Madensky Square (19 page)

Miss. Passion isn’t at all good for the character; I’ve always known that.

My pear is well. Not exactly enormous – toe-sized one could say – but it’s a late-maturing variety and I have absolute faith in its ability to swell.

Tomorrow I shall shut the shop. Nothing happens in these dusty summer days and I’m glad of that. I’m not sure that I really like ‘events’.

No, I was wrong. Something has happened that has upset me very much.

Magdalena’s wedding dress has gone off to be sewn with seed pearls, her blue velvet cloak is being embroidered with silver acanthus leaves. I have made her a day dress of linen the colour of sandalwood and another of pearl-grey faille striped with rose…

But Magdalena herself remains an enigma. She is utterly beautiful, graceful, remote… always polite to her fiance whom, however, she almost never addresses directly. Certainly her engagement has achieved the result she hoped for. Herr Huber has had the twins coached for cadet college, medical treatment has been arranged for the taxidermist and he is negotiating for a better apartment for the family. But I’ve only seen her animated when she’s in company, real or imagined, with her saints.

At least until tonight. I’d taken pity on the Countess von Metz and delivered her two-piece, and as the evening was so beautiful I walked back, taking a short cut through that enclave behind St Oswald’s Church where the Jesuits have their priory. There’s a little garden there that is used by lovers and old people. It’s pretty and quiet, with the priory on one side and the old Krotsky Palace on the other, and the roses are famous.

It was already dusk; and I half averted my eyes from the two people standing very close together under an acacia. The man was tall and dressed in a black cloak like a student. The girl too wore a dark cloak ? – but what stood out even from a distance was the intensity of their involvement. She was looking up at him, entreaty in every line of her body; he bent over her with an unmistakable tenderness and love.

Then they drew apart, and as the girl walked away past the flower beds her hood fell back and I saw, quite clearly, Magdalena’s face and the long white-blonde hair.

There’s nothing I can do about this, nothing I can say – but oh, that poor, kind, unsuspecting man! Is it all a sham, this religiosity of hers? For it seems clear now that she chose the butcher from her other rich suitors for the ease with which she will be able to deceive him. There was nothing of farewell in that meeting under the acacia tree.

One thing is certain: in thinking Magdalena Winter incapable of passion, I was a fool.

Sigismund’s uncle fainted today on the stairs. Frau Hinkler told me this in her usual pleasant manner. ‘He’s starving himself to keep up the instalments on the piano. I didn’t get a doctor; what’s the use? He can’t pay.’

I’ve never been inside Sigismund’s attic; the glimpse through the window that first night was enough for me, but in the evening I put some fruit and a jar of soup into a basket and went across.

Frau Hinkler let me in with a bad grace. She longs to evict the Kraszinskys and any sign that they’re not friendless infuriates her.

Oh God, that wretched room! The piano stands in the centre and I see it now as a black monster devouring the lives of those two miserable exiles; endlessly consuming the money that they need to live. It alone had been wiped clean: everywhere else, on the bare boards, on the window sill, the dust lay clotted. Sheets of music and a few tattered books were piled on newspaper on the floor – and on a trestle bed against the wall lay Kraszinsky, still wearing his rusty black clothes, with his arms by his sides like someone waiting for the undertaker.

‘I’ve brought you some soup. Is there somewhere I can heat it up ? Do you have a kitchen ?’

Sigismund, who had appeared silently by my side, led me into a scullery with a dirty sink, one dripping tap, a paraffin stove. His crucifix, I noted, was once again tied with a grubby piece of string. I scrubbed out the only saucepan, disposed of a cockroach, rinsed the grease from two tin bowls.

‘We are going back,’ said Kraszinsky as I returned to his bedside. ‘We are finished. I have written to Preszowice.’

‘You’d like that?’

He shrugged. ‘For myself, yes. Perhaps I can get my old job back. But there is nothing there for the child – nothing. I dream about my sister.’

As I was leaving, Sigismund beckoned to me from the doorway beside the scullery. It led to a windowless slit of a room with a skylight so begrimed that it let in almost no light. This, clearly, was where Sigismund slept – only what was it that he wished to show me ? The rancid smelling mattress on the floor? The one cane chair with a broken seat?

No… something else. Against the wall, on what must have been the wooden box in which he’d brought his few possessions, Sigismund had set up an icon corner such as all pious households have in the east.

