The Star of Kazan

40 Pauline’s Scrapbook

After she had stormed out of Annika’s farewell supper, Pauline shut herself up in the bookshop.

Her grandfather was away at a book sale; Zed had dismantled his camp bed and taken his things next door to pack.

‘I am alone,’ said Pauline to herself in a hollow voice. ‘I shall always be alone. My friend is going back to her man-eating mother because she’s a snob and doesn’t like me enough to stay in Vienna. Very well. I shall manage. I have my books. I have my dreams.’

All this sounded so tragic that she cheered up a little and took out her scrapbook. Since Annika had been brought back from Grossenfluss, Pauline had had no time to paste in her cuttings. Now she got down the bottle of glue, and set to work.

The story about the boy with whooping cough who had waded right through the sewers beneath the city to find his terrapin did not take long to paste in. Nor did the one about the woman who had thrown herself over her twin daughters during a sudden sandstorm and shielded them with her body, even though she was completely covered in boils at the time.

But the third cutting was longer. It was an article about a man who was 102 years old and had had twelve operations and was on his deathbed when he heard the mewing of a trapped kitten on a ledge outside his house. All his relatives were standing round the bed and he asked them one by one in a failing voice to rescue the little animal. But none of them would, so he rose from his deathbed and climbed out on to the ledge in his nightshirt and brought the kitten safely down — and then he died.

Pauline read through the story once again; then she turned it over and picked up the bottle of glue and the brush.

But the brush stayed in mid-air, because she was looking at a smudgy picture of a dapper man in evening clothes and a top hat.

Underneath the picture were the words: ‘Eminent Viennese lawyer faces prison. Pumpelmann-Schlissinger accused of fraud and illegal practices.’

Pauline read the piece once, then read it again.

There are things you can forget and things you can’t — and even if she hadn’t known quite a lot about Herr Pumpelmann-Schlissinger she would not have forgotten his name.

He was the lawyer who had witnessed the document that Amelia Plotz, the midwife at Pettlelsdorf, had signed.

The document in which she had sworn that on the sixth of June 1897 she had attended Frau Edeltraut von Tannenberg and delivered a baby girl.

Pauline had seen the document in the professors’ sitting room, with Amelia Plotz’s sprawling signature countersigned by the neat, spiky signature of the dapper laywer, and all of it stamped with red sealing wax bearing the double-headed eagle of the House of Austria.

Fraud and illegal practices. What exactly did that mean? As far as Pauline could see, it meant that Pumpelmann-Schlissinger was a cheat. Which meant… But as Pauline saw what it might mean she felt fear rise inside her. Her stomach churned, her heart began to thump and she closed her eyes because the room had begun to spin.

It meant that she, Pauline, would have to leave the shop — and set out alone because her friends were not there to help her.

It meant getting on a tram by herself, and after the tram reached the Southern Railway Station it meant buying a ticket to Pettelsdorf, and when she reached Pettelsdorf it meant asking to see Amelia Plotz the midwife. Pauline knew about midwives — after all, her mother was a nurse. Midwives often had to bring babies into the world without the help of a doctor or anyone else, and in the middle of the night. They had huge strong arms to pull out babies, and they boiled kettles of water and tore up sheets…

‘I can’t,’ said Pauline aloud. ‘I absolutely can’t.’

She put the cutting away and went to bed. But the following morning she was up at dawn, writing a note to her grandfather.

‘I have robbed the till,’ she wrote, ‘because I had to have money for something important. I will pay you back from my wages when you pay me some.’

Then she locked the shop, put the key under the mat and walked across the square and through the chestnut trees to catch the tram.

There is a name for what it was that troubled Pauline. It is called agoraphobia, which means fear of open spaces and strangers. People who suffer from it are perfectly all right indoors or if they go out with friends they know and trust. But when they’re alone in unfamiliar places they suffer from panic and dread. They tell themselves not to be silly, but it doesn’t help any more than it helps people who are terrified of snakes or spiders to tell themselves that they are being silly. A phobia is a silliness you can’t control and it is a very frightening thing to have.

So Pauline’s stomach went on lurching and her heart went on hammering as she sat on the tram, and again as she walked through the vaulted railway station and bought a ticket for the lakeside halt that served Pettelsdorf.

