Madensky Square

by Eva Ibbotson

  Alice puts up no notices, that’s certain. She sits quietly in the flat she had prepared for Rudi and does exactly what she’s told. If you say ‘Eat, Alice!’ she eats; if you say ‘Lie down and rest’, she stretches out obediently on the bed. Sometimes, in the puzzled voice of a child, she asks a question.

  ‘What do you suppose they mean when they say we shall meet again in heaven? What shall we meet? If I went right along the rows of angels would I find one with bandy legs and pince-nez? You never seem to hear about angels like that.’

  And she is mystified by the behaviour of the British in India.

  ‘They’re trying to abolish suttee, did you know, Sanna? Why are they trying to do that? Everyone’s allowed to throw themselves on the funeral pyre in suttee — not just the wives and relatives. Everyone who belonged to the man that’s died.’

  Then came the reading of Rudi’s will. His investments were secure; his life had been heavily insured. With a little care, Laura would be able to live much as before. Nothing, of course, had been left to Alice; there was no mention of her in the will; she had not for a moment expected it. With the will, however, there was a letter, the contents of which knocked Alice out of her dangerous docility and brought on a storm of such dreadful weeping that at last it brought her sleep.

  Rudi had asked to be buried at St Florian’s.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Laura Sultzer, arriving in my shop on her way to interview Father Anselm. ‘I naturally assumed that Rudi would be cremated — we were both free thinkers. I wasn’t even aware that my husband knew this church existed.’

  I, however, was aware, for it was in the churchyard of St Florian’s that Alice and Rudi had met. It was just after I’d moved to the square. I was in bed with flu when Alice came to see me and I think I must have been running quite a high temperature because I became very agitated about the untended grave of the Family Schmidt which I had adopted. (This was before the harebells had seeded themselves.) Alice immediately offered to take some flowers and ran over to Old Anna to buy a bunch of cornflowers.

  Rudi Sultzer had been visiting a client in the Walterstrasse and taken a short cut across the square. Like so many people he’d lived in Vienna all his life and never been in St Florian’s, and now he paused and wandered into the churchyard. Where he saw a woman with gentle eyes laying a bunch of cornflowers on a grave . . .

  ‘I shall of course do my duty,’ said Laura and she did it. Rudi now lies in our churchyard. The hole they dug for him was small, but oh, it was deep!

  ‘My husband had very few friends,’ Frau Sultzer had told the priest. ‘Hardly anyone came to the house.’

  She was mistaken. There was scarcely room in St Florian’s for all the people who wanted to pay their respects to Rudi’s memory. He must have helped countless people of whose existence his wife was not even aware.

  Father Anselm had arranged for a full choral service. Not less than twelve carriages with their black horses and nodding plumes disgorged the mourners, and the hearse was piled high with wreaths.

  There was only one oversight. No one had seen fit to alter the notice on the churchyard gate. It still said: DOGS NOT ADMITTED. They had forgotten to amend it to: DOGS AND MISTRESSES . . .

  By this notice, Alice stood for the length of the service. Erect, exquisitely elegant, her veil down over the black hat she had tried on that day at Yvonne’s and bought now to bid her love goodbye, she waited, her hands grasping the spiked railings — the only mishap a split in the finger of one glove as the pallbearers passed with the coffin.

  Rip waited with her and so did I. We heard the responses, and Ernst Bischof singing the De Profundis. When the bells began their dreadful tolling Rip lifted his head and howled and I bent down to caress him, but Alice saw nothing, heard nothing, that did not touch her remembered life with Rudi.

  Only when the congregation came out and they took the coffin to the grave did she begin to tremble so much that I was afraid.

  ‘Come, let me take you home.’

  But her hands only fastened tighter round the railings. ‘I can’t . . . not till . . .’

  Laura was pushed forward and laid a handful of earth on the coffin, followed by Edith. And then it began, that dreadful, relentless shovelling of the obliterating earth.

  It was over. Frau Sultzer still lingered in the porch, but Edith now set off down the path towards the line of waiting carriages.

