A Glove Shop In Vienna

The Great Carp Ferdinand

This is a true story, the story of a Christmas in Vienna in the years before the First World War. Not only is it a true story, it is a most dramatic one, involving love, conflict and (very nearly) death — and this despite the fact that the hero was a fish.

Not any fish, of course: a mighty and formidable fish, the Great Carp Ferdinand. And if you think the story is exaggerated and that no fish, however mighty, could so profoundly affect the lives of a whole family, then you’re wrong. Because I have the facts first-hand from one of the participants, the littlest niece’ in the story, the one whose feet, admittedly, failed to reach even the first rung of the huge leather-backed, silver-buttoned dining-room chairs, but whose eyes cleared the table by a good three inches so that, as she frequently points out, she saw it all. (She came to England, years later, this littlest niece, and became my mother, so I’ve kept tabs on the story and checked it for accuracy time and again.)

The role the Great Carp Ferdinand was to play in the life of the Mannhaus family was simple, though crucial. He was, to put it plainly, the Christmas dinner. For in Vienna, where they celebrate on Christmas Eve and no one, on Holy Night, would dream of eating meat, they relish nothing so much as a richly-marinated, succulently roasted carp. And it is true that until you have tasted fresh carp with all the symphonic accompaniments (sour cream, braised celeriac, dark plum jam) you have not, gustatorily speaking, really lived.

But the accent is on the word fresh. So that when a grateful client with a famous sporting estate in Carinthia presented Onkel Ernst with a live twenty-pounder a week before Christmas, the Mannhaus family was delighted. Onkel Ernst, a small, bandy-legged man whose ironic sympathy enabled him to sustain a flourishing solicitor’s practice, was delighted. Tante Gerda, his plump, affectionate wife, was delighted. Graziella, their adorable and adored eighteen-year-old daughter, was delighted, as was Herr Franz von Rittersberg, Graziella’s ‘intended’, who loved his food. Delighted too, were Tante Gerda’s three little nieces, already installed with their English governess in readiness for the great Mannhaus Christmas, and delighted were the innumerable poor relations and rich godfathers whom motherly Tante Gerda collected every Christmas Eve to light the candles on the great fir tree, open their presents and eat… roast carp.

Accommodation for the fish was not too great a problem. The house in Vienna was massive and the maids, simple country girls accustomed to scrubbing down in wooden tubs, cheerfully surrendered the bathroom previously ascribed to their use.

Here, in a gargantuan mahogany-sided bath with copper taps which gushed like Niagara, the huge, grey fish swam majestically to and fro, fro and to, apparently oblivious both of the glory of his ultimate destiny and the magnificence of his setting. For the bathroom was no ordinary bathroom. French tea roses — marvellous, cabbage-sized blooms — swirled up the wallpaper, were repeated on the huge china wash-bowl and echoed yet again in the vast chamber-pot — a vessel so generously conceived that even the oldest of the little nieces could have sunk in it without a trace.

And here to visit him as the procession of days marched on towards Christmas came the various members of the Mannhaus family.

Onkel Ernst came, sucking his long, black pipe with the porcelain lid. Not a sentimental man, and one addicted to good food, he regarded the carp’s ultimate end as thoroughly fitting. And yet, as he looked into the marvellously unrevealing eye of the great, grey fish, admired the gently-undulating whiskers (so much more luxuriant than his own sparse moustache), Onkel Ernst felt a distinct sense of kinship with what was, after all, the only other male in a houseful of women. And as he sat there, drawing on his pipe, listening to the occasional splash as the carp broke water, Onkel Ernst let slip from his shoulders for a while the burden of maintaining the house in Vienna, the villa in Baden-Baden, the chalet on the Worther See, the dozen or so of Gerda’s relatives who had abandoned really rather early, the struggle to support themselves. He forgot even the juggernaut of bills which would follow the festivities. Almost, but not quite, he forgot the little niggle of worry about his daughter, Graziella.

