Chapter XI: Oettingen, 1919

Chapter XI: Oettingen, 1919

he news that had arrived from Munich made Maria sick. Strangely enough, even in the Great War she hadn’t lost anyone T she knew personally. Of course, her heart went out to her friends and neighbours who had lost their sons and brothers; she held back tears when she saw the endless lines of the names of those who had fallen. But this was the first time she actually faced the death of a friend. No, not death — for death was something that came to you when your time was up; when you had achieved everything you were meant to. Death was nothing but a dark angel who came to take you to other dimensions.

This had been murder. A filthy demon, an emotionless cockroach that was born of malice and hatred and arrived to gnaw at your soul. To kill Hella and the prince — what was the point? If anything, to prove that a human life is worth nothing.

Maria had tried to establish a spiritual contact with both or either of them, but the séances they held at Sigrun’s mother’s summer house were unsuccessful. Maria knew that something was wrong — not with herself as a woman, but rather as a seer. She hated herself: had she gambled and lost everything? For what was she, if not a psychic able to move between the two worlds? She had accepted an offer that had promised a lucrative escape from loneliness; she hadn’t read the small print that excluded her from any unearthly activities.

In two weeks, she called Princess Franziska from the Grafing post office. Of course, the princess wasn’t available. Maria composed a letter to the princess and mailed it in secrecy. For some reason she was reluctant to have the others know about her wish to meet the princess. They would’ve been surprised; would have reminded her that she had met Princess Franziska only casually and had no reason even to believe that the grand lady would have given her another thought since their meeting in Berchtesgaden. But Maria was hardly

ever wrong about people: there had been a brief but very intense connection between them; she was sure it had been mutual, even though the princess had in no way indicated she had recognized a kindred spirit in Maria.

Nobody wanted to return to Munich, so the girls stayed at Grafing pretending nothing had gone wrong, By June, Maria was no longer able to pretend she wasn’t pregnant.

Sigrun and Traute became somewhat alienated from her. Having never asked, they had not received an answer, and Maria did not confide anything.

Princess Franziska arrived quite unexpectedly, in early July, to take Maria to her summer house near the Swiss border.

Leaving Grafing was like escaping from a prison. With the departure came an almost embarrassing sense of liberation. Everything she had held dear now seemed to tie her down to places and people who seemed to have changed. Maria knew it was actually she herself who was undergoing changes. Sometimes she hated herself and the thing that was growing inside her. It craved to take the place of Maria’s friends, to leave her isolated and secluded with no other function than to serve it. The worst thing was that it appeared to drain Maria’s powers. She felt heavy and earthbound, as if the foetus were of iron. It seemed to be taking roots that were like bronze shackles, tying it safely to the ground, turning Maria into an immobile incubator with the sole purpose of facilitating the hatching process.

After the initial elation that was brought on by the departure, Maria soon realized that even though the sets around her were changed as the train continued towards Switzerland, the stage was still the same. Her liberation was just an illusion: she was carrying her prison inside her.

Princess Franziska barely seemed to notice that Maria showed signs of pregnancy. But once the train left all traces of human settlement behind and began to speed towards Switzerland, the princess, sitting opposite Maria in the first-class carriage, leaned towards her:

“So, when are you due?”

Mart Sander

“I don’t care,” Maria said. “I’d like to either push it out of my body at the next station or keep in imprisoned inside me forever, just to punish it.”

Princess Franziska smiled as if she knew the feeling too well.

“But what does the calendar say?” she asked. “Surely a young lady would forever remember the date she lost her maidenhood.”

Maria frowned at her.

“Is it so obvious?”

“Not to the world, no,” the princess said. “Perhaps only to the one who has a special, albeit not too practical, gift of seeing these things.”

Maria sighed, feeling regret and relief at the same time. The untold and unasked shameful secret had been stinging inside her, making her spirit heavier by a ton with every ounce the foetus gained.

“January, thirty-first,” she said. “Just a couple of days before we met at Berchtesgaden.”

“So it would mean you’re due on October thirty-first,” the princess calculated.

“Yes.”

“Pardon me,” the princess said, “but isn’t that your birthday?”

“It is,” Maria replied.

“And you’ll be twenty-four?”

“Yes.” Maria was somewhat amazed that the princess had taken the trouble of finding these things out about her.

“It’s remarkable,” Princess Franziska said. “The child will be subject to a star chart identical to yours.”

“How do you mean?”

“You see — not only is the child going to be a Scorpio like you. But in addition, this is the year of the goat, just as you were born in the year of the goat.”

