The Star of Kazan

5 The Countess of Monte Cristo

For a few days after the bundle, looking like a pile of unwanted clothes, had been carried into the Eggharts’ house nothing more was heard. The Eggharts didn’t speak to anyone and of course rumours flew round the square. The bundle was a madwoman like Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, who laughed hideously and would set the place on fire… or she had bubonic plague and had to be sealed up and quarantined.

Then Pauline read a book called The Count of Monte Cristo about a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned in a dungeon in a castle on an island in the middle of the sea.

‘That’s what she’s like. She’s a Countess of Monte Cristo,’ Pauline said. ‘They’ve walled her up and she can’t get out.’

It was Annika who found out that the ‘countess’ lived not in a dungeon but in an attic. It exactly faced the attic where Annika slept, across the square, and on the third day she saw something carried to the chair beside the window. Then the window was opened, and the old lady was aired — like the washing, thought Annika — before the window was closed again and she was carried back to bed.

It was not until the beginning of the second week that Mitzi, one of the Eggharts’ maids, was able to slip into Ellie’s kitchen for a cup of coffee and tell them what was going on.

The old lady was Herr Egghart’s great-aunt. She was ninety-four years old and sometimes wandered in her mind, and the Eggharts had done everything they could to find a hospital or old people’s home where she could be looked after.

‘They put her in the asylum — the one they’re going to pull down, behind the infirmary,’ said Mitzi, ‘but the man who ran it found she was related to the Eggharts and he said she wasn’t mad and they should take her in. She’s very frail and he said she wouldn’t live long. There was quite a fuss, but the Eggharts were afraid of what people would say so they agreed. She has a nurse in the morning and evening to tidy her up, but she can’t get downstairs and most of the time she just lies in bed. She’ll go soon; old people know when they aren’t wanted.’

‘Poor soul,’ said Ellie, stirring her coffee. ‘It’s hard to be old.’

This annoyed Annika, who was sitting on her stool in the corner, stringing beans. ‘No it isn’t. It won’t be for you because I shall buy a house in the mountains and look after you — and Sigrid too.’

‘Mind you, she can be a handful, the old lady,’ Mitzi went on. ‘She didn’t get on with her family and when she was fifteen she went her own way and the family lost touch with her.’

The Eggharts had been forced to take in their great-aunt but that was all. They never mentioned her to visitors who came to the house, they never took her out. It was as though they were pretending to themselves that she wasn’t there.

What happened next was odd and Annika couldn’t make sense of it. Loremarie stopped to speak to her when she met her in the street — and not to sneer or to show off. She was polite, almost friendly, and though she still stuck out her behind, the black eyes, sunk so deep in her face, did not seem quite so baleful.

The first time Loremarie came up to her was when Annika was wheeling out the new Bodek baby in his ancient, rickety pram. Usually Loremarie walked past all the Bodeks with her nose in the air, but now she forced herself to look under the hood and even asked how old he was.

The second time, Annika was returning from the shops with a basket of new potatoes and this time Loremarie actually crossed the street to speak to her.

But it wasn’t till she found Annika leaning over the rim of the fountain, crumbling bread into the water for the goldfish, that the reason for Loremarie’s friendliness became clear. She wanted something from Annika and it was the last thing that Annika expected.

‘You know you’re poor,’ she began, ‘aren’t you?’

Annika shrugged. She was worried about the goldfish — one of them had fungus on his fins — and though it would have been nice to hit Loremarie, there was always a fuss at home when she hit people.

‘So would you like to earn some money?’ Loremarie went on, looking back at the windows of her house to make sure her mother wasn’t watching.

Annika crumbled the last of the bread into the water.

‘How much money?’

‘Quite a lot. Twenty kreutzers. Each time you go.’

‘Each time I go where?’

Loremarie looked round again furtively. ‘Go and read to my great-aunt. Sit with her. I’m supposed to do it for half an hour every afternoon. The doctor told my mother that she was lonely — the old woman. But I can’t. I tried once and it was awful. She dribbles and her head wobbles and suddenly she goes to sleep and her mouth falls open.’ Loremarie shuddered. ‘It made me feel sick.’

