The Star of Kazan

When visitors came to Vienna and were asked what they wanted to see most, the answer was usually: ‘The Lipizzaner horses. The dancing white stallions. Could we please see those?’

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As soon as she woke, Annika opened her attic window and looked out at the square. She did this every morning; she liked to see that everything was in order and today it was. The pigeons were still roosting on General Brenner’s head, the fountain had been turned on, and Josef was putting the cafe tables out on the pavement, which meant it was going to be a fine day. A door opened in the ramshackle little house on the opposite corner and her friend Stefan came out and set off across the cobbles with a can to fetch the milk. He was the middle one of five flaxen-haired boys and his mother, Frau Bodek, was expecting a sixth child any day. She had said that if it was another boy she was going to give it away.

Now a solitary dog came sauntering between the chestnut trees, from the street. It was a dog she did not know and Annika looked out eagerly – perhaps it was a stray and ownerless and if it was, Ellie couldn’t refuse to let her keep it, surely? After all Ellie had taken her in when she was ownerless; she’d been a sort of stray left in a church.

But behind the dog now came a lady carrying a lead, so that was no good. The church clock struck seven and Annika turned from the window to get dressed. No school today – it was Saturday, so she could leave her hair unbraided and put away her pinafore – but there was still a lot of work to do before she could go out and find her friends.

Nearly twelve years had passed since Annika had been carried into the kitchen of the professors’ house. When the typhus epidemic had come to an end, and the Convent of the Sacred Heart had sent word that they were out of quarantine, Ellie had bundled up the baby, and she and Sigrid had gone upstairs to seek out their employers.

‘We’ve come to say goodbye,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll find some way of providing for her, but we can’t give her up.’

The professors were deeply offended. They were puzzled. They were hurt.

‘Have we complained about the baby?’ said Professor Julius stuffily.

‘Have we made any objections?’ asked Professor Emil.

‘I’m sure I never said a word,’ said Professor Gertrude, blinking and looking stricken.

Sigrid and Ellie had looked at each other.

‘You mean she can stay?’

Professor Julius bent his head.

‘We shall of course expect her to be useful,’ he said.

‘Oh, she will be,’ cried Ellie. ‘She’ll be the best-trained child in Vienna.’

And she was. By the time she was seven, Annika could bake and ice a three-tiered chocolate cake, and bring a roast to the table. At nine she could cut cucumbers so thinly that you could read a newspaper through the slices, and when she was sent to do the marketing, the stallholders brought out their best vegetables and fruit because the little girl was famous for her eagle eyes. Sigrid had taught her how to polish the parquet floors by sliding over them with dusters tied to her feet, and how to clean silver, and how to crochet and knit and sew – and from both women she learned that work was something that had to be done, and how you felt had absolutely nothing to do with it.

But neither Ellie nor Sigrid had taught the child how to dream. The ability to disappear into her own head had come from the unknown parents who had abandoned her.

Ellie was grinding coffee and putting the bread rolls to warm in the oven when Annika came down, but she turned to give her adopted daughter a hug. She had stopped expecting to hear a knock at the door at any minute and see a strange woman standing there, claiming the child – but all the same, every morning when Annika came down from her attic, Ellie gave thanks.

‘Have you washed behind your ears?’

Annika nodded and extracted an ear for inspection. She was a sturdy child with heavy corn-coloured hair, thoughtful grey eyes under level brows, and a wide mouth. There were many such pleasing, clear-eyed girls at work in the Austrian countryside – goose girls and dairy maids and girls who took the cattle to the high pastures in the summer – but not many with Annika’s look of eager intelligence. More than that, she was a child who comforted others; she had done so from the start.

Now Annika, returning Ellie’s hug, drank in the scent of green soap and fresh bread that clung to the cook’s white apron, and wrinkled her nose with pleasure, because coming into the kitchen was coming home. Nothing changed here: the table was always scrubbed to whiteness, the emperor’s picture hung above the stove, the calender sent each year by the Bavarian Sausage Company stood on the window sill beside Ellie’s pots of herbs – and on a sacred shelf beside the dresser lay the worn black recipe book that had been Ellie’s mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before her.

But it was time to start work.