‘It’s for you,’ said Mitzi, beaming. ‘It’s a surprise.’
‘We both thought of it,’ said Maia firmly. ‘Both of us had the
idea
, but Mitzi cooked it.’
I picked up my fork, hoping to rise to the occasion, whatever it might be.
‘Shall I cut it right through ?’
‘Yes,’ said the girls, clearly relieved. ‘It would be best to do that first. You don’t just want to swallow it without looking.’
So I cut it carefully into two. In the middle of a very thick ring of dough was something brownish and small and just a little decomposed.
‘Goodness!’ I said, playing for time.
‘Don’t you see what it is? Don’t you recognize it?’ Mitzi’s blonde head and Maia’s black one were bent over my plate.
And then, thank heaven, recognition came.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It isn’t… it can’t be… but it is! It’s my pear!’
‘Yes, yes,’ cried the little girls sitting round the table, and nodded and beamed.
‘We made it for you because we thought you wouldn’t get enough to eat the way it was. So we picked it,’ said Maia. ‘We did it secretly at night so that it would be a surprise!’
So you see my mother was right. It’s all still there: sparrows and leaves, knodels and friendship. Even without Gernot, it’s all still there. Somehow I’ll manage. Somehow I’ll find a way.
Egger has wasted no time. Men appear continually in the square: those men in brown overalls with hard hats and tape measures and furtive faces. The chestnut trees are to be cut down next month: already they’ve made white crosses on the bark. There’s always one tree – the one closest to Joseph’s cafe that I worry about: its leaves fall earlier than those of the others and its buds come out later. Maybe its roots, below the pavement, have encountered some obstacle, and I have the absurd idea that the white cross will kill it even before the felling: that it is a kind of evil eye.
Herr Schnee is being businesslike about clearing his premises. He’s morose and terse and says there’s no point in shillyshallying; the sooner he’s out and in a new place the better. He has a chance of a workshop on the other side of the town and is not inclined to be sentimental about the square.
Augustin Heller’s a different matter. He’s a broken man, wandering about his shop, putting things in piles and then forgetting where he’s put them. I can’t imagine how he will ever manage to get away. His daughter in Wiener Neustadt has ‘agreed to take him in’ as he put it. This is Maia’s mother – a woman as bossy as her daughter, but without her daughter’s imagination. No wonder that Heller has aged by ten years since Egger’s letter came.
Now I had better put down what happened this afternoon. The Countess von Metz arrived in her creaking carriage and asked me to make her an evening dress. She was as rude and decrepit as ever but I had the feeling that she was concealing some kind of triumph. ‘I’ve come to ask you to make me an evening dress.’ ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, Countess. As you may have heard, my shop is closing and I can’t take any new orders.’
‘Ah, Egger.’ She banged on the floor with her cane. ‘Yes, I’ve heard. But you won’t let a parvenu like that stop you. You’ll start up somewhere else.’ ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve been offered a job in a department store.’
I hadn’t yet decided what to do about Peter’s offer but whatever else happened, I was going to get rid of the Countess von Metz. ‘I wouldn’t approve of that,’ said the incredible old woman.
C
I would not be pleased.’
I said nothing. She’d paid me for her green broadcloth with a piece of arsenic-impregnated wallpaper sandwiched between glass. It came, she’d informed me, from Napoleon’s house on St Helena and was the undoubted cause of his demise.
‘Nevertheless, I must insist that you make me an evening gown immediately,’ she went on. ‘It is a matter of considerable importance.’ And unable any longer to conceal her triumph, she said: ‘I have been invited to a house party at Burg Uferding.’
Strange how nothing
shows
when one’s heart races and one’s mouth becomes dry as dust.
‘Burg Uferding?’ I managed to say. ‘Isn’t that the home of Field Marshal von Lindenberg.’
‘It is.’ But she was not at all pleased that I – a mere dressmaker – had heard of Uferding. ‘They’re having a house party next week and I have been asked to join them. The Field Marshal wrote himself at the bottom of his wife’s letter, so you see I must have something new to wear. It might be an advertisement for you; I’m quite prepared to mention your name.’
