by Eva Ibbotson
‘No, no! I never spoke of it to Magdalena. It distressed her.’ ‘Well it doesn’t distress Fräulein Edith and she’s a great deal more intelligent.’
But the poor Bluestocking didn’t exist for the lovesick butcher.
‘How can you say that?’ I had deeply offended him. ‘How can you talk of obscenity? It was the purest, the most —’
‘It wasn’t anything of the sort,’ I snapped. ‘It was loathsome. An insult to human love. You’ve been saved from the most appalling unhappiness and so has your fiancée. I can’t imagine how a man of your intelligence could come up with anything so sickly. You ought to be ashamed.’
‘Ashamed! Of wanting to be pure! Of trying to embrace high ideals. Of being like Parsifal!’
‘Parsifal. Ha! What do any of us really know about Parsifal? As for the opera it lasts six hours and in the first act absolutely nothing happens except someone waiting to have a bath. Furthermore, if Parsifal was so pure how did he manage to father Lohengrin — answer me that!’
After he left I regretted my sharpness. The poor man is half demented not only with grief but with anxiety. Where can a girl with no money have gone to? Is she hungry? Is she in need? All the same, it’s odd how low purity comes on my list of priorities. From my earliest youth I have wanted to be successful, warm-hearted, generous and rich — but pure, no. Even when there was still a chance of it, I can’t say I ever wanted to be that.
I wish there was someone other than Jan Kraszinsky to supervise the child’s work for the concert. Surely he shouldn’t be working so ceaselessly? It isn’t just the way he plays that Kraszinsky is bullying him about.
‘Don’t make faces,’ we hear him yell. ‘Don’t screw up your mouth!’ The child isn’t even allowed out now in the evenings for his airing by the fountain. It’s understandable, I suppose, Kraszinsky’s agitation, so much depends on this one night. He’s borrowed money on the strength of it and given up so much, but he’s a fool. He’ll break the boy’s health if he goes on like this.
This morning I met Rip coming out of the paper shop and because we’re old friends, he let me take the Neue Presse briefly from his jaws. Opening it at the concert page, I found Van der Velde’s advertisment: a pen and ink drawing of a romantically coiffed waif who looks about six years old with the caption: In 1842 — Anton Rubinstein! In 1887 — Ignace Paderewski!! In 1911 — Sigismund Kraszinsky!!!
The child’s debut is attracting a lot of attention; nearly all the seats are sold and the critic from Tageblatt is said to be coming, and the man from the Allgemeine Zeitung. Van der Velde took the boy to the hall to show him where he was playing.
‘What was it like?’ I asked Sigismund.
‘It is a very fine piano,’ he said seriously. ‘A Bosendorfer — and I don’t have to sit on books; there is a special seat.’
‘And the hall itself?’
He looked at me, puzzled. I don’t think he saw anything except the piano. His concert clothes are finished. I’ve made him an extra pair of trousers for every day and Nini, unasked, has stitched him a handkerchief embroidered with his initials. With his hair properly cut, he looks now what he is: a plain and serious little boy — but tired, terribly tired. Van der Velde, who surely should be keeping an eye on him, has gone to Paris.
Mitzi Schumacher, that gentle soul, has her own anxieties.
‘Should I marry Sigismund, do you think, Frau Susanna, when I’m grown up?’
‘Do you want to, Mitzi?’
‘No, I don’t. He’s too thin and small. But someone should look after him if he’s going to be a famous pianist and see that he eats enough. Maia won’t — she says that pianists only go to boring towns, not interesting places like the Amazon, and Franzi doesn’t like to cook.’
‘If he’s going to be famous perhaps he could get a housekeeper,’ I suggested — and took Mitzi out to look at my pear.
But the pear affected this motherly person much as Sigismund had done.
‘It’s not very big, is it?’
‘It’ll grow,’ I said firmly.
Though I do wonder . . . The first frosts are expected soon. Perhaps I should simply cut my losses and pick the thing?
