Mrs Mohr Goes Missing Read online

  In memory of Krystyna Latawcowa née Dutkiewicz

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Preface

  Prologue – In which not much can be seen, and not much can be heard.

  Chapter I – In which we meet the household at an apartment on St John’s Street, learn how Vienna is taking its revenge on Cracow, what one can do with seven stallions, and how to cure many a case of cholera; we also hear about the great value of certain books, the equally great rapacity of the ladies from a certain society, and the tragic accident that befell the Hungarian envoy all because of a bottle of slivovitz.

  Chapter II – In which we learn that some people save tens of cents on cabs, while others throw millions of crowns away, and that even countesses like to gawk; we also learn how to climb Olympus and what most often goes missing at charitable institutions.

  Chapter III – A long but pithy chapter, in which we learn about Cracovian conservation practices, and that – mark my words – Matejko will live for some time to come, that one can keep procuring new staff for years on end, what one must do to lie down beside Mrs Helcel, and finally what the watchman found.

  Chapter IV – In which we discover that students are rogues, on the day of the grand opening of its new theatre Cracow is corked like a bottle, a cousin can be the age of a grandmother, the foyer is swarming with flora and fauna, a princess sleeping on a glass mountain is woken by a boy in a peasant coat, and one corpse is too few.

  Chapter V – In which the professor’s wife glowers through a half-open door, reveals her past experience as a detective (the celebrated case of the silver sugar bowl), lectures Ignacy on the technical superiority of the fork, and has a terrifying dream.

  Chapter VI – In which Zofia Turbotyńska shows no interest in the digestive tract of the salamander, lurks in a gateway, and brings up topics at table that a woman of propriety should not discuss while eating catfish.

  Chapter VII – In which Zofia runs up expenses because of her fatal addiction to detective work, gets to the bottom of a dessert, and from there to two queens and one king.

  Chapter VIII – In which a peacock feather parades about Cracow on a Saturday, the watchman yields to the voice of Sarah Bernhardt, Zofia inspects the spot where imaginary treasure was buried, makes a dubious deal, and finally discovers a thing or two in a love nest.

  Chapter IX – In which Zofia Turbotyńska is forced to resort to some morally dubious acts, realises that a sizeable chapter has been torn from the book of her life, sets two belligerent bucks against each other, comes upon a suspiciously shabby cross between an Alpine chalet and the Alhambra, learns that not every widower’s wife is actually dead, and finally that the police do not let the grass grow under their feet.

  Chapter X – In which Zofia does not agree with The Cracow Times but adheres to ancient customs, and Cracow suffers an irretrievable loss. A day of triumph changes into a day of surprises, accusations are put off for now, and Rakowicki Cemetery is visited by Odysseus, who has something to say on the subject of every grave.

  Chapter XI – In which Cracow impatiently prepares for its favourite kind of ceremony, Zofia Turbotyńska burns with shame in a fourth-class funeral procession, the mysterious young man appears in the foliage, and Mrs Mohr’s sister in torrents of mourning tulle; it’s also Sunday, and as such there is a prison visit, and a threat to wreck the prison governor’s family home.

  Chapter XII – A short but eventful chapter, in which the major funeral procession of the season doesn’t go to St Michael’s or the Wawel Cathedral, while Zofia plays truant from the burial, or one could even say: makes a dubious rendezvous.

  Chapter XIII – In which Zofia Turbotyńska discusses cruel monsters, and later, when two important expeditions beyond Cracow are undertaken, she delves in the bushes and the armorials, and comes close to solving the puzzle.

