by Eva Ibbotson
All round the room — on the shelf above the bed, on the chest of drawers, on the small table, there stood glass jars and inside each of them something white and sinister appeared to float. Curled up embryos? Pickled organs? Had we strayed into some kind of mortuary?
Then our eyes grew used to the gloom and we could see that they were figures made from wax: little doll-like models of martyrs and saints.
‘Do you like them?’ came a voice from the bed. ‘I made them myself.’
Magdalena rose and stood before us in her dressing gown and I forgot the waxen puppets and simply stared. Both Herr Huber and Edith Sultzer had described Magdalena as beautiful, but nothing had prepared me for what I saw. The girl was tall and slender; her loose hair rippled to her knees, her curving eyes were the colour of lapis lazuli.
‘The ivory brocade you bought from Seligmann?’ whispered Nini.
But I was ahead of Nini. I had already cut the brocade into panels floating down from the shoulders, drawn the back ones into a train . . . had wired the top of the bodice so that Magdalena’s throat came out of the cloth like a lily from the stem.
‘I’ll show them to you,’ said Magdalena, and moving gracefully over to the chest of drawers, she took down one of the glass bottles and handed it to me. ‘That’s Saint Lucy; she’s one of my favourites.’
The doll in her waxen grotto was holding in her pink-tipped hands a velvet cushion on which rested her gouged-out eyes.
‘This one’s Saint Nepoumak,’ she went on. ‘He’s got the rope round his neck, ready to be thrown in the river. And the one next to him is Saint Katherine. She was broken on the wheel, that’s why she’s in two parts like that. Though she joined up later.’
It was impossible to stop Magdalena as she moved tenderly among her friends: Saint Eulogius holding his severed head, Saint Agatha covering her cut-off breasts; Saint Cecilia smothered in her bath . . . I think she would have spent all afternoon showing us her treasures, but I now said firmly that it was time we got down to work.
At once the life, the animation, went out of the extraordinary girl. She replaced Saint Futurosa in his hair shirt and sat down obediently on the bed like a child getting ready to listen to a tiresome teacher.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so disconcerted. Magdalena nodded politely while I sketched what was possibly going to be the most beautiful wedding dress ever made, she acquiesced in my design for a Renaissance evening gown in cloth of gold; she agreed that a cloak of midnight-blue street velvet would become her.
But she was bored. Unmistakably, unconcealably bored.
Walking back to the shop, taking deep breaths of fresh air, Nini and I tried to make sense of what we had seen. For it seemed that Edith was right. Magdalena had indeed turned down a number of offers from men who’d been quite as prepared as Herr Huber to help the family. There’d been a handsome army captain who wanted to take the boys down to his estate in Styria, a young banker with a house in Paris . . .
‘Of course we’re grateful to Herr Huber,’ Frau Winter had said as she showed us out, ‘though I’m glad my father’s not alive to see her marry into trade.’
If it was pressure from her family that had made Magdalena agree to a rich marriage, her choice of suitor, clearly, was all her own.
Alice continues to be worried about Rudi.
‘He still looks so wretchedly tired,’ she said when I met her at the Landtmann. ‘That awful wife of his has got this gaggle of females called the Group. They come to the house and listen to her rabbiting on about Goethe, and the maids spend hours putting things on pumpernickel — you know how literary groups love to eat — and when Rudi comes in they just lift their heads and look at him like cows. I must say, Sanna, it seems to me so wrong that a man should have to endure all that just because he sat next to someone the day he’d finished his dead mother’s raspberry jam.’
I agreed. It’s always struck me as grossly unfair that men have to carry lifelong burdens on account of some brief and arbitrary accident, and I told Alice about my bank manager, Herr Dreiss.
‘He went to Budapest to see his brother and they went to a café where the gypsies were playing. Proper ones, you know, with all those czembaloms and things. And there was this girl from Wiener Neustadt at the next table: the most boring girl with buck teeth — he’d never have looked at her ordinarily — and by the next morning they were engaged. Just because of the gypsies. She has a baby every year and she’s brought her mother and her aunt to live. You’d think he could so easily have gone to some other café. Even in Budapest there must be a café where you don’t get yowled at by gypsies.’
