The Star of Kazan

42 Found Day

Annika woke in her attic and stretched and opened the shutters

In the square everything was as it should be. The pigeons flew up from General Brenner’s head, the cathedral bells rang for morning mass… Stefan came out of the Bodeks’ house with a pail to fetch the milk, and waved to her.

But after all everything was not quite the same as before, because they had decided that from now on they would have to be nice to Herr Egghart.

‘We might not even mind if he becomes a statue,’ Pauline said.

‘A s long as the statue was somewhere else,’ said Stefan.

For it was this unpleasant, conceited man, with his foghorn voice and his ridiculous motor car, who had brought Annika safely home. The words which Pauline and Stefan had not been able to make her hear had reached her easily when Herr Egghart yelled them.

‘She is not your mother!’

And as soon as she had heard them, Annika had known.

‘I must have known all along, in a way,’ she said. ‘I tried too hard.’

When she came home they had all watched Annika for signs of shock or grief or disbelief — but there were none. The waters of the Danube, as she swam to the shore, had woken her completely from her spell. Forgiving a mother who had robbed her would have been a hard task — but what of a woman so greedy for wealth that she pretended to have a daughter, took her away from those who loved her, fed her with lies…?

A woman like that could be banished from one’s mind completely and forever. It would take time, for Annika’s love had been real and it had been deep, but she knew that in the end she would succeed.

‘You’re not nobly born, then,’ Loremarie had taunted her the day after Annika returned. ‘You’re not a “von” after all.’

And she had stepped back at the happiness in Annika’s face.

‘No,’ said Annika. ‘I’m completely ordinary. I’m me! And I have the most marvellously ordinary mother in the world. I have Ellie!’

Annika washed and dressed and came downstairs. In the kitchen the water was boiling for coffee, the rolls were warming in the oven — but there was no sign of Ellie.

The door to the courtyard was open. On the bench sat Ellie, and across her lap, though there was plenty of room for him on either side, lay the three-legged dog.

‘You’ll have to make the coffee,’ said Ellie.

Annika turned away to hide her smile.

‘Couldn’t you just tell him to get off?’

Ellie looked at her reproachfully.

‘He’s tired,’ she said.

There had been a nasty row when Bertha had written that she was going into hospital for an operation and asked if they could take Hector.

‘Couldn’t we have him?’ Annika had begged. ‘I’ve always wanted a dog.’

‘Over my dead body does a dog come near my kitchen,’ had been Ellie’s reply.

‘He’s not a dog. If it wasn’t for Hector finding the photograph I’d still be at Spittal.’

‘All the same, he’s a dog,’ Ellie had said. ‘Germs and hairs on everything and dirt.’

But Hector by this time had been on his way.

Zed came in just as they were clearing breakfast. He was still sleeping in the bookshop and working by day in the professors’ house, but in September, when the Lipizzaners returned from the mountains, he and Rocco would join the riding school. Apprentice riders lived in the school; they learned to do everything not only for their horses but for all the horses. But once a fortnight they were allowed home for a whole Sunday — and home for Zed was now the professors’ house.

‘Are you ready?’

Annika nodded. ‘I finished it last night. Professor Julius let me use his typewriter, but I kept spelling “agoraphobia” wrong.’

She took down a large sheet of paper and Zed looked at it.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘They’re meeting us at the hut.’

Pauline and Stefan were there before them. They had tidied up and put a bunch of daisies on the table and laid out the mugs and a bottle of lemonade. There were even paper napkins because this was not an ordinary meeting, it was a presentation.

‘We’ve got something for you,’ Stefan told Pauline. ‘A cutting for your scrapbook. Take care how you paste it in; it’s a good one.’

Zed took the folded paper in its heavy envelope and handed it to Pauline.

There was a lot more; it was a long article, and as Pauline read it she flushed to the roots of her hair.

‘I can’t put that in,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, you can,’ said Annika. ‘You were quite as brave as the man with the bee stings, and the lady who chased the hot-air balloon.’

‘And the boy who hung on to the cow under the ice — if he existed,’ said Stefan.

‘Of course he existed,’ said Pauline.

But for once she was in no mood to argue with her friends, and they lifted up their mugs and drank her health.

