by Eva Ibbotson
Her illness seemed to have washed Kira free of her distress about the Ballet School. She asked no questions about the future, obeyed Edwin like a trusting child, seemed content to drift.
One beautiful day towards the end of May, with the sunlight streaming into the room, he picked her up and carried her from her bed to the open window.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘ Oh, Edwin, look! The river! The sky! Oh, isn’t it marvellous that I’m not dead!’
And she turned in his arms and kissed him.
‘Edwin was no fool,’ said my aunt. ‘He knew exactly what that kiss was about. Gratitude for a return to health, artless affection, nothing more. All the same, as a result of it, he decided to change his life.’
Two days later he left Kira with some magazines, went along to the English grocer in Gogol Street and asked for a job. They needed English-speaking staff, were impressed by his knowledge of the trade and told him he could start the following month.
Edwin didn’t go back to Kira straight away. He walked back across Palace Square and sat down on one of the benches in the Alexander Gardens.
It was a beautiful day. Babies in perambulators passed him, pushed by nurses with streamers in their caps; beside him on the grass a small girl in a white dress built a stick-house for a captured beetle. And Edwin closed his eyes and looked into the future.
He was a modest man, but he knew that he was better than Aunt Lydia and the chickens of Kazan. And sitting there, the sun on his face, Edwin lived through the life he would have with Kira.
He saw their little flat on the other bank of the Neva where everything was cheaper; two rooms, a window box, a canary to sing for Kira when he was out at work. He saw her sitting opposite him in the morning, cupping her bowl of coffee, while he told her how much, how very much it had grown in the night – her poor, shorn, duckling-feather hair; saw her running towards him in the evening in an apron too big for her. He felt her hand creep from her muff into his pocket as they walked the snowy streets to buy their Christmas tree; dusted the pollen off her nose after he had brought her the first king-cups. By the gay and gilded fountains of Peterhof they bandied preposterous names for their unborn child. At night, in their big wooden bed, he watched her spoon cherry jam into her tea and told her that her habits were disgusting, that he loved her more than life itself.
‘When he was dying,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, jabbing the tip of her umbrella into a cracked paving-stone, ‘he told me that of all the hours of his life, that hour in the Alexander Gardens was the one he would most like to have again.’
It was noon when he returned to the hotel. He was a quiet man, always, and now, opening the door of his room, he made no sound. Kira’s back was to him. She was standing by the open window through which there flowed, badly played, relentlessly rhythmic, the sound of someone practising a Schubert waltz. Kira’s feet were folded in the fifth position; her arms were curved in to her side. And then as he watched, slowly, so shakily, with the ghost of her former strength, she began to go through one of her old routines: glissade…jeté … attitude en avant…
Edwin stood very still, holding on to the knob of the door. He could see only her back and the nape of her neck with its heartbreaking, sawn-off hair, but he knew …
‘You’re crying,’ he said.
Her arms dropped. Her foot glided to rest like an autumn leaf.
‘From the back of my neck you can tell I’m crying?’ she said wonderingly.
Probably she grew up at that moment. At any rate she turned and came towards him and lifted her face to his, and he kissed her wet eyelids, her mouth, while everything inside him crumbled slowly into dust.
The next day he went to Druce’s in the Nevsky Prospect and bought a pair of incredibly expensive English gloves. He said he didn’t think he could have done it without those gloves. Then he took out Lord Broomhaven’s visiting card and drove to Theatre Street.
‘I’ll never know how he managed it‚’ said my aunt. ‘You’ll notice I’ve used the same words about him again and again: “meek”,“quiet”, “gentle”. All the same, he confronted the Principal and persuaded her that he really was an English aristocrat whose entourage had been horrified to find a member of the Czar’s famous Ballet School abandoned and at death’s door. He hinted at a scandal in the English press, implied a special interest in Kira on the part of a high-ranking diplomat – and just at the right moment became a supplicant, stressing Kira’s remorse and change of heart.’
The decision to expel her had not been unanimous. Now it was reversed.
