by Sarah Perry
I shivered then, and asked what became of those who take her hand. Herr Schröder laughed. “Nobody knows what happens,” he said, “because she isn’t real. If she were, I suppose one might go with her, if life had become intolerable. Put it from your mind, young Hoffman. You are too old for fairy tales.”
Calamity came to my family in 1936. The Moser factory, whose frail glass bowls and flutes were no match for factory-made glass, laid off many staff and my father among them. He came home that day with a red bowl wrapped in pages of the Prager Tagblatt and hidden in his winter coat. It had a flaw on the rim, but he’d saved it from the master glassblower’s wrath, in what was I think the sole act of individualism and courage of his whole life. Loudly he bemoaned the mischance that led him to place his fortunes into the hands of a Jew. I suppose we may have fallen into poverty had not my mother’s brother died childless, leaving her the sole beneficiary of his will. He had owned a shoe shop in Prague, a city I’d never visited and to which I’d never given any thought; and so by the close of that year we had left behind the Eger and the lindens and Herr Schröder’s school, and become part of the little group of ethnic Germans living at that time in Prague.
I recall how large and light the shop and its apartment seemed; see quite plainly now the apartment with its old oak floor, and how downstairs were many posters of ladies’ ankles in high-heeled shoes, always with the suggestion of lace or a satin hem. There were two large windows filled with glass cases, displaying shoes on lengths of cloth, and I cleaned these every Saturday with white vinegar dabbed on worn-out handkerchiefs. My father turned his mind to the accounts; my mother fitted schoolgirls and grand German–Czech dames for shoes. A brighter child than I might have found himself living in bewilderment and delight, for in place of a modest village and a single church, I had within arm’s reach the city of a thousand spires, which glittered on the banks of a great river: of staircases steep as mountainsides, and buildings plastered and painted in the colors of girls’ dresses in spring, and Prague Castle which rose up from the Vltava seeming black and terrible. But two impressions alone have outlasted the years: the motorcars and trams which seemed barbarous to me as they thundered past the open windows, and a building on the Old Town Square painted like the Wedgwood plates my mother had been given as a wedding gift and never used since. I made myself invisible among the boys at school, and every afternoon stood behind the counter with my mother wrapping in brown paper the sandals and slippers she sold. I turned eleven, then twelve: acquired breadth of body, and none of mind. No school companions invited me to their homes, and I never thought to invite them to mine. Our only visitor was the policeman whose beat included the shop. He was a childless and fatherly man whose mother had been German, and who was delighted to speak to my mother in the language he knew better than Czech. She called him Polizist Novák, as if they’d met on a Berlin street, and not Rotný Novák as the Czechs did; and though I dimly understood that this was a small act of defiance I could not comprehend why it gave my mother such pleasure. I grew fond of him because he made my mother laugh, a feat which lay far beyond my father. His wife was Catholic, and very devout, and I understood this to be a great trial to him. He did not speak to me with kindness or condescension, as people so often speak to children, but as if I were a man like him, and like my father. “Seen anything interesting lately?” he would say, leaning on the counter and eating one of the pieces of cake which he seemed always to have about him. “How’s work going? Are you keeping well?” So we went on, my parents and I—dull, unspeaking: three oxen trudging in their furrow, not once looking up at the changing weather, which rolled in very low and very black from the east.
