The Star of Kazan

3 The Sinking of the Medusa

As soon as she woke, Annika opened her attic window and looked out at the square. She did this every morning; she liked to see that everything was in order and today it was. The pigeons were still roosting on General Brenner’s head, the fountain had been turned on, and Josef was putting the cafe tables out on the pavement, which meant it was going to be a fine day. A door opened in the ramshackle little house on the opposite corner and her friend Stefan came out and set off across the cobbles with a can to fetch the milk. He was the middle one of five flaxen-haired boys and his mother, Frau Bodek, was expecting a sixth child any day. She had said that if it was another boy she was going to give it away.

Now a solitary dog came sauntering between the chestnut trees, from the street. It was a dog she did not know and Annika looked out eagerly — perhaps it was a stray and ownerless and if it was, Ellie couldn’t refuse to let her keep it, surely? After all Ellie had taken her in when she was ownerless; she’d been a sort of stray left in a church.

But behind the dog now came a lady carrying a lead, so that was no good. The church clock struck seven and Annika turned from the window to get dressed. No school today — it was Saturday, so she could leave her hair unbraided and put away her pinafore — but there was still a lot of work to do before she could go out and find her friends.

Nearly twelve years had passed since Annika had been carried into the kitchen of the professors’ house. When the typhus epidemic had come to an end, and the Convent of the Sacred Heart had sent word that they were out of quarantine, Ellie had bundled up the baby, and she and Sigrid had gone upstairs to seek out their employers.

‘We’ve come to say goodbye,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll find some way of providing for her, but we can’t give her up.’

The professors were deeply offended. They were puzzled. They were hurt.

‘Have we complained about the baby?’ said Professor Julius stuffily.

‘Have we made any objections?’ asked Professor Emil.

‘I’m sure I never said a word,’ said Professor Gertrude, blinking and looking stricken.

Sigrid and Ellie had looked at each other.

‘You mean she can stay?’

Professor Julius bent his head.

‘We shall of course expect her to be useful,’ he said.

‘Oh, she will be,’ cried Ellie. ‘She’ll be the best-trained child in Vienna.’

And she was. By the time she was seven, Annika could bake and ice a three-tiered chocolate cake, and bring a roast to the table. At nine she could cut cucumbers so thinly that you could read a newspaper through the slices, and when she was sent to do the marketing, the stallholders brought out their best vegetables and fruit because the little girl was famous for her eagle eyes. Sigrid had taught her how to polish the parquet floors by sliding over them with dusters tied to her feet, and how to clean silver, and how to crochet and knit and sew — and from both women she learned that work was something that had to be done, and how you felt had absolutely nothing to do with it.

But neither Ellie nor Sigrid had taught the child how to dream. The ability to disappear into her own head had come from the unknown parents who had abandoned her.

Ellie was grinding coffee and putting the bread rolls to warm in the oven when Annika came down, but she turned to give her adopted daughter a hug. She had stopped expecting to hear a knock at the door at any minute and see a strange woman standing there, claiming the child — but all the same, every morning when Annika came down from her attic, Ellie gave thanks.

‘Have you washed behind your ears?’

Annika nodded and extracted an ear for inspection. She was a sturdy child with heavy corn-coloured hair, thoughtful grey eyes under level brows, and a wide mouth. There were many such pleasing, clear-eyed girls at work in the Austrian countryside — goose girls and dairy maids and girls who took the cattle to the high pastures in the summer — but not many with Annika’s look of eager intelligence. More than that, she was a child who comforted others; she had done so from the start.

Now Annika, returning Ellie’s hug, drank in the scent of green soap and fresh bread that clung to the cook’s white apron, and wrinkled her nose with pleasure, because coming into the kitchen was coming home. Nothing changed here: the table was always scrubbed to whiteness, the emperor’s picture hung above the stove, the calender sent each year by the Bavarian Sausage Company stood on the window sill beside Ellie’s pots of herbs — and on a sacred shelf beside the dresser lay the worn black recipe book that had been Ellie’s mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before her.

But it was time to start work.

Annika put out the apricot jam for Professor Julius and the raspberry jam for Professor Emil and the honey for Professor Gertrude and carried them upstairs to the dining room. Then she laid out the napkins, saw that the sugar bowl was filled and came down again to fetch a jug of hot water for Professor Julius to wash in, and down again to fetch another one for Professor Emil.

By this time Sigrid had swept the downstairs rooms and tidied them and she and Ellie and Annika had their own breakfast at the kitchen table. Then the bell rang from Professor Gertrude’s room and Sigrid went to fetch the black-silk skirt she had ironed and from which she had removed a small piece of cheese that had got stuck to the hem, and gave it to Annika to take upstairs. Gertude was playing the harp in a lunchtime recital and it was always necessary to clean her up before she left.

And now the bell rang again and it was Professor Emil, who had lost his cravat, followed by Profesor Julius, who gave her ten kreutzer and asked her to go and buy a copy of Vienna Today from the newsagent round the corner.

‘That idiot Jacobson has published a piece about the origin of volcanic rock which is absolute rubbish,’ he said. ‘I had to write a letter — they should have printed it.’

