The Star of Kazan (8 page)

‘You see,’ said Annika, when she got back home, ‘I told you she would get better.’

But the next day the old lady asked for a lawyer, though she had no money to leave, and for a priest. That evening the doctor’s carriage was seen in front of the Eggharts’ house. It was still there two hours later – and then the young maid was seen running wild-eyed towards the post office.

A
lthough the Eggharts had been sorry to cut their holiday short, the funeral which they gave their great-aunt was a very respectable affair.

‘No one can say we have not done all we should have done,’ said Herr Egghart as he pulled on the trousers of his funeral suit and fixed a black rosette into his buttonhole.

‘No indeed,’ said his wife. She had bought a new black-silk suit and her hat was veiled in yards of black netting. ‘In fact I’m not sure you haven’t overdone it a bit. With the church so near we could have had the coffin carried over by hand.’

‘Well, a bit of show doesn’t hurt,’ said her husband and he looked out of the window at the four black horses with their mourning headdresses of jet feathers. The coffin was just being loaded on to the hearse, and the horses would pull it across the square so that everybody could see that they had not stinted on the old lady’s funeral. ‘After all, she was an Egghart,’ he said.

And really it was tactful of his great-aunt to die after only a few months in their attic. He had been afraid that the mess and the expense would be long drawn out.

‘How do I look, Mummy?’ asked Loremarie, coming into the bedroom. She too had acquired a whole new outfit for the funeral: a purple velvet dress with lace round the collar, and black kid gloves.

The hearse set off for the short journey across the square. The Eggharts followed with bowed heads, and after them at a respectful distance came the Eggharts’ maids and their manservant, the snooty Leopold.

As they made their way to the front pew, the Eggharts noticed that quite ordinary and unimportant people had come to pay their respects to the old lady. There were three of the Bodek boys, the old bookseller and his granddaughter . . . and sitting with the professors, as though they had a right to be there, their servants, Ellie and Sigrid, and their adopted daughter, Annika. It is not possible to turn people out of a church during a funeral, but the Eggharts were not pleased. Fortunately the head of the asylum, a very eminent doctor, had also come, and two councillors from Herr Egghart’s office, as well as the manager of his bank.

Ellie and Sigrid had mourning dresses; so many of their elderly relations had died. Annika only had the black shawl that Sigrid wore to mass over her Sunday dress, and Loremarie turned round to throw her a contemptuous glance.

Annika didn’t even see her. She had watched the coffin carried up the aisle and, though she had promised herself not to cry any more, she couldn’t stop the tears coming, because La Rondine shouldn’t have been shut up in a box – no one should, but certainly not someone who had flown high over the stages of the world.

I should have gone to see her more often, thought Annika. I should have brought her more flowers, and stayed longer; she was so lonely.

Beside her, Ellie squeezed her arm.

‘She was glad to go, love,’ she whispered. ‘You know that. She was so tired.’

‘But I’m not glad,’ sobbed Annika. ‘I didn’t want her to die.’

The organ pealed out, the service began. Annika, not wanting to be seen in tears, wrapped herself in Sigrid’s shawl.

The Latin words of the service were dark and frightening. Though the priest spoke about resurrection, he seemed to spend more time on the yawning grave and the dust to dust. The incense swept through the church like smoke.

Annika heard the old lady’s voice: ‘The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika.’ And her own reply: ‘Honestly, it still is.’

She’d been wrong. The world was not beautiful. People you were fond of died, and got shovelled into holes.

The congregation rose for the last hymn. Annika let slip her enveloping shawl and lifted her head, to look up at the roof of the church.

And then for a moment she saw her! Not the exhausted old lady – but the girl on the swing. Higher she went, and higher, in time to the music; there were flowers in her hair and she was strewing the beams of light from the stained-glass windows.

As they filed out, Loremarie turned and hissed at her. ‘You smiled. I saw you. You smiled because my poor great-aunt is dead.’

Annika looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I smiled.’

