No food this time: after dinner I must go and see to the seven-day plan's tight and extremely important alcohol distribution management procedure. Such are the burdens of command. But even shorn of it's first bit, there follows a big chapter, so you've got nothing to complain about.
The door was pulled abruptly aside and I, unprepared and cuddling my heavy burden, barely managed to stay on my feet as I tumbled over the threshold. I was half-aware of a rustling sound as someone hopped out of my way.
"Gosh! Sorry," said the voice of this figure - unapologetically - as it closed the door. It was a female voice, and its accent was unlike the gentle Austrian that I'd been breathing in with the air since I arrived in the city: it sounded middle-German and I tried in vain to place it. Saxon? Junius, from Dresden, spoke a little like that... Whatever its home, it boistered audibly.
I regained my balance as its owner turned to face me. She was a girl, and must have been about my age but appeared... not young, not any younger than her twenty or so years, but somehow very youthful - and certainly very short. Her dress - in that time when gaudy dies were cheap and ubiquitous, when skirts were held up by elaborate wooden frameworks, when hair was forever migrating northwards into great suspended masses - was remarkable for its plainness: simple blacks and whites, like somebody's governess; in their tattiness, they even reminded me of a student's clothes. The only flashes of colour were a bright red neckcloth tied in an oddly masculine fashion - like a student, again, or a sailor - for the benefit of which the top button of her jacket was undone; the floral pattern on her skirt, which had once been white but which was now the colour of cream that has gone funny, and was patched on both knees, one of the patches being patched again in turn; and her face.
It was a little, rounded face, coloured ruddy pink as if from exertion; there was no trace of powder or paint on it. It had an understated nose, a mouth almost too small for its own infectious grin, and enormous, eager eyes: it was as if their owner were forever pushing them a little wider than God had intended, so as not to miss a single detail of the world. They were brown, almost black. Her hair, indeed, was the colour of coal, and it framed everything in a disorderly mass: each strand and tangle did its best to strangle another.
In short, this young woman didn't quite fit my expectations of Macebulski's 'old colleague'.
"Hello. Who are you? What's your book?"
I felt suddenly very embarrassed. I mean, Plato!
"It's, ah, it's not mine!"
"Oh? Are you a thief, then?," she asked with neutral curiosity.
"Oh, no!," I said, anxious that I should be taken for a respectable criminal, or at least an interesting one. "I'm a... well, I suppose I'm a smuggler." Surely it couldn't hurt to tell her?
"Oh! What a fascinating occupation!" She tugged brazenly at the book. "Let me see! Would you please?"
I parted with it, reluctantly. "It's fake. The smuggler's gold is inside."
"Ah! That's very clever! Ah!"
I started awkwardly on the spot: for a moment, I'd been sure she was going to drop the false book in her excitement. She laid it down unceremoniously and straightened up with the first volume of its contents, holding the leather lovingly to her cheek. "Here it is! This is mine. It's for me, I mean. I've been wanting it for ages."
"They're all in Hungarian. Are they all yours?"
"Yes!" She dived and came up holding them all precariously under her arms. I offered uncertainly to take a couple.
"Oh, thanks. Which one will I read first? This one! No! That one! Argh!"
"...This one?," I said with a tentative gesture.
"That's it! No! Now I want to read the other ones! Bah!" She closed her eyes. "Give me one, and I shall have to read it first." I hesitated - worried that I'd choose the wrong book - then placed one at random in her hands.
She tore it open (again at random), opened her mouth, and seemed all of a sudden to have a different voice altogether: a surer and somehow older voice. Its words were meaningless to me and sounded strange, and I couldn't anticipate where the rhymes were to fall, but the rhythm of verse was unmistakable. I remembered the images of horsemen the text had called to mind: that was it, a galloping voice...
She came to a halt and looked up from the book with what seemed like an expectant expression.
"...That's remarkable," I breathed. "Are you Hungarian yourself? You-"
"Not really, I'm German, but I'm from Transylvania so I've always known it. My name's Elke Vanderschmidt."
Well, that explained her mysterious accent...
"I'm Ottokar Jánkovač. I'm from Brno, in Moravia."
"Ooh! Can you speak Czech? Do say something!"
