After she had shared the secret, my grandmother was worried that it might trouble me. By way of comfort, she told me that what God took away with one hand, he gave back with the other. This idea appealed to me considerably, as it suggested that there was a fairness to the universe and a pleasing degree of symmetry – much like the algebra I had begun at school, where a problem could only be solved when both sides of it were of equal value. In this instance, what God gave to balance the equation with respect to my mother was me. And the proof of it was that the dead child and I shared the same name. My sister Senka, I noted sadly, was not included in the equation, but I knew why that was: because she did not go to school as I did, and consequently had no knowledge of either algebra or God.
I had by this time been identified as a scholar of some promise. My studies had been greatly improved by the arrival of a new teacher from Zagreb whose name was Bošković. He had been to the university, and arrived with many new theories about the curriculum. One rainy day, when I was not yet eleven years old, he turned up outside our house wearing his best frock-coat and asked to speak with my father. I didn’t know what to think, and was much afraid that I had done something bad, such that I might be punished or barred from the school. I tried to listen at the door of my father’s study, but was shooed away by my mother, who told me sternly to go to my room and stay there until I was sent for. So I sat in my room, on the verge of tears, while Senka sat in the corner singing to herself and drawing, at which she was quite proficient. Seeing that I was upset, she offered to make a portrait of me, which helped take my mind off my worries, especially since she made me look pretty and grown up, which pleased me a good deal.
From the window I at last saw Mr Bošković leaving, and ran downstairs, though I had not yet been sent for. My parents had gone back into the study and were in earnest discussion, as I plainly heard: my mother excited and entreating, my father truculent, which was very much the norm for their discussions, regardless of the subject. I heard several references to money and whether enough could be procured, which again did not surprise me, since that was in my experience the only subject that ever engaged the two of them together for more than a minute at a time – unless it was the manifest failings of my mother’s family, which was a theme my father never tired of raking over.
It turned out that I was not in trouble after all. As my mother informed me, the teacher had recommended that I be sent to continue my education at the gymnasium in Bečkerek, where the principal happened to be an acquaintance. Considerable expense would be involved, for there were fees, not to mention the cost of travelling daily on the train, Bečkerek being some fourteen miles away. For this reason, my father added, it was most unlikely that the recommendation would be followed, which disappointed me sorely. I had grown tired of the school in the village, of the taunts of the boys and the lessons, which were far too easy, especially in mathematics. And while Bečkerek was very far from a great metropolis, or for that matter a city of any kind, still it seemed to me at that age infinitely grand and impressive. In tears, I ran back to my room and hid my head in my arms, and would not lift my face to the light even for Senka, who drew me in that posture with shading all around me as dark as my mood.
I need not have been so disappointed. I do not know exactly how the money was found for the gymnasium, but found it was. I do know my mother wrote to our Aunt Helene in Belgrade, and after a month or so received a welcome answer. Such was the timing of this, coinciding as it did with my father’s sudden change of heart, that I perceived a connection without being told what it was. I went as far as to ask if Aunt Helene had sent money for my education, but was smartly told to stop talking nonsense. So I left the matter there, and thought no more about it.
From that time onward my life was scarcely my own. The classes at the gymnasium were more demanding than any I had known before, especially since I was by some months the youngest in my class. The daily train journeys ate up most of the waking hours that remained and left me with neither time nor strength for play. Then there was my father, who now took greater interest in my studies, critically perusing my homework (even though much of it, especially in mathematics, was soon entirely beyond him), and demanding of my teachers constant reports of my progress. Worst of all, he took to boasting of my achievements, and telling people that I was a child prodigy, and that a girl like me had never been seen in the region before, which was not true, as you of all people know very well.
In short, the attention which once I had sought soon became a burden; but I could have borne it gladly had his neglect of my sister not grown worse at the same time. It was as if my father had only a very limited stock of paternal love, if such it was, and had decided to spend it all on me. He spoke to her harshly and made sly jokes about her slow wits and complained that she ate too much for a child that did nothing all day – which was unfair, because she laboured hard to keep the animals in good health, and both the chickens and the geese laid for her in great profusion, such that it was remarked upon around the village. In the past my mother would have upbraided him for such slights, but her health was not of the best at this time, and she was often in her bed by the time I got home.
I knew what angered him, well enough. Senka was a Draganović, and the fact that she was backward in her learning and unlikely to make a good match for herself, if any at all, shed a bad light on the family name. It was another sign that the line was fallen into decay and corruption, like the escutcheons above the windows and the land we no longer had (though we had enough, and more than most). Every time he looked at her, that was what he was reminded of – that and the fact that he had no son to restore the family fortunes, nor no longer any chance of getting one while our mother lived. That burden had fallen to me, if only as a last resort, but I was under no illusions that should I fail in that regard, my treatment would be no better than my sister’s.
