The Children's Book (64 page)

Griselda blushed, and her voice faded, far behind. Dorothy continued to work for clarity.

“What would—what will—your wife think?”

“My wife is an artist. My wife models in clay and carves stone and teaches at the Damen-Akademie. Her name is Angela, and she is an Angel. She likes to be in the forefront of modern thinking. In principle, she would expect a family to welcome a discovered child. In practice, I do not know. How long are you in Munich? For if you are here for some time, we might proceed—delicately, soft-footed, sagaciously—”

Griselda was having more trouble with the translation as Anselm Stern—who chose his words carefully—began to use the slightly odd, poetical vocabulary his friends would have recognised.

“We are here for two or three months. We are studying. I am trying to learn German. I have to pass my matriculation. I am not gifted at languages, Mr. Stern. But I will try.”

“Not gifted at languages? But serious, not a hausfrau. An interesting kind of daughter. What are your gifts, your inclinations, your hopes, Miss Dorothy?”

“I mean to be a doctor. The training is very hard. I should like to be a surgeon.”

“Let me see your hands.”

He put aside the limp puppet—his own hands seemed uneasy without occupation. Dorothy moved closer to him, and he took both her hands in his. Both pairs were thin, wiry and strong. They were the same kind of hands.

“Strong hands,” said Anselm Stern. “Capable hands, delicate hands.” He gave a dry little cough. “I am moved.”

Dorothy went red, and then white. Tears threatened, and she held them in.

“You are tired, young ladies,” said Anselm Stern. “A great effort has been made, strain has been endured. We should go and drink coffee, or chocolate, and eat a pastry, and talk calmly and generally, about Life and Art, and begin to know each other? Yes?”

That night, Dorothy said to Griselda “His name suits him.”

“Stern.”

“Yes. He looks stern. Serious and stern.”

Griselda gave a little laugh.

“Stern
in German doesn’t mean stern.”

“What…?”

“It’s the German word for a star.”

“Oh,” said Dorothy, revisiting the imagined figure in her mind. “A star.”

The events, so far, had been initiated by Humphry’s lapse, and controlled by Dorothy’s will. To her surprise—and in some ways, to her relief—Anselm Stern now took over the control of the story, which he began almost to direct as though it had been the structure of a play. He arranged meetings, of different kinds, in different places. He took his new daughter for walks in the Englische Garten, with Griselda walking like a shadow a few paces behind. He wore a swinging coat with wide skirts, and a wide-brimmed hat. In his pockets, it turned out, puppets were tucked, with strings and bars. A wistful female child, a wolfman with a snarling smile and a fur coat, a strange mooncalf, luminous green with huge eyes. He held them out and they tripped along beside him. Passers-by waved to them. Anselm said to Dorothy

“I do not know whether I believe they have souls, or temporary souls, or intermittent souls.” He looked searchingly at Griselda. “Du
kannst übersetzen?
I think I believe that we are all fragments of one great soul—that the earth is one living thing, and the clay and the wood and the catgut these are made of are forms of life, as is the movement I lend them.”

Dorothy nodded seriously, pink. She had a pretty straw hat with a midnight-blue ribbon.

“I have embarrassed you,” he said. “No.”

“Oh yes. I knew I would. But I always walk here, with these creatures—these manikins—and I wish my daughter to know me as I am.”

The little figures danced on the path, and stopped, and looked up at Dorothy.

“Take one,” said Anselm Stern. “Move him.”

Dorothy pulled back. Griselda held out her fingers and was given the mooncalf. Dorothy then took the wolfman. They sagged. Griselda twitched and adjusted and the mooncalf began a drunken dance. Anselm Stern put his hand over Dorothy’s.

“Do not be afraid. Let him walk.”

The strings were, after all, alive. Horribly alive. Once, with Tom at the brook, she had tried dowsing with a hazel fork, just for the fun of it,
and had been terrified when the dead wood lurched at her fingertips, and pulled. She had dropped the thing and refused to have more to do with it. These strings pulled the same way. She let her fingertips listen, and the wolfman began to stride, and bow. He raised his paw. He threw back his head, to howl, or to laugh. Her fingers tingled.