“Does that mean the child is going to be a carbon copy of me?” Maria joked feebly.

“It can be a lot of things,” the princess stated, “but never a regular child. You may think you hate it because it has stripped you of something you value in yourself. And yet these gifts are never lost, only re-invested, to be collected at a later date with huge interest.”

“I haven’t been able to make a connection in five months,” Maria said. “As if the cosmic consciousness had probed me and found me spoilt goods. I only receive noise, where I once heard the harmonies and vibrations of the spheres. I am unable to reach out into space; I feel as if I were in the water and frantically trying to swim to the surface of a lake towards the light, but am being sucked back into the mud at the bottom. The only ones who now speak to me are the spirits that are as trapped as I am. Those who have recently died and are unable to realize it, so they perceive in me a narrow doorway, which unites the two worlds, and they jam themselves into this doorway aggressively, clawing and scratching my soul as if I could enable them to return from the dead. And they cling to me, like leeches — every time I return from a trance, I have to cleanse myself as if from evil bacteria that are slowly poisoning me.”

“I don’t think this was a random occurrence,” the princess deliberated. “I believe it was the cosmic consciousness who wanted you to procreate in order to produce the next generation of mediums, possibly so powerful that through them a permanent link between our two solar systems could be established and maintained. I believe that on the thirty-first of January, your body was programmed to secure a partner. Without even realizing it, you became a beacon that sent out a signal that the right type of man would find impossible to ignore.”

“If only that type would have been different,” Maria whispered.

The princess lowered her voice.

“Do you want to tell me who he was?”

“No,” Maria said. “I’m sorry. I’d rather forget it.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” the princess repeated her point. “The decision was made for you; you only had to meet your obligation.”

They had to change trains twice and arrived at Meersburg in four hours. From there they took the ferry to Konstanz, where the princess’s driver was waiting to take them to a large secluded summer house, surrounded by beautiful forest. Maria had never been a guest at such a luxurious mansion; she once again felt like a child who dreams of being a princess, just as every little girl does. Only this

Mart Sander time, she was with a real princess. Regarding her status, Franziska had decided to spend a fairly modest summer: after their initial dinner at the manor, she asked Maria, if she would be satisfied with conditions at a humbler summer house nearby. The princess had decided to give most of her staff leave for the summer and planned to make do with one house maid and the cook, with the chauffeur only a telephone call away in Konstanz.

“So, your summer house has a summer house?” Maria asked Franziska.

“What a fascinating point!” the princess said. Her way of expressing herself was such that Maria was never quite sure if she was making fun (even though benevolent fun) of her or simply being naïve. But there was nothing naïve in the princess. The gracious, almost saintly façade hid a brilliant mind, a very sophisticated sense of humour, and a perceptiveness that was to astonish Maria during the course of their stay.

That evening, they dined at the smaller summer house which resembled the hunting lodge at Berchtesgaden but displayed a feminine touch in its interior and selection of art.

“Before you decide to compliment my choice of furniture and paintings, please be advised that none of this is my taste,” the princess said as the first course was being served.

Maria was beginning to realize that the princess anticipated her words, perhaps even thoughts.

“What shall I do next?” she thought to herself.

Princess Franziska looked at her with a face that could have made a fortune at the poker table.

“If you are currently expecting me to read your thoughts, I must disappoint you,” she said.

“You must — or you choose to?”

Franziska smiled. “I do not read minds,” she said. “I can, however, deduce the course along which a human mind travels. I have observed and concluded since my early childhood and it was made especially easy, since in my family everybody was certain that if they upheld a princely front, none of their thoughts or motives would be visible to anyone, let alone a child. Whereas, in reality, the nonchalant

face of a member of aristocracy is mostly an indication of a blank mind.”

She observed Maria with her trademark inscrutable smile playing on her lips, like a purring sphinx that gets eternal satisfaction from watching the bewilderment of mere mortals.

“I know that there are questions you want to ask me,” the princess said, “but they are dwarfed by another question you keep asking yourself: does she already know all my questions?”

So far, she was right. Maria nodded, and Franziska continued:

“My honest reply is — yes and no. Things cannot be made too easy. If you want to learn whether I know the questions in your heart, you shall have to ask them first!”

Maria emptied her glass. It felt like those far away evenings with Sigrun, when they were both excitedly learning new things about life and each other. But whereas the thrill at Sigrun’s parents’ summer house came from the potential danger introduced by the creatures of the spirit world, in the summer house of Princess Franziska the thrill radiated from the princess herself. It wasn’t a danger which would make one run away from it — it was a seductive hazard that drew one closer to it.

