Authors: Roberta Latow
‘Karel, one of the best things about us is our hunger for each other. So let’s, for the time that’s left to us, continue to enjoy being the selfish lovers that we are.’
There was a tremor in her voice that she wished had not been there, not for her sake but for his. She sensed that he might have spoken from some sense of guilt, and that would have been abominable. Emotions were running high for them both, and so she had no doubt that he would understand her, and that it was not weakness on her part or a desire to cling on to a love story she had already been warned could never be.
He was much more in control. He raised her hand to his lips, kissed it and told her, ‘You are magnificent. The most beautiful thing that has entered my life in a very long time. Maybe ever. I will always hold you dear to me. And you are quite right: my heart will always be hungry for you.’
She listened to Karel Stefanik. There was no maudlin, cheap sentimentality in his words. They were an expression of genuine feeling. Once again silence enveloped them. For a time they sat together, savouring that something special that great loves are made of.
Karel began reading aloud to her from the book he had taken from her library. Then their idyll was shattered by the intrusive buzz of the intercom. It silenced him. He placed the book on the sofa and they looked at each other.
‘I’ll go.’ Rising from the sofa he touched her shoulder, and she placed her hand over his. ‘But where,’ he asked, ‘is that terrible machine?’
‘It’s the black telephone on the table near the window.’
If that small enclosed world that they had created for
themselves was shattered, certainly the feelings they had for each other were not. She was resting on her knees on the sofa, leaning against its back, her arms folded across the top and her chin resting on them, watching him walk back towards her. She could not help but smile when she told him, ‘My goodness, you look the most handsome, romantic figure of a man. No wonder I picked you up at the Stork.’
He gave her one of his charismatic smiles, and laughed. ‘Now what should I say to that? What can I say except, thank God you did? How frightening to think that we might never have met.’
His words hit her hard. They made her realize what she had not until that moment. It would have been more than frightening, for then she would not have met the great love of her life. She quickly recovered herself, more grateful than ever for the courage they had shown to love each other for one brief period in their lives.
‘The driver says he’s early. We have a little time.’
‘Then one last drink – for the road,’ she told him, and mixed their drinks. Then they sat in another part of the room in a pair of Venetian wing chairs that faced each other, near one of the windows overlooking the terrace and the view of the city beyond.
‘It’s a fairy-tale city. I’ve always thought of it like that. I’ve always liked it. Its energy. Its opulence and its fragility. The slums, the ugliness, all that incredible hardness. It has a kind of madness that doesn’t exist in Paris or London or Rome. It’s so uncivilized, and I don’t know how people can live here, really live here. But I have met you, and so now I’m learning that it can be done. New York is unique, and so has been this four-day trip to America, although I don’t know that I have accomplished what I came here for. Only time will tell that.
‘What I do know is that, since we have been together, you have made me forget the war and devastation I am about to return to. Barbara, you are so removed from all that, so safe.
You can’t begin to understand what insanity this war has brought upon Europe and England. And may you never know. You’re so alive and rich in yourself – but never take that for granted. I have for years been so busy trying to survive, I had forgotten that there
is
more to life than mere survival.’
He went to sit on the arm of her chair, to place an affectionate kiss on her lips, to slip his hand through her blouse and caress her bare breast, to lay it over her heart. It was as if he wanted to feel her warmth, the beat of her heart, life pulsating in his lover for one last time.
They held hands and listened to the wind driving sleet against the window. He was entranced by the sound and the sight of it streaking down the glass. She was losing him. She could feel him drifting away. It seemed as if the storm was transporting him to some place far from her. She tightened her grip on his hand, trying to hold him back, keep him warm and safe and with her for just a little while longer. Too late. She watched him slip his hand from hers. He was gone. She had lost him to the life he lived beyond their idyll when it came flooding back to him and he told her, ‘I was a very different man before this war. I was living a life quite alien to the one I live now. And then one morning I woke up. Scales had fallen from my eyes. I faced the reality. My country, my life, the world, were no longer being merely threatened – they were being shattered. Almost too late, I became ruthless about my country, about my daughter and myself just staying alive.
