[52] A dream sleep has fallen over the city

That’s the first thing I know about Paul that he doesn’t have to tell me – he has an older sister. When I wrap myself in her cape and step outside, she and her husband have galloped off. Five hundred metres down a path through woods bumpy with hoof prints, I see the gates of a hunting lodge – a castle, except it’s in a valley, but the stone is the same, the surrounding flint wall the same. I learn later that Paul could have just knocked, and Charlotte would have put us up for the night, or a year. And, he’s welcome to half her money – the inheritance – though Paul’s never taken any of it. It’s a point of honour that he breaks in when he visits, that he kicks down a door like last night, or shatters a basement window. Even when he’s expected. A point of honour? No, I’m beginning even then to learn how he thinks. It’s a running joke between them. They’re always playing running jokes on each other. It’s also a way to torment her husband, Count Freddie, which they both love to do.

With the river and the forest and the entrapping hills all around, it’s always a dark and misty place. It’s always just raining at Schloss Freddie. Inside the gates I see a half-dozen minions with faces like potatoes stitched together and heads shaved with an axe three days ago, chewing their words until they dribble out. When they see us, they cross themselves in unison. A cart pulls up with two shot wild boars lashed side by side, his and hers. A tottering raven blocks our path, another soars up to a battlement and starts to laugh.

We walk through an oak side door into a box room, and Paul leads me – he knows every corner – up a flight of stone steps to a vaulted alley dark with guttered torches. The ground storey is mostly empty. In the ballroom is a fencing piste down the centre and stacked ranks of barbells, Indian clubs, medicine balls, on the walls either side of the burning hearth. They quarter themselves upstairs, in the rooms beyond the minstrel’s balcony, one wing his, the other hers.

Paul points to the wall above the hearth: ‘Don’t worry about that.’

Mounted on the wall is the Iron Ring. Do I need to tell you? Of course I know it – if you’re a Jew, you keep watch. You don’t admit you do, but we all do. This one’s a closed circle with another circle outside it, broken in four places and with a cross joining the four pieces. It’s the insignia for the Iron Brotherhood – in other words, Jew Haters of Budapest. There are a dozen societies like it in the empire, but this is the big one across the river, the one with the old money behind it. The lumpenprols, the howling shopkeepers, the parkbench mutterers, they have their own groups with their own leaders and newspapers and reading circles. This one is for the outer gentry, the ones who already have the powers. They don’t demonstrate, which is the worst news – if they did, you’d know where they are and what they’re doing and saying about you next. I remember this one from Budapest the winter before but I’ve never seen it in the Dream City.

Paul points me towards a door at one end. ‘And I go this way,’ he says, and goes through the opposite.

I climb stiff-legged four flights of stairs. I’m dribbling blood again. Do I have hypertension? He worried about it hurting, but it didn’t. I bled, but it didn’t hurt much. It was just too new to be anything but new. No other word for it but that – new. The first time was going to have to be like something, so all right, it was like this, and nice at the end, oh yes. I think I surprised him how soon it was nice. I’ve already forgotten what it felt like, and I wonder, Why is that what I do?, and I’m already yearning for him to help me remember. I feel foolish in this summer frock. A tribe of maidservants are pacing the halls in a white-piped grey smocks – lady wrestlers, most of them, and I can smell the hay in their hair. One of them points me at a door. On the other side of it, a hot bath is running. When I hang my dress on a chair and climb in, Charlotte appears through the opposite door. Two maidservants come in after and begin to scrub me with coarse red sponges.

She’s wearing a long loose dress of no style, some thin chartreuse material I don’t recognize. She’s Paul in a dress – the same long jaw and raven hair – with a loose chignon, knife slash of a mouth, eyes that are both dark and bright, steely and warm. Paul’s eyes.

‘Ha. Found love last night, did you?’ she says. ‘You’ve got the look he likes.’ She lifts my dress from the chair and stares at it front and back. ‘Emilie’s boutique – she doesn’t work on me, too bad. I’m just too dark. It will be clean and pressed before you go. Can’t go home to mommy with the tide going out like that. I can’t do much for your shoes. What did he have you walking through?’

She barks something in Hungarian. The two maids unpin my hair and loosen it with their fingers, and begin pouring water with a ewer.

‘Is Paul Hungarian?’

‘Us? No – ’ That predator goddess laugh. ‘We’re Sudeten Czechs. But I know enough Hungarian to run this place, and the others. No one actually speaks Hungarian in this world. A couple of peasants, maybe. And Count Freddie, but he doesn’t have any choice if he wants to lord it. How old are you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘That young?’ She pinches my bicep lightly and studies the gap between finger and thumb. ‘Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul …’ she sighs. ‘Ha.’

Now she’s sitting on the tub’s edge, daring me to be embarrassed, as if I haven’t been naked in front of a hundred women before this. So I brush the bath bubbles from my surfacing breasts and stare back.

‘Nice, you,’ she says. ‘It’s the hair that got him first, I’m sure. Your own? It’s warning time. Do you know what Paul is really attracted to in women? What really turns him on? What he loves in women more than anything else? Variety, Emma. A slim-hipped Ninth Quarter princess isn’t new for him. Daddy’s got money, mom’s a harpy, everything proper at home – I mean, looks proper. He likes them a little bruised. I’ve never seen him bruise one himself. No, around Paul women do that to themselves. He’s got a conscience, you see. This much of one. Just enough to spoil him for real cruelty. He’ll never be king of the world with a conscience like that. So when did you meet him?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘There is no original sin, whatever Paul would tell you,’ she says. ‘There’s only the sins people invent in the moment. Self-will like Paul’s and mine isn’t the same thing as depravity. Believe me, if you ever see depravity, the real thing, you’ll know it without having to be told, and he isn’t capable. Listen, beanpole, if you don’t know how to wash yourself out I’d better show you. Properly, you should do it right away, but Paul wouldn’t have told you how. If you don’t want any little fledglings next spring, you’d better get in the habit. The bidet’s best.’

‘I don’t have to do that.’

‘Yes you certainly will.’

‘No I don’t.’ I rub my forehead. ‘The maturing follicle prompts the release of higher amounts of estrogen. The hypothalamus responds by secreting gonadotrophin, which makes the pituitary produce luteinizing hormone. High levels of LH trigger ovulation within –’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m saying its all right till Thursday, then next week we’d better not, then it’s all right again for a week, then for a week he won’t want to.’

I wait for her face to move.

‘O-kay,’ she says. ‘A Flöge dress, so you must be one of Gustav’s models. Paul usually just talks them out of a coffeehouse, or they’re sisters of his friends. If you’re none of them, how did you end up in our forester’s hut?’

I tell her.

‘Paul can never think of a reason not to do something,’ she says. ‘He’s like me that way, okay. Right, so, drag a fresh one into the woods and show her what she didn’t know she wanted, and he was right, wasn’t he? Some men actually are, about us wanting that. Who knows who told them? They just aren’t very good at giving it to us.’ Laugh, one. ‘Very good, beanpole. You’d better know how to run, that’s all. Towards him, away, that’s your choice. But one or the other. Around him, it’s things that stand still that get run over. There’s a robe. Come.’