by Eva Ibbotson
I had quite forgotten; so had Herr Huber. Both of us were speechless, and it was Magdalena who lifted her head and said calmly:
‘Edith never eats meat. She is a vegetarian.’
An assassin leaping through the window with a revolver could not have caused more distress! By the doorway, the cook covered her face with a plump hand and as Fräulein Louisa yelled the dreadful information into Fräulein Marianne’s ear trumpet, the ladies fell into a litany of self reproach.
‘How foolish of us!’
‘We should have asked!’
‘We’re so out of touch here, you see.’
‘I could make an eierspeise,’ said the cook.
But at the thought of feeding a valued guest on scrambled eggs, the ladies plunged into even deeper distress. Topfen Palatschinken were mooted, a spinach roll . . .
I now decided to intervene.
‘Fräulein Sultzer,’ I said, laying a hand on Edith’s arm, ‘I have long been meaning to speak to you on the subject of your diet. In my view you are seriously anaemic; I’m experienced in such things and I assure you that there are signs. If you could force yourself to swallow just a few mouthfuls of meat — if you could overcome your disgust — I’m absolutely certain that you would feel the benefit.’
The butcher, who had risen to console his sisters, sat down again. ‘It is true, you know,’ he said in his deep, comfortable voice. ‘It is red meat that makes good blood.’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t . . . My mother . . .’
‘Your mother’s vegetarianism is noble,’ I said firmly. ‘We honour her for it. But sometimes a principle has to yield to expediency. After all, you have your work to think of. The Plotzenheimer prize and Beowulf. You have no right to let yourself get run down.’
‘Perhaps just a mouthful of the Filetspitz?’ suggested Herr Huber. ‘There’s nothing to distress you in a filet; it’s a very calm meat, that. You needn’t finish it.’
Edith’s anxious, myopic eyes went back and forth between us.
‘Well, perhaps . . . if you think . . . if it’s for my work.’
She took up her knife and fork, cut off a piece of filet, put it in her mouth. Herr Huber was right; there wasn’t anything to distress her, and she swallowed it, speared another piece, and swallowed that also. When the filet had gone she looked surprised and began on the kidney, and this too proved undistressing for she finished it, embedding fat and all. Her spectacles steamed up, a flush appeared on her face, and she turned her attention to the rolled-up slivers of ox tongue . . .
There is nothing like a narrowly averted disaster for making a party go with a swing. As Edith began to scoop the marrow from the bones, the ladies laughed and clapped their hands, enchanted to have saved a soul from the perils of inanition; Herr Huber told stories of his early days; the wine flowed . . .
We returned to Vienna by train. When Herr Huber, who had business to attend to in Linz, dropped us on the station platform, loaded with baskets of flowers and fruit which the sisters had insisted on picking for us, Edith thanked him with such warmth that he was quite embarrassed.
‘Na, na,’ he said. ‘Linz isn’t like Vienna. No one’s intellectual here. My sisters almost never read a book.’
‘But they were so kind,’ said Edith. ‘So terribly kind. I liked them so much.’
As the train drew away, it was the Bluestocking who leant out of the window and waved, while the lovely Magdalena sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.
Alice has great plans for her summer idyll with Rudi. She is cleaning the flat from top to toe and has made an extra-thick cover to put over her canary so that Rudi can sleep in the day if he wants to — and she is going to cook.
‘Seriously, I mean, Sanna. Proper health-giving things. Egg custard . . . and brawn and things like that to build him up.’
We decided to go to a new department store which stays open in the lunch hour to buy saucepans.
‘Those double ones with water underneath because I do find it difficult to remember what’s on the stove when I’m with him.’
And we did indeed set off, but unfortunately we entered the store through the lingerie department where Alice came face to face with a French slip in pale blue lace which was so obviously the thing to wear while cooking egg custard that it would have been absurd not to buy it.
‘Oh dear, I do feel guilty,’ she said as we came out. ‘But he really likes me in blue and I can always put a bowl over an ordinary saucepan, can’t I?’