And so, on a still grey morning, he drove Kira back to Theatre Street. At the last minute she was afraid and by the same door at which he had found her she clung to him and said, ‘No! No! I want to stay with you!’
But he was beyond everything by now and gently he loosened her arms and picked up the great brass knocker shaped like the Imperial Eagle of the Czar, and then he just stood there very quietly and watched her go.
My aunt stopped talking. She had finished her umbrella jabbing and we stood side by side, our elbows on the parapet, looking at, and not seeing, the river Thames.
‘That’s all?’ I said at last.
She shrugged. ‘He’d meant to go on, to see Moscow, Kiev, the Crimea. But his money had run out, of course, and anyway …
‘So he went back to Edith?’
My aunt nodded. ‘ Edith,’ she said, ‘was tired after the journey from Clapham. She was sitting up in bed with cream on her face and—’
‘No! She didn’t! She didn’t say it to him. Not that first night!’
‘She said it! And Edwin went up to her and said: ‘“Yes Tonight. And any other night I choose.”’ And went on living with her for thirty years.’
‘Oh, hell!’ I said. ‘He had so little. For so short a time.’
‘No,’ said my aunt. ‘You’re wrong. Edwin was all right.’
I waited.
‘I was with him at the end, as I told you. And just before he died, suddenly … he lifted up his head…’ She broke off. I have never,’ she went on, ‘seen such a look of happiness on any human face. And then he said this one word. I didn’t know what it was; I had to look it up.’
‘Dousha‚’ I said. ‘Was it that? Doushenka?’ And suddenly it seemed desperately, frantically important that I had guessed right.
My aunt looked up, started. ‘That was it. It’s an endearment, of course.’
‘Yes.’ It’s an endearment, all right, and for my money the best ever, the ultimate. ‘My soul’, ‘My little soul’ …
‘So you see,’ said my aunt, unfurling her umbrella, ‘that he really was all right.’
And we turned and left the quiet, grey, incurably English river and went home to tea.
But mostly, as the plane flew quietly through the night, I found myself thinking of one man in my past – my very distant past – Great-uncle Max.
Great-uncle Max was a very old man indeed when I was a boy and he was famous by that time not for any particular eccentricity or time-defying bon môt, but for something both less spectacular and more remarkable: a Great Love.
Needless to say, in the matter of a Great Love there are bound to be elements of secrecy, of mystery … As a boy, overhearing the women gossip in my mother’s drawing room, the story bored me. A Great Love seemed to me in every way less interesting than the ability to swallow eighteen Zwetschkenknödel or throw pickled gherkins at the Imperial Guard.
Now, close on half a century later, I was no longer quite so sure.
The story of my Great-uncle Max’s Great Love is unusual in that it has not only a happy ending but a happy middle. The beginning, however, was sad.
Max Bergmann was thirty-nine, unmarried, a successful solicitor, small, blue-eyed and just a little bald when he attended, on a historic night in May, a performance of Rheingold at the Opera House.
Rheingold, if you remember, is the first work in Wagner’s great operatic cycle, The Ring. Uncle Max, slipping into his box and bracin
g himself a little (for Wagner made him nervous) thus saw the curtain go up on what the programme referred to as ‘the underwater bottom of the Rhine’.
The Vienna Opera at the time prided itself on the realism of its stage effects. Cardboard waves undulated laboriously from left to right and back again: jagged rocks pierced the watery gloom; undefined but undoubtedly sub-aquatic plants wreathed upwards towards the proscenium arch.
And dead centre, triumphant, the pièce de resistance: the three Rhinemaidens, lowered from steel cables to hang suspended some twenty feet above the stage.
Mermaid-tailed, scale-covered, golden-haired – the size of half-grown hippopotami – they swayed and sang, immortal sirens of the deep, beckoning men to their doom.
‘Weia Waga, Woge du Welle‚’ sang the centre maiden, a lady named Helene Goertel-Eisen, not because she was off her head but because that was what Wagner, in his wisdom, had given her to sing.
The rest is operatic history. The ghastly twang of snapping steel; the orchestra, at first unheeding, pursuing its relentless Wagnerian leitmotif; then breaking into splintered sound, silence…
While Helene Goertel-Eisen, pushing forty, topping the scales at one hundred and twenty kilos, came crashing to the ground.