  Grim-faced, alone, plainer than ever, the Bluestocking marched towards us, her hideous, thick-soled shoes crunching the gravel. Any hope that she might foil to recognize her father’s mistress in her polka-dot veiling vanished as she stopped, scowling, beside Alice — and remembering the scene in the hospital I prepared to throw myself between them, quite ready to murder anyone who tried to hurt my friend.

  Her face still contorted, Edith stumbled forward. Her arms went out stiffly like the arms of a puppet . . . and closed round Alice’s shoulders in a clumsy, pitifully unpractised embrace.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  They clung together, Alice released by this undreamt of gesture into torrents of tears. ‘But at least you didn’t miss him,’ said Edith Sultzer. ‘I did. I missed the whole of his life.’

  Then she walked on and got into the first of the carriages and sat there, scowling again, and waiting for her mother, who had noticed nothing.

  Nini departed this morning for the Grundlsee. She wore her assassination shoes — high-heeled kid with grosgrain rosettes — which were so expensive that she meant to keep them for a really important event in the Anarchist calendar, and a bronze silk faille suit with a Winterhalter blouse. A perfect outfit for washing up the dishes of a hundred disturbed children and sweeping floors.

  ‘I still don’t see why I have to go,’ she said mulishly. ‘You know how much work there is to do on the Huber trousseau.’

  I took her to the station and saw her into her compartment, where a young man with a violently waxed moustache rose to receive her suitcase with alacrity. Poor fellow: it hurt me to see his look of expectancy. Nini’s been fending for herself since she was fourteen. Long before I found her in Ungerer’s atelier she’d had more experience than women three times her age — and no one can wield a hatpin like my assistant.

  The flat seems appallingly silent without her. I asked Alice if she’d like to come and stay; this is the time when Rudi would have come to her and I hate her to be alone, but she needs to be in her own place, she says, and I understand that. At least the Volksoper is closed. Herr Huber has been kindness itself driving her to the theatre, seeing she has a meal afterwards.

  ‘Na, na,’ he says in his slow, rumbling voice when I thank him. ‘You know what an honour it is for me to have the friendship of two such gifted women.’

  If Vienna now belongs to the poor, the industrious and the bereaved, the Countess of Metz certainly fits in this category. She stays in her palace with the shutters closed and writes me petulant notes. She would like her bottle-green suit and she would like it quickly. She doesn’t know what is delaying me, and to give wings to my endeavour she has sent me a pair of battered candlesticks of the kind old ladies hit burglars on the head with and a Louis Quatorze spittoon.

  The choirboys have gone home for the holidays and the Schumachers are still away so the square is as silent as the house. It is very hot now; the mornings are misty and vaporous; you know where the sun is rather than see it, and the flowers have stopped being blue and yellow as in spring; they’re mostly red now: dahlias and tall gladioli, and in the window boxes a mass of scarlet geraniums that seem to shout their colour into the muted light. Rip is in an aquatic and sportif mood, clambering up the side of the fountain and very seriously thinking of jumping in, but there is the problem of his back legs. He’s much more cheerful without the setter of the English Miss. Passion isn’t at all good for the char
acter; I’ve always known that.

  My pear is well. Not exactly enormous — toe-sized one could say — but it’s a late-maturing variety and I have absolute faith in its ability to swell.

  Tomorrow I shall shut the shop. Nothing happens in these dusty summer days and I’m glad of that. I’m not sure that I really like ‘events’.

  No, I was wrong. Something has happened that has upset me very much.

  Magdalena’s wedding dress has gone off to be sewn with seed pearls, her blue velvet cloak is being embroidered with silver acanthus leaves. I have made her a day dress of linen the colour of sandalwood and another of pearl-grey faille striped with rose . . .

  But Magdalena herself remains an enigma. She is utterly beautiful, graceful, remote . . . always polite to her fiancé whom, however, she almost never addresses directly. Certainly her engagement has achieved the result she hoped for. Herr Huber has had the twins coached for cadet college, medical treatment has been arranged for the taxidermist and he is negotiating for a better apartment for the family. But I’ve only seen her animated when she’s in company, real or imagined, with her saints.

