piste. This was only the second time women had competed at the Olympics. Who else was I supposed to model myself on? One of those biddies in bloomers who collapsed in an exhausted heap after running all of eight hundred metres? My father was a reluctant spectator, not only of the duel but of the fever taking possession of his daughter. He tried to talk sense into me, but to no avail. Whichever way you looked at it, surely these ladies would have been better off devoting their agility to a feminine pursuit—ballet, figure-skating or gymnastics? With their beautiful faces locked in those cage-like masks they screamed like animals when they were hit. Not cries of pain, those ridiculous outfits put paid to that, but cries of fear. Remember the day when Pontius the rooster escaped and Granny had to grab him by the legs? He screeched at the top of his little lungs, thinking his hour had come, and hadn’t we all felt so sorry for him? Well, that’s what it means to fear for your life. Pain doesn’t enter into it. It’s not a game. Perched on the very edge of my seat, I wasn’t listening to a word he said. The rules of the sport were a mystery to me. For the uninitiated, fencing matches are almost impossible to follow. Even the trained eye of the president falls short and he often has to rely on his judges to spot a hit. My gaze homed in on Helene Mayer, the victor. My father, as usual, only had eyes for the victim. He rambled on about the scaffold and vengeful mobs, but Helene had already drowned him out. Later she would loom large in the mesh of my mask as I prepared to lunge. No one could lunge like Helene. Every sinew, from her Achilles tendon to the tip of her weapon, conspired to conjure a lunge of at least three metres from a frame of 1 metre 78 and a blade of no more than 90 centimetres.
Before Father and I returned to Maastricht, Auntie Clara Bow braided my hair in the style of Helene. A middle parting and two pretzels over my ears, held in place by a bandeau. This kept your hair out of your face while allowing you to slip a fencing mask over your head. During her match against Olga Oelkers, Helene’s braids unravelled and her hair had fallen in golden strands over her shoulders. How could such a Teutonic force of nature lose? I was slender and a head shorter than she was—not exactly advantages for a fencer—and I was a brunette into the bargain. From that moment I resolved never to wear my hair any other way. My friends, obsessed with trimming each other’s pixie cuts on a monthly basis, thought I was being absurdly old-fashioned.
After my Olympic initiation, it was only a matter of time before my father gave into my moods. My reproaches were anything but loud, not a tear was shed, but for the best part of a year my anger was inescapable. I hid under the blankets with Dumas and self-baked biscuits for company. Every evening I disappeared upstairs with a baking tray, my books and my body increasing in size, the books growing fatter as the crumbs piled up between the pages. When my father finally summoned me for a chat, a small fencing jacket lay on his lap. ‘For my angry little musketeer.’ How typical of my doctorly father to put protective measures first and launch my fencing career with a jacket the colour of a plaster cast. He had heard of a small fencing school in the city, run by a young man called Louis. The fees were modest and beginners were allowed to hire their equipment. The maître had no official qualifications—to this day I have no idea how he came by his title—and he was having a fling with the cashier at the Palace Cinema.
I was allowed to borrow a rusty child’s foil. Everyone in Louis’s class fenced with rusty equipment, a good incentive: avoid being hit or end up with a reddish-brown mark on your pristine jacket, one that will never wash out. It wasn’t until my sixteenth birthday that I received my first adult foil. After class, when everyone else had gone home, Louis called me in and with a flourish produced a bewitching weapon. This was the real thing! The blade looked new to me, gleaming and flexible. Louis opened his fingers to reveal a ridged leather grip.
‘Take it.’
I took the foil from his grasp. My hand barely fitted around the grip, the end of which rested against the wildly pulsing artery in my wrist.
‘Not too big?’
‘No, it’s wonderful,’ I whispered.
‘It will mould itself to your palm before long. The steel is still very stiff, let me bend it for you a little.’
I looked on anxiously as he drew the weapon under the sole of his shoe to curve the blade.
‘That’s more like it. This foil is yours if your father will do something for me. It is important that you ask him immediately. It has to be done soon and requires complete discretion. From you too, so mum’s the word.’
My father frowned when I passed on the message. Of course, I immediately asked whether there was an abortion in the offing. Perhaps my maître’s bit of skirt down at the Palace had a little problem that needed attending to? My father was as dismissive as he was indignant. Who on earth had been planting notions like that in my head! And whatever Louis wanted in return, there was no call to assume that I was about to become the owner of a brand-new weapon. Such decisions were not Louis’s to take. Father had wanted to give me something else for my birthday, not a weapon for heaven’s sake. That was when I looked at my father, the pacifist and professional healer of wounds, and explained all. I told him a foil is not made to kill. It is a weapon to practise with, a sporting invention, never once used on the battlefield. The blade bends on impact to prevent fatal stab wounds and could never be used to sever limbs; besides, the rules of foil-fencing only permit hits to the trunk of the body. I told him it used to be called the fleuret, its point protected by a small leather cap that was said to resemble the bud of a flower. It was the first time my father took note of anything I had to say. With this weapon, my own dear foil, I became a grown-up.
My father idolized me, his only child, but my only idol was Helene Mayer. For years I dreamed of fencing against her. On the Olympic podium in Berlin the ‘strapping lass from the Rhineland’ had stood solemn as a statue in her high-necked fencing jacket and white flannel trousers, the swastika like a brooch below her left shoulder and her right arm extended in front of her. One step higher stood a Hungarian, gold medal around her neck and a little potted oak in her hands. By all accounts, making do with silver did not trouble Mayer much, but oh how she wept over that tree. She had so badly wanted a memento from German soil to take back to her new home: America. Only later did I discover that she was leaving Germany as I arrived. As if we had just missed each other. Perhaps it was for the best. Von Bötticher insisted that to be a good fencer you needed only one idol: yourself.
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4
On my first night at Raeren, the pigeons found their way into my room. I dreamed of wrinkled claws walking all over me and a fat-necked grey bird trying to peck a birthmark from my throat. Stifled by the heat, I had left the balcony doors ajar and now I was too frightened to get up and close them. The birds seemed to be everywhere, scratching about the room. A preening silhouette was perched on the chair. The flapping curtain only let in fitful streaks of moonlight and, too tired to look for the light switch, I pulled the covers up to my chin. The second I woke up in the morning, the stink of the birds hit my nostrils: there were creamy splatters on the carpet and down floated through the air when I threw off the covers. The balcony looked like a battlefield. The pigeons had strutted around in their own droppings and seemed to have lost half their plumage as they wandered in and out. What had they been after? Now the roof was eerily silent.
‘A proper disgrace,’ said Leni when she came to tell me breakfast was ready. ‘Pigeon shit contains all kinds of germs. It can give you pneumonia, I read it in Die Woche. I’ll ask Heinzi to fit a screen. Or maybe we could furnish a room on the next floor down.’ She took the water jug from my washbasin and sloshed some of its contents over the balcony. In the end she had to fetch a scrubbing brush from the hall. Feet planted wide, she went at it, hunched and cursing. ‘The filth I’ve had to clean up today! It’s more than my job’s worth. What does he think we are, muck collectors? Oh, it’s a far cry from the biscuit factory.’
She was going to be a while yet, so I would have to find the kitchen on my own. Downstairs