It was during the war that I finally began to see my father for what he was. Until then, we had kept the geese for laying, but he announced a few days before Christmas that we should have to kill one for the table. He told Senka that she should choose the plumpest of the birds and see to it that its neck was wrung so that it could be gutted and dressed by our mother. Poor Senka fell silent, for she was very afraid of him. I knew how his words must have horrified her, for the geese were all her friends, and she had a name for each and every one. But I did not guess what she would do, which was to steal out that night and lead them all away across the fields – so far away, in fact, that she herself did not return until dawn. I suppose she was afraid that they would come home again otherwise, for they had certainly never shown the slightest inclination to escape, and were only fenced in for their own protection.
I went off to school first thing in the morning, and did not discover what had happened until I returned in the late afternoon. I found the geese gone and Senka nowhere to be found. My father was not in the house and my mother had once again taken to her bed. Eventually I found Senka in the disused part of the stables – disused because by that time we had just the one horse. She was shivering in the corner, half-covered in straw for warmth. She dared not go back inside the house, and when I tried to help her up, I began to see why. Her lip was split, and there were welts and purple bruises on her shoulders, arms and legs, and I dared not even look at her back. Until then, our father had never been much of a one to hand out beatings. As far as he was concerned it was our mother’s job to keep us in hand. Now it was as if he had made up for lost time all at once.
Over the days that followed some of the geese came back to the village and were rounded up and returned to us, though Father claimed that many had been stolen. We had goose for Christmas, as planned, though Senka did not eat it. In fact, she did not eat with the rest of us from that day onward, except when our father was away, because, he said, the very sight of her took away his appetite.
I continued to study, harder now than ever, though the war often interrupted the railways, such that I could not
get to school. By now I was not studying to please my father, but mainly to make good my escape when the time came. I did not know to where, only that it would be far away, and that I should take Senka with me. And my only doubt was how we would manage to make our getaway with her geese in tow, for, just as it says in the Roman legend, geese are noisy birds and prone to raise the alarm whether they mean to or not.
In spite of what had happened, I did not hate my father exactly, though some might say he deserved to be hated. Rather, the notion sank in deeper than ever that we were different in every way – so different that if we were indeed family and shared the same blood, then those connections meant little, and certainly much less than was generally supposed. For, from that day onward, I perceived no great difficulty, no revolt against nature, in the idea of being parted from the Draganović clan for ever – from all its lines, but most especially the maternal line, of which I saw no reason on Earth to boast, and never would again.
Nineteen
The first thing he saw when he opened the door were sprigs of lavender in a cut-glass vase, and a pile of neatly folded petticoats on the wicker chair. On top of the chest of drawers there was a small stack of postcards – unused, as it turned out: Berlin scenes just like the ones he had bought for Maria. Beside that was a matching hand mirror and hairbrush, a few strands of dark hair still clinging to the bristles. On the bed sat an antique doll with a porcelain face and oriental eyes, dressed in a Chinese costume of reds and greens. A pair of black lace-up shoes, the shoes he had seen Maria wearing outside Herr Bronstein’s music shop, stood neatly lined up behind the door, the toes pointing outwards.
Everything in its place. Everything normal. Nothing torn to shreds. Nothing scrawled on the walls. No blood. The pile of petticoats still gave off a clean, laundered smell.
Her possessions had been positioned so as to make best use of the available space, and to display the few objects of worth to advantage – the doll, the lace tablecloth, the hand mirror with its mother-of-pearl in-lay. The place had not been left in a hurry. Its tidiness anticipated a return. It set out to create an impression. But for whom?
Apart from the antique doll, Kirsch saw no evidence of a child, not even a photograph, or a brooch with a lock of hair. He went to the window and looked down into the street, picturing himself there, hat in hand, a stranger looking for directions. Snow clung to the lamp-posts and the top of the cemetery wall. It was settling on the pavements. A pair of huddled figures hurried past the gates, their footsteps making no sound at all.
He closed the door and went to the chest of drawers, opening them one after another. They contained mostly clothes, all clean and folded but few in number; and a sewing kit, with spools of thread in various colours. Some items of clothing had been patched. She had several pairs of cotton stockings, all black and of the coarser, heavier variety eschewed by the girls at the Tanguero. He checked for laundry marks, but found no trace of identification.
Three dresses were hanging in the wardrobe, simple prints on dark fabrics, one skirt pleated. None of them had labels. On one side there was the brown velvet cloche hat he had seen her wearing in the street. The label read Herrmann Gerson, Werderscher Markt, BERLIN, but the hat was not a recent line. Either she had shopped in the city years before or she had acquired it second-hand, perhaps at one of the stalls on Grenadierstrasse. The coat was there, too; and the dress she had worn at the Tanguero.
He closed the wardrobe door, caught his frowning reflection in the smoky glass. What then had she worn on her trip to Potsdam? A different hat, a different coat, a different dress, different shoes – wasn’t Alma always telling him that such things made all the difference to a woman? He looked around the room, saw now with a squeeze of panic the blankness of it. There was no obvious history, no discernible past. A few objects, sensibly arranged, just as they might be by someone waiting for a new life to begin. An empty stage awaiting the arrival of the cast.
