The Star of Kazan Read Free

typhus.’
    The baby turned its head and snuffled. Professor Emil looked at it in amazement. He was used to pictures of the baby Jesus lying stiff and silent in his mother’s arms, but this was different.
    ‘It’s absolutely out of the question that we should allow a baby to stay in this house,’ said Professor Julius. ‘Even for a day.’
    Professor Emil nodded. ‘The noise . . .’
    ‘The disturbance,’ said Professor Gertrude. ‘Not to mention what happens to them . . . at the far end.’
    ‘It would only be till the quarantine is over,’ said Ellie. ‘A few weeks . . .’
    Professor Julius shook his head. ‘Certainly not. I forbid it.’
    ‘Very well, sir,’ said Ellie listlessly. ‘We’ll take her to the police station in the morning. They’ll have somewhere to put unwanted babies.’
    ‘The police station?’ said Professor Emil.
    The child stirred and opened her eyes. Then she did that thing that even tiny babies do. She looked .
    ‘Good heavens!’ said Professor Julius.
    It was not the look of somebody who belonged in a police station along with criminals and drunks.
    Professor Julius cleared his throat.
    ‘She must be kept out of our sight. Absolutely,’ he said.
    ‘She must make no sound,’ said Emil.
    ‘Our work must not be disturbed even for a minute,’ said Gertrude.
    ‘And the day the quarantine is over she goes to the convent. Now where is my whisky?’
    ‘And my warm milk?’
    ‘And my hot-water bottle?’
    The professors were in bed. The baby lay in a borrowed nappy on a folded blanket in a drawer which had been emptied of table mats.
    ‘She ought to have a name, even if we can’t keep her,’ said Sigrid.
    ‘I’d like to call her by my mother’s name,’ said Ellie.
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘Annika.’
    Sigrid nodded. ‘Annika. Yes, that will do.’

C HAPTER T WO
T HE G OLDEN C ITY
    T he city of Vienna, at the time that Ellie and Sigrid brought their bundle home, was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which took in thirteen different countries spread over the heart of Europe.
    The empire was ruled by one old man, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who had a winter palace in the centre of the city and a summer palace out in the suburbs, where the air was always fresh. He was a lonely person because his wife had been assassinated by an anarchist and his son had shot himself, but he worked hard at his job, getting up at five o’clock every morning to read state papers, and sleeping on an iron bed like his soldiers. He even washed the feet of twelve needy men who were brought to him on the Thursday before Easter because he wanted to be good.
    Because he was so old, bad things happened to him.
    Little girls would present him with bunches of flowers and when he bent down to take them, his back would seize up and his aides would have to come and straighten him. Or the school children of Vienna would make pink paper tissue hearts and throw them over him as he rode b y, and they would get into his moustache, and up his nose, and make him sneeze.
    All the same, the people of Vienna loved him. They liked his obstinacy and the way he would never get into a motor car though they had been invented a few years earlier, but always drove through the streets in a carriage with golden wheels and waved to anyone who greeted him. They liked the firework display he ordered on his birthday, and the military uniforms into which he struggled whenever there was a procession or a party: the pink trousers and blue tunic of the Hussars . . . the silver green of the Tyrolean Rifles . . . and with them a great helmet with gigantic plumes.
    Every school in Vienna had a picture of him on the wall, and his face, with its mutton-chop whiskers and bald head, was as familiar to the children as the faces of their grandfathers.
    As well as the emperor and his court, Vienna was known for its music. Almost every famous composer who had ever lived had worked in Vienna: Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and