So Annika ran across the square and through the chestnut trees into the Keller Strasse, hoping that they had printed it, because when they didn’t print his letters he got very upset.

The lady in the newspaper shop was a friend of Annika’s and she had already seen that the professor’s letter had been put in.

‘So he’ll be in a good mood,’ she said. And then, ‘I hear the Bodek baby is due any minute.’

Annika nodded. ‘If it’s a boy she’s going to give it away.’

When she got back with the paper she was sent out again to the flower seller who sat with her basket beside the fountain. It had become Annika’s job to choose the flowers that Professor Julius put every Saturday in front of the picture of his Beloved — the one who had died before her wedding day. Today, with summer on its way, Annika bought gentians and edelweiss from the mountains and took them to the professor’s study, where he was reading the letter he had sent to the paper for the third time.

His Beloved, whose name had been Adele Fischl, lived on a table near the window, and as she arranged the flowers, Annika thought again how sad it was that she had died. She was a serious-looking woman with a strong nose, and Annika was sure that she and the professor would have suited each other very well.

After this Sigrid put her to polishing the silver candlesticks and then it was time for her elevenses — a glass of frothy milk and a golden vanilla kipfel straight out of the oven which she took out to the cobbled yard behind the house.

Annika loved the yard with its vine-covered door to the back lane. The wash house was there and the clothes line and the woodshed, and the old stables which were no longer used for a horse and carriage but acted as a storeroom. Ellie grew tubs of geraniums and petunias there, and in a sunny corner by the house was a blue bench on which the servants liked to sit when they had a minute to themselves.

Today though there was no lingering in the sun. The washing had to be taken out of the copper and hung up to dry and the carpets beaten and the peas shelled for lunch. And then Annika ran out to choose a suitable cab for Professor Gertrude from the row of hansoms drawn up on the far side of the Keller Strasse — one that was tall enough for the harp to fit inside but had a peaceful-looking horse which would not rattle the instrument.

Then back into the kitchen to help Ellie with the lunch — and lunch on Saturday was a big meal: today there was pea soup and stewed beef with dumplings, and pancakes filled with cherry jam, all carried up and down from the kitchen to the dining room and back again for the two professors, who sat with their napkins tucked into their collars and ate with a hearty appetite.

Then Sigrid and Annika and Ellie sat down to their lunch in the kitchen, and after that came the washing up — masses and masses of washing up.

But on Saturday afternoon Annika was free.

She went first to the bookshop on the corner. It was an antiquarian bookshop, which meant that the books that were sold in it were old ones. It also meant that not many people came into the shop. No one quite knew how Herr Koblitz, who owned it, made a living. He was not a sociable man and whenever anyone tried to buy a book he hadn’t finished reading, he became grumpy and annoyed.

Today he was reading a book about mummies — the kind that are embalmed.

‘Has Pauline finished?’ asked Annika.

Pauline was Herr Koblitz’s granddaughter. She lived with him because her mother was a ward sister in Berlin and had to sleep in the hospital. Like Annika, Pauline had to help with the chores, dusting the shelves, sweeping the floor, stacking the books.

Herr Koblitz nodded.

‘She’s in the back.’

Pauline too was reading. She was a thin girl with frizzy black hair and black eyes. Pauline was clever; she seemed to remember everything she came across in the books she devoured and she kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn’t see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies.

‘It’s to make me brave,’ she’d explained to Annika, but Annika said it was silly to want to be brave and clever.

‘You’re perfectly all right as you are,’ she’d told Pauline — but Pauline was nervous of the outside world and did not agree. She found it difficult to leave the bookshop on her own; open spaces and strange people frightened her, and she knew she would have to do something about this if she was going to put right the many things she did not approve of, like rich people having everything and poor people having nothing.

Now she closed the book, which was a story about the sinking in the Atlantic of a ship called the Medusa, and followed Annika out into the street. ‘I think we could do it,’ she said. ‘It’s exciting, with all the people crowded on a raft and getting swallowed by the sea.’

Annika nodded. ‘Tell us when we get there so Stefan can hear.’

Stefan’s family, the Bodeks, lived in the bottom half of the smallest house in the square.

They were very poor. Herr Bodek worked as a groundsman in the funfair at the Prater and Frau Bodek took in washing, but with five boys to feed there was never any money to spare.

All the same, it was Frau Bodek who had come round to the professors’ house on the night that Annika was found, bringing a pile of freshly boiled nappies and some baby clothes for the foundling. Stefan, the middle boy, was exactly the same age as Annika; the two had grown up together, sharing their few toys, learning to crawl in each other’s kitchens. All the Bodek boys were friendly and cheerful, but Stefan was special. Annika would have trusted him with her life.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said now. ‘The baby’s definitely on the way and they’ll want me to take messages.’

But he put on his cap and together the three children ran down the alleyway beside the church, along a cobbled lane — and paused by a crumbling wall covered with ivy.

Mostly the wall was high and fairly solid, but in one place, if you pushed aside the ivy, you could see a hole. They crawled through it — and then they were in the garden.