But now I did have to turn away. She was going to Uferding, this horrible old woman. She would sit in his hall by the great log fire and his dogs would lay their heads in her lap. Perhaps Gernot himself would tuck the wolfskin rug round her knees, settling her in the sleigh the von Lindenbergs used to take their guests to church – and in the candlelit dining room she would watch his hand stretch out to the silver fruit bowl. Perhaps for this selfish, ancient creature he would select a pear and –
No.
No.. A
‘Well ?’ came the irritable voice of the Countess.
But I couldn’t turn round yet. I was in agony. Yes, I, a healthy woman, not hungry, not cold, experienced agony -and only those who have never been in love will quarrel with the word.
Then I got myself under control – and what I did next I did because of the absurd and foolish notion that at least something of mine would go to Uferding. That perhaps she would keep her word and speak my name in Gernot’s presence and he would hear that I was losing my shop and –
And then, nothing. Gernot had probably known long ago what was going to happen. I could see now that he had been trying to warn me all along of Egger’s plans.
‘I can’t make you a dress in so short a time,’ I said. ‘But I have some evening dresses belonging to a trousseau that has not been claimed. I could alter one for you.’
Magdalena’s dresses were laid out in the workroom, ready to send to the nuns to sell; they would not miss one. The Countess was shorter than Magdalena but her measurements were not dissimilar.
And as always, just when I hated the old woman most, she disarmed me. She walked among Magdalena’s gowns with a kind of eagle-eyed reverence – and when she picked the dress she wanted it was not the Renaissance gown in cloth of gold, nor the burgundy velvet with a tabard, but the simplest of Magdalena’s evening dresses: a soft georgette in misty blue, high necked and gently draped, on which Nini and I had worked for countless hours – and which was, quite possibly, my masterpiece.
We hear about Sigi only from the papers. The tour of Germany and Switzerland was a success and he is bound for Paris. Helene brought me an article from the
Wiener Musikant
with a picture of him. The critics have been enthusiastic: only old Hasenberger, the veteran musicologist, and Busoni who heard him in Berlin, said his talent shouldn’t be forced, he should be put to a good teacher and have time to study and mature. But there doesn’t seem the slightest likelihood of that happening now that Van der Velde has got hold of him.
The attic flat across the way is still empty. Frau Hinkler has been so morose since Rip died that I don’t suppose anyone can get past the door and now, with the dirt and noise of the demolition to come, it will probably be impossible to find a tenant.
Sometimes at night I imagine I can hear him practise.
We have had a drama: Gretl’s fiance has become a hero and she has agreed to marry him at the end of January. There was a piece about him in the paper, three girls wrote and asked if they could meet him, and that was too much even for my dozy Gretl. Father Anselm will perform the ceremony – so she at least is taken care of.
And the goldfish slayer has been sent back to Graz!
I’d better begin at the beginning.
Of late, Gustav, egged on by Ernst Bischof, has been in search of his manhood, and in pursuit of this elusive quality, he managed to smuggle a cigar and a box of matches into the timber yard.
During his lunch hour three days ago, he retired to the loft above the stables where Herr Schumacher’s dray horses are kept, and proceeded to light up.
The experience was not what Ernst Bischof had told him it would be. Gustav choked, spluttered… and dropped his burning cigar into the straw!
At first the boy was more terrified of his uncle’s wrath than of the flames. By the time he emerged, screaming, into the yard, the loft was ablaze, and the horses stamping with terror. Herr Schumacher is a fool, but he behaved well. With the help of his men he led the horses to safety out in the street, but by the time the fire brigade arrived the flames had ignited a pile of sawdust and spread to the open-sided shed where the sawn planks were put to season. And beyond that were the workshop with its valuable machinery… the barn with the wagons… the offices and store of figured hardwood for the cabinet trade…
That all these were saved were due to the energy and foresight of Gretl’s fiance. While the men in the first engine started to douse the stables, he drove his machine up the alleyway at the side of the yard, leapt the fence and hacked down the far wall of the blazing shed, pushing it inwards in spite of his blistered hands, so as to contain the blaze until his men could follow with their hoses.
Herr Schumacher is insured of course. Rebuilding of the stables has begun already – but the day after the blaze, Gustav was put in a carriage and returned to his parents. The little girls are delighted, the aquarium has been brought down from the attic – but the problem of the inheritance remains unsolved. What is going to happen now about Herr Schumacher’s blood?
