Authors: Belinda Alexandra
Tags: #Australia, #Family Relationships, #Fiction, #Historical, #Movies
Silver Wattle
Belinda Alexandra
DEDICATION
For Mauro
Discover the world with Belinda Alexandra …
W
e 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 the while her face was blanched of colour as if she had received a shock. I could not imagine what it was about Uncle Ota’s letters that made Mother change so. The family photograph albums were full of pictures of my father and his older brother arm in arm, from their childhood until just after the time my father and mother married. Mother had adored Father who had in turn worshipped his brother. My father, according to Aunt Josephine, had been inconsolable when his own father disinherited Uncle Ota.
‘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.