Each time they straightened themselves and looked round they felt a shiver of relief — for the garden was doomed; they knew that. It belonged to the city council and they were going to build offices on it. Any day the diggers and shovellers would come and the destruction would begin.

But not yet. Butterflies still hovered over the long grass, thistles and dandelions blew in the breeze, the great cedar spread its branches. At the top of a flight of cracked stone steps, a statue of Venus with missing arms stared quietly out at what had once been a fountain; and in the pond, the water lilies still flowered among the weeds.

The garden belonged to the ruined house of an Austrian nobleman who had come to Vienna more than a hundred years ago to serve the emperor and make his fortune.

And he had made it. Unfortunately he was a gambler and soon he lost all the money he had made, and the beautiful house he had built had to be sold, and sold again. Then it stood empty, and a fire had broken out… and now the villa was just a heap of fallen pillars and broken stones.

But the garden had survived. The garden was better than ever: wild and tangled and mysterious.

‘We won’t try and tidy anything… we won’t even weed the flower beds,’ Annika had decided, and the others agreed.

But there was one place which they did tidy and care for and even scrub. In the middle of a shrubbery, overgrown with lilacs and laburnums, stood a green-painted hut. It had once been a tool shed, and unlike the house, the hut was undamaged. The roof was sound, the windows were unbroken, the door could be properly closed.

The hut was their headquarters; they had borrowed a blanket for the floor, and some mugs, and stuck a candle in a sauce bottle and Stefan had found a padlock for the door.

When they first came to the garden they had kept house in the hut, found nuts and berries for food, pretended it was time to go to bed and get up. But now they were older, the hut had become the springboard from which they planned their games. It might be the barracks in Mafeking besieged by the Boers, or a tomb in the Valley of the Kings threatened by robbers. Last week it had been the tower in which Mary Queen of Scots had been imprisoned.

It was usually Pauline who found the stories in the books she read, and once they had decided on a story they were off, doubling roles, being now soldiers, now the people that the soldiers shot. It was half playing, half acting and while they were doing it they were lost to the world.

Today Pauline told them about the Medusa — a slave ship run by a corrupt and incompetent captain who ran her aground on a reef off the coast of Africa.

‘All the rich people saved themselves in lifeboats and left the slaves to look after themselves. So the slaves made a huge raft and kept it afloat for days and days, but gradually they began to die of thirst or get washed overboard or go mad. They even ate the flesh of the people who had died — and when a rescue ship found them, only fifteen people out of more than a hundred were still alive.’

Annika nodded. ‘The hut can be the Medusa and we’ll put the blanket in the middle of the lawn; that’ll be the raft, and the grass all around is the sea. Stefan can be eaten and his remains thrown overboard — and then he can be the captain of the rescue ship.’

She frequently altered the story so as to make it more dramatic and fairer, giving each of them a chance to drown or be shot or run into the hut under a hail of arrows.

For a couple of hours they suffered shipwreck, thirst, terror and cannibalism. Then suddenly it was over. They ate their sandwiches — Pauline and Annika sharing theirs with Stefan, whose mother never had any extra food to give him. When the clock struck six, they came out of their private world, tidied the hut, padlocked the door and crawled back through the hole in the wall.

In the square they separated and became their ordinary selves again.

Later that evening, when Annika was sitting in the kitchen dunking strips of bread into her eggs-in-a-glass, there was a knock at the back door and Stefan came in.

‘It’s come,’ he said. ‘The baby.’

Everybody waited.

‘It’s a boy,’ said Stefan.

Annika pushed back her glass. ‘Will she give it away then?’

Stefan grinned. ‘Not her. She’s holding it and petting it and telling us what a lovely baby it is. She even thinks it’s got hair.’

Ellie got up and fetched a shawl she had been knitting for the baby and a bonnet Sigrid had crocheted.

‘Are you sure she won’t give it away?’ asked Annika a little anxiously after Stefan had gone.

‘Not her,’ said Ellie. ‘Mothers don’t give away their babies,’ she began — and broke off, seeing Annika’s face. She laid her hand over Annika’s. ‘Your mother would have kept you if she could, you know that, don’t you?’

And Annika did know. When she was in bed in her attic and had put out her lamp, she told herself the story she told herself night after night.

It began with the ringing of the door bell — the front door bell — and a woman stepped out of a carriage. She had thick auburn hair under her velvet hat; her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a rich warm brown; and she was tall and beautifully dressed, like the woman in the painting Professor Emil had in his room, which was called The Lady of Shalott. She swept into the house, saying, ‘Where is she? Where is my long-lost daughter? Oh, take me to her,’ and then she gathered Annika into her arms.

‘My darling, my beloved child,’ she said, and she explained why she’d had to leave Annika in the church. The explanation was complicated and it varied as Annika told herself the story, but tonight she was very tired so she skipped that part and went on to where her mother turned back to the carriage and a dog leaped out — a golden retriever with soft moist eyes…

‘I brought him for you,’ her mother said. ‘I was sure you’d like a dog.’

And Annika was asleep.