Tante Gerda, too, paid visits to the carp — but briefly, for Christmas was something she could never trust to proceed even for a moment without her. She came hung about with lists, her forehead creased into its headache lines, deep anxieties curdling her brain. Would the tree clear the ceiling — or, worse still, would it be too short? Would Sachers send the meringue and ice-cream swan in time? Should one (really a worry, this) ‘send’ to the Pfischingers, who had not ‘sent’ last year but had the year before? Oh, that terrible year when the Steinhauses had sent a basket of crystallized fruit at the very last minute, when all the shops were shut, and she had had to re-wrap the potted azalea the Hellers had given and send it to the Steinhauses — and then spent all Christmas wondering if she had removed the label!

Bending over the fish, Tante Gerda pondered the sauce. Here, too, was anxiety. Celeriac, yes, lemon, yes, onion, yes, peppercorns, ginger, almonds, walnuts — that went without saying. Grated honeycake, of course, thyme, bay, paprika and dark plum jam. But now her sister, writing from Linz, had suggested mace… The idea was new, almost revolutionary. The Mannhaus carp, maceless, was a gastronomic talking-point in Vienna. There were the cook’s feelings to be considered. And yet… even Sacher himself was not afraid to vary a trusted recipe.

The carp’s indifference to his culinary environment was somehow calming. She closed her eyes for a second and had a sudden, momentary glimpse of Christmas as existing behind all this if only she could reach it. If she could just be sure that Graziella was all right. And she sighed, for she had never meant to love anyone as much as she loved her only daughter.

Franz von Rittersberg also came to see the carp. A golden-haired, blue-eyed, splendid young man, heir to a coal-mine in Silesia, the purpose of his visit was strictly arithmetical. He measured the carp mentally, divided it by the number of people expected to sit down to dinner, estimated that his portion as the future Mannhaus son-in-law was sure to be drawn from the broader, central regions — and left content.

And escaping from the English governess, scuttling and twittering like mice, white-stockinged, brown-booted, their behinds deliciously humped by layers of petticoat, came the little nieces clutching stolen bread rolls.

‘Ferdinand,’ whispered the youngest ecstatically, balancing on the upturned, rose-encrusted chamber-pot. Her sisters, who could see over the sides of the bath unaided, stood gravely crumbling bread into the water. The fish was a miracle; unaware of them, yet theirs. Real.

Each night, when the nursemaid left them, they tumbled out from under the feather bed and marshalled themselves for systematic prayer. ‘Please God, make them give us something that’s alive for Christmas,’ they prayed night after night after night.

But it was Graziella, the daughter of the house, who came most frequently of all. Perched on the side of the bath, her dusky curls rioting among the cabbage roses on the wall, she looked with dark, commiserating eyes at the fish. Yet, though she was by far the loveliest of the visitors, Ferdinand’s treatment of her was uncivil. Quite simply, he avoided her. Carp, after all, are fresh-water fish, and he had noticed that the drops which fell on him when she was there were most deplorably saline.

She was a girl the gods had truly smiled upon — loving and beloved; gay and kind, and her future as Frau Franz von Rittersberg was rosily assured. And yet each day she seemed to get a little thinner and a little paler, her dark eyes filling with ever-growing bewilderment. For when you have been accustomed all your life to giving, giving, giving, you may wake up one day and find you have given away yourself. And then unless you are a saint (and even, perhaps, if you are) you will spend the nights underneath your pillow, trapped and wretched, licking away the foolish tears.

And so the days drew steadily on, mounting to their climax — Christmas Eve. Snow fell, the tree arrived, the last candle was lit on the Advent ring. The littlest niece, falling from grace, ate the chimney off the gingerbread house. The exchange of hampers became ever more frenzied. The Pfischingers, who still had not sent, invaded Tante Gerda’s dreams…

It was on the morning of the twenty-third that Onkel Ernst and his future son-in-law assembled to perform the sacrificial rites on the Great Carp Ferdinand.

The little nieces had been bundled into coats and leggings and taken to the Prater. Graziella, notoriously tender-hearted, had been sent to Rumpelmayers on an errand. Now, at the foot of the stairs stood the cook, holding a gargantuan earthenware baking dish — to the left of her the housemaids, to the right the kitchen staff. On the landing upstairs, Tante Gerda girded her men — a long-bladed kitchen knife, a seven-pound sledgehammer, an old and slightly rusty sword of the Kaiser’s Imperial Army which someone had left behind at dinner…

In the bathroom, Onkel Ernst looked at the fish and the fish looked at Onkel Ernst. A very slight sensation, a whisper of premonition, nothing more, assailed Onkel Ernst, who felt as though his liver was performing a very small entrechat.