At this point we got so depressed that we decided to boost our spritzers with a couple of schnapps, and I asked Alice about Magdalena’s headdress.
‘I want to use freshwater pearls braided into her hair and then take them up into a circlet to hold the veil. Only I’m not sure how to do it without getting that ridiculous pill box effect.’
Alice nodded and took the pencil from me. ‘You need that very soft wire they use for aigrettes. Yvonne has some — I’ll get it for you. Then you twist it like this . . .’
She drew exactly what I wanted and I thanked her. ‘You’re wasted on operetta, I’ve told you before. God meant you for a milliner.’
She sighed. ‘He certainly didn’t mean me for an ageing village maiden yowling in a dirndl for forty kronen a week.’
The schnapps came. We drank it and felt better, and Alice inquired about Edith.
‘Actually I don’t quite know what to do about her. It seems an extraordinary choice, to have her as an only bridesmaid. I can put her into moss green crêpe, a princess line and all that. Play safe . . . But I’d like to do better for the poor Bluestocking. Always a sheep in the nativity play and that dreadful briefcase full of Beowulf . . .’
For a moment I shut my eyes and tried to shake my mind free of all preconceived notions about Edith Sultzer. I can do that sometimes and get a kind of instant cameo of a person’s essence. It doesn’t last long, but it gives me a clue and I design to that.
I had forgotten about the schnapps. What flashed before my closed eyes was a bedroom with a french window leading out on to a verandah which overlooked a wide grey river. Inside the room was a large and tumbled bed and on it a plump Edith Sultzer in black lace underwear bounced up and down.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alice.
I stopped giggling and shook my head. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and explained. ‘It’ll just have to be the moss-green crêpe.’
June
I thought it was the full moon that woke me; I’d left the shutters open, for today was the first day of summer heat. It was two o’clock in the morning and even in the busy Walterstrasse the traffic was stilled; yet something had disturbed me.
I slipped on my kimono and went through into the kitchen to warm some milk. The moonlight was very bright: Saint Florian with his bucket was white as alabaster.
Then I heard the stamping of horses and saw a carriage standing by the Schumachers’ front door. The doctor. Some time tonight, then, the child would be born — and I leant out on the sill and prayed that the baby would be strong and well.
My baby was well. She was perfect. They shouldn’t have given her to me to hold, but she was born at night when the sister who was in charge of the ward was absent — and the young novice gave her to me.
So I held her.
As soon as she lay in my arms I knew for certain that I was going to keep her and I told her so. I felt well and strong and entirely without doubts and I spoke to her calmly and sensibly, for my joy was so overwhelming it needed the discipline of extreme politeness.
‘There is, for example, the question of your Christian name,’ I said to her as she lay and snuffled in the crook of my arm. ‘You see, Sappho called her daughter Kleis and I would very much like to ca
ll you that. Only I don’t think it would go well in German? So I wondered if you’d care to have my mother’s name? Would you like to be called Elisabeth?’ I asked my baby. ‘Would you care for that?’
And she opened her eyes.
We talked most of the night, my daughter and I, and in the shadowed ward the young novice who had brought her to me moved about her work.
The next day the sister came back and was furious. Babies destined for adoption should never be given to the mother to hold. By this time my temperature had begun to rise, and it rose and rose in the next days while half-comprehended figures in black habits sponged my forehead, felt my pulse and mouthed again and again their terrible, sincerely held beliefs. I must be sensible . . . I must sign the papers . . . I must let go.
I had puerperal fever. Most of the time I was delirious, but when I became aware of my surroundings they gave me laudanum because I screamed for my baby and upset the other patients.
Some time during those days, my daughter vanished.
