Jigsaw Page 3

  In front of each of us stands a large clear glass with a stem, my father lifts the decanter by his hand and pours precisely – each glass is one third full. Lina is about to add water to hers and mine, my father stops her, Water in Bordeaux, quelle horreur! I sniff mine, take a mouthful slowly, twirling the wine in the glass, as he has told me to do. He is serious about this as he is about anything involving ritual and skills, but he is not fussy or anxious. Enjoy your wine, he says, and I do. At midday we drink cider – cider made in an old wooden press from apples grown in the orchard; we drink claret at night. We don’t have to worry, he says, we have a decent amount left in the bins. He has taught me to pronounce the names on the labels and to look at the pictures of the châteaux, he has been to them, has met the owners. What shall we drink tomorrow? I am sent to fetch up the bottle. I am proud of the job, but when it’s late in the day it fills me with terror – two flights down from the morning-room, across the large dark hall filled with crucifixes and statues, down another flight into the cellar; in one hand I hold a candle, in the other I shall have a bottle (bring it up gently); I shall have no free hand to cross myself if the ghost appears. He is a bishop, Wessenberg was his name, and he is said to have done a foul deed in this very hall. Lina has taught me an incantation to use if, Heaven forbid, I should see him, a German jingle, All good ghosts praise God the Lord, yet crossing oneself is of the essence. When I’m home and safe upstairs in the lighted room with the right wine and the candle has not blown out, my father often gives me a piece of gingerbread or a few coins. Danger-money. For he professes to believe – believes? – in old Wessenberg as he off-handedly calls the ghost and claims to have found him occupying the chairs he is said to favour in the library and the Renaissance room, chairs I give a wide berth to, the dogs won’t go near them, I’ve seen their hackles rise. Well, once the wine is safely up, it is stood somewhere to settle – that room’s too warm, keep it well away from that stove! – and next day I am allowed to cut the seal and, unless the wine is very old, draw the cork, wipe the neck inside and out. The decanting is done by my father, my hands are not strong enough yet to do it properly.

  And what do we talk about over our wine, at table and later when we sit by the lighted stove, a beautiful stove made of sixteenth-century tiles? Lina does not say much. She has confided in me that eating with my father scared her desperately at first (he said it was the right thing to do in these new times, revolutionary times), now she is getting used to it. Her ambition is to end her days as housekeeper to a priest. My father makes conversation as though Lina and I were real ladies. He tells us stories. About his youth; about Paris; about Monte Carlo and ways of breaking the bank. ‘And did you?’ ‘Oh no! But one can. Systems … one needs capital …’ He tells us about the pair of chimpanzees he kept as a young man first on Corsica then at his villa at Grasse where they used to rush out in the morning to feast on the neighbours’ peach-trees. When he married, the Merzes made him give up his monkeys, dirty apes, unhygienic, ‘though, you see, they were actually very soignés’. He tells us about the time he spent with a group of Mesmerists in a castle in central France which belonged to a Polish count, a queer fellow, who claimed that he could raise the dead.

  If my father was not good at showing affection, neither did he show hurt or reproach. When I came back after running away, Lina had scolded, kissed and wept; my father let it pass. To me a curious thing happened; the sadness was gone, vanished; I settled down at once. I missed my sister (I did that for many years after wherever I was), the interlude at her house became paradise lost, a dream. Some time again, I promised myself, there would be piano lessons and tennis; meanwhile I was resigned, better than that: without quite realising it, I was content. My attitude to my father had not changed, I was contemptuous about his prohibitions and fears – I was sure I knew better – his minute protection of me made me rebellious, not grateful, and there was an element of mutual evasiveness in our intercourse. Yet detached as I was from him, I lived in his stories (I played with bits of wood which were the horses he had had as a boy and young man), I looked forward to our evenings – the claret helping? – and was open to the skills he taught me.

