young men who were hardy as cabbages in a frozen field. There had been boys who fell for my skin, the colour of young walnuts, but I brushed their attentions aside. In my daydreams I looked entirely different. It was a girl at the fencing club in Maastricht who had stated the cold, hard facts. ‘You look far prettier in the mirror!’ she had exclaimed, adding hastily, ‘I mean … well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’ The damage was done, I had been knocked off-balance for ever. What the Janna in the mirror needed was a mask, then all would be well. Masked I could face down any opponent, including that jealous cow at the club. At Raeren, the masks hung from a rack on the wall. One of them was a snug fit, though there was no one to see me. Von Bötticher’s angry voice drifted up from the garden. He was giving Heinz what for, something about dead fish and a pond. I hung up the mask, lay down my weapon and slunk out of the room.
Back in the kitchen it didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. The book lay in the middle of the chopping block: Gastrosophy. A Breviary for the Palate and the Spirit. Many of its pages seemed to consist of coloured-in photographs. Fish dishes shaded in pastels. A roast piglet with its trotters in a helping of lentils. Crimson landscapes of meat stretched across the centre pages with a butcher’s knife held in a pale hand to point the way: how to chop the backbone of a lamb, how to bone a leg of pork, how to slice the tendons from a fillet of beef. It reminded me of the illustrations that hung in my father’s surgery, a dissected human body with muscles, organs and bones exposed. As a child I refused to believe there could be a skull hidden behind my face. The butcher’s pale hand showed how to cleave shoulder from foreleg. The envelope had been removed from the book.
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5
Everything stayed within the grounds at Raeren. Only the clematis scaled the wall, beyond which an occasional farmer’s cart could be heard crunching along the path. By the sound of things the world outside did not have much to offer. The time might come when I would have to climb those walls in a fit of fear and panic. I wasn’t ruling that out, but during those first few days there was still so much to explore. In the orchard I had seen a little ladder leaning hopefully against a tree laden with hard green apples. The garden was more work than Heinz could handle. The rose arbours and flower beds were overrun with ivy, while the kitchen garden vegetables had taken on grotesque shapes and sizes. Abundance run riot.
Before Heinz had a chance to even consider these chores, he had to spend the entire morning behind the house, where the animals were kept. At six the horses were already kicking at the stable door, while the smaller livestock squealed in their pens. From the terrace I could watch him unseen, our gardener from the biscuit factory, cursing a creature behind a knee-high wooden fence. ‘Dirty little rotter. I’ll rub your nose in it. Just you wait, I’ll shove you right in.’ Unable to get hold of whatever was running around in there, rending the air with its rusty scream, he pulled loose his pitchfork and continued mucking out. What else was he to do? His eccentric master had more time for his animals than he did for his personnel but ignored the filth his menagerie produced in much the same way as teenage girls ignore their boyfriends’ pimples. Von Bötticher’s animal utopia was a lie from start to finish and no one knew this better than Heinz. It was he and no one else who stood there every morning up to his ankles in all that these noble creatures spilled out upon God’s green earth. ‘Lord preserve us! Don’t get me started …’
The cattle up on the slopes were the only livestock he did not have to tend. They belonged to a neighbouring farmer, a taciturn man orbited by a swarm of the same flies that buzzed around his animals. When the weather was warm, the cattle lay down with their legs tucked under them. If you approached them, you could hear the sloshing and gurgling in their massive bodies as they heaved themselves up, their inner workings going full tilt. They refused to be patted but were quite happy to wrap their pliable tongues around your feet and drool half-digested grass over your shoes. From one day to the next they would vanish. This meant the farmer had herded them off through the woods to let the grass grow back. It had been that way for years, no need to waste words explaining it.
Out on the terrace I ran my circuits, four lonely mornings in a row. This was part of a schedule the maître had drawn up and hung in the entrance hall. Seven o’clock: morning training session. Eight: personal hygiene. Half past eight: breakfast. Half past nine: a walk and instruction. One free hour after lunch, followed by an afternoon training session and domestic chores after six. During the week, the pupils—whoever they might be—were expected to spend the evening in their room. Leni had taken the schedule down off the wall and brought it to my room so I could copy it into my exercise book. She had no need of schedules, she said. From the second she opened her eyes in the morning till she closed them at night there was more than enough to keep her occupied. Once the downstairs rooms had been mopped, she had exactly one hour to attend to the bedrooms before she began to get hungry and it was time for breakfast. Schedules were for bosses and other layabouts. I needn’t think for a moment that Herr von Bötticher was the full shilling. An unhappy man, that’s what he was. Back when he had only just moved to Raeren and they had been taken into service, he had no routine whatsoever. When the moon was full he would stay up all night only to collapse into bed during the day, sick as a dog.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ she said. ‘He spent those first few days standing up, like he was afraid of the furniture. It wasn’t his, you see, it was here when he bought the place. All he brought with him was a few chests of books and weapons. Every time I looked he was on his feet, at the window, against the wall, in the garden, which was a complete jungle by the way … What you see now is all thanks to Heinzi. We’re the ones who got Raeren running like a normal household. Leni, my mother always used to say, when a person has no routine he’s done for. All that’s left of him is a sad little heap of need and suffering. And right she was.’
Starting another circuit, I picked up the pace. The wind carried the peal of bells from a distant village. Somewhere people were being called on to button up their children’s cardigans and send them out into the world. But the chiming soon stopped and left me alone with my heartbeat. All those discouraging sounds from within: blood pumping, joints creaking, lungs heaving. Saddled with a complaining body as his sole companion, every athlete feels lonely. I was about to stop when the doors to the fencing hall flew open. There stood the maître in an instructor’s jacket, black leather so stiff it made a straight line of the contour of his torso. He wore it well, I’ll give him that. Not like Louis, whose natural slouch made him look like an upturned beetle, arms flailing from his carapace.
‘Keep running, stay on your toes. Arms stretched as high as you can. Higher. Faster. Come on. Now continue on your heels, knees up, stay relaxed.’
After every exercise he looked at his watch. Next I had to take up my weapon, make thirty step-lunges over the length of the terrace and counter every attack he threw at me. ‘Clumsy! You have another fifteen minutes in which to redeem yourself.’
He tapped my behind with his foil. A frivolous act; a hit on the backside has nothing to do with fencing. For a foil fencer, the target area begins under the chin and ends in the crotch. That is all he has to work with, the body of a carelessly excavated Greek god. I shook my forearm loose, jogged on the spot, adopted the on-guard position, inclined my weapon against the ball of my thumb, fixed my eyes on the point of his foil and met his gaze. If only he had worn a mask, I am sure I could have stood my ground.
‘Now do you understand why I asked you yesterday whether you could fence against yourself?’ he asked, as he knocked my weapon away with a lightning-quick counter-parry. ‘I know your next move before you’ve even decided on it.’
I didn’t see the point of training in front of the mirror. As if it were possible to catch yourself off guard. A reflection corrects itself in a fraction of a second, but take the mirror away and errors creep back in like thieves under cover of darkness. I’ve heard fencing likened to playing chess at high speed. The outward spectacle is nothing compared to the forces at work behind the mask. Throw it off to see more clearly