In the centre was a picture of a young woman in a leather frame. Kraszinsky was right – his sister had been beautiful. The oval face was tranquil, the mouth full. Beside the picture was a bracelet made of woven hair, now faded but still retaining the reddish tint it had had in life. Had they cut the tresses from Ilona’s head as she lay murdered in the forest? It was hard to hold it and admire it as the boy put it into my hand.

The third object on Sigismund’s shrine was an old cigar box and as I bent down to look at it he made a protective gesture, covering it with his fingers.

‘You don’t want me to open it?’

He hesitated; colour flooded his narrow face; then suddenly he turned back the lid.

Oh God! Inside was the lace-edged handkerchief I’d dropped the night I took him to the churchyard to smell the limes… the gold ribbon I had sent over for his crucifix, carefully coiled as sailors coil a rope… two shrivelled forget-me-nots from the bunch I had worn in my belt the first day I said ‘
Gruss Got
? to him by the fountain. And most macabre of all, cut from an ancient newspaper which some earlier tenants must have left behind, an advertisment for my shop in the days when I still had to advertise.

Crossing the square to go home, I took deep breaths of air, trying to shut out what I had seen. Even before I reached my door, it had begun again: calm, orderly, serene – Sigismund’s music. I was right about the piece. It is by Mozart. The
Rondo in A
.

The Schumachers are back. They invited me over as soon as they’d unpacked and the girls showed me their treasures: the skeleton of a fish from Lake Locarno, a thistle head the size of a plate… Gisi, now that she is no longer the youngest, has been taken out of nappies. She has a surprised and slightly anxious look as though she finds this sudden adulthood uncertain and draughty.

Then on Sunday we had the christening.

The godmother Helene had chosen for the baby was ill so I held the comical creature whose blemish I no longer ‘see’. Even before I gave her to the priest she was not entirely pleased with events. A terrible frown appeared between her autocratic eyebrows, and she wrinkled her nose. And when Father Anselm sprinkled her with holy water and pronounced her string of resplendent Christian names, Donatella’s yells of rage would have displaced a whole regiment of devils from the depths of hell.

Afterwards there was a party in the Schumachers’ pretty Biedermeier drawing room and today Herr Schumacher has gone to Graz to fetch his nephew.

I was present at Gisi’s christening too, and at Kati’s and at that of the quicksilver Resi… I could recite all the Christian names of all the little Schumacher girls.

But I don’t know what my own daughter is called. I don’t know what names the people in Salzburg chose for her. Somehow I can never get over that. That I don’t know my daughter’s name.

Oh dear! I expect it will be all right but it has to be admitted that the goldfish slayer is not a pretty sight. The carriage in which Herr Schumacher brought him from the station turned in between the chestnut trees as I was crossing the square, and he ordered the coachman to stop, and introduced the boy.

‘This is my nephew, Frau Susanna. Gustav, bow to the lady.’

I was surprised at this instruction. At fourteen, I thought

Gustav might be able to bow without being told, but I was wrong. Over the boy’s somewhat vacant face, with its flat nose and faint tracings of a moustache, spread a look that was both bovine and puzzled.

‘Take off your cap!’

This at least Gustav seemed able to do. He inclined his head and murmured something which could have been a greeting.

‘We’ll soon get him trained up, eh Gustav ? You’re going to be a great help to me, aren’t you, boy?’

Gustav said something which sounded like ‘Ugh’, or maybe ‘Agh’ and put on his cap again. I don’t think I have ever seen a boy with such enormous ears.

The girls’ aquarium has been moved to the attic where Lisl can keep an eye on it.

Nini has been back three days and she spends a great deal of time telling me that she is all right.

She does not look all right. There are dark rings under her eyes and she is ill-tempered and twitchy. She also works the kind of hours which would make her absolutely furious if they were demanded of a textile worker in Ottakring, and there is a tendency to stare at roses. Roses, where Nini was concerned, belonged behind one ear or copied in silk to go on a bodice. Now she stares at them, and since the ones that are easily available to us are the pink ramblers separating my courtyard from Herr Schnee’s, which are currently at the brown dishclothy stage, I am not particularly pleased.

I shall put up with this for a few more days, but if it doesn’t improve I’m going to have it out with her.

