Is it true that the Hungarians put donkeys in their salamis?’ I heard her say, blinking anxiously at Herr Huber through her spectacles.
And the butcher’s soothing reply: ‘It is true. But it doesn’t mean that the Hungarians are wicked; only that they make good salamis.’
I have not been particularly good this week. I have visited no sickbeds, I was cross with Gretl when she knocked over the box with Frau Egger’s ridiculous buttons. And yet – and this shows how mysteriously and marvellously God goes about his business – on Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting beside Hatschek in a carriage bound for a hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods – and Gernot.
My lover had borrowed the house from a colleague who had gone to America in pursuit of a rich wife. We were to have the evening together, and the night. A whole, entire night, for which I had packed a whole and moderately entire nightdress, but I wore the rich cream dress I had worn the last time at the Bristol. So much of love has to do with remembrance. I love driving with Hatschek. It is from him that I learn those details of Gernot’s life that he regards as trivial or uninteresting. It is from Hatschek that I hear the tributes paid to him by his men, the intrigues and dangers that he has to face. They had just returned from Serbia, as part of the delegation supposed to undo the harm we had done by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovinia – a move Gernot had consistently opposed.
‘He wouldn’t let anyone give him a bodyguard, neither. Just walked round the slums in mufti, saying he had to know what people were thinking. Well, I could tell him what they were thinking. They were thinking how to murder every Austrian they could lay hands on, the swine.’
Even more then the Ordnance Department, we hate the Serbians, Hatschek and I.
We passed Mayerling in its dark circle of trees. They’ve pulled down the hunting lodge in which the Crown Prince shot himself and his mad little mistress and built a convent, now filled with mourning nuns, but I don’t know why. Rudolf had a good life and a good death, surely, with silly, loving Mitzi by his side?
Gernot was waiting by the door. In spite of his gruelling time in Serbia he looked extremely fit.
‘Ah, I see you have decided to be beautiful’ He kissed my hands, then the self-coloured silken rose on my bodice, a gesture I found unsettling.
‘Do you object?’
‘Not exactly. As long as you keep it up. I can get accustomed to you looking like the Primavera. It’s when you suddenly think of something sad and turn into a potato-picking peasant in one of those dark Van Goghs that I get unsettled. After all, maybe I can have her for life, I think then – not everybody wants to go to bed with potato-picking peasants. And then you giggle and we’re back in the schoolroom: a
Backfisch
preparing for her first dance…’
‘I
never
giggle,’ I said sternly, unbuttoning my gloves.
We had supper in a panelled room, served by Hatschek and watched by the heads of about four hundred chamoix on the wall. As we finished our meal it began to rain, but my suggestion
that we should now go out and smell the fragrance of the woods was badly received.
‘Your hair smells of larches,’ said Gernot, ‘I’ve told you before… So there’s not the slightest need to go plodding about in the rain.’
In the bedroom there were more dead chamoix, a stuffed trout under glass and a bearskin. Also a vast and marvellously solid bed.
I disappeared into the dressing room, took off my clothes, put on the nightdress.
‘Ah, delightful!’ said Gernot, surveying me through his monocle. ‘Might one ask why you have dressed again?’
•It’s because we have a whole night. I’m establishing permanence… status.’
A mistake. The bleak, closed look came over his face. The furrows made by Macedonia and Serbia and the idiocies of the General Staff deepened on his brow. ‘That’s why I’ll be consigned to hell – because I didn’t force you to leave me. You could be a happily married matron with a cupboard full of nightdresses.’
‘But not like this one.’ It was high-necked, long-sleeved, exceedingly demure; it was just that the material was not very thick. I walked into his arms, fashioned my hair into a tent for us both… ‘You know I like it best like this; I like having to re-create our love afresh each time. I like being on my mettle.’
A lie, but a good one. And that’s so odd – these lies that feel so right. Laura Sultzer never lies, so I suppose she is good and Alice and I are bad. As though we wouldn’t change it in an instant – all the glamour, the ‘romance’ of being a mistress for the humdrum and honourable job of being a wife.
I asked after Elise.
