The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  Drozde gave the money to him for safe-keeping, which was a tactical manoeuvre. There was nowhere in her tent or on her person where she could safely keep it. But she knew where he kept it – in a strongbox at the bottom of a sack of potatoes that he topped up daily so it was always full – and when she parted ways with the company it was going with her, not staying with him. The money represented the next stage of her grand plan. It would pay for the rent and the stock of a small shop in Ledziny or Imielin, or some other town in the far south that basked in the twin blessings of good climate and being a million leagues away from where she was born.

  Drozde rose from the table, gave Molebacher a kiss on the cheek – for the benefit of the three privates he fended her off as though this was an unwanted irritation – and took her leave.

  She still had an hour or so left. She used it to practise some of the sketches she had in mind and to work up a song to one of her favourite tunes – that of a hoary old ballad called ‘Bären Gässlin’. The original song was a grim screed about ghosts and vengeance, but its simple rhythms were very easy to compose to. Drozde had taught Taglitz to play it fast and light, and she used it regularly.

  Soldiers began to wander over to the ruins in twos and threes as she worked. Most of them were content to sit and enjoy what was left of the sunlight, but some wanted to talk and Drozde (already in persona as the mistress of ceremonies) had to talk back. It was just chaff, flirtatious on their part and outrageously insulting on hers. They expected it and she had to deliver, even though she could have used a few minutes more to prepare.

  When Taglitz came, she ran through the songs with him quickly and then, as the ruins filled with men and women, she retired into the tent-like space behind the theatre where the puppets were laid out ready. She watched through a worn patch in the fabric, judging her moment. Dietmar arrived (with wife) and then Pabst (without). Klaes came last of all, talking to the adjutant, Bedvar, and staying right at the back, where he could leave early if there was anything he disapproved of. There usually was.

  When she judged by a quick count that two-thirds of the detachment was sitting on the grass in front of the theatre, she got the proceedings underway with a ragged fanfare that she played herself on an old, battered trumpet that probably had more tin than brass in it. The sound was awful, and she made no attempt to stay in tune, but the soldiers and the women greeted that raucous, untempered squawk with their usual cheers and applause.

  Drozde started the show, as she did all her performances, with a short speech from General Schrecklich. The general’s puppet had a huge stomach, gin blossoms on his cheeks and so many medals on his uniform that they stood out further than his shoulders. ‘Pay attention, you men,’ Schrecklich rumbled. ‘Entertainment’s an excellent thing. Takes your mind off other things. Like getting your heads blown off. All to the good, what, what? Watch the nice puppets. Give the puppet lady your pennies. And don’t think about the Prussians. We won’t be seeing any trouble from them. Sticklers for good manners, you know. They won’t shoot you if you don’t introduce yourself.’

  The general said several more things in a similar vein, ostensibly trying to improve morale while dwelling in insensitive detail on the imminence of war. The soldiers, for whom this was no laughing matter, laughed until they pissed themselves.

  The next item was broad slapstick – Molebacher’s liberation of the cows. Molebacher himself barely figured in the piece, whose heroes were Privates Swivek and Rattenwend. The farmer they swindled was belligerent and suspicious. He chased the soldiers away three times before they finally succeeded in tricking him out of his livestock. Finally they took the cows back to Molebacher, who ennobled them as Sir Swivek of the beef stew and Baron Rattenwend von Cowpat. The piece ended with the first song, a hymn of praise to beef sung by Molebacher and the two privates to a lilting skirl from Taglitz’s pipe. This was the song that Drozde hadn’t had enough time to work out, so it wasn’t very funny until in a moment of pure inspiration she had the cows join in, singing off-key. Tag played off-key too, as though there was a cow piper piping for the cow singers. That went down pretty well.

  After that she enacted the piece she felt most confident about. The coquette came on along with a second puppet who played the role of her mother. ‘What ails you, Feronika?’ the mother asked as her daughter languished prettily.

  ‘I need … Lipisher torte!’ the coquette sighed. ‘If any man should bring it to me, oh, what I should give to him! How my heart would swell with love and tender feeling for him! How pliant and willing I would be in his masculine arms!’