‘There could be no betrayal of a loved one, no collusion with the enemy for me. The loss of my home, freedom, my country, became an unbearable thought. From that moment when I lost my illusions and faced the reality of Hitler and Nazi Germany, everything that I did, everything that I do now, every breath I take, has been and still is for the survival of those things and my daughter. But it has been survival bought at a price.
‘Self-denial: my child, my homeland, my estates, my identity. It has had a corrosive effect on me. My life has lost the capacity for even the most extreme emotion. Cunning replaces feeling. That, I am sorry to say, is the romantic figure you think you see before you.’
He was less lost to her than Barbara thought because he rallied himself, broke away from the mesmerising sleet trying to beat its way into the warmth and safety of the flat. He turned to look at her and tell her, ‘It’s temporary. Until the war is over and I find my child, till my country is free and my land and houses are returned to me.
‘There are not thousands nor hundreds of thousands but millions, Barbara, millions of people more hurt than me. Millions who have suffered unspeakably, and perished in this war. Innocent Jews, gypsies, the Poles, the Czechs, Hungarians. I feel no guilt about those who have been hit harder than me. My shame is for having sold my child’s identity to preserve her life. That’s my pain, my anguish.
‘I live with that pain every day, every waking minute of my life. It will always be there until this war is over and I can return here to America to reclaim my daughter. I wanted her to grow up with a childhood she could bear to remember, and not have to invent one, as the hordes of concentration camp children, ghetto children, the hungry and lost orphans roaming the streets, begging for bread, rags for shoes, will have to.
‘I ease my conscience about my child because I know she is safe here in America with a mother who adopted her, a woman who was her wet-nurse. She loves her as her own child. And the girl has a tutor who loves her no less. These women are devoted to her and care for her. She lives secure in their love and the comfort I have provided for them all until my return. And yet, with all that, she is a victim of war, a displaced person. My hope, my dream, is that she is too young and too innocent and happy to know it.
‘I try not to think about her. But, when I do, it is in a
lovely house with a garden where she has not a worry in the world. Where no one can reach her, hurt her, or use her to get to me. It assuages my guilt for the danger I put them all through before I took action to ensure their safety, for abandoning her.
‘Czechoslovakia, my country, has a government in exile in London. I flew to Washington on a mission for them. It was to be London, Washington, London. I am only in New York because weather delayed my flight back to London. A romantic figure, you see? A ruthless bastard, more like! These days with you have been more than perfect, more than any man has a right to expect. We’ve been selfish for each other, and reaped fantastic pleasure from our selfishness. Maybe even sparks of love. But love is not my game. Survival is what I’m playing for. I can only hope you understand, and that you will forgive me.’
Barbara was stunned by all that Count Karel Stefanik had chosen to reveal about himself. She had not expected it. Nor had she expected that he would fall in love with her. In spite of his words, the coolness with which he had spoken, she sensed that he did love her, no matter that he didn’t want to. She had had other men fall in love with her. The signs were there now: she read them clearly.
‘Forgive you for what, Karel?’
‘For walking out on you. No. That’s not quite right. For walking out on love. That’s more the truth of it.’
He pulled her up from the chair and held her in his arms. Then he sat down again with her on his lap. They kissed. She stroked his hair, and he kissed her hands. There was nothing to forgive, and therefore nothing to say about his departure. Nor about understanding that they would never meet again.
The intercom buzzed. They let it carry its irritating tune for some moments while they sat silent looking into each other’s eyes.
Mimi’s change of fortune began with the kindness of the fruit pedlar, Joe Pauley. But real change began in her life on that autumn afternoon in 1943 when she and the Queen met on the steps of the chapel. When she felt secure enough to cut through the tissue of lies she had been living with since she had been parted from her father, and mentioned that she too had a chapel in the house where she lived in Prague. Always looking for diversions to keep the children amused, the Queen had suggested a tea party where everyone could view the child’s precious photographs. Those were the first details Mimi had voluntarily given anyone about herself. Neither Mimi nor anyone else could possibly envisage how a tea party could change her fortunes.