It took me a moment to understand this request: nobody had ever made it before. If they knew Czech, they were Czech themselves (or they were Professor Macebulski), spoke our language as a matter of course and knew from a lifetime's experience precisely when to stop speaking it; and if they didn't, they didn't care. After a moment's hesitation, I cleared my throat and did my best Macebulski impression, recalling something from the lecture.
"How very... you know, like you're chewing at something! Aren't languages such wonderful things? I love hearing them, hearing words I've never heard before, but then I realise how many I don't know..." She trailed off.
"I know just the feeling. I study the Slavic languages, but I have a friend who knows English and French, and it makes me a spot jealous, to be honest, seeing the things he can read and wondering what they might say. It shouldn't! That we can come up with more kinds of language than anyone can learn in his life is just the wonderful thing, isn't it?"
"Yes!" She seemed to struggle with gravity whenever something she found particularly significant was said; gravity only just got the better of it.
"What languages can you speak?," I said once I was sure she wasn't about to float off.
"Well, Hungarian, Romanian, everyone from Transylvania should know those - but most people don't, I mean, most people can't read and out of people who can the Hungarians refuse to learn Romanian because they think they're too good for it and the Romanians won't learn Hungarian to get their own back and then we're just too lazy all around... it's so stupid!... anyway." She drew a deep breath and then continued apace. "Sort of French. I got some French books in the French and the German as well and sort of worked it out - Romanian helped - so I can read French, but when I try and speak it it comes out a bit funny. And enough Latin and Greek to fudge. I can read the Hebrew writing but I don't speak a word of it."
"Lord, that's impressive! I feel quite outdone," I said truthfully: I was amazed at the nonchalance with which she rattled it all off. "Czech and German is nothing, really, I learned them from the cradle."
"That doesn't make them nothing!," she sternly protested. "Every language has got something to say and it doesn't matter if you've always known it, or it doesn't have as much to say. What it does say you couldn't say in any other language."
I nodded eagerly. "You're right! Hah, you've made me feel better about it, studying the Slavic languages with their all being so close to each-other. But you can certainly hear the differences. The things only one can quite say. They suggest stories, as well."
Now it was her turn for an enthusiastic nod. "I taught myself French because I was learning about the Revolution, to start with..." She paused, looking thoughtful. "Do you ever wish there could be another one? When I'm bored, I sometimes think it would be nice if somebody were to start building a barricade and everyone could defend it to the death. It would be very dramatic."
"But a great many people would be killed."
She looked annoyed. "I mean, without that part!"
"Well... isn't smuggling books is revolutionary activity, of another kind?"
"Yes!" She grinned fiercely. "I suppose that makes me your accomplice!"
At this lull (fortunately for me, for I didn''t have the first idea what to say) there broke in a voice from up the hall. It belonged to a man who for all I know might have been standing there for a long time (on consideration, he probably had been): my eyes hadn't left Elke's keen little face.
"Excuse me, Elke, who is our visitor?"
The speaker, I knew at a glance, was our 'old colleague': he looked like somebody colleague, and old as time. He was so small and wrinkled that he seemed to have shrunk from drying out. His eyes peered out from between a pair of bushy eyebrows and the albatross-like moustache perched on his upper lip. A few remnants of hair were swept across his scalp like snowdrifts, and I somehow guessed from this that he and the girl weren't related: a strange prejudice, perhaps, but I simply couldn't imagine anyone's hair turning from perfect black to perfect white.
"Sorry, Pascal," said Elke, once again not sounding it in the least. "This young man diverted me!" I didn't consider this entirely fair. "He's a book-smuggler."
"Good evening, dear boy. My name is Pascal Fruehauf. This is Miss Elke Vanderschmidt. She stays with me when her father is away on his business. Andrzej Macebulski sent you, did he not?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh, no 'sir'. Please, call me Pascal. If you're one of Andrzej's lads, you're already a friend to me. And what is your name?" He sounded a little sleepy; he always did.
"Ottokar Jánkovač-" I stopped myself from 'sir'ring.
"Ah! A very fine name. German root, ironically, since it's become so characteristically Czech: 'Odoacer', 'wealthy and vigilant'. It was the name of the first barbarian king of Italy after the fall of Rome, in fact."
