The Star of Kazan

4 White Horses

There was only one child in the square whom Annika couldn’t stand. Her name was Loremarie Egghart and she lived in a big house opposite the house of the professors.

The Eggharts were extremely rich because Loremarie’s grandfather had been a manufacturer of soft furnishings and in particular of duvets and pillows. These were stuffed with goose down from the plains of Hungary, where the poor birds were rounded up and plucked naked, but the Eggharts did not worry about the geese, only about the money.

Loremarie’s father still took money from the factory, but he had become an important councillor and went each day, with a flower in his buttonhole, to sit at a large desk overlooking the Parliament Building, where he helped to make boring laws and shouted at the people who worked for him in his foghorn of a voice.

What he wanted more than anything was to become a statue. Not a statue on horseback, he knew that was unlikely, but a proper statue on a plinth just the same. There were many such statues in Vienna: statues of aldermen and councillors and politicians, and Herr Egghart thought that if he could become one too, his life would have been worthwhile.

Loremarie’s mother, Frau Egghart, spent her time spoiling her daughter, shopping, gossiping and looking down on her neighbours, particularly the Bodeks, who, she felt, should be rehoused somewhere else. She was driven everywhere in her husband’s brand-new canary-yellow motor with its outsize brass lamps and its bulbous horn that could be heard three streets away, and she didn’t just have maids from the country to work in the house, but also kept a snooty manservant called Leopold, who walked behind Loremarie carrying her satchel when she went to school.

Needless to say, Loremarie was not allowed to play with a ‘kitchen child’ like Annika, so it was easy enough to keep out of her way.

But on Sunday morning after church Annika liked to catch up with what was happening in the city, and she did this by walking carefully round a large red pillar covered in notices and advertisements which stood on the pavement on the other side of the chestnut trees.

On this pillar were notices of the plays being performed and what was showing at the opera. There were notices of military parades, visiting circuses, special matinees at the theatre, and receptions given by the old emperor at whatever palace he was staying at.

And of course there were advertisements for stomach pills and for ointments to cure baldness, and a picture of a man with huge muscles, which he had got by eating a particular kind of liver sausage.

Today there was a new notice; a big one, with a picture of a snow-white horse with golden reins and a gold-and-crimson saddle, sitting back on his haunches with his forelegs tucked under him. A man in a bicorne hat and a brown cutaway coat was riding him — and Annika, like any child in Vienna, knew that it was one of the famous Lipizzaner stallions doing a levade. And not any stallion but Maestoso Fantasia, the oldest and strongest of the horses and a great favourite with the emperor.

The notice said:

Annika stared at the poster for a long time. She walked past the Lipizzaners’ stables often, she had even been allowed inside because Stefan’s uncle was the blacksmith who shod the horses, but she had never seen a proper performance in the Spanish Riding School. She would have loved to go, but the tickets would be incredibly expensive; there was no hope that Ellie and Sigrid could afford to take her; she would not even ask.

She was still looking at the notice rather wistfully, when she heard a high and bossy voice behind her.

‘We’re going to the gala, aren’t we, Miss Smith?’

Loremarie was with her English governess, a tall sad-looking woman. Loremarie had had a lot of governesses — English ones and French ones and German ones. Some of them had been thin and some of them had been fat, some of them had been strict and some of them had been gentle — but all of them, after a few months with Loremarie, had looked sad.

‘We’re going in the front row on the first tier,’ bragged Loremarie.

She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt and a tartan tam-o’-shanter, although the Eggharts were not known for their Scottish blood. Her small dark eyes were set very deep in her pale cheeks and she had a particular way of walking, with her behind thrust out, as though she wanted people to know that her backside, like her front, was important.

‘It costs a lot of money to go,’ said Loremarie, who loved to taunt Annika for being poor — and then the sad governess led her away to her dancing lesson.

Since no one knew exactly when Annika had been born, Ellie and Sigrid did not celebrate her birthday, they celebrated her ‘Found Day’, the day on which they had discovered her on the altar steps at Pettelsdorf.

They did this by leaving Vienna very early and taking the same train into the mountains as they had taken then, to give thanks in the little church and to pray. At first they had walked through the village in fear and trembling, waiting for someone to tell them that an unknown woman had been seen asking questions, but as the years passed and nothing was heard, they relaxed. It really seemed as though the woman who had left her daughter on the altar steps had vanished from the face of the earth. When Annika was a baby they had left her with the Bodeks when they went to the mountains, but as soon as she could walk they took her along. It always seemed to be fine on the twelfth of June. The scent of the pines blew softly from the slopes, the stream sparkled — and the fortunate cows grazed contentedly on salads of clover and primulas and harebells which studded the rich grass.

‘I’d rather have been found here than born in a boring hospital,’ Annika would say.

