The Star of Kazan

6 The Star of Kazan

Summer was now well under way. The geraniums in Ellie’s window boxes had to be watered twice a day, the cats lay in the shade of the cafe awning, and were shooed away, and came back…

At the opera, the season was nearly over, and Annika was sent out to buy the roses that Uncle Emil always sent, at the last performence, to a lady in the chorus called Cornelia Otter, whom he had admired for many years.

Professor Julius was relabelling the collection of rocks in his study, helped by Sigrid, who stood beside him with a duster looking sour, because it is not at all easy to dust rocks. Professor Gertrude was having trouble with her harp sonata and kept to her room, dabbing lavender water on to her temples to help her think.

But when she went to visit the Eggharts’ great-aunt in her stuffy attic, Annika was in a different world.

‘I was La Rondine for several years. The Little Swallow. There were pictures of me everywhere and people gave me such presents… Once a posy of flowers was brought on to the stage for me, and when I took it it seemed to be covered with drops of dew. But they weren’t drops of dew, they were diamonds… A banker sent them, just to say thank you. And a marquis gave me a priceless brooch in the shape of a butterfly. People were like that in those days; so generous — and so rich. My jewels were famous. I could have bought horses and carriages and mansions if I’d sold them, but they were friends, I loved them.’ She turned her head. ‘It’s true what I’m telling you,’ she said anxiously.

‘Of course it’s true.’

‘Anyway I was too busy — with my work…’

‘With strewing,’ said Annika, who liked that word particularly.

‘Yes. Not only, of course. I danced and sang too, but every time at the end of the show there had to be a number where I was hoisted up high and scattered things. The stage hands used to get quite cross, sweeping up roses, sweeping up daffodils, but the audience insisted. We toured all the big cities… we even went to London.’ She paused and stretched out her hand for the glass of water and Annika helped her to drink.

‘And then something happened,’ she went on.

Annika put her hand over her mouth. ‘You fell?’

‘I fell all right, but not off the swing. I fell in love. Oh my goodness how I fell! He was a wonderful man… a painter… and when he smiled… Ah well, you’ll know one day.’

‘Did you get married?’

‘No. But I gave up the stage. I gave up everything and went to live with him in the most beautiful place in the world.’

‘Where’s that?

‘It’s called Merano. It’s a village in the South Tyrol, in the Dolomites; it’s where the mountains come down to shelter the valley. There are vineyards everywhere and flowers, and orchards full of fruit — and when you look up there are the great peaks, which turn to rose when the sun sets.’

‘Yes, I know about that. It’s called Alpengluhen.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. His house was a little yellow villa halfway up the mountain, smothered in wisteria and jasmine, with a blue balcony where we had our meals. You must go there one day. You’ll know it because it has a tiny clock tower with a weathervane shaped like a crowing cock.’

She groped for her handkerchief, then shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m not sad. It’s good to remember. We lived there for ten years and I was so happy. Not famous now… but my goodness, so happy! Then he was killed in a climbing accident. He was trying to help someone who was trapped on an ice ledge.’

She stopped and Annika got up from her chair.

‘You’ll want to rest now.’

‘No, not yet. Then the vampires came. Six huge vampires. Harpies with fangs and claws. His relatives. Two sisters, an aunt, three cousins… They turned me out of the house — they wanted to sell it at once and get the money. So I went back to Paris. I tried to get back to work, but ten years is too long to be away from the theatre and I wasn’t so young and pretty any more. It was a difficult time. But I still had my jewels — the harpies couldn’t take them away from me. I’ll tell you about my… jewels when you… come again.’

And almost at once she was asleep.

The weather now became very hot and all the important people left Vienna to go on their summer holidays.

The most important person of course was the emperor, who put away his military uniforms and the helmets he wore to attend to his duties and went off to his villa in the mountains, where he put on lederhosen and embroidered braces and pretended to be a peasant.

Ellie was always pleased when he went away.

‘The poor old man: all those parades and processions and him with his bad back.’

When the emperor left Vienna, so did the courtiers and the civil servants and the bankers and the opera singers.

