"What’s on tonight?" I asked between coughs. "The Magic Flute?"
He raised a pointed eyebrow and gave a one-sided smile; it was an impressive mannerism of his, probably born of his habit of wearing a monocle. "Yes," he said. "Who cares? More flute than magic, as far as I’m concerned. Still. Well, anyway, as I was saying— What was I saying? Never mind. I’d better be off now. So long. Speedy recovery."
The memory of this bedside scene remained with me for years as an insidious snare, a mousetrap tied up with blue ribbon like a chocolate box, always ready to catch me with its painful grip whenever I saw a man paying court to my mother.
THE DRESS REHEARSAL for The Miracle was to start in the early afternoon, and we had been warned that it might continue till the small hours of the night. It was not just a dress rehearsal, but what the Viennese staff called the Generalprobe—a full, ultimate rehearsal and review before the public performance the following evening. We had been told to be prepared for storms of bad temper, and we had heard the saying that a dress rehearsal without hitches and without rows promised a disastrous first night. To my amazement, scene after scene flowed smoothly, entwining with stage sets and lighting effects and accompanied by peaceful dealings behind stage. It was like seeing a finished Persian rug which up till then one had seen being knotted only from the reverse side.
The only upset I witnessed was not a quarrel itself but its aftermath. It happened when my group had been assembled, before walking onstage for the dance round the Maypole. A deputy stage manager was standing in front of us, ready to lead us into the wings. Just as he beckoned to us to follow him, he was obstructed by several stagehands carrying props, who shouted some warning I could not make out, and then a lad came running, telling him to make a detour. An assistant director appeared from behind, urging us to get going, and thus we were led, by a roundabout way, through a door and into what seemed a passage, then out through another door opposite, and from there to the wings. But this passage was in reality a long, narrow room, and on a divan close to one wall crouched Lady Diana Manners, who was naked. I knew it was she, because her double, Rosamond Pinchot, was to be in our scene. Lady Diana was encircling one knee with her arms, with her head flung back; her face washed with tears, she was screaming with sobs. Near the wall facing her, close to a table, stood two stage dressers, holding between them a cloak of brocade that I recognized as the one worn by the Holy Virgin in the church scene. They were looking at it with the tense and reproachful countenance peculiar to women when they search for a rent or stain in a piece of cloth. Suspended above the naked actress was a single dim electric light, which lit her hazily and to advantage, suffusing her pale coral-pink body with amber shadows. This, together with her extravagant pose of abandoned grief, made her look like a mythological figure painted by Correggio—an Ariadne deserted on Naxos, or a Europa after the rape by the bull. In contrast, the two fat, short, elderly women, absorbed in their prosy and thrifty task, tightly and shabbily clothed in black and with every wrinkle and every graying wisp of hair sharply limned in the glare of a powerful lamp on a nearby table, while the rest of the room was in a brownish gloom, formed one of those domestic interiors painted by the Dutch masters in the seventeenth century.
We were startled and embarrassed, wanting to stare and yet averting our eyes. Some of us started to curtsy, to apologize for our intrusion. Neither the stage manager nor the assistant director seemed to find anything unusual in the situation. They clapped their hands at us and called "Tut, tut" and "Come, come, come!" impatiently and foolishly, like townsmen attempting to shoo along a flock of geese. Lady Diana and the dressers did not give us so much as a glance. The one continued weeping and screaming, the others went on examining their brocade.
In the interval of the dress rehearsal, we children were still wandering about in our medieval smocks, with wreaths of artificial field flowers in our hair, because we had to wait our turn to use one of the communal changing rooms. I was with two girls from my group, and we were in search of ices. Our mothers never allowed us to eat the cheap water ices sold on street corners and in popular establishments. The only place considered fit for us was Berger’s, in the Vodiková, whose sorbets surpassed those at Rumpelmayer’s in Paris and at Demel’s in Vienna. We went into the bar on the first floor, where refreshments and a coffee urn were set out on a trestle table in front of the counter. While we were counting our money and worrying whether the woman behind the table might know who we were and refuse to serve us, a medieval roisterer appeared in the archway, with his fur-trimmed cape draped over one shoulder, revealing one yellow-slashed blue sleeve. He was carrying his blue-plumed beret in his hand.