“May I have some more wine, please?” Maria asked and filled her own glass as the domestics had by that time retired to the adjoining servants’ quarters. The glass of the princess seemed to be perpetually full even though she constantly sipped from it.

“Wine tends to liberate our minds and bodies,” the princess said, “and yet it is like the liberation that the communists offer: it often frees us of that which we should cherish the most!”

“Like our innocence?”

“Among other valuables,” Franziska smiled.

Maria was too tired to be astonished, so she merely shrugged her shoulders. “What’s the use of pretending when you know it anyhow,” she said. “I drank wine twice in my life and on both occasions I’ve turned into a spineless creature who melts at the feet of any man who pours the wine.”

“Or,” the princess said slowly, “perhaps you’ve turned into a soft and emotional being. Into a woman.”

Mart Sander

“Everyone can be a woman,” Maria said.

The princess lifted her eyes, and the gleam of the candlelight shining through the red wine in her glass made them sparkle like embers. “Not everyone, Maria. Not me.”

It took Maria a second to understand these words and to sober up accordingly.

“What do you mean by that, Franziska?” she whispered.

“Exactly what I said.” The princess had again assumed the poise that had only cracked for a moment. “Whatever I have drunk, whatever I have felt, or thought, or done, or imagined — nothing has ever turned me into someone that a man could lust after or carry to his bed.”

“But this is absurd,” Maria protested. “You are a remarkably beautiful woman — refined, witty, stylish! What man wouldn’t…”

“… be intimidated by me, and flee?” The princess laughed. “Men are eager hunters for trophies, but sometimes I think I am wearing nature’s camouflage: instead of a butterfly, they see a pair of monstrous eyes.”

“But surely,” Maria said, “there are men of your equal social status who wouldn’t be overawed but would look at you and see an independent and available woman in her prime!”

The princess shook her head.

“A man is never equal to a woman — he either considers himself her better and wants a woman to be nothing but a geisha, or he suffers from an attack of inferiority and sees the woman as an unnatural Amazon. A woman can only be considered an equal by another woman.”

Listening to the princess had reminded Maria of her own similar thoughts on the last night of January. She had appeared so eager to be moulded into an exact vision of womanhood by the man who either had calculated the impact of his words on a female psyche, or even worse: didn’t even consider it but achieved the effect through some raw animal magnetism. Her drunken stupor had watered and softened the soil for his words to fall upon and take root, for his seed to take root, to ripen into the fruit of deception that now demanded to be let into the world.

The sound of distant thunder flowed softly over the darkening skies. When Maria closed her eyes, she was carried back to the night when the rumble of a distant thunder was predicting the rumble of the cannons of the war. She suddenly had a vivid recollection of a conversation with Sigrun on one of these mellow nights when they were sitting on the porch of the summer house, imagining they possessed the keys to unlock the stars.

“Do you want to get married?”

The sudden syrupy quality of Sigrun’s voice as she asked that question was in strict contradiction of the tone of their conversation so far. Maria thought it was very inappropriate to mix the subjects of spiritual wisdom and interstellar information with the very girlish and primitive issue of musing about a future suitor.

“I do not,” Maria replied. “Why should I?”

Sigrun had her eyes averted towards the firmament, evidently looking for the answer in the stars that had no other function than to dance in different constellations enabling lovesick maidens to read their future.

“I’m not referring to any romantic involvement with some handsome cavalry officer or starry-eyed poet,” Sigrun said and did her best to sound offended at Maria’s dismissive tone. “There can be a kind of love that is based on a spiritual bond, not on primitive attraction. I know every girl wants to marry the cadet she had her first waltz with at her coming out ball. I am above that!”

Maria followed the direction of Sigrun’s glance.

“Don’t tell me you wish the stars to choose a husband for you?” she said.

“No, not choose — but to approve my choice,” Sigrun said. “To prevent the wrong ones from getting too near to me and to direct the right ones towards me, even if they are blind to my attractions.”

Maria felt like opposing.

“So how would you know if the man has been sent to you by the stars, or if he’s just a cad who wants to have his way with you?” she asked. “If he is blind to your attractions, how can you be sure you’re not blind to his?”

Mart Sander

“Attraction isn’t everything,” Sigrun said, but it was obvious that this assertion was meant to be indefinable.

“Come, come; you don’t wish to tell me you would marry a man whom you don’t like?” Maria kept on teasing.

“I would like him on some other level,” Sigrun was trying to wriggle out.

“How many levels can there be? Marriage imposes certain obligations upon a woman. I’ve heard of engagements based on stargazing — but not marriages.”

