Page 7 of Hell to Pay
“Oh,” I said, “downstairs. I suspect they offerWienerschnitzel,and it’s asparagus season.How I hope Dresden still celebrates asparagus season.LebkuchenandWienerschnitzelon the same day, though, neither of which I have to prepare? Heaven.”
What is this tiara? I hear you wondering. A bit like the Holy Grail, and the search about as likely to be successful. And if we were facing uncomfortable truths, possibly merely an excuse to spend some time with my beloved granddaughter.
When one is very old, the currency of life changes. Money and power and position matter not much at all, as long as one’s bread is not half sawdust, one’s shoes don’t have cardboard insoles, and one’s lodging is free of holes in the roof. I certainly had no desire to go back to any of that, but aside from survival, the true currency of old age is time spent with loved ones. Memories help, but making more memories is better. “Spending time,” they call it, which is right, because time, even more than money, is precious, and never more so than when one senses it running out.
Although memory can be a double-edged sword, as painful as it is pleasurable. I lay a stone’s throw from my childhood home, in a room named after my ancestor’s mistress, my swollen feet raised on two stacked pillows—like chin hairs, nobody warns you of these things—and tried to read. Alix had bought me one of those electronic readers, which allowed me to increase the type size enough to allow reading by blinded moles and not to have to carry books around with me—I could barely carrymyselfaround with me, these days—and I’d just purchasedA Tale of Two Cities,after Ben’s reminder.Ninety-nine cents! One shouldn’t gain so much satisfaction from buying a book for under a dollar,especially when lying on a feather bed with a chandelier overhead, and yet I did.
I tried to read, but before long, the device slipped from my hand and I fell into a doze. Half dreaming, half conscious, the weight of the Dresden sandstone around me, the surreal shock of seeing elaborately embellished structures whole again, the knowledge that tomorrow, I would walk those floors again … the memories came unbidden.
I am six, my English nanny having brought me to my mother’s dressing room after nursery supper to say goodnight. My mother, her eyes looking green tonight in the mirror, is sitting at her dressing table while her maid dresses her pale-blonde hair, the same shade as mine. Or maybe it isn’t her eyes but the emeralds I remember, or perhaps both, her eyes picking up the green of the stones in the famous emerald parure. Josephine’s parure, the set of jewels given to her by Napoleon, and eventually becoming the most precious heirloom of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, my mother’s house. The parure will be mine, I know, when I marry, although I’m too young to imagine such an occurrence.
My mother’s beautiful hair is at last perfected, swept back from her face and coiled behind, and Fräulein Lippert, her maid, opens the velvet case with reverence, removes the tiara with two hands, and carefully, so carefully, settles it into place, wedging it ruthlessly into the hairdo with the help of its spiked combs. My mother says, “Honestly, it’s too ridiculous, this discomfort. How this heavy thing does pull at one’s hair. I should just wear the necklace and earrings instead. Surely that’s enough glamour for Mozart.”
Lippert’s mouth pinches into its thinnest line. “You joke, Majesty,” she says reprovingly. “How disappointed the others would be to see you so simply dressed.”
“Simply dressed?” My mother laughs. “In all this?” Sheskims a hand over her silk gown, all slinky gold fabric and artful draping, then touches one of the emerald-and-diamond clusters on the necklace Lippert has just fastened, the one that looks like a daisy chain, the centers made of the most beautiful green stones and the petals of diamonds, with one enormous emerald hanging down from the center. My favorite of all my mother’s jewels. Sometimes she lets me hold the necklace, but not tonight.
Lippert taps at her hand and says, “Don’t smudge the stones,” and my mother laughs again. “Honestly, Lippert,” she says, “you should be the Queen. You’d be much better at it than I am, and you’d take it more seriously, too.”
Lippert merely sniffs and fastens the matching diamond-and-emerald earrings, then stands back, examines the effect, picks up a powder puff, and dusts my mother’s cheeks and nose with perfect delicacy. “I’m not beautiful enough to be Queen,” she says, and it’s true. With her hooked nose and her black dresses, Lippert has always reminded me of a witch. “There. You’ll do.”
My mother picks up my favorite, most beautiful bottle of Paris scent from the glass-topped table, uncaps the cut-glass stopper, and sprays the smallest amount behind each diamond-and-emerald-bedecked ear.Je Reviens,it is called.I Will Return.“One’s scent should whisper,” she tells me. “Never shout.”
“Yes, Mama,” I say. “You look like a queen in a fairy story.”
She smiles and touches the tiara, and once again, Lippert slaps her hand. My mother laughs, as gay as a shepherdess in May, and says, “Come give me a kiss, then,mein Liebling, to send me on my way.”
“I wish I could come too,” I say, then kiss the powdery, sweet-smelling cheek before my mother places her own kiss on my forehead.
“You will,” my mother says. “When you are a beautifulyoung lady, you will wear silk and pearls and sit in the royal box at the Semperoper.”
“Is it as beautiful as the Grünes Gewölbe?”I ask.
“Maybe not,” my mother says, “but it’s very fine.”
“With a great chandelier as big as a house,” I say, “and the royal box with a crown and crimson curtains.”
“And who built it?” my mother asks.
“King Frederick Augustus II,” I say obediently, “but it was, um …”
“Designed,” my mother prompts.
“Designed,” I say, “by Semper. He also designed the Great Synagogue, that looks like a Moorish palace.”
“He did,” my mother says. “And for getting it right, you get a chocolate.”
“Marzipan?” I ask.
“Marzipan,” she agrees. “See, this one here—this has marzipan inside. You can tell because it has an almond on top. So clever of them to give you those clues.”
I never did go to the Semperoper, with my parents or otherwise. I never saw the inside of the Great Synagogue, either. And when I ran from my home on that terrible day when the city burned, I did so with the emerald necklace sewn into one sleeve of a worn, patched woolen military coat, a man’s coat, and the earrings and brooch sewn into the other. The tiara, I left behind. I couldn’t think how to hide it during the days or weeks or months to come, so I left it in its hiding place and thought,I’ll come back for it. I’ll get it back.A foolish thought, I knew even then, because the Russians had nearly reached Prague, and they would have other ideas about the treasure they found. And even the emerald parure of the Empress Josephine pales in importance when one is running for one’s life.
Now, though? Now, I would find it if I could. I hadn’t thought I needed it, but that line from mother to daughter … I’d broken it. The necklace and brooch, I would never recover. I’d sold them, and who knew where they’d landed, nearly eighty years later? The tiara, though, might be here still, practically under my nose. A tiara and a pair of earrings … it was by no means a complete parure, but it was something, and it was Alix’s legacy.
Another memory, this one from a few years later. I’m paying a visit to my parents in the morning room this time. My mother sits, still beautiful but dressed much more simply in a day dress of blue and with pearls in her ears, and looks at the newspaper, a frown creasing the spot between her eyes. I notice the frown, but I’m not surprised by it, because my mother’s demeanor is less gay these days. My father enters the room and, to my disappointment, doesn’t greet me. Instead, he says, “It’s as bad as we feared. As bad as they’re saying. They’re calling itKristallnacht.”
My mother says, “It’s happened everywhere, it says here. ‘A spontaneous mass uprising,’ they say.”
