by Eva Ibbotson
Miss Hogg’s twin brother, however, had been a train fanatic. Consulting the Baedecker for Central Europe, she found that it was not necessary, when travelling from Berlin to Herr Hoffmansburg’s estate on the edge of the Carpathian hills, to go through Budapest. One could, instead, take the express to Bucharest and, by arrangement with the guard, be set down at an obscure railway station in the middle of nowhere from which, some three hours later, one could catch a stopping train which meandered southwards into Hungary.
And the name of this station was Vlodz.
One could look for a long time at the map of Central Europe and not find Vlodz. It is not quite in Romania, not really in Czechoslovakia, more or less in Poland. The rivers Wistok, Klodza and Itzanka are not far away, nor is the town of Jaroslaw. But since this helps most people very little, it is easier to say that the station was very like a thousand others in that vast European plain: the platform riding high over a sea of Indian corn, sunflowers leaning their enormous heads against the low, white-painted building, geese perambulating on the tracks … A Fiddler-on-the-Roof station, a station over which the painter Chagall might have floated a blue-green, dreaming poet… A station to the like of which Tolstoy had come in old age to die.
And yet Vlodz was not quite like other stations. To begin with, to those in the know – as was Miss Hogg – it was a junction. Because of this there was a proper waiting-room with a picture of Marshal Pilsudski on the wall, a curly iron stove and wooden benches. There was a real booking office, a place for registering parcels … And to accommodate all these, the station-master’s house had been detached and built elsewhere, in a meadow just across the earthen road.
Over certain houses there seems to hang a kind of rightness, almost a seal of approval bestowed by a divine hand leaning down with a fatherly pat from the sky. This is the kind of house that children will draw for you with their new Christmas crayons; the kind of house to which storks will return year after year, winging their way from Egypt. The station-master’s house was built of aspen wood with a sheen that was almost silver; hearts and roses were carved into its shutters, and into the window-boxes in which petunias and French marigolds grew with the neat abundance which is the hallmark of careful husbandry. Each part of the garden was cultivated and cross cultivated, a palimpsest of lettuce and kohlrabi, of onions and mignonette, of sweet peppers and raspberry canes and mint. The pig in its pen seemed a little cleaner and fatter than the pigs kept by a thousand station-masters between Cracow and Kiev, the ducks livelier, the bantams more brightly-coloured and audacious.
In this house there lived the station-master, Mr Wasilewski and his wife, Hannah, who had learnt in the practice of a daily kindliness the secret of a happy marriage. There lived also a complacent and not very feline marmalade cat, a dog called Joseph, a canary …
And a boy …
A boy who, sitting in his attic from which he could look over the road, the station, the great sea of ripening maize which led to Abyssinia, heard the signal clank downwards, closed his school-books and ran downstairs.
For it was very seldom that the Berlin Express deigned to stop at Vlodz. There might, just once, really be treasure trove: an explorer in a topee who wanted his luggage carried to the inn; a wild bear in a crate …
His father was ready, his tunic buttoned, his cap straight. Once it had been the boy’s greatest joy to be allowed to blow the horn which hung on a chain round his father’s neck, to unfurl and wave the green flag. But he was eleven now, no longer a child, and he waited quietly, perched on a trolley, his arms clasped round his knees. He could make out the black dot of the engine now, hear the imperative whistle with which it signalled its intention to stop – and seconds later it was there, blotting out the sky, hissing, enveloping him in its hot breath.
Somewhere at the far end of the platform a door opened and at the same time a great cloud of steam billowed out from under the carriage, obscuring everything.
Almost at once, the door slammed shut again, Mr Wasilewski waved his flag. The train began to move, to gather speed.
The steam cloud lifted.
No treasure trove … Only, standing alone, surrounded by her luggage, a little girl.
Miss Hogg had gone into the building to reconnoitre. ‘Wait here,’ she had said to Sidi and Sidi waited. She had hurt her fingers, trapped them in the twisted, heavy leather strap when the guard pulled down the window, but there was no blood so as an injury it didn’t count. No blood, no tears – everyone knew that.