I left her at the turning to the Kohlmarkt and went on down the Graben — where I ran straight into Frau Egger. She was wearing the cloak I had made for her — and the horn buttons I had originally suggested!
‘Oh that’s much better, Frau Egger. But why did you change them?’
She looked furtively about her. ‘It was my husband,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘He was so angry, you wouldn’t believe it! It seems the buttons I found were very rare; they’re from an early British regiment before the Napoleonic wars, even. They ought to be in a museum, he said.’
‘I didn’t know he was an expert in such things.’
‘No, I didn’t either. But then, there’s not much one knows about men, is there? He particularly asked if I’d got all the buttons back from you. But I did, didn’t I?’
I nodded and took my leave. As a matter of fact one of the buttons had rolled under Gretl’s machine when she knocked over the box and we’d found it two days ago. But I didn’t feel I deserved another visit from the poor sheep and anyway I was curious. Who was right: the Countess von Metz or Herr Egger?
Gernot could have found out for me — but the summer manoeuvres are upon us and heaven knows when I shall see him.
Tonight Sigismund came out into the square and stood by the fountain as usual. I waved from the window, but I had a lot to do and I didn’t go down. Usually he stands there for a quarter of an hour or so, but tonight he was still there after half an hour, after three quarters of an hour, just looking up at the window. At nine o’clock he still stood there, and at nine thirty . . .
I was angry by the time I reached him, but not for long. In the hot summer night he was shivering as if frozen to the marrow.
I knelt down beside him. He’s nearly eleven years old, but a head shorter than an Austrian child of that age. ‘What is it, Sigismund? Are you ill?’
He shook his head.
‘Come, tell me. Are you frightened?’
A half nod. I wondered if his uncle had been beating him again. But it wasn’t that: his uncle was missing. He hadn’t returned home.
‘It’s not so late, my dear. He’ll come.’
The child shook his head — a slow movement to and fro, like an ancient soothsayer’s. Then in that husky, scarcely audible voice, he murmured something that I didn’t catch.
‘What, Sigismund? What did you say?’
He moistened his lips and repeated the word.
‘Cossacks,’ he whispered. ‘The Cossacks have got him.’ Oh, God, what was this?
‘Nonsense,’ I said briskly. ‘There aren’t any Cossacks in Vienna. I tell you what, we’ll go and sit on Joseph’s terrace and have a cup of hot chocolate. Then you can watch out for him and before we’ve finished, there he’ll be.’
I took his hand which grasped mine like a vice. On the crowded terrace where people were enjoying the warm dusk there was one free table.
‘Would you like a cake? A piece of strudel or an Indianerkrapfen?’
He repeated ‘Indianerkrapfen’ though I’m not sure he knew what it was but when I ordered only one he frowned. ‘Will you eat a cake?’
‘No, Sigismund. I’ll just have chocolate.’
‘Then I will not have a cake either.’
I don’t know where he got his idea of etiquette from but it was very deep. I o
rdered two eclairs and he ate his without skill, getting cream on his face — but always watching, watching . . . My face, then the street for his uncle, then my face again.
‘Where did your uncle go, Sigismund?’
‘To find someone who will give me a concert. If I can play in a recital then I can make some money for the rent and perhaps have some lessons. My uncle can’t teach me any more.’
It seemed a forlorn hope that anyone in this city of aspiring prodigies would offer a concert to this ill-kept child.
‘He goes every day, but no one will hear me.’
I don’t know what I would have done if his uncle hadn’t come. Would I have taken the boy home, bringing at last a smile to the face of the irritable angel on her cloud? Probably not. I’d have knocked up the loathsome concierge and told her to mind the child while I went for the police.
At all events he came just as we had finished: a pathetic, dusty figure, his gaunt face creased with exhaustion.
I cut short his thanks and asked Joseph to bring him a glass of wine and an omelette — and when he had eaten he sent Sigismund to bed and told me his story.