At last something penetrated through that atmosphere of foolish indifference into which I had been born. One property on our street had evidently been empty since long before we’d come to live nearby. It was a much grander shop than ours with two red doors covered with curlicues of iron, and two curved windows papered over with old newspapers. One morning—September, I suppose, for I wore new school shoes that pinched—I was astonished to find the paper taken down and the windows clean and shining. A sign swung above the door on a wrought-iron bracket: it read BOOKS AND MAPS, and the paint was wet, and red. Concealing myself in the doorway of the grocer’s shop I looked for a long time at the new shelves that clad the walls from floor to ceiling, and the new glass cabinet where antique books were set on blocks. Two children stood laughingly directing a woman as she pinned up a map of Bohemia in a fine brass frame. I watched the light striking their sleek fair heads, and thought the woman very beautiful, so unlike my own mother: tall and plump, with strong legs in fine stockings, her hair set in fashionable rolls. Then one of the children turned and his blue intelligent eyes picked me out in the gloom where I stood and met mine with a sensation like the touch of hand on hand. I had the bewildering feeling of inhabiting for a moment that fair and shining countenance. For just as I saw him—how straight he stood, and how the sun picked out the whiteness of his shirt—I saw also myself. It was as if I’d been without warning placed before a mirror. I saw my lumpish face, and the rough hair my mother cut; saw the downturned mouth and greenish eyes that had no gleam to them. Was it then I hated him, I wonder? Or was it later, when I saw how often he laughed, and how fondly his mother put her hand on that sleek blond head? For certainly I must confess that yes: I hated him, and the hatred lodged in me as though I had swallowed a stone.
Within three days I knew the name of the boy and his family. He came into the shop one Saturday afternoon, not wanting shoes, but wanting me. He spoke to my mother and he charmed her more than I ever had. He said, “Frau Hoffman, may I introduce myself to your son? I am new to Prague and I should make friends.” He was German, it seemed; and I knew this would please my mother, who had only sufficient Czech to sell a shoe, and thought it an ugly language. He bowed to her, and as he did so he looked at me with a conspiratorial look so that I would know he was my ally, and not hers. He stuck out his hand. “I am Franz Bayer,” he said. “Look outside! That’s my sister, Freddie.” I shook his hand, and waved at the girl beyond the glass: another creature of white-blonde hair, and direct blue eyes. I could not tell how old they were: they were tall, and had a confidence I knew I would never have no matter how long I lived; but their white clothes and buckled shoes would have suited younger children. “I saw you move in,” I said. “You have a lot of books.”
“We never read them.” He had his hands in his pockets and looked at the glass case where my mother had displayed a pair of shoes. Suddenly I saw how ugly those shoes were, and what a poor job I’d done of cleaning the glass.
“I’d much prefer this,” he said kindly. “My father thinks I should read at least some of the books we sell but I bet nobody wants you to wear those shoes. Look at them! The ribbons! Oh look, Freddie wants us.” The girl tapped on the window; she smiled, and beckoned.
“Look here,” said the boy. “Come and see what we’ve got! It was our birthday yesterday, you see, and we’ve got a radio, and nobody to show it to.” He did not look embarrassed, but said, with a frank shrug: “Our mother teaches us at home, so we don’t have friends.”
I didn’t want to leave the dreary shop, and my dreary parents, where my own dreariness passed without notice. But my mother smoothed her dress in a manner so strange and coquettish I would have liked to kick her. “Of course he’ll come and play,” she said. “Won’t you, Josef? I can spare you an hour or two.” Franz took my arm. I don’t believe that anyone had ever taken my arm before. I could not suppress a sensation of pleasure—and then of course I hated him again, for that.
Freddie did not look very like her twin. The resemblance was there in the gestures and the ease, and in the unwavering looks she gave; but her face was quite different. I recall it now as I have recalled it every day since: the freckles across her nose, only eight of them, and the deep bow to her lip. Her fringe was cut very short, and showed her eyebrows—how dark they were, and how odd they l
ooked below her white-fair hair. Her hands were large and capable, and around each bright blue pupil a dark blue line was drawn. I loved her as readily and without reason as I hated her brother.
I found they had as much to say to each other as grown siblings who have been apart for months and have family business to discuss: they criticized their mother, who fussed; and castigated their father, who let her. They deplored the rooms they’d been allocated, which were cold; they didn’t like Prague, having much preferred Hamburg, but were prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. They liked their lessons. They did not like marzipan. They were looking forward to winter. They needed a cup of coffee, and didn’t I?
