The Star of Kazan

  ‘Near Pettelsdorf,’ put in Annika. Her heart was beating very fast.

  ‘Yes, on the other side of the pass.’ She paused and lifted one finger in the direction of the waiter, who came at once to remove their plates.

  ‘When I’d been there a few weeks my maid became ill and I sent her back to her home, but I didn’t tell my father. He was very, very strict. I’d never been alone and I was enjoying it. But then of course I met a man.’

  She gave a deep sigh and took another roll from the dish.

  ‘My father?’

  She nodded. ‘You can’t believe how handsome he was. The same dark gold hair as you have, and the same thoughtful eyes. He was a hussar – he wore a blue uniform with silver facings, and well . . . we fell in love.’

  She paused and Annika waited. Her father in a blue uniform like the Kaiser wore . . .

  ‘He asked me to marry him and I agreed. I was so happy. He said he would get the papers we needed – I knew nothing. I had never been away from home before. We went through a wedding ceremony in a little office somewhere – I see now that he must have bribed some clerk . . . and then we set off on our honeymoon.

  ‘A week after that he vanished. He simply disappeared off the face of the earth. I tried to trace him through the army, but they’d never heard of him. Oh, I was desperate . . . I’d trusted him completely.’

  She paused and put a hand to her throat as though she was once again living through the agony.

  ‘And then,’ she looked away for a moment, ‘I found I was . . . expecting a child. I don’t know if I should speak to you so frankly, but I imagine that children brought up as you have been learn things early.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was frantic. I knew my father would kill me if he found out . . . the disgrace and shame . . . the wedding was only a sham, you see. So I pretended I was still with my maid and taking a cure. I was quite alone when you were born, in a little chalet. The midwife only came at the last minute. Oh, the agony I went through, deciding what to do for the best – the best for you, I mean. I had found the little pilgrim church in Pettelsdorf on one of my lonely walks and I thought it was so beautiful. Such a holy place. So I wrapped you up . . . and . . . took you there . . . and laid you down beneath the altar . . . and then I went home.’

  She was holding her handkerchief to her eyes – a lace-edged one with the von Tannenberg crest embroidered in one corner.

  ‘May you never know such despair and wretchedness, my daughter. May God shield you from it.’

  ‘And you never found my father? You never saw him again?’

  ‘Never. I think he must be dead. It would be better if you thought him so.’

  Annika was going through the story in her mind. She could imagine it all: the love and then the anger, the sorrow . . . the awful decision to be made.

  ‘You will want to know why I have come now, so long afterwards, to claim you, and I will tell you. You see, my father died not long ago – he was a man feared everywhere – the Freiherr von Tannenberg. But Spittal now belongs to me, and anyone who does not accept my daughter will be banished from my sight.’ She stretched her hand out across the table. ‘We will start a new life, Annika. A new life in your family home.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annika. ‘Yes.’

  So she was going away. Of course she would come back on visits but she was definitely going.

  ‘You see, you haven’t just found a mother,’ said Frau von Tannenberg, smiling. ‘You have a brother too; a halfbrother all of your own.’

  Annika was bewildered. ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘When I came back home, I was so lonely; so sad . . . you can imagine. But then a man came to court me. A decent man and of a good family – Franz von Unterfall. His people had an estate not far from ours. So I married him, and very quickly our son was born. Hermann. He’s not much younger than you and you will love him. Everybody loves Hermann.’

  Annika was trying to take all this in. ‘So I have a stepfather too?’

  ‘You have, but you won’t see him for a while. He’s away in America, on diplomatic business, which is why I’m living in my old home. But you mustn’t worry about being lonely: my sister lives very near Spittal and she has a daughter, Gudrun. She’s a dear girl, your new cousin, so you see you won’t be short of company.’

  Annika slept very little that night. Mostly of course it was because of her great happiness – but partly too it was because she had a stomach ache. She wasn’t really used to eating large meals late at night.

  At two o’clock she got up and went to the lavatory and was sick. Usually when she was unwell she called Sigrid next door, or went down to Ellie in her room near the kitchen. But of course she couldn’t do that now; the daughter of Edeltraut von Tannenberg couldn’t wake people up just because she felt ill.

  In fact, Sigrid was awake, and Ellie too. They heard Annika, and waited for her to come to them. But she did not come. Her door clicked shut again and they knew then that the old life was finally over.

  After that everything happened quickly. Once Professor Julius had checked out the documents that Frau von Tannenberg had brought there was nothing to put off Annika’s departure, and he called her in for a lecture on her new home.

  ‘You will be living in Norrland, in the north-east of Germany, not far from the Baltic Sea. The soil there is clay on a bed of granite, so the land is liable to flooding and the main crop is sugar beet and other root vegetables . . .’ And he went on to explain that the different German states were now one country ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, who was younger and healthier than the Austrian emperor with a bigger moustache, and was trying to build up the German army and navy so as to make Germany the most important country in Europe.

  Two days before Annika was due to leave, Sigrid came into the kitchen to find Ellie holding the old black book of recipes that had belonged to her mother and her mother’s mother before her.

  ‘I wanted to give it to Annika on her next Found Day. Do you think I should give it to her now, to take away?’