"Come here," he said, in a low voice.
I went up to him.
"You are ravishing and enchanting," he said. "I’ve been all over the place looking for you." He drew his free hand over his forehead. "This is our last time," he said. "Have you thought of it? Next week, I’ll start my internship in obstetrics, on call day and night, and after that it will be my finals, one oral after another."
I did not understand him. I only grasped that we would not be meeting anymore. "How very interesting," I said, in the way my mother did when she did not know what one was talking about.
"After this," he continued, "I’ll have to go for my military, and you will be behind your bastion of "—and he set the beret on his head, splayed out his left hand, and counted off on its fingers with the forefinger of the right—"cook, scullery maid, in-between maid, parlor maid, the hairdresser every day, and the seamstress once every fortnight. I’ve remembered it right, haven’t I?"
"Yes," I said.
"Edith, she’s only got coffee and vanilla!" called one of the girls. "Are you still in on it? And there’s no whipped cream."
"Come with me," he said, and, embracing my shoulders, he turned me round, stepped behind me, and took me into the anteroom that opened onto the galleried landing. "Here," he said, stopping in a corner. Still standing behind me, with his arms round my shoulders, he lowered himself to the floor and sat down cross-legged, pulling me into his lap. "My sweet," he said. "At last."
I saw people passing on the landing beyond. Two figures were bending over the ledge and looking down onto the stalls, from which rose the murmur of voices and the sounds of footsteps, shouts, claps, and bangs. The enervating fragrance peculiar to the theater—the smell of dusty plush, mildewed velvet, stale scent, stale sweat, and heated iron from the radiators behind latticed brass grills—made me languid to the point of weakness. I could not have risen even if I had wanted to.
I knew he was going to kiss me, but the struggling, kicking, scratching cat inside me, the animal that could fight free and run away, had deserted me. Inside me, in its place, there was a plant, and plants cannot run away. They want to open the bud they have grown and unfold it into a flower, and they are at the mercy of the weather and have to submit to every mood of the sky above them. I was sure he was going to kiss me, to kiss my lips and the inside of my lips, as I had heard this was what lovers do. And I waited for it.
What he did was not what I had expected; it was much less and yet much worse. He raised his hand to my head and slowly took off the wreath of field flowers, patiently disentangling the wire where it had caught my hair. With the same slowness, unhesitatingly and inexorably, his fingers went underneath the heavy strand of hair that always covered one side of my forehead, almost touching the eyebrow, and slid it aside, uncovering a bare part of me that no one ever saw. With the same deliberate slowness his mouth moved in where his fingers had been, and stayed there, insistently but with an ebbing and flowing of its pressure that swayed my whole body and made me lean against him with increasing closeness, until I felt I was melting into his arms. A shudder moved his mouth and went through me, and then his lips closed and stayed in calmness for a long time.
When he lifted his face, the coolness of my forehead remained for a while, from the moisture of his lips, and a lightness, from the absence of their pres
sure. I watched the green fur-bordered cape on his shoulder rising and falling.
"It is enough now—more than enough," he said. "You are sweet beyond my dreams."
"I can see you breathing," I said.
"Evenly?" he asked.
"Yes, of course," I said. "Why shouldn’t you? You haven’t been running."
"We must go now," he said. "No, let me do it. I must cover what I have uncovered. What belongs to me." And he made the strand of hair fall in a wave over its accustomed place. He lifted the wreath from the floor, laid it on his palm, and offered it to me.
"Thank God you remembered it," I said. "I’d quite forgotten I had it. Golly."
"Be careful with it," he said. "Keep it for the first night. But don’t put it on anymore now. Not today. The dress rehearsal is over."