Alice has received a letter which has troubled her. It’s from a bank in Switzerland and full of mysterious and pompous language. They want her to travel to Zurich bringing evidence of her identity, and she’s convinced that she has committed some misdemeanour of which she is unaware.
‘I think that’s most unlikely, Alice,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine a more law-abiding person and Switzerland isn’t really a very frightening place. Also they say they’ll give you back your fare — and I shouldn’t think they’d do that if they’re going to arrest you. Anyway Swiss gaols are probably lovely: all scrubbed and hygienic with cow bells to summon the warder.’
It doesn’t seem to get any better for her, Rudi being dead.
‘If only there weren’t so many small bandy-legged men with gold pince-nez,’ said Alice, trying to laugh. ‘I see them everywhere.’
The search for Magdalena continues. I take no interest in it — where the girl has gone with her lover is no concern of mine — but Herr Huber seems to be shrinking inside his skin. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to tell him what I saw at St Oswald’s: one short, sharp blow might be better than this long-drawn-out distress. I have told Edith, but the Bluestocking in her own way is as obstinate as her mother and she doesn’t believe in Magdalena’s elopement.
‘I don’t think she’d do that,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t sound like Magdalena. She never wanted anything to do with men.’
Ah, I wanted to say, if you’d seen her with this man. If you’d seen the yearning, the way she leant towards him.
But I left it. I can’t do anything now about Magdalena, nor about the little Count of Monte Cristo preparing for his big day as I prepare for mine. For it’s less than a week before I take the train to Trieste. I’m making myself a dress of corn coloured shantung — very simple, very Greek. Fluted like a pillar I shall stand with my lover on a promontory licked by the azure water — and I shan’t only look like a temple, I shall be one. Yes, it’s true. The thoughts I have, the gratitude, the worship will be the kind of thoughts that they must have had in the dawn of time, those men and women who lived so closely with the gods.
‘Physical love is completely unnecessary for you,’ Gernot once said to me. ‘A work of supererogation. You’re in love with the whole created world. I’m competing with every idiot sparrow chirping on a window sill, with every tree that bothers to put out a leaf.’
If only it were true! If only he knew how the sparrows would fall and the leaves shrivel if I lost him.
But he shall know. I’m not ashamed that I mean to make of this journey a kind of sacrament. If either of us smile on our deathbed, it shall be because we are remembering our days and nights beside the sea. So move over, Oh Shulamite, for I assure you that the best bedroom of the Hotel Post or the Hotel Bella Vista (or even of a pension with an asterisk, hard as it is to imagine Gernot in such a place) shall be the setting for my ‘Song of Songs’!
I’ve bought a new sponge bag too.
October
I woke early this morning, the day before my voyage to the sea. The weather has been misty and autumnal, but I don’t mind that — indeed it makes it better. For once you go through the Mallnitz tunnel and come out on the southern slope of the Alps, the sun always shines, Gernot told me that. Just one tunnel and you are among the lemon trees and the blue skies, in the country that the songs are about. ‘Kennst Du Das Land Wo Die Citronen Blühen’ wrote Laura Sultzer’s Goethe, and tomorrow I too shall know it.
At seven thirty I slipped out to the apothecary in the Walter-strasse to fetch the special shampoo that Herr Frieberg mixes for me, for the dress of corn-coloured shantung in which I shall stand like a pillar on a promontory
demands the echoing gold of my coiled hair and though Nature has done what she can, Herr Frieberg’s Special Mixture is undoubtedly a help.
When I had washed my hair and buffed my fingernails I wandered peacefully through the shop. Everything is ready for tomorrow’s journey. My hats, nested in tissue, rest in their boxes, my case is dusted, the shoes already packed. The most reliable cab driver in the Albertina Platz will come at five o’clock, a good hour before I need to leave to catch my train, but I love stations and hate rush.
Across the square I could see Jan Kraszinsky come out of the apartment house looking dishevelled and agitated as usual, and hurry off towards Joseph’s café. I haven’t seen Sigismund for days.
‘Let it go well for him tomorrow,’ I prayed — and forgot him.
