‘One should try to draw the line at cats.’ Captain Mencken, all shaded eyes, colourless hair and sandy uniform, comes up to us and borrows a light from Van Geest. ‘They are eating worse in the Moravia and Little Bohemia, I hear.’ He looks down on us through smoked glasses, a sober lemur.
People seem to have become obsessed with what should and what should not be eaten. Yesterday I was in the kitchen while Frau Schmetterling discussed menus with her cook. Herr Ulric has always impressed me. He was a butcher in Steinbrucke twenty years ago, and he still retains something of the smell of the shambles about his coarse and enormously gentle body. His hands, when at rest, lie upon his thighs as if they grip an axe and his eyes contain that familiar sad tenderness of a betrayer of lambs and ewes. His old calling proves useful again. Herr Ulric was amused by Frau Schmetterling’s insistence that the food be described simply as ‘meat’. He agreed. ‘So long as it isn’t described as prime. That nag was hardly the finest horse in the cavalry, even when she was young!’ Frau Schmetterling had nodded in that dismissive way she has when she does not wish to hear what is being said to her. Van Geest sighs. ‘I feel like one of those dark weeds which grows in the deep sea, which never observes the light of the sky, is never exposed to the air. I wave in fathomless currents. I am moved by profound, slow forces; I am never attacked; I give a hiding place to both predator and prey, yet I am scarcely aware of them and never affected by them. Is this power, do you think?’ Captain Mencken hands back the box of matches and looks to me for a reply, but I know Van Geest too well by now to bother to answer. Captain Mencken has little to do and frequently seems embarrassed to be here. He is courteous enough, but always distant. He is unhappy, he has confided to us, with a state of affairs in which our soldiers do battle with starving citizens in their own streets. There have been several terrible incidents. ‘We should take the offensive,’ he has said. ‘That’s my opinion. But we wait still for the Kaiser. And the Kaiser will not come. The only relief for Mirenburg depends on the actions of her soldiers. One good cavalry charge could take those positions. Or could have.’ Now he moves away from us.
‘The horses are growing too weak,’ he says. ‘Well, you know what’s happening to them.’
He goes to the boarded-up window as if he hopes he will get some glimpse of the enemy. ‘They’re starving us rather successfully, aren’t they?’ He is one of the few Mirenburger soldiers to have seen active service. Frau Schmetterling returns and settles at her piano. Rakanaspya and Count Belozerski enter, speaking in low Russian voices. The Count has grown a thin pointed beard, and both men have become increasingly serious; they spend all their time together and appear to be discussing metaphysics. Count Belozerski’s hair has been allowed to grow, too. It now touches his high fur collar, emphasising his Tartar blood and giving him a Mephistophelean appearance completely at odds with his behaviour, which remains amiably courteous. He has been to see Caroline Vacarescu once or twice, though she is determinedly in pursuit of a rather nervous and flattered Captain Mencken, while granting her favours most frequently to Rudolph Stefanik. She is playing several hands at once. We have heard nothing at all of Princess Poliakoff except a vague rumour she has escaped the city and thrown herself on the mercy of her ex-lover Holzhammer. I enquired at every hotel and boarding-house I was able to find. I still fear she has guessed my perfidy and might by now have discovered who Alice really is. She would betray me if she could. She would betray us all. In the Town Hall a day or so ago a fire had been especially prepared for an emergency meeting. The business people of Mirenburg were to meet General von Landoff and his staff to discuss the situation. The big mediaeval hall, with its gilded gargoyles and elaborate flags, was full of loud voices and tobacco smoke. A number of old men were in contentious discourse near the fireplace. Everyone still wore their overcoats. No member of the military staff had yet arrived and merchants and bankers continued to represent themselves as experts in the business of War. There were rumours of an emissary from Holzhammer, of new peace-terms which General von Landoff had dismissed out of hand as ‘quite impossible’. One iron-master joked that he had it on good authority that all women under twenty were to be given up to the Bulgarians. ‘My mistress was in tears when I got there last night. She knew that it was nonsense, of course, but was I suspect enjoying the melodrama. There is so little entertainment, these days. I told her the story was untrue but that I had made a private agreement with General von Landoff to give her up to his uses in return for my own safe-conduct.’ No-one there knew anything of the Princess Poliakoff. ‘You don’t believe you’re making sense, do you?’ says Papadakis, uncorking a bottle of Chambertin. ‘You’re being foolish. What are you writing about? The girl? Because I won’t listen any more, you’re writing it down. Is that it?’ Mirenburg is still alive. Her battlements have held off the Goth and the Hun and every empire Europe has known. ‘She is indestructible.’ Papadakis begins to pour the wine. ‘Let it breathe!’ I tell him. ‘Let me breathe. Let us all breathe! God! You stink of disease. You are putrefying before my eyes. I can smell you night and day!’ Clara joins me in the salon. She wears a sable coat, borrowed from Diana, and a matching muff and hat. We are going for one of our walks. Captain Mencken removes his smoked glasses and warns us to be cautious. His eyes have that pale, bloody look of dogs whose hair permanently covers their faces. ‘The amount of crime in the city is prodigious…’
We laugh at him as we step into the path which has been cleared through the snow. The dismissed porter is close behind us, grumbling that it has become impossible to please anybody these days. He goes towards Rauchgasse while we turn in the opposite direction, to Papensgasse and the Botanical Gardens. The guards have stamped paths all over the gardens and we follow them. The smell of burning wood comes from near the Tropical Plant House. The white smoke rising over the snow adds to the haze. The sky is the colour of new steel and from the Moravia a score of belfries begin to peal. The people on that side are mostly Catholic. ‘They pray four or five times a day now,’ says Clara. She wants to investigate the source of the smoke, but I hold her back. ‘It would be best not to find out what they are cooking,’ I say. ‘Have they become cannibals?’ She makes to go on. ‘There are rumours,’ I say. She shivers and her eyes brighten. ‘Oh!’ She tries to find a remark and fails. ‘How terrible,’ she says finally, in a small voice. ‘I wonder what would happen to me? Would they prefer to eat me or rape me, do you think?’ We take the turning for the ornamental lake. ‘Probably both,’ I say. Most of the trees are down. They have been used for firewood. The unbroken snow covers their stumps, however, so that it is still possible to pretend the Siege does not exist and all is as it was in September. I walk slowly, savouring the sense of peace. I am a little light-headed from hunger. In the distance glass buildings are heavy with snow. Every other outline seems black. There is a strong smell of urine from the lake. Clara holds her nose. ‘They must be using it as a cess-pit. I suppose they can’t empty the sewage into the river any more, though I don’t see what difference it makes.’ A soup-kitchen has been set up in the Lugnerhoff. The line of people, many of them well-dressed, stretches the length of Korkziehiergasse and goes out of sight around the corner. I see an old acquaintance, Herr Prezant the tobacconist, and stop to talk to him. ‘What’s the soup like?’ I ask him. ‘It gets thinner every day,’ he says, smiling. He is a grey ghost in astrakhan. ‘Soon it will be only water, but we shall still go on queuing for it. By that time we shall not have noticed. It’s as good a way as any of starving to death.’ He seems to be quite serious. ‘Relief will soon be here,’ I say. He is fatalistic: ‘There is nobody who would wish to help us in the current political climate. You must know that as well as I, Herr von Bek.’