The Star of Kazan

8 The Christmas Carp

Annika used to love October almost best of all the months: the smell of chestnuts roasting everywhere on street corners, the school outing to the Vienna Woods to collect mushrooms and berries, the drift of blue smoke from garden bonfires…

But this year she saw autumn not just as beautiful but as sad. She missed the old lady and for the first time she wondered about her own future.

Stefan too seemed less settled. He still carried his younger brothers about, delivered the washing for his mother, ran errands… But once, in the hut, he put it into words: ‘I don’t want to end up spearing rubbish with a stick like my father,’ he told Annika and Pauline.

‘Yes, but what do you want to do?’

Stefan blushed. ‘I want to be an engineer. I’d like to build bridges.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Everything. Even if I got into the technical school, I couldn’t spend long training. My parents need the money I’ll bring in when I start work.’

Because she felt restless, Annika’s daydreams about her mother became longer and more detailed. She came now not in a carriage but in one of the new motors like the Eggharts’, except that it wasn’t a garish yellow but a soft and tasteful grey. She wore a hat with a plume and carried a sable muff, and the dog she brought had become grander too: a Russian borzoi, white and brown and black, with a silken tail. But the words with which she entered the house were always the same:

‘Where is she, my long-lost daughter? Take me to her, please — take me to my child!’

But when the first snow fell, Annika cheered up; and in no time, she and Ellie and Sigrid were off to the market to buy the Christmas tree.

This was a serious business. The tree could not be big; it had to fit into a particular corner of the dining room — but it had to be perfect.

And it always was.

As they came out of the market, carrying the tree, they saw Leopold with one of the stallholders, loading an absolutely enormous fir tree on to a cart. Beside him stood Loremarie looking smug.

‘It’s the biggest there was,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It’s probably the biggest in the whole of Vienna.’

Annika stopped for a moment and felt a pang of envy. What would it be like to have a tree that would fill a whole room with its scent and its beauty? She imagined candlelight from the floor to the ceiling, the shimmer of silver and gold…

But that night, Mitzi, the Eggharts’ maid, came round to see them.

‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘The tree’s too big! They had to cut the top off and Loremarie’s having a tantrum because there’s nowhere to hang the star!’

After the tree, Ellie and Annika began to make the gingerbread house. By this time the professors had realized that Christmas was near and started to think about presents. On the grounds that the best presents are those one would like to have oneself, Professor Julius bought Annika the new edition of Kloezberger’s Mesozoic Fossils, and Professor Emil bought her The Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Painting, which they gave to Sigrid to wrap up. Professor Gertrude took the advice of the lady in the shop and bought her a manicure set that included tweezers for removing facial hair.

Then Sigrid brought down the decorations from the attic. They had been made over the years from scraps of silk, ribbons, fir cones painted silver and gold — but each year they made new things, and each year the sweets had to be wrapped in silver paper and hung on the lower branches so that the younger Bodeks could reach them when the time came.

In Vienna Christmas is celebrated on the twenty-fourth — on Holy Night. But it is not a goose or a turkey that is roasted on this night of nights. No one on Holy Night would dream of eating meat. What is roasted is a fish — and not any fish but a carp, the largest and most succulent fish in Austria’s rivers.

And just three days before Christmas, the carp arrived.

It arrived packed in lumps of ice from the salt mines of Hallstadt and the fishmonger had done them proud.

‘It’s the biggest we’ve ever had,’ said Annika, and certainly the fish was magnificent, the kind that appears in fairy stories, rearing up out of the sea and granting wishes.

During the next day it was clear that Ellie had something on her mind. She and Sigrid talked together, and when Annika came they stopped suddenly and looked at her in a considering sort of way.

That night, just as Annika had got into bed, she heard footsteps coming up to her door and Ellie entered. She usually said goodnight downstairs — Ellie’s legs were tired by the end of the day — so it was clear she had something important to say, and she had.

‘We think you can do it.’ Ellie’s voice was solemn. ‘We have made up our minds.’

‘Do what?’

‘Cook it entirely by yourself. Without any help.’

‘Cook what?’ said Annika, bewildered.

And Ellie said, ‘The Christmas carp.’

Annika came downstairs the next morning looking pale, with dark smudges under her eyes. Ellie too looked as though she’d had a sleepless night.

‘I’m sorry, pet, I shouldn’t have suggested it. You’re too young. There’s ten things to go into the sauce alone, and there’s the stuffing and the basting…’

Annika put up her chin. ‘Yes, I can. I can and I will. Please will you get down The Book for me.’

So Ellie lifted down her mother’s worn and faded recipe book, which contained all the wisdom of her family, and Annika found the page headed ‘Christmas Carp’.

The instructions were written in crabbed handwriting in violet ink, not even by Ellie’s mother, but by her grandmother, and they covered nearly three pages.

Annika began to read. The fish had to be washed four times in running cold water and the fifth time in water and lemon juice. At least four times, the book said. After that it had to be put to soak in a marinade — a kind of bath of white wine, chopped onions, herbs and lemon.

‘It says here that Chablis is the best wine to use.’

Sigrid raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s the most expensive,’ she said.

‘But it’s the best,’ said Annika firmly, and Sigrid went down to the cellar without another word.

By lunchtime the fish was in its marinade, where it would stay for the rest of the day, and Annika had started to assemble the things she needed for the stuffing. She had been given the main kitchen table to work on. Ellie prepared the vegetables and the desserts at the smaller side table, but she was beginning to suffer, seeing Annika heave the enormous fish kettle about. Annika’s hands were red and chafed, she had tied her hair up in an old cloth, and when anybody spoke to her she didn’t hear. Something was sure to go wrong, thought Ellie, and to stop herself from interfering she took herself off to the shops.