Equality Cake
I
In the kitchen of my grandmother’s castle in Bohemia there were two implements for the removal of cherry stones. They were wire loops mounted on stems of white unpolished wood, and every time the cook got ready to prepare the cherries for equality cake, she took them both out of a nest of drawers and laid them on the table. Then, with the superb calmness of the habitual evildoer, she pulled a hairpin from the coil of hair that crowned her head like an outsize snail shell carved of ebony and used it for digging the stones out of the fruit. When this task was done, she wiped the pin across the front of her apron, restored it to its place, and returned the cherry stoners where they belonged, as their deceitful presence was no longer needed. I never remarked on this ritual, but because I was a constant visitor in the kitchen it was inevitable that, for me, equality cake stood for deceit. It was a bland, smooth, unpretentious cake, of blond appearance, closely paved with fruit, and when it came out of the oven the gentle swell of the pastry nailed down by the cherries made it look like a button-tufted sheet. I was a child in those days, in the early nineteen twenties, and to me equality cake was an eatable calendar, which marked the progress and passage of every summer I spent in the castle. On my arrival, in June, it was set with the early, sour, palefleshed amarelle cherries, which could not be eaten raw. Then came the sweet red cherries, then halved greengages, then quartered apricots, then the late, piquant black griotte cherries, and then, in the beginning of autumn, it ended with small violet-blue plums. By the time I was eleven years old, the benefits of advanced education lent a new character to my feelings about equality cake. I inclined to the belief that it derived its name from the French Revolution and the slogan "Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” and I tried to convince the cook that Robespierre had eaten it every day, washing it down with sips of his afternoon coffee. The cook was contemptuous of this conceit, though I had taken great pains to furnish her with historical explanations.
"I’m surprised at you, Miss Edith," she said one afternoon. "Everybody knows it’s called equality cake because you weigh the eggs and then put in the same weight of flour, butter, and sugar. All equal. Simple."
"That’s true, of course," I said, "but don’t you see it’s symbolic? Égalité—that’s butter, sugar, flour. Fraternité— that’s the eggs. Because with the eggs instead of weights you don’t have to worry about decagrams, the way you do here in Bohemia, and if you were home with Mama and me in South Kensington you wouldn’t have to bother with ounces, either. The eggs make it across frontiers, and that’s the idea of universal brotherhood."
"Equality cake always was and always will be," said the cook. "Being an easy cake to make, and easy to eat, seeing it doesn’t squash and crumble, and coming in handy, considering it stays moist for days on end. It’s older than your French Revolution, the way I see it."
"But don’t you see, equality cake is so truly and utterly equal it must have a special meaning? You always bake it in trays—never in the round—and then you cut it up in squares. And a square has equal sides and equal angles."
"And where does the liberty come in, if you please?" said the cook.
"I don’t know, exactly," I said, "but I’ll think about it. It’s got to be somewhere, too. I’ll tell you when I know."
"You do that, Miss Edith," she said.
This remark, coming from anyone else, could have been of an ironical nature, but with the cook it was not. She was incapable of irony or sarcasm, and she was also insensitive to them. That day, I watched her as she wiped the table with fierce large sweeps, as though needing to unfurl her energy after the finicky task of stoning cherries. She was perhaps not the perfect partner for discussing the higher meaning of equality cake, but she was willing to give her serious interest to anything I might say, and thus spared me the indifference I would have met with elsewhere in the castle. Emma, who was my mother’s London maid, and whom we brought with us to Bohemia on our summer visits, would have cut me off with, "You make me laugh, Miss Edith. You make me laugh, you do," adding one of her false, affected laughs. Uncle Frederick would have said, "You fascinate me," thus achieving the same ironical effect. My mother would have said, "If you didn’t think up such utter nonsense, you might occasionally give your mind to washing your neck and cleaning your nails." And my grandmother would have dismissed me with, "Difficult to say," and made me fetch her patience cards "while you’re on your feet."
