The Star of Kazan

29 The Palace of Grossenfluss

Gudrun had not been lying. Grossenfluss was a palace. It was a very large and very grand palace, perhaps the largest and grandest palace in East Prussia. Built in 1723 by Prince Mettenburg, the front facade measured 400 metres in length. The roof was guarded by 100 lead warriors with drawn bows; the niches and ledges were crammed with warlike carvings: the heads of captured Turks, spiked helmets, crossed swords and cavalry horses with fiery nostrils. On either side of the front door stood two stone heroes, each crushing a wriggling traitor under his foot.

Inside there were vaulted stone corridors, fortified windows and a vast staircase of marble surrounding a stairwell three floors deep.

But this palace, which looked as though it had been built for ogres or giants, was not used now for parties and pomp. It had become a school.

Not, however, an ordinary school. A school for Daughters of the Nobility and a very select and special place, as Frau Edeltraut had explained to Annika when at last she had revealed the surprise she had prepared for her.

‘It’s such wonderful news!’ Frau Edeltraut had said, taking Annika’s hand as they sat side by side on the sofa in her boudoir. ‘They have accepted you!’

‘Who?’ Annika was bewildered. ‘Who has accepted me?’

‘The ladies of Grossenfluss! The committee! And you can start next week.’

Annika was still totally at sea. ‘But what is… Grossenfluss?’

‘Oh, Annika,’ her mother laughed merrily, ‘I always forget where you were brought up. Grossenfluss is one of the most famous schools in Germany. It only accepts daughters of the nobility and it trains them to become worthy women of the Fatherland, able to take their place anywhere in society. The principal, Fräulein von Donner, has the Order of the Closed Fist, one of the highest awards which the emperor gives, and it is very rarely awarded to a woman. I was so worried that they would not let you come because of… well, your father. I could not swear to the purity of his birth. But when I told them what a dear good girl you were, they relented. I cannot tell you how pleased I am for you. Your future is assured. Girls who have been to Grossenfluss can become ladies-in-waiting, or companions to high-born widows. Nothing is impossible for them.’

‘But… do you mean I have to go away? To stay in the school all the time, like Hermann?’

‘Well, yes, my dear, naturally. There will be so much for you to learn — more than children who have… who have been brought up in a good home from the start. But the time will fly. In seven years you will be ready to go out into the world again, and how grateful you will be to the people who have taught you so much.’

Annika had risen from the sofa, and walked over to the window, keeping her face turned away from her mother.

‘I don’t want to go away,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘I’ve only just found you. I’ve only just come.’

‘Now, my dear, you mustn’t talk like a common little girl. Like a servant. In our class — the class to which you now belong — we are trained to think of the future. We are trained to achieve and to conquer and to let nothing stand in our way.’

But Annika was overwhelmed by misery. She was to go away, not back to Vienna, but to strangers, to a world she knew nothing about. And, unable to help herself, she threw herself sobbing into her mother’s arms. ‘Please, please, please, don’t send me away,’ she begged. ‘I’ll do anything, but please don’t send me to that place.’

And she buried her head in her mother’s lap, the first time she had dared to do so.

‘Oh, Annika, my dearest child, you break my heart,’ said Edeltraut, stroking Annika’s hair. ‘I was so sure you would be delighted. Think of Hermann.’

‘But I’m not Hermann, I’m me, and I don’t want to be a lady-in-waiting. I just want to be at home. Please, please, don’t make me go. I’ll do anything—’

But her mother’s hands now fell away from her daughter’s hair. She sat up very straight, and gently but firmly pushed Annika away.

‘My dear, you don’t want to disappoint me, do you? You don’t want to make me sorry that I came to fetch you?’ And in a voice of finality, ‘We shall leave next week.’

But in the end it was Mathilde who took Annika to Grossenfluss. Frau Edeltraut was called away on urgent business to Switzerland to do with Herr von Grotius’s will, she said, and she was taking Oswald.

‘There are always so many stages to go through in these affairs,’ she told Annika. ‘But Mathilde will see that you get there safely.’

There was no shopping to do before Annika left. It was old Princess Mettenburg, the great-granddaughter of the man who had built the palace, who had turned it into a school where girls of good family could be trained to be a credit to the Fatherland. The uniform was provided; there were no fees to pay. The princess was very rich and this was her way of helping her country.

‘Of course, the discipline is strict,’ said Mathilde as they sat in the train. ‘But you will quickly get used to that. Gudrun is quite jealous of you, going to live in such a splendid place.’

