me,’ my father had said of the earnest man. Pointing at the other figure, little more than a smudge in an unbuttoned military overcoat and a fur hat, he said, ‘That is your maître.’
My friends thought the photograph was divine. Girls my age were all too eager to sketch in that blur of a face. He was sturdy and he was gallant, that was what mattered, and he had a country estate for me to swan around on. Surely this was a Hollywood ending waiting to happen? Yet all I saw was a worn-out man without a weapon. Instead of Gary Cooper or Clark Gable gazing down from my bedroom walls, I had the Nadi brothers staring at each other. A unique photograph, one I have never seen since: Olympic heroes Aldo and Nedo, both right-handed, saluting before a bout. It’s not a pose in which fencers are often photographed: facing one another in the same stance, exactly four metres apart, bodies staunchly upright, holding their blades in front of their unmasked faces. It looks as if they are sizing each other up along the steel of their weapons, but as a rule this pre-match ritual never lasts long. Not as long as it used to in the days when a duellist stared into his opponent’s eyes and took one last look at life.
It was War and Peace that first gave Herr Egon von Bötticher a face. I had pressed him between its pages as a bookmark. When I opened the book, his features evaded me just as he had tried to evade the camera’s lens, but as I read on they began to take shape. The haze of his blurred immortalization had robbed him of his pride. His fur hat was really a tricorne, golden epaulettes adorned his shoulders and a red-sheathed sabre hung at his left hip. I knew all this for certain. During my train journey I tried to read on quickly but I was distracted by a leering passenger who averted his eyes whenever I looked up. Every few sentences I would feel the heat of his gaze taking in my body through the compartment window and I read on even faster, skipping entire passages to arrive at the point where I wanted to be: the kiss between Bolkonsky and Natasha. My timing was perfect: I reached it just as we entered the tunnel. The passenger had vanished. I tucked the photograph away. I did not need a face, I would recognize my Bolkonsky among thousands. On that late summer’s day in 1936, he was the most distinguished of all the men at Aachen station. But on closer inspection he turned out to be a disfigured cad who let me heave my own suitcase into the car.
‘Has your father explained the purpose of your visit?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
Only he hadn’t. I had no idea what von Bötticher was talking about. My purpose was to become a better fencer, but my father knew the maître from a dim and distant past that would not remain so for long. He was German, an aristocrat with a country estate by the name of Raeren. At these words, my mother had begun to sob and shake her head. We had expected no better of her. The parish priest had warned her about the Nazis and their ill-treatment of Catholics. My father told her not to get herself into such a state. As for me, I barely gave these things a second thought. Nazis meant nothing to me. Von Bötticher, on the other hand, was inescapable. Without braking once, he drove me out of town over dirt roads and around hairpin bends. His knuckles slammed into my leg whenever he changed gear and his knee, sticking out to the right of the steering wheel, would have been nudging mine had I not inclined my legs toward the door of the cabriolet. He did not dress like a man his age, his sandals fastened around his ankles with a cord. My father, never one to shy away from a Gallicism, would have dubbed him a pigeon.
‘We’re here.’ It was the third sentence he had fired in my direction after a drive of at least an hour. Pulling up outside the walls of Raeren, he braked so abruptly that I shot out of my seat. He slammed the car door behind him and tore up to the gate, muttering as it groaned open, then jumped back in the car, screeched into the drive, and got out again to bang the gate behind us. It occurred to me that I would not be venturing outside these walls any time soon. Among the fading chestnut trees that lined the drive, my first glimpse of the place was the old roof turret, which was used as a pigeon loft. It would be a week before I was able to sleep through their cooing and the patter of their claws. And once that week had passed, I would be kept awake by matters far more disquieting.
Opposing mirrors reflect themselves in one other, a succession of images that become ever smaller and less distinct yet never cancel each other out. Certain memories exist in this state too, for ever bound to the first impression in which an older memory is contained. At the turn of the year, I had seen a film called The Old Dark House. I am tempted to say I recognized Raeren from the film, though it was only a passing resemblance. Even then I knew that I would always remember Raeren as the mansion where Boris Karloff had walked the floors. In my mind’s eye, its mirrors would always be cracked, its curtains flapping from open windows, the ivy around its front door stone-dead.
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2
The front door looked like a coffin lid. I was being melodramatic, of course, but when von Bötticher left me standing there while he went back to fetch something from the car, the house seemed to radiate a loneliness that resonated with my own. Minutes passed. I stared at the black paint, the tarnished knocker and the silver nails. Then the door swung open and as if to complete the scene a deathly-pale little man appeared on the threshold. He said nothing, a daguerreotype from a time when people were still in awe of their photographic perpetuation: rooted to the spot, eyes fixed on the horizon, face drained of colour.
‘Heinz! What kept you?’ von Bötticher shouted from a distance. ‘The gate needs oiling. Leave it any longer and I’ll never get it shut. Where is Leni?’
The little man braced himself, took the suitcase from my hands and cleared his throat. ‘In bed, sir. No need to worry. She’s promised to be up and about by lunchtime.’
‘This is Janna, the new pupil I told you about. Remember?’
‘I can make a pot of tea,’ said Heinz, without so much as a glance in my direction.
‘Take the girl upstairs. I do not wish to be disturbed today, for once.’ Then suddenly with a smile, ‘Except by you two!’
He was talking to the St Bernard and another smaller dog that had been waiting in the hall, bottoms quivering with excitement. This was something at least. Though I had never had a pet dog, there was still a reassuring familiarity about them. Lacking words, animals simply cannot be strangers. The St Bernard let me stroke it briefly before bounding into the garden to greet its master, stamping playfully on the ground with both front paws at once. I was left alone with Heinz, who had something to tell me. ‘We do not have a telephone.’ He thrust a pointed finger in the direction of the outside world. ‘The lines run north along the main road and don’t reach this side. There’s already a telephone pole on every corner of the village, but the master doesn’t see the use. We don’t have many visitors. That’s something you should know. Other than the butcher and the students, no one comes to call.’
The clock in the hall had stopped. Later I would discover that Raeren was full of clocks that no longer ticked and cupboards that contained nothing at all. It was as if everything had been put there for appearances’ sake. The interior offered two contrasting moods: rustic and faded chic. Everyday life was confined to the smoky kitchen, where the beams were hung with game hooks, pots and kettles, all in frequent use, and where a rough-hewn dining table invited you to rest your elbows on its knotted surface. The grand section of the house was steeped in a silence that was amplified by the slightest movement. Even the hint of a footstep would trigger a salvo of creaks and groans from the wooden thresholds, floorboards and furniture, noises so unwelcome that these were rooms where dust hung in the air instead of smoke.
Von Bötticher strode into the hall, the dogs trailing in his wake. ‘Take the girl up to the attic room and bring these two and Gustav to my study.’
‘I can’t get hold of Gustav, sir.’
‘Try luring him with a biscuit. Kaninchen sind