By now the news that Annika was cooking the professors’ Christmas carp entirely by herself had gone round the square. Pauline in particular was very upset and she came in after lunch bringing her scrapbook of people who had done brave and difficult things even though they were too young or too old or too ill.

‘There’s one here about a girl of ten who swam across the Danube to rescue her grandfather, even though she had the measles.’

But Annika did not seem to be cheered up by this. She had reached the grating stage: grating honey cake, grating lemon rind, grating horseradish, grating (but only slightly) her middle finger…

In the afternoon Ellie returned and sent Annika out into the crisp snow to get a newspaper, thinking some fresh air would do her good, but this turned out to be a mistake, because the lady in the paper shop told her that her mother’s stuffing for the carp at Christmas had always contained chopped prunes.

Annika was unsettled by this, but then she remembered that the paper-shop lady’s family had come from Czechoslovakia, where they probably ate all sorts of things, and she turned back to Ellie’s book.

There was now only one more day to go, and the professors began to quarrel about the best way to stop the tree from going up in flames if the candles set it alight. Professor Julius believed in a bucket of sand to stand beside the tree. Professor Emil thought that a bucket of water was better, and Professor Gertrude favoured a large blanket with which to smother the flames. They argued about this every year and could never agree, so this year as in other years they took all three into the dining room. Sigrid polished the knives and forks, the napkin rings, the candlesticks… Ellie put the finishing touches to the poppy-seed strudel, the chocolate mousse, the iced and marbled gugelhupf, which is the most famous cake in Vienna.

And Annika removed the carp from its bath and patted it dry and stuffed it with truffles and chopped celery and chestnut purée and lemon rind and grated honey cake and dark plum jam, and greased the gigantic roasting tin with clarified butter and laid the carp to rest on it until the following day, when it would go into the oven. There was only the sauce to make now, but there wasn’t anything ‘only’ about the sauce — which took up a page and a half in Ellie’s mother’s book.

Later that evening, Frau Bodek came over with a blouse for Annika which she had stitched in her spare time, though where she got spare time from was not easy to see. But she too unsettled Annika, for Frau Bodek’s aunt in Moravia had always added chopped walnuts to the sauce.

‘It gave it a lovely crunch,’ Frau Bodek said.

But Annika was determined to stick to the the recipe handed down from Ellie’s grandmother. Anything else would be cheating.

And yet that night, the last night before Christmas, she felt restless. A single word kept going round and round in her head, and the word was nutmeg.

Only why? Nutmeg was a lovely spice, but there wasn’t a word about nutmeg in the instructions for the sauce. Other spices, yes, and other herbs… but not that.

‘I mustn’t,’ said Annika again. ‘I mustn’t change anything or add anything. It’s got to be the way it always was.’

The bells woke her in the dark on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She shrugged on her clothes, and then she and Ellie and Sigrid went across the square to church for early-morning mass.

When she got back she knew with a deadly certainty that lunch was going to be a failure. The carp would come apart, the sauce would curdle, the stuffing would leak. Fighting down panic, she went to the larder to fetch the fish and put it in the oven.

Then, right at the last minute, she did something she knew she would regret.

The three professors were dressed in their best clothes, their starched napkins were ready round their necks, their eyes were expectant and the table was set with the gold-rimmed Meissen plates, which were only used on very special days. Then the door opened and Annika entered with the carp.

The professors smiled benevolently. Ellie brought the vegetables and the sauce. Professor Julius began to cut the fish into slices.

‘Delicious,’ they said. ‘Absolutely delicious. Just as always.’

But when Ellie and Sigrid and Annika sat down in the kitchen to their share of the fish, the worst happened.

Ellie put a helping of carp to her mouth. Her face clouded. Annika had seldom seen her look so angry.

‘What have you done?’ she asked, aghast. ‘What have you done, Annika? My mother would turn in her grave.’

She took another mouthful. An awful silence fell.

Then Sigrid said, ‘Just taste, Ellie, just taste, don’t lecture.’

Ellie speared another piece of fish in its dark sauce… and another… She closed her eyes. She still did not speak, but when the first course was finished she got up and fetched the black book from the dresser and with it a pen and a bottle of ink.

Then, ‘You can write it in,’ she said to Annika. ‘Don’t smudge it.’

Annika took the pen. ‘What do I write?’ she asked, bewildered.

Ellie pointed to the instructions for cooking the Christmas carp. ‘Here… Under the last line write: “A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.”’

The tree did not catch fire. Sigrid had made Annika a brown velvet dress with a wide lace collar, and Ellie gave her a silver charm to add to her bracelet. Later the Bodeks came and Stefan lifted up the smaller ones to get their sugar mice and gingerbread hearts from the tree.

All in all it had been a wonderful Christmas; ‘the best ever,’ Annika said, as she said each year, and meant it. She had quite forgotten her doubts and sadness. Her future lay clear before her; she would learn to be the best cook in Vienna — perhaps even a famous cook who had dishes named after her. Certainly there was no better place to grow up than here in this familiar square in the most beautiful city in the world.

She opened her double windows, which she was not supposed to do, and held out a hand to catch a snowflake. Faintly, across the cobbles, there came the noise of a child screaming. Then the Eggharts’ door opened and Loremarie threw her new skating boots out into the street.

‘They’re the wrong colour,’ she yelled. ‘I told you, I wanted them to be blue!’

And Annika, who had prayed only that morning not to think unkind thoughts, felt that this was the perfect end to the day.