  Chapter XIV, The Last (Not Counting the Epilogue) – In which Zofia Turbotyńska, bourgeois citizen of Cracow, solves the mystery of the murders at Helcel House, brings punishment to the crime, and in the process obtains the raffle prizes for her lottery for the benefit of scrofulous children.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  By the end of the eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned by three empires: Russia, Prussia and Austria, and throughout the nineteenth century it did not exist as an independent country. Cracow, Poland’s former capital, had special status: in 1815, following the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna, the city and its vicinity became a semi-autonomous, small-scale republic under the control of all three empires. As a result, the capital of the Austrian partition of Poland – the region known as Galicia (unrelated to the Spanish region of the same name) – was the historically less significant but larger city of Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine). The tiny republic’s freedom was increasingly suppressed, which led to resistance, mainly from the gentry and the nobility.

  Towards the middle of the nineteenth century Europe was experiencing intensifying unrest, culminating in the wave of insurgencies of 1848 known as the Spring of Nations, when various nationalities, especially the Hungarians and Poles, tried to regain their independence within the empires. In 1846, when an uprising had been about to erupt in Cracow, the Austrian authorities incited the peasants to massacre the nobility. In spite of this action, which came to be known as the Galician Slaughter, the uprising occurred and was bloodily suppressed. Afterwards the republic was abolished and Cracow was incorporated into the Austrian partition, where it continued to take second place to Lemberg, which was growing larger and richer.

  However, the Spring of Nations led to a change of power in Vienna. In December 1848, the eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph Habsburg became emperor and would rule for almost sixty-eight years, longer than Queen Victoria; just like her, he would give the entire epoch a distinctive character. In 1867, in an attempt to save his vast domain – more than twice the size of the British Isles – from disintegrating, he transformed it into Austria-Hungary, equally combining the empire of Austria and the kingdom of Hungary, each with its own parliament and government, united by the figure of the monarch.

  In 1893, when this story is set, Cracow was home to a diverse mixture of ethnicities, languages and religions from all over the empire. Apart from Poles and Austrians, there were Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians and Ukrainians (known as Ruthenians in those days), and above all, Jews. The Jews accounted for more than a quarter of the city’s population but most of them were not assimilated and led their own separate life. Even those who were assimilated into society were treated as second-class citizens.

  Despite its wealth of cultures and its great historical past, Cracow was a provincial city. Made into a bastion surrounded by forts, it could not expand and had only about seventy thousand citizens. Galicia was backward, the poorest region not just in Austria-Hungary, but in all Europe at the time. Yet greater freedom prevailed there than in the German, and especially the Russian partitions of former Poland, where frequent uprisings continued to erupt against the oppressive partitioning powers. The Poles were represented within the parliament, and even the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire; they were freely allowed to study in the Polish language at schools and at the Jagiellonian University – which dated back to medieval times, when Copernicus studied there – and to found cultural institutions. Cracow became a major centre for culture and learning, a vital place not just for Galicia but for all the Polish lands, home to many leading authors, scholars and artists.

  Not surprisingly, many Poles regarded themselves as loyal subjects of His Imperial Majesty, and saw the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary – that curious country familiar to us from the novels of Joseph Roth and Robe
rt Musil – as their motherland; though in political terms it was fairly liberal within the context of contemporary Europe, in terms of society and culture, it was painfully conservative, full of hypocrisy and social inequalities, a place where the desire for change was gradually increasing.

  PROLOGUE

  In which not much can be seen, and not much can be heard.

  At this hour the corridor is entirely empty – but the pale blue glow of the moon shining through the branches of the trees outside is making strange patterns on the door and walls that merge now and then to form figures – a nun in a wimple and flowing tunic, an old lady bent double, or a brawny watchman. But there’s nothing there, nothing at all.

  How much easier it would be if the room were in a side wing, around a corner – but this door can be seen from the glazed area at the end of the corridor, brightly lit by a lamp; this is where the ladies’ and gentlemen’s halves of the building meet, and Cerberus, in the guise of a Sister of Charity, is usually on guard in the duty room beside the locked door; but now, thank God, Cerberus is not there.

  Someone returns, doing their best to move silently. This person slips into the room and goes up to the corpse in the rumpled bedclothes; it has clearly been through its death throes, and yet the face looks oddly serene, as if dying had brought on a state of bliss.

