that was a long time in passing. Helene Mayer took no extra measures to protect her breasts during her matches, and so neither would I. With that kind of padding under your jacket you are asking to be hit square in the target area. Admitting the possibility of a hit is a compliment to your opponent and refusing to do so made my parries stronger, especially quarte and sixte. A hit to the chest during a fencing bout left me sick to my stomach. I had no desire to feel those milk glands, those maternal appendages. I would never become a mother. Nor would Helene. It could be no coincidence that my idol bore the name of the most beautiful of all the Greek goddesses, the protectress of young virgins, she who had been abducted and overpowered. We were girls of Sparta, who battled on so we would never have to grow up, but we were passionate just the same. In my daydreams I increasingly became the object of desire. At night my painstakingly composed allegories were thrust aside by impatient, unbridled phantoms who left me panting and satisfied. Phantoms I had been unable to capture, just as they had been unable to capture me.
Fencers are often a little childish: playing at musketeers, wearing their hair long, swigging wine from the bottle, stamping around in their boots and pounding on tabletops. Such antics end on the piste, where deadly seriousness is the order of the day. Even von Bötticher was playful in his way, though his imagination was directed at animals. He taught them to behave like humans and when he succeeded he was happy as a sandboy. The task of opening the letter fell to Gustav. This was pure showmanship, of course: look how clever my rabbit is and how little store I set by this epistle from your father. His bunny nibbled neatly along the edge with mechanical dedication, even giving a little tug when he arrived at the corner so the resulting sliver of envelope could be detached and devoured. A letter opener could not have done a better job. Von Bötticher slipped his hand between the cardboard sides, pulled out the letter and began to read. For three full pages, I hardly dared draw breath. I stared intently at his eyes, as if my father’s words would be reflected in them, but they darted from line to line and, as Leni had feared, began to smoulder furiously.
‘I’ll spare you the embarrassment of reading it aloud. You’re his daughter and it’s not my place to shatter the image a daughter is apparently supposed to have of her father. I have said enough already.’ He folded the letter and stuffed it back in the envelope, which still had more to divulge.
‘And what else do we have here?’
It was a yellowed sheet of paper, an illustration. I grew dizzy with curiosity but von Bötticher walked over to the sink, placed the envelope between the pages of a cookery book that was thick as a fist and slammed it shut.
‘Very well. We shall see who is right,’ he said scornfully. ‘I expect you in the fencing hall for your first lesson in half an hour.’
The fencing hall had once been a ballroom. The parquet in the middle had been worn by a century in which dances traced circles. The floorboards, on which laced-up satin boots once followed the heavier tread of army officers, now only bore the weight of footsteps that advanced and retired, still following but never in the round. Three pistes had been drawn in black paint, delimiting the strictest of choreographies: fourteen metres long and two metres wide, two adjoining triangles pointing out from the centre toward the on-guard lines at a distance of two metres on either side; it was a further three metres to the warning line for sabreurs and épée fencers, one weapon’s length beyond came the warning line for foil fencers, and then it was back another metre, and not a single pace more, to reach the end line. The net curtains billowing in front of half-open terrace doors were the sole reminder of rustling tulle ballgowns. It was warm. I tugged at the collar of my quilted jacket and caught sight of myself in the large mirror: the swordswoman. My face and my hands looked brown against the white of my suit, which my mother had given a quick soak in a dolly blue. I took up my favourite foil, pulled on my glove, and stood heels together, feet apart. Salute. At that moment, von Bötticher entered the hall. It was there, in the mirror, that I first noticed his limp.
‘Salute yourself, as well you might. For now, you will be your only opponent. A formidable foe, as every fencer knows.’
‘When will the other students be arriving?’
‘You will have to make do with two sabre-wielding boys. Don’t worry, I am planning to have them practise with the foil again. You know the type: young hotheads incapable of placing a decent riposte but all too happy to wave a big sword around. Speed and endurance, the mainstays of youth—they have nothing more to offer. They were due to arrive last week, but two days ago I received a telegram from their mother. There appears to be some kind of problem. You will have to be patient. Until then, let’s see whether you are as good a fencer as your father claims.’
He came closer, dragging his leg irritably. ‘My gait is not always this laboured. My leg is playing up today. Show me your weapon.’
I grasped the blade of my foil and proudly offered him the grip. One wrong word about this weapon and all would be lost. Von Bötticher kneaded the leather, stretched his arm, peered along the length of the blade, let the foil spin between thumb and forefinger, kneaded the grip again, weaved his wrist this way and that, and then nodded. ‘Very well, now show me you are worthy of such a weapon. Stellung!’
‘Unarmed?’
Before I knew what was happening, he struck me full on the chest. ‘Ninny! When you hear “Stellung” you take up your position, understood? Or must I resort to French? Stellung!’
I assumed the on-guard position, my hand thrust out before me, gloved and empty.
‘What do you call this?’
He tapped my left hand, which I held in mid-air behind me. ‘Relax those fingers! Keep them loose. You’re not hailing a carriage!’
He then turned his scrutiny to the distance between my feet and kicked the back of my heel, which perhaps deviated one per cent from the line he had in mind.
‘Tsk … Ausfall!’
He left me standing in the lunge position till my thigh muscles began to tremble, correcting my stance down to the last millimetre. I knew he could bark another command at me any moment. ‘Stellung!’
I shot back into position. The maître gave me my weapon and slapped his chest. ‘Now, show me a splendid lunge.’
‘But you are not wearing a jacket.’
He fastened a single button, a tiny shell, half a centimetre across. ‘This button is your target. If I were you I’d worry about the impression your lunge makes on me, not the indentation your weapon leaves behind.’
I was almost beginning to miss Louis back in Maastricht. He may not have been a bona fide maître but at least I could count on his admiration, stamping for joy when I landed a hit. I was Louis’s best pupil and he would much rather have seen me bound for an academy in Paris than the retreat of some obscure military man in Germany. Those officer types understood nothing about women’s fencing. When von Bötticher packed it in after fifteen minutes, I began to fear Louis was right. Having examined my body from the soles of my feet to the tips of my fingers, he declared it to be a reasonable apparatus, limber, enough of a basis to work from, but my ability to react, my speed, my tactical skill—in short everything that had won me prizes back in Maastricht—were of no interest to him for the moment. He had other matters to attend to, and I was left to fence against my reflection. I hoped he would look on in secret from the terrace. The curtains flapped, the door banged shut. In the mirror I took in my formidable opponent. She made me feel uncertain, and uncertainty is a fatal flaw for a fencer. There she stood, too short in stature, brandishing a weapon of which she might not even be worthy. She was not ugly, some even said she was pretty, there’s no accounting for taste. I was not to my own taste. It was the Aryan race that
