Her Hungry Heart (33 page)

They gazed into each other’s eyes. He felt something so strong for Mimi that without hesitation he made his way past the other men to stand in front of her. In all the excitement of this roadside reunion, introductions somehow escaped them. He raised her hand in both of his and held it for several seconds before he kissed it.

Mimi sensed destiny. There was no other way to explain her sense of belonging, of being some part of this stranger’s life. She felt a shiver of excitement, and it was visible. She knew he understood. She could see it in his eyes. They spoke to her of sensual love, of new beginnings, and he knew she heard him. His first words to her were, ‘Have courage, soon you will be free …’ He hesitated, suddenly aware that others were listening. Then he continued, ‘… to put your life together after this sad time.’ But Mimi knew that he meant much more than that. She could see in those seductive, intelligent eyes that he wanted to say more, but the time and place were against him.

‘Your father was a remarkable man who impressed me very much. I may have liked his politics but I liked even more his self-possession, his will to live his life on his terms. He grabbed his destiny with both hands and made a life for himself with it. Everything changes. That’s life, the changes. I am so happy to meet you, even if it has had to be under these sad circumstances.’

What was he telling her? That destiny was placing a continental kiss on her hand on a soft verge in a Communist
country she had hoped never to see again? Mimi tried to make light of what she was feeling for this young man and his words, but it was difficult because he spoke to her in English, a soft voice with an accent not unlike her father’s, sensuous and filled with charm.

He smiled at her. It was one of those smiles conjured up to give reassurance, support, the message ‘I’m with you’.

‘Thank you. You seem very wise about my father, as if you knew him very well. Were you a frequent visitor to his house? I don’t recall seeing you there.’

‘No, in Paris. I knew your father there.’ She didn’t remember him. But that was the only hint he intended to give her.

Mimi’s attention was drawn away from the young man by someone trying to organize the cortège, and before she realized it seating arrangements were reorganized and she and Barbara were riding with two of the dissidents rather than her cousins.

They were unaware of how or when it began, but as the convoy of cars approached the Stefanik Estate people came out of houses and shops in the villages they passed through to hand flowers through the windows of the cars. Looking back, Mimi was amazed to see a tail of twenty or thirty cars now travelling behind them. She asked, ‘What’s happening? I don’t understand – how do they know? Isn’t it dangerous? We’re supposed to keep a low profile.’

‘Yes, you are, officially. But your father is still a hero to many in this country. We couldn’t let him come home without showing him how we feel.’ It was Alexji who answered her; who, seeing tears of emotion fill her eyes, placed an arm around her shoulder and told her, ‘His death is a sad thing for many of us, too.’

Mimi could accept being comforted by Alexji, she had known him and his story for years. He was one of her father’s refugees who had been in and out of the Fifth Avenue house for many years. Alexji had been imprisoned
four times between visits. Mimi knew him to be a fighter for the same things her father had once fought for and that she had thought he had ceased fighting for.

‘I don’t want any trouble, Alexji. My father is past all that now. We only want to bury him in the family crypt and leave this place.’

‘Don’t you have any feeling for our country, Mimi?’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘That’s because you’re grieving.’

Mimi thought it best to leave it at that. She saw no point in making an issue of her indifference to something Alexji was still in the good fight for. Emotionally she felt on shaky ground. It was impossible for Mimi and Barbara not to be shocked by the sight of hundreds of people along the road, the cars filled with flowers, and not a policeman in sight, not a soldier to frighten them. It was all so totally unexpected. They had geared themselves to a sad and lonely cortège of one hearse, one car and a few cousins, and the misery of their loss which they could express in any way they liked since there would be no one there to put up a front for.

‘I’m afraid of all this, Alexji. What if they appear, the police, the Army? Those dreadful Soviet officials we were stuck with at the airport?’

‘They won’t, and anyone who does will turn a blind eye. It’ll be easier for them. It’s near Prague that you have to worry. They would still like to know some of the Count’s secrets. They might even want to question you but you will be gone before they figure that out. They are slower, less efficient and organized than you think.’

