The Star of Kazan

38 The Letter

Nobody could believe it.

‘You’re not going to do anything about the jewels? You’re going to let her have them and say nothing?’

Everybody was amazed and distressed, but Pauline was furious.

‘You must be completely mad,’ she said.

They had all gathered in the courtyard to find out where Annika had been.

‘Would you give your mother up to the police?’ asked Annika. ‘Would you, Ellie?’ She turned to the professors. ‘Would you?’

For a moment she had silenced them. Ellie remembered her mother, who had once taken a small wilted sprig of parsley hanging down from the side of a market stall because the stallholder was busy serving a queue of customers and she was in a hurry. The following day she had sent Ellie to walk five kilometres in the heat down a dusty road to find the woman and pay her.

‘You see,’ said Annika, ‘you wouldn’t. Not your own mother.’

But what they minded — what was almost impossible to understand — was that Annika was going back of her own free will to Spittal. She wasn’t even going to try and stay in Vienna.

‘She asked me to forgive her; she went down on her knees to me.’

Pauline snorted and the professors frowned at her, but it was true that they too were very much upset. They had given Annika a way out and she had not even tried to take it.

‘It’s just snobbishness,’ said Pauline. ‘You really like being a “von” and having people bow and scrape to you. You must like it or you wouldn’t be so feeble.’

‘No.’ Annika’s wretchedness was beyond tears. ‘I don’t like it.’

The boredom of life at Spittal came back to her. The long empty days, not being allowed to help… and she would go back without Zed, without Rocco’s whinny of greeting when she went down to the farm. Without the farm…

She set her teeth. She had given her word and she could see no other way. Perhaps people who had always had mothers felt differently, but to her, her mother’s arrival after the years of daydreaming about her had been a miracle. She could not now turn her back on the person who had given her life.

‘It’s in the Bible,’ Annika said wearily. ‘It’s where Ruth says, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”’

But it was not wise to quote things to Pauline, who had always read more than anybody else. ‘Ruth didn’t say it to her mother, she said it to her mother-in-law, and that’s completely different.’

But Annika had fought her battle on the way back from the Riverside; no one could shake her decision. If people did not forgive those closest to them, how could the world go on?

‘It’s in the pictures too, everywhere.’ She turned to Uncle Emil. ‘The whole museum is full of mothers holding their children.’

Emil, however, could see no connection between Frau von Tannenberg and the Holy Mother of God, and said so.

The person who said the least and perhaps understood the most was Ellie — but her hurt was absolute. She knew that Annika was not a snob and that she was unimpressed by riches. Annika was a person who was interested in doing things, not in having them. Only an overwhelming love for her mother could make her behave as she had done.

Up to now Ellie had hoped that her foster child still remembered her old life with affection. Now she faced the truth, but she did not know how she was going to endure a separation for the second time.

‘I think I’ll go back to my people,’ she said to Sigrid. ‘They’ll be glad of some extra help. They’d take you in too.’

Ellie’s cousins ran a little hotel high in the Alps.

‘I’m sure it’ll be better up there,’ she went on. ‘The mountain air’s so thin it makes you see things differently.’

But the air would have to be very thin indeed, thought Sigrid, to make either of them forget the girl they had brought up.

Annika had asked for two days more in Vienna. She wanted to say goodbye to Zed — and she wanted, for the last time, to cook a meal.

‘I shan’t try and help or interfere at Spittal,’ she said to Ellie. ‘They’ve got servants and there would be no point. But I’d like to make one meal for all of you tonight. If the professors don’t mind we could all eat in the dining room. And I’d like to ask Frau Bodek.’

She began the preparations for the farewell meal at once, writing the menu down and assembling the ingredients.

‘Would you like me to help you or do you want to work alone?’ said Ellie.

‘I would like it if you helped me, Ellie. Please. And Sigrid. It’s not a difficult meal, but I’ll need lots of ice… and somehow I’ve got to get hold of molasses.’

‘Molasses?’

‘You’ll see. I want to make those Norrland Nussel — at least I do if you’ve kept the recipe I sent you.’

‘Of course I’ve kept it. It’s on the back of the envelope it came on. I put it in the black book.’

‘You haven’t tried them yet?’

‘No. I wasn’t sure if I could get tansy, but Sigrid says she’s seen some in the market.’

‘Good.’ Annika had finished scribbling. ‘I’m going to start with beef broth with very small dumplings; they’ll be light for Uncle Emil’s stomach. Then roast saddle of venison with peas and celeriac and potato puffs… then a strawberry bombe — and with the coffee, the Norrland Nussel. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds just fine,’ said Ellie. ‘Now you just tell us what you want us to do.’

They cooked together all afternoon. Cooking is hard physical work, and while they were busy pounding and stirring and chopping and sieving, the grief of the parting that was to come could be pushed to the back of their minds, and be endured.

‘Now for the Nussel,’ said Annika. ‘I do hope I can get them right. I can’t see how they can help being heavy with the molasses and the chestnuts… but the ones I had in Bad Haxenfeld were really light. And she was such a nice woman, the one who gave me the recipe.’

Ellie was reaching up for the black book, looking at the envelope she had placed between its pages. Annika’s handwriting sprawled over the back. ‘It’s the egg white that will keep them light,’ she said. ‘Twelve eggs, it says here; we’ll have some beating to do.’

‘You can get egg-beaters that work mechanically,’ said Annika. ‘I saw one in a shop.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Ellie. ‘No egg is going to be touched by that new-fangled machinery in my kitchen.’

But Annika was looking at the envelope. ‘What an idiot — I sent it on the back of the letter I found in the desk at Spittal. I suppose I’d better take it back with me when I go.’

And suddenly the lull in which the three of them had worked together, as so often before, was over.

The farewell meal had been cleared away. The food had been a triumph, but no one felt very cheerful and Pauline actually lost her temper and stormed out before the strawberry bombe, though this was her favourite dessert. It happened when Frau Bodek asked Annika if she really had to go back to Spittal and Annika said, ‘She is my mother,’ in a way that made Pauline, she said, feel sick.

‘Did you like the Norrland Nussel?’ Annika asked Ellie. ‘What did you think?’

‘They were good,’ said Ellie, who did not feel like saying that the whole meal had tasted to her like sawdust. And, looking at Annika’s anxious face, ‘I think you ought to copy the recipe into the book.’

‘Really?’ Annika was pleased. ‘Then you can cook them when I’ve gone.’

And Ellie nodded, though she thought that nothing was less likely than that she would swallow a Nussel ever again.

‘I’ll do it in my room,’ said Annika, and she took the black book and the envelope and kissed Ellie and Sigrid rather quickly, because this was not a night for lingering over anything emotional.

The house was very quiet. Zed had gone to say goodbye to Stefan’s uncle. He had already packed up his belongings in the bookshop and set up his camp bed in Sigrid’s ironing room, ready for an early start.

The cathedral clock struck eleven. This time the day after tomorrow she would be gone. No, that was silly, she wouldn’t think like that. There might be an earthquake. She might die in her sleep.

She reached for the black book and for her pen and inkwell.

‘Twelve egg whites, seven ounces of chestnut purée, six tablespoons of molasses…’ wrote Annika.

The letter was still there inside the envelope — probably it was just an old bill, in which case there was no point in taking it back to Spittal.

She finished copying in the recipe, and slit open the envelope.

Annika read the letter once, peering at the old-fashioned, looped handwriting. Then she read it again.

It was definitely not a bill.