‘Yes, but how could I do it instead of you? Your mother would know.’

‘No, she wouldn’t. I go up between tea and supper when she rests. Anyway, even if she did find out she probably wouldn’t mind as long as it keeps the old woman quiet. The doctor is horrid to us. He says we’ll be old one day and we should be kind to her. But we won’t — not like that… poor and mad and dribbly…’

Annika was thinking, wringing the water from the ends of her hair. ‘I can’t come till next week when school breaks up and even then I have jobs to do. But I’ll come when I can. Only you must give me twenty-five kreutzers. Twenty isn’t enough.’

If she could stick it out a few times she’d have enough money to buy a proper birthday present for Ellie.

‘All right. I’ll leave the money on the window sill in the scullery, in an envelope. You’ll come in by the back door, of course, being a kitchen child, so you’ll see it.’

Annika nodded. It was odd how people thought she wanted to come in by the front door instead of straight into the nice, warm, friendly kitchen of whatever house she visited.

School had finished; exams were over and so was the tidying up, which was almost worse. Pauline had come top in everything except gymnastics, in which she got a very low mark indeed, and this set her worrying about a man called Ferdinand Haytor, who had become wrestling champion of Lower Austria even though he had been born with his left foot the wrong way round.

‘I don’t know why I can’t be like him,’ she said.

Annika was still very busy. Ellie had decided that she was old enough to make a proper apple strudel entirely by herself.

Making an apple strudel on your own is a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen. Only one very special type of flour will do, the dough has to be teased out to be paper-thin and laid over a tablecloth, and the apple slices and melted butter and nuts and spices have to be poured on without making a single hole, before it is rolled into a dachshund shape and baked.

Annika managed it, but it was a mixed blessing because Ellie then said it was time she started working with aspic.

‘Quails’ eggs in aspic — now there’s a dish!’ she said.

In the holidays, too, Professor Emil liked to take Annika behind the scenes in the art museum, to the restoration room, where men in baize aprons were at work cleaning old paintings.

‘Look at that!’ he would say as the halo of some tortured saint turned from grubby brown to shining gold under the restorer’s hand. ‘Isn’t that splendid? And that idiot Harteisen actually thinks pictures shouldn’t be cleaned! The darker and dirtier they are, the better he is pleased.’

But on Saturday the children still escaped to their deserted garden. Stefan’s older brother Ernst came too and they acted the whole of The Count of Monte Cristo with the hut as the dungeon on the island and the steps of the ruined house as the palace of the villain who had plotted the count’s downfall.

In the story the count escaped and vengeance was done. But in the Eggharts’ attic, the other prisoner still lay unvisited and alone.

The first time Annika went to sit with the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie was waiting to show her the way. As she tiptoed after her up the stairs, Annika’s feet sank deep into the patterned carpet; Chinese vases stood on pedestals, there was a smell of hothouse lilies.

After the third flight of stairs they came to a landing with a wooden partition and a door. This led to a last flight of stairs, but these were very different: narrow and bare and airless, and instead of the scent of lilies it was the smell of disinfectant that drifted towards them.

Here were the two attics where the servants slept, and a third one, which now housed the unwanted old lady.

Loremarie turned the handle, pushed Annika into the room, and closed the door again.

The room looked like a lumber room. The trunk and the two wooden boxes that had come in the ambulance were stacked in the corner; nothing seemed to have been unpacked. In the middle of the floor was a narrow bed with a chair beside it. On a bedside table was a jug of water, a glass and a pile of books. No flowers, no fruit, nothing that was usual in the bedrooms of the sick.

The Eggharts’ great-aunt was snoring, small snuffling snores like the snores of a pug dog; and her mouth hung open, just as Loremarie had said.

Annika walked to the window. It was strange seeing her own house and her attic from the other side of the square.