She glanced up. A boy had appeared as if from nowhere. He had cropped fair hair, very blue eyes, leather trousers and bare feet … A peasant boy who would despise her, shout things, perhaps throw stones.
She bit her lip, waited as the boy came closer, staring. He had never in his life seen such an elegant and burnished little girl. She wore a white sailor suit, a blue beret set back on her narrow head, snowy knee-socks, gleaming black shoes with silver buckles. Nothing was crumpled even after hours in the train – nothing except her face.
‘Have you hurt yourself?’ he asked.
He had rejected his native tongue, spoken in German. He could have managed, also, a little French. The village schoolmaster – a saint – had picked him out for university and, given a little luck, the premiership of Poland.
She looked at him in amazement. ‘It was my fault,’ she stammered.
To his own intense surprise, he reached out, took her creased, bruised fingers, blew on them … And was suddenly, blindingly pierced – rent – no word is too apocalyptic – by an all-consuming, earth-shaking tenderness.
Somewhere, two hundred miles or so to the south-west, in the beautiful grey and gold city of Vienna, the great Sigmund Freud was at that moment propounding to a world destined to be entirely transformed by his doctrines, his theories of infant and pre-pubertal sexuality. But the Professor, if present at Vlodz station, would have been wide of the mark. This was the other thing.
Wonderingly, Sidi took back her hand. The waters of Babylon receded. Ruth when exiled amid the alien corn had wept. Sidi, who very much resembled her, standing above a rustling sea of maize, now lifted her head and tentatively, experimentally, smiled.
Miss Hogg was to look back on the afternoon she spent in the station-master’s house mostly as somewhere it had been possible to sit and knit comfortably and at the proper speed. After the last of the telegrams came, the one that said that Hughie too was dead, she had been what she later referred to as ‘a little bit silly’. She had, in short, thrust her arms through the belt of her summer dress and jumped into the Thames. Rescued by an unnoticed fisherman she had, in the hospital, been advised to take up knitting, the therapeutic properties of which the doctor was much inclined to praise.
Miss Hogg had obeyed and in her subsequent career as a governess, been glad of it. It was the intricacies of a turned heel on an extremely complicated Fair Isle pattern sock that had prevented her from getting up and hitting Frau Hoffmansburg when she referred to Sidi’s father, in the child’s presence, as a Magyar runt with the sexual appetites of a ferret. It was the need to insert a cable needle, precise as a catheter, into the sleeve of an Arran sweater, that had enabled her to keep silent when Herr Hoffmansburg informed his daughter that her mother had the soul of a Jewish pawnbroker and had embezzled the family pearls. But at Vlodz, sitting on the carved rocker, a glass of tea beside her, protected by her monumental ignorance of Polish from the rigours of conversation, she knitted contentedly and in peace.
But Sidi … Sidi, from the moment that the boy opened the white-painted gate that led into his garden, entered upon her heritage.
She had known, really, that somewhere there had to be such a house. A house that smelled of vanilla and cinnamon and fresh-baked bread … A house with embroidered cushions tied to each carved pine chair and a canary as yellow as butter that sang and sang and sang. She had known too that such a house would have a cat with whiskers like cello strings which jumped on to your knee the moment you sat down, and tha
t she would not be banished to the parlour but allowed to help at once, given a straw basket to go into the garden and pick raspberries for tea. She had known, without quite knowing that she knew it, that somewhere in the world there had to be a couple like the Wasilewskis who smiled at each other as they passed, touched each other on the shoulder or the arm.
But the amazing thing, the thing she had been quite unable to envisage, was the boy.
For the boy was hers; she had known this at once. She had no words for what she saw in his steady blue eyes, but she was compelled to understand it. He was older than she was, tall, strong and very brave. She saw how fearlessly he shooed away the hissing gander that barred their path, how skilfully he whittled a stick with a wicked knife. Yet he wanted to be where she was. If she moved away, even a few steps, he followed. It was incredible, yet unmistakable. She pleased him.