  Sigrid stood beside her friend, looking at the page Ellie held open: the instructions for cooking the Christmas carp and the words Annika had written underneath: ‘A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.’

  ‘Ellie, she’s going to a different life. She’s going to be a proper lady – a “von”. She won’t get much chance to cook, I’d say.’

  ‘Well, if they don’t encourage her, they’re wicked,’ said Ellie fiercely. ‘Annika’s got a proper talent. If it was for music or painting they’d see she carried on.’

  But she stood looking at the book a little longer and then she put it back on the shelf.

  Ellie had managed to pull herself together and was determined not to spoil Annika’s joy. If she cried now, she did it at night under her pillow, and in the morning she washed her face rather longer than usual so that Annika saw nothing wrong. Sigrid too busied herself washing and ironing Annika’s clothes, sewing on buttons, checking hair ribbons . . . Frau von Tannenberg was not going to buy anything for the child till they got home, she said. Spittal was not far from the spa town of Bad Haxenfeld, where the most important people in Europe went to be cured of their diseases, and the shops were splendid.

  ‘You can imagine how much I shall enjoy dressing my little girl,’ she told Sigrid. ‘It’s what every mother dreams of.’

  And Sigrid sighed, for she too would have liked to take Annika into a dress shop and fit her out without worrying about the cost, but she said nothing.

  Rather a lot of people were saying nothing, it seemed to Annika. The professors, the Bodeks, Pauline . . . it was as though they didn’t understand the marvellous thing that had happened to her. Only Loremarie’s family seemed impressed. Her father had looked up Spittal and found that it was mentioned in the guidebooks as an interesting fortified house of the seventeenth century. To see Loremarie curtsying when she was introduced to her mother had given Annika a moment of pure pleasure.
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  Pauline had hardly come out of the bookshop since the day Frau von Tannenberg arrived, and Annika was puzzled. She couldn’t believe that her friends were jealous of her, but why couldn’t they share in her happiness?

  Then, on the day before she was due to leave, Stefan and Pauline asked her to come to the deserted garden.

  The snow had melted at last, but it was still very cold. They sat inside the hut, wrapped in a blanket; Ellie had prepared a picnic but no one felt much like eating.

  Both of Annika’s friends had brought farewell presents. Stefan had carved her a little wooden horse.

  ‘To remind you of when we went to see the Lipizzaners,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t need reminding,’ said Annika.

  Pauline had copied the best of her scrapbook collection into a special notebook that could be fastened with a ribbon. All her favourite stories were there: the one about the girl with measles swimming the Danube, the one about the champion wrestler with the back-to-front foot – and a new one about a boy who was herding his mother’s cow across a frozen lake when the ice broke and the cow fell into the water.

  ‘He held the cow by the horns and he just held on and held on till help came and his fingers were so badly frostbitten that one had to be amputated, but the cow was saved.’

  Annika took the book and thanked her warmly. It must have taken hours and hours to copy all the stories in.

  ‘I know you don’t need to be made brave because you are brave, but one never knows,’ said Pauline.

  But the real reason they had brought her to the hut was to tell her that whatever happened to her in her new life they would never forsake her.

  ‘I really hate aristocrats, as you know,’ said Pauline, ‘always grinding the faces of the poor.’

  ‘My mother wouldn’t grind the faces of the poor,’ said Annika.

  All the same, she knew how Pauline felt. Last spring they had acted the story of Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine. Annika had been the doomed queen and she’d been shocked at the glee with which Pauline and Stefan had jeered at her as she bared her throat for the knife.

  ‘On the other hand it isn’t your fault that you’ve turned out to be a von Tannenberg,’ Pauline went on. ‘So if you need us, just say the word.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stefan, nodding his blond head. ‘Just say the word.’

  After that the hours rushed by and suddenly her suitcase was packed and it was time for the last goodbyes.

  She had said goodbye to Josef in the cafe, and his mother, to Father Anselm in the church, to the lady in the paper shop . . .

  Now she went upstairs to say goodbye to the professors, who weren’t professors any more but uncles, and to Aunt Gertrude, who suddenly bent down to kiss her, bumping her nose.

  Then came Sigrid and Ellie . . .

  They had prayed and they had practised. Now they stood dry-eyed and side by side to give Annika a cheerful send-off.

  But as Annika put her arms round Ellie something horrible happened to her. It was as if she was being disembowelled – as though her insides really were being pulled apart.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ she cried. ‘I’m coming back often and often. My mother says I can.’

  Why did no one listen; why did no one understand that she was coming back?

  ‘Yes, dear; of course you’re coming back,’ said Ellie quietly.

  Then the carriage was at the door. Though Annika had already taken leave of everyone, they had all gathered in the square to wave. The same people as had been there just a few days ago, when she and Stefan had come back from the Prater. The Bodeks with the baby, Pauline and her grandfather, Josef from the cafe . . .

  Annika climbed into the carriage, where her mother sat waiting. As it clattered away across the cobbles, the Bodek baby in his pram began to scream. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed long after the carriage had turned into the Keller Strasse and was out of sight.

