A Glove Shop In Vienna

Vicky and the Christmas Angel

It was mid-December and a night of snow. All day the thick, soft flakes had fallen quietly, covering the blank-faced nymphs and satyrs on Vienna’s innumerable fountains; blanketing the bronze rumps of the rearing horses on which dead warriors of the Habsburg Empire rode forever; giving the trees along the Ringstrasse a spare, Siberian splendour.

Sounds in the snow were muffled. The sound of carriage wheels on the cobbles, the sound of street sellers crying their wares — even the sound of church bells, so much a part of Vienna in those days before the First World War — came far more gently in the snow.

The gas-lamps threw rings of brightness into the squares, the smart shops along the Kartner Strasse looked like stage sets. In the big apartment houses, those grand, slightly crumbling Viennese houses which look like Renaissance palaces but house simply doctors and lawyers and other self-respecting members of the bourgeoisie, the closed shutters were pierced by rays which the snow threw back in unaccustomed brightness.

One window, however, in one such apartment house, remained unshuttered so that its square of golden light went untrammelled into the dusk. It was a bathroom window and, surprisingly for a bathroom, it was occupied not by one person but by three.

The eldest of these was a girl of about eight. She sat enthroned — and literally so, for there was no doubt about her kingship — on a linen basket from which her legs, in white ribbed stockings and kid boots, stuck out at an angle, for they were a good six inches off the floor.

Her subjects, twins about three years old, were arranged on either side of her on gigantic, upturned chamber-pots. Epically fat, seraphically golden-haired, they sat gazing upwards at their sister. Only Tilda’s half-swallowed thumb, Rudi’s strangulated ear as he twisted a silken curl tighter and tighter round the lobe, revealed the strain they were undergoing: the strain — at that age — of totally listening.

Earlier in the year, listening had not been such anguish. ‘Snow White,’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ or Vicky’s own creation — the mighty but gentle giant, ‘Thunder Blunder,’ whose ill-mannered stomach rumbles caused the thunder which, before they knew this, had so much frightened them… all these were so familiar they could be understood without this terrible concentration, this agonising immobility.

But what Vicky was telling them now was different. Somehow more important; more… true. It was about Christmas, which was coming (‘Soon, now,’ said Vicky, ‘properly soon’.) Christmas, a concept so staggering that the twins could hardly grasp it, involving as it did everything they had ever warmed to: food and smiling people and presents — and, most mysterious of all, the tree.

‘A great tree,’ said Vicky. ‘Mama will buy it at the Christmas Market. But it will be nothing. Just a fir tree. And then…’

And then… The twins sighed and swayed a little on their seats as Vicky told them the story that every child in Vienna knows: the story of the Christ Child who comes on Christmas Night when the children sleep, to bring the presents and decorate the tree.

But because it was Vicky, in whom the flame of imagination burnt with an almost dangerous brightness, the fat and placid twins saw more than that. They saw the gentle, tiny babe in the manger turn, on Christmas Eve, into a great golden-winged angel who flew through the starry night bearing the glittering array of baubles for the tree; heard the beating of his wings as he steadied himself; felt the curtains stir as he flew in from the mighty heavens to make their tree wonderful, leave their presents in lovingly labelled heaps beneath its beauty.

‘It’s the angel does all that?’ said Tilda, removing her thumb.

‘Of course. The Christmas Angel.’

‘Can he carry all the presents?’ demanded Rudi. ‘If I get a big engine can he carry that?’

‘He can do everything,’ said Vicky. ‘Everything.’

But the angel in the household of Herr Doktor and Frau Fischer had help. In the kitchen Katrina, fat and warm and Czech like all the best cooks in Vienna, produced an ever-growing pile of gingerbread hearts and vanilla crescents; of almond rings and chocolate guglhupf. Vicky’s mother, pretty and frivolous and very loving, helped too, whispering and rustling behind mysteriously closed doors. As for Vicky’s father, erupting irately from the green baize door of his study shouting, ‘Bills! Bills! Nothing but bills!’, he possibly helped most of all.

A week before Christmas the Christmas visitors began to arrive. First came Vicky’s cousin, Fritzl, just a year older than she was, with his mother Frau Zimmermann.