  At least until tonight. I’d taken pity on the Countess von Metz and delivered her two-piece, and as the evening was so beautiful I walked back, taking a short cut through that enclave behind St Oswald’s Church where the Jesuits have their priory. There’s a little garden there that is used by lovers and old people. It’s pretty and quiet, with the priory on one side and the old Krotsky Palace on the other, and the roses are famous.

  It was already dusk; and I half averted my eyes from the two people standing very close together under an acacia. The man was tall and dressed in a black cloak like a student. The girl too wore a dark cloak? — but what stood out even from a distance was the intensity of their involvement. She was looking up at him, entreaty in every line of her body; he bent over her with an unmistakable tenderness and love.

  Then they drew apart, and as the girl walked away past the flower beds her hood fell back and I saw, quite clearly, Magdalena’s face and the long white-blonde hair.

  There’s nothing I can do about this, nothing I can say — but oh, that poor, kind, unsuspecting man! Is it all a sham, this religiosity of hers? For it seems clear now that she chose the butcher from her other rich suitors for the ease with which she will be able to deceive him. There was nothing of farewell in that meeting under the acacia tree.

  One thing is certain: in thinking Magdalena Winter incapable of passion, I was a fool.

  August

  Sigismund’s uncle fainted today on the stairs. Frau Hinkler told me this in her usual pleasant manner. ‘He’s starving himself to keep up the instalments on the piano. I didn’t get a doctor; what’s the use? He can’t pay.’

  I’ve never been inside Sigismund’s attic; the glimpse through the window that first night was enough for me, but in the evening I put some fruit and a jar of soup into a basket and went across.

  Frau Hinkler let me in with a bad grace. She longs to evict the Kraszinskys and any sign that they’re not friendless infuriates her.

  Oh God, that wretched room! The piano stands in the centre and I see it now as a black monster devouring the lives of those two miserable exiles; endlessly consuming the money that they need to live. It alone had been wiped clean: everywhere else, on the bare boards, on the window sill, the dust lay clotted. Sheets of music and a few tattered books were piled on newspaper on the floor — and on a trestle bed against the wall lay Kraszinsky, still wearing his rusty black clothes, with his arms by his sides like someone waiting for the undertaker.

  ‘I’ve brought you some soup. Is there somewhere I can heat it up? Do you have a kitchen?’

  Sigismund, who had appeared silently by my side, led me into a scullery with a dirty sink, one dripping tap, a paraffin stove. His crucifix, I noted, was once again tied with a grubby piece of string. I scrubbed out the only saucepan, disposed of a cockroach, rinsed the grease from two tin bowls.

  ‘We are going back,’ said Kraszinsky as I returned to his bedside. ‘We are finished. I have written to Preszowice.’

  ‘You’d like that?’

  He shrugged. Tor myself, yes. Perhaps I can get my old job back. But there is nothing there for the child — nothing. I dream about my sister.’

  As I was leaving, Sigismund beckoned to me from the doorway beside the scullery. It led to a windowless slit of a room with a skylight so begrimed that it let in almost no light. This, clearly, was where Sigismund slept — only what was it that he wished to show me? The rancid smelling mattress on the floor? The one cane chair with a broken seat?

  No . . . something else. Against the wall, on what must have been the wooden box in which he’d brought his few possessions, Sigismund had set up an icon corner such as all pious households have in the east.

  In the centre was a picture of a young woman in a leather frame. Kraszinsky was right — his sister had been beautiful. The oval face was tranquil, the mouth full. Beside the picture was a bracelet made of woven hair, now faded but still retaining the reddish tint it had had in life. Had they cut the tresses from Ilona’s head as she lay murdered in the forest? It was hard to hold it and admire it as the boy put it into my hand.

  The third object on Sigismund’s shrine was an old cigar box and as I bent down to look at it he made a protective gesture, covering it with his fingers.