In the long mirrors I saw myself, my hair loose, my eyes bright, and felt a surge of gratitude to God for letting me have a little longer, still, to summon beauty. He could so easily have smitten me with a spot on the chin, a cold in the nose, but He had seen into my heart and stayed His hand.
Kraszinsky had left the café and was running across the square. He was hatless, his coat-tails flapped — he was coming towards my shop and I was instantly angry. I wanted nothing of the Kraszinskys and their problems on the morning of my waiting day.
‘He’s gone!’ said Kraszinsky almost falling across the threshold. ‘Sigi’s gone!’
‘Nonsense! He’ll have gone out for a stroll.’
‘No, no! He never goes out now, I forbade it because of the boys.’
‘What boys?’
‘Herr Schumacher’s nephew and the other one who sings in the choir. They throw stones at Sigi and shout things.’ Oh God, poor Sigismund. I had known nothing of this. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘In the night. I woke up and I thought I must tell him to change the fingering in the polonaise, so I went in and he was there then.’
‘You woke him in the middle of the night to tell him that?’
‘Yes, yes . . . Often I have ideas in the night and I tell him. The concert must be a success, it must! I have borrowed so much money! Oh God, what shall I do?’
The man was quite out of control, shaking . . . a little mad. Did Frau Hinkler not see him go out?’
He shook his head. ‘He must practise still — he must practise! Yesterday he made a mistake in the last movement of the sonata.’
‘I’m not surprised he made a mistake. I’m surprised he can still play at all. Look, you’d better tell the police, but I’m sure he can’t have gone far. He may even be back now; he could have slipped in through the courtyard.’
I almost pushed him out of the door, but my lovely, quiet day of anticipation was shattered. Nini came out of the workroom and I told her what had happened.
‘Poor little scrap; I saw him yesterday at the window and he looked terrible; really ill. No wonder he’s run away.’
‘He hasn’t run away,’ I said crossly. ‘Where would he run to?’
Strange that I never thought of the obvious thing. Even after Nini gave a little squeak and said: ‘Oh! There’s something moving there, under the table,’ even then I didn’t think.
But of course he was there. He must have crept in while I was out at the chemist . . . come for sanctuary to the ‘little house’ of yellow silk he’d hidden in when he came to be measured for his clothes, and fallen asleep.
For he slept still; he had only stirred briefly. He lay curled up, his arms crossed over his chest. I saw a human embryo once, in a jar in Professor Starsky’s lab; a waxy white, curved little creature with slits for eyes who lay as the boy lay, seeming to protect itself from birth, from life.
We pulled him out, helped him on to the sofa.
‘I can’t,’ he said, still not quite conscious. ‘I can’t. I don’t remember how it goes any more.’ And then something in Polish which he repeated. ‘Sleep,’ said Sigismund. ‘Please can I sleep?’
I could have murdered Kraszinsky at that moment.
While Nini locked the door and pulled down the blinds, I pushed the hair away from Sigismund’s face and found a bloodied graze on his temple. A stone thrown with venom would have made such a mark.
‘He won’t be able to play, will he?’ whispered Nini. ‘I don’t know.’
With twenty-four hours to go it seemed impossible. Even if they could get him to the hall what kind of performance could be expected from this weary little wreck? But it wasn’t the ruined prodigy I saw in Sigismund’s hollowed cheeks and stricken eyes; it was a sick and ill-treated child.
I sent Nini for some milk and a croissant, and while the boy ate and drank I tried to think what to do. I’d kept the day deliberately free of clients; most of my packing was done. And suddenly I knew . . .
‘Sigismund,’ I said, ‘we’re going away for a little while. Just you and I. We’re going to play truant.’
He put down his cup. ‘I don’t have to practise any more?’
’No. You don’t have to practise ever again if you don’t want to.’
‘And it doesn’t matter if I screw up my mouth?’
‘It doesn’t matter in the least.’
He was on his feet; he put his hand in mine. He was ready.
I gave Nini her instructions. ‘I’m going to slip out at the back. Give me half an hour, then go and tell Kraszinsky that the boy is safe. I’ll bring him back this afternoon.’