She was not, in fact, greatly hurt. Shaken, of course. Bruised. Angry; very. And the lawyer she called in to help her sue the Opera Company was Uncle Max.
Max had been deeply upset by the incident. The vast, invincible figure hanging aloft in shimmering silver, and then the flailing limbs, the crumpled body, the broken mermaid’s tail rolling into the footlights …
He never attended a performance of Rheingold again. And six months after the accident, he married Helene Goertel-Eisen.
Whether my Great-uncle Max and my Great-aunt Helene were happily married I cannot say, for it was a question which, in the Vienna of my childhood, no one asked, let alone answered. In those days (when the infant Freud, I daresay, was still bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse) one wasn’t happily married. One wasn’t unhappily married either. One was married.
Certainly my Uncle Max was very good to her. To the end, he called her his ‘Rheinmäderl’ and denied her nothing. As for my Aunt Helene, she gave up her career and settled down contentedly in the big yellow villa in the suburb of Hitzing which Max bought for her, furnishing it in the Makart style which was just sweeping Vienna: peacock feathers, shell ornaments and large numbers of small stuffed animals under glass. Freed from even the minimal restraints of her career, she was able to indulge her passion for Karlsbad plums and Linzer Torte and became, even by current standards, not just very, but extraordinarily fat.
After a year or two, being of a rather indolent nature, she brought her Cousin Lily to live in Hitzing, to take over the housekeeping.
Cousin Lily belonged to that now extinct band of faintly-etched and unassuming spinsters whose own lives never quite break into flame and who live at the periphery of others – often indispensable, as often ignored. She was pale, long-nosed and ageless and wore round her neck a necklace of the milk teeth of all the children in the family. It was a disquieting necklace: brownly mottled in places, never quite free of the suggestion of dental caries and tiny flecks of dried blood.
Milk teeth or no, Cousin Lily was an excellent and unobtrusive housekeeper, keeping Uncle Max’s clothes in order, supervising the maids. And my Uncle Max, now a vigorous man in his early forties, thus had a beautifully run home, a prosperous business, an undemanding wife …
Had, in short, everything.
Well, nearly everything. For to tell the truth, Aunt Helene was a trifle too undemanding. Probably it was quite simply a matter of her bulk. One imagines her, in the matter of sex, prepared in every way to do her duty but feeling, perhaps, that it was all happening a long way off; possibly even to someone else.
If Freud had by now stopped bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse, he could not have got much further than examining his incipient moustache in the bedroom of his parents’ house. It was therefore in the conventions of his own day that Uncle Max solved this most conventional of problems.
He took a mistress.
In the old Habsburg Empire there was a precedent for everything. From Bohemia one got the best cooks, the finest glass. From Hungary one imported horses and violin players for the Philharmonic.
But for a mistress … somehow, for a mistress you couldn’t do better than a real, a proper ‘echt’ Viennese.
My Uncle Max, searching the chorus at the Folk Opera, the little dressmakers scuttling by with cardboard boxes, found what he was looking for at last, in a glove shop in the Kärntner Strasse.
Susie Siebermann was everything a mistress should be: golden-haired, blue-eyed and not too young. Uncle Max, detecting an unexpected rip in his grey kid gloves, had been despatched by Tante Helene to replace them before an important dinner. Susie did nothing except sell him another pair, but it was enough.
He offered her a villa in the Vienna Woods, but she was modest and sensible and took instead a small apartment in the unfashionable district beside the Danube Canal. This she furnished simply, in the old Biedemeyer style, with painted furniture, white-looped curtains and geraniums in pots – for there was nothing of the courtesan in Susie, who recalled a simpler, more pastoral kind of mistress: Giselle in her forest hut waiting for Prince Albrecht: Gretchen at her spinning-wheel … Only one object linked Susie’s love nest with the grand villa in Hitzing: a large, mildly malodorous stuffed squirrel (a present from an anonymous admirer) on which Uncle Max, when he came to visit, hung his hat.
