whose eyes and hair have the same russet tint, she�
��s nearly forty and recently there’s been a tendency to put her in the second row, often with a hay bale or a milking stool. And from there, as everyone knows, it’s only a short step to the back row in a grey wig with the village elders and a spinning wheel.
I usually pick her up at the theatre and we go and have a spritzer at the Café Landtmann. Tonight I was early enough to use the ticket she’d left for me, and so I was privileged to see the whole of a new production from Germany called Student Love. Alice was in the second row again, holding huge steins of beer aloft because it all took place in Heidelberg and about the operetta itself I prefer not to speak.
At the same time people were enjoying it. I noticed particularly a very fat man in the same row as me. He had bright ginger hair parted in the middle and a round red face which clashed with his moustache and it was clear that he was very much moved by what was going on. During the song about the fast-flowing River Neckar he sighed deeply, during the duet in which the nobly born student and the impoverished landlady’s daughter plighted their troth, he leaned forward with parted lips, and during the heroine’s solo of (strictly temporary) renunciation he was so overcome he had to mop his face several times with a large white handkerchief.
When it was over I went backstage to fetch Alice, who was just lowering what looked like the mossy nest of a Parisian chaffinch on to her curls.
‘Oh Alice, what a marvellous hat!’ I said when I’d embraced her.
‘Yes, it’s good isn’t it? I got it at Yvonne’s. But listen; there were three straws in her window, all with identical brims: big ones. One trimmed with roses, one with mimosa and one with cherries. Imagine it, Sanna, exactly the same brims in every case!’
I too was shocked. How can anyone think that roses, mimosa and cherries can all be treated in the same way? For roses the brim must be wider, softer; mimosa (about which I’m doubtful anyway — one so easily feels one is in the presence of a hatchery for miniature chickens) needs to be wired on with a lot of greenery, and cherries really only work on a boater. You have to be quite rakish and impertinent when wearing fruit.
It was a beautiful evening; the scent of narcissi came to us from the Volksgarten and the waiter, who knew us, found us a quiet table, for together Alice and I are inclined to unsettle unattended gentlemen. As Alice poured our wine and mineral water she chatted cheerfully enough, but I know her very well and I thought she was worried.
‘How is Rudi?’ I asked — and I was right, the trouble was there.
‘He’s so exhausted, Sanna. So tired and grey — and he just works and works. And that wretched wife of his doesn’t even feed him properly! I have to cook goulash for him when he comes and that isn’t fair. It’s wives who should cook goulash; not mistresses — we have so little time.’
‘She’s become a vegetarian, I hear?’
‘Yes, but not the kind that eats proper vegetables — just the kind that has gherkin sandwiches sent to her room while she prepares talks on Goethe’s Nature Lyrics. And there’s a court case coming up, did you know? The university is suing her: she broke in at night and let out hordes of rats and mice. You can imagine how Rudi feels — one of the most respected solicitors in Vienna having to beg a colleague to defend his wife.’
‘So it was her? I did wonder. Poor Professor Starsky lost all his terrapins.’
‘If you knew what a saint Rudi was, Sanna. If anything happens to him. . .’ She blew her nose.
As a matter of fact I did know what a saint Rudi Sultzer was. I’ve never been surprised that this balding, bandy-legged solicitor has for so many years held Alice’s heart. Rudi Sultzer is an Atlas who supports uncomplainingly an enormous, dark and over-staffed flat in the Garnison Gasse, a villa in St Polten to which he never has time to go, and a wife and grown-up daughter who despise him because he reads cowboy stories and likes to play cards.
‘I expect I’m being silly,’ said Alice. ‘Rudi’s only forty-five — he’s absolutely in his prime.’ She shook off her fears. ‘Now listen, Sanna, when you were out front tonight did you see a very fat man with ginger hair sitting in the same row as you?’
‘Yes I did. He got very carried away — in fact I thought he was going to burst into tears.’
‘That’s him. He comes almost every night.’
‘Is he in love with you?’
‘No, no; not at all. He’s a pork butcher from Linz — charcuterie particularly. His name is Ludwig Huber. He came first with the Meat Retailers’ Outing and they came backstage and we got talking. He looks a bit gross but he’s sweet really. And listen, Sanna, because this could be big for you. He’s very rich — owns a whole chain of shops all over Lower Austria. His wife died two years ago and he’s getting married again. And I told him that no one could make the bride’s trousseau except you!’
‘But why is he buying the bride’s trousseau? Is she an orphan or something?’
