by Angels
“Elfy. My first toy.”
Johann turned the key in the mechanism and put down Elfy on top of the chest. The little gray elephant began to walk forward, its trunk swinging rhythmically from side to side.
“I have lived all my life for you,” said the old man in a voice that broke. “All I have invented, all of my endeavours, all that is nothing to me beside the toys I built of my hands for you, beside the games we created together on winter evenings. I would give anything if you could be, for just one more day, the little boy I took in. But I can’t make it so. Forgive me.”
And Pieter had to hold him up in his arms, for Johann Havel had begun to weep, as old men do when they remember that the pattern of their lives is done and that there is nothing left for them to await.
For three days, Anna’s parents screamed the same reproaches, tore their hair, sent fine china plates crashing against the walls as if they had been vulgar tin dishes. Anna observed their hysterics with a detached gaze, as if she watched a ballet. Several times, if only to get five minutes of quiet, she tried to explain to her mother what was about to happen, but her mother would not listen. For three days, Anna remained a prisoner of the house on the Sommerstrass, while parental recriminations made the glass panes shake in their lead.
Finally, the letter came. Sealed with the crimson dynastic wax, it surrounded itself with an aura of silence. Anna shook it under her mother’s nose, then her father’s, and when their mouths had shut at last, Anna broke the seal and read what she had no need to read. Then she opened the finely worked box that accompanied the letter, and in a rage put on her finger the second seal, the silver ring of her betrothal.
The news spread through Wessendam as a drop of water wets a square of cloth. An incredible number of young women were revealed as long-time friends of Anna Holtz, eager to visit her in her house on the Sommerstrass; the whole of the aristocracy could no longer conceive of a soirée that did not include Herr and Damme Holtz.
Radulf himself only came to visit Anna a week later. They were left alone. Anna was sitting on the same armchair from which she had welcomed Radulf the first time. Radulf, sitting on the divan Anna’s father had occupied, offered her a half-dozen compliments as if choosing them from a previously written list.
“I beg you, Highness,” Anna finally said in a toneless voice, “take back the ring. I am not the one you desire. I am incapable of ever loving you.”
“That matters not at all to me,” answered Radulf.
“But why?” asked Anna, desperate. “Why me?”
At these words Radulf grew pale, rose abruptly and took his leave. Anna, incredulous, had been able to read on his face that he did not know himself.
The next day, Anna learned from her father that harsh controls had been established at the gates of the city: it had become an ordeal to get in or out, and merchants complained bitterly about these unforeseen restrictions for which no reason had been given, only the two words “dynastic orders.” She went to her bedroom window and pulled the curtain aside. On the pavement of the Sommerstrass, below her, a man stood staring insolently at her window. His cloak was bordered by a crimson line.
Anna went to see Stefan. “Do you know where Pieter Havel lives?”
“Yes, Damoiselle. At the house of the inventor Johann Havel, on the Ligeiastrass. I have the address.”
“I will go there this hour, but you mustn’t accompany me. I have accounts to settle with Pieter Havel, and I believe I do not have much longer to do so.”
She went out of her house. The servant of the Dynasts followed her without bothering to be discreet. Anna had hidden her hair under a shawl and wore her dullest garments.
She walked up the Sommerstrass and crossed the Gartenplatz at the top of the hill, then took a transversal street that led to the Ligeiastrass. Once she had reached number thirty-seven, she knocked on the door. Radulf’s agent observed her as he leaned against the house across the street.
It was Pieter who opened the door.
“May I come in?” asked Anna softly, and Pieter withdrew to let her pass.
“I am happy to see you’re healed,” said Anna. “I’ve come to apologize; I troubled you when I should have been letting you recuperate from a shock.”
“Damoiselle Holtz,” said Johann Havel, who was coming out of a room giving on the entry hall.
“Herr Havel. I am glad to meet you. Pieter will have told you what happened?”