  The hardest thing is grabbing hold of it. A naked heel protruding from the blanket raps against the floor. Shh, not a sound! No, there’s no one coming, nobody heard a thing. All that’s left is to make the bed. And heeeave! Who’d have thought her body weighed so much? More than when alive. How heavy could she have been? Eight stone? A hundredweight? No, less than that. She was a scrawny creature, nothing but skin and bone, with the head of a sparrow and the hands of a squirrel. The life has only just flowed out of her, but it’s like lifting a cathedral bell. Was that a gasp? No, nothing of the kind. It’s just the feeling that at any moment the corpse is going to come back to life and wreak its revenge. Just a few more yards, four, three, two to go. This corridor doesn’t usually look so wide, but now crossing it seems like a struggle. Fortunately there’s no door here, no lock, and the way up is clear. At any rate, this is where the stairs begin. How lucky that they’re new and don’t squeak.

  CHAPTER I

  In which we meet the household at an apartment on St John’s Street, learn how Vienna is taking its revenge on Cracow, what one can do with seven stallions, and how to cure many a case of cholera; we also hear about the great value of certain books, the equally great rapacity of the ladies from a certain society, and the tragic accident that befell the Hungarian envoy all because of a bottle of slivovitz.

  It was Saturday 14 October 1893. All morning a large cloud, dark grey with streaks of sapphire blue, had been hanging above number 30, St John’s Street in Cracow – known as ‘Peacock House’ because of the fine sculpted bird above the main entrance – threatening rain.

  ‘Come along, Franciszka,’ said Zofia Turbotyńska gloomily, fearing the worst, by which she meant having to pay twenty cents for the ride home in a cab, ‘the shopping won’t do itself.’

  And then, ignoring the cook’s aphoristic answer (‘On Saint Jerome’s either it rains or it don’t’ – though in fact this particular sacred figure had been commemorated a fortnight ago), she went into the hallway, did up two rows of small black buttons on her boots, pulled on her cherry-red kid leather gloves, donned a new hat bought at Marya Prauss’s fashion emporium and examined herself in the mirror.

  Zofia, née Glodt, wife of Professor Ignacy Turbotyńska of the medical faculty at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University, was approaching her fortieth summer, but she noted with approval that she was really quite comely. Perhaps over the past year she had gained a minimal amount of weight, but she carried herself erect and still had an alluring figure. A healthy complexion with no pimples and very few wrinkles – just one was more distinct, on her forehead, between the brows, perhaps too often knitted. An oval face, the features rather stern, but softened by nicely defined eyebrows and keen eyes with dark lashes . . . a slightly hooked nose . . . and lips – well, the lips could have been fuller, but she consoled herself that her thin lips gave her the look of a refined Englishwoman.

  She reached for an umbrella from the porcelain stand, which was bristling with her husband’s walking sticks. Briefly her fingers fluttered over the handles – a silver parrot’s head with topaz eyes, a rolled-up elephant’s trunk, an ivory knob (donated a couple of years ago by his grateful students), and a small, glossy skull (a souvenir of his last year at medical school) – and finally extracted a Chinese dragon chasing a pearl: a present, as Zofia liked to mention, from her sister, who lived in Vienna. Just one more backward glance into the mirror – playful enough for her to find herself pleasing, and stern enough for Franciszka not to dare counter it with a smirk – and they were ready for the march to Szczepański Square.

  They went the usual way: down St John’s Street, then St Thomas’s, with an occasional reluctant glance at that cloud, which was gathering, swelling and seething over the Piasek district.

  ‘It’s sure to be pouring in the outskirts by now,’ said Franciszka, seemingly into space, though with patent reproof. But she knew that in the life of Zofia Turbotyńska there were sanctities greater than the Elevation of the Host, including a proper Sunday luncheon, and thus an equally proper Saturday shopping expedition.