Pauline’s discovery at Pettelsdorf had been the key that enabled the professors to untangle the story.

Frau Edeltraut had heard about the jewels in the trunk far earlier than anyone had realized, before she even knew who Annika was, and the story would not go out of her head. The idea of a fortune going begging when she was at her wit’s end was more than she could bear. So she had gone to the old lady’s lawyers in Vienna, veiled and grieving, and under a false name, pretending to be a friend of La Rondine’s, and begged for a keepsake out of the old lady’s trunk.

Only the lawyer’s young clerk was on duty. He was very sorry, but it was out of the question — the trunk had been left to a little foundling girl. It was under lock and key, in the lawyer’s basement; there were still legal matters to sort out.

‘If you were a relative of the girl it might be possible to arrange something,’ said the clerk, who was sorry for the grieving woman in her veil. ‘A close relative. Even so you would have to get permission. The child does not even know of her legacy yet.’

Frau Edeltraut got Annika’s name from him and went away to think. A relative? A close relative. Why not a very close relative? Why not her mother? She was desperate enough to try anything.

It was only then that she consulted Pumpelmann-Schlissenger, who was known to do ‘unusual’ jobs, and promised him a share of the fortune if he would help her to trace the details of Annika’s birth and adoption and provide her with the necessary papers.

When she arrived at the professors’ house, two weeks later, it was as a woman who, against all odds, had found her long-lost child.

It had been difficult to interest Annika in what was to happen to the money for the jewels which Frau von Tannenberg had not yet sold.

She had started by saying that she didn’t want the money. ‘I don’t need it for anything,’ she had said. ‘And I don’t want to punish her. She may not have been my mother but I thought she was.’

But Pauline said that that was nonsense. ‘You need it to pay for Stefan’s training as an engineer for a start.’

They were all in the kitchen, as they so often were these days.

‘I wouldn’t take money from Annika,’ said Stefan.

‘Yes, you would. If it was a loan. And you need it to pay back Ellie’s savings,’ Pauline went on.

‘And there’s Professor Gertrude’s harp,’ said Stefan.

‘Isn’t there anything you want for yourself?’ asked Zed.

Annika grinned and looked sideways at Ellie.

‘Maybe a mechanical egg-beater?’ she suggested.

And waited while Ellie’s eyebrows drew together in a frown and she said, ‘Over my dead body.’

All the same, it seemed as though Annika would get some money in the end whether she wanted it or not, because the Eggharts were now on the warpath. As the truth came out about Frau von Tannenberg’s activites, they were once again making it clear that the famous trunk had belonged to their great-aunt.

‘She was OUR great-aunt so it was OUR trunk,’ they pointed out in case anybody had not heard this yet.

They also threatened to dispute the will on the grounds that the old lady had not been right in her head before she died.

‘One of the maids said she spoke about a rose garden in the sky,’ said Frau Egghart, ‘which shows she was wandering.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Pauline. ‘There is a rose garden in the sky above Merano. It’s a glacier, very high, which turns a rose colour in the evenings and that’s what they call it. It’s in the guidebook.’

But the Eggharts were not easy to shake off.

‘If Annika won’t take the matter any further we will take steps ourselves. It is outrageous that the woman should get away with her crime,’ they told the professors.

The professors felt the same, so in the end it was agreed that while Frau von Tannenberg should keep what she already had — ‘because of Spittal,’ said Annika. ‘It would be awful if everything fell down again’ — the rest of the jewels should be sold and the money divided between Annika and the Eggharts.

Pauline of course thought this was monstrous, but it was the Eggharts who were going to consult the lawyers and brief them and take all the steps that would be necessary to keep the police out of the investigation, and everyone knew that if it was left to Annika she would do nothing. Annika was to get a small allowance each month and a lump sum for the loan to Stefan, and the rest would be put in a trust for her till she was twenty-one.

‘Actually,’ said Annika, ‘if there’s enough money in the end maybe we could buy the house in Merano with the weathervane shaped like a crowing cock and Ellie and Sigrid could live there when they’re old. All of us could. It would be nice to have a rose garden in the sky.’

Found Day had come round again, and with it the Found Day treat.