Behind her, the snoring had stopped. She turned.

The old lady was so small and wizened that she scarcely made a hump in the bedclothes. Her white hair was so sparse that you could see the scalp through it. She might have been dead already.

But not when she opened her eyes. They were very blue and her gaze was steady.

‘You’re not Loremarie,’ she said.

Annika came over to the bed. ‘No.’

The old lady gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s a good thing anyway,’ she said.

Annika smiled. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’

The great-aunt sighed. ‘Not really. Not from those dreadful books.’

Annika picked up the top book on the pile. It was the colour of bile and the title was Meditations of a Working Bishop. The one below that was called The Evening of Life by One Who Has Suffered.

‘They’re not exactly cheerful books, are they?’ said Annika.

‘No. No indeed. But then the Eggharts are not exactly a cheerful family. That’s why—’ She was stopped by a fit of coughing.

‘Would you like some water?’

‘Yes. You’ll have… to help… me to… sit up.’

She was so light and bony and frail, it was like propping up a bird.

‘So… who are you if you’re not Loremarie?’ she said when she could speak again.

‘I’m Annika. I live across the square. And I’m a foundling.’

‘Ah, that explains it.’

‘What does it explain?’

The old lady lay back on her pillows. ‘Foundlings make their own lives.’ For a while she was silent and Annika was wondering if she should go, when she said, ‘We could tell stories instead of reading them.’

‘Yes. I’d like that,’ said Annika. ‘I know a lot of stories because my friend Pauline works in a bookshop, and we act them.’

‘Ah, acting. Do you like that?’

‘Yes, very much. I don’t know that it’s proper acting though; we only do it for ourselves.’

‘Of course… Of course…’

Annika waited, sitting on the chair with folded hands. ‘Will you start?’ she said.

‘All right then… Once upon a time… there was a girl who lived in a very pompous, silly family in a very pompous, silly town. Her mother and father were stuffy and her brothers and sisters were stuffy — they used to take two hours to finish their breakfast and then it was time to start laying the table again for lunch: salt cellars, pepper-mills, mustard pots… on and on and on.’

Annika nodded. She knew about meals that went on and on.

‘The girl wanted to see the world — and she wanted to dance and act and sing, properly — in a theatre. But no one in her family danced or sang — dear me, no. Dancing was not respectable. So they looked about for a husband for her and they found an alderman with a big stomach and a watch chain across it, and when the girl saw him she decided to run away.’

‘Properly?’ breathed Annika. ‘With a ladder and knotted sheets?’

The old lady nodded. ‘More or less. She escaped at night and she had a little bit of money saved and she went to Paris. You know about Paris? So free… so beautiful… She found someone who ran a theatre and she begged him for work — any work, so that she could learn and watch — but he only laughed at her. He said he had a hundred girls who wanted to dance and sing, for every place he had.

‘So the girl became very poor and very hungry; she scrubbed floors and worked as a waitress, but she didn’t give up. Then one day she found a theatre manager who said she could stand at the back of the stage and pretend to milk a cow — it was a musical comedy set on a farm. So for many months she milked cows and sang songs about springtime, but all the time she watched and practised and learned.

‘And then one day something happened. A new designer came and he had made a swing that rose up very, very high above the stage, and swayed back and forwards, and on the swing was a great basket of flowers — and they wanted a girl to go up on the swing and strew the flowers.’

Annika thought she knew what came next.

‘And everybody was frightened except this girl?’

‘That’s right. Mind you, they were right to be frightened — it was a dangerous contraption. But the girl said she would do it. She was not afraid of heights and she liked the idea of strewing flowers — even paper flowers. She liked it very much. So they combed out her hair — she had lots of hair; pretty hair like yours — and they hauled her up and up and up, and she strewed and smiled and everyone clapped and cheered. And that was the beginning…’

The old lady’s voice died away.

But Annika wanted to be sure. She put her hand over the wrinkled one lying on the counterpane.