  ‘You don’t want me to open it?’

  He hesitated; colour flooded his narrow face; then suddenly he turned back the lid.

  Oh God! Inside was the lace-edged handkerchief I’d dropped the night I took him to the churchyard to smell the limes . . . the gold ribbon I had sent over for his crucifix, carefully coiled as sailors coil a rope . . . two shrivelled forget-me-nots from the bunch I had worn in my belt the first day I said ‘Grüss Gott’ to him by the fountain. And most macabre of all, cut from an ancient newspaper which some earlier tenants must have left behind, an advertisment for my shop in the days when I still had to advertise.

  Crossing the square to go home, I took deep breaths of air, trying to shut out what I had seen. Even before I reached my door, it had begun again: calm, orderly, serene — Sigismund’s music. I was right about the piece. It is by Mozart. The Rondo in A.

  The Schumachers are back. They invited me over as soon as they’d unpacked and the girls showed me their treasures: the skeleton of a fish from Lake Locarno, a thistle head the size of a plate . . . Gisi, now that she is no longer the youngest, has been taken out of nappies. She has a surprised and slightly anxious look as though she finds this sudden adulthood uncertain and draughty.

  Then on Sunday we had the christening.

  The godmother Helene had chosen for the baby was ill so I held the comical creature whose blemish I no longer ‘see’. Even before I gave her to the priest she was not entirely pleased with events. A terrible frown appeared between her autocratic eyebrows, and she wrinkled her nose. And when Father Anselm sprinkled her with holy water and pronounced her string of resplendent Christian names, Donatella’s yells of rage would have displaced a whole regiment of devils from the depths of hell.

  Afterwards there was a party in the Schumachers’ pretty Biedermeier drawing room and today Herr Schumacher has gone to Graz to fetch his nephew.

  I was present at Gisi’s christening too, and at Kati’s and at that of the quicksilver Resi . . . I could recite all the Christian names of all the little Schumacher girls.

  But I don’t know what my own daughter is called. I don’t know what names the people in Salzburg chose for her. Somehow I can never get over that. That I don’t know my daughter’s name.

  Oh dear! I expect it will be all right but it has to be admitted that the goldfish slayer is not a pretty sight. The carriage in which Herr Schumacher brought him from the station turned in between the chestnut trees as I was crossing the square, and h
e ordered the coachman to stop, and introduced the boy.

  ‘This is my nephew, Frau Susanna. Gustav, bow to the lady.’

  I was surprised at this instruction. At fourteen, I thought Gustav might be able to bow without being told, but I was wrong. Over the boy’s somewhat vacant face, with its flat nose and faint tracings of a moustache, spread a look that was both bovine and puzzled.

  ‘Take off your cap!’

  This at least Gustav seemed able to do. He inclined his head and murmured something which could have been a greeting.

  ‘We’ll soon get him trained up, eh Gustav? You’re going to be a great help to me, aren’t you, boy?’

  Gustav said something which sounded like ‘Ugh’, or maybe ‘Agh’ and put on his cap again. I don’t think I have ever seen a boy with such enormous ears.

  The girls’ aquarium has been moved to the attic where Lisl can keep an eye on it.

  Nini has been back three days and she spends a great deal of time telling me that she is all right.

  She does not look all right. There are dark rings under her eyes and she is ill-tempered and twitchy. She also works the kind of hours which would make her absolutely furious if they were demanded of a textile worker in Ottakring, and there is a tendency to stare at roses. Roses, where Nini was concerned, belonged behind one ear or copied in silk to go on a bodice. Now she stares at them, and since the ones that are easily available to us are the pink ramblers separating my courtyard from Herr Schnee’s, which are currently at the brown dishclothy stage, I am not particularly pleased.

  I shall put up with this for a few more days, but if it doesn’t improve I’m going to have it out with her.

  The Schumacher girls are awed by Gustav. He is awful in an archetypal way like the monsters and ogres in fairy tales: large, slow-moving and stupid. Most of all they are awed by his appetite.