The funeral tea, like the funeral, was a most dignified affair. The maids had set out slices of Sachertorte and various kinds of strudel, and open sandwiches spread with fish roe, which might well have been caviar – though actually it wasn’t. Needless to say, the servants from the professors’ house were not invited back, nor the Bodeks, nor the old bookseller and his daughter, but the head of the asylum stayed, and the councillors and the manager of the bank.

‘We will miss her dreadfully,’ Frau Egghart told her guests, dabbing her perfectly dry eyes with a handkerchief. ‘And Loremarie was so fond of her, weren’t you, dear?’

‘What?’ said Loremarie, turning round with her mouth full of cake.

‘Weren’t you so fond of your great-aunt?’ shouted Frau Egghart above the noise of the conversation.

‘Yes,’ said Loremarie, letting some crumbs fall from her mouth, and turned back to reach for another slice of chocolate cake.

Then, as soon as the last guest had gone, the maids were sent up to the attic with buckets of hot water and scrubbing brushes and mops and bottles of disinfectant. Frau Egghart came with them and saw that the work was done properly: the bed stripped and the bed linen steeped in Lysol, every window pane squirted, every floorboard scoured.

‘That’s better,’ she said when it was done and all traces of the old lady had been removed. ‘That’s much, much better.’

After that Leopold came with another man, to take the great-aunt’s trunk and boxes down to the cellar for the dustcart to take away.

‘I could use the things in the trunk for dressing up,’ Loremarie said. ‘All those funny turbans and jewels and things.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ her mother said. ‘Everything in there is full of germs. And you can’t use vulgar rubbish like that, even to dress up. You’d look like a circus horse.’

So the trunk and the wooden boxes were taken down to the cellar and that was that.

But the following morning two men in dark coats arrived and presented their cards. ‘Gerhart and Funkel,’ they said. ‘We work for the firm in the Karntner Strasse. The old lady’s lawyers. She left a will and we have to take all her possessions into safekeeping. Here are the papers.’

Frau Egghart pursed her lips. ‘She hasn’t got any possessions. She was penniless.’

‘It says here a large tin trunk and two wooden boxes.’

‘That’s all rubbish. It’s in the cellar waiting to be carted away.’

‘Nevertheless we would like to take charge of it.’

‘I tell you it’s all vulgar rubbish.’

‘But perhaps not to her,’ said the lawyer’s clerk quietly. And then, ‘Have it brought up, please.’

A
nnika used to love October almost best of all the months: the smell of chestnuts roasting everywhere on street corners, the school outing to the Vienna Woods to collect mushrooms and berries, the drift of blue smoke from garden bonfires . . .

But this year she saw autumn not just as beautiful but as sad. She missed the old lady and for the first time she wondered about her own future.

Stefan too seemed less settled. He still carried his younger brothers about, delivered the washing for his mother, ran errands . . . But once, in the hut, he put it into words: ‘I don’t want to end up spearing rubbish with a stick like my father,’ he told Annika and Pauline.

‘Yes, but what do you want to do?’

Stefan blushed. ‘I want to be an engineer. I’d like to build bridges.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Everything. Even if I got into the technical school, I couldn’t spend long training. My parents need the money I’ll bring in when I start work.’

Because she felt restless, Annika’s daydreams about her mother became longer and more detailed. She came now not in a carriage but in one of the new motors like the Eggharts’, except that it wasn’t a garish yellow but a soft and tasteful grey. She wore a hat with a plume and carried a sable muff, and the dog she brought had become grander too: a Russian borzoi, white and brown and black, with a silken tail. But the words with which she entered the house were always the same:

‘Where is she, my long-lost daughter? Take me to her, please – take me to my child!’

But when the first snow fell, Annika cheered up; and in no time, she and Ellie and Sigrid were off to the market to buy the Christmas tree.

This was a serious business. The tree could not be big; it had to fit into a particular corner of the dining room – but it had to be perfect.

And it always was.

As they came out of the market, carrying the tree, they saw Leopold with one of the stallholders, loading an absolutely enormous fir tree on to a cart. Beside him stood Loremarie looking smug.