Inside the compartment she felt better; compartments are closed and cosy, like rooms, but as the train chugged up into the mountains the thought of what she had set herself to do was terrifying. She imagined Amelia Plotz with her huge arms and her face covered in sweat and the water boiling away behind her and tried to think what she would do to a girl who came from nowhere and asked her impertinent questions.

The train went no faster than it had done when Ellie and Sigrid had taken it to the mountains all those years ago. Pauline had been with them often since then, on Annika’s Found Days, but never alone. Still, she set off on the familiar walk to the village and everything was there: the cows with flowers hanging out of their mouths, the goat bells up in the high pasture, the pine-scented breeze.

In the village she stopped at the post office and asked if she could be directed to the house of the midwife.

‘I’ve got a message from someone in Vienna who wants to thank her for delivering her baby,’ she said.

The postmistress was helpful. ‘It’s the little house at the end of the street on the right. There’s a carving of a donkey on the gate, and a peach tree in the garden.’

The house was nice; there was a little boy playing on the grass who reminded her of the Bodek boys. The midwife was preparing lunch for her family, but she invited Pauline into her kitchen and poured her a glass of milk.

But it seemed quite quickly that something was wrong. She did not remember a baby she had delivered twelve years ago because she had only been working in Pettelsdorf for four years.

‘And the nurse who worked here before me has gone to Canada,’ said the midwife.

Pauline tried to fight down her disappointment. The trail had gone completely cold.

‘That would be Amelia Plotz then?’ she said. ‘It’s Amelia Plotz I’m looking for.’

The midwife put down her spoon. ‘Amelia Plotz? Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well… she’s here — she lives about half an hour’s walk away up the hill. But I don’t know—’

‘Will she see me?’ asked Pauline.

‘Yes and no… I can’t really explain.’

She gave her instructions, and a doughnut, and Pauline set off up the hill. The empty road leading to nowhere gave Pauline another panic attack: she felt as though she had been cut off forever from the safety of her home. But she sat down on a kerbstone and took some deep breaths and then she could go on again.

Amelia Plotz’s house was rather a sad little one. It stood on the edge of a river which had cut its way deep into the hill. The windows were dirty and the cat that slunk past her as she knocked on the door was thin and wild.

But that was nothing to what she found when the door opened and an old woman with a tufty grey moustache and rheumy eyes asked her what she wanted.

‘I wondered if I could see Amelia Plotz? Are you—?’

The old woman cackled. ‘No, I’m not Amelia, the Lord be thanked,’ she said. ‘What do you want with her?’

‘I have a message from someone in Vienna.’

The woman with the moustache gave her a sharp look. ‘Well, you can talk to her if you like. She doesn’t get many visitors.’

Pauline followed her up a narrow flight of stairs. There was a smell of cat, and of other things that Pauline was careful not to give words to.

‘A visitor for you, Amelia,’ shouted the old woman.

She could have saved her breath. Amelia was propped against soiled cushions on a vast armchair which only just accommodated her bulk. Her white hair was loose; her eyes stared into space. She took absolutely no notice of Pauline or of the woman who had spoken to her.

‘She’s got a message for you,’ shouted the moustached lady.

Amelia Plotz’s vacant eyes continued to stare at nothing. A drop of spittle came from her mouth.

‘What happened to her?’ asked Pauline.

‘She’s been like that for twenty years or more,’ said her carer. ‘Had a stroke and never recovered. She can’t speak, can’t hear… Looking after her is a nightmare, I tell you, but what can you do, she’s my sister.’

Pauline stared at the wrecked figure in the chair. So when Annika was born, she had already been like this.

‘Can she write?’ asked Pauline. ‘Could she write her name.’

The old woman stared at her. ‘Funny you should ask that. There were some people who came a few months ago — said they’d a few bits for her left by a patient years back and she had to sign a paper. They helped her to write her name. Well, they held the pen really and wrote for her. The poor old thing didn’t have an idea what she was writing. We’re still waiting for the things.’

‘Was it a tall, very stately woman with a German accent?’

‘Yes. And a man with her, very smartly dressed. Looked like a frog, but you could see he was a gentleman. A lawyer, he said he was. He wouldn’t let me into the room to see the paper — said it was private. You might as well get a dog to sign a paper, but I didn’t tell him that.’