In Search of Anna

by Valerie Volk

  I wonder that my parents permitted it, and I will never cease being grateful to them. Those were the days that made me what I am—both my faults, and God knows there are many of these, and also my virtues come from those years and the Countess’s training. I know now that she was a remarkable woman, with an eager curious mind and a good grounding in many fields of knowledge. For those she did not know so well, for the work in numbers, and for lessons in geography and the world around us, she had engaged governesses and, later, tutors. She believed in a well-rounded education.

  Her passions were literature and history, and these and the classics were fields in which she was more knowledgeable than any of the teachers she hired.

  ‘You are like a little sponge,’ she said, smiling at me one day. ‘I could wish that Lydia was as willing a pupil as you.’

  Dearly as I loved Lydia, I understood what she meant. We were different. My friend’s passions were dress and ornament, and her favourite lessons those with the drawing master and the singing teacher who came each week from Breslau, preparing her for the life ahead. She has now gone from here, first to Berlin as her father’s hostess, and then as a society lady herself, with a husband from the Emperor’s court. We see little of each other. Yet when we do, the old Lydia is still there, warm and affectionate, and still grieving for the shared mother we both lost.

  The Countess died so unexpectedly that today I still feel the sense of shock that hit me when they brought the news. She had been returning from Glatz in storms when a thunderclap startled the horses, and they had bolted, overturning the carriage. She was thrown from it, her neck broken. I wept long hours into the night, grieving for the woman who had been so much a part of my earlier days.

  The life of the chateau came to an end, though by then I had already been separated from it. The Count had used it rarely, with occasional parties of hunting friends coming to our mountains. I think now that the thoughtful cultivated mind of a wife who preferred books and music to politics and horses had been little inducement for him to spend time with her. And he had, as we later discovered, many consolations in Berlin. With his wife’s death Lydia became for a time his hostess, until she made the marriage he approved of.

  There had been some talk that I might have accompanied my friend to Berlin, but the Count had no real interest in the suggestion. I suspect I might have been too like his wife in character and interests, whereas Lydia fitted his lifestyle well. Impossible anyway; Otto would never have permitted it.

  Lydia. When I think of her a smile always touches my lips. Lydia was like that. She made the world happy, just as she was always happy. A little doll, her mother called her, and it was true. It pleased the Countess to dress her like a princess, in clothes ruffled and lacy, embroidered like a flower garden. I have often seen my mother sigh over the pressing of those dresses, as she lifted the black flat iron from the old stove and tested it for heat with a drop of water from the pewter jug. I do not think she would have wanted to dress me in that way, even if there had been coins to pay for it. They were not clothes for playing. I remember Lydia with her music and her beloved cage birds. Books bored her, and she quickly grew tired and vexatious when the Countess and I lingered over volumes from their library.

  What a library it was. Such joy when the Countess and her daughter went to pay calls, and I was left to roam free among the books, even the foreign language ones. Lydia and I were tutored in French and English. Two days of each week we were not permitted to speak, even to each other, in our own language, but one day for French, another for English.

  ‘Mais, maman,’ Lydia would pout, ‘pourquoi?’ Until she discovered that if she was ever to take her place in Berlin society she would need these skills, especially the French that all fashionable ladies would talk. Ah well, now she is part of that world, and I hope that marriage to her father’s old friend, the Graf von Nicklenberg, has brought her happiness as well as the town house, country estate and carriages that are part of her trappings.

  Today I see her only rarely, when they open the Chateau for a hunting party of guests. The old bonds remain but beneath the smiles and embraces, I see a different Lydia. This one has the look, at times, of a small hunted animal. There are stories among her servants, for they speak more freely to me—after all, am I not really one of them?—about the Graf’s ways with maids that make me fear for my once light-hearted friend.

  ‘Does your husband ever hurt you, Anna?’ she asked on one of their visits to her old family home.