‘It’s the biggest there was,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It’s probably the biggest in the whole of Vienna.’

Annika stopped for a moment and felt a pang of envy. What would it be like to have a tree that would fill a whole room with its scent and its beauty? She imagined candlelight from the floor to the ceiling, the shimmer of silver and gold . . .

But that night, Mitzi, the Eggharts’ maid, came round to see them.

‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘The tree’s too big! They had to cut the top off and Loremarie’s having a tantrum because there’s nowhere to hang the star!’

After the tree, Ellie and Annika began to make the gingerbread house. By this time the professors had realized that Christmas was near and started to think about presents. On the grounds that the best presents are those one would like to have oneself, Professor Julius bought Annika the new edition of
Kloezberger’s Mesozoic Fossils
, and Professor Emil bought her
The Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Painting
, which they gave to Sigrid to wrap up. Professor Gertrude took the advice of the lady in the shop and bought her a manicure set that included tweezers for removing facial hair.

Then Sigrid brought down the decorations from the attic. They had been made over the years from scraps of silk, ribbons, fir cones painted silver and gold – but each year they made new things, and each year the sweets had to be wrapped in silver paper and hung on the lower branches so that the younger Bodeks could reach them when the time came.

In Vienna Christmas is celebrated on the twenty-fourth – on Holy Night. But it is not a goose or a turkey that is roasted on this night of nights. No one on Holy Night would dream of eating meat. What is roasted is a fish – and not any fish but a carp, the largest and most succulent fish in Austria’s rivers.

And just three days before Christmas, the carp arrived.

It arrived packed in lumps of ice from the salt mines of Hallstadt and the fishmonger had done them proud.

‘It’s the biggest we’ve ever had,’ said Annika, and certainly the fish was magnificent, the kind that appears in fairy stories, rearing up out of the sea and granting wishes.

During the next day it was clear that Ellie had something on her mind. She and Sigrid talked together, and when Annika came they stopped suddenly and looked at her in a considering sort of way.

That night, just as Annika had got into bed, she heard footsteps coming up to her door and Ellie entered. She usually said goodnight downstairs – Ellie’s legs were tired by the end of the day – so it was clear she had something important to say, and she had.

‘We think you can do it.’ Ellie’s voice was solemn. ‘We have made up our minds.’

‘Do what?’

‘Cook it entirely by yourself. Without any help.’

‘Cook what?’ said Annika, bewildered.

And Ellie said, ‘The Christmas carp.’

Annika came downstairs the next morning looking pale, with dark smudges under her eyes. Ellie too looked as though she’d had a sleepless night.

‘I’m sorry, pet, I shouldn’t have suggested it. You’re too young. There’s ten things to go into the sauce alone, and there’s the stuffing and the basting . . .’

Annika put up her chin. ‘Yes, I can. I can and I will. Please will you get down The Book for me.’

So Ellie lifted down her mother’s worn and faded recipe book, which contained all the wisdom of her family, and Annika found the page headed ‘Christmas Carp’.

The instructions were written in crabbed handwriting in violet ink, not even by Ellie’s mother, but by her grandmother, and they covered nearly three pages.

Annika began to read. The fish had to be washed four times in running cold water and the fifth time in water and lemon juice. At
least
four times, the book said. After that it had to be put to soak in a marinade – a kind of bath of white wine, chopped onions, herbs and lemon.

‘It says here that Chablis is the best wine to use.’

Sigrid raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s the most expensive,’ she said.

‘But it’s the best,’ said Annika firmly, and Sigrid went down to the cellar without another word.

By lunchtime the fish was in its marinade, where it would stay for the rest of the day, and Annika had started to assemble the things she needed for the stuffing. She had been given the main kitchen table to work on. Ellie prepared the vegetables and the desserts at the smaller side table, but she was beginning to suffer, seeing Annika heave the enormous fish kettle about. Annika’s hands were red and chafed, she had tied her hair up in an old cloth, and when anybody spoke to her she didn’t hear. Something was sure to go wrong, thought Ellie, and to stop herself from interfering she took herself off to the shops.