‘Couldn’t Gudrun come too?’ asked Annika. ‘She’s much more nobly born than me.’

‘Gudrun has a weak chest,’ said Mathilde.

But she turned her head away, not meeting Annika’s eyes.

They left the train at Potsdam and were driven to Grossenfluss in a closed carriage sent by the school. Annika could never travel long without any air and soon she felt so sick that she saw the facade of the palace, looming out of the mist, almost with relief.

‘Take your dress off.’

Annika slipped her dress over her head and the lady with pins stuck all over the collar of her black overall took it away and hung it in a cupboard.

‘Your number is 127 — remember that. Everything you own or wear must have that number. Now try the uniform.’

Annika had already seen the uniform on the girls walking with bent heads and folded arms down the long stone corridor. It was black with thick green stripes, worn with a starched black collar and a black apron.

She slipped it over her head and the seamstress pulled it straight.

‘But it’s been worn,’ said Annika. ‘There’s a dress preserver under the arms.’

‘Of course it’s been worn,’ said the seamstress. ‘You didn’t expect a new one, surely. When you outgrow it, it will go to another girl. “Thrift and Discipline” is our motto. Now come here and let me do your hair.’

‘I’ve just brushed it.’

‘It can’t stay like that. It’s got to be pinned back.’ She took out a bundle of hairpins and began to jab them into Annika’s hair and neck. ‘Stand still.’

Annika stood still. She felt at that moment as though she would never move again.

‘Now these are your night clothes and your underwear. Everything you brought with you has to be handed in. Books, money, letters… You can keep your hairbrush and the Bible. And remember you are number 127. Your number is the most important thing about you.’

There was a mirror against one wall of the room. Annika, turning to go, saw a kind of female convict, a girl in stripes who could be picked off by a bullet from a warder if she tried to escape. Prisoner 127.

A pale, dark-eyed girl called Olga von Seefeld was put in charge of Annika. She explained the rules. No talking in the corridors, no running ever, only the back stairs to be used by the pupils; the main stairs were for the staff. A full curtsy whenever she met one of the teachers, a half-curtsy for older girls.

‘Can we write letters?’ asked Annika. ‘Would they let us have stamps?’

‘We’re allowed one letter a month, but the teachers have to read them first. If we put anything in about being homesick or the food being bad or anything like that, it isn’t sent and we get punished. You can’t write the first one till you’ve been here a month, and you can’t get any letters till then either. It’s so you settle down.’

‘Do you… are you happy here?’ Annika plucked up the courage to ask the question.

Olga’s dark eyes rested for a moment on Annika’s face.

‘It is a privilege to be here and learn to be a credit to the Fatherland,’ she said in a flat voice.

She took Annika to join the line of girls waiting to go in to supper. A bell shrilled and they shuffled forward into a bare, vaulted room with green linoleum on the tables. In front of each girl was a plate of stew, mostly consisting of potatoes, but the girl standing opposite Annika was looking down at something different: a bowl of congealed rice speckled with a few pieces of dried mushroom.

‘That’s Minna,’ Olga whispered. ‘She didn’t finish her food at lunch — she can’t bear mushrooms — so she has to eat it now for supper. And if she doesn’t eat it for supper she gets it again at breakfast. It’s the rule, food mustn’t be wasted.’

The bell shrilled again and the girls said grace and sat down. As Annika swallowed her tasteless stew, she smiled at Minna. But Minna did not smile back. She had picked up her spoon and two huge tears were rolling down her cheeks.

‘Once a girl had her breakfast served up for two whole days,’ Olga went on. ‘She was sick over it in the end — they had to stop then.’

After supper there were prayers in the hall, then another bell summoning them to their dormitories. In Annika’s were thirty iron beds, each covered in a single grey blanket. There were no curtains between the beds, only bare lockers. A bell rang, and the girls filed in wearing their regulation-flannel nightdresses, and knelt down. Another bell, and they rose and got between the scratchy sheets.

The light went out.

It was the old Princess Mettenburg who had turned Grossenfluss into a school, but she no longer lived in the palace herself. Once a month she came to inspect both the pupils and the staff. Once a fortnight she sent some of her musicians to give concerts of patriotic music to the pupils. It was the headmistress, Fräulein von Donner, who ran the school.

No one who met Fräulein von Donner was surprised that she was the only woman in Germany with the Order of the Closed Fist. She was a terrifying figure with a moustache, grey hair pulled relentlessly into a bun and rimless pince-nez on a metal chain. One of her hips had been displaced as a child and she walked with the aid of a stick. The thump, thump, thump of this stick along the stone passages was like the bell of the old plague bearers announcing another death.