“You said,” said Anselm Stern, “you wanted to know who I am. I am a man who makes dancing dolls.” Griselda was tangled and did not translate, but Dorothy understood.

“I see,” she said, and halted the wolfman and handed him back.

Griselda would have expected the old, resolutely rational Dorothy to be worried, possibly even repelled, by the strangenesses and formalities. The garden walk was followed by an exploration of the cavern behind the stage, an introduction to all the hanging family, a disquisition on the character of every severed head, an exploration of the boxes in which they lay, decently, head to tail, all except Death, who lay back in his single casket until Anselm Stern raised him to bow deeply to Dorothy, to stretch out his arms to her, fold them, and lie back again. He talked only intermittently and Griselda could not translate all of it. The creatures had a purer, more essential existence than emotional beings. Griselda, the imaginative one, found it was she who was being half-sceptical. Dorothy wandered on in a listening dream.

It was not only serious metaphysics of marionettes. It was cream cakes and coffee in Café Félicité, with Anselm and daughter leaning on their elbows and staring into each other’s eyes, and a long interrogation.

“Your favourite colour, Fräulein Dorothy?”

“Green. And yours?”

“Green, naturally. Your favourite smell?”

“Bread baking. And yours?”

“Oh, bread baking, there is none better.”

He gave her little gifts. Things he had carved. An owl. A walnut. A hedgehog. She frowned over the hedgehog. It reminded her of Olive’s Dorothy-tale, about Peggy and Mistress Higgle, the shape-changer, and in a way that appeared truly uncanny Dorothy received, on the day he
gave it to her, a fat envelope from home, containing another instalment, a placatory peace-offering from the storyteller in Todefright, who did not know what Dorothy knew, who was afraid of what she was finding out, and could think of nothing better to do than to send a segment of fairytale. Dorothy meant not to read it. But did. Mistress Higgle’s hedgehog-mantle—and with it her magic—had been stolen, Dorothy read. It had been folded away, in its secret drawer, and Mistress Higgle had come home to find the window open, and the spiny jacket nowhere. All the dependent furry creatures in the house—the mouse-people, the frog-people, the little vixen—had lost the power to change shape, because the thorny integument had vanished. Who was responsible? The story stopped there. Olive’s accompanying letter was somewhat plaintive.

There were now things Dorothy wanted to say to Anselm Stern without saying them to Griselda. She was picking up basic German but she could not speak it well enough to explain Mistress Higgle, or to ask him questions about her mother. She felt, in odd moments of solitude—like this one, sitting with the English schoolroom paper with writings on it about English furry creatures that were also human—that Anselm Stern had her under a spell. She was not happy now except when she was with him, or on her way to meet him, and yet she also felt fear, fear of a trap, fear of something unseen.

She handed him—they were sitting in his workroom—the sheaf of papers from Olive. She said, expressionless, in German

“Ein Brief von meiner Mutter. Ein Märchen. Ich habe meiner Mutter nichts von Ihnen—von Dir—gesagt.”

He gave her a long, sombre look, and picked up the papers. Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the
alter ego
, before they have learned what the real Other can and can’t understand, can and can’t accept. Griselda sat pale and vanishing. Anselm turned over the pages, with their little drawings of hedgehogs and frogs and underground kitchens with rows of pannikins. He said to Griselda

“What is this?”

“Tell him—” said Dorothy. “She writes a story for each of us. This is mine. It is a whimsical story about magic hedgehogs.”

“I can’t translate whimsical.” She looked at Dorothy. “Dorothy, don’t cry. Why did you bring it?”

“She’s in this story too. I brought it to
bring it together
. Don’t translate that.”

But he nodded, as though he had understood. “Higgle,” he said. “Mis-tress Hig-gle. What is Mistress Higgle?”
“Eine kleine Frau die ist auch ein Igel,”
said Griselda.
“Ein Igel,”
said Anselm Stern. “An
eagle?”
asked Dorothy.