Until that day Mimi’s life at Beechtrees had been a happy but hard one. She worked tirelessly and with a willingness to please in order to remain at Beechtrees that was exploited by everyone. The family and cook treated her as what she was supposed to be, a poor waif from the gutter who was there to serve and learn. Every job that was too low, menial or dirty in the kitchen: the rubbish detail, scrubbing the floor, the pots, cleaning the stove, the endless potato and onion peeling, fetching the heavy bags of charcoal. Even the cleaning ladies used her to fetch and carry for them. The children thought nothing of making her do their chores and pinched her as a warning not to tell. She never ate until the family’s meals had been served and then, the ‘waste not
want not’ theory was the excuse for her having to eat scraps. By the time she was allowed to go to bed she was trembling with exhaustion. And yet, as her first year there wore on, she etched herself into their hearts. Not enough, however, for them to think of her as an equal. She ran, she fetched, and was thrown the occasional bone, some small treat that showed her they would have liked it to be different. The tea party to view her photos was a gesture long overdue because, in spite of her position at Beechtrees, she had wormed her way into their hearts. Everyone sensed Mimi deserved better than what they were giving. That made them uncomfortable.
Tea was always the gathering-time of the day, and whenever possible turned into a party. What they had seen as a breakthrough for Mimi was all the excuse they needed to make a party of looking through her photographs. The tea-table had been set in the library in front of the fire and covered with a linen and lace cloth. It was resplendent with silver pots for coffee and tea and hot chocolate, cream, sugar and jams: apricot, blueberry, strawberry. Cups, saucers and plates in a sparkling white porcelain edged with a lacy pattern of gold. Cook filled the table with her delicious thin-cut sandwiches that melted in the mouth, filo pastry-squares filled with chicken and mushrooms in a thick, white, buttery-tasting sauce. There were tarts and cakes and scones, and crispy hot fried apple-fritters sprinkled with powdered sugar. When Mimi and the maid, Bessie, and Cook had set the table, and the Queen had done the flowers, Mimi had asked permission of the Queen for Jack and Ernie to be allowed to come because they were going to find her father. Another breakthrough? It was more than anyone could have hoped for.
The excitement of Mimi breaking out of her shell put everyone into top gear. The two school-teachers prepared little entertainments: a song, a poem, a reading of a scene from
A Tale of Two Cities
were to be the children’s
contribution to the party. Then would come Mimi’s: the showing of her photographs.
Jack and Ernie had come, Jerry was posted to cover the gate, and Cook had joined them after serving. It was Mimi’s party: she asked if everyone could dress up for tea. They had, with Mimi herself in one of Juliet’s prettiest party frocks, her golden hair tied back off her face with a ribbon embroidered with flowers.
Much laughter and applause for the entertainments, much eating and refilling of cups. Lots of chattering about the weather, school, going skiing in the winter, whether they could find a toboggan-run in the area. They were trying to pretend the war did not exist, although it kept slipping in and out of the conversations going round the table.
With tea declared over, and the table removed from the room, the children sat in a circle on cushions on the floor in front of the fire. The adults were in chairs behind them, except for the Queen who sat in the centre of the sofa, Mimi alongside her. Next to Mimi was her broken and squashed cardboard box of photographs held together with a selection of coloured rubber bands, and the leather envelope lying in her lap.
‘May I show you my chapel now, Ma’am?’ she asked.
‘Yes, now would be a perfect time, Mimi. And maybe you could give us a little talk with each picture.’
‘Oh, yes. I could do that,’ she answered with some enthusiasm.
Then very carefully she removed one rubber band at a time, and the lid. ‘I’ll hold those for you, Mimi,’ offered Jack and took them from her.