‘You shoo him down this end,’ ordered Franz, splendidly off-hand. ‘Then, when he’s up against the end of the bath, I’ll wham him.’

Onkel Ernst shooed. The carp swam. Franz — swinging the hammer over his head — whammed.

The noise was incredible. Chips of enamel flew upwards.

‘Ow, my eye, my eye!’ yelled Franz, dropping the hammer. ‘There’s a splinter in it. Get it OUT!’

‘Yes,’ said Onkel Ernst. ‘Yes…’

He put down the sword from the Kaiser’s Imperial Army and climbed carefully on to the side of the bath. Even then he was only about level with Franz’s streaming blue eye. Blindly, Franz thrust his head forward.

The rest really was inevitable. Respectable, middle-aged Viennese solicitors are not acrobats; they don’t pretend to be. The carp, swimming languidly between Onkel Ernst’s ankles found, as he had expected, nothing even mildly edible.

It was just after lunch that Onkel Ernst, dry once more and wearing his English knickerbockers, received in a mild way guidance from above.

It was all so easy, really. No need for all this crude banging and lunging. Simply, one went upstairs, one pulled out the plug, one went out locking the door behind one. And waited…

A few minutes later, perfectly relaxed, Onkel Ernst was back in his study. He was not only holding the newspaper the right way up, he was practically reading it.

The house was hushed. Franz, after prolonged ministrations by the women of the family, had gone home. The little nieces were having their afternoon rest. The study, anyway, had baize-lined double doors. Even if there were any thuds — thuds such as a great fish lashing in its death agony might make — Onkel Ernst would not hear them.

What he did hear, not very long afterwards, was a scream. A truly fearful scream, the scream of a virtuoso and one he had no difficulty in ascribing to the under-housemaid, whose brother was champion yodeller of Schruns. A second scream joined it and a third. Onkel Ernst dashed out into the hall.

The first impression was that the hall was full of people. His second was that it was wet. Both proved to be correct.

Tante Gerda, trembling on the edge of hysteria, was being soothed by Graziella. The English governess, redoubtable as all her race, had already commandeered a bucket and mop and flung herself into the breach. Maids dabbed and moaned and mopped — and still the water ran steadily down the stairs, past the carved cherubs on the banisters, turning the Turkish carpet into pulp.

The enquiry, when they finally got round to it, was something of a formality since the culprits freely admitted their guilt. There they stood, the little nieces, pale, trembling, terrified — yet somehow not truly repentant-looking. Yes, they had done it. Yes, they had taken the key out from behind the clock; yes, they had unlocked the bathroom door, turned on the taps…

Silent, acquiescent, they waited for punishment. Only the suddenly-descending knicker-leg of the youngest spoke of an almost unbearable tension.

Graziella saved them, as she always saved everything.

‘Please, Mutti? Please, Vati… So near Christmas?’

Midnight struck. In the Mannhaus mansion, silence reigned at last. Worn out, their nightly prayer completed, the little nieces slept. Tante Gerda moaned, dreaming that the Pfischingers had sent a giant hamper full of sauce.

Presently a door opened and Onkel Ernst in his pyjamas crept softly from the smoking room. In his hand was an enormous shotgun — a terrible weapon some thirty years old which had belonged to his father — and in his heart was a bloodlust as violent as it was unexpected.

Relentlessly he climbed the stairs; relentlessly he entered the bathroom and turned the key behind him. Relentlessly he took three paces backwards, peered down the barrel — and then fired.

Graziella, always awake these nights, was the first to reach him.

‘Are you all right, Papa? Are you all right?’

Only another fearful volley of groans issued from behind the bolted door. Tante Gerda rushed up, her grey plait swinging. ‘Ernst, Ernst?’ she implored, hammering on the door. ‘Say something, Ernst!’

The English governess arrived in her Jaeger dressing-gown, the cook… Together the women strained against the door, but it was hopeless.

‘Phone the doctor, the fire brigade. Send for Franz, quickly,’ Gerda ordered. ‘A man — we need a man.’

The governess ran to the telephone. Bur Graziella, desperate, threw her fur cape over her nightdress and ran out into the street.

