“Damnedest luck of all,” someone was telling the Colonel as Polak held our bridles lightly, seeming to not want to interfere with us. “Captured this Jerry2—’scuse me, this German officer—who was keeping the horse at headquarters. Dick took a fancy to him, seeing as he grew up on a ranch, and we just kept him. Now we find you folks, in the very place he belongs. Look at those two! Always thought stallions just fought all the time.”
“They are brothers,” Polak said quietly.
I nibbled Ned’s mane.
“I’m a P.O.W.!” he told me enthusiastically. “I was captured by an American soldier named Dick!”
“No,” said Maestro, looking fondly at us in the last of the day’s light, “I believe we are all finally free.”
EPILOGUE: THE NEW WORLD
A brilliant white light illuminated the motionless horse, frozen in the ancient posture of cavalry statues, throwing the rest of the cavernous stadium into blackness. Over the loudspeaker a man’s voice intoned, “The levade, performed by Favory Mercurio,” and the strains of the accompanying orchestra were drowned out in a spontaneous eruption of applause. The horse’s rider, a young Swiss who had been among the last trained by Reitmeister Gottlieb Polak before his death, was as still and calm as the horse beneath him, whom the élèves sometimes referred to affectionately as “the Maestro.” To the horse, that title would never belong to anyone save the grand old stallion who had outlived Polak by only a few months. He liked to think that they were together, in some sunny pasture reserved for horses and the men who loved them.
Schnecki, as he still thought of himself, at eighteen years old was finally fully white-coated, though he certainly remained the homeliest among his fellow Lipizzaners. But watching him perform the piaffe next to the breathtaking stallions Neopolitano Galanta and Conversano Bonadea (the star capriole artist) in the quadrille that finished their performance, the spectators did not think of his slightly odd looks—they marveled at the seamless combination of power and grace, precision and strength, that were manifest in every movement of the horses’ bodies. But one man picked out the stallion, recognized his subtle, distinctive difference from the other snowy white forms, and in his heart honored him for everything that made him who he was: Schnecki, Mercury, Maestro. As the stallions lined up for a final salute to the packed hall of Madison Square Garden, the man wiped the tears from his face with a handkerchief, replaced his gray hat, and smiled down at the young child sitting beside him.
“Let’s go meet some old friends,” he told her. The girl did not hear. Her eyes followed the horses from the arena, and her heart was filled with hoofbeats.
* * *
In the five years since the end of the Second World War, the white Lipizzaners of Vienna had yet to set hoof back in their rightful home. They had instead become citizens of the world, touring Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and, when not on the road, lived in ancient Dragoon barracks in the country. By the time Favory Mercurio sniffed the salt tang of Bremen, hoisted high in the air in a strange crate to the deck of an enormous ship, he had seen enough of the oftentimes inexplicable world to feel at home in it, even when swaying like a gull in the ocean breeze. Now he had braved a squally, four-week passage to the city of New York and had witnessed the overpowering canyons of buildings, their dark shadows swallowing whole streets, while up, up in the sky their windows shone in the brilliant autumn sunshine. The dock swarmed with men in hats with cameras, shouting, “Smile! Look happy! Smile!”
“In America,” said the Colonel, as if trying to explain to the riders what this all meant, “everything is of course gigantic.”
* * *
The man steered the small girl through the crowd, saying, “Pardon me” as he craned his neck for a better look forward. He smiled at the mixture of people who had been drawn to the horse show—men in formal eveningwear, women in long dresses, but then a large assortment of women with children in everyday clothes. In Europe, he thought, horsemanship is a man’s world. In America, it is for the women and especially the children. It was a happy thought, and he squeezed the shoulder of the girl beside him.
There was a large clutch of eager bystanders pressing against the velvet rope partitioning the audience from the backstage area of the Garden. The man picked his daughter up and swung her onto his broad shoulders so she could catch a glimpse of the white horses being untacked, groomed, and fed treats. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half a strudel, the best he could find in the Brooklyn bakeries, and handed it to the girl.
“Let’s see if we can give the horses a treat, Lydia,” he said. He pushed his way forward as politely as possible, but then as he caught sight of a familiar head, Roman-nosed, intelligent eyes sparkling with life, his manners deserted him.
“Mercury!” the man cried out.
The horse threw his head back, ears pricked, nostrils flared. His eyes darted rapidly over the crowd, then looked on all sides of his enclosure and even behind him. He whistled through his nose, and let out a tremendous whinny that sent reverberating oohs and ahhs through the crowd.
And then another man was shouldering his way through, from the other side of the velvet ropes, ignoring the hands reaching out for his, the pens stretched forward for his autograph, the eager clamor of the ladies calling, “Colonel! Colonel!” And Alois Podhajsky drew Max Müller’s arm through his own and led him forward through the crowd.