I smiled. "I'm not really any of those things, I'm afraid."
"You're not the type to be a barbarian king," said Elke matter-of-factly. "They'd be very large and vulgar and red from quaffing all that mead, and very cruel. No, you're not like that at all. You'd be a skald! You know, wandering everywhere, declaiming the old sagas by the fireside and so on. You look cut out for that."
Pascal took no apparent notice of this interruption: the look on his face was even further away now than it had been.
"Jánkovač... it's no good, I'll have to look that one up. It's not often that a name gets the better of me, dear boy."
"I see you're something of an expert!"
"Oh, I've picked up a few things here and there," he said with self-conscious modesty. He saw an invitation in the expression of my face; I couldn't blame him. Experts never miss their chances, and I was genuinely interested: names fascinate me, like all words. "'Pascal' means having to do with Easter. It goes originally back to Hebrew. 'Fruehauf' is an easier one: pure German, and it of course means 'early riser'."
"He's not!"
Pascal smiled. "Yes, thank you, Elke. I'm not at all. 'Vanderschmidt' is obviously from-the-smithy, in the Low German rendering. I believe her family came originally from Frisia. 'Elke' is usually Frisian: it's a diminutive of 'Adelheid', meaning 'of noble birth' or 'a noble sort'."
"I hope it's the second," said the name's owner. "Just anyone can be of noble birth. Some people of noble birth are simply loathsome. But it takes something to be a noble sort! But my name is Elke, anyway, not Adelheid! I like to have a name that doesn't mean anything. If it meant something I might feel obliged to live up to it, but as it is I can do as I like! I shouldn't like to have any other name. And names do match people. I mean, I can't imagine you being anything but Ottokar, and we've only just met!"
"I'm glad to hear that, since I'm not wealthy or vigilant or a barbarian king! Although until today I never knew about any of that. Perhaps in the end names mean what we make them mean, to people who come after us. It's a great man who gives his meaning to his name and not ther other way around."
"That's true!"
Silence descended for a moment. She seemed to be contemplating this revelation: her eyes were intently focused on something in the middle distance that nobody else could see, and she wore an expression of almost comically intense thought. As for me, it dawned on me that we had been standing all this time in the cloakroom; I tentatively removed my cap and coat and hung them up. I did this out of instinct and because a drop of melted snow was creeping its way tortuously down my back, not foreseeing the implications.
"Do you live far from here, dear boy?"
"Oh, in Neubau." I had forgotten all about it.
"Oh! I am sorry! I'm afraid I can't offer you any dinner after detaining you like this, I've..."
"Who detained?," said Elke indignantly. "I did, and since I have detained him he can have my share of dinner. I shall have something spare. I'm not hungry, and we have never have guests! Hardly ever!"
Pascal looked at me as if to ask indulgence. "I'd have thought we had quite a lot of guests, Elke?"
"Never anybody I don't expect! Never anybody I've never met! And anyway, tutors don't count. You can refuse guests if you don't feel like seeing them, but not tutors."
"I don't want to intrude...," I tried to say.
"Come upstairs!"
She shot away as though impelled by some unseen force, animated by an energy too powerful to live in her little frame: I followed close on her heels. At that time, Young Ladies of the type that Jan harassed were forever trying to give the illusion of gliding everywhere: the interplay of foot and floor was considered inelegant and probably vulgar. Elke, on the other hand, bounced.
I followed her trippingly up darkened stairs and along a darkened corridor: they didn't burn many lamps or candles here, and I was only dimly aware of our bourgeois and book-laden surroundings, smelling of dust and old paper.
We came to a door from which yellow lamplight was pouring into the corridor, and in she dived. Inside, a jumble of books overspread the floor, finger-marked and stained and bristling with bookmarks and dog-ears; mixed in among them there were skirts and blouses and a nightdress discarded any-old-how. The walls were thick with shelves. Books dominated these as well - leaning this way and that, lying along each-other, balanced precariously on the brink - but here and there all manner of strange miscellania was squeezed in amongst them: here an abacus, there some toy soldiers poking their bayonets out of a box, there again a carved wooden elephant. The furniture was sparse and almost lost in the mess: an open wardrobe half-stocked with clothes, some hung up and some simply heaped; a heavy chair hiding beneath blankets and cushions; and a bed onto which Elke, having locked the door habitually and without looking, hopped and lay on her belly like a seal. On the bedside table were a crumb-covered plate and an empty coffee-cup, a wobbly stack of books (of course), and - to my slight alarm, I confess - a pistol.
