This was the time of the great trains de luxe, beasts of power and personality which raced across the Continent. The Train Bleu, the Ahlberg-Orient, the Sud Express… Sidi travelled in immense comfort, gallantly swallowing five-course dinners in the restaurant car of the wagons-lits, retiring to snowy bed-linen in her damask-lined first-class sleeper with its gleaming basin and pink-shaded lamps. Yet her eyes, as she looked out over the heaths and birch forests, the great fields of maize and rye, seldom lost their sad, bewildered look. Who wanted her? where did she belong?
Sidi’s mother was an actress, the ravishing Sybilla Berger whose silken peroxide-blonde hair, plucked ethereal eyebrows and high cheekbones concealed the constitution of an ox and the single-mindedness of a column of driver ants.
Marriage to a minor Austro-Hungarian landowner without influence or brains was a mistake she quickly rectified. After three years of domesticity in Vienna she divorced him, moved to Berlin, broke into films… ‘Home’ for Sidi with her mother was a series of suites in ‘Grand Hotels’ from which the little girl was exercised by the hotel porter along with the dachshunds and schnautzers of the guests and ‘listened for’ at night by suitably tipped chambermaids. Sometimes taxis would call for her and she would be taken to film studios, patted by directors, kissed by actresses — and then forgotten, sometimes for hours. She played under cafe tables and, in the corners of frowsty dressing-rooms; made pebble houses in the courtyards of restaurants, looking up occasionally to trace through the clouds of cigarette smoke the face of her loved and unattainable mother.
Then suddenly there would be a spate of clothes-and-present buying to impress the other parent, an affecting scene at the station as Sybilla, surrounded by admirers, took leave of her little girl… and the long journey to the moated Wasserburg at Malazka to see if perhaps it was her tall, good-natured father with his easy laugh who really loved and wanted her — and to watch the tumbrils cross the cobbled courtyard with the piled corpses and blood-stained antlers of the deer which her father spent his days in killing as he killed, with seasonal enthusiasm, his pheasants and water-fowl and boars.
Sometimes, when her parents tired of their tug-of-war, other pieces were thrown on the board: a grandmother in Prague, a trio of maiden aunts in Paris — and Sidi, the small pawn in their machinations, was put on to yet another great train with some hastily assembled travelling companion.
Thus Sidi, at nine years of age, was a child to whom one could not give a present without her passing it on within minutes to some recipent from whom she might buy even a momentary affection; a child who, if you played her at halma, would wrinkle her abortive nose, trying and trying to lose so that the winner might be pleased and care for her. A child at whose feet the waters of Babylon inexorably lapped.
At which point there entered Miss Hogg.
Miss Hogg was English, a governess, imported with Frau Hoffmansburg’s marmalade and riding boots. A stout redheaded lady, she proceeded to bring order and routine into Sidi’s life — but not love. Love was a commodity in which Miss Hogg no longer dealt.
Once it had been different. Once, long ago, Miss Hogg had been the Vicar’s Sarah-Ellen with a bridge of freckles across her upturned nose and waist-length tresses that struck fire from the sun. Once she had had an adored twin brother, two ginger-haired boy cousins with a penchant for dreadful practical jokes and a fiance called Hughie who could melt her bones just by entering the room. On her nineteenth birthday her brother and the twins and Hughie had taken her in a punt down the river with hampers and bottles of champagne and a gramophone that played ragtime. A year later, not one of the four young men was still alive. When the last of the telegrams came, the one that told her of Hughie’s death on the Somme, Sarah-Ellen had excised her heart, gone to a training college and become, eventually, a governess.
Miss Hogg’s twin brother, however, had been a train fanatic. Consulting the Baedecker for Central Europe, she found that it was not necessary, when travelling from Berlin to Herr Hoffmansburg’s estate on the edge of the Carpathian hills, to go through Budapest. One could, instead, take the express to Bucharest and, by arrangement with the guard, be set down at an obscure railway station in the middle of nowhere from which, some three hours later, one could catch a stopping train which meandered southwards into Hungary.
And the name of this station was Vlodz.
One could look for a long time at the map of Central Europe and not find Vlodz. It is not quite in Romania, not really in Czechoslovakia, more or less in Poland. The rivers Wistok, Klodza and Itzanka are not far away, nor is the town of Jaroslaw. But since this helps most people very little, it is easier to say that the station was very like a thousand others in that vast European plain: the platform riding high over a sea of Indian corn, sunflowers leaning their enormous heads against the low, white-painted building, geese perambulating on the tracks… A Fiddler-on-the-Roof station, a station over which the painter Chagall might have floated a blue-green, dreaming poet… A station to the like of which Tolstoy had come in old age to die.
And yet Vlodz was not quite like other stations. To begin with, to those in the know — as was Miss Hogg — it was a junction. Because of this there was a proper waiting-room with a picture of Marshal Pilsudski on the wall, a curly iron stove and wooden benches. There was a real booking office, a place for registering parcels… And to accommodate all these, the station-master’s house had been detached and built elsewhere, in a meadow just across the earthen road.
Over certain houses there seems to hang a kind of Tightness, almost a seal of approval bestowed by a divine hand leaning down with a fatherly pat from the sky. This is the kind of house that children will draw for you with their new Christmas crayons; the kind of house to which storks will return year after year, winging their way from Egypt. The station-master’s house was built of aspen wood with a sheen that was almost silver; hearts and roses were carved into its shutters, and into the window-boxes in which petunias and French marigolds grew with the neat abundance which is the hallmark of careful husbandry. Each part of the garden was cultivated and cross-cultivated, a palimpsest of lettuce and kohlrabi, of onions and mignonette, of sweet peppers and raspberry canes and mint. The pig in its pen seemed a little cleaner and fatter than the pigs kept by a thousand station-masters between Cracow and Kiev, the ducks livelier, the bantams more brightly-coloured and audacious.
In this house there lived the station-master, Mr Wasilewski and his wife, Hannah, who had learnt in the practice of a daily kindliness the secret of a happy marriage. There lived also a complacent and not very feline marmalade cat, a dog called Joseph, a canary…
And a boy…
A boy who, sitting in his attic from which he could look over the road, the station, the great sea of ripening maize which led to Abyssinia, heard the signal clank downwards, closed his school-books and ran downstairs.
For it was very seldom that the Berlin Express deigned to stop at Vlodz. There might, just once, really be treasure trove: an explorer in a topee who wanted his luggage carried to the inn; a wild bear in a crate…