The house was a fifty-room country palace, now pathetically derelict, set in more than a square mile of parkland, and still in the hands of some Communist union. Her heart sank as the cortège passed through the once magnificent gates. Parkland gone to ruin, uncared for. Fountains dry, broken. The family chapel, once a Baroque
gem, in disrepair, sad, unloved-looking, and as if God himself had abandoned it. When the cortège pulled up to it there were horse-drawn flat carts, three of them, piled high with flowers. Local people from the estate, villagers from a hundred miles around, were gathered there, waiting to pay their respects to Count Karel Stefanik. Possibly as many as three hundred old friends and compatriots, distant relatives and just plain admirers from a young generation Mimi was surprised had ever heard of him, were milling in front of the chapel. It was beyond her comprehension, this display of emotion for her father. The moment they saw Mimi with Alexji and the cousin, the crowd rushed towards her to grab her hand and kiss it. In Czech they told her, ‘Welcome home, Countess. Countess, come home. Countess, he was never forgotten. This is your home now, Countess.’ One old peasant woman took the hem of Mimi’s skirt in her hand and kissed it. ‘Countess,’ she wept, ‘the Count has come home.’

Once she had stepped out of the car she was caught in the crush of people. She and Barbara were swept up and moved with them in a wave of humanity towards the chapel, up the stairs, and through the chapel doors. No longer the place where she had known magnificent statues, paintings, nativity scenes, the risen Christ. Where were the gold chalices, gilt tables, tapestry cushions on which as a child she had knelt with her father to pray? The only remnants of those things were the once magnificent marble floors, now cracked and filthy, even in some places scorched by fire; frescoes neglected and peeling. The roof had enormously large holes in it, some covered with corrugated metal, others nailed inadequately with planks of wood. Mimi could only think how sad it was that Karel should be brought to this ruin as his last resting-place above the ground. Alive he would have wept at what they had done to his family’s tribute to God.

Someone had taken the time to repair what was left of the
pews, to knock together rustic benches, find a few old wooden chairs. The people were scrambling for a seat, some clambering to get in to the chapel. They were lining the walls and every available surface with flowers. The chapel became an arbour of blossoms more fit for royalty than a mere expatriate nobleman.

They all crammed into the chapel. Somehow Barbara and she settled in seats in front of what was left of the Baroque altar. It was now a bower of flowers with a makeshift wooden table covered with a lace cloth, waiting for the casket to be brought in by the pall-bearers. Alexji and her cousin were the only men who did not relinquish their places as pall-bearers. The other men did so in turn, allowing after a few minutes others to take their places, carrying Karel home for the last time. Mostly older men like himself, with whom he had worked during the resistance days of World War Two. It was such a moving tribute to her father, Mimi could only feel touched by the overwhelming love people had for him. The courage they had too, publicly to come and pay their last respects to Count Stefanik. It was in its own way a jab at the occupying Soviet regime to honour a hero like Count Stefanik, especially since only a few years ago they had come through a time of severe restrictions and repression at the hands of the Soviet regime. Mimi felt displaced yet again in her adult life, as she had as a child when she had been sent away from this place to survive. An outsider, who did not really understand all that was happening. The man she had known as a private person seemed here a stranger to her in his public persona.

There was something about the people and their love for this brave man that she found unreal. It all appeared so feudal, the gathering of people standing around waiting for something to happen now that he had returned. They were expecting something from her and she didn’t know what. She felt a strange resentment at being called Countess
Stefanik and kept answering, ‘My name is Mimi Steindler. Steindler. I am not a Countess, there is no Countess.’ In vain. No one listened.

She turned to Alexji and said, ‘Why do they do it? Keep going on like that. I am Mrs Steindler and not the Countess Stefanik. Countess Stefanik is dead, that was my mother.’

‘And you are the Count’s heir. Look, they heard of the death of your brother a couple of years ago. They consider you to be the rightful Countess Stefanik. It won’t change anything, they will never see you as Mrs Steindler.’