‘Her family’s very poor. Genteel but without a kreutzer, so he’s offered to see to all that. You can charge him a lot. They say he’s as hard as nails in business but he’s very chivalrous with women. You’ll be able to twist him round your little finger.’
‘What’s the bride like?’
‘I haven’t met her. She’s supposed to be pretty and very young. But listen, that’s not all. Who do you think is going to be the bridesmaid?’
I shook my head.
‘Rudi’s daughter! Edith!’
Alice was very pleased with the effect of this announcement. ‘You mean the Bluestocking? Are you serious?’
‘That’s right. Apparently she and Fräulein Winter were at school together. And I’ve told Herr Huber that the bridesmaid’s dress must be designed together with the bride’s so Edith will be coming to you as well!’
I considered this. ‘If she’s as plain as you say, I’m going to have a problem.’
‘Well she is plain. Very. And the most awful prig. Rudi says she was a taking little thing when she was small but then her mother started making her into a Wunderkind and that was that.’
I had never met Edith but I knew a lot about her. I knew, for example, about the night on which she had been conceived.
In the spring of 1891, a young solicitor named Rudi Sultzer found himself sitting, at a public lecture in the university, next to a high-minded girl named Laura Hartelmann. Nothing would normally have followed from that, but Rudi had that morning finished the last pot of raspberry jam made by his mother before she died. The consumption of jam made by people who subsequently die is a traumatic experience and Rudi had loved his mother, a witty and beautiful woman who troubled him little for she was Czech and preferred to live in Prague. His eyes, during a pause in the discourse, filled with tears and Laura, always impressed by suffering, offered comfort.
They married, and owing to Laura’s passion for Goethe they went to Weimar for their honeymoon. There the bride retired to her bedroom (which overlooked a statue of the poet), put on a calico nightdress and for an hour read from the Master’s Trilogy of Passion while her new husband waited down below. Then she closed the book, opened the door, and in her high, clear voice called out ‘You may approach me now, Rudi!’
Rudi, to his eternal credit, approached her — and nine months later, Edith was born.
Nevertheless the strain of being married to such a high-minded woman began to tell on Rudi quite early on. Coming from a hard day at the office he would find a notice pinned to his wife’s bedroom door. Silence, Frau Schultzer is reading Faust, was the sort of information she liked to convey and while it was meant for the maids rather than for him, Rudi (who was also smaller than his wife and had worldly tastes like food) soon realized that he was not worthy of a woman who not only understood Goethe but also Schopenhauer, Leibnitz and the feuilletons in the Wiener Tageblatt. And when his little daughter also began to quote from Goethe and to give her toys away to the poor, he began to ‘appro
ach’ my dear friend Alice.
‘I think Rudi would be terribly pleased if you could make Edith look nice,’ said Alice, looking at me appealingly. For all she’s been brought up to be such an intellectual snob, he’s fond of her.’
Alice loves the Hof Advokat Herr Doktor Sultzer very much. For the past eight years she’s made for him a secure retreat in her little apartment in the Kohlmarkt and asked only the basic courtesies that any woman has a right to expect from her lover: a new dress now and then, a bracelet. No one in the Sultzer household knew of her existence yet she shared, if anybody did, his life.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
But since the task was clearly going to be a formidable one, we poured our second glass of spritzer in different proportions. Less soda water and much more wine . . .
May
The first of May means different things to Nini and myself. For me it means lilies of the valley sold on every street corner in the city, and the certainty of summer to come.
For Nini it means Labour Day. Though Anarchists are not supposed to join organizations, being committed to spontaneity and freedom, she is so anxious for the revolution that she condescends to march with the Marxists. Today this caused a problem.
‘They’ve given me a red flag to carry — quite a big one, but it’s a proper scarlet: well, you know. I was going to wear my rose-pink muslin because it’s so warm, but red and pink. . . I suppose one can make it work, but it’s tricky. It’ll have to be my damask skirt, I suppose, and the broderie anglaise blouse.’ Her Magyar eyes slid in my direction. ‘I was wondering about your cameo brooch. . . ?’
She never goes off on these jaunts without my feeling a distinct pang. Sometimes the police are idle and quiescent — at other times they suddenly turn fierce.
The newspaper Rip carries each morning to his owner has been full of information about which one tries to be excited: that they have abolished pigtails in China, that Kaiser Wilhelm is displeased with the British, angry with the Russians and not exactly delighted even with us. That the Giant Wheel in the Prater has got stuck again. . .