  I looked at her in surprise. She rarely talked of anything except her social life, the card parties, balls and salons they attended for concerts that held little appeal for her. But never of marriage, or what it had meant to her.

  Had we still been close and able to speak freely, I might have told her of Otto’s drunken rages and the nights I sent the children to sleep in the adjoining stables with the animals, but those days of intimacy were long past.

  ‘Why do you ask such a question, Lydia? Does yours?’

  Her eyes slid away from me, and she laughed her tinkling unconvincing laugh. ‘Mais non, cherie.’

  Those times together, so seldom, were precious to me, for they took me back to a happier time of life spent in two worlds. As I climbed into the wooden bed I shared with Gertrud and our brothers, I would think of Lydia, in solitary splendour in the four-poster in her room, the silk curtains draped from the carved and gilded tester above her head. So different from our shared horsehair bedding, where each time one of us turned in the night we were all jostled out of position. Oh, the luxury of a bed to oneself.

  Yet envy was rare, for the Countess treated me with such kindness, and I knew that dearly as she loved her daughter, what she shared with me was special. When a box of new books arrived from Berlin, we would fall upon them with excitement. She had made a point of collecting complete works of her favourite authors, and Lydia could not understand why her mother and I could be happy for hours reading aloud the great Shakespearian plays, switching from role to role as the stories unfolded.

  She introduced me to the great German writers of the classic period—to Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, von Humboldt. And to to Racine and Voltaire, the French tragedians of an earlier age. We read the novels of Fontane and wept over the miseries of Effi Brest. Little did I realise as we agonised for Effi that in a few years I would also be in anguish, over whether or not to confess what I had done.

  Too late to think about these things, for I hear the bridle bells jangling on the path outside, and then the heavy tread of Otto as he lurches close to the door. A good wife would open it, to welcome in her man, no matter what his condition. But I have never claimed to be a good wife. After all, I had never wanted to be this man’s wife.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rauschwitz, Silesia, 1861

  When the hunting party comes back at the end of the day, there is always one face I look for. Dare I hope that before he dismounts, he looks for me too?

  The chateau has become once again the centre of neigh­bourhood life, for this is the hunting season, and the Graf loves his sport. I am not so sure that the Countess enjoys this time so much. The house now rings with life and activity, but these men are not so congenial to her. The Prussian Junkers are heavy and stolid, and their days at the hunt are followed by evenings of drinking and talk of political events. They spend much time re-living the glory days of fifty years ago when Napoleon was finally defeated, and our country became again a powerful participant in world affairs. Much of their talk is outside my understanding and when they bemoan the failure of the German Confederation I have little interest in this.

  Or had little interest, until now. It was Lydia who pointed out new arrivals at the chateau as we stood at the windows from her room and gazed down at the coaches, the horses steaming and sweating from their labours and the grooms lifting the travelling chests for servants to carry to the guest rooms.

  ‘See, Anna,’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘Papa has brought some younger men in this group.’
Her blue eyes were alive with excitement, for she had reached sixteen, and the next season she would be going to Berlin, to sample the pleasures of life there. And, we both knew, to find a suitable husband. The Countess sighed when she talked of this, for she did not share her daughter’s anticipation of the delights of this life.

  ‘I would prefer, Anna,’ she had confided to me, ‘if we could just continue our lives here. But what must be, must be. And it is important to my husband that our daughter marries well.’

  She shrugged her shoulders wearily, then smiled at me. ‘But what of you, Liebchen? Your mother tells me there is a young man courting you …’

  I could feel my face redden as the blood rushed to my cheeks. I tried hard to meet her gaze steadily. ‘N’importe, madame.’ But she looked disbelieving.

  ‘I find that hard to accept, ma chère. There must be many young men in the village who would find your style of beauty much to their taste.’