Sitting opposite me with his melancholy side whiskers and unwholesome breath, Jan Kraszinsky was not an appealing character, yet as he spoke I felt pity for him for he had been forced by others — by his sister’s idealism, his nephew’s talent — to leave his native land, his job, the security he craved.
It began in Preszowice. Sigismund’s uncle pronounced the name of this obscure place on the borders of Russian Poland with a deep hunger: a straggling row of houses on a white dust road, a church . . . a school.
His parents worked a smallholding outside the little town, but Jan wanted to get away from the bleakness of the land, the frost-bitten turnips . . . He wanted a white-collar job, safety — and after his parents’ death he found it as caretaker of the Preszowice school.
‘It was a good position. I had my own little brick house in the schoolyard and a woman came to cook my meals.’
Jan had a younger sister, Ilona, whose ambitions were very different.
‘She was beautiful. You wouldn’t think it to look at the boy, but she was. She had red hair and a fine singing voice.’
Ilona went to Warsaw. Soon she was working in cabaret, and carried along on the tide of the Polish Freedom movement.
‘How I hate all those words,’ said Kraszinsky, sipping his wine. ‘Freedom, Unity, Liberation . . . To me they mean only one thing: people lying in their blood, corpses hanging on gibbets . . . death.’
At a concert (‘Chopin, of course,’ said Kraszinsky bitterly) Ilona met a young music student who was deeply involved in Pilsudski’s plans for an uprising against the Russians. They fell in love, went to live together, and Sigismund was born. But Ilona’s lover couldn’t keep out of politics. Twice he was arrested and released. Then in 1905 came Pilsudski’s revolution, its failure — and the dreadful retribution of the Russians.
With her lover, two other Polish patriots and the four-year-old Sigismund, Ilona fled back over the border to Galicia. One night she arrived with the child and asked Kraszinsky to hide the insurgents in Preszowice.
Sigismund’s uncle shrugged with the ingrained despair of the Slays. ‘Where do you hide someone in Preszowice? To cross a road is to meet three people who ask you where you are going.’
Ilona had left her lover and his friends in the forest. Now as her brother remonstrated with her she said: ‘Take the boy, then; I beg of you. Take him and I’ll come back for him as soon as we’ve found somewhere to go.’
‘What could I do?’ asked Kraszinsky now. ‘She was my sister.’ He paused to dab his eyes with a dirty handkerchief. She put the child down and went out through the back of the school, through the maize fields to find the others who were hiding. But the boy followed her. Later I found him gone. He was so small — as small as a beetle — but he followed her.’ He looked down at his glass. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. The Russians had no right to cross in to Austrian territory, but it’s all forest to the east of Preszowice, and who is going to tell the Cossacks that they can’t ride where they choose? There weren’t any shots — they used their sabres — so we didn’t know for a while; not till we found the bodies. The boy was sitting by his mother with his knees drawn up — not crying, just waiting. Waiting for her to wake up . . .’
‘Oh, God!’ It was my turn now to shiver in the heat.
‘We don’t know how much he saw, but he didn’t speak for a year.’
Then the local landowner sent down a piano for the school and Sigismund climbed on to the piano stool . . .
‘I tried to give him a violin, I could have helped him better with that, but it was the piano he wanted. When he was away from it he still didn’t speak much, but when he was playing he was all right.’
So for the next five years Sigismund sat on the Encyclopedia of World Art and played. The villagers brought him sheet music from the market; the schoolmaster taught him a little, and an old Professor from the Lvov Academy of Music gave him some lessons till he fell ill and died. Then last year the people of Preszowice decided to raise what money they could and send the child to Vienna. It was clear from the way Kraszinsky spoke that they, like he, felt no particular pride or pleasure in the child’s talent. It was simply something that had to be dealt with, like a multiple birth or a freak harvest.
‘And I came with him,’ he said now. ‘What else could I do?’
I ordered another glass of wine for him. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. And tonight? What kept you so late?’
‘I was trying to get an interview with Van der Velde.’ ‘The impresario?’