And so did the Lipizzaners — who were most certainly important — who went off to the high pastures to rest and grow strong on the rich grass. Their grooms led them through the quiet streets at daybreak, to the special train that was kept for them, and the Viennese heard them and smiled because it meant that the holidays had begun.

The professors too went away. They always went to the same place, a quiet hotel in Switzerland, where they swam up and down a dark-green lake and read their books. Though the holiday was not a complicated one, getting them off safely was hard work. Annika’s job was to search their long woollen bathing costumes for moth holes, through which somebody might see pieces of their skin, while Ellie oiled their boots and Sigrid ironed Professor Gertrude’s dirndls, which were of the stately kind, with black aprons and many pleats.

And the Eggharts left in their canary-yellow motor car, which was quite a performance because Loremarie and her mother had to wrap their heads in layers of veiling to protect them from the dust, and Herr Egghart had to find his gauntlets and his goggles and his leather driving coat, and poop the horn loudly to make sure everyone would get out of the way before he even got in. They had rented a house in Bad Haxenfeld, a famous spa in Germany where sulphurous water gushed out of the rocks and people sat in mud baths up to their necks and were massaged and pummelled and put on diets.

‘I feel absolutely exhausted, having that old woman in my house,’ Frau Egghart told her friends before they left. Actually all she had done was to go up to the attic once a week and stand by the door with her handkerchief over her mouth as though old age was catching — but her friends were very sympathetic.

Because they had rented a house, the Eggharts took all their servants except the youngest of the maids, who was left in sole charge of their great-aunt. The people in the square were shocked by this, but for Annika it was a relief. She could go over when she liked and stay as long as she wanted. Loremarie had not left any money for the holidays, but Annika had almost forgotten that she was ever paid.

Ellie had taken a pot of her scented geraniums and some fruit to the old lady, and she tried to warn Annika.

‘You mustn’t be sad when she goes,’ Ellie told her. ‘She’s very tired and she’ll be glad to slip away.’

‘No, she won’t,’ said Annika furiously. ‘She’s only tired because the weather’s so hot. When it gets cooler she’ll be better again; she’s NOT going to die!’

And Ellie shook her head because it was impossible to convince Annika that she was not in charge of the world.

Meanwhile, in her attic, the old lady was coming near the end of her story.

‘I went to live in a little room on the Left Bank and I was all right. I bought a dog.’

‘What kind of dog?’ asked Annika eagerly.

‘A little schnauzer. I would have liked a big one, but not in the middle of town.’

‘Yes, schnauzers are good,’ said Annika and sighed, for her quest for a dog of her own was not making any progress.

‘So I was all right. I still had my jewels you see. I still had the Star of Kazan and the butterfly brooch and the diamond tiara and the rings… I used to look at them, when I was alone. They were so beautiful. And while I had them I was still rich — very, very rich. But of course one by one I had to sell them to buy food and pay the rent.’

‘Were you very sad?’

‘Yes, I was. But I had a friend — such a good friend. He was really a saint, that man; he was a hunchback and he was a brilliant jeweller — he built up one of the most famous jewellery businesses in Paris: Fabrice, he was called. He remembered me from when I was famous and he helped me. Whenever I needed money, I would take him a piece of jewellery and he would sell it for me at the best possible price. But — this is what was so special — every time he sold a piece for me he had it copied in glass or paste so that it looked almost exactly like the original. He sold my Star of Kazan and copied it, and my butterfly brooch and my cluster rings… and after a while I got just as fond of the copies as the originals. I thought they were just as beautiful even though they weren’t worth anything at all. Wasn’t that kind of him?’

‘Yes, it was. It was very kind.’

‘And so I managed for twenty years. I suppose I could have saved some money, but I didn’t and there were other people as badly off as me whom I wanted to help. Perhaps I had got into the habit of strewing. Then the day came when I didn’t have anything left to sell, and just about this time my jeweller friend died.’

Annika leaned forward. ‘What did you do?’

