Silver Wattle, page 1
Silver Wattle
Belinda Alexandra
DEDICATION
For Mauro
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Discover the world with Belinda Alexandra …
Preview
Copyright
ONE
We Czechs have a saying: ‘Do not let evil take you by surprise.’ I wish I had paid more attention to that warning. But then we also have a proverb: ‘After the battle, everyone is a general.’ It is easy to see what one may have done differently in hindsight.
When I remember Prague, I think of chestnut blossoms bursting out on the trees of Petrín Hill. I see shutters thrown open to blue skies and smell lilac wafting in on the breeze. I hear my sister, Klara, playing Chopin on the Petrof grand in our house at the foot of the Castle. My mother is there too, busy at her easel—blocking in the sky, roughing in a foreground, dabbing in the finer details of her latest painting. The book of verse falls from my lap while I listen to the music drift on the air as delicately as the lilac scent. Klara’s fingers glide over the keyboard. From the time she first sat at the piano, my younger sister confounded music teachers by playing complex pieces with a subtleness that belied her age. She has a certain touch, a way of caressing the music that is best described as ‘silky’.
My mother and I could listen to Klara play for hours on those mornings we spent together when my stepfather was away on business. And, being an indefatigable practiser, Klara readily obliged us. Even now, all these years later, when I think of her playing a sense of peace washes over me.
Later in the day, my mother, Klara and I would eat potato soup and fruit dumplings while Mother read the newspaper to us. We were interested in developments in our newly born state, Czechoslovakia. It had come into existence with the collapse of the Austro–Hungarian Empire at the end of the Great War, which had finished the previous year. But if Aunt Josephine arrived for a visit with her poodle, Frip, the newspaper was put aside and the spirited spinster and her black-furred companion given our full attention.
‘Ah, look at you two girls,’ Aunt Josephine would say, addressing Klara and myself. ‘You grow more lovely each time I see you!’
Klara and I would exchange a smile. Aunt Josephine visited us three or four times a week and always said the same thing with an exclamation of surprise. ‘But what do you expect?’ she asked when we reminded her of this fact. ‘With such a glorious mother.’
Although Mother had been friends with my father’s sister for years, she was embarrassed by the compliment. Mother’s round face was not classically beautiful but her bowed smile and pink cheeks gave her a certain charm. She dressed superbly in shades of violet and, although she was close to forty, there was not a strand of grey in her blonde hair or a wrinkle on her creamy skin.
Some afternoons, Aunt Josephine arrived earlier than usual and in a state of excitement because she had received a letter from Uncle Ota. Mother would invite her into the drawing room with us, where we sat down on the gilded chairs like royal ladies on our thrones. Frip would plonk himself at Aunt Josephine’s feet.
On one of these visits, Mother and the cook had made apple strudel that morning and Mother’s maid, Marie, was called to serve the pastry along with a pot of tea. When the strudel was presented to Aunt Josephine, she lifted her palm to her cheek in horror. ‘With my waist?’ she cried, patting her belly, but accepted the plate Mother passed to her anyway. The smells of cinnamon and sultanas filled the air. The strudel was too tempting for anyone to resist.
Silence reigned while we ate the strudel, although Aunt Josephine kept glancing at her purse, impatient to share the contents of the latest letter. Frip, who was on a strict diet, lifted his nose in the air, but when he saw that none of the dessert was coming his way he rested his head on his front paws and fell asleep.
‘Hmm,’ said Klara, closing her eyes and relishing the strudel.
‘You must include this recipe in the box-supper fundraiser,’ Aunt Josephine told Mother.
At the start of each season, the women in our district baked their fanciest desserts and wrapped them in boxes covered with silk and decorated with ribbons, hearts and flowers. The boxes were auctioned off to the highest bidders and the money given to the church to help the poor.
Mother smiled and turned to me and Klara. ‘I fell in love with your father that way. He always offered the most money for my Sunday babovka.’
It was a story that she had related to us a hundred times but we never tired of hearing it. I looked around the room. The house was every inch my mother with its velvet curtains, tapestry cushions and floral scrollwork, but the drawing room had touches of my father: the bronze stallion on the mantelpiece with its front hoof raised and its head thrown back; the acanthus leaf tea chest; the Turkish rug with its beasts of the forest motif.
‘A man who has daughters has a family, and he who has sons has strangers,’ Father used to say whenever someone expressed their sympathy that he had no male heirs. It was an unusual sentiment for a man who had been a captain in the army, but it was true that Father had loved Klara and myself as dearly as he would have loved male children. For a moment, I saw us all together again at the country house in Doksy on Machovo jezero. My father did not like to hunt and would take us riding through the woods in the early morning instead so that we could observe the deer and the otters. I smelt the damp of the mossy earth mixed with the summer air as clearly as if I were there.