  When I say that my father did not reproach me, I mean that he never spoke of my having deserted and exposed him (my mother for one, inevitably hearing of the escapade, treated it as a huge joke in her letters); he did scold me about having left the house unlocked, a prey to thieves and marauders. What with the changes brought by the end of the war and the setting up of the Weimar Republic, he saw himself surrounded by an almost entirely hostile environment. Monarchy with its concomitants of courts and protocol was if dull – at some early point in his life he had done his stint as ADC – of the natural order of things: it was safe. My mother’s defection did not help; nor did our poverty, our being ruined he called it. He felt himself betrayed by her, by his parents-in-law, by the times, by social forces he could neither understand nor name. And by me, God help me. (Are all young children unregenerate creatures? Incapable of moral responses? responses of the heart? Can these be awakened? Mine were not. I was unregenerate and self-absorbed.) What about that poverty of ours? Was it real? Or was it self-protection? Was it relative? I think it must have been all three, and at any rate very bitter for a man in his sixties who had been brought up not exactly to money but to the sweetness of life. (In a moderate, very civilised way: not for him the Merz opulence; his taste was too good, his fastidiousness too great, in their house he held himself aloof like a prisoner of honour at the victor’s banquet.) The little money he had inherited he went through early, afterwards the money came from his wives. When the first one died, the Merzes made him an allowance which continued after he married my mother. Now, my mother was gone and Grandpapa Merz was dead. He had died in his nineties at Voss Strasse before the end of the war – I was there: a death in the house. The Merzes had been believed to be very rich but the old man had long ceased to look after his affairs and when he was gone there was barely enough left for Grandmama to carry on in that huge house: my father, like many other of their pensioners, was left out in the cold. He still had Feldkirch (bought by my mother) and his collection of objects, to these he was enslaved, the house was a necessary setting to contain them. Were they beautiful? What he was after, ever since he began as a young man to stalk the sales-rooms, were craftsmanship, rarity, decorative quality, not art. He had bought few paintings, and he spurned anything much after 1600. Here too he indulged a gloomy, even macabre trend. Gothic carvings, altar vessels, mediaeval chests, rows of pewter mugs, fifteenth-century bronzes, Renaissance chairs, fragments of tapestries – we lived inside a museum, one that nobody came to see. (If he were here today, could he have borne to turn public?)

  How did we exist? Well, by barter up to a point; and here my father, being country-bred, developed some ingenuity. For we had no land to live off, only park and lawn, and courtyards and drives where the nettles stood waist high. He had some grass ploughed up (a man and horse came to do that) and put it under potatoes and poppies. The poppies were to make cooking oil, poppy-seed oil – Lina and I had to crack and shell the pods, and my poor father deploring it all, sadly talked of olives. What was left of the lawn was used by sheep and geese. Our cooking and heating was done with wood from the park, and there was enough left to trade in for the donkeys’ feed and the fowls’, and flour for our bread. We had nearly three hundred apple-trees, good strains and known to be so, both eating and cider; these too were traded: for milk, for cream (we churned our butter), for honey and man-hours. Every few months a butcher’s assistant came out from the market town to kill a sheep or a pig. We had poultry, we had eggs, we grew vegetables, and grapes on a south wall. From these in October my father made a small quantity of fine white wine. So much for our table. My father’s wardrobe – suits, greatcoats, shirts, boots – was inexhaustible; mine was not replenished. For every day I wore a kind of overall, trousers and apron in one, or my Red Indian outfit, a relic of Merz bounty not yet too badly
outgrown. To mass I wore one of my old dresses and over them, as they became shorter and shorter, one of my father’s jackets, Lina having adjusted the sleeves and little else. We took in one paper, a local one, chiefly for the agricultural ads; that must have been paid for in cash. So must some other items – salt, soap, candles, matches; and being on main electricity by now, my father’s mind was much exercised by future bills. The thing that cost most, he told us, was switching on, as the current had to flow in from so far. So we kept lights burning in the morning-room and in my father’s suite and went about the rest of the house candle in hand. (I tried to save candles by melting and remoulding the ends but found no way of managing the wick.) I quite enjoyed playing the Robinson Crusoe game, yet in my unfeeling way I was irritated by my father’s groans about money. Again, I knew so much better – he’d only have to sell some of the stuff, a few pieces from the collection, and we’d be all right again. Poor man, I fear that this is precisely what he must have done, secretly, agonisingly, in minimal instalments. He would never allow a dealer to come near the place (some prowled), but there were days when carrying a Gladstone bag and looking aloof he drove to the station in the donkey carriage and took the train to Freiburg or Basle. He’d come back in the evening inscrutable, bearing presents for Lina and me. I am sure now that this was the way the electric bills were met and Lina’s wages got paid.