  It is certainly not the blue-eyed golden-haired beauty of Lydia. I am not one who would ever be chosen by artists or the makers of daguerreotypes as a model, though I confess I would love to see just how these pictures are made. This capturing of one’s image on paper fascinates me—but not our village pastor, Herr Pastor Liebelt, who thundered against it from the pulpit last Sunday.

  ‘It is a work of the devil,’ he roared. ‘God made us in his own image; it is a sin to try to copy him and make further images of his creations!’ He waved aloft an old copy of the Leipzig Advertiser that had come his way, and quoted its words: ‘Blasphemy! Would God have allowed a Frenchman to give to the world an invention of the devil?’ Pastor Liebelt often found himself interpreting the Almighty’s wishes to the rest of us sinners, I had noticed. But then, perhaps such a man of God is granted a special insight into the mind of his maker …

  From what I have heard, these condemnations have not stopped inventors and they now have much better ways of capturing images of people—not just once, but many copies of the same image.

  One of the many wonders of our age, indeed. But unlikely that I would be chosen as a model for such reproduction. I stand behind Lydia in her bedroom and view us both in the looking glass and see the contrast. I am much taller—too tall for beauty—and my hair, though lustrous, is dark and straight. Even coiled around my head it does not have the appeal of her fair ringlets. My eyes are dark, and my skin is not the pink and white of apple blossoms, as is hers. We are very different.

  So I find it strange when village lads look at me with interest. But only from a distance. Otto has made it quite clear that I am his property, and it would ill behove anyone to forget it while he is away in Glatz. There are many times I feel trapped by the force of his will.

  But is this what I want for my life? I am not sure. Soon he will demand it, and I confess that the stirring in my blood when his hand moves from my waist down my wakened body makes me uneasy. But I do not want Otto.

  ‘By sixteen,’ my mother tells me, ‘I was already wed and had both Willi and Georg. It is time you too are wed. And Otto will give you a secure future. You will not have to work the way I do.’

  Yet I think, for all her words about ‘her labours’, she enjoys being part of life at the Chateau. Even if my father is suspicious of the effect on his youngest daughter, and spends many hours reminding me that I am only a workman’s child, perhaps he too, like our mother, has a grudging respect for what I have become.

  It has separated me from my family, and even more from the village boys who might have wished a closer knowledge of me, in spite of Otto. When he returns each week from his time at the training college in Glatz, it seems to me that he becomes more demanding, and wants from me liberties I will not give. Yet everyone seems to expect that we will marry. No doubt this is what my mother has told the Countess.

  ‘Quickly, quickly, Anna!’ Lydia was all haste now, rearranging her dress more becomingly, and fixing small blue bows in her hair. But I was not forgotten, and had to submit laughingly to her attempts to smarten my plain grey dress with a linen cape and scarf. She surveyed the outcome with a critical eye, pinched my cheeks to make a little colour rise, before she nodded in satisfaction, pointing to the picture in the glass.

  In truth, I did look my best. She led the way along the gallery with its mounted deer heads lining our route, down the curved staircase with the gleaming wood that my mother so lovingly polished. Into the large salon, where the evening candles were already being lighted and the gentlemen were gathering for the traditional stirrup cup before dinner—a notion the Count had brought back from the Russian Imperial Court.

  So it was that I first saw Kurt. Even now, weeks later, I still catch my breath at the memory of the moment our eyes first met. As he was to tell me often in succeeding days, it was the same for him. A recognition, a spark that flew between us.

  ‘Why,’ I asked him later, ‘did you look at me and not at Lydia? She is so pretty.’

  ‘True,’ he responded. ‘She is pretty. She will be a great success at court. But you, my dear one, are beautiful—and I would not wish to see you at court.’

  ‘Besides,’ he added laughingly, ‘she only had eyes for Gustave. And he for her.’

  Did he not think me good enough for court? He would have been right. For all my education and the careful cultivation by the Countess, I was still only a peasant girl. No linen capes and scarves were going to change that. And while they saw me as Lydia’s companion, not as a servant, there was a gulf between us.