Sigrun turned her back to Maria, giving a slight laugh. Then she faced her with determination.

“Then tell me, oh wise one,” she said to Maria. “You, who are so experienced and sophisticated! Have you had many men?”

This was an attempt to stagger Maria, but she had seen it coming and didn’t even blink.

“I don’t need to have men,” she replied. “I can read them like open books — but mostly the ones who are no longer of this world!”

“So you’d rather grow old with the ghosts of long since deceased husbands of other women, than to spend life with a living man whom you could actually love?”

No doubt, Sigrun had made a valuable point. Maria took a second to think and not make it apparent that she had to concede that the correction was valid.

“I wouldn’t mind sharing my life with someone, eventually,” she said, taking great care to make the words she had chosen with deliberation appear random and spontaneous. “And I wouldn’t mind accepting him into my bed — and into myself.”

It was Sigrun’s turn to taste her own medicine. She giggled awkwardly, but didn’t prevent Maria from speaking further.

“But that man would need to be someone who astonishes me with his ideas and visions,” Maria continued. “Not a poet of resounding but empty catchphrases and not a warrior with the desire to build a throne above every living creature by force. The man who makes me his would need to have a greatness that I can detect before others do; a strength that I can recognize and submit myself to while the rest of the world scorns and persecutes him. A man who embodies greatness

for me and nothingness for the world — until I have fanned the ember of his greatness to flames!”

Sigrun was — as she was supposed to be — deeply in awe of such doctrine.

“What then would this man have to say, or to look like?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t care for his looks, because a man of great visions has a beauty that exceeds that which is perceived by the mortal senses,” Maria shrugged her shoulders, appearing more convinced of her own stand than she actually was. “And he wouldn’t need to speak much. His eyes would speak to me — and his soul. Words are designed to lie.”

“Are your words?” Sigrun had resumed her self-confidence. Then her eyes lit up with a mischievous spark.

“Let’s summon a spirit and find out about our future men!” she hissed and it sounded like an incantation.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Maria said and found herself giggling too.

But Sigrun was like a cat that had tasted first blood and was reluctant to let go:

“And if this man came — you would open herself for him? Would be his, body and soul?”

“Yes,” Maria said.

“Right away?” Sigrun kept on purring. “Even when you knew the two of you could never be married?”

“Yes,” Maria said. “I don’t wish to be his wife. I shall be his goddess.”

No spirit had appeared that night. Evidently, it had been decided that no information on this matter would be disclosed to the mortals.

Maria was awakened from her reverie when Princess Franziska hemmed cautiously, tapping her fingernails against the wine glass.

“What were you thinking about?” she asked.

Maria slid her hand across her belly that appeared only slightly larger than on their last meeting with the princess. For her it felt like touching a stranger against her own will.

“I was thinking how right you are,” she said. “I was anticipating a man who would regard me as a deity, not realizing that the only

Mart Sander alternative for him was to regard me either as a comrade or as a whore. I was eager to offer myself to be moulded into a lamp to burn his oil; I mustn’t complain when the flame now scorches me from within.”

The princess listened to her, smiling, almost as if suppressing the urge to laugh at the drunken reasoning of a younger woman.

“It’s the wine that speaks in you,” she said. “Have some more so the fire will be put out. After this glass, I shall not permit you to have another for the remaining months!”

“You… you wish me to stay here until…?”

“Yes, my dear,” the princess said. “You can’t very well return to Munich where nobody knows about your condition. And from what I’ve heard, neither do your lady friends know.”

“But I can’t be a burden to you for the next four months!” Maria protested, while her inner voice was praising God for this solution that she had secretly hoped for but not counted upon.

“I was planning to spend my summer here and I was planning to have you stay with me even before I received your letter,” the princess said. “We have a lot in common and now we have time to find out all about each other.”

She must have perceived that Maria longed to run to her and embrace her but hadn’t the courage to do so, because she rose from her seat and stepped to Maria, folding her in her arms, saying:

“At the moment, you may have the feeling that your life is finished, that it is as if you have been taken over by some alien being that has entered your body uninvited. But you will grow to love your child, if not now, then in the years to come. Don’t hate it because you hate yourself or its father!”

Maria wiped her eyes with a napkin. “Don’t go on,” she said. “I know you are right. I am being stubborn, because I have decided to distrust men since my childhood. It’s this old predetermination that is now turning against me, because for at least a very brief moment, I, my soul and my body, found love.”

She felt her belly, with reluctance and bitterness.

“This, for certain, is a love child.”