Chapter 4 Jewels and Broken Glass
JEWELS AND brOKEN GLASS
So far, I hadn’t been as affected as I’d expected.
Perhaps I’d finally found the serenity of extreme old age.
More likely, I was just numb. My suite, to my secret relief, didn’t have a view of the Residenzschloss, which allowed me to wait until tomorrow to confront more of my past. The space, although rather ornate and boasting a most beautiful sage-green wallpaper in the bedroom, bore no resemblance to the palace rooms of my childhood—another relief. Tomorrow would be soon enough.
Alix helped me unpack my two cases, which I appreciated, and then we had our tea and Lebkuchen, which Ben greatly enjoyed.
“They’re, like, gingerbread cookies or something,” he said.
“Except not. They taste kind of … complicated. Spicy and complicated. I really like the ones with chocolate on them. Maybe we could buy these from someplace when we get home.”
“Not possible,” I said. “Not der echte Lebkuchen—real Lebkuchen. If you like, I could show you how to make them the next time you visit me, but you must have patience. They’re much better if you prepare your own candied citrus peel and your own spice mix, and few people want to do that now.
It’s all shortcuts, as they rush about.”
“Well, to be fair,” Alix said, “not everybody lives in a palace with a cook and a … scullery maid or whatever.”
“Or plays for the NFL,” Ben chimed in. “You wouldn’t believe how much takeout we order at home, or how many different things we get, things I never heard of.
I thought at first that Sebastian’s food was really weird, but I guess I’m getting used to it.
I still don’t want to eat things with shells, though.
Prawns are just gross. It’s like eating bugs, and there are their heads and legs and everything, right there. Gross.”
“Because Sebastian was working so hard, and so was I,” Alix said. “When I was working on the data center, I could barely manage to fix chili and beef stew for the week on my day off. Of course, I didn’t have a dishwasher.”
Sixty years ago, I might have been annoyed.
Today, I laughed. Everyone stared at me, and I waved a hand and laughed more before saying, “It’s possible you will gain a new perspective on hardship during our time here.
Although I will agree that you worked too much, Alix, for somebody not forced to it, and modern life does get more and more expensive, partly because the minimum requirements seem to grow every year.
I was so happy to have two rooms and a bathroom to share with only my husband, and even when we added your mother, I felt nothing but fortunate.
This modern mania for bathrooms is quite mad. ”
“It sounds,” Sebastian said, “like you’ve lived your way up and down the entire realm of possibilities.”
“Probably so,” I said, “although I’ve never begged in the street. Quite. But before we examine those possibilities further, I think I must have a rest.”
Alix jumped up fast, nearly upsetting the coffee table, and said, “Fine. I’m going to go walk around and look at things, if you guys want to come. And we really should make a plan for how we get your tiara back, Oma. We probably can’t just sneak into the cellars and go for it, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t imagine the German justice system would look kindly on that.”
“We could do a guided tour of the palace tomorrow,” Sebastian suggested. “Scope things out, ask innocent questions, figure out our next step. I already bought tickets to the … whatever it’s called. The treasure chamber.”
“The Grünes Gewolbe,” I said, with something that was either coronary palpitations or excitement fluttering in my chest. “The Green Vault. A guided tour sounds like an excellent first step. And you are not,” I told Alix, “to tell anyone that we are princesses. Firstly, because I’ll start to believe that you’re a snob, and you don’t want that. ”
Alix gasped. “A snob? Me? Excuse me? I was an electrician! In a hard hat and work boots! I own zero sets of engraved stationery. That would be my mother,” she explained to Sebastian and Ben.
“The coat of arms of the royal house of Saxony has a crown and a shield and not one but two lions, and she writes thank-you notes to her clients on that paper! It also says ‘From the desk of Her Royal Highness, Princess Elise Alexandrina von Sachsen,’ in case anybody missed the point. In gold. Absolute cringe-fest. ‘Helpful for my work,’ my foot. I’m not doing that, Oma, and you must know it.
I’m just trying to make sure people treat you right!
” She looked truly upset. Accusations are most upsetting, in my experience, when they are a tiny bit true.
“Obviously,” I said, “you’re not your mother. I apologize for the implication. But it will be better to be incognito for now. And now,” I said, rising from my chair with the kind of effort that reminds one of one’s age, “I must rest.”