‘And where has your mind wandered to, Adelka?’ Aunt Josephine asked. I woke from my daydream to see that everyone had finished their dessert and was looking at me. Klara hid her smile behind her napkin. At nine years of age, Klara’s features had already formed into the ones that would be with her all her life. The pointy chin and soft waves of golden-brown hair growing upwards from her forehead created the shape of a heart. It was a shape true to her character, because Klara was all heart, even under her sometimes cool exterior.
‘Adelka is a great one for dreaming,’ said Mother, smiling at me. ‘She has a writer’s imagination.’
Aunt Josephine clapped her hands. ‘Ah, to be sixteen again.’ I was expecting reminiscences about her youth, but instead she reached into her purse and pulled out the letter. ‘Your uncle has written to us again,’ she said, her eyes sparkling. ‘It is a most interesting letter.’
Klara and I leaned forward. Uncle Ota was Aunt Josephine’s and my father’s brother and an adventurer who had avoided going into his father’s sugar business by proposing he ‘travel for education’ before settling down.
Mother once explained it to me. ‘Your Uncle Ota started soberly enough with sojourns to Italy and France. But soon these trips extended to treks in Egypt and Palestine, from where he sent back pictures of himself in Arab dress and vivid descriptions of the temples of Karnak and Luxor. When his father called him home, Ota claimed that a fortune-teller had told him that if he ever stopped travelling he would die.’
Klara and I had grown up unaware of Uncle Ota’s whereabouts, until he began corresponding with us through Aunt Josephine after Father was killed in the war. Yet his letters were so enthralling, it was as if we had known him all our lives. His salutation was always ‘To my dear ladies’ and, although it was not clear if he intended the letters to be read by Mother as well as Aunt Josephine and ourselves, there seemed no harm in their being shared with everybody.
My stepfather called Uncle Ota a povalech, a useless loafer, but we paid him no attention. Klara and I were captivated by our uncle’s descriptions of his journeys up the Nile and the Ganges and his visits to civilisations that had never heard of words like ‘national revival’ and ‘independent state’.
To my dear ladies,
I am sorry for my tardiness in writing but I have been three weeks on the deck of a ship bound for Bombay, then a further week tied up with self-important customs officials…
‘India again?’ said Klara, tracing her finger along the map Aunt Josephine brought with her. ‘Perhaps he intends to travel overland to China this time?’
Aunt Josephine read Uncle Ota’s letter with great expression and Klara and I hung on every word about the devout of India who bathed in the holy rivers and the medicine men who healed simply by opening their palms.
The things I have seen here, one could not imagine…a five-legged cow wandering through the markets, a holy man making a pilgrimage on stilts, a ritual dance in which the worshippers throw coconuts into the air to crack them on their heads…
Mother’s reaction to the wonders Uncle Ota described was more reserved on these occasions. She nodded at every turn in the adventure, but all
‘Do Uncle Ota’s letters bother you?’ I asked Mother when we were alone in the drawing room after Klara and Aunt Josephine had taken Frip for a walk in the park.
Her face did not change but her eyes flashed with surprise. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. Her voice trailed off when she added, ‘Ota sounds very happy.’
When I remember Prague, I try not to think of my stepfather, Milosh. If I do, my stomach turns to knots and his voice booms in my head.
‘Marta, I want that useless maid sent away this afternoon!’
I see him in my memory, pale blond like an ice prince, stamping about the house and admonishing my mother because Marie had over-starched his collar and he could not button it.
‘I don’t know how your mother could have married him after Antonín,’ paní Milotova, the Russian music teacher who gave Klara piano lessons, confided to me one day after my mother and stepfather had returned from their honeymoon. ‘He doesn’t want Klara to play anything challenging, only decorative pieces. He broke a string on the piano just because I was teaching her Faure’s Le Voyageur.’
The question of why my mother would marry a man like my stepfather was on everyone’s lips. ‘He’s seven years younger than you and has no position,’ Aunt Josephine had warned Mother the day their engagement was announced. ‘He is after your money.’
‘My daughters need a father,’ Mother replied. ‘And he is cultured.’
Mother’s stubbornness on the issue was legendary; perhaps it was a kind of madness that came from the terrible grief she had suffered when the telegram arrived announcing Father’s death in the first year of the war. It was to Aunt Josephine’s credit that she remained Mother’s friend after her second marriage, although our aunt would never visit us when my stepfather was in town. Mother and Milosh married in 1917. All I remember of the day is being annoyed that Milosh’s mother said that because Milosh was fair like me, everyone would think I was his natural daughter. My father had been as dark as an Arab.
Each time my stepfather, a partner in a firm of interior decorators and plasterers, returned from one of his business trips, our easy meals of soup and dumplings gave way to a table covered with a white cloth, candlesticks and platters of roasted duck with sauerkraut, marinated beef and saddles of oozing venison, which Klara refused to eat.
‘If you don’t eat meat, Klara,’ my stepfather would say, pointing his finger at her, ‘not only will you fade away but you will cease to be Czech.’