“No, no.
Igel
is the German word for a hedgehog.”

“‘Hans mein Igel.’ That’s a story from the Grimms. He says he played it for her.” She turned to Anselm.

“Für die Mutter?”

“Genau.”

“So. Mrs. Higgle is Hans mein Igel. I have not played it for many years. The Hedgehog-human puppet is one of my finest, I think. We will find him out, and tomorrow I shall perform the story. I think she must have named you Mistress Higgle for Hans mein Igel. The story is strange. It is the tale of a woman who so desired a child that she said she would give birth to anything, even a hedgehog. And in tales, you get what you ask for. Her child was a hedgehog above, and a pretty boy below, and he revolted her.”

Griselda had trouble with “revolted.”

“So he slept in straw by the stove, and rode out into the woods on a fine cockerel, playing the—I can’t translate
Dudelsack.”
Anselm Stern mimed.

“Ah, bagpipes. He sat in a tree, and played the bagpipes and looked after herds of swine, and prospered. By and by he came to the attention
of a king lost and bewildered, to whom he showed the way, and the king promised him whatever first met him on his way, which was of course, as it always must be, his daughter. And the daughter must marry the half-hedgehog swineherd, for promises in tales must be kept. And she was greatly afraid of his spines, and did not respond to bagpipe music. So we move to the bridal chamber and there in secret the hedgehog takes off his hedgehog-skin, and servants of the king rush in and burn it in a fire. This is a fine scene for puppets to play. And then he is wholly human, but black as coal. So they wash him, and dress him as a prince, and the princess runs into his arms and loves him—very much—mightily—and all is well. I think, Dorothy, your mother was thinking of the half-alien child, and the hedgehog—who is a trickster, a clever Hans, a German character—when she named your Mistress Higgle. You are the much-desired child who is half from somewhere else, a different child.

“In this story she sent, someone has stolen the hedgehog-skin. In
this
story, she needs it, it is magic, it makes her smaller, or invisible.”

Anselm Stern found out the old puppets from “Hans mein Igel,” the spiny-coated changeling, the prancing red cockerel with his golden comb, the mother with her face that perpetually wept, two painted tears on her wooden cheek—first, because she had no child, and then, because her child was uncanny. A few days later he put on the old play, with Wolfgang as his assistant. This play was not silent—the two men spoke all the parts, and Wolfgang played a tripping tune on a primitive bagpipe. They all came—Joachim and Karl, Toby and Griselda, Leon and Dorothy. Dorothy had noticed that the artist was quietly disappointed if she was not at every performance in the Spiegelgarten. Light glistened on the half-hedgehog’s lively spines. She thought, I shall never pass my matriculation, if I spend all my time in here, watching dolls dance. And yet, as the hedgehog came blackly out of the thorns, like a butterfly out of a chrysalis, and was washed white so he could bed his princess, she was moved to tears, she felt liquid inside, she was pulled about like tides by the moon. She had not bargained for all this.

Wolfgang, a few days later, caught at Griselda’s sleeve as she was leaving the lunch table in the Pension Susskind.

“A word with you—” he said, in English. “Some quiet place,” he said.

Griselda felt his fingers electric. She had been aware that he watched her—her skin was warmer in his searching stare. He was both a mocking and a serious young man. He made wry jokes about Bavarians and beer, about the Kaiser and his wardrobes full of uniforms, about King Edward in England, his harem of ladies, and the Boers suffering stolidly in South Africa. He was at home in this strange new world of satire, skits, innuendo and sudden plangent sentiment. He watched her, Griselda. When he saw she saw him watching, he curled his wide mouth in a deprecatory grin, and looked away.

She followed him out into the garden, and they sat at a table, under a vine sprawling over an arbour.

“I want you to see this,” he said.

He handed her a large sketch-book. It was filled with drawings of female heads, very occasionally with bodies attached to them, seen from every angle, with every possible expression. They were done in charcoal, in pencil, in chalk, in ink.

They were herself and Dorothy. They studied their bones, their hair, their attitudes, their habits of mind.