  There was a yelp from the back of the audience. Drozde risked a quick glance through her peephole and saw the newly minted Dame Dietmar with her hands clasped to her mouth, eyes wide at the outrageous dialogue. But she was thrilled, not scandalised. She turned to her husband, shaking her head in wonder, and he chucked her under the chin as he kissed her. Look at this, his smile said. You married me, and now you’re famous.

  Enter an officer puppet, much to the two ladies’ astonishment. Drozde put a swagger into the soldier’s movements as he introduced himself as Lieutenant Dietmar and swore himself into the coquette’s service like a knight of old. He would never return, he said, until he had found a Lipisher torte and brought it back to her.

  ‘From Lipish?’ the coquette hazarded. ‘It would take you no more than half an hour to ride there.’

  No, the soldier said, not from Lipish. From the den of the ice dragon in the far north, who was known to keep a stash for his own use. Nothing would prevent the brave lieutenant from finding the dragon’s lair, slaying the beast and bringing back its hoard for the maiden’s delectation.

  This was greeted ecstatically by the audience, as Drozde had known it would be. She kept the joke going through a series of comedic encounters, with the Dietmar puppet braving more and more absurd dangers to find and bring back the cream cake, and then in due course getting his reward – the love of the coquette, who married him with the ice dragon officiating. Drozde loved the dragon puppet, which had taken her three days to make, and lost no opportunity of bringing it into the show.

  Another song, then – the ‘Bären Gässlin’ one, with the coquette singing about the many reasons why she loved Lieutenant Dietmar, referring back to a great many of his exploits from former times, all well known to Drozde’s audience. She was careful to avoid any reference to Dietmar’s sexual conquests. They were a theme she’d visited often, but in front of Dietmar’s wife it would be perilous to cause him any real embarrassment. Instead, the jokes she retold in the song turned on drunken excesses or narrowly averted disasters.

  The Dietmar piece was the longest in the show. Drozde went on to a series of short vignettes about the village people and the brief interactions that the company had had with them thus far. Most of these were harmless in the extreme, turning on the villagers’ mistrust of the soldiers and their ignorance of current affairs, but she’d saved (as she often did) a sting in the tail to end the performance.

  The Schrecklich puppet, without his medals and standing in now for Colonel August, brooded silently in a dungeon-like room. A second officer entered, marching with such vigour and energy that his boot came up above his head with each step. He saluted his commanding officer, then bowed for good measure. When the colonel failed to notice him, he went out and came in again, saluting all the way.

  ‘At ease, Klaes,’ the colonel said. Drozde had to pause for a moment here, as this simple line caused such hilarity that it was a minute or more before she could make herself heard again. The rules were subtle here, but what it came down to was that Klaes was fair game because he was the youngest officer in the company, required to show good-natured tolerance rather than take offence when he was lampooned.

  The colonel gave Klaes a secret mission – to spy on the villagers and see what secrets they were keeping. Klaes went on to do an appallingly bad job of this, spying on milkmaids while murders, thefts and wholesale debauchery went on all aroun
d him. The real Klaes had already left by this point, but Drozde couldn’t tell whether this was before the piece or in response to it. She wasn’t afraid either way. Klaes wasn’t a brute like Dietmar, and even if he were offended he wouldn’t stoop to act on his hurt feelings. It was sad, but it was so: the more pretensions a man had to good manners, the more liberties she could take with him. The vicious cleared a circle around themselves that she had better sense than to enter.

  She wound the show down with a final song that was more sentimental and maudlin in nature. Then she came out from hiding and stood with her skirts hitched up to catch any coins the soldiers might give her as they filed out from her makeshift auditorium. Most gave a copper, or perhaps two. The women generally gave nothing, which wasn’t surprising. For them, as for Drozde, money was a matter of survival. Dietmar gave her a cruitzer and a condescending nod. From the smirk that tugged at his lips, she guessed that Dame Feronika had enjoyed The Quest for the Torte and the spotlight it put on her.