I was ill for a long time. Puerperal fever kills more often than not, but I was eighteen and had been healthy all my life. I got better and they sent me down to their convalescent home in Klagenfurt where I sat in the sun with the other Fallen Women and stared at the Worthersee. After a month the doctor said I was fit for work and the nuns found me a job in domestic service in Vienna.
My employers had a big apartment behind the stock exchange. I slept in a windowless cupboard, rose at five-thirty and worked without a pause till nine at night. But it wasn’t the work that was the problem. I was prepared for that. It was my employers’ detestable sons, Alphonse and Franz, young men-about-town with incipient moustaches and ridiculous dandified clothes who regarded the maids as entirely available and thought they were honouring me with their favours.
I bit and scratched my way through my three months there. Then one morning I found my employers’ newspaper and in it an advertisement for a seamstress in the teeming textile quarter north of the Hohermarkt.
I worked for Jasha Jacobson for three years. He came from Russian Poland and ran a typical sweat shop — overcrowded, noisy, ill-ventilated. I knew nothing about Jews: their religion, their habits — being there was as strange to me as if I’d gone to work in an Arabian souk. We worked unbelievably long hours and my pay was low, but I’ve never ceased to be grateful for my time there. I learnt everything there was to know about tailoring: choosing the cloth, cutting, repairing the ancient, rattling machines. At first I was a freak — a schickse set down in the midst of this close knit immigrant community — but gradually, I became a kind of mascot. People passing smiled and waved at the blonde girl sitting in the window beside the cross-legged men sewing their button holes. And I was never molested — I might have been a girl of their own faith by the care they took of me.
When Jasha realized that I was serious about wanting my own shop, he began to take me about with him. I met an old Tunisian who did goldwork and his crippled wife who showed me how to handle sequins and beads. Lacemakers, leatherworkers, pedlars from Flanders and Normandy . . . I got to know them all and know them still.
After three years I asked Jasha for a reference and left. There were tears in his eyes when we said goodbye, but he was glad to see me go because his nephew, Izzy, his heir and the apple of his eye, wanted to marry me. Izzy had been rotted by education and lent me books by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky which I fell asleep over after a twelve-hour day. Jasha knew I had no intention of accepting the boy but it hurt him to have a member of his family who would consider marrying out of the faith.
With the reference Jasha wrote for me I got a job in a fashionable dress shop in the Herrengasse. I started in the sewing room, but soon I was modelling and helping with the designs, and at the end of two years the proprietress hinted at the possibility of a partnership, for she was getting on in years. Some of the customers befriended me and they had brothers, cousins — even fathers — who were very willing to take me out. I began to go to the theatre, to the opera; to meet writers and painters. Listening to their talk in the cafés, I became almost educated. And I learnt how to behave like a beautiful woman, which is not the same as — but more important than — being beautiful.
By this time I was sharing a flat with Alice: three rooms and a kitchen in a pretty, arcaded courtyard behind the Votiv Church. We’d met at Yvonne’s, both staring at the same hat: a green straw with parrot tulips and a navy-blue ribbon which we both decided not to buy! We got on well from the start — I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much as I did with Alice, nor seen so many operettas!
So within five years of leaving the House of Refuge, a penniless girl without a future, I had an excellent job, a home, a circle of friends.
I don’t know when I stopped daydreaming and decided to act. But one day at breakfast I said:
‘Alice, I’m going to get her back. I’m going to find my daughter. Can she come here?’
And Alice, who alone in the world knew my secret, jumped up and put her arms round me and said, ‘Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes!’
At four a.m. the doctor’s carriage was still outside the Schumachers’ house and the windows blazed with light.
Oh, let it go well for her, I prayed — she’s so tired, poor Helene — and let that pompous husband be good to her whatever the outcome.
Should it take so long, a seventh child?
It was one thing to decide to bring my daughter home, another to find her.
The sister who had been in charge at the House of Refuge had been transferred; the other nuns would tell me nothing. The deed was done, the child had a good home. As I beseeched and pleaded, they suggested I go to confession and purge myself of impure desires.