Inside the church, though, she always felt bewildered and cross. ‘It was me you were giving away,’ she wanted to say to her absent mother. ‘It wasn’t just anybody, it was me.’

And then of course she felt guilty, and that night, when she told herself the story of her mother’s arrival, the love between them knew no bounds.

But the important part of the celebrations came on the Saturday after Found Day, when the professors let her choose a treat, something to which all the household could go. The year before they had gone on a paddle steamer down the Danube to Durnstein, where Richard the Lionheart had been imprisoned, and the year before that they had gone to the opera to see Hansel and Gretel.

This year Annika plucked up courage and asked if they could go to the gala to see the Lipizzaners dance for the English king. She was tired of Loremarie’s taunts.

‘If it’s not too expensive?’ she asked.

It was expensive, very expensive, and the professors were not entirely pleased with her choice because they thought that the emperor spent too much money on his beautiful white horses — money which could be better spent on making the university bigger, especially the parts of it in which they worked. Sigrid too did not really approve of the Lipizzaners.

‘They could build new hospitals all over the city with what those animals cost,’ she said.

But the professors gave in — and bought tickets not only for the household but for Pauline and Stefan, whom Annika always wanted to invite.

Treats which involved the professors always started off with rather a lot of education. Before they went to Durnstein, Professor Julius had told her about the depth of the river at that point, the speed of the current and the kind of sandstone from which the castle had been built, and Professor Gertrude had played on her harp the tune that Richard’s rescuers had played under his castle window.

‘We’ve learned a lot about the horses at school,’ Annika said now, thinking she might get away without too many lectures.

She already knew that the horses were bred in Lipizza, near Trieste, from Arab and Berber strains brought from Spain and that the Archduke Charles had brought the first ones to Vienna 300 years before. She knew that the horses did not start off white but dark brown or black, in the same way as Dalmatian puppies are born without spots, and that each stallion had his own rider who stayed with him all through his life in the riding school.

But Professor Julius was not satisfied. He took Annika up to his room and got out a map of Karst, the plateau on which Lipizza was situated.

‘The soil is sparse and there are rocks close to the surface, so that the horses learn to pick up their feet and this helps to form their high-stepping gait. All the area is limestone, which is very porous…’ And he was off, because he was after all a geologist, and very fond of limestone — and it was an hour before Annika could get away.

Professor Emil took her and Pauline to the art museum. Both girls knew it well, with its marble floors and the pictures of half-dressed ladies with dimpled knees. Now, though, Emil led them to the seventeenth-century Spanish artists who had painted huge battle scenes with rearing horses and dying soldiers and blood dripping from swords.

‘You see the way those forelegs are poised over the enemy soldier,’ he said, pointing to a grey stallion with flaring nostrils and wild eyes, ‘that’s a courbade, and when he brings his hoofs down, he’ll crush the man to pulp. And over there, the Duke of Milan’s horse — the one that seems to be flying — he’s doing a capriole. See how he’s kicking out with his hind legs!’

And he explained that the most famous of the movements that the Lipizzaners performed, the ‘airs above the ground’, were originally developed in battle, where they could help a rider to escape, or kill his foe.

By the time they set off in two hansom cabs, with the professors and Annika in the first, and Sigrid, Ellie, Pauline and Stefan in the second, Annika was almost wishing she had chosen a different treat. As soon as she knew that Loremarie would be at the gala, Sigrid had decided that Annika needed a new dress and had gone out for a roll of sea-green silk. She was a superb needlewoman, the dress was a triumph; Annika’s hair was brushed out and taken back with a band of matching silk. All the same, she felt rather as though she was going to a lecture given by horses instead of people.

But when they went up the stairs and came out in the riding school itself, everything changed.

It was like being in a ballroom: the crystal chandeliers blazing with light, the white walls, the red velvet on the banquettes, the huge portrait of Charles VI on his charger. The band played soft music, and below her, the russet sand was raked into swirls like the sea.

Loremarie was at the other end of the row, wriggling and showing off, but Annika had forgotten her.

The band broke into the national anthem, everyone rose to their feet; the emperor in a blue-and-silver uniform came in, with his guest — the portly English king — and Ellie sighed with pleasure. She dearly loved the emperor, who was so old, so alone and so pig-headedly dutiful. Then everyone sat down again, the band started to play the Radetzky March, the great double doors opened — and two dozen snow-white horses came into the ring.

They came like conquerors, in perfect formation and in perfect time to the music, lifting their legs high, bringing them down exactly on the beat, and as they came level with the place where the emperor sat, they stopped as one and the riders swept off their cockaded hats in homage.

Then they began. They started with the simpler movements: the passage, which is a kind of floating trot, the piaffe, where the horse trots on the spot, the flying changes, the turn on the forelegs… The tall riders in their white buckskin breeches sat silent, guiding the horses with movements so small they could not be noticed — or even just with their thoughts. The understanding between the stallions and the men who rode them had been built up during the long years of training. There was no need any longer for commands.