Thus it was that in the space of half a minute the life of Sebastian Haffner underwent a complete and total revolution. One minute he was free as air, easy-going, a young man devoted to his research work at the University — and seconds later he was a committed, passionate fanatic ready to scale mountains, slay dragons and take out a gigantic mortgage on a house. For no other reason than that Graziella, rushing blindly down the steps into the lamplit street, ran straight into his arms.

Just for a fraction of a second the embrace in which Sebastian held the trembling girl remained protective and fatherly. Then his arms tightened round her and he became not fatherly — not fatherly at all. And Graziella, with snowflakes in her hair, looked up at the stranger’s kind, dark, gentle face and could not — simply could not — look away.

Then she remembered and struggled free. ‘Oh, please come!’ she gabbled, pulling Sebastian by the hand. ‘Quickly. It’s my father… The carp has shot him.’

Instantly Sebastian rearranged his dreams. He would visit her regularly in the asylum, bring her flowers, read to her. Slowly, through his devotion, she would be cured.

‘Hurry, please, please! He was groaning so.’

‘The carp?’ suggested Sebastian, running with her up the steps.

‘My father. Oh, cornel’

Maids moaned at the foot of the stairs. Tante Gerda sobbed on the landing.

Sebastian was magnificent. Within seconds he had seized a carved oak chair and begun to batter on the door. Quite quickly, the great door splintered and fell. At Sebastian’s heels they trooped into the bathroom.

Onkel Ernst sat propped against the side of the bath, now groaning, now swearing, his hand on his shoulder which was caked with blood. Round him were fragments of rose-encrusted china and shattered mirror which the lead shot ricocheting from the sides of the bath and grazing Onkel Ernst’s shoulder, had finally shattered. The carp, lurking beneath the water taps, appeared to be asleep.

‘Ernst!” shrieked Tante Gerda and dropped on her knees beside him.

‘Bandages, scissors, lint,’ ordered Sebastian, and Graziella fled like the wind.

It was only a flesh wound and Sebastian, miracle of miracles, was a doctor, though the kind that worked in a lab. Quite soon Onkel Ernst, indisputably the hero of the hour, was propped on a sofa, courageously swallowing cognac, egg yolk with vanilla, raspberry cordial laced with kirsch. The family doctor arrived, pronounced Sebastian’s work excellent, stayed for cognac too. The fire brigade, trooping into the kitchen, preferred slivovitz.

And upstairs, forgotten, seeing nothing but each other, stood Graziella and Sebastian.

This was it, then, thought Graziella, this wanting to sing and dance and shout and yet feeling so humble and so good. This was what she had never felt and so had nearly thrown herself to Franz as one throws a bone to a dog to stop it growling… As if in echo to her thoughts, the bell shrilled yet again and Franz von Rittersberg was admitted. His eye was still swollen and his temper not of the best.

‘This place is turning into a madhouse,’ he said, running up the stairs. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

Graziella did not. Time had stopped when she ran into Sebastian’s arms and years were to pass before she quite caught up with it again.

‘Well, for heaven’s sake let’s finish off this blasted fish and get back to bed,’ he said, shrugging off his coat and taking out a knife and a glass-stoppered bottle. ‘I’ve brought some chloroform.’

‘No!’

Graziella’s voice startled both men by its intensity. ‘In England,’ she said breathlessly, ‘in England, if you hang someone and it doesn’t work… if the rope breaks, you let him live.’

‘For goodness’ sake, Graziella, don’t give us the vapours now,’ snapped Franz. ‘What the devil do you think we’re going to eat tomorrow, anyway?’

He strode into the bathroom. ‘You can help me,’ he threw over his shoulder to Sebastian, who had been standing quietly on the half-lit landing. ‘I’ll pull the plug out and pour this stuff on him. Then you bang his head on the side of the bath.’

‘No,’ Sebastian stepped forward into the light. ‘If Miss… if Graziella does not wish this fish to be killed, then this fish will not be killed.’

Franz put down the bottle. A muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘Why you… you… Who the blazes do you think you are, barging in here and telling me what to do?’

