The Star of Kazan, Page 2

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked Professor Julius, putting his head round the door of his room.

  ‘I suppose we had better go down and investigate,’ said his brother.

  So they made their way downstairs, past the drawing room and the library, to the thick green-baize-covered door that separated the house from the kitchen.

  Carefully they opened it. The wooden table was scrubbed white, the fender was polished, the stove had stayed alight.

  But where were Ellie and Sigrid?

  And where were the whisky and the warm milk and the hot-water bottle?

  Just at this moment the back door was opened and the two women came in. Sigrid’s hat was crooked, Ellie’s hair was coming down – and she carried something in her arms.

  Silence fell.

  ‘What . . . is . . . that?’ enquired Professor Julius, pointing his long finger at the bundle.

  ‘It’s a baby, sir. We found her in a church; she’d been left,’ said Sigrid.

  ‘We tried to take her to the nuns,’ said Ellie, ‘but they were in quarantine for typhus.’

  The baby turned its head and snuffled. Professor Emil looked at it in amazement. He was used to pictures of the baby Jesus lying stiff and silent in his mother’s arms, but this was different.

  ‘It’s absolutely out of the question that we should allow a baby to stay in this house,’ said Professor Julius. ‘Even for a day.’

  Professor Emil nodded. ‘The noise . . .’

  ‘The disturbance,’ said Professor Gertrude. ‘Not to mention what happens to them . . . at the far end.’

  ‘It would only be till the quarantine is over,’ said Ellie. ‘A few weeks . . .’

  Professor Julius shook his head. ‘Certainly not. I forbid it.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Ellie listlessly. ‘We’ll take her to the police station in the morning. They’ll have somewhere to put unwanted babies.’

  ‘The police station?’ said Professor Emil.

  The child stirred and opened her eyes. Then she did that thing that even tiny babies do. She looked.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Professor Julius.

  It was not the look of somebody who belonged in a police station along with criminals and drunks.

  Professor Julius cleared his throat.

  ‘She must be kept out of our sight. Absolutely,’ he said.

  ‘She must make no sound,’ said Emil.

  ‘Our work must not be disturbed even for a minute,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘And the day the quarantine is over she goes to the convent. Now where is my whisky?’

  ‘And my warm milk?’

  ‘And my hot-water bottle?’

  The professors were in bed. The baby lay in a borrowed nappy on a folded blanket in a drawer which had been emptied of table mats.

  ‘She ought to have a name, even if we can’t keep her,’ said Sigrid.

  ‘I’d like to call her by my mother’s name,’ said Ellie.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Annika.’

  Sigrid nodded. ‘Annika. Yes, that will do.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE GOLDEN CITY

  The city of Vienna, at the time that Ellie and Sigrid brought their bundle home, was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which took in thirteen different countries spread over the heart of Europe.

  The empire was ruled by one old man, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who had a winter palace in the centre of the city and a summer palace out in the suburbs, where the air was always fresh. He was a lonely person because his wife had been assassinated by an anarchist and his son had shot himself, but he worked hard at his job, getting up at five o’clock every morning to read state papers, and sleeping on an iron bed like his soldiers. He even washed the feet of twelve needy men who were brought to him on the Thursday before Easter because he wanted to be good.

  Because he was so old, bad things happened to him.

  Little girls would present him with bunches of flowers and when he bent down to take them, his back would seize up and his aides would have to come and straighten him. Or the school children of Vienna would make pink paper tissue hearts and throw them over him as he rode b y, and they would get into his moustache, and up his nose, and make him sneeze.

  All the same, the people of Vienna loved him. They liked his obstinacy and the way he would never get into a motor car though they had been invented a few years earlier, but always drove through the streets in a carriage with golden wheels and waved to anyone who greeted him. They liked the firework display he ordered on his birthday, and the military uniforms into which he struggled whenever there was a procession or a party: the pink trousers and blue tunic of the Hussars . . . the silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles . . . and with them a great helmet with gigantic plumes.

  Every school in Vienna had a picture of him on the wall, and his face, with its mutton-chop whiskers and bald head, was as familiar to the children as the faces of their grandfathers.

  As well as the emperor and his court, Vienna was known for its music. Almost every famous composer who had ever lived had worked in Vienna: Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and Strauss. Music poured out of the houses, waltzes were played in every cafe and by the barrel organs in the street – and in the richly decorated opera house, large sopranos sang their hearts out every night.

  Then there was the food. The Viennese really liked to eat. Wonderful cooking smells wafted through the streets – vanilla and freshly ground coffee; cinnamon and sauerkraut. Even cucumber salad, which in other cities hardly smelt at all, had its own scent in Vienna.

  In the sweet shops you could buy tiny marzipan beetles and spotted ladybirds and snails curled snugly in their shells. There were sugar mice so beautifully made that the children who bought them could scarcely bear to bite off their heads, and gingerbread houses complete with terrible witches made of nougat, with hats of liquorice. The cake shops sold seven kinds of chocolate cake, and tarts made of vanilla wafers layered with hazelnut cream, and pastry boats filled with the succulent berries that grow in the Austrian countryside: wild strawberries so bright that they seem to be lit up from the inside, and blueberries, each one a perfect globe.