Annika knew exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to take everybody on the Giant Wheel in the Prater for a celebratory lunch high above the city.

And there was something she wanted to do when she got up there, but she didn’t mention this to anyone in case it didn’t work, or people thought she was silly, or both.

Everyone was to come who had been to see the Lipizzaners the year before, and of course Zed. The treat needed a lot of preparation because they had to rent the special carriage used for wedding parties, which was bright red and had a crown painted on the outside. Unlike the other carriages, which only had wooden benches and sealed windows, the wedding carriage was furnished with a long table screwed to the floor, benches covered in velvet, and velvet curtains — and it had one window, high up, which could be opened.

By paying extra — by paying quite a lot of extra — the carriage could be stopped at the highest point — sometimes for a few moments, sometimes for much longer. If the full price was paid it would stay suspended at the highest point for a whole hour, and the other passengers had to wait down below. Stefan’s father had arranged everything for them.

Annika and Ellie and Sigrid were up at dawn on the day, packing cold pheasant in aspic and ham strudels and salads of cucumber and radish. They piled chocolate mousse and vanilla puffs into boxes, and made lemonade, and wedged the professors’ champagne into a silver bucket filled with ice.

And Annika bought two big bunches of summer flowers from the old flower seller in the square, because there could be no proper celebration without flowers on the table, and found two heavy vases that would not fall over as the wheel went up into the sky.

They piled into three hansom cabs and drove to the Prater, and Stefan and Zed unloaded the hampers and then Annika and Ellie and Sigrid set the long table with a white damask cloth and put the flowers in the vases and slowly, very slowly, in regular jerks, the famous wheel rose up, and then up again, and up once more.

The food on the table held steady, the professors walked from side to side pointing out places that mattered to them, and Annika remembered the last time she had been on the wheel by herself, and thought how fortunate she was to grow up in this place.

At the highest point the carriage stopped with a little click and they hung suspended in space.

Ellie, however, did not permit long sightseeing sessions.

‘The meal is ready,’ she said firmly, and at these important words the professors left the window and everybody seated themselves at the long table — and ate.

But after the last of the chocolate mousse had been scraped from the dishes, and the last sip of wine had disappeared down the professors’ throats, Annika got to her feet.

‘There’s something I wanted to do when I was up here last time,’ she said. ‘Only I couldn’t. So I’m going to do it now. Would you please pass me the vases — both of them?’

So Professor Gertrude pushed down the vase opposite her, and Zed pushed over the one which was next to him — and everybody watched as she took all the flowers out of both vases and patted the stems dry with her napkin.

Then she gathered up the blooms and walked over to the side of the carriage with the one small, high-up window which could be opened — and asked Stefan to open it.

‘I think I can reach.’ she said. ‘Yes. Just. Could you hand me the flowers one by one please? I don’t want to knock anybody out.’

So they passed her the flowers they had brought, and Annika stood on tiptoe and strewed them — the blue irises, the pink tulips, the marigolds and larkspur and zinnias, the delphiniums and the sweet-scented stock… strewed them and scattered them over the golden city which was her home once more.

The wind had dropped; the flowers fell gently. Some swirled away on air currents to the city’s edge, but most fell down over the roofs and booths of the funfair, and the people who saw them looked up for a moment and then went back to their work as though this kind of thing was no more than they deserved. And one — a large red tulip — fell on the turf path of the Prater where Rocco had reared up to save the life of a small fat boy in a sailor suit.

And it so happened that Fritzi, in the same sailor suit, was walking with his mother and his sister in her pram, as he walked each afternoon along the path that he had walked along that day, when a large red tulip descended and fell at his feet.

Fritzi had learned not to let go of his mother, but he picked the tulip up with his free hand and examined it.

‘Mine,’ he said — as he had said that day when he found the big red ball.

But this time no thief came running towards him to deprive him of his spoils.

Fritzi was pleased. There is a lot you can do with a tulip — fill the flower cup with sand, hold it aloft by the stem like a sword, put it over your shoulder like a rifle…

‘Mine,’ he said again, and his mother nodded, for it did not seem to her at all surprising that the heavens had opened and thrown a flower at the feet of her magnificent son.

This, after all, was Vienna.