  Kurt was a student, he told me, dragged unwillingly from his university by a father who said he needed to get out of Berlin and live some life away from books. But those same books gave us a life to share that became more and more important as the days passed. The Countess saw us with concern, but did not interfere, or even warn my mother that the hours I spent at the Chateau were no longer with Lydia. Her mind was on her husband and her guests, and she had little time to chaperone two flighty girls.

  It was Kurt’s mind that I first loved. That thoughtful probing mind that looked at and showed me things I had not understood about our country. Certainly I knew how our society was changing—one only had to look at the misery and need in so many households around us. The closing of mines had brought poverty and the new manufacturers were destroying the home industry we all depended on. It was no wonder that so many of our neighbours were fleeing to the towns in the hope of work in factories that were springing up like mushrooms.

  ‘My father fears my politics,’ Kurt admitted to me. ‘I see the awful injustice of our lives, and he thinks that I may become a socialist.’

  I listened in fascination as he described events and political movements I knew nothing about, such as the Silesian Weavers’ Revolt, which I dimly recalled my father, always one for law and authority, exclaiming against. Now I saw it with Kurt’s eyes, as a beleaguered craft guild fighting vainly against the industrialisation that was ruining their livelihood. I burned at the injustice of the Prussian Royal Court banning the song that expressed their anger, and felt for the poor singer who had been imprisoned in 1846 for daring to sing the song in public.

  ‘I would have sung it too!’ I burst out passionately, and Kurt smiled at my fury.

  ‘Yes, my little one. I could see you there, marching with your pickaxe and smashing the looms in factories just as they did. It is no wonder that Marx called it the first great uprising by the proletariat.’

  I looked at him askance. I had heard of this Marx, whose name Kurt spoke with reverence.

  ‘But surely he was a revolutionary? An evil man, against religion?’

  His lips twitched. ‘Not all revolutionaries are evil. Had I been a little older, I would have joined them in 1848.’

  That date meant nothing to me at the time, small child as I was, but the thirteen years that have passed have not erased it from people’s minds. In the taverns where the men gather at night, it remains raw and new. They still fight that battle, though not all agree that it should have happened. I have se
en it through my father’s eyes—that those hotheads, sinfully rebelling against the old ways, were put down was only, he was certain, God’s will to keep us safe. But there were those who had listened to the speakers in the towns and argued a different viewpoint. My father came home at night, confused and bewildered, asking how men of sense, men he had known all his life, could possibly have listened to such evil rebellious ideas.

  ‘See!’ he would insist. ‘See what happened in France when the people are out of control!’

  We all shivered. France might have been our old enemy, but the horrors of that revolution struck fear into all neighbouring countries. Tales of the monstrous killing machine, la guillotine, were enough to terrify any mischievous boy. Yet even when that bloodstained time was over and order restored, it did not last, and the restored king had to flee from France to London. My father shook his head gloomily.

  ‘No good will come of it when people resist their God-appointed rulers!’

  Now I started to see a different view as Kurt showed me his ideas. I listened fascinated as he told me of the professors at the university, and their evenings in the taverns of that seething city. His eyes lit up as he described their passionate discussions and the plans they were making for a new world.

  Kurt was charmed by my mind as much as my body. All those years under the Countess’s guiding hand, all those hours in her library, had opened different worlds to me, and I could listen and explore with Kurt the ideas that were so important to him. How could I have expected that he, a student at the famous Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, the University of Berlin, would take seriously the ideas of a village girl?

  Yet it seemed he did and oh, how much I learned from him. He told me how he had been influenced by the theory of philosopher Hegel, and I learnt to accept that the evil and revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels might actually have sense behind them. He described Count Otto von Bismarck, who they say is likely to become our next Minister President in Prussia; he too was a force in his student days in Berlin and now, in his forties, his powerful influence lingers with today’s youth.