  There were other things which made Vienna a splendid town to live in: the Prater, a royal park shaded by ancient trees where everyone could walk or ride, and the Prater funfair, where the highest Giant Wheel in Europe had just been built. There was the River Danube, which curled round the north of the city; from a landing stage on the quay you could take a paddle steamer and go all the way up to Germany or down to Budapest in Hungary. And there were the mountains, which could be reached in an hour on the train.

  But Vienna’s greatest pride was in the dancing white horses which performed in the Spanish Riding School. The Spanish Riding School was not in Spain but adjoined the emperor’s palace in the middle of the old town, and with its vaulted ceiling and rows of columns it was certainly the most beautiful arena in the world. The horses which could be seen there – the Lipizzaner stallions – were bred especially in a village called Lipizza in the south of the empire and only a few, the very best, were sent to the emperor in Vienna. The chosen horses were stabled in what had once been the arcaded palace of a prince. They fed from marble troughs, and spent four years learning to perform to music the movements which had once been so important in war. Incredible movements with resounding names: caprioles and courbettes and levades . . .

  When visitors came to Vienna and were asked what they wanted to see most, the answer was usually: ‘The Lipizzaner horses. The dancing white stallions. Could we please see those?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SINKING OF THE MEDUSA

  As soon as she woke, Annika opened her attic window and looked out at the square. She did this every morning; she liked to see that everything was in order and today it was. The pigeons were still roosting on General Brenner’s head, the fountain had been turned on, and Josef was putting the cafe tables out on the pavement, which meant it wa
s going to be a fine day. A door opened in the ramshackle little house on the opposite corner and her friend Stefan came out and set off across the cobbles with a can to fetch the milk. He was the middle one of five flaxen-haired boys and his mother, Frau Bodek, was expecting a sixth child any day. She had said that if it was another boy she was going to give it away.

  Now a solitary dog came sauntering between the chestnut trees, from the street. It was a dog she did not know and Annika looked out eagerly – perhaps it was a stray and ownerless and if it was, Ellie couldn’t refuse to let her keep it, surely? After all Ellie had taken her in when she was ownerless; she’d been a sort of stray left in a church.

  But behind the dog now came a lady carrying a lead, so that was no good. The church clock struck seven and Annika turned from the window to get dressed. No school today – it was Saturday, so she could leave her hair unbraided and put away her pinafore – but there was still a lot of work to do before she could go out and find her friends.

  Nearly twelve years had passed since Annika had been carried into the kitchen of the professors’ house. When the typhus epidemic had come to an end, and the Convent of the Sacred Heart had sent word that they were out of quarantine, Ellie had bundled up the baby, and she and Sigrid had gone upstairs to seek out their employers.

  ‘We’ve come to say goodbye,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll find some way of providing for her, but we can’t give her up.’

  The professors were deeply offended. They were puzzled. They were hurt.

  ‘Have we complained about the baby?’ said Professor Julius stuffily.

  ‘Have we made any objections?’ asked Professor Emil.

  ‘I’m sure I never said a word,’ said Professor Gertrude, blinking and looking stricken.

  Sigrid and Ellie had looked at each other.

  ‘You mean she can stay?’

  Professor Julius bent his head.

  ‘We shall of course expect her to be useful,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, she will be,’ cried Ellie. ‘She’ll be the best-trained child in Vienna.’

  And she was. By the time she was seven, Annika could bake and ice a three-tiered chocolate cake, and bring a roast to the table. At nine she could cut cucumbers so thinly that you could read a newspaper through the slices, and when she was sent to do the marketing, the stallholders brought out their best vegetables and fruit because the little girl was famous for her eagle eyes. Sigrid had taught her how to polish the parquet floors by sliding over them with dusters tied to her feet, and how to clean silver, and how to crochet and knit and sew – and from both women she learned that work was something that had to be done, and how you felt had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  But neither Ellie nor Sigrid had taught the child how to dream. The ability to disappear into her own head had come from the unknown parents who had abandoned her.

  Ellie was grinding coffee and putting the bread rolls to warm in the oven when Annika came down, but she turned to give her adopted daughter a hug. She had stopped expecting to hear a knock at the door at any minute and see a strange woman standing there, claiming the child – but all the same, every morning when Annika came down from her attic, Ellie gave thanks.

  ‘Have you washed behind your ears?’

  Annika nodded and extracted an ear for inspection. She was a sturdy child with heavy corn-coloured hair, thoughtful grey eyes under level brows, and a wide mouth. There were many such pleasing, clear-eyed girls at work in the Austrian countryside – goose girls and dairy maids and girls who took the cattle to the high pastures in the summer – but not many with Annika’s look of eager intelligence. More than that, she was a child who comforted others; she had done so from the start.