It was a reasonably-sized room with a markedly undersized inhabitant, I thought, and yet it wasn't a big enough space for the mind it housed.
"This is where I live! Well... my house is up in Transylvaniam, really, in Schässburg, but I've ended up coming here so often that I've moved everything, bit by bit. Now I have to pack my things when I'm going to Schässburg - when father's there - instead of when I'm coming here. It's sort of sad..."
She flopped back on the bed and then immediately sprang up again, grinning as if out of breath. "I love Vienna, though!"
"Oh, it's wonderful!" I settled myself on her chair, atop the blankets. "You can duck down side-streets and come out a hundred years ago! The whole place reeks of history, and pulses like a living thing. It's almost like it talks to you sometimes..."
At this, she leaned forward on the bed. "What does it say to you?"
"Sometimes it tries to warn me about things." I chuckled, half to myself. "I don't listen!"
She nodded. "It's only a city! What does it know, anyway? And it's existed continuously for more than, let's see... one-thousand, eight-hundred, and seventy-two years, so it's probably gone senile."
"But it must remember so many things-"
"You're right! Next time I talk to it, I must ask it so many questions! Hrm. How long have you been here?"
"I arrived on the third." The day was the eighth of January. One short week! Not even that! It seemed to have contained more than a month of my old life.
"Gosh! How terribly exotic."
"I'd be just as foreign if I'd been here for a year, surely?"
"I know, but it's like you've been blown in! Blown in by the winter wind!"
"Ah, that reminds me of something!" Elke's conversational method of saying the first thing that came into her head on hearing the other party's words, liberally peppered with exclamation marks, was catching. Images and words bubbled up, all demanding to be spoken, though I wouldn't know were to start speaking some of them. But I was on safer ground in reciting Pushkin's 'Winter's evening'.
She squealed delightedly. "What's that?"
"It's a poem by Pushkin, all about the winter wind."
"Go on! Go on!"
I finished the verse as she sat stock-still, eyes shut, ears wide.
"...It is about winter evenings. I can tell."
"I suppose that's what poetry is. The meaning's in more than just the words-"
"That gives me an idea! Let me find it..."
She rolled onto the floor and was scrabbling about frantically among the books when a servant somebody rapped on the door and a gruff female voice with an accent like Elke's informed us that dinner was ready. This, I would learn, was Jutte Osterhagen, the household's only servant.
"Coming!," Elke said without looking up, and continued to search the floor. I slid off my seat. "What're you looking for? Can I help?"
"Anything by Vasile Alecsandri, he's-"
"There's a book of his in the pile by your bed." I had noted this earlier, thinking what a splendid name 'Alecsandri' was.
"So there is! Well, that's a stupid place for you to be!," she chided the book as she discarded all those above it in the pile. Retrieving the sought-for volume, she flourished it triumphantly; but at that point another knock interrupted her.
"Elke, I know perfectly well when you aren't coming."
"I'm not hungry!," she called out irritably.
"But our guest..."
"Neither am I! Could we please have a moment? We're busy."
I heard the maid rustle reluctantly away: one had to respect the wishes of guests. Elke grinned at me mischievously as she sat back down on the bed, as though we were both party to some conspiracy, and I smiled back.
"Sit down!" She thumped the space next to her with the book and I perched there a little awkwardly, tentatively. She didn't appear to notice: she was flicking through the book so fast that the air displaced by the pages was making stray strands of her hair quiver.
"Here! Ahem:"
She launched into 'Mioriţa', which these days any Romanian schoolboy knows by heart - but to me, on that evening, it and the language in which it was written were new and unprecedented discoveries. Romanian had a certain musical sound like Italian, but it sang of altogether different things: dark skies that glowered at the peaks of mountains clad in twisting forests - forests of a deep and living green into which man ventured only at the sufferance of the true owners, wolves and bears and eagles and who knew what else! Elke read all this with her nose close to the page, her eyes wide, looking surprised and thrilled at her own words.