“Indeed. I’m most grateful that you rescued him, Damoiselle. . . . And my best wishes of happiness on the occasion of your betrothal.”
Anna’s smile shattered. “Thank you,” she said in a muffled voice.
“You have the eyes of a caged beast, Damoiselle. Must I conclude that you are not totally happy at the thought of this union?” Johann’s tone was quietly assured, almost sarcastic.
“Don’t mock me, Herr Havel,” a livid Anna warned him. Pieter looked at his adoptive father with a scandalized expression.
“You do not wish this marriage, Damoiselle, nothing could be more clear. You wish to flee, but nothing can take you beyond Radulf’s attentions. Am I wrong?”
Anna shook her head, mutely.
“Come with me, Damoiselle. You too, Pieter.”
Pieter followed Johann and Anna. A whiff of roses and jasmine came to him; the thought that the Dynast’s son could own Anna without her consent dizzied him.
Johann took a large key from his pocket and opened the door to his private workshop, where not even Pieter had ever been allowed. The young man held his breath as he entered this sanctum for the first time. There were too many things scattered on the shelves fixed to the walls for him to distinguish them one from the others. In the centre of the room was a vast construct of chains and gears, behind which a trompe-l’œil painting of a cloudy night sky had been set up.
“What is this, Herr Havel?”
“A time machine, Damoiselle. Your way out, if you wish it.”
Anna raised her eyebrows, ready to laugh. “You’re joking, mein Herr!”
“No, Damoiselle. I have been working on this machine for twenty years, and now it is ready. Use it, and you will vanish within the flow of time. For all of us here, including His Highness Radulf, you will have disappeared forever.”
“But how can you be sure that it works?”
“Oh, believe me,” said Johann Havel, “it works. And it’s at your disposal, Damoiselle.”
Anna knew the inventor’s words could not be true; yet she believed them. Because nothing mattered anymore, because whatever happened she would find herself wed to a man she would hate more and more every day of the rest of her life—why not believe, why not be happy for a few days, before everything came apart?
“Let me return to my home, to get what I shall need. I will see you again tonight.” And she left.
FROM AUTUMN TO SPRING
She came back at sunset. Wearing a servant’s clothes, carrying a purse filled to bursting with kröners. Johann went to open the door before she knocked.
“I’m ready, Herr Havel,” she said. “I have bid my parents goodbye, even though they didn’t understand me. There is nothing to hold me back. I have brought what I hope will be enough to pay you. I must warn you I have probably been followed here, even though this time I saw no one.”
“I don’t fear the son of the Dynast,” said Johann Havel. “And I want no payment. Come.” He took her to his workshop, where Pieter waited, pale and tense.
“Damoiselle Holtz,” said Pieter, “you can’t leave alone. I’m ready to accompany you.”
“Why bother yourself with me?”
Pieter looked her in the eyes, ready to lie, but once again Anna’s gaze tore the truth from him.
“Because I want to be with you.”
“It’s true I shall need a friend over there,” said Anna, lowering her gaze.
“Then take your places,” said the old in
ventor. Anna and Pieter sat down side by side on the black leather seat. “Pieter, turn the pedals, as you would for a bicycle. Yes, like that.”
The horizontal gear pivoted above their heads and the shining metal comets, suns, and stars spun slowly. “Look carefully at the painting!” said the inventor. Docilely, Pieter and Anna gazed at the large canvas.
The illusion came into play: for an instant Pieter thought to see the true sky and clouds; the whirl of the metal ornaments suddenly dizzied him. . . . He let the pedals and the gears grind to a halt. Pieter took his gaze away from the painting. Nothing had changed: his adoptive father still stood there. Anna, seated next to him, was biting at her lower lip. The only strangeness was that he had trouble keeping his concentration, as if he were emerging from sleep or about to enter it.
“Nothing is happening,” said Anna. “Herr Havel! Your machine—”
“ . . . is working perfectly, Damoiselle. Your trip has already begun. Leave the house and fear nothing. Farewell, Pieter, my son.”