  Now Annika, returning Ellie’s hug, drank in the scent of green soap and fresh bread that clung to the cook’s white apron, and wrinkled her nose with pleasure, because coming into the kitchen was coming home. Nothing changed here: the table was always scrubbed to whiteness, the emperor’s picture hung above the stove, the calender sent each year by the Bavarian Sausage Company stood on the window sill beside Ellie’s pots of herbs – and on a sacred shelf beside the dresser lay the worn black recipe book that had been Ellie’s mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before her.

  But it was time to start work.

  Annika put out the apricot jam for Professor Julius and the raspberry jam for Professor Emil and the honey for Professor Gertrude and carried them upstairs to the dining room. Then she laid out the napkins, saw that the sugar bowl was filled and came down again to fetch a jug of hot water for Professor Julius to wash in, and down again to fetch another one for Professor Emil.

  By this time Sigrid had swept the downstairs rooms and tidied them and she and Ellie and Annika had their own breakfast at the kitchen table. Then the bell rang from Professor Gertrude’s room and Sigrid went to fetch the black-silk skirt she had ironed and from which she had removed a small piece of cheese that had got stuck to the hem, and gave it to Annika to take upstairs. Gertude was playing the harp in a lunchtime recital and it was always necessary to clean her up before she left.

  And now the bell rang again and it was Professor Emil, who had lost his cravat, followed by Profesor Julius, who gave her ten kreutzer and asked her to go and buy a copy of Vienna Today from the newsagent round the corner.

  ‘That idiot Jacobson has published a piece about the origin of volcanic rock which is absolute rubbish,’ he said. ‘I had to write a letter – they should have printed it.’

  So Annika ran across the square and through the chestnut trees into the Keller Strasse, hoping that they had printed it, because when they didn’t print his letters he got very upset.

  The lady in the newspaper shop was a friend of Annika’s and she had already seen that the professor’s letter had been put in.

  ‘So he’ll be in a good mood,’ she said. And then, ‘I hear the Bodek baby is due any minute.’

  Annika nodded. ‘If it’s a boy she’s going to give it away.’

  When she got back with the paper she was sent out again to the flower seller who sat with her basket beside the fountain. It had become Annika’s job to choose the flowers that Professor Julius put every Saturday in front of the picture of his Beloved – the one who had died before her wedding day. Today, with summer on its way, Annika bought gentians and edelweiss from the mountains and took them to the professor’s study, where he was reading the letter he had sent to the paper for the third time.

  His Beloved, whose name had been Adele Fischl, lived on a table near the window, and as she arranged the flowers, Annika thought again how sad it was that she had died. She was a serious-looking woman with a strong nose, and Annika was sure that she and the professor would have suited each other very well.

  After this Sigrid put her to polishing the silver candlesticks and then it was time for her elevenses – a glass of frothy milk and a golden vanilla kipfel straight out of the oven which she took out to the cobbled yard behind the house.

  Annika loved the yard with its vine-covered door to the back lane. The wash house was there and the clothes line and the woodshed, and the old stables which were no longer used for a horse and carriage but acted as a storeroom. Ellie grew tubs of geraniums and petunias there, and in a sunny corner by the house was a blue bench on which the servants liked to sit when they had a minute to themselves.

  Today though there was no lingering in the sun. The washing had to be taken out of the copper and hung up to dry and the carpets beaten and the peas shelled for lunch. And then Annika ran out to choose a suitable cab for Professor Gertrude from the row of hansoms drawn up on the far side of the Keller Strasse – one that was tall enough for the harp to fit inside but had a peaceful-looking horse which would not rattle the instrument.

  Then back into the kitchen to help Ellie with the lunch – and lunch on Saturday was a big meal: today there was pea soup and stewed beef with dumplings, and pancakes filled with cherry jam, all carried up and down from the kitchen to the dining r
oom and back again for the two professors, who sat with their napkins tucked into their collars and ate with a hearty appetite.

  Then Sigrid and Annika and Ellie sat down to their lunch in the kitchen, and after that came the washing up – masses and masses of washing up.

  But on Saturday afternoon Annika was free.

  She went first to the bookshop on the corner. It was an antiquarian bookshop, which meant that the books that were sold in it were old ones. It also meant that not many people came into the shop. No one quite knew how Herr Koblitz, who owned it, made a living. He was not a sociable man and whenever anyone tried to buy a book he hadn’t finished reading, he became grumpy and annoyed.

  Today he was reading a book about mummies – the kind that are embalmed.

  ‘Has Pauline finished?’ asked Annika.

  Pauline was Herr Koblitz’s granddaughter. She lived with him because her mother was a ward sister in Berlin and had to sleep in the hospital. Like Annika, Pauline had to help with the chores, dusting the shelves, sweeping the floor, stacking the books.

  Herr Koblitz nodded.

  ‘She’s in the back.’

  Pauline too was reading. She was a thin girl with frizzy black hair and black eyes. Pauline was clever; she seemed to remember everything she came across in the books she devoured and she kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn’t see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies.

  ‘It’s to make me brave,’ she’d explained to Annika, but Annika said it was silly to want to be brave and clever.