The Star of Kazan

As they filed out, Loremarie turned and hissed at her. ‘You smiled. I saw you. You smiled because my poor great-aunt is dead.’

Annika looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I smiled.’

The funeral tea, like the funeral, was a most dignified affair. The maids had set out slices of Sachertorte and various kinds of strudel, and open sandwiches spread with fish roe, which might well have been caviar – though actually it wasn’t. Needless to say, the servants from the professors’ house were not invited back, nor the Bodeks, nor the old bookseller and his daughter, but the head of the asylum stayed, and the councillors and the manager of the bank.

‘We will miss her dreadfully,’ Frau Egghart told her guests, dabbing her perfectly dry eyes with a handkerchief. ‘And Loremarie was so fond of her, weren’t you, dear?’

‘What?’ said Loremarie, turning round with her mouth full of cake.

‘Weren’t you so fond of your great-aunt?’ shouted Frau Egghart above the noise of the conversation.

‘Yes,’ said Loremarie, letting some crumbs fall from her mouth, and turned back to reach for another slice of chocolate cake.

Then, as soon as the last guest had gone, the maids were sent up to the attic with buckets of hot water and scrubbing brushes and mops and bottles of disinfectant. Frau Egghart came with them and saw that the work was done properly: the bed stripped and the bed linen steeped in Lysol, every window pane squirted, every floorboard scoured.

‘That’s better,’ she said when it was done and all traces of the old lady had been removed. ‘That’s much, much better.’

After that Leopold came with another man, to take the great-aunt’s trunk and boxes down to the cellar for the dustcart to take away.

‘I could use the things in the trunk for dressing up,’ Loremarie said. ‘All those funny turbans and jewels and things.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ her mother said. ‘Everything in there is full of germs. And you can’t use vulgar rubbish like that, even to dress up. You’d look like a circus horse.’

So the trunk and the wooden boxes were taken down to the cellar and that was that.

But the following morning two men in dark coats arrived and presented their cards. ‘Gerhart and Funkel,’ they said. ‘We work for the firm in the Karntner Strasse. The old lady’s lawyers. She left a will and we have to take all her possessions into safekeeping. Here are the papers.’

Frau Egghart pursed her lips. ‘She hasn’t got any possessions. She was penniless.’

‘It says here a large tin trunk and two wooden boxes.’

‘That’s all rubbish. It’s in the cellar waiting to be carted away.’

‘Nevertheless we would like to take charge of it.’

‘I tell you it’s all vulgar rubbish.’

‘But perhaps not to her,’ said the lawyer’s clerk quietly. And then, ‘Have it brought up, please.’

C

HAPTER

E

IGHT

T

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HRISTMAS

C

ARP

Annika used to love October almost best of all the months: the smell of chestnuts roasting everywhere on street corners, the school outing to the Vienna Woods to collect mushrooms and berries, the drift of blue smoke from garden bonfires . . .

But this year she saw autumn not just as beautiful but as sad. She missed the old lady and for the first time she wondered about her own future.

Stefan too seemed less settled. He still carried his younger brothers about, delivered the washing for his mother, ran errands . . . But once, in the hut, he put it into words: ‘I don’t want to end up spearing rubbish with a stick like my father,’ he told Annika and Pauline.

‘Yes, but what do you want to do?’

Stefan blushed. ‘I want to be an engineer. I’d like to build bridges.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Everything. Even if I got into the technical school, I couldn’t spend long training. My parents need the money I’ll bring in when I start work.’

Because she felt restless, Annika’s daydreams about her mother became longer and more detailed. She came now not in a carriage but in one of the new motors like the Eggharts’, except that it wasn’t a garish yellow but a soft and tasteful grey. She wore a hat with a plume and carried a sable muff, and the dog she brought had become grander too: a Russian borzoi, white and brown and black, with a silken tail. But the words with which she entered the house were always the same:

‘Where is she, my long-lost daughter? Take me to her, please – take me to my child!’

But when the first snow fell, Annika cheered up; and in no time, she and Ellie and Sigrid were off to the market to buy the Christmas tree.

This was a serious business. The tree could not be big; it had to fit into a particular corner of the dining room – but it had to be perfect.

And it always was.

As they came out of the market, carrying the tree, they saw Leopold with one of the stallholders, loading an absolutely enormous fir tree on to a cart. Beside him stood Loremarie looking smug.

‘It’s the biggest there was,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It’s probably the biggest in the whole of Vienna.’