"So, what do you think it's about?," she said when she had finished. I shooggled my head and regained my bearings. Vienna... Yes, Vienna, Lower Austria, that was it...
"Let me see..." I closed my eyes and tried to return to those wooded mountain slopes. "It's about mountains, mountains covered in forests, and it ends in tragedy, but with a note of hope."
She snapped the book closed, smiling so widely I had to smile as well.
"Exactly! That's exactly what it's about! There's three shepherds in the mountains, you see..." She dropped back into Romanian to repeat something without appearing to notice. "Anyway-"
"Elke? Mr. Jánkovač?" Dinner is getting cold."
I started, alarmed that I should be discovered. Discovered what? Discovered crouching on Elke's bed with our faces nearly touching as she smiled up at me? Don't be stupid, Ottokar. There's nothing to discover in here - except for forested mountain slopes, of course.
"Alright, alright! Bah!" Elke turned to me as she got up. "What good is a lock, if people can bang on my door and bother me whenever they please? If I could, I'd have a lock that would keep out noises. I'd have a lock that could keep out the whole world!"
"I never had a lock on my room back home," I thought aloud.
"Really? How did you manage?"
"Well, I was outside a lot, for one thing."
She nodded, sending her hair into a new chaos as we entered the dining room. Pascal, lost between an oversized chair and an oversized book, looked even smaller. He looked up, and removed a pair of wire-frame reading-glasses.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Pascal. Roles are reversed, it seems!"
"Oh, it's quite alright, dear boy, quite alright. It's good for Elke to have people of her own age to talk to sometimes..."
And what is that supposed to mean? I apologised for being late for dinner, that's all! Can't a man be late for dinner in this country, without people implying things? Not that I'm implying anything!, I thought.
"...Absolutely," I said.
I sat down to sausages, potatoes, and sauerkraut. I was famished and had no time between mouthfuls for talking, merely nodding vague ascent to Pascal's speculations about the origin of 'Jánkovač'. Elke was silent too: she had brought her book of Alecsandri down to read as she munched on buttered bead. But I couldn't help noticing that she seemed to spend less and less time reading the book and more and more with her chin in her hands, staring without focus at my plate.
"Would you like a bit?," I said: hungry as it was, I hadn't the stomach to deny her.
"If you wouldn't mind...," she said distantly.
I forked over a share; she drowned everything in mustard and devoured it with savage ferocity, pausing only to tug at a few strands of her own hair that she had accidentally bitten down on. When she was finished and the carnivorous haze had lifted from her eyes, she noticed my stare and gave a mustard-stained smile, sudden and even shy. I hastily looked down to my plate, and finished it off promptly and quietly.
This done, I rose to my feet.
"Ah, that was delicious! Solid German stuff. My compliments to the cook, and thank you all! You've been terribly hospitable to this ragged-"
"Oh, you don't mean to say you're going? We've hardly even met!" Elke looked so distressed that there was nothing I could do but assure her that it would be uncharitable to thank people for hospitality only when you were taking leave of it; her smile returned, and I was glad, for on her lively features a frown was an aberration.
So we forgot the time, scampered back up to her room, locked out the world at large, and sat down on the bed; and then, after this flurry of activity, a moment of silence. Elke fizzed expectantly.
"Tell me about Brno! Tell me about Moravia!"
"Hmm... It's a country of big fields and little rivers. You know you're far from the sea. The soil is black, everything has dark, living colours. We have forests that go on for miles and miles. The whole country is in the shadow of green and black hills all around, so that on a clear day you can pretend that beyond us it's just wilderness, on and on. The towns are white with red roofs and little Baroque bits on all the great old houses. We lived on the edge of Brno, near my father's work. He's a clerk, for a firm making pencils-"
"Hm, yes. They make pencils and soap and steel in Brno, don't they? If you were the son of a steelmaker, you'd be very dirty and smelly. And if you the son of a soapmaker, you'd be very clean and smelly, which is worse."
Yes, I thought, that was true! That was just what you would expect, in some odd way: it was the kind of intuitive sense of how things ought to be that I often felt myself, but seldom gave voice to.