I went to the Ministry of Home Affairs and was transferred from room to room. At last I found the place where the adoption records were kept — and was met with a blank refusal. The files were confidential; there was no question of my seeing them.
‘I’m afraid it’s impossible, Gnädige Frau. It’s the regulations. There’s nothing we can do.’
They went on doing nothing, a thing that Austrian civil servants are very good at, for week after week. I kept going to see if a different clerk might be on duty; I implored, I wept — and still, implacably, they answered ‘no’.
And yet I didn’t lose hope. Now when I drove out with one of my escorts, I looked at Vienna with new eyes, noting fountains which would amuse her, alleys where she could bowl her hoop. I found myself staring at a poster of the Danube Steamship Company, searching the timetable for river trips which would not keep her from her bed too late. Once, quite by myself, I went to the Prater. Sometimes I think that of all the days of my life, that’s the one that I’d most like to have back: the day I tested the dappled horses of the carousels, travelled the magic Grottenbahn, sailed high over the city on the ferris wheel with my imagined daughter.
And I began to dress a doll. There has never, I do assure you, been a doll like the one I dressed for my daughter. Alice made her hats, but the rest — the evening gowns of faille and lace, the sailor suit, the nightgowns and bed jackets and capes, I stitched in the evening. The doll was my flag nailed to the mast. While I dressed her, I still had faith.
Then one day in July my luck turned. Going yet again to the records office I found a new clerk: an unattractive young man, spotty, with a big Adam’s apple, too much hair cream.
I began again, pleading, asking to see this one entry — the one referring to the adoption of a daughter born to Susanna Weber on the seventh of April 1893.
He listened, looked round to make sure that we were not overheard, asked what I would be prepared to give.
All the money I had, I said, also whispering. Everything I possessed — and I almost tore from my throat, then and there, the necklace that I wore.
But of course that wasn’t what he wanted.
It was
a long night, the night I spent with him in a cheap hotel behind the Graben — oh Lord, it was long. But he played fair. The next day he brought me a copy of the entry I had asked for. A baby girl born on the seventh of April 1893 to Susanna Weber, spinster, had been adopted on April the twenty-third by Erich and Sidonie Toller of 3, Nussbaumgasse, Hintersdorf, Salzburg. Herr Toller’s occupation was given as ‘water engineer’ and I remember being cross about that. Surely they could have done better for my daughter than a water engineer?
So now I was ready. I had been saving up my annual holiday, and on a perfect late summer’s day, with the doll packed in a special box, I set off for Salzburg.
Everyone knows what Salzburg is like. Very pretty, a little absurd. The Mirabelle Gardens, the Fischer von Erlach churches, the castle high on its hill. And Mozart of course. Mozart whom the inhabitants ignored and who now brings the tourists flocking.
But if you drive round behind the castle you come to a green and pleasant landscape which has nothing to do with the fashionable shops and the crowds. Here there are fields of clover, little streams and prosperous villages in which people who work in the town have built pretty villas with well-kept gardens.
Hintersdorf was one of these. There was a main street, a few quiet side streets running out towards the fields.
I had booked into a pension in Salzburg. Now as I alighted from the bus I was suddenly terribly afraid. Not that I couldn’t bring her back with me — I knew I could do that — but that she would be less than I had hoped, strange to me. Other . . .
Oh God!
I walked down the lane and found the house. Low, yellow stucco, in a big tree-shaded garden. There was a wooden table under a walnut tree and a swing in the branches of a cherry.
And she was in the garden.
It is becoming very hard to write but I had better finish now.
She was exactly as I had known she would be. Her face, wide-mouthed, sweet and funny was the face from which all others departed at their peril. She was fair, plump and golden-skinned; her thick hair was braided, but loosely so that the ends curled into fat tendrils the colour of corn. She wore a blue dirndl with a crisp white blouse and a dusty pink apron; her socks were white as snow and the ribbons which fastened her pigtails matched exactly the colour of her dirndl.