The ladies and gentlemen and children who saw the tall, thin man embrace the noble stallion, and saw the tiny, fair-haired child offer him a treat, did not know who they were or how many miles and years it had taken to reunite them, but they knew love when they saw it—they knew tenderness when they saw it—and they knew through their own war what it was to find the person you loved again after the world had taken them from you. And so they burst into applause.
NOTES
Chapter 1
1. Czech for “fellow”
2. Wienerisch (the German dialect spoken in Vienna, Austria) for “slowpoke,” or “little snail”
Chapter 3
1. The stable
Chapter 4
1. Joker
2. Trainee
3. Part of the present-day Czech Republic, in Central Europe
Chapter 6
1. Inspection
2. Around the full arena
3. Small circles
Chapter 7
1. Ancient Greek soldier and historian, author of the seminal work On Horsemanship
Chapter 8
1. The invasion of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938
2. The International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) was a Vienna organization that started an international Gypsy registration in 1935. By 1940, the ICPC and its records were under control of the SS, an organ of the Nazi party.
3. The great eighteenth-century French riding master, whose training method forms one of the foundations of the Spanish Riding School’s program.
4. Not a zoo with wild animals, but a public parkland in Vienna
Chapter 9
1. Famed director of the riding school from 1813–1833
Chapter 10
1. “No SS here?”
2. A GI nickname for a German
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
While my previous books in the Breyer Horse Collection involved forays into, for me, unknown territory and history—twice to the American West, and a brief trip to the coal mines of Scotland—Mercury’s Flight took me further afield both in time and place … and required quite a lot of help to get right.
My first thanks must be to Atjan Hop, former secretary general of the Lipizzan International Foundation (www.lipizzaninternationalfederation.eu.com) and founder of Baroque Consult (www.lipizzan.nl). Atjan is not only an authority on the noble Lipizzaner breed, its training, and its history, but was also the kindest, most thorough, and most generous of readers, saving me from nu
merous errors and cheering me on throughout two drafts.
I would not have met Atjan had it not been for Andreas Hausberger, head rider of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, who kindly allowed me to join the Horses and Dressage Web site and listserv (http://horsesanddressage.multiply.com), which he manages. This deeply knowledgeable and vibrant community gave me expert guidance on everything from how horses got from the train station to the Stallburg in 1930s Vienna, to Gottlieb Polak’s violin; from training techniques to stall bedding. In addition to Andreas, who answered many questions himself, I must particularly mention John N. D’Addamio (who gladly learned, and gladly taught).
At the Spanish Riding School, I am indebted to Barbara Niederberger-Sommersacher, who helped me with the depiction of the inspection process at Piber, as well as created a general timeline for a stallion’s progress through training. Die Spanische has a beautiful Web site (www.srs.at), as does the Federal Stud Piber (www.piber.com).
I was ridiculously lucky to have the translator Krishna Winston’s help in coming up with the perfect Viennese nickname for my thoughtful, slow-paced stallion: Schnecki (little snail).
And it is lucky for students and aficionados of the Lipizzaner breed that its most valiant protector, Colonel Alois Podhajsky, was a prolific writer with a firm sense of his own place in history. These books of his were essential to the writing of mine: The Complete Training of Horse and Rider in the Principles of Classical Horsemanship (reprinted by the Wilshire Book Company), My Dancing White Horses: The Autobiography of Alois Podhajsky (1965, Henry Holt), and Die Spanische Hofreitschule (1954, Verlag Adolf Holzhausens NFG).
Of course, none of these marvelous sources could save me from willful error for the sake of narrative. While I made every attempt to get as factually and historically correct as possible, there were times in which I felt I had to take liberties with facts for the sake of fiction. First, the new recruits from Piber would never have been allowed to run freely in the Winterreitschule with older, territorial stallions—they would have been by themselves. Second, I’ve condensed some of the events of the war years into a shorter space of time. And last, Gottlieb Polak died before the evacuation of the riding school—but I couldn’t bear to lose him. His violin solo during the air raid is, alas, a fantasy. While I rather doubt there were any half-Gypsy élèves at the school during the war, there is no doubt at all about the persecution of the Gypsies in Austria before and after the Anschluss.
Lastly, heartfelt thanks to Miriam Altshuler, Susan Bishansky, and Jean Feiwel for their patience and trust.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNIE WEDEKIND grew up riding horses in Louisville, Kentucky. Since then, she’s been in the saddle in every place she’s lived, from Rhode Island to New Orleans, South Africa to New York. Her first novel, A Horse of Her Own, was praised by Kirkus Reviews as “possibly the most honest horse book since National Velvet.… A champion.” She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. www.anniewedekind.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Notes
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
An Imprint of Macmillan
MERCURY’S FLIGHT. Copyright © 2011 by Reeves International, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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ISBN: 978-0-312-64451-2
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First Edition: 2011
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eISBN 9781250120380
First eBook edition: March 2016
Mercury's Flight - The Story of a Lipizzaner Stallion Page 8
