Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 9

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THERE was nothing wrong with my childhood, so far as I could tell. Our home was all in one room, but why not? I knew of nothing better. It was familiar and Mother was there and I liked it. The world outside our windows was a pageant that I watched with endless interest, but I had no wish to go down to the street to play. Until I was six years old I seldom left the room, except to go on short errands for Mother to one of the shops below, and when I did I was always glad to come straight back. Everything I wanted was right there.

The window at the back opened over a garden which seemed to me enormous. A great tree reached nearly to the sill. At the far end of the garden was a seat with an arbor of vines growing over it, and here the proprietress of the house sat on sunny days, isolated from her tenants whom she considered inferior and regretted having there. She lived somewhere on another part of the second floor.

The window sills were stone and very wide, and Mother always put bread crumbs there for the sparrows. I was constantly delighted as I watched them. Behind the garden was a stone wall which separated our house from a bakery. Beautiful smells of freshly baked loaves of bread came to us through this window. Nearly always the smell was pleasant, but sometimes when I was hungry it could be painful as well.

The windows which overlooked Palacký Street were my introduction to the outside world. It was an important thoroughfare of Prague, leading from the river through Smichov to the outskirts of the city. It was wide enough to accommodate four horse-drawn carts abreast, but whenever two of the horsecars which ran its length happened to pass, and carts were on the street at the same time, the carts had to go up on the sidewalks or be run down. Many of these carts carried coal, and I liked to watch people who needed it badly jump onto the carts and knock as much as they could into the street before they were detected. As it fell, others would run along and pick up the pieces.

It was still the era of leisurely transportation. Whenever Grandmother wanted to go into town, as we called the other side of the river, she waited until she saw one of the horsecars approaching from the Ringhoffer Works down the street, then she waved to the conductor and rushed downstairs. Two houses below, the streetcar waited until Grandmother climbed in breathlessly, and then it went on its way. The first time an electric car ran down the street everyone hung out the window to watch. Grandmother wept and declared it the work of the devil. Mother said quietly she needn’t worry, for it couldn’t possibly last.

The street was lined with middle-class and workers’ shops. Everyone knew the distinction between them. There were sausage shops with white tiles in the window for the patronage of white-collar workers in the factories, petty government clerks and other shop proprietors. There were also butcher shops which sold horse meat for the trade of the workers. So it was with everything sold on the street.

No one ever came to see us and we had no real friends, but that again seemed a natural state of affairs because I had never known any other. Mother was much too busy to encourage neighborly chats. I had no companions of my own age, but I didn’t mind. I much preferred to watch the boys in the street below than to play with them, for they seemed to make a great deal of noise as they broke windows and were chased by policemen. I played my own quiet games under the table while Mother worked and told me stories, and I continued to hang over the window sills and watch the life that went flowing back and forth below.

Perhaps another reason why I was never lonely was the fact that there always seemed to be so many of us living in that one room. Grandmother alone was trouble enough for two. She had to be served and waited upon because she refused to do anything for herself. Whenever she started to sigh loudly as she sat in her chair by the back window we knew she felt aggrieved at one of us, but she would seldom say specifically what had annoyed her or what was troubling her mind. Nearly every afternoon she went out to meet other old ladies of her acquaintance in a public park on Žofín Island in the Vltava, and as soon as she arrived home she wanted attention from us both. Mother’s work seemed to her of no importance whatever.

Whenever she felt particularly offended, or wanted to emphasize for the millionth time her disapproval of a daughter who could be so thoughtless as to have the child of a dead man, she sighed deeply and looked at the two oil paintings which hung together on one wall, calling them as witnesses to her downfall into such proletarian surroundings. They were both half-figures, brown with age. One was her mother, a mean, pretentious woman in a bonnet with a large gold chain hanging over a black bombazine dress which was buttoned to her chin. The other was the portrait of a very good and very dull gentleman who was her older brother. He wore the uniform of a colonel in the Austrian Imperial Army Medical Corps, and his hand remained forever stuffed between the loosened buttons of his jacket. Because of him, I formed an early loathing for military life.

On the dresser stood a daguerreotype of my uncle, Mother’s younger brother. Grandmother looked at that a great deal, too, and it was of more moral support to her than the oil paintings. My uncle looked like her, for he was small-boned and his features were pinched. He had always been enormously ambitious. He did not want money so much for the power it gave him as a safeguard against ever having to remember his life as a boy in Prague, in a house filled with insecurity and parental disagreements.

He had left home as quickly as he could, some time before Mother was married. He had started as a petty clerk in one of the largest banks of Prague, eventually had become an accountant, and then he had left Prague in order to get farther away from his family. He went into a German bank in Dresden and then to Berlin, where he had become a director of the Deutsche Reichsbank. Somewhere on the way he had acquired a German wife and a son who was two years my senior.

When I was about four years old, soon after the episode on the bridge, he began to send a small check each month to Mother, which he said was for the three of us. The checks were very small in amount—one hundred Austrian kronen, or about twenty dollars—but they represented safety from destitution.

Mother always told me about her brother in a tone of voice that made him sound like a minor saint, and she reminded me again and again that without his kindness we would all be lost. I looked at his photograph and tried to see the little boy Mother had known, but he was hidden behind the features of “Your Uncle.” It was a clean-shaven face, long and ascetic, but it seemed to me to be made of stone, for it held none of the wrinkles made by smiles. His hair was cut short in the German fashion and brushed straight upward from his forehead, and because I knew no one else who looked like that, he remained a strange and rather terrifying figure.

Grandmother wrote him long letters filled with complaints about Mother and asked him to send her a separate allowance. He wrote regularly once a month, and nothing in his twelve letters each year ever underestimated the grand gesture of his aid to us. Instead, he emphasized his pleasure in being able through his great wealth to help his parents and his sister. If it weren’t for so many unexpected expenses caused by his wife and child, as well as his social obligations, he would send us more. As for Grandmother’s complaints, he reminded us once again that if we couldn’t keep peace among ourselves, he would cut us all off for good.

These letters always made Mother cry, not because of his threats but because she felt we were depriving her poor brother of money he could ill afford to let us have. Grandmother merely sniffed and looked out the window toward the bakery.

And then I began to receive boxes at Easter and Christmas filled with old clothes, books and playthings that had belonged to my cousin. Again I was reminded by Mother of my uncle’s generosity, but even this couldn’t dull my interest in the contents of the cartons. I can still recall the way they smelled—of fine soap and rooms in another world. These were the first picture books in my life, the first dolls and tin soldiers, the first tailored suits and shoes. They spelled the beginnings of a new world to me, beyond the confines of my imagination.

The seventh presence in our room was Grandfather. Mother had a small picture of him in a locket which she allowed me to look at only when Grandmother was not at home. While she talked about him I looked at his long white whiskers parted down the middle, and he became for me everything a child admires in a man.

He lived now in the attic of a farmhouse near Žatec, in the hop region of Bohemia. Here he had a loom where he made beautiful homespuns for the petticoats of farm women and the dress jackets of farmers. They were all his own patterns and he was famous throughout the countryside, even though textiles were already being made in Bohemia by machinery. Through Mother’s eyes I could see him sitting in his attic before the loom, surrounded by a mess of things which I thought would be everything a little boy could want to play with, while he threw his shuttle back and forth through the threads of the warp and sang lustily as he worked.

To a large extent, Grandfather compensated for the presence of Grandmother’s portraits in oils and my ever-judging uncle who sat on the dresser in plain view of everything we said or did.