Nini returned safely from her march but with a flea. One of the few skills that her father, the Hungarian hussar who abandoned her and her mother in the slums of Budapest, had time to bequeath his daughter was an ancient method for hunting fleas. One strips naked and stands on something large and white — a tablecloth, a quilt cover — holding a cake of moistened washing soap. The flea becomes confused or perhaps a little chilled and hops down on to the white surface — whereupon one whacks him with the soap, impaling him on the sticky surface.
We had finished supper. I was sitting by the window, drinking my coffee. Upstairs in the attic, thumpings and poundings indicated the progress of the hunt. Then there was a shriek, the sound of running footsteps, and Nini appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a towel.
‘Oh, quick, Frau Susanna. Quick, quick — bring your opera glasses and come upstairs!’
I fetched the glasses and followed her.
Nini’s attic is almost level with the top floor opposite. They must have moved the piano: the shutters were open, the lamp had been lit.
I put the glasses to my eyes.
I’ll never forget what I saw, framed in the circle of the lenses as if on a lighted stage. The piano, bare, black, with the lid propped up, two candles in the sconces… No other furniture that I could see: no pictures on the wall, the gas mantle uncovered on its bracket.
My eyes travelled across the piano and down… further down than one would expect, to take in the thinnest, the most pathetic-looking creature you could imagine. A boy, scarcely ten years old, perched on two battered books. His black hair fell across his face, his skinny legs hung down towards the pedals that were out of sight. And all the time as I watched, this miniature creature’s hands moved with undiminished vigour across the keys.
I handed the glasses to Nini. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. That explains it. That’s why he suddenly breaks off. There are places where he just can’t reach.’
‘It’s a shame!’ said Nini indignantly. It’s exploitation. It’s worse than sending children down mines, shutting him up like that all day.’
‘Can one make someone do that? From the outside?’
But I too turned from the window with a frown. It was too vivid, that image: the meagre undernourished child carrying like a hump his arbitrary talent.
Long after Nini had gone to bed I went on adding imagined details to what I had seen… The child’s frail neck rubbed by the rough collar of his blouse; the dusty neglected room; the sad man with the sideburns, shouting, correcting… The pressure, the obsession… the total absence of a woman in their lives.
A child should grow up slowly, peacefully, in an unemphasized happiness. Poor little Count of Monte Cristo. His seemed a desperately unenviable fate.
After this, the waters closed over my head.
I don’t know the name for these attacks: depression, despair, panic… I only know that there’s nothing to be done; they just have to be lived through. I used to curl up under my quilt, trying not to exist, but now I walk. I walk all day through the city and out of it and by the evening the worst of it is over.
Nini knows by now. She looked at me sitting on the edge of my bed and said: ‘I’ll cancel the Baroness Leitner. The others I can deal with’ — and I nodded, and put my clothes on and went.
Where I go seems to be arbitrary for I’m hardly aware of what I’m doing yet I never find myself in the old city passing beautiful churches or lovely parks. Nearly always I cross the Danube Canal and then the Danube itself, tramping on through the ugly industrial suburbs, and turn to the east.
Everything that was bad for the city came across this desolate Eastern Plain. The Huns came to pillage and slaughter, and the Turks to pitch their tents before the city walls. The wind here blows straight from the pusztas of Hungary; there are no romantic taverns as there are in the Wienerwald; no packs of cheerful hikers tramping through the beeches. The people here are poor and incurious, harvesting their maize, keeping their geese. I could have walked to Budapest, wringing my hands, and no one would have turned his head.
‘You should get help,’ Alice said to me when she found me once curled up in a darkened room. ‘There are so many doctors who understand these things. Vienna is full of them.’
That’s true but I don’t want any help. My attacks are not mysterious or causeless afflictions like Job’s boils. I deserve them. They are entirely just.
I was born in the Wachau, in the shadow — or rather in the sunshine of the rococo monastery of Leck. Glorious Leck with its famous library, its green and gilt and strawberry pink church, its serene arcaded courtyards; its devout and scholarly monks.
My Leck though was different. A small cluster of ochre houses shaded by linden trees; little gardens in front, a hayfield behind. The people who lived there were servants of the monastery: the groundsmen and masons and gravediggers whose wives and daughters, when the monks had visitors, were called up to polish the inlaid floors or work in the kitchens.
It was a stable community and a contented one. My father was a master carpenter: the monks thought highly of him; he earned good money and my mother could stay at home and tend the garden and the goats and hens. We had a trellis on the front of the house with apricots and peaches, then came the little garden: zinnias and sunflowers grew in ours, and raspberries and neat vegetables in careful rows. The garden ended in a green kept grazed and springy by the geese, with a small stream crossed by wooden planks — and when you looked up there was the splendid, curling, glittering building like a magic mountain built for God.
My father was stern, fair; very much a man concerned with his work and the work of other men up at the abbey. But my mother…!
My mother believed in God and I believed in my mother. She was fat and fair and smelled of beeswax and vanilla, and she was the only person I can remember who thought it was absolutely all right to be happy.
‘There now, look at that!’ she would say of the speckles on a bird’s egg, the splendid swirling pattern made by the apricot jam as we poured it over the nuts and breadcrumbs to make our strudels. When she washed my hair, rubbing egg yolk into the scalp and drying it off in the sun, she would brush the tendrils round my fingers so that I could feel the spring in the curls and tell me how lucky she was to have such a pretty daughter and that I would certainly grow up to be good because being pretty and good went hand in hand.
(Up at the monastery an old lay brother who worked in the library told me once about Sappho who long ago lived on the island of Lesbos in a valley filled with hyacinths and roses, and made up songs. She had a daughter, Kleis, with hair as yellow as torchlight.
I wouldn’t change her for all the gold in Lydia, Sappho wrote about her, and she tried to find her an embroidered head band from Sardis, and chided her when she felt sad. He was an innocent monk and I was an innocent child and it seemed to me that he was describing my mother and myself. And also — I promise there is no hindsight here — that he was describing the daughter that I would one day have and love in just this way.)
Well, I had a long time really. Almost twelve years of baking bread and picking fruit and sewing by lamplight. And of laughing — goodness how we laughed at our idiotic jokes, my mother and I.
She died suddenly of a stroke. I came in from school and the doctor was there and she was dead.
It sounds strange but after the first months of shattering grief I managed quite well. She’d endowed me so richly, you see. I knew how to cook and bake and care for the animals; the monks sent gifts, I was proud to look after my father.
Then Aunt Lina came from Geneva to look after us.
She was my father’s half-sister and she was a Calvinist. I’ve met people of the same faith since and many of them were gentle and kind, but she was a fanatic. My mother lived with God: she baked lebkuchen for Him at Christmas and wove pine branches into Advent rings. She dressed me in my prettiest dress on His birthday and when He rose from the dead, we filled the house with flowers and roasted our best goose.