‘She’s in Aix. An oto-laryngological complaint has been diagnosed.’
I have never discovered what, if anything, ails Gernot’s frail and high-born wife. Only a slight dryness in his tone when he speaks of her wanderings betrays Gernot’s possible doubts -but as far as I am concerned she should pursue her health with the utmost rigour and determination. Let her hang from stilts in the lake at Balaton and let the jets of water play over her pale, thin legs; let her emerge from the baths at Ischl powdered in salt. May she walk up and down the pump room in Marienbad sipping her sulphur water - and may she soothe herself afterwards with waltzes and cream cakes, for when she is absent I can see Gernot.
‘And your daughter?’
‘There is hope of an engagement to a whiskery young man in the Diplomatic Corps. Myself I doubt if he’ll come up to scratch, but Elise is working on it.’
My lover’s fatherhood is a frail plant. He now indicated that he was no longer prepared to discuss his wife and daughter and we retired to bed.
Outside the wind was freshening; the scent of wet earth came to us through the open window.
How good love tastes in the country!
It was in a place very like this that I first met Gernot. Though ‘met’ is not quite the right word. I was somewhat mad, walking – sodden – through the countryside and slightly off course for the Danube.
At one level of my mind I must have known that throwing yourself into the Danube is not a good idea: the currents are unreliable, the bridges full of policemen and drunks. But it was the day I had seen my daughter playing under the walnut tree and left her and I wasn’t particular about ways and means; I just wanted to get away from the pain. So I started walking.
I never went back to the pension in Salzburg to pick up my case. Wearing only a light cloak and carrying the doll in her box, I set off down a long dusty road, across a stream, blundered along footpaths – and found myself in a neighbouring valley.
Here there was a lake and I stopped to throw the doll into the water. I watched her float and bob in her plaid travelling suit, losing her tam-o-shanter before she sank at last into the reeds. After her, I threw the red evening cape, the lace-trimmed skirts, the blouses, Alice’s pretty fragile hats.
But not myself. With the obstinacy of the deranged I had fixed my mind on the Danube and I trudged on in what I believed was the direction of the city.
By nightfall I was in a wood and it had begun to rain. I
found a forester’s hut and lay there for a few hours, and then I stumbled on again. The rain had grown heavier; my hair was streaming, my cloak torn.
By midday my legs simply stopped working and I sank down against a tree. What happened next was that someone tried to shoot me. Not deliberately; he was aiming at a boar. I had collapsed in the grounds of Count Osterhofen’s shooting box in which Gernot (reluctantly because the sport was poor and the Count stupid) was staying for informal discussions on some point of foreign policy.
But I didn’t see him then. I came round to find a soldier in
the rough grey of a corporal’s field uniform staring down at
me. A round face, huge ears… and for the first time – bringing
me back to consciousness – the smell of the raw onions that
Corporal Hatschek loved to chew.
The dogs were called off. Huntsmen in green hats arrived. A litter was fetched. I hadn’t in fact been hit, but no one believed I could walk.
The Count, fair and moon-faced, looked concerned. ‘Such a beautiful girl to come to this,’ he kept saying. It was generally assumed that I was either dead or deaf.
Then a grim-faced, clean-shaven man, thin to the point of emaciation, appeared and took charge of the operation. He wore a loden coat but his superior rank and authority were evident at once.
I was carried into the house – a gloomy place surrounded by trees – and up to a bedroom. Warming pans were brought; the housekeeper removed my clothes.
“She’s not a common girl, look at those underclothes,’ she said to the maid.
They brought me hot soup which I drank. Then a doctor came with a syringe. Although I was supposedly about to end my life, I minded the prick of the needle.
I woke the next morning in a clean nightgown, my hair brushed. I had a memory – or was it a dream? – of a thin, grim-faced man coming in once with a candle.
All that day they questioned me: the housekeeper, the
doctor, and the fair-haired Count who owned the house, but I
‘
•
shook my head and would tell them nothing. I knew that if once I began to speak I couldn’t stop, and I thought, too, that if I spoke I would realize afresh what I had done: parted for ever from the only person I could really love.