‘It was you, wasn’t it? The girl on the swing was you?’

The lids fluttered; the blue eyes opened. She smiled.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was me.’

When Annika got back she found Pauline hunched in the wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen. She was eating a cheese straw, which Ellie had given her before she went to the shops, and she looked angry and most unusually clean. Pauline’s hair had been washed and stood up in a frizzy mass round her head, her fringe had been ruthlessly cut and she wore a starched dress with a glaringly white collar.

‘Your mother’s come?’ asked Annika.

‘Yes. For a whole week. She’s scrubbing her way round the shop at the moment. Grandfather’s gone to bed with a book about the Galapagos Islands, but it won’t help him. She’s going to turn out the bedrooms next. Really, Annika, I don’t know why you’re so interested in mothers.’

Pauline’s mother wasn’t just a nurse, she was a very high-ranking one, and the way Pauline and her grandfather lived filled her with despair. Whenever she had a holiday from her hospital she came from Berlin and washed and scoured and scrubbed and polished, while they tried to keep out of her way and became cleaner and gloomier by the minute.

‘The trouble is, by the time she goes, I’ve sort of got used to her and I almost miss her. You really can’t win with mothers.’

But of course her mother wouldn’t be like that at all, thought Annika. She would step out of her carriage in her lovely clothes, smelling of French perfume and hold out her arms. Scrubbing and cleaning simply wouldn’t come into it.

The next time Annika went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie let her go up alone. There seemed to be nobody about and she was glad of it, because she had brought a sprig of jasmine from the bush growing against the courtyard wall.

‘And Ellie baked some honey cakes, but we didn’t know if—’

The old lady shook her head. ‘I don’t get hungry. But the jasmine…’ She put it to her nose. ‘I can still smell it. Just.’

She was drowsy today, but she had not forgotten that it was Annika’s turn to tell a story.

‘But not “Gunga Din” or Stanley and Livingstone. Your story. How you were found.’

So Annika told her about the church in the mountains and about Ellie and Sigrid, who had taken her in and brought her up.

‘Ellie is soft and comfortable like a mother and Sigrid is strong and busy like an aunt — and the professors are good to me. But sometimes… I dream about my real mother coming. Often I dream it — that she’s looked and looked for me and at last she’s found me. Do you think it’s wrong to keep dreaming that?’

‘How could it be wrong?’

‘Well, when Ellie and Sigrid look after me so well.’

‘Dreams don’t work like that, Annika.’

She was still holding the spray of jasmine to her face and her eyes were shut, but Annika didn’t go away. She wanted the rest of the story.

‘Last time you said it was the beginning,’ she said. ‘Being on the swing.’

‘Yes. I was a success. People called me La Rondine — it means a swallow in Italian — and they put me on to clouds and into hot-air balloons and gondolas, but always high, high over the stage and always I strewed something. Flowers mostly; but sometimes autumn leaves or golden coins or gingerbread hearts… And once, in Russia, I strewed snow!’

‘Snow! But how…?’

‘Well, of course it was tissue-paper snow, but it looked wonderful. We were touring Moscow and St Petersburg and I was the Spirit of Winter. The Russians stamped and shouted and cheered. They love it when it begins to snow — it makes the streets so quiet, the horses’ hoofs are muffled and there are sledges everywhere. A count who lived in a wooden palace in the middle of a forest gave a great banquet for us. He was mad but so generous — he gave me an emerald pendant, which had belonged to his grandmother. The Star of Kazan, it was called.’

‘Were there wolves?’

‘We didn’t see any, but we heard them — and when we arrived it was dusk and there was a whole line of the count’s servants with lighted flares to lead us up the drive and welcome us.’

Her eyes closed. She began to snore, and her mouth went slack, but it didn’t matter any more. Annika was looking at a friend.

Then she woke as suddenly as she had slept.

‘The world was so beautiful in those days, Annika. The music, the flowers, the scent of the pines…’

‘It still is,’ said Annika. ‘Honestly, it still is.’