Anna and Pieter climbed down from the machine. Anna wanted to ask for more explanations from Johann Havel, but at that moment Pieter touched her arm and she staggered, reeling with vertigo.
“It is time to go,” said Johann softly. Pieter and Anna opened the front door and took uncertain steps down the Ligeiastrass in the light of the setting sun. Johann Havel watched them leave, but his eyes were blurry with tears, and he did not see them reach the end of the street.
Pieter’s vertigo increased at every step. When they had reached the end of the Ligeiastrass, where it leads onto the Mittelstrass, he had to stop. Anna held him by the arm and complained: “Pieter, this is insane, this invention did nothing. . . .”
Pieter stepped sideways and felt something cold and wet. He had put his foot into a small patch of snow, in the shadowed corner of a wall.
He spoke to a small boy who watched them curiously. “Will you tell me what day this is?”
“Well, March the sixteenth, Herr-und-Damme.”
Pieter began to laugh. “And the year? What year?” When the bewildered child had answered, he took Anna’s hands.
“Eighteen years back, Damoiselle. I never doubted my father.”
“Neither of us has been born, Pieter. I am nothing and no one, here.” She began to smile. “I am nothing!”
“Damoiselle—”
“No. Anna. I am a girl like any other, now and forever. Come, evening is falling, we have to find somewhere to lodge for the night.” She took him by the hand and together they went, indifferent to those who watched them from the high windows of their houses.
They rented a small room on the third floor of an inn on the Weinenstrass. Anna blew out the candle and lay down next to Pieter in the single bed.
“I’m happy, but frightened at the same time,” she said.
“I’m afraid too, Damoiselle—Anna. I don’t know what we will do now.” Pieter’s voice shook. Anna put her head on his shoulder.
“I’m not . . . not so different from Radulf, Anna.”
“Never say that. Radulf wanted me like a man wants a statue, or a precious stone: with the knowledge money will be enough to acquire it. You are not Radulf.”
“I’m seventeen. I don’t understand what I feel, I don’t know if it’s what I think, or something else. . . .”
“I’m the same age as you, Pieter Havel, and I don’t understand what I am feeling either. We will have to learn, that’s all.” And she kissed him.
MAY TO DECEMBER
They made their home in a small house on the Fernestrass, at the periphery of Wessendam. Anna had pilfered a considerable sum from her father’s coffers, and this money served them well. Refusing to depend only on Anna’s resources, Pieter found work at a neighbourhood trader and Anna, for her part, insisted on doing embroidery work at home.
“But you’ll ruin your fingers,” objected a dismayed Pieter, until she slapped him.
“Hear me well, Pieter Havel. I will nevermore be the Damoiselle Anna I used to be. Stop treating me like a prize doll; when you do, you are Radulf. Have the courage to see me as I am, if you want me to share your life!”
She was crying. He took her in his arms. She murmured against his shoulder: “Make me forget, I can’t go on anymore, make me forget my house and my father and my mother, make me forget it all . . .”
Without need to speak of it, they avoided the aristocratic districts of the city. They lived in another Wessendam, a city they might have believed a thousand leagues from the one they had always known.
Once only, they broke that rule. At the Solstice holiday, the whole city went to dance in the dynastic gardens. Anna could not resist going.
They danced a tarentelle, and a waltz, and a Hopfentanz that made everyone giddy, and suddenly Anna met Radulf’s eyes.
He was only a fifteen-year-old boy, disguised as a petty aristocrat to better mix with the celebrants; but his haughtiness set him apart better than all the rich clothes in the world. Anna’s face froze, trying to mask her fright and contempt. After a heartbeat, she turned away and fled, dragging Pieter along.
Radulf knew he had been recognized, and he had been able to read the young woman’s emotions on her face. The affront seared him. He tried to make his way to her, but she had vanished in the crowd.