  My own life was full. I opened up the chicken coops and shut them again at dusk, I fed the geese and made the dogs’ dinner (it was served by my father), I fanned the smoke-house fire, turned the joints of pork in their barrel of brine, drew our daily cider. There was no more slow time to dread. There was weeding to be done and watering, and vegetables to be picked and windfalls to be gathered and kindling to be made, and I now could muck out the donkeys’ stable on my own. Then there were seasonal tasks, apple picking and storing (on the parquet floor of my mother’s drawing-room now empty of its light gracious furniture), the brief vintage, the gathering and stacking of wood, the autumnal raking of leaves … The leaves were my responsibility (they were needed for the donkeys’ bedding as we could not afford to buy straw); spreading and drying and turning, then piling them into the cart and driving them to the barn, Flora between the shafts (Fanny being too tricky). I also had private pursuits. Teaching the dogs arithmetic – having heard of Calculating Horses – trying to make them tap out numbers with their paws, by persuasion and rewards; that was an entire failure. Trick bicycling, on an old machine: I was seldom allowed out on the road so I taught myself stunts in the yard – I could kneel on the saddle going downhill and I could ride backward in tight circles (not within sight of my father). And tennis. Solo tennis by the hour with the pre-war balls and the ill-strung racket against the wash-house wall, keeping the score and dreaming of Wimbledon. (Oh, the things I had heard of.)

  A new worry came to beset my father. He had my custody but my mother still meddled (his word); she wanted me to be educated, so apparently did the law. In the now distant past nanny had taught me my pot-hooks, reading I had more or less picked up on my own, figures I liked to play with; at Voss Strasse I had quite enjoyed the biweekly visits of a rather decrepit tutor … At Feldkirch we forgot all about it. When my mother nudged our memory, she suggested a governess; my father beside himself with vexation decided to send me to the village school.

  The school house was a recent building implanted by some distant authority – a classroom on the ground-floor and some lavatories above, a flat for the schoolmaster and his family – and it smelled of cement, linoleum and piss. Here I was brought one day in the middle of term. The children, about thirty of them, sat on benches, each with a slate before them, girls on one side, separated by an aisle, boys on the other. They were placed according to their age, six-year-olds in the front row, eleven-year-olds in the back. The schoolmaster, a youngish man in a town suit, came in and everybody stood up and broke into a chant, Grüt’zi Gott Herr Lehrer. He stepped in front and began to do something quite fascinating – making each row learn a different thing at the same time. The six-year-olds were told to practise their letters – how their slates squeaked – the next lot were set sums, the row behind was learning a poem and the back row was given a map. We nine-year-olds, a girl and I and three boys across the aisle, were made to read aloud in turns. Then there was dictation for some and learning by heart for others; later there was singing and reciting the catechism by all. It was noisy but not really confusing, and I soon got the hang of it. The teaching was done in real German (with a strong southern accent) and the children too repeated their lessons in Hochdeutsch, which came out quite stilted, but when they talked, even to the master, they dropped back into patois. Each row formed what they called a school-year; mine had a set of textbooks marked Fourth: a Fiebel for reading, a Rechenbuch for arithmetic, stories from the Holy Bible; the content of the books, the curriculum (a standard curriculum!) was the same word for word through the whole of Baden and had to be learned day by day, week by week by every child of nine throughout the land.

