Effi Briest (8 page)

Cards like this arrived daily, from Innsbruck, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and every one started, ‘Today we visited the famous local art gallery’, or if it wasn’t a gallery, it was an arena or a church, Santa Maria something or other. From Padua a proper letter arrived along with the card.

Frau von Briest, when she had read the letter, said, ‘Poor child, she’s homesick.’

‘Yes,’ said Briest, ‘she is. All that damned travelling around…’

‘What’s the point of saying that now? You could have prevented it. But that’s you all over, always wise after the event. Locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

‘Oh Luise, don’t say things like that. Effi is our daughter, but since the 3rd of October she has been Baroness Innstetten. And if her husband and our
son-in-law wants to go on a honeymoon and spends the trip recataloguing the pictures in every gallery he visits, there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s what marriage is all about.’

‘Aha – now you admit it. With me you’ve always denied, I repeat, always denied that women are in a situation of constraint.’

‘Yes, I have Luise. But why bring that up now? It’s really too vast a subject.’

It was a pleasant journey and the train reached Klein-Tantow on time; from there a highway led over to Kessin ten miles away. In summer, especially during the bathing months, people preferred to go by water, taking an old paddle-steamer down the Kessine, the little river from which Kessin took its name; on October 1st the
Phoenix
– of which the local people had long wished in vain that it might one passengerless day be true to its name and go up in flames – regularly ceased service, for which reason Innstetten had already sent a telegram from Stettin to his coachman Kruse: ‘Five pm Klein-Tantow station. If weather fine open carriage.’

And now it was fine and when they arrived Kruse was waiting in an open carriage to greet them with the deference required of a gentleman’s coachman.

‘Now then, Kruse, everything in order?’

‘Yes sir, at your service sir.’

‘Well Effi, if you’d like to get in.’ And as Effi did as instructed and one of the railwaymen stowed a little hand-case at the front beside the coachman, Innstetten gave instructions to send the rest of the luggage on the omnibus.
Immediately afterwards he too took his seat, and – wishing to show the common touch – asked a bystander for a light and shouted, ‘Off we go, Kruse.’ Their route went across the track, which had several lines at the crossing, diagonally along the railway line and presently past an inn by the highway which bore the name ‘The Prince Bismarck’. At this point the road forked, branching right to Kessin, left to Varzin. In front of the inn stood a broad-shouldered man of medium build in a fur coat and a fur hat; the latter, as the Landrat drove past, he raised with great dignity. ‘Who was that?’ said Effi, who was highly interested in everything she saw, and consequently in the best of moods. ‘He looked like a
starost
, not that I’ve ever seen a
starost
I must confess.’

‘No matter Effi. You’re very close, just the same. He really does look like a
starost
, and in fact he is something of the sort. He’s half Polish you see, his name is Golchowski, and when we have the elections here, or a hunt, he’s in his element. Actually he’s a very dubious customer whom I wouldn’t trust out of my sight and who probably has a lot to answer for. But he likes to act the loyal subject, and when the gentry from Varzin go by, he all but prostrates himself in front of their carriages. I know Prince Bismarck loathes him. But what can one do? We can’t offend him because we need him. He has the whole constituency in his pocket and knows how to run an election like nobody else, and he’s supposed to be well off. And to cap it all he’s a moneylender, which the Poles usually aren’t; quite the contrary as a rule.’

‘But he looked handsome.’

‘Yes, he’s handsome all right. Most people here are handsome. They’re of good-looking stock. But that’s the best you can say for them. Your people in the Mark are an unprepossessing and morose lot, and their manner is less respectful, in fact it’s not in the slightest respectful, but when they say yes they mean yes and when they say no they mean no, and you can rely on them. Here nothing is clear-cut.’

‘Why are you telling me this? Now that I’m going to have to live with them here?’

‘No you won’t, you won’t hear or see much of them. Because town and country are very different here, and you will only get to know our towns-people, the good people of Kessin.’

‘The good people of Kessin. Is that sarcasm, or are they really so good?’

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are really good, but they’re different from the others; they have no similarity whatsoever with the country folk.’

‘And how does that come about?’

‘Because they are quite different people, of different stock with different ways. If you go inland, what you find are so-called Kashubians, whom you may have heard of, a Slav people who have been here for a thousand years
and maybe much longer. But all the people who live in the little shipping and trading towns along the coast are immigrants from far away, who care little about the Kashubian hinterland because there’s nothing there for them, their concerns are elsewhere. What concerns them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all corners of the globe. Which goes for Kessin too, backwater though it is.’

‘But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwater, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new world. All sorts of exotic things. Isn’t that right? That’s what you meant, isn’t it?’

He nodded.

‘A whole world, I say, with perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.’