The next fifteen minutes had been both a revelation and a disappointment for the tea-party guests. The revelations were the claims that Mimi made on the commercial photographs that could be found in any tourist shop in Prague. Beautiful, coloured reproductions of one of the finest Rococo chapels in Czechoslovakia, complete with
frescos and ceiling-scenes of unimaginable beauty. The altars and niches displayed images of Christ on the cross, sunbursts of gold hung on the painted and gilt panelling, same encrusted with jewels. Cherubs flung themselves from the opulent deep carvings everywhere, or flew down from the celestial ceiling.
‘I will pass them to you first, ma’am, and then please will you pass them on around the circle? This is my favourite,’ she said, smiling, ‘but I like this one in our country house almost as much.’
There had been fewer than a dozen such photographs: a Baroque palace in Prague, another (or so Mimi claimed) family chapel in Hacha, worthy of a pilgrimage for the paintings of Christ on the cross in richly carved gilt frames alone. A palatial house on the edge of a lake, an aerial shot of an ancient wood with a herd of deer on the run. A large, rustic hunting lodge on the side of a mountain, a magnificent formal garden with a stone gazebo in the middle of it. Any identification once printed at the bottom of these photographs had been carefully cut away.
When, with a certain composure and childish pride, Mimi had shown the Prague chapel to her sovereign benefactor, she had said, ‘I know how much you like the little chapel here. Maybe some day you can come to our chapel. It’s very beautiful, don’t you think? You could pray there with my father and me, and perhaps you could come at Christmas. Then it’s all draped in gold and white flowers. All sorts of white flowers.’
Mimi’s openness, her enthusiasm about the chapel, a future, had been spontaneous, as any child’s would have been who wanted to say, ‘Look, I have something and I want to share it with you and to say thank you for your friendship, generosity, and hospitality. Maybe, even, I love you.’
The adults in the room were touched by her display, but not unaware that, after she had shown several of the
photographs, she seemed to lose her enthusiasm, to become less informative about them. She had been pleased to be sharing her box of treasures, but they could actually feel her receding from them, pulling back into herself before she was half-way through them.
The adults hardly knew what to say, because they were having to question Mimi’s claims. Were they true? Was this part of the life she had before she found her way to America? Or were they just post-cards and commercial photographs of her country that she had fantasized about in her need to create some kind of a life, a home, a background that could lift her out of the trauma and poverty of her life? And so what they did say was admiring but cautious, to their own ears banalities. But, to a nine year old desperate to have something to share with them, banalities were good enough.
If the Beechtrees adults had that problem, the children certainly did not. Privileged children, born and brought up in houses such as those Mimi chose to claim as hers, were innocents, with no reason not to believe what she told them. It had been their gullibility, the happiness they felt because Mimi was not the poor waif they had all thought she was, that prompted questions. ‘Can we come to visit?’ asked Juliet.
‘Oh, yes, and stay, all of you, for as long as you like.’
Pierre asked, ‘Have you a boat on the lake?’
‘Yes. You can come for a summer.’
‘Then the next summer you can come to us,’ suggested Maxi.
‘Do you have a stable?’ Juliet had become obsessed with riding.
‘Which house shall we visit?’
‘The lake,’ answered Pierre.
‘No, the hunting lodge.’ That was Maximillian, preoccupied with anything that had to do with guns. ‘That is a deer-park, isn’t it, Mimi?’
And so it went on, while the adults worried whether this was a child’s fantasy or a real life lost, and maybe lost forever if it had existed at all.
There were two photographs left in the box which Mimi had seemed hesitant about showing. For one brief moment she had the most wonderful feeling in the world. That she did belong, that it was true that it was all going to come right. That her father would come and find her, and that her real mother, who had vanished so long ago would reappear, and they would all go home.
The photos, having been passed from hand to hand, were now coming back to Mimi. She had been about to replace them in the box (she was very careful in handling them, almost neurotically so) when Her Highness asked, ‘Mimi, won’t you show us the last two photos you have in the box?’ The chattering seemed to die down. All eyes were on the box.