I often imagined that the French Revolution would be delightful to the cook, considering the rebellious cast of her own nature. Unlike Emma, who could not see a filled salt-cellar without smoothing its surface with a spoon and imprinting on it with the end of its stem a pattern of overlapping crescent-shaped ridges, the cook was not governed by a desire for pleasing neatness. When it came to decorating, she liked a violent clash of colors—"making things a bit lively," as she called it—and thus she would give a dusting of fiercely red paprika to the jade-green cucumber salad, ignoring my mother’s repeated protests that she was setting our mouths on fire. She also revolted against the decencies of thrift and privilege, by stealing the expensive bottled spa water that my grandmother drank for her gout and using it for the poaching of asparagus, saying, "A noble vegetable must be treated noble. This is a castle and not a poorhouse." Or she would chuck a whole brick of butter into the sluggish flames of the kitchen range, muttering, "Burn up, will you?" I concluded that it was people like the cook who made revolutions, and that Robespierre had looked exactly like her, with the same imperious presence.
And yet one afternoon when I told the cook Marie Antoinette’s remark, "If they have no bread, let them eat cake," and explained how it had brought on the French Revolution, she was not impressed. "For that sort of daft-ness, Miss Edith," she said, "you don’t have to go all the way to France. You could have found it right here next door, in Sestajovice, with the old Countess Sternborn, if you’d known her."
"Oh, that," I said. Countess Sternborn, the mother of the present Count Sternborn, whose estates bordered on those belonging to my grandmother, had on one occasion been approached by a beggar. "Lady, I haven’t eaten a bite these last three days," he said, to which the Countess replied, "That’s very wrong of you, you know. One must force oneself to eat."
"Old Countess Sternborn didn’t start a revolution," said the cook, "and I can’t see how this Marie Antoinette did."
"That’s because there was no Robespierre to listen to the old woman Sternborn," I said. "With Marie Antoinette, he was on the spot and heard it all."
"Maybe," said the cook. "But mark you, Miss Edith, your Marie Antoinette wasn’t so singular, seeing we’ve got that same kind of talk right here, too, so who’s to say your Robespierre was singular? For all you know, there’s one just like him just round the corner, getting good and ready to get going."
For a while, I was speechless with fright. Then I said, "But he wouldn’t come here to us. He would go to Sestajovice and cut off Count Sternborn’s head, because Count Sternborn is nobility, and we aren’t."
"You don’t want to be so sure, Miss Edith," said the cook. "Count Sternborn’s got the manor house—what’s he got, all in all? Ten, twelve rooms—a handful, you migh
t say—and once you’re inside it, it’s like a dumpling sitting on a plate. One look round and you’ve seen it all. But here you got the park, that takes two hours’ fast walking to do one round of it, and you’ve got fifty rooms, with the painted rooms as no one else’s got—the Austrian Room and the Saints’ Room— and even the Garden Room is done with parrots, and whoever did it did it because he was tired, seeing it’s only got three walls, and the fourth wall missing where it should be."
"It’s got to be open on one side," I said. "That’s what makes it a sala terrena, and it isn’t parrots, it’s crested cockatoos."
"Never mind," said the cook. "And Robespierre wouldn’t mind, either, because you wouldn’t be alive, not by the time he’d got that far."
"I wouldn’t be here, because you don’t have revolutions during the holidays," I said. "We’d be in London, Mama and me, and Uncle Frederick isn’t here in the winter, either, and with Grandmama it wouldn’t matter, because with her he wouldn’t dare. Nobody dares anything with Grandmama. You can’t even be cheeky to her, and if Marie Antoinette had been like Grandmama, nothing would have happened to her, either."
"Maybe," said the cook.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I was harrowed by the cook’s remarks, wishing I could dismiss them as nonsense and fearing I could not. On the one hand, the cook was lacking in historical perspective. For instance, during our talk regarding Marie Antoinette, the cook had said, "Ah, our Lord the Emperor, he never did have any luck with his family," and when I told her that the Emperor Franz Josef belonged to the nineteenth century, whereas Marie Antoinette belonged to the eighteenth, the cook remarked, "Now you got me all muddled. You’ve mixed me up like a Christmas loaf." On the other hand, the cook was a person of sound judgment; she could lay a hundred eggs on the table and pick out the rotten ones, speedily and infallibly, without holding them up against the flame of a candle.
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 10
