‘What about one of the roundabouts?’ I suggested when we were out once more.
He shook his head. ‘Please, again,’ he said.
You can believe it or not, but we went seven times round the Grottenbahn. Seven baby mice, seven benevolent giants, seven jokes about sleeping chops, seven golden princes waiting for Thumbelina…
Then I struck and pulled him out of the car and we went to look for something to eat.
The sun had pierced the mist. We found a place where we could sit under a chestnut tree, but Sigismund was not very interested in his Wiener wurstl. He wanted to know the stories. All the stories.
‘I can’t tell you all of them, Sigismund. Choose one. I’ll tell you the rest some other time.’
He chose ‘Snow White’.
‘Once upon a time,’ I began, ‘there was a woman who longed and longed for a child. She wanted a daughter more than anything in the world…’
I had stopped, fighting the lump in my throat. But it was she herself who urged me on; the golden-haired phantom who had travelled with us on the Grottenbahn and who is now — perhaps I’d better face this once and for all — old enough to have children of her own.
‘One day she sat beside her window which was framed in darkest ebony; outside the snow was falling and as she sewed she pricked her finger so that three drops of bright red blood fell on to the ground…’
He moved closer and his mouth parted. What had been done to this child, or left undone? Even in a Polish forest, surely, they had heard of Snow White? But of course it is women who tell these stories to their children. There seemed to have been no women in the boy’s short life.
‘I will get you a book, Sigismund,’ I said when I had finished. ‘All the stories are in a book.’
He shook his head. He wanted me to tell them, and of course he is right. The stories are for telling.
We went then to the roundabouts. He chose to ride not on a dappled horse — I had noticed already his dislike of horses — but on a swan. He enjoyed it, but he didn’t want to go round again. It was an experience complete in itself.
Then came the Wurschtlmann. He’s so famous the Prater is named for him and you can see why. A hideous rubber man with a red nose who, for a few kreutzer one can thump and pound and wallop to one’s heart’s content, knowing that he will right himself undamaged and come up for more. Give him a name — that of your mean-minded boss, your bullying commanding officer — and you can punch him insensible and walk away, purged.
‘Would you like to have a go, Sigismund?’
Even before he shook his head I saw him instinctively shield his hands, hiding them behind his back — and that was the first time I remembered the concert.
In the end, though, the Prater is about the ferris wheel whose fame has spread throughout the Empire. It towers over everything else, its carriages take you a hundred metres into the sky. To be up there and look down on the city is to ride with the gods.
So I asked him: ‘What about the giant wheel? Would you like to go on it?’
His hand tightened in mine. A tremor passed over his face. She had not been frightened even at six years old, but the boy was scared.
‘The view is very beautiful from the top. You can see all Vienna.’
He stood still in the middle of the path. He tilted his head and gave a small sniff.
‘I want very much to be brave,’ he said in his low, cracked voice. ‘I very much want it.’
And suddenly it all dissolved — my long antagonism, my restraint, the resentment that I felt at being asked for what belonged only to my daughter. I saw him sitting beside his dead mother in the Polish forest, waiting for her to wake… Saw him wobbling on the Encyclopedia of Art, playing and playing because he could no longer talk. I remembered the silent patience with which he’d endured his uncle’s bullying, saw the graze on his forehead of which he’d said no word.
And I knelt beside him and took him in my arms.
‘You are brave, Sigi. You’re very brave, my darling,’ I said — and kissed him.
So now I can tell you this. They are entirely exact descriptions of what happens, those ones in the fairy tales which tell you what occurs when you kiss an ugly frog, a hairy beast, with proper love.
Sigi didn’t kiss me back or cling to me. He just straightened his shoulders and then in a calm, almost matter-of-fact voice, he said: ‘Now we will go up,’ — and then led me to the brightly painted carriages swaying high above our heads.
It is evening now and I am sitting at the window waiting for my lovely day. Sigi is asleep in the house opposite; he will play tomorrow and play well, I know it. Kraszinsky has had enough of a fright to leave him alone. I went in with him and helped to put him to bed; he was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. And he made no fuss at all when I told him I wouldn’t be at the concert.
‘I have to go on a journey, but I’ll be back on Tuesday and then we’ll go to Demels and have a splendid Jause!
‘Can we eat Indianerkrapfen?’ was all he wanted to know. ‘Yes, Sigi. Lots of Indianerkrapfen.’
All the Indianerkrapfen in the world he shall have when I have been with my lover by the sea.
I haven’t written for over three weeks. I couldn’t. I was too wretched.
It was because of Herr Schnee’s horses that it happened and who could have foreseen that? His nephew, the cornet, kept his promise. At five o’clock on the day of Sigi’s concert and my journey to the sea, he trotted into Madensky Square at the head of his troop. They were splendid horses, cavalry chargers, each ridden by a trooper in full regalia of the Carinthian Jaegers: dolmanyis, shakos, swords…
It was a kind of joke. It is not easy to remember that. A sort of birthday tribute to Herr Schnee — a salute — but a jape really. Horses do not need to be fitted for their harness, but the cornet was very young.
The day was misty, if you remember. Dusk fell early, but the lamps were not yet lit.
When the horses came I was standing outside on the pavement with my suitcase waiting for the cab to take me to the station. I saw how fresh the horses were; how mettlesome. One in particular, a black ridden by the soldier who was next in line to the officer.
The cornet shouted, ‘Halt!’ and dismounted, and gave his reins to the man behind him. Herr Schnee came out, smiling and bowing, and walked along the line of horses which stretched past my shop also, and then he and the cornet went inside.
In the apartment opposite, Sigi and his uncle came out on to the step to wait for Van der Velde’s limousine. I was hidden from him by the horses but I saw how proudly he held himself in his new clothes.
Then…
I know what he saw. I know exactly what he saw in the dusk. He was four years old again in the forest in Preszowice. I know the word he screamed though it was in Polish:
Cossacks! Cossacks!
And he went mad. He raced across the square to the horsemen who had come to kill me as they had killed his mother.
Rip, barking, followed him.
The boy couldn’t see me as I stood pressed against the doorway of the shop. He threw himself at the leader of the troop, he tried — this midget — to wrest the man’s sword from its scabbard, and all the time he screamed abuse in Polish.
The trooper was amused at first. ‘Hey, hey,’ he said, reigning in his horse, controlling the cornet’s charger.
Then Rip arrived. In a paroxysm of barking, he ran between the horse’s legs.
I shouted to Sigi. ‘It’s all right, Sigi. It’s all right!’
He didn’t hear. Still yelling abuse in Polish, caught in his time warp, he started to tug at the bridle.