  By now they had reached the end of St Thomas’s Street, and so Franciszka, who was walking slightly behind with a basket over her arm, knew what would happen next: as soon as they came level with the Alchemist’s house, the bow on Zofia’s hat suddenly twitched and turned to the right, followed by the rest of the hat and her head. The time had come for a groan, for this was where ‘that crime’ came into view, ‘that hideous shack, worthy of a station halt in a garrison town’; in other words the enormous bulk of the covered emergency staircase, tacked onto the City Theatre a couple of years ago after the fire at the Ringtheater in Vienna.

  ‘I realise that almost four hundred people burned to death there,’ Zofia would say, ‘but is that a reason for Vienna to take revenge on Cracow with this monstrosity? Fortunately we’ll have our new theatre in a matter of days!’

  And so there was the ritual groan, and then the bow moved back into place. Now they had to move on to serious matters.

  Szczepański Square opened wide, edged with squat little houses; here and there crooked booths sprang from the dirty cobblestones; they were roofed in shingle and crammed with tables large and small, barrels of pickled cabbage and gherkins, piles of wood, bunches of brushes and wicker baskets creaking from an excess of pears, apples, potatoes and cauliflowers carted here by peasants from the villages outside Cracow – and so it was, all the way to the other side of the square, which was closed off by the longest booth of all, divided into yet more stalls, with the saleswomen and their customers buzzing about in front of them, as well as a handful of grubby urchins scenting the opportunity to swipe an apple or seize a dropped coin from the ground, despite being repeatedly shooed away. But maids and cooks were in the majority – Zofia had her own opinion on the topic of ladies of the house whose servants went shopping unsupervised: ‘they leave with a handful of crowns and return with a single parsnip, and a rotten one at that’; of course, she occasionally sent the girl to the market, the pharmacy or the haberdasher’s for a trifle or two, but she had to take personal command of the Saturday shopping.

  As she walked among the booths, her brain was working away like an arithmometer or other mechanical calculator: entire days and weeks were organised in her mind, accounting for breakfasts, luncheons, teas and suppers, and the requisite amount of flour, butter, milk, cream, lard, sugar and honey, pounds of fruit and measures of wine, capons, goose breasts, schnitzels and aspic. Between a basket of apples and a table piled with cheeses wrapped in horseradish leaves, she could mentally convert seidels and vedros, lots and stones, bushels and achtels of the foodstuffs that she would administer for
the next few days, weeks or months. She only lost her way in the new coins. Last year Vienna had replaced the silver guldens with golden crowns, so now there were two currencies in circulation; both the good old kreuzers (sixty of which had made a gulden) and the new hallers (one hundred of which now made a crown, so they were worth almost half as much as their predecessors) were commonly known as ‘cents’, leading to constant misunderstandings at the market, where every housewife would carp about the high prices: ‘Twenty cents for a kilogram of kohlrabi? That’s banditry!’ at which the tradeswoman would mollify her by saying: ‘There’s no need to get in a stew, madam, it’s in new cents, not old!’

  Be that as it may, after reaching the meats that she had seen to in advance – the schnitzels for today’s luncheon had already been prepared, and the lad from the butcher’s on the Small Marketplace was due to deliver the poularde for tomorrow’s by four o’clock – Zofia’s thoughts had moved on to the cakes for every day of the week ahead, when suddenly her mental arithmetic was interrupted by a tuneful cry: ‘Cousin Zofia! Cousin Zo-fiaaa!’

  Beyond the figures of two old biddies from the countryside, wrapped in shawls, who were selling mushrooms picked at dawn, she discerned a tall, austere figure taking tiny steps in her direction – it was Józefa Dutkiewicz. In fact, they were only distantly related through an aunt whom they had last seen some thirty years ago – and who had long since resided in a graveyard – but they were more closely associated by a long-standing, ardent mutual dislike, or to be precise, they had been sticking pins in each other for years, fighting a duel in which each blow was masked by exaggerated courtesy. And the final outcome was not yet apparent.