Annika was taken to see her on the second day.

The headmistress was sitting at her desk. Behind her hovered her assistant, Mademoiselle Vincent, a thin white-faced woman who moved like an eel, gliding along in a wave-like motion, her head thrust forward.

‘You know our motto, “Thrift and Discipline”?’

‘Yes, Fräulein von Donner.’

‘For you it will be necessary to be particularly careful in view of your early life. Lapses in your case would be particularly serious.’

‘Yes, Fräulein von Donner.’

‘We shall do our best to train you to be a worthy daughter of the Fatherland.’

‘Yes. Only Germany isn’t my Fatherland. I’m Austrian. At least I used to be.’

Fräulein von Donner looked at her as though she couldn’t believe her ears. She fingered the three keys round her neck: the big key for the front door, a smaller key for the isolation room where troublesome girls were kept, and the smallest key of all which was also the most important. It was the key to the cubbyhole where the recently installed telephone lived.

Then, ‘That is something I would advise you not to mention. Or even to think,’ she said — and Annika was dismissed.

For the first week Annika still hoped. She hoped that her mother meant well by her and that something good could be made out of her new life. Perhaps there would be one teacher who could make her subject interesting; one girl who would show her friendship.

She set herself to work hard. She learned to walk downstairs with wooden blocks on her head so as to aquire an iron-straight back, and to recite the family tree of Europe’s noble families from the Almanach de Gotha. She learned poems about the glory of war, and who should be placed above a field marshal at the dinner table. There were even a few proper lessons, but not many because the teachers were as cowed and miserable as the pupils and the sound of the headmistress’s stick along the corridor sent all ideas of grammar or arithmetic out of their heads.

In the afternoon, if it did not rain, they were taken for a walk, lining up in pairs, but not allowed to choose their partners in case they formed special friendships. The walk took forty minutes exactly, marching down the avenue, turning left at the gate along the road to the village, then back to the drive behind the house. At all other times it was forbidden to go out of doors.

Annika’s mother had told her that it was difficult to get into the school, but it seemed to her that all the girls were there because they were not really wanted. Olga’s mother was dead and her stepmother did not like her. Ilse had a club foot and was teased by her sisters. Hedwig had been brought up by grandparents who found the care of a young girl too much for them.

‘Don’t let anyone tell you different,’ she said to Annika. ‘We’re here to be out of the way and because we don’t have to pay. The Fatherland could manage without us very well.’

The food was worse than Annika could have believed and the punishments were endless: being shut in a dark cupboard, kneeling on dried peas… Minna was served her breakfast four times then sent to the isolation room for a week.

Annika lost weight. She found it difficult to sleep. One day she asked Olga what had happened to pupil 126.

‘Hedwig is 125 and I’m 127, but who is 126?’

Olga looked down at her feet.

‘We are not allowed to talk about her.’

But Annika found that she already knew. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘She died in the school?’

‘Don’t ask me any more,’ said Olga. ‘I’ll get into trouble.’

But Annika was not so easy to shake off. ‘What was she like?’

‘She had nice hair,’ said Olga, and walked away.

All the same, some part of Annika would not give in to total despair. She forced herself to remember details of her life when it had been good; when she was busy and fufilled. So, lying in bed at night, Annika recalled her time in Ellie’s kitchen — and when she felt misery engulfing her completely she cooked the Christmas carp. She didn’t leave anything out. The part at the beginning where she washed the fish four times in cold water. Then the marinade: chopped onions, herbs, lemons and white wine. Not any old white wine but Chablis, which was the best and which Sigrid had fetched for her from the cellar.

Lying in her cold and narrow bed, Annika took herself through all the stages and when she reached the moment when Ellie had taken down the black book and told her to write ‘A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce’, she could usually drop off to sleep.

But then came the night when she was going through the ingredients for the stuffing: truffles and chopped celery… grated honey cake and lemon rind and chestnut purée… but there was one other thing. One thing that was really important. Not chopped prunes — the lady in the paper shop had suggested chopped prunes, but Annika hadn’t used them. But it was something like prunes… Oh God, what was it? If she forgot that, if she forgot how to cook, everything was lost.

She sat up in bed in the dormitory where the girls snored and snuffled and whimpered in their sleep — but she could not remember.

And at that moment she was defeated, and she sank down into a dark place where nobody could reach her.