‘What everybody does when their luck runs out. I was old by then. I got what work I could, cleaning the streets… scrubbing… There were quite a few of us — people who’d been on the stage or in the music world. And there were soup kitchens… I managed. Then I decided to come home to Austria. I suppose I wanted to die here, or perhaps I thought my family would… and you see in the end they did take me in, though I don’t know why.’

Annika did know why. It was because Herr Egghart wanted to become a statue and you can’t become a statue if you leave your aunt to die in an asylym — but of course she said nothing.

‘Anyway I’m glad I did,’ the old lady went on, ‘because I made a new friend and not many people make friends at ninety-four.’ And she stretched out her hand and laid it for a moment on Annika’s arm.

Ellie was right about the Eggharts’ great-aunt. She was getting very weak. Sometimes now when Annika came she would do no more than smile at her before she drifted off to sleep, and when she spoke it might be just a few words, which did not always make sense.

‘A rose garden in the sky,’ she said once, and the maid who had come to straighten the bed said, ‘Poor old thing, she’s wandering in her mind.’

But just a week before the Eggharts were due to return, Annika found the old lady alert and excited with a mischievous look in her eye.

‘I’ll show you something,’ she said, ‘if you can open the trunk. It’s locked, but I wouldn’t let them keep the key. I made them give it back and then I forgot where I’d hidden it, but now I’ve found it. It was in my other bedsocks.’

The trunk was a big one, banded in rings of wood, but Annika found she could pull it over to the bed.

The key turned easily in the lock and Annika lifted the lid.

Inside were dresses in gauze and satin, wisps of muslin, a wreath of daisies, silver gloves… The clothes were very old; some were a little torn, here and there were splashes of powder still clinging to the material, or dabs of greasepaint. It was like opening a door on to a theatre dressing room.

‘Now take off the top shelf…’

The trunk was separated into two parts, like a box of chocolates. Annika took off the top — and found herself looking at a large number of parcels wrapped in newspaper.

‘Go on. Unwrap them.’

Annika took out a packet wrapped in paper so old that it was beginning to crumble, and unwrapped it.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, how beautiful!’

She was holding a necklace of rubies, the jewels seeming to flash fire against the setting of gold.

‘The stones came from a special mine in Burma. I was given it after I was an Eastern Princess and strewed lotus blossoms. I think it was lotus blossoms… You wouldn’t know the stones aren’t real, would you?’

‘No. And anyway it doesn’t matter — they couldn’t be more splendid.’

‘Go on; unwrap them all. I’d like to see them once again.’

The next parcel was a butterfly brooch in sapphires — the stones as blue as the famous morphos of the Amazon. The wings were outlined in tiny diamonds and the antennae trembled with filigree gold.

‘I wore that when we were presented to the Duc d’Orléans. And those earrings were brought round after I was Cupid and strewed pink-paper hearts. The diamonds were eighteen carats — if I still had the real ones you could have bought a castle with them. But you can see what a craftsman that jeweller was. You’d have to know a lot about jewels to tell the difference.’

One by one Annika unpacked the parcels and laid them on the bed, till the old lady seemed to be floating on an ocean of colour: the piercing blue of the sapphires, the warm glow of the rubies… and the brilliance of the Star of Kazan from the country of dark firs and glittering snow…

Right at the bottom was a small parcel, wrapped not in newspaper but in a piece of black velvet. Inside was a box which opened to show a picture of a man and a woman standing in front of a house — a woman with thick, light hair, a man with a lean, intelligent face. It must have been one of the earliest photos ever taken, but Annika knew at once who they were.

‘That’s you and your painter, isn’t it? You look so happy.’

The old lady took the photo in its wooden frame, and as she cupped the picture in both hands, the jewels heaped on the bedspread were forgotten. ‘So happy…’ she said softly. ‘So very, very happy…’

‘You see,’ said Annika, when she got back home, ‘I told you she would get better.’

But the next day the old lady asked for a lawyer, though she had no money to leave, and for a priest. That evening the doctor’s carriage was seen in front of the Eggharts’ house. It was still there two hours later — and then the young maid was seen running wild-eyed towards the post office.