City of Shadows (41 page)

Schmidt stopped trying to brush bird shit off his shoulders and let it dry. “How are we going to get back?”

“Jan’ll come and fetch us,” she said comfortably, and added, “In a day or two, I expect.”

He said, “Does he have to keep singing?”

“We’re paying him well. I think he feels he’s got to do extra for his money. Very Venetian of him, if you ask me. Very honeymoon.”

The prune-skinned, gap-toothed old Polesian at the tiller wasn’t Schmidt’s idea of a gondolier. His singing wasn’t exactly bel canto ei
ther, but since this looked like the only honeymoon Schmidt was going to get . . . “Does he know what happened at Bagna Duze?”

She shook her head. “Whatever it was, it was bad. The Jews I talked to wouldn’t say anything, just warned me not to go. So I put on my Gentile hat, like I told you, and tried the Polesians along the river, but they weren’t any more forthcoming. Whatever it was, I think it hap
pened during the Great War, yet I get the impression it wasn’t anything to do with the war.”

The point was, did it have anything to do with Anna? A confirmed city man, he found wilderness disconcerting, and the pleasure of play
ing Adam and Eve in it was tinged with a professional’s guilt that he’d miscalculated in thinking that by coming here he’d learn anything more than geography.

He looked about him; they were going through another tunnel of alder. An otter slithered up the bank and disappeared in a shake of glit
tering water drops. “Even the war’d get lost around here.”

“I know. I keep trying to fit Anna into these surroundings. She just doesn’t.”

He couldn’t picture that strange little soul in this morass either. But he could imagine her wanting to leave it.

His woman, on the other hand, was reveling in the journey, taking picture after picture with her camera. “Oh, look,” she kept saying. “Oh, look,” at a heron frowning at them from a tree, another bird-covered lake, another set of reed-thatched huts, some watermen scouring weed from a dike.

She’ll run out of film, he thought as she licked a roll closed and tore open yet another.

His own knapsack included two bottles of Scotch whisky for the purpose of loosening tongues.

Such natives as they saw seemed friendly, if web-footed. They waved and exchanged shouted consonants with Jan. Compared with most peasants, he supposed, these were well-off; the water and air were full of food if you could catch it, and the boat was beginning to pass mead
ows fat with cattle. No Depression here; they were back in a primitive but contented eighteenth century.

“Jan says Bagna Duze is quite a big village,” Esther said. “Got a church, school, everything. It serves a hunting lodge belonging to”— she talked to Jan again—“the Count and Countess Zorawski. We can stay there if we have to.”

He didn’t question it. In this neck of the woods, barging up to some aristocrat’s house and asking to stay was probably normal behavior.

It was what they did. Bagna Duze might have been the metropolis of the marshes, but if its population topped five hundred, Schmidt would have been surprised—nearly all of it crammed into tweedy little cot
tages that were also part barn. The only stone buildings were an over
large church and, in the far distance, among beeches, a house, more like a French château than a hunting lodge.

The soup was
hribnoy sup (mushroom and barley), the next course hrybi v smtane (mushrooms with sour cream), the entrée kotleta pokrestyansk (pork cutlet in mushroom sauce).

“Danuta went mushrooming today,” the countess said unnecessarily, “but tomorrow you shall have lampreys. Lampreys tomorrow, Danuta.”

Sagging, Danuta tottered off. So far, to Schmidt’s knowledge, she’d picked dinner, cooked it, served it, and prepared the guest room. Apart
from a retainer in a powdered wig, even older than herself if that were possible, she appeared to be the only servant in the place.

“A king of England died of a surfeit of lampreys. Did you know that, my dear?” The count leaned as far as he could from his place at the top of the table to lay a liver-spotted, lecherous hand on Esther’s.

“We mustn’t let that happen to you,” the countess said, signaling im
patience at her husband with her fan. “We are
so
pleased to have you. A book, you said, Frau Schmidt?”

It was the first time she’d shown curiosity. You had to say that for aristocratic Polish hospitality, Schmidt thought: it didn’t ask questions. He and Esther had been welcomed without a second’s hesitation, and not just because they were an inrush of freshness into a moldering house; they were travelers and therefore entitled to courtesy.

The count and countess had been more eager to show who
they
were than find out about the couple who’d landed on their doorstep. They spoke German well. The Almanack de Gotha—a book to which Schmidt had been introduced within half an hour—declared their rightful position among the
Szlachta
, Poland’s nobility.

The scarlet-and-white flag of Poland flew from a turret roof. Tattered standards from various battles for Polish freedom hung from the high, cobwebbed ceiling of the great hall in which the four of them were now dining. The motto
“Nic o naz bez nas”
(Nothing concerning us can be settled without us) was on each piece of beautiful, tarnished silverware on the table.

Decay was everywhere, in the mildewed portraits of Zorawski an
cestors lining the walls of the enormous staircase, in the bulwark of planks that held up the door of a disused wing, on the rusted faces of clocks that had stopped as if too dispirited to tick on.

Like their house, the Zorawskis were museum pieces. The count-ess’s dress echoed that of the empress Maria Theresa, and her dentures made disconcerting attempts to escape. The count was half the size of his wife, a wizened, embroidered-waistcoated manikin, animated by the energy that had seized him on seeing Esther, as if a ferret had sat up at the sight of a rabbit.

The couple talked of other residences, a castle near Warsaw—“our son keeps it now”—a schloss in Austria—“but we are becoming too old
to keep moving from place to place as we used to, so we summer here.

For the shooting, you know.”

And it’s cheaper, Schmidt thought.

