The Star of Kazan

‘There’s one here about a girl of ten who swam across the Danube to rescue her grandfather, even though she had the measles.’

But Annika did not seem to be cheered up by this. She had reached the grating stage: grating honey cake, grating lemon rind, grating horseradish, grating (but only slightly) her middle finger . . .

In the afternoon Ellie returned and sent Annika out into the crisp snow to get a newspaper, thinking some fresh air would do her good, but this turned out to be a mistake, because the lady in the paper shop told her that her mother’s stuffing for the carp at Christmas had always contained chopped prunes.

Annika was unsettled by this, but then she remembered that the paper-shop lady’s family had come from Czechoslovakia, where they probably ate all sorts of things, and she turned back to Ellie’s book.

There was now only one more day to go, and the professors began to quarrel about the best way to stop the tree from going up in flames if the candles set it alight. Professor Julius believed in a bucket of sand to stand beside the tree. Professor Emil thought that a bucket of water was better, and Professor Gertrude favoured a large blanket with which to smother the flames. They argued about this every year and could never agree, so this year as in other years they took all three into the dining room. Sigrid polished the knives and forks, the napkin rings, the candlesticks . . . Ellie put the finishing touches to the poppy-seed strudel, the chocolate mousse, the iced and marbled gugelhupf, which is the most famous cake in Vienna.

And Annika removed the carp from its bath and patted it dry and stuffed it with truffles and chopped celery and chestnut purée and lemon rind and grated honey cake and dark plum jam, and greased the gigantic roasting tin with clarified butter and laid the carp to rest on it until the following day, when it would go into the oven. There was only the sauce to make now, but there wasn’t anything ‘only’ about the sauce – which took up a page and a half in Ellie’s mother’s book.

Later that evening, Frau Bodek came over with a blouse for Annika which she had stitched in her spare time, though where she got spare time from was not easy to see. But she too unsettled Annika, for Frau Bodek’s aunt in Moravia had always added chopped walnuts to the sauce.

‘It gave it a lovely crunch,’ Frau Bodek said.

But Annika was determined to stick to the the recipe handed down from Ellie’s grandmother. Anything else would be cheating.

And yet that night, the last night before Christmas, she felt restless. A single word kept going round and round in her head, and the word was nutmeg.

Only why? Nutmeg was a lovely spice, but there wasn’t a word about nutmeg in the instructions for the sauce. Other spices, yes, and other herbs . . . but not that.

‘I mustn’t,’ said Annika again. ‘I mustn’t change anything or add anything. It’s got to be the way it always was.’

The bells woke her in the dark on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She shrugged on her clothes, and then she and Ellie and Sigrid went across the square to church for early-morning mass.

When she got back she knew with a deadly certainty that lunch was going to be a failure. The carp would come apart, the sauce would curdle, the stuffing would leak. Fighting down panic, she went to the larder to fetch the fish and put it in the oven.

Then, right at the last minute, she did something she knew she would regret.

The three professors were dressed in their best clothes, their starched napkins were ready round their necks, their eyes were expectant and the table was set with the gold-rimmed Meissen plates, which were only used on very special days. Then the door opened and Annika entered with the carp.

The professors smiled benevolently. Ellie brought the vegetables and the sauce. Professor Julius began to cut the fish into slices.

‘Delicious,’ they said. ‘Absolutely delicious. Just as always.’

But when Ellie and Sigrid and Annika sat down in the kitchen to their share of the fish, the worst happened.

Ellie put a helping of carp to her mouth. Her face clouded. Annika had seldom seen her look so angry.

‘What have you done?’ she asked, aghast. ‘What have you done, Annika? My mother would turn in her grave.’

She took another mouthful. An awful silence fell.

Then Sigrid said, ‘Just taste, Ellie, just taste, don’t lecture.’

Ellie speared another piece of fish in its dark sauce . . . and another . . . She closed her eyes. She still did not speak, but when the first course was finished she got up and fetched the black book from the dresser and with it a pen and a bottle of ink.

Then, ‘You can write it in,’ she said to Annika. ‘Don’t smudge it.’

Annika took the pen. ‘What do I write?’ she asked, bewildered.

Ellie pointed to the instructions for cooking the Christmas carp. ‘Here . . . Under the last line write: “A pinch of nutmeg will improve the flavour of the sauce.”’