He sat down on the bed. Were his impressions to be trusted? Other interpretations of the scene were possible. Perhaps Maria had come with few personal possessions because she had few personal possessions. Or because she had never planned to stay long. The pillow case and sheets were pristine. He turned the pillow over, found a few faint creases in the cotton. He laid his head down, picking up a faint, musky scent.
His heel knocked against something hard. It was under the bed: an old travelling trunk, varnished yellow canvas stretched over wood, the initials Z M D stencilled in red across the front. He moved it out into the light. A faded label on the lid read: Hotel Sacher, Vienna. From downstairs came the thud of a door closing. He listened for a moment, then eased open the catches.
The lid came up with a sharp crack and a musty smell he knew only too well. Kneeling on the floor, he pulled out the books, two at a time, turning their spines towards the light. They were textbooks: mathematics, physics, chemistry – all German editions, none recent. A translation of John F. Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy had been heavily annotated in pencil. A copy of the original 1913 edition of The Principal of Relativity by Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski and Sommerfeld had a broken spine, so that the folios came loose as he opened them. What was Maria doing with books like these?
Among them was a notebook with a hard cover. It was full of mathematical calculations – line after line, page after page, of equations and symbols, many amended or crossed out. Kirsch recognised the notation of differential calculus, the same mathematical puzzles with which Max had once bamboozled visitors to Reinsdorf. At once he was reminded of something he had read in the newspaper: how the police had found a programme or a flier in the Potsdam woods, close to where Maria was found. It had been printed on the occasion of a public lecture by Professor Albert Einstein at the Philharmonic Hall, entitled The Present State of Quantum Theory.
‘What did I tell you?’ Max said, as clearly as if he were standing at Kirsch’s shoulder.
‘You didn’t tell me anything,’ Kirsch replied.
There was a cough from the hallway below, other voices: the landlord and his mother in hushed disagreement. Kirsch tucked the notebook inside his coat and went back to the trunk. At the very bottom, under the textbooks, there was something bulky wrapped up in a white cloth.
Herr Mettler called up the stairs: ‘Dr Kirsch?’ It seemed five Reichmarks bought limited privileges. ‘Are you finished?’
Hastily Kirsch unwrapped the cloth. Inside it was an old photograph album with an embossed leather cover. There had been one just like it in his grandfather’s house, a big sturdy tome kept, like the family Bible, in a special place where neither sunlight nor prying hands could damage it.
He found a brass clamp at the side. It bore evidence of damage. He had to force it open with both hands.
Down below Herr Mettler sighed audibly and began to climb the stairs, letting out an exasperated grunt every few steps. Kirsch opened the album.
The pictures had been secured with corners made of silvered paper. They were on every page, framing rectangular spaces large and small. But the photographs themselves were missing. All that remained of them were faint shadows and what seemed to be knife marks in the surface of the card.
Halfway through the album, someone in the family had acquired their own camera. Small prints, a few inches square, had been evenly spaced across the pages, held in place with the same corner mounts, though here several were missing.
Near the bottom of the last page Kirsch found one picture still in place. Two girls with scarves round their heads, aged ten or eleven, were feeding a flock of geese. One of them stood back a little, holding a scrap of bread between her hands. The other was squatting down, caressing a bird with one hand and feeding it with the other. Both were looking up at the camera, smiling. Either of the girls could have been Maria, or neither of them.
Herr Mettler was crossing the landing, coughing to announce his presence. ‘So is this what you’re looking for?’
He stood surveying the scene through his thick lenses,
clearly unsure whether or not to object to the invasion of privacy.
Kirsch closed the album. ‘Forgive me, Herr Mettler,’ he said, ‘but something tells me you don’t read the newspapers.’
Herr Mettler adjusted his spectacles. ‘The newspapers?’
‘Because I think you’ve quite a famous tenant.’
Her name was Mariya, just as she had said – only it was spelled the Slavic way: Mariya Draganović. At least, that was the name she had given on arrival. Herr Mettler admitted that he had never asked to see her passport. She had arrived at the beginning of October from Zürich, where she said she had been a student. Someone there had recommended his premises for their cleanliness and convenient location. She hadn’t revealed her reasons for travelling to Berlin. She had paid her rent six weeks in advance, lived quietly and entertained few guests, if any. That was all he knew.
Mariya: she had remembered it correctly. That had to be a good sign, a hopeful sign – unless it was a mistake, a slip-up in an otherwise faultless performance.
If we’re keeping an open mind, Dr Kirsch.
Walking back to the tram stop along snowy, luminescent streets, Kirsch went over the facts. His patient was a student of mathematics from Zürich, although presumably not a native of that city, given her accent. Mariya Draganović. The family name added substance. It placed her in the world again, the world outside the Charité – a good thing, he reminded himself, the goal of psychiatric treatment being a return to society. On the other hand, according to the literature, it was typical in cases of psychogenic fugue for the subject to assume a new identity. Hans J, the bank clerk from Nürnberg, had sworn his name was Otto Kleist, a detective from Berlin. Until Kirsch saw the name Mariya Draganović on some official document, he couldn’t be sure it was genuine.
The Einstein Girl Page 14