“Here we are,” said Franz. At the threshold of the shop he actually bowed, in the manner my father sometimes had when more than usually mindful of the Hoffman name. His mother stood with a customer turning the pages of a book with marbled edges. Behind the counter a door was open. I could not see much of what lay beyond it, only an impression of light striking polished wood, and perhaps of flowers. “In we go,” said Freddie; and I was drawn between them through the shop, and towards that open door. Franz kicked it shut. The shop vanished, and I found myself in a room of a kind that I had never seen before. I suppose it was not, really, so different from the ones where I had lived: there was a table against a wall, and four chairs with tapestry seats; a clock above the mantelpiece, and a rug. But everything in it was so affectionately chosen that it did not seem furnished so much as inhabited. The table was rosewood, and the grain of it shone with beeswax that had the scent of honey; the tapestry on the chairs had been done by hand, and each was different, and showed game birds and their green and amber plumage. The walls were freshly papered, and the paper was green with fern fronds and stems so lifelike I would not have been surprised to see them stir in the draught from the open window. There were books everywhere, tossed on the seat of an armchair with their spines broken and their pages folded. I could see the remains of the birthday: paper chains cut from newspaper draped over picture frames, and cards on the mantelpiece. Someone had left a pot of glue on the dining table, and the glue had run down from the lip of the pot and dried on the lace mat which was there, and nobody seemed to mind. There were flowers in a glass bowl set in the empty grate.
I was bewildered and resentful. What right did they have, to bring me here, where I could only look even more drab and more dull than ever? I looked down and my brown leather shoes against the scarlet carpet shamed me. I was thirteen years old. I did not know what to say, or how; I hardly even knew how to feel. Then Franz said: “What do you make of this?” They were standing now in front of an oak sideboard, obscuring something from my view. “There!” said Freddie, and with a funny little bow showed me a radio set on a green velvet cloth edged in gold brocade.
I’d seen radios before, of course I had. They were readily for sale in Prague, and even in our village on the Eger the pastor’s family kept one, and listened to broadcasts from Austria. But I’d never seen one so close, and certainly not one so grand. They showed it to me as if they were parents of a new baby: didn’t I love the dials, and how smoothly they turned? Wasn’t the case enormous? Oak, of course! Would I like to see inside? There, what did I make of that? I wanted to remain aloof, but I could not, because concealed behind a panel were the valves, and they were glass, and I couldn’t help touching them and saying they’d been cast in a mold, and not blown. This fragment of knowledge delighted them disproportionately. How did I know? Had I ever seen glass blown—had I even done it myself? I confessed that I had, and suffered their delight. In that case: would I like to try my hand at unscrewing one, and taking a better look, or was that unwise? Very well, it was unwise: they would leave me to replace the panel, since I knew what I was doing. How bewildered I was! They did nothing but flatter and charm, and with each word I felt myself diminish in stature. I suddenly thought of my precious green moldavite, which had been the one beautiful thing I’d ever owned, and which might have pleased them; but it had been lost on the way to Prague, and its loss left me a pauper. Then they turned the radio on, and I heard cabaret music.
The room was hot, with the close fragrant warmth of a well-heated home, very unlike the dour chill I was used to, and I became drowsy and slow. I could smell the glue drying in its pot, and the white flowers in the grate. Freddie danced, but not in the decorous fashion we were taught at school, counted diligently out: it made her white skirt lift and show her bare thighs, and the pale downy hair that grew above her knees. She spun and spun, laughing, and I saw once, very briefly, the hem of some pink satin garment which seemed obscene under her childish dress. I didn’t want to look because it made me feel sick—or so I thought, though I know better now what it was. Then the decadent music gave way to something martial, and Franz took my arm and marched me up and down. Freddie, petulant and suddenly bored, curled up in an armchair and began to read.