Frau Zimmermann, her father’s sister, was something Vicky did not understand; something called a ‘Free Thinker’. It meant having to go and speak to the servants when other people were saying their prayers, and taking Fritzl to see the skeletons in the Natural History Museum when everyone else was going to hear the Vienna choirboys. Since Vicky loved both the skeletons and the choirboys, she could never decide whether Free Thinking was a good thing or not.

It was the same with Fritzl. Mostly Fritzl was her friend — inventive and talented. After all, it was Fritzl who had lowered a stuffed eel down the ventilation shaft into Frau Pollack’s flat below. But at other times…

This time, particularly, the odd, restless and obscurely frightening side of Fritzl seemed to have got worse. He had hardly unpacked before he made her come into the linen cupboard and told her all sorts of things — things which weren’t actually very interesting because Kati, the washerwoman, who was her friend, had explained them to her already and anyway they were obvious enough to anyone who used their eyes. But Fritzl added other things which were to say the least of it unlikely because the Kaiser simply wouldn’t have done them — and anyway, she didn’t like Fritzl’s hot and hurried voice or the way he stammered over the words.

But it was in the bathroom at story time that he worried her most. During ‘Snow White’, or ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den,’ or ‘Thunder Blunder’, Fritzl listened well enough, sitting between Tilda and Rudi with his back against the bath. But when it came to the story which mattered more than any other because literal and actual and true — then Fritzl made her nervous, fiddling with the loofah, tapping his feet on the tiled floor until Tilda, through her sucked thumb, said moistly and reproachfully, ‘Shh, Fithl; she’th telling about the angel!’ And even then he would sit with his dark, too-bright eyes boring into Vicky and make her go on too quickly, as though only by reaching the end of the story could she find safety. But safety from what?

The last of the Christmas visitors was Cousin Poldi.

Cousin Poldi arrived, as inevitable as the sunset, on the Friday before Christmas Eve, having travelled from Linz where she lived alone above the milliner’s shop in which she worked.

Nothing, by then, could put a blight on the Christmas spirit, but Cousin Poldi usually achieved a kind of halt in the general ecstasy, making it necessary for Vicky and the twins, and even her parents, to recharge themselves so to speak after the impact of her arrival.

For Cousin Poldi was, in every way, most decidedly a ‘Poor Relation’. Dressed in fusty, dusty black with button boots which looked as though the cat had spent the night on them, she wore a bracelet consisting of a sparse plait of grey hair which had been cut from the head of her mother after death. While there was nothing particularly tragic about the death of Cousin Poldi’s mother, who had passed away peacefully in her bed aged eighty-six, the circumstances and the strange smell of preservative which clung to the bracelet made it an object of terror to Vicky, for whom kissing Cousin Poldi when she arrived was a minor kind of martyrdom.

And now, with everyone safely in position, the household of Herr Doktor Fischer could march forward to the great climax of Christmas Eve. A frenzied last-minute clean-up began, the maids gliding silently up and down the already gleaming parquet with huge brushes strapped to their feet. Carpets were thumped, feather-beds beaten, and in the kitchen… But there are no words to describe what went on in a good Viennese kitchen just before Christmas in those far-off days before the First World War.

Bed-time prayers, for the children, became a laborious and time-consuming business. Vicky, obsessed by her angel, devised long entreaties for his safe conduct through the skies. The twins, on the other hand, produced an inventory which would not have disgraced the mail order catalogue of a good department store. And each and every night their mother got them out of bed again, all three, because they had forgotten to say. ‘And God bless Cousin Poldi.’

Five days before Christmas, the thing happened which meant most of all to Vicky. The tree arrived. A huge tree, all but touching the ceiling of the enormous drawing room, and: ‘It’s the best tree we’ve ever had, the most beautiful,’ said Vicky, as she had said last year and the year before and was to go on saying all her life.

She wanted presents, she wanted presents very much, but this transformation of the still, dark tree — beautiful, but just any tree — into the glittering, beckoning candle-lit vision that they saw when one by one (but always children first) they filed into the room on Christmas Eve… That to her, was the wonder of wonders, the magic that Christmas was all about.