I suppose I should have known. Nini wasn’t just wearing her assassination shoes when she went out, she’d made herself a new velveteen jacket and her eyes were shining with excitement.
But they do so often. With her fervour, her belief in ‘The Propaganda of the Deed’ whatever that may mean, she often goes to her meetings looking like that.
It was her half day so she left in the afternoon.
‘I’ll be late,’ she said – but she is often late, and I went on with my stocktaking. Peter Konrad has found someone who’ll take my cloth at valuation.
In the evening I went out to buy a newspaper. On the front page was a picture of what looked like a moustachioed slug, but was apparently Herr Engelbert Knapp, the German arms manufacturer and steel magnate who was arriving in Vienna as a guest of the Austrian Ministry of Trade.
Even then I felt no disquiet. I had heard Nini rage about Knapp, who is said to treat his workers abominably and recently called in the army to put down a strike in his factory at Essen – but who have I not heard Nini rage about: archdukes, cabinet ministers, financiers?
There had been some threats to his life by subversive bodies; an extra contingent of police had been detailed to guard his route from the station to the Hotel Imperial…
I don’t wait up for Nini. When I first took her in I set myself the task of leaving her free, so I went to bed at the usual time, but when I woke I knew at once that she wasn’t there. Her bed had not been slept in, her room was bare and tidy. Between the two Anarchist posters, she’d pinned a picture of a candy-striped pinafore cut from a fashion magazine.
I told myself that she’d found a boy she liked and spent the night with him – not unlikely in view of her determination to forget Daniel Frankenheimer. But for all her wildness Nini is considerate. She’s come in in the small hours, but never as late as this.
So by the time the pounding on my door started, I was prepared. But it wasn’t the police, it was Lily from the post office, tear-stained and frantic. Her father’s a revolutionary, that’s how she and Nini met.
‘They’ve got her, Frau Susanna! They’ve got Nini! They’ve rounded up everybody in the group – as soon as Knapp died they went to the cellar and took everyone.’ ‘What happened to Knapp?’
‘Someone threw a bomb at his car as he was coming down the Ring.’
I took the paper from her.
Assassination Horror
screamed the headline. A young man dressed like a student had stepped out from behind a tree as the car slowed down to take a bend, and thrown a bomb. Herr Knapp died instantly, as did his chauffeur. His secretary was seriously injured and so were a number of by-standers. The assassin made no attempt to escape. ‘
Long live the poor and the oppressed
,’ he’d cried, and biting on a cap of fulminate of mercury which he had in his mouth, he fell lifeless to the ground.
‘You must tell me exactly how far Nini was involved,’ I said to Lily. ‘That’s the only way I can help her.’
‘I don’t know exactly, Frau Susanna. Honestly I don’t. I know she had to go to a hat shop in the Neuermarkt at three and pick up a message. It was part of a chain of messages, I think. But she couldn’t have been there when the bomb was thrown because she was in Ottakring when the police came and that was miles away. They were all there.’
Oh yes, I thought wearily. Naturally. They would all assemble afterwards so as to save the police the trouble of rounding them up one by one.
‘Where have they taken her, Lily? Have you any idea?’ Lily’s face was grim. ‘She’s at Pechau. They’ve taken her to Pechau.’
It’s the worst of all the gaols in the city: ancient, rat-infested, notorious. I packed a shawl, some washing things, a basket of food – quite without hope that they would let me see her.
It takes an hour to drive to Pechau and you can tell that you’re approaching it because even the surrounding streets are dank and squalid and the muffled people who walk in them seem blighted by the proximity of that awful place.
I had dressed carefully, I spoke carefully, I smiled. This got me past the outer office and into an inner one with a desk and a chair – and an official of the kind I remembered from the days when I had pleaded for particulars about my daughter. A stone-waller, a no-sayer, a cipher whose bumbledom was itself an act of cruelty.
‘I have come about my assistant. A dressmaker. A girl I have adopted. I think she was arrested last night in Ottakring.’
He drew a dossier towards him.
‘Name?’
I gave Nini’s name which is long and very Hungarian.