  Once everyone had left, Drozde began to fold away the puppets. Taglitz knelt down to help her, but she shook her head and shooed him away. She had her own method of looping the strings so that they didn’t tangle in the box, and he’d never been able to learn it. To forestall any more well meant but unneeded assistance, she paid him off.

  Taglitz stared at the coins in the palm of his hand, counting them twice before he spoke. ‘There are five fenings here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘That doesn’t add up to a grosch. It adds up to a cruitzer and a fening over.’

  ‘You had a good idea. Going off-key for the cows. So you get a little extra.’

  ‘And I still get my beer?’

  ‘And you still get your beer.’

  ‘Fielen danken, Drozde.’

  ‘You’re welcome. But don’t talk Schönnbrunner, Tag. Not even bad Schönnbrunner. Someone might mistake you for an officer, and then where would you be?’

  Clouds had begun to scud in from the north as the sun retreated to the horizon. Tag cast a suspicious glance up at their black bulk. ‘Sleeping up in the house,’ he sighed, ‘instead of in a tent with a fucking hole in it.’

  Drozde hefted the first of her boxes onto her shoulder. If it was going to rain again, she had to get them inside quickly. ‘Everything has two sides to it, Tag. The secret to staying happy is turning things around so only the good side faces you.’

  Taglitz didn’t look convinced. ‘Even getting soaking wet and chilled to the bone?’

  ‘Even that. Isn’t Swivek in your tent?

  ‘Yes, he is. Why?’

  ‘If he farts in the night, the hole will save you from suffocating.’

  The first drops were starting to fall as she walked away.

  11

  Drozde began to think that this might not be such a bad billet for the winter. The puppet show had made a good profit, and Molebacher seemed pleased when she turned over the coins. She’d go into town tomorrow, get some supplies and, just as importantly, start talking to people. With luck the village would turn out to be a rich source of stories for future performances.

  For now she was free. Molebacher planned to drink with the sergeants again tonight and had dismissed her to her own devices. She had some idea of spending the night in the camp: the other women would certainly be happy to see her and talk over the show. But it had started to rain heavily, as it had the night before, and the tents outside looked bleak and uninviting under the louring sky. Almost without intending it, Drozde found she was heading towards the old ballroom where she had met the ghosts on that first night, as if they might still be there. It would be stupid to expect such a thing, of course. These spirits did not stay put like most, and she had seen them in other places since. But even before she turned into the side passage she felt a light pressure against her hand, and looked down to see the little girl, Magda.

  ‘It was a funny show,’ the child said. ‘We all liked it a lot.’

  ‘I didn’t see you there,’ Drozde said, somewhat startled.

  ‘We stand at the side,’ explained Magda. She beamed at Drozde. ‘But I’ll sit right out in front next time, because you said that.’

  When Drozde opened the door of the room the ghosts were waiting. They clustered around her, murmuring their congratulations on her performance. Several even touched her arm as she passed in a kind of greeting. Drozde was expecting their welcome this time around, and so she was ready for it. She did not flinch at their proximity, nor draw back from the feather-light contacts. The unease that she had felt so strongly before was fading now. She knew that the ghosts respected her, though she couldn’t work out why, and it felt somehow churlish to snub the open and ingenuous goodwill that she saw in their faces. Still, there was a lingering sense of wrongness to all of this, a strangeness that set her on her guard. And in spite of their frank welcome, she knew that there must be things the ghosts were keeping from her. She noticed that a few of them – maybe only one or two – held back from the press, even turned away as she came in. But their shyness was no more accountable than the friendliness of their fellows.

  She had no way of making them explain these puzzles – ghosts were immune to bribes and threats alike. But perhaps, if she was patient, they might give her the answers she wanted without her having to ask.

  ‘Can we have another story?’ Magda asked, while the ghosts were still milling around her. The talk stopped abruptly, and faces turned to Drozde in expectation. Magda put a wheedle into her voice. ‘You’ve got some time now. Pleeease, Drozde?’