On the second day I tried to get up, and looked for my clothes which they had taken. It was then that they sent for Gernot von Lindenberg.
‘You can leave when we know of your circumstances,’ he said. ‘That you have a home to go to and people to care for you.’
‘I have a place to live. And a job. At least I had.’
‘Very well. My servant goes to Vienna tomorrow with some papers. He will escort you – but first you must tell me how you came here in this condition.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
He then introduced himself formally, giving himself his full rank and title. ‘So you will be aware that anything you say to me will by treated in the strictest confidence.’
‘Please don’t make me… It would be of no interest…’
‘You are mistaken.’
He sat there some way from the bed in a hard-backed chair and waited. Just waited.
I held out a long time. The clock ticked, the wind blew and rattled the shutters and still he sat there. Midnight struck…
Then suddenly I began to talk.
Strange, that. The strangest thing of all, almost, that to this austere, grim-looking man whom I had never set eyes on before and never expected to see again, I gave the whole story of my daughter’s birth, her loss, the agony and depressions… the sudden hope and joy as I realized I could care for her. I told him things I could scarcely remember myself: the woman in the next bed in the House of Refuge saying ‘Her skin is the colour of apricots.’
I told him about Sappho who had chided her daughter for anticipating grief, and how every child I’d seen for six long years had been her: every little girl bowling her hoop in the park, every waif in a painting looking out of the canvas at the world.
By now I was crying so much that I don’t know how he
understood me, but he seemed to. Then I told him about what happened three days ago. How I’d seen her and she was everything I’d dreamed of… and how I let her go.
‘You acted rightly.’
The quiet words goaded me into a rage that almost transcended my wretchedness. ‘Do you think I care? Do you think that helps?’
He didn’t answer. Then he said something so strange that at first I thought I’d misheard. ‘I envy you.’
That stopped me.
What
?’
His head was turned away from me towards the one candle that burnt in the room. ‘I had a son. He died when he was five months old. He
died
, but I did not grieve as you grieve now.’ Then in an entirely different voice: ‘Tomorrow you may go home – on one condition.’
‘What is that?’
‘You know, I’m sure. That you give me your word not to take your life.’
I gave it. I had no wish to spend my days in a hunting lodge shut in by gloomy trees.
The next day Hatschek took me back to Vienna. Even with the Count’s excellent horses it was a long drive and Hatschek used it to inform me of the Field Marshal’s importance, position and stature. This embraced, of course, his military exploits in places of which I had never heard, and his , decorations – but in Hatschek’s eyes depended also on more arduous and less spectacular feats. Going without food once , for eight days, getting proper horse blankets out of the obstinate bumblers at the Ministry, telling the Archduke Franz Ferdinand where he could put his plots. The Marshal’s wife and daughter were scarcely mentioned. Hatschek’s passionate loyalty lay only with the man.
When I got back I found that von Lindenberg had done his staff work. Alice knew what had happened and was waiting with a meal. My employer had been told I would be returning to work a few days late. My suitcase had arrived from the pension in Salzburg.
So I resumed my life. The anguish went on, growling away, sometimes suppressed, sometimes getting me by the throat, but as the months passed I could attend to my work and even my pleasures, except on those sudden black days which even now I have not outgrown.
And as the months passed, beneath the anguish there was another and entirely discreditable emotion. Chagrin? Irritation? Surprise? How could the Feldherr von Lindenberg, who had sat by my bed throughout a long night, so entirely forget my presence ?
For he made no attempt at all to get in touch with me. A formal inquiry, even a note acknowledging the letter of thanks I sent him would have been appropriate, but he made no reply.
Odd how they can exist side by side: anguish and pique.
Almost a year had passed when a tall, narrow-faced, angular young woman walked into Madame Hermine’s shop, and with her a man in his forties dressed in mufti: dark suit, a bowler hat, a monocle.
The young woman was Fraulein Charlotte von Lindenberg and the man her father, the Field Marshal, who (most unaccustomedly as it turned out) had decided to buy her a dress for her birthday.
He seated himself, his daughter consulted with Madame Hermine. Three dresses were brought out.