And though no one could accuse the Christ Child of having favourites or anything like that, it did seem to Vicky that when He came down to earth He did the Fischers especially proud. There never did seem to be a tree as wonderful as theirs. The things that were on it, such unbelievably delicate things, could only have been made in Heaven: tiny shimmering angels, dolls as big as a thumb, golden-petalled flowers, sweets of course — oh, every kind of sweet. And candles — perhaps a thousand candles, thought Vicky. Candles which caused her father every year to say, ‘You’ll see if the house doesn’t catch fire, you’ll see!’, and which produced also a light whose softness and radiance had no equal in the world.

The twins grew less seraphic, less placid as the tension grew. ‘Will the angel come tonight?’ demanded Tilda at her prayers.

‘No,’ said Vicky. ‘You’ve got to go to sleep for two more nights.’

‘I want him to come now’ said Rudi, ‘Now.. ’

For the last two days, the time for the young ones passed with unbearable slowness. Even Vicky, clothed in her own mantle of imaginings, grew restless. Only Fritzl, who did not have to bless Cousin Poldi because he was not allowed to say his prayers, retained his cheerfulness, looking at Vicky often with that strange and glinting brightness which she could not understand.

But at last it was the twenty-third and on that night her mother turned the key in the huge double doors which led to the drawing room. And at this sound the chrysalis which had been growing inside Vicky all these days broke open and Christmas, in all its boundless and uncontrollable joy, broke out.

She had not expected to sleep but she must nevertheless have slept, because she didn’t hear Fritzl come in and yet suddenly he was there bending over her in his nightshirt, shaking her.

‘He’s there!’ said Fritzl, his voice hot and eager as it had been in the linen cupboard. ‘Come on, get up. I’ll show him to you.’

‘Who?’ she asked, still stupid from sleep.

‘Who do you think? The Christmas Angel. The Christ Child. The one you’re always going on about. He’s in there, decorating the tree.’

Vicky sat up. Even by the subdued glow of the night-light, Fritzl could see her turn pale. ‘But then… we shouldn’t.’

‘Oh, don’t be so soft. We wouldn’t go in. You can see quite well through the keyhole.’

So Vicky got up and felt for her slippers and crept after Fritzl down the long parquet corridor, careful to make no sound. Her heart was pounding and she felt sick, and this was all because soon now she would see a sight so blinding, so beautiful…

That was why she was afraid. That was the reason. Not that odd glitter in Fritzl’s eyes, not that shrill edge to his voice. Not anything else.

They were up to the door now. Fritzl was right, the key had been taken out, the hole that was left was big enough…

‘Go on, have a look,’ said Fritzl, giving her a push.

Vicky stepped forward.

‘Fritzl! Vicky! How dare you!’

Her mother’s furious voice sounded from behind them; her arm came out and wrenched Vicky away from the door.

But Vicky had already seen.

Seen the step-ladder, the bunched skirt pulled up to reveal, above the dusty button boots, a desperately unfragrant length of stocking. Seen Cousin Poldi, her mouth full of pins, reach up to hang the star on to the tree.

There was little anyone could do. Her father, frightened by her pallor, her stony silence, gave her a white powder; her mother sat by her bed chafing her hands and wishing as she had not wished anything for years, that Vicky would cry, wail, reproach them for lying — anything to show that she was still a child. But Vicky said nothing. Nothing to Fritzl slinking off to his room, nothing to her parents. Nothing to anyone, because there was nothing at all to say.

Even so, she must have slept once more because she was woken by the sound of sobbing. Not the twins’ sobbing, not a child’s sobbing at all, but an ugly tearing sound. A sound which frightened her.

She got up and went on to the landing. Though she’d known really what it was, she stood for a while outside Cousin Poldi’s door as though hoping for a reprieve.

Then she turned the handle and went in.

Cousin Poldi was sitting upright in a chair. Her starved looking plaits hung down on either side of her blotchy face and there was something dreadfully wrong with her mouth. On the table between the glowing, shining things: snippets of silver ribbon, wisps of gossamer lace, lay the hair bracelet, curled like the tail of some old, sick animal.

Vicky took two steps forward and stood still.

‘Your mother is right,’ mumbled Cousin Poldi, her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m an old idiot, fit for nothing. Every year she reminds me to block up the keyhole — and then I forget.’

Vicky said nothing.