Now the younger horses left the ring, the band played a Boccherini minuet and three of the most highly trained stallions did a pas de trois: weaving the earlier steps into an intricate and faultless dance.

‘They’re so beautiful,’ whispered Annika. Light poured from their white skins, their manes and tails tossed like silk, they held their heads like princes.

The three stallions disappeared through the huge double doors. The horses which came in now were riderless; their riding masters walked behind them, holding them only on the long rein. These were the most experienced horses, who could do the steps on their own — the one in the lead was the emperor’s favourite, Maestoso Fantasia, the horse Annika had seen on the poster.

If Annika had chosen to come to the horses to get even with Loremarie, she had long forgotten it. Beside her Pauline, who was always doubtful about horses — the way they tossed their heads and stamped their feet — was hanging eagerly over the balustrade.

And after the interval, the climax of all those years of training, the famous ‘airs above the ground’, with the riders riding without stirrups as they took their mounts through the levade, known to Vienna’s children because of the many statues where the horses sit back on their haunches and lift their legs into the air… and the courbette, where the horses don’t just rear up but jump forward on their hind legs and one can see their muscles bunched and rippling with the effort… And the most difficult of all, the dazzling ‘leap of the goat’, the capriole, where the horse really seems to be flying, and Annika, along with most of the spectators, let out her breath in an ‘Oh’ of wonder.

The show ended with the famous quadrille, ‘The ballet of the white stallions’, in which all the horses took part.

Unlike the other children in the audience, Loremarie had found it impossible to sit still. She fidgeted and fussed and dropped her purse and picked it up again… Now she stood up and pointed at one horse in the centre of the row of stallions weaving faultlessly between the pillars.

‘That horse is the wrong colour,’ she said loudly. ‘He’s brown; he isn’t white. He shouldn’t be there!’

She was hushed not by her doting parents but by an old gentleman in the row behind who told her to sit down and be quiet.

‘You had better study the traditions of the Imperial Spanish Riding School before you come here again,’ he said sternly.

Loremarie shrugged and sat down, and the dance went on.

Then once more the riders raised their hats to the emperor, the horses’ ears came forward, acknowledging the thunderous applause — and it was over.

‘It makes you proud to be Austrian,’ said Ellie as they stood up to go, and nothing more was said about the money being better spent on new buildings for the university.

The Eggharts hurried Loremarie away without speaking and were driven home in their enormous yellow motor, but the professors now led the way to Sacher’s restaurant, where they had booked a table, for on Found Days they were very democratic and ate with their servants.

And at the end of the meal, they had something important to say to Annika.

‘We have decided that from now on you do not have to call us “Professor”. You may call us “Uncle”,’ said Professor Julius. ‘Not Professor Julius but Uncle Julius.’

‘And not Professor Emil, but Uncle Emil,’ said Professor Emil.

And they smiled and nodded, very pleased with this gesture. Professor Gertrude did not say that she could be called ‘Aunt’ because she had wandered off inside her head, where she was composing a sonata for the harp, but she too nodded and smiled.

So all in all it was a splendid evening and as they got off the tram in the Keller Strasse and turned into the square, the party was in an excellent mood, singing and telling jokes.

Then suddenly they stopped.

In front of the Eggharts’ house a white motorized van with high windows was parked. There was a red cross painted on the side and the words ‘Mission of Mercy’ written above it.

Had there been an accident? No one liked the Eggharts, but that did not mean they wanted them to be hurt.

The door of the van opened, and two nurses in navy-blue uniforms got out. Then they turned back to the van and fetched something — a bundle of shawls and blankets. One nurse took hold of one end of the bundle and the other nurse took hold of the other end and they began to carry it towards the house.

‘What is it?’ whispered Annika — for the bundle seemed to weigh more than one would expect from a pile of blankets.

At this point the bundle twitched and said something. It gave a jerk and a nightcap with a ribbon fell out on to the pavement. Not a bundle then, a person. And a person who was not pleased.

Meanwhile, the driver of the van had got out and rung the Eggharts’ bell. A maid came and seemed to be giving instructions, pointing upwards. There was no sign of the Eggharts, though Annika saw the curtains of the drawing room twitch.

Then the manservant, the snooty Leopold, came out and opened the back of the van and took out a battered-looking trunk, which he carried into the house. When he had done that he returned and pulled out two wooden boxes and these too he carried in.

Presently the door opened once again, and the two nurses got back into the van, the driver returned, and the van drove away.

As the birthday party crossed the square to their own houses, they were very quiet. No one sang now or told jokes.

It had been a strange arrival. Was it really a person who had been delivered so carelessly? And if so, what did it mean?