Why Mother had thought that Klara and I needed the kind of culture that Milosh was capable of teaching us escaped me. While he played the violin and danced more elegantly than any other man in Prague, one got the impression that he had never shaken the stigma of belonging to a trade. It was clear from my mother’s pained expressions and silences one year into her new marriage that this truth had dawned on her. But there was nothing to be done now. Divorce was social suicide and she had spent a fortune on buying Milosh his partnership in the firm.
Klara was usually unmoved by our stepfather’s admonitions against her vegetarianism until his fierce blue eyes shifted to Mister Rudolf swimming in his tank on the sideboard. Milosh had threatened to dump Klara’s pet carp into the Vltava, where he would die of cold, and just his glance at the fish was sufficient to make Klara scoop a slice of beef onto her plate and nibble at it. Her face was always impassive, but I knew that her stomach was retching. Milosh did not understand what it was about Mister Rudolf that stopped Klara from eating meat or fish, but he sensed the connection and found it a useful threat.
Czechs eat fish for Lent and our farmers have been breeding fat, thick-boned carp for centuries. Carp and potato salad are the traditional Christmas dishes, and it was with the intention of buying a juicy fish for Christmas that Mother, Klara and I set out, canvas bag in hand, one frosty December evening.
It was the first time Klara had accompanied Mother and me to the Christmas markets. She reached out one hand to Mother and one to me, and skipped along between us through the streets. When we reached the market, her eyes widened and she let go of us, running towards the brightly decorated huts. ‘Look, Maminka. Look, Adelka!’ she cried, pointing to the rows of wooden toys and straw and paper ornaments. The Christmas lights danced in her eyes like tiny flames.
After a sip of the hot spiced wine Mother bought from a vendor, Klara grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the nativity scene, where both of us patted the heads of the clay donkeys and sheep. Mother reminded us that we had to hurry because she had other things to prepare at home. The fishmongers were at the far end of the square. The cobblestones became slicker the closer we got to the stalls, and the air was especially chilly around the wooden vats where dozens of silvery carp swished together. Klara brought her face close to one, watching the fishes’ mouths gaping for air. The enchantment on her face disappeared.
‘Adelka, they are drowning,’ she said.
‘How do you want it?’ a fishmonger asked an old woman, dipping a net into the vat and scooping up a fish. ‘You’d be best to let it swim in the bathtub until Christmas Eve. It will be fresher that way.’
The woman pulled her shawl tighter around her head. ‘I don’t have a bathtub. Kill it for me, please.’
Mother always brought our Christmas carp home to swim in the bath as the fishmonger had suggested. I had never seen one killed. Somehow I had missed the connection between the live fish that came home with us and the fried one that appeared on a platter on Christmas Eve.
The fishmonger dropped the writhing fish onto a pair of scales and from there to a wooden block. It stared up at the man with a bulging eye, as if begging for mercy. The fishmonger held the fish and lifted the mallet. Klara clenched my hand so tightly that her fingernails pierced both of our gloves. I tried to stretch my free hand over her eyes but was too late. The fishmonger slammed the mallet down. The ‘bang’ sent a jar through me. He sliced off the fish’s head and wrapped it with the body in a cloth which he handed to the woman.
After the woman left, my mother lifted her bag to the fishmonger. ‘Ours will be going in the bathtub for a few…’ She stopped short when she saw that the fishmonger was looking beyond her, not listening. She turned and saw Klara backing away, gazing from myself to Mother with tear-filled eyes. Her mouth moved as if she wanted to say something, but no sound came out. She reminded me of the fish we had just seen killed, writhing and wriggling away from me each time I tried to grab her hand.
‘Klarinka, what’s wrong?’ my mother asked, rushing towards her but looking at me for an explanation.
‘The fish,’ I stuttered. ‘She saw him kill the fish.’
Mister Rudolf, the carp we brought home from the markets, swam in our bathtub for the next three nights. Mother had promised to keep him as a pet, secretly hoping Klara would turn her attention to something else. But Klara watched over the fish vigilantly, regarding anybody who went to the bathroom to wash their hands or sponge their face as a potential murderer. When we wanted to take a bath, we had to do it quickly, because Mister Rudolf needed to be moved to a bucket, and he would often flip himself out and onto the floor. Finally, in exasperation, my mother bought a tank for Mister Rudolf and served another, less fortunate fish from the markets for Christmas dinner. But Klara was not fooled that the cooked fish had suffered less than the one she had seen killed at the markets. Mother and I realised then that Klara was seeing us differently, and that we would have to win back her trust. After that, my mother indulged Klara’s whim to never touch meat or fish and instead fed her nuts, dates, figs, grapes, raisins and mushrooms as substitutes. As for Mister Rudolf, carp were supposed to die a while after being removed from their pond, but he thrived in his tank.
While our stepfather took exception to Klara’s eating habits, he used our mealtimes to improve my education. The impromptu lessons made me so nervous I could not swallow my food.