Only when we were in a cab bowling down the Walterstrasse did Sigismund ask: ‘Where are we going?’
And I answered: ‘To the Prater.’
The words were hard to say.
I had not been in the Volksprater — the Wurschtlprater — since I went to try out for my daughter the dappled horses on the roundabouts, the coconut shies, the swings. That day, twelve years ago, when I had been so sure that she and I were about to begin our life together, had been one of the happiest of my life. She was with me all the time in spirit, driving a miniature carriage pulled by white llamas, throwing hoops over bobbing celluloid ducklings, clapping her hands when I won for her a cross-eyed, fluffy dog. And at the end she led me, my lion-hearted daughter, towards the giant wheel with her blonde head tilted to the skies.
So it was not easy now to drive through the gates with this alien child.
Sigismund, as we got down from the cab, stood looking around him in bewilderment. There must have been fairs even in Galicia, but the boy seemed overwhelmed and his cold hand fastened tightly on mine.
But in any case I wasn’t going to let him choose what to do first. I knew. The treasure I’d discovered when I came here with my little phantom daughter was still there: I could see the brightly coloured sign above a clump of bushes. GROTTENBAHN, it said — and I moved resolutely towards it, paid, led the child into the first of the wooden coaches, painted a brilliant red and blue.
‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘You’ll see.’
Only a few people got in behind us; it was late in the year for the Prater. The bell rang and we lurched forwards into the darkness. There was time to be properly afraid — and then the train stopped.
We were opposite the first of the lighted caves. It showed Cinderella stooping by the embers, her golden hair brushing the hearth. Everything that would later transform her life was there: the pumpkins, the mice . . . One baby mouse playing beneath the dresser was half the size of the rest, with tiny crooked whiskers. The clock ticked in the corner, hams and salami hung from the rafters. She was utterly forlorn, poor Cinderella, and as we leaned out of the train (which we were not supposed to do) we could see the tears glitter on her cheeks.
‘Who is she?’ whispered the boy beside me, and I realized that he had never heard of Cinderella; never in his life.
Yet he was transfixed, as I was too. For we were entirely in the kitchen, sharing her loneliness,
her rejection — but at least I knew the future as did the children in the coaches behind me. That the old woman visible through the window was coming. . . that as soon as the train moved on she would be there, the fairy godmother under whose cloak one could see the glimmer of silver.
The train surged forwards and beside me Sigismund sighed. It was too soon, always too soon, that jerk of the train, one never had time enough. Another journey into the darkness, and then we stopped once more.
Snow White this time, and the glass coffin and the dwarves clustered round in mourning. And how they mourned! They held their heads in their hands, they clutched their handkerchiefs, one lay prostrate among the lilies of the valley on the ground. White doves hung above the bier, white roses sprouted from the earth and she lay with her raven hair streaming across her face.
And again for the other children in the coaches the sadness was almost pleasurable because they knew, as I knew, that the prince would come (one could see his painted horse, his handsome head on a distant hill), the poisoned apple be dislodged, the grief-stricken dwarves rise to their feet and dance.
But not Sigismund. ‘Why is she dead?’ came his hoarse little voice beside me. ‘Who killed her?’
‘I’ll tell you later. But it’s all right. She comes alive again.’
Another plunge into the darkness and the giant Rubezahl, our special Austrian giant and wholly benevolent. He was holding a cow in the hollow of his hand and chiding it for not giving milk while tiny people in the field below looked pleased.
And on again to the Sleeping Beauty. She lay back in a swoon holding her spindle and she had the richest, fattest plait of flaxen hair you have ever seen. A great hedge of thorns grew across the window and all around her lay the palace servants overcome as she was by sudden sleep. There was a sleeping dog, a sleeping chef in a tall hat — and a sleeping kitchen boy still holding aloft the cutlet he had been about to eat.
‘A sleeping chop!’ said Sigismund, pointing, and for the first time since I had known him, I heard him giggle. He had made a joke.