The Star of Kazan

So all in all it was a splendid evening and as they got off the tram in the Keller Strasse and turned into the square, the party was in an excellent mood, singing and telling jokes.

Then suddenly they stopped.

In front of the Eggharts’ house a white motorized van with high windows was parked. There was a red cross painted on the side and the words ‘Mission of Mercy’ written above it.

Had there been an accident? No one liked the Eggharts, but that did not mean they wanted them to be hurt.

The door of the van opened, and two nurses in navy-blue uniforms got out. Then they turned back to the van and fetched something – a bundle of shawls and blankets. One nurse took hold of one end of the bundle and the other nurse took hold of the other end and they began to carry it towards the house.

‘What is it?’ whispered Annika – for the bundle seemed to weigh more than one would expect from a pile of blankets.

At this point the bundle twitched and said something. It gave a jerk and a nightcap with a ribbon fell out on to the pavement. Not a bundle then, a person. And a person who was not pleased.

Meanwhile, the driver of the van had got out and rung the Eggharts’ bell. A maid came and seemed to be giving instructions, pointing upwards. There was no sign of the Eggharts, though Annika saw the curtains of the drawing room twitch.

Then the manservant, the snooty Leopold, came out and opened the back of the van and took out a battered-looking trunk, which he carried into the house. When he had done that he returned and pulled out two wooden boxes and these too he carried in.

Presently the door opened once again, and the two nurses got back into the van, the driver returned, and the van drove away.

As the birthday party crossed the square to their own houses, they were very quiet. No one sang now or told jokes.

It had been a strange arrival. Was it really a person who had been delivered so carelessly? And if so, what did it mean?

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For a few days after the bundle, looking like a pile of unwanted clothes, had been carried into the Eggharts’ house nothing more was heard. The Eggharts didn’t speak to anyone and of course rumours flew round the square. The bundle was a madwoman like Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, who laughed hideously and would set the place on fire . . . or she had bubonic plague and had to be sealed up and quarantined.

Then Pauline read a book called The Count of Monte Cristo about a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned in a dungeon in a castle on an island in the middle of the sea.

‘That’s what she’s like. She’s a Countess of Monte Cristo,’ Pauline said. ‘They’ve walled her up and she can’t get out.’

It was Annika who found out that the ‘countess’ lived not in a dungeon but in an attic. It exactly faced the attic where Annika slept, across the square, and on the third day she saw something carried to the chair beside the window. Then the window was opened, and the old lady was aired – like the washing, thought Annika – before the window was closed again and she was carried back to bed.

It was not until the beginning of the second week that Mitzi, one of the Eggharts’ maids, was able to slip into Ellie’s kitchen for a cup of coffee and tell them what was going on.

The old lady was Herr Egghart’s great-aunt. She was ninety-four years old and sometimes wandered in her mind, and the Eggharts had done everything they could to find a hospital or old people’s home where she could be looked after.

‘They put her in the asylum – the one they’re going to pull down, behind the infirmary,’ said Mitzi, ‘but the man who ran it found she was related to the Eggharts and he said she wasn’t mad and they should take her in. She’s very frail and he said she wouldn’t live long. There was quite a fuss, but the Eggharts were afraid of what people would say so they agreed. She has a nurse in the morning and evening to tidy her up, but she can’t get downstairs and most of the time she just lies in bed. She’ll go soon; old people know when they aren’t wanted.’

‘Poor soul,’ said Ellie, stirring her coffee. ‘It’s hard to be old.’

This annoyed Annika, who was sitting on her stool in the corner, stringing beans. ‘No it isn’t. It won’t be for you because I shall buy a house in the mountains and look after you – and Sigrid too.’

‘Mind you, she can be a handful, the old lady,’ Mitzi went on. ‘She didn’t get on with her family and when she was fifteen she went her own way and the family lost touch with her.’

The Eggharts had been forced to take in their great-aunt but that was all. They never mentioned her to visitors who came to the house, they never took her out. It was as though they were pretending to themselves that she wasn’t there.