  The girls were meek and most were hopeless at their lessons, the boys were lazy and noisy. The chief punishment was Tatzen, pawsers, a beating on the hand with a short swishy stick. If you were late more than once or couldn’t do your daily lot you were given two Tatzen, for something worse four, for something really bad six. Six was rare. Sometimes the schoolmaster would just hurl a boy over the desk and beat him on his behind. The boy usually yelled (stoicism was not prized). Tatzen and spankings would be given then and there in front of the school, the innocents sitting still and cowed with an undercurrent of nastier feelings: Schadenfreude, an unholy excitement.

  School-hours were not long, the children being expected, as I did, to give a hand at home. One o’clock till four in the afternoon for us in the lower school, seven to eleven in the morning for the twelve- to fifteen-year-olds. So were the holidays regulated by the needs of the fields and seasons – hay holidays, harvest holidays, potato and wood-making holidays. Nor do I remember much homework. When the threshing machine was due or someone was repairing a barn, the school children were given the day off – we’d sit on ladders, forming a chain, handing up tiles.

  Like my sister’s house, school opened another world for me. Again I discovered the pleasures of social life. First there were the children, though they treated me with curiosity and restraint at first (their parents and the schoolmaster called me by the preposterous name of Baroness Billi – Billi was what my family always called me, a corruption of the last syllables of my first name), I tried to make friends with the zest of a puppy. Where are they now my ephemeral companions of Feldkirch (for my schooldays were numbered)? Where and what are they likely to have been doing in 1933? in 1939? in 1945? Josephina, my coeval, a silent sallow girl with black hair severely pulled back? Clara, another slow child, Katherina who never washed (nor did I when I could help it) and whom I could seduce into mischief, the five Martin girls, each one year older and two inches taller than the next and otherwise exactly alike? The girls were a tame lot on the whole, their idea of play was promenading arms linked down the village street of a Sunday afternoon, bawling sad songs. I soon turned to the boys, forming a gang with three older ones, Alphons, Robert and Anton, as we shared tastes; my Meccano, playing trains, getting on a farm horse when no one was looking.

  I was interested in their home life and pleased when my new friends took me to their houses after school. There I was hospitably received by their elders. The meal in progress would be the four o’clock Z’fiere neh’ in Baden patois which is a language unto itself. The fare was the same in house after house; cold raw bacon, bread and cider. The bacon was cut thick, right off a side in the larder, as thick as a beef steak. The bread was home-baked in big round loaves weighing about five pounds, whitish, not snow-white, good bread not unlike the French pain de campagne though harder and closer in texture; and at its best when about eight days old. The cider was spoken of as wine, and not up to ours, as many stretched it by adding water and
a powdered stuff, a kind of must, that came out of a cardboard box. Nobody in the village, except the priest and the mayor, drank grape wine, and they rarely drank beer.

  It was a small village, one long curved street, unpaved, a few lanes, some two hundred and fifty inhabitants in less than fifty dwellings. They had about four surnames between them, Rinderle, Faller, Martin and Hauser. Everybody farmed (except the priest and the schoolmaster) and nearly everybody farmed their own land. Some had only an acre or two, some had thirty or forty; some were said to be in debt to the mortgage bank, some were quite prosperous; a few did something on the side such as keeping the smithy, the post office (with the one and only telephone which went dead at seven p.m.), the village shop and the inn. All lived much in the same way. The houses varied in size, all were stone and most of them had two storeys. A few were shiningly clean with polished cook-stoves and floors, a dustless quiescent parlour, a main bedroom with a store-bought suite, double bed, wardrobe, framed wedding photograph on the chest of drawers, often a photograph too of a son fallen (so recently) in the war. Some were less speckless, some were sluttish. At the back was the yard with the dung heap and the pump and trough (only the schoolhouse, the presbytery and the château had water laid on), then the stables and barns, and these also were tell-tale. The mayor’s were a joy to behold, the stables airy with the straw high and clean, the harness-room sparkling, the milk churns scoured and the apple loft smelling sweet. There was an enclosed vineyard. The mayor, like a few other big farmers, had four horses, most had only one and you often saw a horse and an ox teamed up before a load. Oxen did much of the work, and one man who was also the cobbler had to do the ploughing with his only cow.