‘A Chinaman too. What a good guess. We may still have one, we certainly did have; he’s dead now, buried in a little plot with a railing round it next to the churchyard. If you’re not afraid I’ll show you his grave sometime. It’s in the dunes with just some marram grass round it and a little immortelle here and there, and the sound of the sea all the time. It’s very beautiful and very eerie.’

‘Yes, eerie – I would like to know more about it. Or maybe rather not, I invariably start imagining things and then I have dreams, and I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.’

‘Well, he won’t.’

‘Well, he won’t. Listen to that. How odd it sounds, as if it were somehow possible. You’re trying to make Kessin interesting for me, but you’re rather overdoing it. Are there many foreigners like that in Kessin?’

‘A great many. The whole town consists of foreigners like that, people whose parents or grandparents lived somewhere else altogether.’

‘How very peculiar. Tell me more, please. But nothing sinister. A Chinaman, I think, is always a bit sinister.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ laughed Geert. ‘But the rest of them, thank goodness, are quite different, nice and well-behaved, a little too wrapped up in business, too obsessed with their own advantage and always ready with none too reliable bills of exchange. Yes, you’ve got to watch them. But they’re easy to get on with. And to show you that I haven’t been making this up, I’ll give you a small sample list of inhabitants.’

‘Yes Geert, do that.’

‘Well, not fifty paces from us, our gardens are actually next to one another, we have Macpherson, the engineer who has charge of the dredger, a Scotsman, a genuine Highlander.’

‘And does he look like one?’

‘No, thank goodness, he’s a wizened little man, of whom neither his clan nor Walter Scott would be especially proud. And then, living in the same house as Macpherson, there’s an old surgeon, Beza by name, actually he’s just a barber; he’s from Lisbon where the celebrated General de Meza comes from – Meza, Beza, you can hear they’re compatriots. And then up the river at the Bulwark – that’s the quay where the ships tie up – there’s a goldsmith called Stedingk who’s descended from an old Swedish family, indeed, I believe there are even imperial counts who bear that name, and then, and after this I’m going to stop, there’s good old Dr Hannemann who is of course a Dane and was in Iceland for a long time and has written a short book about the last eruption of Hekla or Krabla.’

‘But that’s marvellous, Geert. It’s like six novels, it’s more than one can cope with. It sounds very dull and bourgeois at first but in fact it’s quite out of the ordinary. And then you must have people, because after all it’s a seaport, who aren’t just surgeons or barbers or things like that. There must be captains, a flying Dutchman or…’

‘You’re quite right. We even have a captain who was a pirate with the Black Flags.’

‘Never heard of them. What are the Black Flags?’

‘They’re people out in Tongking and in the South Seas… But now that he’s back among real people again his manners are of the best and he’s rather entertaining.’

‘I would be afraid of him though.’

‘You needn’t be, never, not even when I’m away or at tea with Prince Bismarck, for, apart from everything else we have, we also, thank goodness, have Rollo…’

‘Rollo?’

‘Yes, Rollo – which makes you think of the Norman Duke, assuming you’ve heard about that sort of thing from Niemeyer or Jahnke. Well, ours is something like that. He may just be a Newfoundland, but he’s a wonderful dog, who loves me and will love you. For Rollo has good taste. And as long as you have him by your side you’re safe and nothing can harm you, no living creature, and no dead one. But look at the moon over there, isn’t it beautiful?’

Effi, who was silently sunk in herself, drinking in each word, half avidly, half fearfully, now sat up and looked over to where the moon had risen behind white but rapidly disappearing clouds. The big, copper-red disc stood behind a copse of alders, casting its light on a broad sheet of water formed here by the Kessine. Or perhaps it was a lagoon fed by the sea beyond.

Effi was spellbound. ‘Yes, you’re right Geert, it’s beautiful. But it’s sort of uncanny too. In Italy I never had this impression, not even when we were
crossing from Mestre to Venice. There was water and swamp and moonlight there too, and I thought the bridge was going to collapse but it wasn’t so spooky. Why is that? Is it just because it’s the north?’

Innstetten laughed. ‘We’re seventy miles further north than Hohen-Cremmen here and you’ll have to wait a while for the first polar bear. I think you’re feeling the strain of the long journey, what with the St Privat panorama and the story of the Chinaman and everything.’

‘You didn’t tell me any story.’

‘No, I just referred to him. But the mere mention of a Chinaman is a story in itself…’

‘Yes,’ she laughed.

‘And anyhow you’re almost there. Do you see the little house ahead with the light? It’s a blacksmith’s. There’s a bend in the road there. And once we’re round the bend you can see the Kessin spire, or rather both of them…’

‘There are two?’

‘Yes. Kessin is going up in the world. It has a Catholic church now too.’