The apartment faced inwards, towards a cobbled courtyard with an old pear tree in the centre, and when the shutters were closed (and of course they always were closed when Uncle Max was there) the call of the street sellers, the carpet-beating, the sound of tug-boats hooting up the Danube, came as the gentlest, the most undisturbing counterpoint to their secret and illicit love.
And indeed their love was secret. Very secret. It had to be. Let no one imagine that the Vienna of those days was a permissive ‘oh-la-la’ sort of place. In the Imperial Hofburg, sixty-seven or so moribund Archduchesses tottered about on Spanish heels, sniffing out imperceptible breaches of etiquette. Vast armies of monumentally incompetent civil servants nevertheless managed to keep tabs on the bourgeoisie. No, in the Vienna of my Uncle Max’s youth, a prosperous solicitor who wanted to stay that way did not exhibit his mistress in public.
And then, of course, there was Helene. Helene who, in one doom-filled moment, had been thrown so tragically from her steel cable above the underwater bottom of the Rhine and who must never, never be hurt again.
And she was not. My Uncle Max and his Susie were incredibly careful. He never took a fiacre to the apartment but walked, his hat over his eyes, or took a horse-bus two stops further before doubling most cunningly back. To the concierge he was Herr Finkelstein from Linz, and it was as Herr Finkelstein that Susie addressed him when she opened the door, even if the corridor was entirely empty. Nor did he ever, however much he might be tempted, visit Susie more than twice a week: on Tuesday evening when Helene held a card party, and on Saturday afternoon when she visited her relations.
So much is fact. What happened next – how the change in their relationship came about – no one will ever know for certain.
For my part, I think it happened very slowly. I think for days and weeks and months my Uncle Max came and hung his hat on the stuffed squirrel and sat politely, first in Susie’s kitchen drinking coffee, because after all it was a business arrangement and neither of them was all that young. And then one day, perhaps, he put down his coffee cup too quickly, staining the cloth, and when Susie rose to dab at it he caught her and held her and began then and there to pull the hairpins from her piled-up golden hair. I think the day came when, returning to his office after lunch, he took a long and pointless detour past the glove shop in the Kärntner Strasse – not to see her, of course, or wave to her through the glass – just to know that she was th
ere.
He was not a very imaginative man. Susie was even a little stupid. There cannot, on the surface, have been much spiritual content in their love. He called her his ‘Putzchen ‘‚ his ‘Mauslein’‚: she, no doubt, giggled and squealed during moments when exaltation would have been more proper.
And yet, as he walked through the dusk towards his abode of shame and found the May-green lime trees limned in lamplight almost too beautiful to be endured, he must have begun to suspect that he was getting more than he was paying for. Until one day, lying behind closed shutters in his Susie’s arms, listening to the soft cooing of the pigeons on the roof, it must have dawned on my modest, unassuming Uncle Max that he had found what half the world was looking for in vain: a Great Love.
With this realisation came sudden black despair. What was he doing to her, his Susie, his treasure? Hiding her away behind closed shutters and barred doors! What was he doing to himself? Tearing himself from her for days at a time, confining his passion to the inhuman restraints of the calendar! How bitter it all was, how cruel!
‘Ach, Suserl,’ my Uncle Max would say as the scent of lilac, piercing the shutters, drifted towards the bed on which they lay, ‘how I would like to take you driving in my carriage to the Prater.’
‘Just once,’ Susie would confess, rubbing her cheek against his. ‘Just once I would like to walk on your arm down the Ring-Strasse and nod to all my friends. I am so proud of you.’
But of course they knew it could never be. Sweet and precious their love might be but also, and for always, secret, unhallowed, furtive.
And this was the way things stood until the day of Tante Helene’s epic picnic in the Vienna Woods.
The Vienna Woods, even as late as my own childhood, deserved every impassioned stanza from Austria’s minor poets, every waltz-beat paean from the pen of every Strauss. A blue-green halo for the city, tender with beech trees, studded with flower-filled meadows, it had everything: viewpoints and castle ruins; rivulets and roe deer and, in the taverns, a wild, green wine …