  Drozde shrugged. ‘If you like,’ she agreed, and rolled up her shawl so she could sit comfortably on the floor, leaning against the rail of the old orchestra stand. Many of the ghosts copied her. As Magda had done on the first night when she climbed the stairs, they acted for all the world as if they had substance, as if walls and floor were real to them. A young man stretched out long legs with an audible sigh of pleasure; an older one hooked one arm over the rail. This all seemed a perverse pantomime to Drozde, but if this mimicry made them happy, she thought, then why not? She had to admit that the ones closest to her really did look comfortable – and remarkably solid, as they had the day before.

  ‘Well?’ Drozde asked. ‘Whose story shall we hear?’

  She addressed the room at large, but Magda darted forward before anyone else could speak.

  ‘Thea!’ she commanded. ‘Tell Drozde what happened in the house when you lived here. I like that one!’

  The ghosts parted, and a little knot of women came forward, their wide skirts interweaving with each other. They were severely dressed, with high collars and hair pulled back, but their expressions were eager. One of them, taller than the rest, took a further step towards Drozde, and in doing so came into sharper focus. She looked around the room as if assuring herself of her audience, and as she began to speak Drozde saw the lines in her face, her grey eyes and shy smile.

  ‘I was born in this house,’ the woman said, ‘the only daughter of the family, and in my own mind the only child.’

  My brother Franz-Augustus was eight years older than me: I only saw him when he came back from school at Christmas, when he already seemed like a man. Our family was rich, though I had no way of judging that we were different from anyone else. One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my mother, looking at engravings of furniture. She pointed out a curly box with legs, which she said was a pianoforte, a musical instrument. She showed it to my father, and three days later a pianoforte was delivered to our house, all the way from Leipzig. It took two men to carry it in. I was much older before I knew that this was at all unusual.

  I grew up against a background of war, in a family that had made war their living. Our grandfather was the distinguished general Gebhard von Schildauer. My mother told me once that the ‘von’ in his name, and the house itself, had been rewards for his service in the wars against the French. So of course my father was a soldier too, a major in the 6th Regiment, and my brother woul
d be a soldier in his turn. But for me, as a girl, the surname meant very little. My mother called me Dorothea, and so did my brother, when he was home. I don’t remember my father calling me anything but ‘child’, or sometimes, when he was in a very good mood, ‘little lady’. But he did not talk to me often: he was not comfortable with children. He must already have been over fifty when I knew him, and he was away a good deal with his regiment, leaving my mother to manage the house, which she did well. I was raised mostly by my nurse, and then by my governess, both of them women of spotless reputation and strict principles. They taught me to revere God, the empire and my parents, to uphold my family’s honour, do my duty and tell the truth. Since then, I think I have broken all those commands.

  I was a solitary child, but not discontented. The house was full of books that no-one else ever read; I could wander where I liked, and make up my own stories to keep me company. And twice every week I had another companion. In the village nearest the house, which was called Puppendorf, there lived a glassblower who was famed locally for his skill. In the early days of my childhood, when my father came home from fighting the Danish, my parents used to entertain guests in the house. The servants were clumsy, so there was always a need for glassware. When I was about seven, the glassblower’s daughter came to the house with my mother’s latest order: six wine glasses, packed in a basket of straw as if they were eggs. My mother saw the girl pick them out and set each one on the kitchen dresser, noted how delicate-handed she was, and engaged her to come in on Mondays and Thursdays to clean the china. So I met Cilie.

  She was a revelation to me. She was a year and a half older than me, but looked younger. She laughed readily, and cried to see a mouse die; her hair was always escaping from her cap, and she never stopped talking. Her given name, Cecilia, was too long for her taste, and so was mine, so when I was with her I became Thea. If my mother or the housekeeper was by, to be sure, she kept her eyes down and hid her smiles and called me Fräulein as a respectful servant should. But in the afternoons my mother took a nap, and Cilie was left alone in the little storeroom with her cloths and spirits of vinegar. At first I just slipped in and talked to her. Later I started doing half her work, to give us time when we could play together outside. The grounds were wide in those days, with many trees, and if we stayed in the orchard no-one could see us.