Читать книгу The Blue Flower - Candia McWilliam, Penelope Fitzgerald - Страница 14

WERE things worse at Weissenfels when a letter from the Big Cross arrived, or when the Mother’s elder brother, Captain August von Böltzig, happened to come to the house? Von Böltzig had fought in the same battalion as the Freiherr in the Seven Years’ War, but had come to totally different conclusions. The King of Prussia, whom he admired without reservations, had supported total freedom in religious belief, and the Prussian army was notably fearless and morally upright. Must one then not conclude –

‘I can see what you have in mind to say next,’ said the Freiherr, his voice still just kept in check. ‘You mean that you accept my reasoning,’ said von Böltzig. ‘You admit that there is no connection, or none that can be demonstrated, between religion and right conduct?’

‘I accept that you, August von Böltzig, are a very great fool.’ The Freifrau felt trapped between the two of them, like a powder of thinly-ground meal between the millstones. One of her night fears (she was a poor sleeper) was that her brother and the Uncle Wilhelm might arrive, unannounced, at the same time. What would she be able to do or say, to get decently rid of one of them? Large though the house was, she always found guests a difficulty. The bell rang, you heard the servants crossing the hall, everything was on top of you before you could pray for guidance.

In 1790, by which time the young Fritz had matriculated at the University of Jena, the forces of history itself seemed to take a hand against Auguste. But here her narrowness of mind was an advantage, in that she saw them as no more and no less important than the worn bed-linen, or her brother’s godlessness. Like the damp river-breeze, which made the bones ache, the disturbances in France seemed to her no more than a device to infuriate her husband.

Breakfast at Weissenfels was taken in a frugal style. On the dining room stove, at six o’clock in the morning, there were ranks of earthenware coffee-pots, the coffee being partly made, for economy’s sake, out of burnt carrot powder. On the table stood large thick cups and saucers and a mountain of white rolls. The family, still in their nightclothes, appeared in ones and twos and, like sleepwalkers, helped themselves from the capacious earthenware pots. Some of the coffee they drank, some they sucked in through pieces broken off from the white rolls. Anyone who had finished turned his or her cup upsidedown on the saucer, calling out decisively, ‘Satt!’

As the boys grew older, Auguste did not like them to linger in the dining room. ‘What are you speaking of, young men?’ Erasmus and Karl stood warming themselves, close to the stove. ‘You know that your father does not like …’

‘He will be quite happy with the Girondins,’ said Karl.

‘But Karl, these people may perhaps have new ideas. He does not like new ideas.’

In the January of 1793, Fritz arrived from Jena in the middle of the breakfast, in a blue cloth coat with immense brass buttons, patched across the shoulder-blades, and a round hat. ‘I will change my clothes, and come and sit with you.’

‘Have you brought a newspaper?’ Erasmus asked. Fritz looked at his mother, and hesitated. ‘I think so.’ The Freiherr, on this occasion, was sitting in his place at the head of the table. He said, ‘I think you must know whether you have brought a newspaper or not.’ Fritz handed him a copy, many times folded, of the Jenaer Allgemeine Zeitung. The paper was still cold from the freezing journey, in Fritz’s outside pocket, from Jena.

The Freiherr unfolded it and uncreased it, took out his spectacles and in front of his silent family bent his attention on the closely printed front page. At first he said, ‘I don’t understand what I am reading.’

‘The convention have served a writ of accusation on Louis,’ said Fritz courageously.

‘Yes, I read those words, but they were altogether beyond me. They are going to bring a civil action against the legitimate king of France?’

‘Yes, they accuse him of treason.’

‘They have gone mad.’

The Freiherr sat for a moment, in monumental stillness, among the coffee-cups. Then he said, ‘I shall not touch another newspaper until the French nation returns to its senses again.’

He left the room. ‘Satt! Satt! Satt!’ shouted Erasmus, drumming on his saucer. ‘The revolution is the ultimate event, no interpretation is possible, what is certain is that a republic is the way forward for all humanity.’

‘It is possible to make the world new,’ said Fritz, ‘or rather to restore it to what it once was, for the golden age was certainly once a reality.’

‘And the Bernhard is here, sitting under the table!’ cried the Freifrau, openly weeping. ‘He will have heard every word, and every word he hears he will repeat.’

‘It is not worth listening to, I know it already,’ said the Bernhard, emerging from the tablecloth’s stiff folds. ‘They will cut his head off, you will see.’

‘He does not know what he is saying! The king is the father, the nation is his family.’

‘When the golden age returns there will be no fathers,’ murmured the Bernhard. ‘What is he saying?’ asked poor Auguste.

She was right, however, in believing that with the French Revolution her troubles would be greatly increased. Her husband had not absolutely forbidden the appearance of newspapers in the house, so that she would be able to say to herself, ‘It is only that he wants not to catch sight of them at table, or in his study.’ For some other way had to be devised by which he could satisfy his immense curiosity about the escapades of the French which meant – if she was to tell the truth – nothing to her whatsoever. At the Saline offices, she supposed, and at the club – the Literary and Scientific Athenaeum of Weissenfels – he would hear the topics of the day discussed, but she knew, with the insight of long habit, so much more reliable than love, that whatever had happened would not be real to him – that he would not be able to feel he truly possessed it until he had seen it on the grey pages of a daily newspaper. ‘Another time, dear Fritz, when you give your greatcoat to the servants to be brushed, you could leave your newspaper showing, just a few inches.’

‘Mother, after all these years you don’t know my Father. He has said he will not read the paper, and he will not.’

‘But Fritz, how will he inform himself? The Brethren won’t tell him anything, they don’t speak to him of worldly matters.’

‘Weiss Gott!’ said Fritz. ‘Osmosis, perhaps.’