‘I still don’t see why I have to go,’ she said mulishly. ‘You know how much work there is to do on the Huber trousseau.’
I took her to the station and saw her into her compartment, where a young man with a violently waxed moustache rose to receive her suitcase with alacrity. Poor fellow: it hurt me to see his look of expectancy. Nini’s been fending for herself since she was fourteen. Long before I found her in Ungerer’s atelier she’d had more experience than women three times her age — and no one can wield a hatpin like my assistant.
The flat seems appallingly silent without her. I asked Alice if she’d like to come and stay; this is the time when Rudi would have come to her and I hate her to be alone, but she needs to be in her own place, she says, and I understand that. At least the Volksoper is closed. Herr Huber has been kindness itself driving her to the theatre, seeing she has a meal afterwards.
‘Na, na,’ he says in his slow, rumbling voice when I thank him. ‘You know what an honour it is for me to have the friendship of two such gifted women.’
If Vienna now belongs to the poor, the industrious and the bereaved, the Countess of Metz certainly fits in this category. She stays in her palace with the shutters closed and writes me petulant notes. She would like her bottle-green suit and she would like it quickly. She doesn’t know what is delaying me, and to give wings to my endeavour she has sent me a pair of battered candlesticks of the kind old ladies hit burglars on the head with and a Louis Quatorze spittoon.
The choirboys have gone home for the holidays and the Schumachers are still away so the square is as silent as the house. It is very hot now; the mornings are misty and vaporous; you know where the sun is rather than see it, and the flowers have stopped being blue and yellow as in spring; they’re mostly red now: dahlias and tall gladioli, and in the window boxes a mass of scarlet geraniums that seem to shout their colour into the muted light. Rip is in an aquatic and sportif mood, clambering up the side of the fountain and very seriously thinking of jumping in, but there is the problem of his back legs. He’s much more cheerful without the setter of the English Miss. Passion isn’t at all good for the character; I’ve always known that.
My pear is well. Not exactly enormous — toe-sized one could say — but it’s a late-maturing variety and I have absolute faith in its ability to swell.
Tomorrow I shall shut the shop. Nothing happens in these dusty summer days and I’m glad of that. I’m not sure that I really like ‘events’.
No, I was wrong. Something has happened that has upset me very much.
Magdalena’s wedding dress has gone off to be sewn with seed pearls, her blue velvet cloak is being embroidered with silver acanthus leaves. I have made her a day dress of linen the colour of sandalwood and another of pearl-grey faille striped with rose…
But Magdalena herself remains an enigma. She is utterly beautiful, graceful, remote… always polite to her fiancé whom, however, she almost never addresses directly. Certainly her engagement has achieved the result she hoped for. Herr Huber has had the twins coached for cadet college, medical treatment has been arranged for the taxidermist and he is negotiating for a better apartment for the family. But I’ve only seen her animated when she’s in company, real or imagined, with her saints.
At least until tonight. I’d taken pity on the Countess von Metz and delivered her two-piece, and as the evening was so beautiful I walked back, taking a short cut through that enclave behind St Oswald’s Church where the Jesuits have their priory. There’s a little garden there that is used by lovers and old people. It’s pretty and quiet, with the priory on one side and the old Krotsky Palace on the other, and the roses are famous.
It was already dusk; and I half averted my eyes from the two people standing very close together under an acacia. The man was tall and dressed in a black cloak like a student. The girl too wore a dark cloak? — but what stood out even from a distance was the intensity of their involvement. She was looking up at him, entreaty in every line of her body; he bent over her with an unmistakable tenderness and love.
Then they drew apart, and as the girl walked away past the flower beds her hood fell back and I saw, quite clearly, Magdalena’s face and the long white-blonde hair.
There’s nothing I can do about this, nothing I can say — but oh, that poor, kind, unsuspecting man! Is it all a sham, this religiosity of hers? For it seems clear now that she chose the butcher from her other rich suitors for the ease with which she will be able to deceive him. There was nothing of farewell in that meeting under the acacia tree.
One thing is certain: in thinking Magdalena Winter incapable of passion, I was a fool.
August
Sigismund’s uncle fainted today on the stairs. Frau Hinkler told me this in her usual pleasant manner. ‘He’s starving himself to keep up the instalments on the piano. I didn’t get a doctor; what’s the use? He can’t pay.’
I’ve never been inside Sigismund’s attic; the glimpse through the window that first night was enough for me, but in the evening I put some fruit and a jar of soup into a basket and went across.
Frau Hinkler let me in with a bad grace. She longs to evict the Kraszinskys and any sign that they’re not friendless infuriates her.
Oh God, that wretched room! The piano stands in the centre and I see it now as a black monster devouring the lives of those two miserable exiles; endlessly consuming the money that they need to live. It alone had been wiped clean: everywhere else, on the bare boards, on the window sill, the dust lay clotted. Sheets of music and a few tattered books were piled on newspaper on the floor — and on a trestle bed against the wall lay Kraszinsky, still wearing his rusty black clothes, with his arms by his sides like someone waiting for the undertaker.
‘I’ve brought you some soup. Is there somewhere I can heat it up? Do you have a kitchen?’
Sigismund, who had appeared silently by my side, led me into a scullery with a dirty sink, one dripping tap, a paraffin stove. His crucifix, I noted, was once again tied with a grubby piece of string. I scrubbed out the only saucepan, disposed of a cockroach, rinsed the grease from two tin bowls.
‘We are going back,’ said Kraszinsky as I returned to his bedside. ‘We are finished. I have written to Preszowice.’
‘You’d like that?’
He shrugged. Tor myself, yes. Perhaps I can get my old job back. But there is nothing there for the child — nothing. I dream about my sister.’
As I was leaving, Sigismund beckoned to me from the doorway beside the scullery. It led to a windowless slit of a room with a skylight so begrimed that it let in almost no light. This, clearly, was where Sigismund slept — only what was it that he wished to show me? The rancid smelling mattress on the floor? The one cane chair with a broken seat?
No… something else. Against the wall, on what must have been the wooden box in which he’d brought his few possessions, Sigismund had set up an icon corner such as all pious households have in the east.
In the centre was a picture of a young woman in a leather frame. Kraszinsky was right — his sister had been beautiful. The oval face was tranquil, the mouth full. Beside the picture was a bracelet made of woven hair, now faded but still retaining the reddish tint it had had in life. Had they cut the tresses from Ilona’s head as she lay murdered in the forest? It was hard to hold it and admire it as the boy put it into my hand.
The third object on Sigismund’s shrine was an old cigar box and as I bent down to look at it he made a protective gesture, covering it with his fingers.