The boy meanwhile had been pondering, his forehead creased. Now he seemed to have made up his mind.
‘Come outside,’ he said – and at once she pushed back her glass of milk and got up from the table.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, trotting after him, her shining shoes whitening in the dust from the road.
‘Into the field,’ he said – but he could as well have said, ‘ into the sea’, for it was like the sea, that limitless field of Indian corn, stretching as far as the eye could see, rustling, murmuring, brushed by cats-paws of wind as was the sea itself.
He led her across the railway track, down the embankment and into a kind of tunnel he had made between the stalks and she crawled after him into a small, circular patch that he had cleared – a nest, a cave in which one was invisible from the house, the station, everyone.
‘I come here to think,’ he said.
She nodded, for she had already understood that he was a person who thought. Characteristically, she was looking not upwards at the sky but downwards at a scurrying golden beetle. About to commit to her his life, the boy – studying the hollows in her appallingly vulnerable neck – nevertheless felt a momentary sense of grievance. She was going to be very little use in Abyssinia.
‘Your house is lovely,’ she said shyly. ‘It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.’
He frowned, surprised. Like all happy children, he took his home for granted. But she had given him a lead.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I shan’t be in it much longer. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going away. To Abyssinia.’
‘Oh.’ Desolation overwhelmed her. She had been entirely mistaken, then.
‘Abyssinia is in Africa,’ he explained. ‘It is a country ruled by a lion … the Lion of Judah…’
He began to speak, his voice strong and full of joy and as he spoke she saw the great, fair-minded beast watching over its weaker brethren, its gentle eyes gazing benevolently at the grazing deer, the lambs skipping among the flowers, the monkeys swinging by their tails from trees heavy with fruit…
‘That’s what they call the Emperor,’ said the boy. ‘He has a bodyguard of warriors who are seven feet tall and can run like an ostrich and he wears a crown and is enormously brave. And there are mountains full of gold and very old men because the air is so good that no one ever gets ill, and lakes bursting with fish, and forests…’
His dream began to stir in her. She saw that he would have to go and tried, with frantic gallantry, to rise to his need.
‘Where will you live?’
‘I shall cut down trees and train elephants to carry the logs and build a house. We shall need a house because—’
‘We?’ came Sidi’s voice, small as a cricket’s, beside him.
He turned. ‘I want you to come.’ And as she was silent, more urgently: ‘Will you come?’
Still she did not speak. Then, as he watched, he saw her become slowly, utterly transformed as she allowed happiness to smoothe her crumpled little face, straighten her frail shoulders, lift her head …
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes.’
She had been right, then. She was going to live in the stationmaster’s house. For she knew now that he would – with the aid of elephants – build it for her there, by a blue Abyssinian lake. A house with carved shutters and a flower-filled balcony from which she would emerge in a red-checked, braided apron like Mrs Wasilewski’s, to call, from the encroaching jungle, her children in to tea.
‘What was the name of the boy?’ Miss Hogg asked later that afternoon, when Sidi had stopped waving at last and Vlodz station was just a tiny dot on the vast landscape.
‘Jan,’ said Sidi, still grave-eyed from the parting.
But to herself she went on calling him ‘the boy’ as though there was no other in the world.
Sidi went to the moated Wasserburg where her father continued to dismember stags by day and to assert, at night, his dominion over a series of apparently identical blondes. But she was stronger, she looked sometimes at the sky. She also became an expert on African affairs, browsing in her father’s deserted library and surprising his house guests by a familiarity with Ethiopian kinship systems and the population of Addis Ababa.
When they came to Vlodz again, en route for Berlin, it was early autumn. This time it was already a homecoming. Miss Hogg had a crochet pattern for Mrs Wasilewski. There was frothy milk and gingerbread and a kitten that Jan had saved from drowning for her. But the last hour before the train came belonged to the children alone and they spent it in the maize field, now head-high and ready for reaping.
They had laid down the blueprint for their lives, but there was something to be done and the knowledge weighed heavily on the boy.