‘I get excited, you see… All year I prepare… So many things are wasted in a milliner’s shop, you wouldn’t believe; pieces of stuff, bits of ribbon. I keep them all and then in the evenings I make things for the tree. It’s a bit lonely in Linz, you see… It keeps one busy.’

Vicky took a sudden step back. She had seen the teeth in the glass beside the bed and understood now what was wrong with Cousin Poldi’s mouth.

‘Every year I’ve done the tree for your mother. It was so nice being able to help… she’s so good to me, so beautiful. If it had been her you’d seen…’ She broke off. Then forgetting her naked gums she dropped her hand and looked at Vicky with a last entreaty in her rheumy eyes.

‘I’ve spoilt it for you for ever, haven’t I?’ said Cousin Poldi.

And Vicky, implacable in her wretchedness, said, ‘Yes.’

In every family there is apt to be a child around whom, in a given year, Christmas centres — not, of course, because that child is more greatly loved than the others, but because of something — a readiness, a special capacity for wonder, perhaps just a particular age — which gives that child the power of absolute response.

In the Fischer household that child had been Vicky. Now, with the centre dropped out of their Christmas world, Herr Doctor and Frau Fischer nevertheless had to push the day relentlessly along its course.

Fritzl, moody and ill-looking, was no help. It was the twins with their sublime unconcern, their uncomplicated greed, who made it possible to carry on; Rudi wriggling through morning mass in St Stephen’s cathedral, Tilda screeching up and down the corridors waiting for dusk.

And then at last it was over, the agonising waiting, and the moment had come. The moment when they all assembled in the dining room and listened to the sweet soft tones of the old cow-bell with which their mother summoned them. The moment when the door was thrown open and, the children first, the adults afterwards walked in, dazzled, towards the presents and the tree.

With a last despairing glance at Vicky’s face, Frau Fischer reached for her bell. And then: ‘Stop!’ said Vicky. ‘We’re not all here.’

Everyone looked at everyone else. ‘I’m here,’ said Rudi, reasonably, sticking to essentials. So were Tilda and Fritzl; so was Fritzl’s mother. Herr Doktor Fischer with his home-made fire extinguisher was there; so was the cook, so were the maids.

‘Cousin Poldi isn’t here,’ said Vicky.

Herr Doktor Fischer and his wife exchanged glances.

‘She’s gone, Vicky; she’s going back to Linz. She thought it would be better.’

‘Then she must be fetched,’ said Vicky.

‘But, Vicky…’

‘We can’t go in till we are all together,’ said Vicky, still in that same inflexible, unchildlike voice. ‘She’ll have to be fetched.’

Herr Doktor Fischer took out his watch. ‘The train doesn’t go until four,’ he said to his wife. ‘I could probably get her still. But it would take some time.’

Vicky said nothing. She just stood and waited and for the first time since Fritzl had stolen to her in the night, there was a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

‘You had better go,’ said Vicky’s mother quickly. ‘We can wait.’

The word wait fell on the twins’ heads like a cartload of boulders.

‘No,’ wailed Rudi, ‘Rudi can’t wait!’

‘Nor can’t Tilda wait neither. Tilda wants her presents now!’

‘Hush,’ said Vicky sternly. ‘How dare you act like that on Christmas Eve? And anyway, I’m going to tell you a story.’

Still sniffing, doubtful, they came closer. ‘In the bathroom?’

‘No. Here.’

Vicky looked over at Fritzl, ready to measure herself against him, and then looked away again because somehow there was no longer any threat.

‘What story do you think?’ she said to the twins. ‘On a day like this? The story of the Christmas Angel, of course. The one who came last night, to bring the presents and decorate the tree.’

And she told the story. Told it so that Frau Fischer had to move over to the velvet window curtain and hide her face. Told it so that the sound of Herr Doktor Fischer’s footsteps, the squeak of Cousin Poldi’s returning button boots, were almost an intrusion.

No one said anything. Only when at last the great doors did open and Vicky moved forward to follow Fritzl and the ecstatically tottering twins into the room, her mother held her back.

‘No, Vicky,’ she said softly, ‘let the children go in first. We adults… we adults will come on afterwards.’

And then very slowly, she led her daughter forward towards the shining glory of the tree.