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 made my heart beat faster. It was not something you could admit to ten years on, but I truly loved blond, blue-eyed 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