The Star of Kazan Read Online Free PDF Page A

Annika’s. ‘Your mother would have kept you if she could, you know that, don’t you?’
    And Annika did know. When she was in bed in her attic and had put out her lamp, she told herself the story she told herself night after night.
    It began with the ringing of the door bell – the front door bell – and a woman stepped out of a carriage. She had thick auburn hair under her velvet hat; her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a rich warm brown; and she was tall and beautifully dressed, like the woman in the painting Professor Emil had in his room, which was called The Lady of Shalott . She swept into the house, saying, ‘Where is she? Where is my long-lost daughter? Oh, take me to her,’ and then she gathered Annika into her arms.
    ‘My darling, my beloved child,’ she said, and she explained why she’d had to leave Annika in the church. The explanation was complicated and it varied as Annika told herself the story, but tonight she was very tired so she skipped that part and went on to where her mother turned back to the carriage and a dog leaped out – a golden retriever with soft moist eyes . . .
    ‘I brought him for you,’ her mother said. ‘I was sure you’d like a dog.’
    And Annika was asleep.

C HAPTER F OUR
W HITE H ORSES
    T here was only one child in the square whom Annika couldn’t stand. Her name was Loremarie Egghart and she lived in a big house opposite the house of the professors.
    The Eggharts were extremely rich because Loremarie’s grandfather had been a manufacturer of soft furnishings and in particular of duvets and pillows. These were stuffed with goose down from the plains of Hungary, where the poor birds were rounded up and plucked naked, but the Eggharts did not worry about the geese, only about the money.
    Loremarie’s father still took money from the factory, but he had become an important councillor and went each day, with a flower in his buttonhole, to sit at a large desk overlooking the Parliament Building, where he helped to make boring laws and shouted at the people who worked for him in his foghorn of a voice.
    What he wanted more than anything was to become a statue. Not a statue on horseback, he knew that was unlikely, but a proper statue on a plinth just the same. There were many such statues in Vienna: statues of aldermen and councillors and politicians, and Herr Egghart thought that if he could become one too, his life would have been worthwhile.
    Loremarie’s mother, Frau Egghart, spent her time spoiling her daughter, shopping, gossiping and looking down on her neighbours, particularly the Bodeks, who, she felt, should be rehoused somewhere else. She was driven everywhere in her husband’s brand-new canary-yellow motor with its outsize brass lamps and its bulbous horn that could be heard three streets away, and she didn’t just have maids from the country to work in the house, but also kept a snooty manservant called Leopold, who walked behind Loremarie carrying her satchel when she went to school.
    Needless to say, Loremarie was not allowed to play with a ‘kitchen child’ like Annika, so it was easy enough to keep out of her way.
    But on Sunday morning after church Annika liked to catch up with what was happening in the city, and she did this by walking carefully round a large red pillar covered in notices and advertisements which stood on the pavement on the other side of the chestnut trees.
    On this pillar were notices of the plays being performed and what was showing at the opera. There were notices of military parades, visiting circuses, special matinees at the theatre, and receptions given by the old emperor at whatever palace he was staying at.
    And of course there were advertisements for stomach pills and for ointments to cure baldness, and a picture of a man with huge muscles, which he had got by eating a particular kind of liver sausage.
    Today there was a new notice; a big one, with a picture of a snow-white horse with golden reins and a