The Schumacher girls are awed by Gustav. He is awful in an archetypal way like the monsters and ogres in fairy tales: large, slow-moving and stupid. Most of all they are awed by his appetite.

‘Yesterday he ate thirteen zwetschken knodel,’ said Mitzi, sitting up in bed. ‘Honestly, Frau Susanna. Thirteen!’

‘And he never looks at Baby. He just goes past with his head turned away.’

‘He and Ernst Bischof go out at night with a catapult and kill cats. They don’t just scare them; they kill them.’

I’d gone over to help Helene who has become embroiled with a complicated piece of smocking on a dress for Donatella.

‘Is it as bad as the girls make out?’ I asked her when I’d said goodnight to the children and joined her in the drawing room.

‘Well, it’s fairly bad. There was nearly a nasty accident last week when the men were loading. Gustav doesn’t exactly have a way with horses. But Albert is determined to succeed with him because the business
has
to go to someone with the Schumacher blood.’ She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. ‘It must be nice to be so pleased with your blood, don’t you think?’

We sat for a while over our work; then the study door was opened and we heard the irate voice of Albert Schumacher.

‘No, no
no
! How many times do I have to tell you – that’s
sycamore
! Sycamore, you blockhead!’

‘Albert’s been trying to teach him how to distinguish the different kinds of wood,’ said Helene. ‘But he doesn’t seem able to take it in.’

This certainly seemed to be the case. There was some more shouting, then Gustav shambled past down the corridor and Herr Schumacher in his smoking jacket appeared in the doorway, mopping his brow.

‘Where is she?’ he demanded of his wife.

‘She’s asleep, Albert; don’t wake her.’

‘She always wakes up about nine, you know that. It’ll do her good to be awake before her bottle.’

He made his way upstairs to the nursery, returned with Donatella in his arms – and disappeared into his study.

Helene endured it for a few minutes; then we rose and followed him.

The baby, freed from the constraints of her shawl, was propped in an armchair. Herr Schumacher had taken a circular piece of wood from the baskets of offcuts he’d brought home from the yard and was holding it up to her face.

‘There you are, my pretty. Look at that! That’s oak. See how dense it is ? See how it is figured ?’

Donatella saw. She kicked; she crowed – bubbles of froth formed on her lips.

‘And this is sycamore, my treasure.
You
wouldn’t mix it up with oak, would you ? You can see that it’s lighter, can’t you; you can see the silkiness?’

She could indeed. Made ecstatic by so much conversation after the uninspiring confinement of her cot, Donatella waved her arms with such enthusiasm that she keeled over and had to be righted.

In no way disconcerted by our appearance, Herr Schumacher extracted another sample.

‘Now this one’s really special, sweetheart. This is rosewood. There’s nothing quite like it.’ He waved the block above her head and growing quite cross-eyed with pleasure, she bared her gums in a seraphic smile.

‘You see,’ he said, turning to us. ‘She knows already. She’s got more sense now in one finger than that oaf has in the whole of his body. In one
finger
…’

My mother taught me to cook and she taught me well. So when Nini, at supper, pushed my excellent Kaiserschmarr’n round and round her plate with a fork and sighed, I suddenly cracked.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I’d like to know what’s the matter with you ? What went wrong at the Grundlsee ?’

‘Nothing went wrong. Why should it ?’

‘I don’t know why, but it did. I suppose you fell in love ?’

Nini glared at me, attempting outrage. Then she put down her fork and groped for a handkerchief.

‘It was so unfair! I can’t tell you how ridiculous he looked – well, not ridiculous, but absolutely like someone you couldn’t possibly be in the slightest danger from. Hardly taller than me, with floppy hair all over his eyes, and socks that kept coming down – and a snub nose. He didn’t even have eyes that were a proper colour. Not blue or brown or black… just bits of colours with flecks in them.’

‘Was he working in the children’s camp?’

‘Yes, he was. I didn’t notice him at the beginning. There was a tall, good-looking Frenchman that I was rather interested in. Whereas Daniel came from America and that was against him – a hotbed of capitalism – and then they said he was a bank clerk. Both his parents were Austrian, but their families emigrated separately and they met in New York. So Daniel was a second-generation immigrant, but his German was perfect of course. Only as I say I didn’t notice him at first. It was the children that made me notice him.’