Franz said, “Well—what do you think?” Proudly, he put his hand on the curved case of the radio, then turned a dial to make the music bloom and fade. It shocked and repelled me to think that this tall bright boy was seeking my approval. What right did he have to ask anything of me, when I had so little, and he had so much? “It’s all right,” I said, and shrugged. If his face betrayed the shock that comes when a plea for kindness goes unanswered I didn’t see it, because I was looking down again at my scuffed shoes on the carpet. Their laces were dirty and had begun to fray. “Oh,” he said, and seemed to be casting about for some means to persuade me that he’d given pleasure and I’d taken it. Then Frau Bayer came in. She wore a pleated blue dress with a full skirt, and over this a kind of white cotton apron. Her shoes had a wooden heel, and fastened with a narrow strap. She wore a string of pearls, and they were not like my mother’s pearls, which often broke and scattered: they were knotted between each bead, and they glowed. Her hands were like Freddie’s hands: large and strong, the nails very short, and her wedding band was loose on her finger. “Ah!” she said, and clapped twice in satisfaction. “Splendid! Are you Franz’s new friend? He told me you were coming.”
“I am Josef Hoffman,” I said, and could say no more.
“He didn’t think much of the radio,” said Franz.
“Then you must choose better music,” said Frau Bayer. She stooped to pick two or three dying stems out of the glass bowl in the grate, and held them to her nose. “The smell goes very sickly, at the end,” she said, and wrapped them in a sheet of newspaper.
Freddie had returned the book she was reading to the shelf. “Can we have coffee?” she said. “We are absolutely dying for some. Aren’t we, Josef?” I had never liked coffee, but the way she said it made me feel that after all perhaps I did.
“Such sophisticates!” said Frau Bayer. “Since your friend is here, I’ll close early. Don’t tell your father: let it be between us.” She tapped her nose, and again I had that curious sensation of being wanted out of all proportion to what I could offer. She went to lower the shutters of the shop, then went out to the kitchen, and I heard running water, and the rattle of cups on saucers. She began to sing.
Franz disconsolately turned the dials on the radio. I felt ashamed of myself, and then angry with him, for making me feel shame. I asked if I might try, and he brightened a little, and said that of course I should. I passed by the cabaret music and the Beethoven and found the crisp bland voice of the news. Freddie turned it off and said she’d heard enough of all that. Then Frau Bayer poured me coffee with milk and sugar, and it was sweet and consoling. For an hour we sat at the table, and I do not recall what was said, only how Frau Bayer sometimes patted the heads of her children, and lightly slapped Freddie away from her third biscuit; the ease of it, and how readily they laughed. It grew dark. The curtains were drawn and an oil lamp was put on the table and I watched the narrow flame rise up from the white glass cover. Then Franz said to me that perhaps I should go. Of course it was not that he wanted me to; only that he’d promised my mother (he said “Frau Hoffman”
very courteously) that I wouldn’t be kept too long. He asked me again what I had thought of the radio, and I said I thought it very good, very clever. His pleasure shone out of him then and I despised him for it. They said goodbye with a kind of formal affection that felt somehow like mockery: I was the sole ugly object in that room, and they treated me like something precious. “You are always welcome here, Herr Hoffman,” said Frau Bayer, as though I were a grown man who’d come on business. Freddie said, “Next time I’ll show you the books I’m not supposed to know about,” and ducked her mother’s admonishing hand. Then Franz took my arm, and conducted me formally through the dark shop. “Good of you to come,” he said: it was stiff, and formal, as if it were something he had been taught. I had disappointed him, of course. Well: he had got what he deserved, and now they’d bother me no more. Then he unlocked the great scarlet door with its iron cladding. “Goodbye,” he said, and receded into the darkness of the shop. There was a moment when I heard nothing, but knew he was still there; then before the door had quite swung shut he said, “Come back, won’t you?” His hand appeared through the gap between door and frame: he waggled it humorously, then held it out, and waited. I looked at it—at the white cuff of his shirt, and the narrow wrist, and the long fingers which had glue drying beside the nail—and I hated him then as I had hated him from the first. I turned my back. I never spoke to them again.