He wondered when Esther would get to the point. Now she did. She took her hand from under the count’s and rested her arms on the table, the picture of a woman at ease. “Yes, we’re writing a travel book about Polesie,” she said. “At least my husband’s writing it—I’m taking the pic
tures. Of course, we
had
to visit the wetlands, and we heard about Bagna Duze in Berlin from a friend who used to know someone that lived here—Franziska Schanskowska.”

There was a pause, but only one attributable to an elderly couple searching failing memories. “Goodness gracious,” the countess said, “little Franziska. I haven’t heard that name in years. You remember her, Casimir, Józef Schanskowska’s daughter?” To Esther she said, “He was the village wheelwright. Dead now.”

The count strummed the table, squinting to remember. “Wasn’t she the girl involved in all that nasty business? I thought she got drowned.”

“She did,” the countess said. She turned to Esther. “More honey truf
fles, my dear?”

19

Esther stared at
her hostess as at a gorgon, then pulled herself

together. “I beg your pardon, Countess. No, that was excellent.”

“Herr Schmidt?”

Fuck it, fuck it. “What? No thank you.”

“I’m sorry,” the countess said. “Did your friend believe Franziska to be alive? I’m afraid she died years ago . . . 1919.”

“
Annus horribilis
for Bagna Duze,” said the count.

“For all Poland,” said the countess.

“They threw everything at us that year, but, oho, we beat them all in the end.” The count’s little face was a triumphant demon’s. “Russians, werewolves, floods, Gypsies, Jews—we beat them all.”

“Casimir.”
The countess snapped it out, then smiled apologeti
cally at her guests. “Such a nuisance, werewolves. A peasant su
perstition, of course. But indeed there were an inordinate number of deaths in the village that year, and I’m afraid young Franziska’s was one of them.”

“Never found her body, of course,” the count said. “Yes they
did,
Casimir,” said the countess with a patience frayed by long-standing irritation. “Her father identified it. It
wasn’t
the

Gypsy girl’s. Józef was quite happy on that point, if you remember.” She turned back to Esther. “The floods, you see. So many were swept away that recovery was rather gruesome and
not
”—this was to the count—“a subject for the dinner table.”

“We survived, we survived it all,” the count exulted.

“Actually, we were in Warsaw at the time,” the countess interjected.

“And then 1920,
annus mirabilis.
We fought the Red Army and won, oh, yes, we won. Poland defeated them, and Bagna Duze did its bit.” Another stroke of Esther’s hand. “If the dead ever rise from these marshes, my dear, there’ll be sorry ghosts among them.”

The countess employed her fan, as if the hall were too warm, though walls a meter thick kept it cool. She pushed back her chair. “Frau Schmidt? Shall we leave the gentlemen to their port and cigars?”

Glancing helplessly at Schmidt, Esther followed her.

A traditionalist, the count told dirty stories over the excellent port and equally excellent cigars, refusing to be diverted from the subject of sex and women except for tales of his prowess against the might of the Red Army. “Thought they’d export communism to the Western world, did they?” he said. “Oho, they didn’t reckon on Poland and Casimir Zo
rawski.”

In the countess’s cluttered drawing room, which smelled of lavender and cats’ pee, Esther focused her hostess’s attention on the subject of Franziska Schanskowska.

“Such a strange child,” the countess said. “Of course, I blame her fa
ther. He sent her away to school at the convent in Pinsk—education is
such
a mistake for peasant girls, don’t you think? It isolated her from the other village maidens, of course, and made her discontented on her return.”

“And the Gypsy girl?” Esther asked.

“Now, that
was
an odd thing. A band of Gypsies came wandering through the marshes—from Russia, as far as anyone could tell, getting away from the civil war, one supposes. In 1919, this was. Was it? Or was it earlier? Well, of course, they weren’t welcome—the
thieving.
People’s geese went missing, washing off the line. A totally dishonest people, you know, despite all that rubbish that’s talked about how romantic they are.
Anyway,
there was this girl with them—she didn’t seem to belong to
them, and...I’ve forgotten how it was that Józef took her in. On Franziska’s insistence, I think. She had some weird fixation that the girl was a changeling, either stolen from a royal nursery or ...I don’t know, something highly improbable. They were inseparable, the two of them. And, poor things, they were swept away together when the floods came.”

“And they didn’t find the Gypsy girl’s body?” Esther asked. But the countess’s head had lolled in the same instant; she was asleep.

Reunited with Schmidt to stroll on the terrace before going to bed, Esther said, “I don’t see how they identified Franziska. The floods were dreadful; this area was inundated, whole villages swept away. They were recovering bodies for months, and the only thing recognizable on Franziska’s when they found it was the cross on the chain around her neck. But every girl in Poland wears a cross, except the Jews, of course. And some of the bodies were carried away into the Pripyat and never found. Her father said the cross was hers, but for one thing they’re mass-produced and, for another, I expect that after all that time he was desperate to put an end to uncertainty and lay his daughter to rest.”

“So it could have been the Gypsy girl?”

“Could have been anybody that was female.”

“So what you’re saying is that they buried someone else while Franziska, who’s been swept away by floodwater, manages to drag her
self onto a riverbank, thinks ‘Bye-bye, Bagna Duze,’ and squelches off.” His mind was turning to bed.

There was a reluctant snuffle in the darkness. “I’m saying there’s a strong possibility that Anna is Franziska. Similar character.”

“Or she could be the Gypsy who was really the grand duchess Anas
tasia in disguise, having been picked up by this band of kindly nomads on their way through Ekaterinburg.”

“All right, then, smarty-pants. What did you learn from the count?”

“Apart from the fact that he fought off the Bolshies single-handed, very little.”

“He was in Warsaw at the time, hardly heard a shot fired, according to the countess,” Esther said. “It was their son. He was with Pilsudski in the counterattack that drove the Red Army back. My God, the Poles were brave. And stop doing that. They’ll see us.”