"Thanks," I said. "So, we lived on the fringes, and in the night I could sometimes hear the wolves-"
"It's the same in Schässburg! I sort of miss the sound of them sometimes, they..."
A look of doubt cast its shadow momentarily across her face. Once again, I found myself wanting to chase it away.
"Tell me about Schässburg!," I said, and she lit up again.
She told me about the little city, preserved almost perfectly since the middle ages, crouched in its walls against the things in the dark forest beyond - the place where Vlad III the impaler had made his refuge from the Turkish armies. Schässburg, Sighişoara, Segesvár! (In our part of the world, there's always more than one way to say the same thing.) There, one could always hear the unique and wonderful sound of German and Romanian and Hungarian blending together in the streets - "That's how I learned them!" - and in winter, the snow was like white flowers blossoming on all the trees, and piled up on the fluted clock-tower until it all slid off with a thump that had used to wake her up in the morning, so she could run to the frosted window to look out... and in summer...
She sighed.
"I miss it awfully sometimes. But it's not really home. I don't really have a home. You can't, if you miss one place when you're here and the other when you're there. And I've been shunted here and there so much... it makes me think of that poem by Heinrich Heine, what's it called?, the one that starts, uh..."
"I can't help, I'm afraid, I never had a chance to read anything of his."
"Gosh! Here, let me find you some."
And thus we were off on another diversion: our dialogue went on for a long time and touched on a great many subjects. A chance remark of mine would inflame her imagination, and off she would soar over some strange world where the history and myth of many lands and languages mixed together with little bits of half-remembered poems and paintings. She would bubble uncontrollably as she pointed out the landmarks of that fantastical country, and then a chance remark of hers would send us somewhere else, to somewhere nearby that only I knew of and pointed out to her; on and on and round and round we went, and forgot altogether that I had to go home, or that she had go to bed, or that we were in a house in Vienna in Germany on Earth.
I remember our travels with remarkable clarity, but I think I've already reproduced enough to give the reader some idea of this first meeting and its significance. It finished with her very nearly asleep, her mouth still struggling with its urge to yawn as it tried to impart one more of the landmarks of the dream-scape, her eyes still managing to sparkle as they at last fell shut.
"You must smuggle some more books...", and here her final murmur became wholly unintelligable.
I was reluctant to go go back into the dark and cold, so I sat reading an unearthed volume of Heine until the bells tolled midnight and chased me away.
My mind was elsewhere as I retraced my steps home. It was only as I turned up Spittelbergasse than I realised that the door would be locked, but I was let in by a disheveled Jan, who had been dribbling coffee into his mouth in the dining room.
"Good evening, Ottokar, you're unreasonably late. What've you been up to?"
"I had to do a job for Stańczyk. Drop some books off."
"Drop them off where, Pressburg?! You've been gone for hours!"
"Well, I got into conversation with the people at the house and I suppose I was sort of invited to stay for dinner."
"You're red. Why are you going red?," said Jan to himself, scratching his chin.
"It's cold."
"Fair enough. If you'll excuse me I'm going up to get some sleep."
"Good night. I should probably do some studying."
He grinned. "A conscientious student! We'll cure you yet."
"Ah... sorry for being tight with you, old fellow, I just..."
He had already slouched away up the stairs, so I followed him, and settled down on the sofa with my paper and pen. But before long the pen began to grow clumsier, my eye slower, my thoughts of Old Church Slavonic vaguer, and my thoughts of Miss Elke Vanderschmidt more vivid, until at last I fell asleep.
Author's note:
You'll have to indulge this pair of spoonies, but I wanted to give a good idea of our female lead, who I think is one of my more interesting creations. Obviously I'd be hanged if I was going to have a Victorian (Franz-Josefian?) heroine who behaved like they were expected to, but I needed a way to make it work without having the story be about it. You still don't know what the story is about (do I? Good question!), but after a while you will perhaps get a bit more idea and in the process be informed about Miss V's rather particular background and upbringing. Suffice it to say that she's outside ordinary society in more ways than refusing to go about in a crinoline.
I do quite look the way old narrator Ottokar has a fond snigger at his younger self. I thought of it years before Dickens or the Brontes or anybody, I assure you. (I ascribe to Literary Quantum Theory, according to which stories don't exist until I read them).
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