‘I have to kiss you,’ he said abruptly, breaking into her happy prattle. ‘I have to.’
The panic that even he could not entirely still in her leapt to her eyes. Their noses would bump; she would fail him.
‘I have to,’ he repeated, for he knew what belonged to Abyssinia: the passports, the documents, the marriage … But as she knelt up and offered her bleak little face as to a feared yet trusted dentist, his heart smote him. Under his brutishness she would wilt, would die. He bent his head, kissed her soap-scented cheek and then,
fleetingly, her mouth.
Her eyes flew open and something danced in them.
Then: ‘Do it again,’ said Sidi.
It was after this that they began to write letters. From Berlin to Vlodz, from Dresden to Vlodz when Sidi’s mother went to film there; from Vlodz to Paris when she was sent to her aunts. Socrates, who said that an unexamined life is worthless, would have been pleased with them as they began to draw out of their daily lives something that would please or amuse the other. For Sidi, the letter-box became the point of reference in whatever town she alighted; she navigated by it as mariners navigate by the stars. At Vlodz, the old postman with his warty face became the Grail-Bearer, the Rosenkavalier.
In November, Sybilla Berger scored a success in a play based on the life of the ill-fated Elisabeth of Austria and as a result, Korda sent for her to make a film test in London. Christmas had been heavily disputed between the parents. Now, Herr Hoffmansburg was told that he could have the child.
‘You’ll manage the journey, Hoggy, won’t you?’ said Frau Hoffmansburg, and departed on the Nord Express.
‘I’ll manage,’ said Miss Hogg. She was only too pleased to leave Berlin, for her initial reaction to Herr Hitler – that the poor man could not last long with that ridiculous moustache – was fast giving way to serious misgiving. She consulted the timetable, cooked the books, sent telegrams.
Thus Sidi and Miss Hogg ‘lost’ a day and spent it in the station-master’s house at Vlodz.
It was not quite Christmas, but for Sidi there was never any other. They were given the best bedroom with the blue-and-white-tiled stove, the goosefeather bed and the samovar that had belonged to Mr Wasilewski’s grandmother, and the house smelled of roasting pork and apples and mulled wine. The days when Sidi had passed her presents on as soon as she received them were gone. She had kept everything: sce
nt and chocolates and silk scarves from the women who aspired to be her stepmother; crystallized fruit and musical boxes and fountain pens from her mother’s suitors – and all these she now emptied joyfully on to the scrubbed pine table.
But when, an hour before sunset, the boy rose from his stool and said: ‘ Come,’ not one of the Wasilewski’s seasonal visitors disputed his right. For the people of Vlodz were under no illusions about Jan. He was the woodcutter’s third son, the one who answered the riddles, and the exotic foreign little girl was no whit too good for him.
Outside, the snow was king. Under its blanket, their maize field slept; the shrouded station was muffled and still.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Sidi.
‘You’ll see.’
He led her into a shed behind the house where there was a high, carved sledge and a bearskin rug in which he wrapped her so that only her bright face showed. But as he began to pull her along the white road towards the rim of fir trees standing out darkly against the orange sky of sunset, his eyes were anxious. It was strictly forbidden to cut down trees in Vlodz. The forest was a private one, planted by the squire centuries ago for his hunting in this country of open plains. And even Jan’s parents had not understood how important it was that Sidi should miss nothing that belonged, in her own life, to Christmas. He had had to contrive, beg, pilfer and even then, rising at dawn, been at the mercy of a sudden blizzard.
By the gate which led into the wood, he stopped the sledge.
‘Wait,’ he said to Sidi, sitting bright-eyed inside her furs. ‘And don’t look. Shut your eyes.’
It was dusk now; the firs, in their white mantles, stood in dark and solemn ranks.
All except one… a small tree standing a little apart from the others, whose needles had been freed from snow. A tree garlanded in gold and silver, hung with rosy apples, with gingerbread hearts and brightly painted toys … A starcrowned tree whose array of candles Jan now set carefully alight.
