The Star of Kazan

2 The Golden City

The city of Vienna, at the time that Ellie and Sigrid brought their bundle home, was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which took in thirteen different countries spread over the heart of Europe.

The empire was ruled by one old man, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who had a winter palace in the centre of the city and a summer palace out in the suburbs, where the air was always fresh. He was a lonely person because his wife had been assassinated by an anarchist and his son had shot himself, but he worked hard at his job, getting up at five o’clock every morning to read state papers, and sleeping on an iron bed like his soldiers. He even washed the feet of twelve needy men who were brought to him on the Thursday before Easter because he wanted to be good.

Because he was so old, bad things happened to him.

Little girls would present him with bunches of flowers and when he bent down to take them, his back would seize up and his aides would have to come and straighten him. Or the school children of Vienna would make pink paper tissue hearts and throw them over him as he rode b y, and they would get into his moustache, and up his nose, and make him sneeze.

All the same, the people of Vienna loved him. They liked his obstinacy and the way he would never get into a motor car though they had been invented a few years earlier, but always drove through the streets in a carriage with golden wheels and waved to anyone who greeted him. They liked the firework display he ordered on his birthday, and the military uniforms into which he struggled whenever there was a procession or a party: the pink trousers and blue tunic of the Hussars… the silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles… and with them a great helmet with gigantic plumes.

Every school in Vienna had a picture of him on the wall, and his face, with its mutton-chop whiskers and bald head, was as familiar to the children as the faces of their grandfathers.

As well as the emperor and his court, Vienna was known for its music. Almost every famous composer who had ever lived had worked in Vienna: Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and Strauss. Music poured out of the houses, waltzes were played in every cafe and by the barrel organs in the street — and in the richly decorated opera house, large sopranos sang their hearts out every night.

Then there was the food. The Viennese really liked to eat. Wonderful cooking smells wafted through the streets — vanilla and freshly ground coffee; cinnamon and sauerkraut. Even cucumber salad, which in other cities hardly smelt at all, had its own scent in Vienna.

In the sweet shops you could buy tiny marzipan beetles and spotted ladybirds and snails curled snugly in their shells. There were sugar mice so beautifully made that the children who bought them could scarcely bear to bite off their heads, and gingerbread houses complete with terrible witches made of nougat, with hats of liquorice. The cake shops sold seven kinds of chocolate cake, and tarts made of vanilla wafers layered with hazelnut cream, and pastry boats filled with the succulent berries that grow in the Austrian countryside: wild strawberries so bright that they seem to be lit up from the inside, and blueberries, each one a perfect globe.

There were other things which made Vienna a splendid town to live in: the Prater, a royal park shaded by ancient trees where everyone could walk or ride, and the Prater funfair, where the highest Giant Wheel in Europe had just been built. There was the River Danube, which curled round the north of the city; from a landing stage on the quay you could take a paddle steamer and go all the way up to Germany or down to Budapest in Hungary. And there were the mountains, which could be reached in an hour on the train.

But Vienna’s greatest pride was in the dancing white horses which performed in the Spanish Riding School. The Spanish Riding School was not in Spain but adjoined the emperor’s palace in the middle of the old town, and with its vaulted ceiling and rows of columns it was certainly the most beautiful arena in the world. The horses which could be seen there — the Lipizzaner stallions — were bred especially in a village called Lipizza in the south of the empire and only a few, the very best, were sent to the emperor in Vienna. The chosen horses were stabled in what had once been the arcaded palace of a prince. They fed from marble troughs, and spent four years learning to perform to music the movements which had once been so important in war. Incredible movements with resounding names: caprioles and courbettes and levades…

When visitors came to Vienna and were asked what they wanted to see most, the answer was usually: ‘The Lipizzaner horses. The dancing white stallions. Could we please see those?’