Aunt Lina dealt with God’s shadow. With Lucifer, with sin… There were many aspects of sin: sloth and waste and pride. But the worst of course was lust… sex… and this she saw personified in me aged thirteen. How that woman battled! She scraped back my hair and it burst from its skinned pigtails into its uncontrollable curls. She dressed me in black calico and heavy boots and tried to flatten my breasts — but it was no use. She couldn’t blacken my teeth or dim my eyes and the boys still came and whistled outside in the field on summer evenings.
I was a good pupil at school; there was talk of my staying on and training to be a teacher, but I didn’t want that for I already had a vocation. I was going to go to Vienna and make beautiful clothes. It beckoned more and more with every wretched year that passed: the Kaiserstadt, the Imperial City — but I was seventeen before I got away and then I went like a foolish girl in an operetta, eloping with a young lieutenant stationed in the little town to which I went each day to work as a sewing maid in an orphanage.
He was good-looking and friendly and undemanding. Simply being alive, that was enough for Karli. He didn’t persuade me to run away: he just said, ‘I’m going to Vienna; they’re sending me on a course.’ Then he held out his nice, strong brown hands and said, ‘Come with me?’ and I came, just like that, in the clothes I stood up in.
We spent a month together in an attic behind the fruit market. Leaning out of the window we could see the green dome of St Charles’ Church and the fashionable people driving across the square to concerts at the Musikverein. I was in love with the city and a little with him.
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, Sanna,’ Karli said, the first day. ‘You’re so young.’
But by then I did want to… I wanted to know, to be part of the mystery. I was grateful to him too for setting me free. The loss of my virtue, that cataclysmic event, took place pleasantly on a Sunday afternoon with the market women outside, crying their wares. An important day, but in line with the other important days of my childhood: the day we killed the pig; the day the crib was brought out for Christmas.
Then Karli’s course finished and he was transferred to a garrison in Moravia. He left me all the money he had and hugged me and said he’d be back. Perhaps he did come back, I don’t know. When I found I was pregnant, I moved to the cheapest room I could find, above a draper’s shop in Leopoldstadt. Even so the money barely lasted three months.
My daughter was born in the House of Refuge on the seventh of April 1893. I was just eighteen years old and penniless, and the nuns who nursed me through the puerperal fever that followed her birth arranged for her adoption.
If I hadn’t been so ill I think I would have retained my sanity and fought for her. For in the moment of her birth I knew beyond any doubt that I was the right and proper person to bring her up. But then the fever came and through it the quiet voices of the nuns, endlessly repeating what they believed to be right. I must be sensible; I must think of the child. They had already found for her a home that anyone would envy.
‘You must make the sacrifice,’ they said.
So I made it. I turned my back on the legacy of courage and Lebensmut bequeathed by my mother; I broke the chain.
And this is why even now I sometimes walk like a madwoman out of the city. Why, too, I don’t seek out kind doctors who might help me. I gave away my daughter. Let them cure me of that!
Today Alice’s pork butcher, Herr Huber from Linz, came to the shop. He ordered a full trousseau: a wedding dress, two evening gowns, day dresses, a travelling cloak… ‘And perhaps a negligee and such things; you will know, Gnädige Frau,’ he said shyly.
We settled down to business and spent a very useful half hour. I asked for something on account and an idea of his price limits, and it was clear that however hard-headed he might be about charcuterie, where Magdalena Winter was concerned he was generosity itself. The only stipulation he made was that her trousseau should be completed a week before the wedding, which was to take place in the Capuchin Church on the fifteenth of October.
I must say I liked Herr Huber. True he was gargantuan, his thighs spread like tree trunks across the chair, his stomach bulged like a tympani under his waistcoat. But the contrast between his ginger hair and crimson face was somehow endearing, the small brown eyes were bright and alert, and the pride he clearly took in being well turned out was touching. The butcher’s brown and white checked suit was immaculate, his spats gleamed, and the handkerchief with which he periodically wiped his perspiring face was of the best linen and spotless.
‘Will Fräulein Winter help you with the business?’ I asked.
‘No, no! Absolutely not!’ Herr Huber’s eyes widened with dismay at the thought. He was buying for her a villa — well away from the contamination of his factory — which he now described to me: pepperpot towers, gables — and in the garden a wooden shrine to the Virgin carved in oak.
‘She is very devout, you see. An angel…’
It now became evident that Herr Huber was going to tell me the story of his life so I went to the workroom to tell Gretl to bring coffee and to fetch Frau Hutte-Klopstock’s dress which still lacked button loops. When I have some sewing in my hand I can listen to anything.
Herr Huber had been born into charcuterie. He remembered the animals coming into the yard behind his father’s shop in a village on the Hungarian border.
‘He was the best butcher in the province. One stroke and it was all over; no animal ever suffered at his hands; and he taught me. It’s very good for the muscles, slaughtering.’ Herr Huber paused to sprinkle Hungary water on to his handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘The business was quite small but everyone knew him. My father’s gyulai had just so much paprika in them; not a spot more, not a spot less, and people came from miles away for his jagwurst. Then he got gallstones and the operation went wrong. I was fifteen; I had my mother to think of, and two sisters. So I took over. And I had a talent, Frau Susanna. You’ll know I’m not being conceited because it’s clear you have one too.’
The young Ludwig Huber became a connoisseur of charcuterie. He travelled by post bus to Italy to study the richer, more voluptuous sausages of the south.
‘I can’t tell you how I felt when I saw my first mortadella. It was in Turin, in a little shop by the Duomo. The marble white splodges of fat… so round and unashamed, and then the brilliant green of the peppercorns against the pink…’
By the time he was twenty-one he had moved to Linz, acquired his own slaughterhouse, and soon afterwards a second shop across the Danube. He pioneered a newer, creamier leberwurst…
‘People often seem to smile when I tell them my profession,’ said Herr Huber. ‘To titter, as though wurst was funny. But I can’t explain to you how interesting I find it. The endless variations in a salami…’
He looked at me anxiously, wondering if I too was going to jeer.
‘We are both artists, Herr Huber,’ I said firmly. ‘You begin with an animal and make it into a beautiful sausage. I take a piece of cloth and make it into a beautiful dress. God may have meant animals to live unslaughtered and women to go unclothed, but life hasn’t turned out like that and you and I must do our best.’
‘Ah, Frau Susanna you understand,’ he said.
And I did. I was also relieved — for a man who can stand transfixed by the beauty of a mortadella is not going to be indifferent to the sensuous qualities of velvet or the fall of a hem. Fräulein Winter would choose, but Herr Huber would pay — and when a man pays I like to please him.