  Nobody hushed him. Instead, as he became more and more purple with sorrow and rage, they nodded their heads.

  ‘Exactly so,’ they said to each other. ‘Yes, yes, exactly so.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JOURNEY TO NORRLAND

  They had travelled all morning and for the best part of the afternoon. The train was stuffy, but when her mother opened a window the wind that blew in seemed to be full of knives.

  Annika had looked out eagerly as they had crossed the Moravian hills, stopped at pretty towns with onion-domed churches and trundled over gorges cut by rushing rivers. Now, after several hours, she was getting sleepy and the landscape had changed. As they went north, and still further north, there was just a wide plain with patches of trees and pools of water circled by dark birds. Snow still lay in the hollows and the gnarled trees were bent by the wind. This was Norrland and the site of her new home.

  Frau Edeltraut had said little on the journey; just smiled at Annika from time to time and reached out to pat her hand – and Annika was free to imagine what she would find . . . the farm, the dogs and horses . . . and Hermann . . . A brother: she had not dared to imagine a brother in her dreams.

  They did not go to the dining car; just bought some rolls from a woman with a basket at one of the stations, and Annika remembered hearing that aristocrats did not get hungry like other people, nor did they mind being uncomfortable. The seats of the railway carriage were surprisingly hard.

  The light had begun to fade by the time the train stopped at Bad Haxenfeld, and they climbed down on to the platform. It was bitterly cold and a strong smell of rotten eggs drifted over from the town. Rather a grand town it seemed to be, with big hotels and a casino, so the smell surprised Annika. Was it the drains?

  ‘That’s the sulphur you can smell,’ said her mother. ‘It’s in the water – it gushes out of the rocks above the town and that’s why people come here to take baths in it and get cured. Sulphur is good for a whole lot of diseases. I have an old uncle who lives in one of the hotels here; he has arthritis.’

  Annika nodded. The Eggharts came here too, she remembered. They had been at Bad Haxenfeld when news reached them of the old lady’s death.

  As they crossed the platform to leave the station, a large number of men in dark suits – thirty at least – got out of the back of the train. They had badges pinned to their lapels and obviously belonged together.

  ‘I think they must be dentists,’ said Frau Edeltraut. ‘Unless they’re undertakers, but I believe my uncle said dentists. They come here for conferences. One month it’s dentists, one month it’s undertakers or locksmiths or bank managers. They stay in the hotels and take the waters and talk about teeth or coffins or whatever.’

  Annika watched the men, still streaming out of the train. As they alighted, uniformed porters with the names of the hotels on their caps fetched their trunks and suitcases out of the luggage van and trundled them out of the station, and the dentists followed. Tall dentists, small dentists, fat dentists, thin dentists . . .

  ‘I didn’t know there were so many dentists in the world,’ said Annika.

  On the road outside the station a large closed carriage with two horses was waiting. It was painted black and on the side Annika could just make out the von Tannenberg crest – the same crest that had been on her mother’s handkerchief.

  The carriage was old, with a musty smell and leather seats. The coachman was old too and when he had raised his hat and nodded to Annika he fell silent. People did not seem to talk so much here in the north.

  They left the town behind them and drove for more than an hour in the gathering dusk. Annika could just make out the same clumps of gnarled and wind-blown trees; the same patches of wind-ruffled water. Then it became too dark to see and she leaned back against the cushions and closed her eyes.

  She was woken by the rumbling of the carriage over a stone bridge spanning a river; then came a second bridge, a smaller wooden one, over a moat, and they drove into a large courtyard. A single lantern came bobbing towards them and she rememb
ered what the Eggharts’ great-aunt had said about arriving at the home of the Russian count – the hundred flares held up to welcome them. But those were Russians. Russians were different, and it was long ago.

  ‘Good evening, gnädige Frau,’ said the old woman who held the lantern, and she bobbed a curtsy.

  ‘Bertha, this is my daughter, Annika,’ said Frau Edeltraut, and the old servant curtsied again to Annika. It was the first time anyone had curtsied to her and she wished it had not been someone so old whose knees were stiff.

  They followed Bertha through a heavy oak door which led from the courtyard into the main part of the house, down a long stone corridor to a flight of steps.

  ‘I think my daughter will want to go straight to bed,’ said Frau Edeltraut, and Bertha nodded.

  ‘I’ve put a warming pan in her bed. Shall I bring up some hot milk?’

  ‘I expect she’ll just want to go to sleep right away, won’t you, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annika obediently, though she would have loved something hot to drink.

  Her mother bent down and kissed her cheek. ‘I am happy to have you under my roof,’ she said formally.

  ‘And I am happy to be here,’ said Annika – and followed the old servant up the curving stone stairs.

  In the very early hours she was woken by an explosion and for a moment she thought she was back in Vienna and it was the emperor’s birthday. They always let off fireworks in the city on that day.

  Then she saw the outline of the room, cavernous and strange, and got up and went to the window with its heavy iron bars. Moored on the bank of the long reedy lake that stretched away in front of the house she could just make out a flat-bottomed boat and a man crouched in it, holding a gun. A flock of birds, black against the grey sky, came over. Wild duck, she thought. There were two more bangs, and two birds fell into the water.