Kraszinsky nodded. ‘Meierwitz refused to see me, so did Niklaus. The Dutchman was my last chance. I went to his office but they said he wasn’t in, so I went out to his villa in Hitzing. A beautiful place . . . a long drive and high gates with stone pillars. The maid wouldn’t let me in — she said he was away from town. But I waited . . . I waited all day by the gates. I thought I would throw myself down on the gravel in front of his automobile, I was so desperate. It was evening before he came and then the chauffeur got out and said he would call the police if I didn’t go away.’
‘Is that what you want for Sigismund? A concert? Is he ready?’
Kraszinsky shrugged. ‘I tried all the music academies at the beginning. Probably it would be best for the boy to be with good teachers and postpone his debut . . . I don’t know. But no one would see me there either. If the doorman didn’t throw me out it was one of the secretaries. They only see a poor Pole with a foreign accent and funny clothes.’ He stretched an arm across the table in a gesture of despair. ‘I only want them to hear Sigi. Is it such a crime to want that? Is it so wicked of me to ask it?’
Yes, of course it’s wicked. To be talented and still alive in Vienna is unforgivable. Ask Mozart, ask Hugo Wolf . . . Ask Gustav Mahler who died six weeks ago to the unctuous lamentations of the men who hounded him.
But my mind was on something else. On Van der Velde, to be exact. Meierwitz and Niklaus I only knew by their less than savoury reputations, but Van der Velde I had met. Van der Velde I had, in fact, once known quite well.
I decided to go to the Opera.
This was nice of me: a sacrifice. It was Tristan and Isolde; the last night of the season and the last appearance of the veteran soprano Motte-Ehrlich before her retirement, so all Vienna would be there. Not just the fashionable world, but critics and agents and impresarios.
But if I felt daunted at the prospect of all that darkness and sadness on ramps, there was someone who was pleased. Up there on her cloud, the Polish wraith (now red-haired and not resembling at all Frau Wilkolaz in the paper shop) looked down at me and smiled.
Of the families who had offered me, whenever I cared for it, a place in their box, I selected Peter Konrad and his wife. Konrad owns a l
arge department store in the Mariahilferstrasse with a flourishing dress department. He’s always been helpful to me in my work and I thought a little professional gossip in the interval wouldn’t come amiss.
‘Of course, dearest Susanna,’ said Konrad when I telephoned him. ‘I’ll be enchanted. In fact you’ve saved my life — Marie has gone on to the Attersee with the children; they’ve all had chicken pox and needed the mountain air. Being envied by all the men in Vienna will make up for four hours of High Germanic screeching.’
There are not many Wagnerians in the rag trade.
I decided to wear black velvet, cut very low, with a small train, and gardenias in my hair.
‘Ah, you mean dressing against the season,’ said Nini appreciatively. ‘While everyone else is all frothy in muslins and organza.’ She paused, eyeing me tentatively. ‘And The Necklace?’
I nodded. It was The Necklace which would turn this somewhat banal outfit into a triumph, but the topic is taboo between us. I have told Nini that my diamond necklace is a fake and she has raised her iconoclastic Magyar eyebrows and disbelieved me.
I never wanted presents from Gernot. I don’t know why this is — I took them readily enough from my earlier admirers, but when I found out what being in love really meant, I became difficult. I wouldn’t let him buy me jewellery or lend me money to start my own shop, and I made my own clothes.
‘I don’t want any wages of sin,’ I said, teasing him, ‘I like sin and no one is to pay me for it.’
Not quite true, but my struggles in the confessional were not his business.
‘And what of me?’ he said furiously. ‘Would it hurt you to consider my feelings in the matter?’
But seeing how serious I was he acquiesced. For five years he only bought me flowers. Then one snowy December day a week before Christmas, a messenger arrived with a box from Cartier’s in Paris. ‘You will accept this,’ said the accompanying dictatorial note. ‘You will not, please, make me any scenes.’
It was a bad moment. Gernot is not rich; I envisaged a small forest sold, a farm sacrificed. Each time I wear this necklace I am transformed.