‘Let it go, Mimi,’ advised Barbara. ‘In twenty-four hours we’ll be out of here and home. And your father would have liked it, been proud for you to carry his name, I’m sure of that. Let it be.’

The service was a long one, considering how repressed religion was under the Communist State. After the funeral, the people filed out of the church and the priests blessed them. They walked from the chapel to the family plot and the crypt, whose bronze doors were open. Mimi watched as her father’s coffin disappeared through them. Inside, someone had arranged dozens of candles. Mimi saw them twinkling in the darkness and found it impossible to follow the coffin in. She broke down and was swept up by a group of strangers, who tried to comfort her. It was Barbara who went inside the mausoleum and said her last farewell. On leaving, someone asked for the candles to be blown out and removed. Barbara stood framed in the open door, the candle flames flickering in the dark crypt behind her. She told Mimi, ‘Please tell them to leave the candles, let them burn down in their own time, leave your father in the light for as long as possible.’ Mimi gave the instructions. Only then did Barbara step aside to allow them to close the bronze doors and padlock them.

Many of the old-timers filed by Mimi to tell her who they were and how they had remembered her. But none of that made any sense to Mimi, she was too distraught. Finally he
was gone, and she felt a sadness even deeper than she had at the time of his death.

Mimi was swallowed up by the crush of people, separated from Barbara and the dissidents who had come to her aid on the road. And now she really did think she could no longer cope. She felt herself slipping, as if she were going to faint, when she felt his arm around her. He was supporting her as he pushed through the crowd. She felt him pull her hat from her head and it vanished into the crowd.

‘My hat?’

‘Fewer people will recognize you without it. Another face in the crowd, that sort of thing.’

He pushed on until they were on the fringes of the crowd. Then, taking her around the back of the cemetery, he walked her very quickly towards the fields and high grass. Mimi was trembling.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’ She could barely manage to speak. She blurted out, ‘I think I’m out of control.’ And then came the sobs and the tears.

They were alone now, walking through the high grass. He felt her slipping towards the ground and caught her in his arms and ran with her further into the field where there was a huge old oak tree. There he laid her down in the grass, leaning her against the massive trunk.

‘My name is Alexander Janacek,’ he told her.

She did not react. She was hysterical, he recognized that. The sobs would not stop. She could hardly catch her breath. ‘Hold me, please, please,’ she begged. ‘I hate him. I hate my father, he’s always leaving me. I can’t love him any more the way I did my whole life, making believe it didn’t matter all those years he abandoned me when I was a child. And now he’s dead, gone for ever and I won’t spend another life-time loving him, trying to make up for what he did to me. I hate him! Maybe I have always hated him as much as I have loved him. That’s it, I hate him. I can say it now. I
hate him for all those years he forgot about me.’

She spoke while beating with clenched fists on the ground and in between sobs. His heart went out to her. He could not bear her pain any longer. He knelt down in front of her and slapped her hard across the face several times. She beat him hard on the chest, went for his face with her fists, and slapped him with the flat of her hands until she wore herself out. The sobbing stopped enough for him to pull her into his arms. ‘It was the only way to stop you, the only way. You’re free of your father now, Mimi. Now you can really love him.’

And with that he roughly grabbed for her. Alexander felt a violent passion for this wildly erotic beauty so filled with love and hate, so full of pain, for this so hungry heart, for carnal and for real love, for one so female. Her power was overwhelming. All thought vanished from his mind. Everything that was lust in him took over. He hugged her hard and kissed her lips again and again, licking them. He had a voracious appetite for Mimi. He felt her ease into his kisses and open her lips. They kissed deeply until a wildness took her over. She bit into his lips, pulled at his hair, tears still streaming down her face. He could feel in their crazy lovemaking all Mimi was, all she would ever be, and he fell in love. With a wild urgency she tore at the buttons of her dress and fumbled with his coat and shirt. His hands were already exploring her naked flesh, caressing her bare bottom, fingers searching between the lips of her cunt. Now she was driving him into an erotic frenzy with her sexuality and desire for oblivion with him.