Considering that both men came from good families, the fight which followed was an extraordinarily dirty one. The Queensberry rules, though well-known on the Continent, might never have existed. In a sense of course the outcome was inevitable, for Franz was motivated only by hatred and lust for his Christmas dinner, whereas Sebastian fought for love. But though she was almost certain of Sebastian’s victory, Graziella, sprinkling chloroform on to a bath towel, was happily able to make sure.

Dawn broke. The bells of the Stephan’s Kirche pealed out the challenge and the glory of the birth of Christ.

In the Mannhaus mansion, Graziella slept and smiled and slept again. Onkel Ernst, propped on seven goose-feather pillows, opened an eye, reflected happily that today nothing could be asked of him — no carving, no wobbling on step-ladders, no candle-lighting — and closed it again.

But in the kitchen Tante Gerda and the cook, returning from Mass, faced disgrace and ruin. Everything was ready — the chopped herbs (bravely, the cook had agreed to mace), the wine, the cream, the lemon… and upstairs, swimming strongly, was the centrepiece, the raison d’etre for days of planning and contriving, who should have been floating in his marinade for hours already.

As though that was not enough, as they sat down to breakfast there was a message from Franz. He was still unwell and would not be coming to dine with them. It took a full minute for the implication of this to reach Tante Gerda and when it did, she put down her head and groaned. ‘Thirteen! We shall be thirteen for dinner! Oh, heavens! Gross-Tante Wilhelmina will never stand for that!’

But fate had not finished with Tante Gerda. The breakfast dishes were scarcely cleared away when the back-door bell rang and the maid returned struggling under a gigantic hamper.

‘Oh, no… NO!’ shrieked Tante Gerda.

But it was true. Now, at the eleventh hour, with everything still to do and the shops closing fast, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.

And now it was here, the moment for which all these weeks had been the preparation. It was dusk. The little nieces boiled and bubbled in their petticoats, pursued by nursemaids with curling-tongs and ribbons. Inside ‘the room’, Tante Gerda, watched complacently by Onkel Ernst, climbed up and down the step-ladder checking the candles, the fire-bucket, the angle of the silver star. Clucking, murmuring, she ran from pile to pile of the presents spread on the vast white cloth beneath the tree. Graziella’s young doctor, summoned from the laboratory, had agreed to come to dinner so that they wouldn’t be thirteen. He had even somehow contrived presents for the little nieces — three tiny wooden boxes which Tante Gerda now added to their heaps.

And now all the candles were lit and she rang the sweet-toned Swiss cow-bell which was the signal that they could come in.

Though they had been huddled straining against the door, when it was opened the little nieces came slowly, very slowly into the room, the myriad candles from the tree shining in their eyes. Behind them came Graziella, her head tilted to the glittering star and beside her the young doctor — who had given her only a single rose.

And suddenly Tante Gerda’s headache lifted, and she cried a little and knew that somehow, once again, the thing she had struggled for was there. Christmas.

You’d think that was the end of the story, wouldn’t you? But my mother, telling it years later, liked to go on just a bit further. To the moment when the little nieces, having politely unwrapped a mountain of costly irrelevancies, suddenly burst into shrieks of ecstasy and fulfilment. For, opening Sebastian’s wooden boxes, they found, for each of them, a tiny, pink-eyed, living mouse.

Or further still. To the family at table — white damask, crystal goblets, crimson roses in a bowl. To the little nieces (the youngest wobbling fearfully on her pile of cushions), each pocket of each knicker-leg bulgy with a sleepy, smuggled mouse. To Onkel Ernst magnificent in his bandages, and Graziella and Sebastian glowing like comets… To the sudden stiffening, knuckles whitening round the heavy spoons, as Tante Gerda brought in the huge silver serving-dish.

And the sigh of released breath, the look of awed greed as she set it down. Egg-garnished, gherkin-bedecked, its translucent depths glittering with exotic fishes and tiny jewelled vegetables, the celebrated concoction quivered gently before them. Lampreys in aspic! Truly — most truly, the Pfischingers had ‘sent’.

The littlest niece, when she grew up and became by mother, liked to end the story there. But I always made her go on just a little further. To the day after Christmas. To the house of the Pfischingers on the other side of Vienna. To Herr Doktor Pfischinger, a small, bald, mild little man ascending the stairs to his bathroom. He is carrying a long-bladed knife, a sledgehammer, a blunderbuss…