Everyone in the room was aware that Mimi had suddenly come under some pressure: unconsciously she was wringing her hands. She lowered her eyes. Catching sight of what she was doing, she stopped abruptly, removed one of the pictures from the box and handed it to the Queen. It was of Mashinka holding Mimi in her arms. Mimi was wearing a luxuriously long christening dress of antique lace studded with tiny pearls. The second photograph was of a five-year-old Mimi, looking far less emaciated than she did now, wearing a beautiful party dress of silk whose hem was trimmed in roses cut of the same material. She had ribbons in her hair, and a face full of laughter.
‘Who is the lady holding you, Mimi?’
Again, the wringing of the small, elegant, now healed, hands. A look of confusion had showed in those large violet eyes before she lowered them. ‘My mother … my mother Mashinka.’
Not for a moment did any adult in that room believe that Mashinka was Mimi’s natural mother. But they all
pretended they did because that was what she wanted. Jack broke the awkward silence that prevailed. ‘No picture of your father? It would help me, Mimi, if there was.’
‘No. No picture of my father.’
Pierre had gone and sat on the floor in front of Mimi. He helped her to arrange her possessions in the box, and replaced the rubber bands, while asking her a stream of questions about Czechoslovakia. She had sat back, regained her former composure and answered whatever she could.
She felt happy once again, good about being able to talk to Pierre about her country. It felt exciting to have once again a heritage that she could talk about. But always in the back of her mind were her father’s words, his warnings about talking to strangers about herself or the family. She had played his game now for years: Mashinka being her real mother, her only family. Talking about anything else was like dreaming aloud or making up a story. She pondered: were fathers always right? She was reminded of how horrible it was, that almost too late flight from her homeland. Maxi poked her gently out of her thoughts when he asked, ‘Can I bring my friend Anatole? He’s French.’
‘Yes, bring anyone you like. There are lots of rooms.’
‘Mimi, I’m looking for clues. The FBI always looks for clues. It helps find the man they’re after. You still do want me to find your father, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes. My father said he would come and find me after the war. But I can’t wait until after the war. He said I would be safe with Mashinka and Tatayana, and I would live in a big house with Mashinka’s brother, who would take care of all of us. But there was no big house for us, and now they’re all gone, and my father would be very angry that I am left alone. I don’t think I can wait for the war to end and for him to come and find me. I think I have to find him and tell him what happened. Clues – where will we find clues, Jack?’
‘Maybe we will find some in that yellow oil-skin packet, Mimi. What’s in there?’
‘I don’t know. Daddy gave it to Mashinka. And Mashinka gave it to Mr Pauley to give to me before she went away.’
‘Your mother?’ asked one of the teachers.
Again hesitation. Then she answered them, ‘Yes, my mother.’
‘Why do you call your mother Mashinka, Mimi?’
Mimi looked uncomfortable with this question, but bravely answered, ‘She liked to be called Mashinka, and not Mother.’
Mimi was lying. It was so obvious, it confirmed the conviction of every adult present that Mashinka could not be Mimi’s natural mother. Doubts about Mimi’s photographs suddenly seemed unkind. They might indeed be pictures of a life she had had to flee from when the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia.
Mimi picked up the parcel. She looked at Jack. ‘Maybe there is something in here that will tell us where my father is.’
‘That’s right, Mimi, and that would be called a clue.’
‘Oh.’ Hope seemed to brighten her face, and she began attacking the knotted string. Juliet rushed to the far side of the room to the sewing basket to find scissors.
Scissors in hand, Mimi seemed reluctant to cut the string. Ernie asked her, ‘Did your mother ever tell you anything about the packet, or whether you should open it or not, Mimi?’
‘Mashinka said it was only to be opened if we were in desperate circumstances, because it’s all my father had left in the world now. She used to look at it a lot and say, “I wonder if we are in desperate circumstances yet.” I don’t think she really knew what to do about this packet. Now it’s mine, I don’t know. Am I in desperate circumstances, Ernie? Do you think I am?’ she asked Sophia the cook. They all turned their eyes on the sovereign sitting next to Mimi, seeking an answer.