Then he went to his apartments and buried his face in his hands. Humiliation pained him as nothing ever had before. He was the son of the Dynast, and it was for that very reason that this young woman with the heart-stopping face despised him.
Rage now burned in him, and spread its fire to his loins. The Palace’s servant girls had compliantly let him rummage under their skirts, but he had never fully proved his virility with a woman. He conceived from this a shame as sudden as it was overwhelming. He put a cloak on his shoulders, took a purse of gold, and went to the poor districts.
He signalled to the first whore he saw. His legs trembled; he told himself it was desire. In a narrow, badly lit room, he made her undress and immediately entered her, spilling his seed after three back-and-forth motions of his sex inside her. Afterwards, she tried to caress him, to give him a chance to recover his ardour, but he pushed her away.
He could not bring himself to ask how much he owed her; he put three gold coins on the small bedside table and retied his breeches. As he opened the door, she whispered, awed by the gold, “Thank you, Highness!” Then he turned to her, terrified: “If you tell—if you say anything of this, I will have you killed!” The girl begged him for mercy, but he was already sprinting down the stairs.
He came back to the Palace, locked himself in his rooms, and washed his whole body, overcome with disgust. He curled up in his bed and told himself again and again that nothing had happened, that he had dreamed, that he would forget it all. He built a wall around his memories of that night, so well so that, many years later, convinced it was from moral purity that he was still chaste at thirty-two, he would never be able to understand why Anna Holtz’s face tore through him so painfully, why suddenly he absolutely must possess the young woman, why he could no longer conceive of living without her by his side.
Anna found out in early July that she was pregnant.
“You will give birth to a bastard,” Pieter remarked, more than half serious.
“As marriage proposals go, I have heard better.”
“ . . . But, after what happened with Radulf, how could you think of . . .”
“You will never know unless you ask.”
He asked. She said yes.
One night in December, Pieter was woken by a strangled cry. He lit the candle and saw Anna holding her belly with both hands, her face twisted in pain.
“Pieter, please, take me to the Geburtshaus right now. I hurt so bad; something’s wrong.”
Pieter went down into the street, fetched the neighbours, and with their help took Anna to the birthing house.
She began to scr
eam, eyes wide open, looking at nothing. She was made to lie down on an elevated bed, in a secluded room. Pieter held her hand while the doctor helped her push out the dead and bloody piece of flesh her womb had sheltered. He held her hand until she stopped screaming, and long afterwards, until the doctor made him let go.
He walked with Pieter through the corridors of the Geburtshaus. “She had lost too much blood,” he said tiredly.
“I don’t blame you for anything,” said Pieter. He tore away from the doctor’s grip and ran out of the Geburtshaus. Something was rising in his throat, and he feared the scream would be nothing more than a terrible burst of laughter.
He strode the streets of Wessendam, unaware of their names. He went downhill, then up, a dozen times. The winter snow made its way into his shoes and froze his feet, but he felt nothing.
Finally, he found himself facing the Schwarze Kanal, whose black water reflected the stars. He leaned above the stone parapet, and saw himself indistinctly in the watery mirror, a shape darker than the night sky, visible more by the stars it occulted than by itself.
On the other side of the canal, he could see the alley separating the houses on the Herbstestrass from those on the Sommerstrass. This alley he hadn’t dared descend, fearing the waters of the canal where now he planned to drown himself. This alley he had ascended less than a year ago and that he would ascend, seventeen years in the future, to reach the house where Anna Holtz lived, this house where Anna would be born in a few weeks.
ANNA AND STEFAN
The morning of December fifteenth, a young man who called himself Stefan called at the Holtz house on the Sommerstrass, and was hired as a domestic. Courteous, efficient, he was soon noticed by his employers and rapidly climbed in the servants’ hierarchy.
Damme Holtz gave birth in January to a baby girl, who was given the name of Anna. Stefan saw her grow up, at first from afar. But when she became old enough to move about the house alone, he became her favourite domestic, outranking even her governess in her affections.