“Dinner in your room?” Sebastian asked. “Or would you rather join us downstairs?”
“Oh,” I said, “downstairs. I suspect they offer Wienerschnitzel, and it’s asparagus season. How I hope Dresden still celebrates asparagus season. Lebkuchen and Wienerschnitzel on the same day, though, neither of which I have to prepare? Heaven.”
What is this tiara? I hear you wondering. A bit like the Holy Grail, and the search about as likely to be successful. And if we were facing uncomfortable truths, possibly merely an excuse to spend some time with my beloved granddaughter.
When one is very old, the currency of life changes.
Money and power and position matter not much at all, as long as one’s bread is not half sawdust, one’s shoes don’t have cardboard insoles, and one’s lodging is free of holes in the roof.
I certainly had no desire to go back to any of that, but aside from survival, the true currency of old age is time spent with loved ones.
Memories help, but making more memories is better.
“Spending time,” they call it, which is right, because time, even more than money, is precious, and never more so than when one senses it running out.
Although memory can be a double-edged sword, as painful as it is pleasurable.
I lay a stone’s throw from my childhood home, in a room named after my ancestor’s mistress, my swollen feet raised on two stacked pillows—like chin hairs, nobody warns you of these things—and tried to read.
Alix had bought me one of those electronic readers, which allowed me to increase the type size enough to allow reading by blinded moles and not to have to carry books around with me—I could barely carry myself around with me, these days—and I’d just purchased A Tale of Two Cities, after Ben’s reminder.
Ninety-nine cents! One shouldn’t gain so much satisfaction from buying a book for under a dollar, especially when lying on a feather bed with a chandelier overhead, and yet I did.
I tried to read, but before long, the device slipped from my hand and I fell into a doze.
Half dreaming, half conscious, the weight of the Dresden sandstone around me, the surreal shock of seeing elaborately embellished structures whole again, the knowledge that tomorrow, I would walk those floors again … the memories came unbidden.
I am six, my English nanny having brought me to my mother’s dressing room after nursery supper to say goodnight.
My mother, her eyes looking green tonight in the mirror, is sitting at her dressing table while her maid dresses her pale-blonde hair, the same shade as mine.
Or maybe it isn’t her eyes but the emeralds I remember, or perhaps both, her eyes picking up the green of the stones in the famous emerald parure.
Josephine’s parure, the set of jewels given to her by Napoleon, and eventually becoming the most precious heirloom of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, my mother’s house.
The parure will be mine, I know, when I marry, although I’m too young to imagine such an occurrence.
My mother’s beautiful hair is at last perfected, swept back from her face and coiled behind, and Fr?ulein Lippert, her maid, opens the velvet case with reverence, removes the tiara with two hands, and carefully, so carefully, settles it into place, wedging it ruthlessly into the hairdo with the help of its spiked combs.
My mother says, “Honestly, it’s too ridiculous, this discomfort.
How this heavy thing does pull at one’s hair.
I should just wear the necklace and earrings instead.
Surely that’s enough glamour for Mozart. ”
Lippert’s mouth pinches into its thinnest line. “You joke, Majesty,” she says reprovingly. “How disappointed the others would be to see you so simply dressed.”
“Simply dressed?” My mother laughs. “In all this?” She skims a hand over her silk gown, all slinky gold fabric and artful draping, then touches one of the emerald-and-diamond clusters on the necklace Lippert has just fastened, the one that looks like a daisy chain, the centers made of the most beautiful green stones and the petals of diamonds, with one enormous emerald hanging down from the center.
My favorite of all my mother’s jewels. Sometimes she lets me hold the necklace, but not tonight.
Lippert taps at her hand and says, “Don’t smudge the stones,” and my mother laughs again. “Honestly, Lippert,” she says, “you should be the Queen. You’d be much better at it than I am, and you’d take it more seriously, too.”
Lippert merely sniffs and fastens the matching diamond-and-emerald earrings, then stands back, examines the effect, picks up a powder puff, and dusts my mother’s cheeks and nose with perfect delicacy.
“I’m not beautiful enough to be Queen,” she says, and it’s true.
With her hooked nose and her black dresses, Lippert has always reminded me of a witch. “There. You’ll do.”