Recently, when I opened one of Kilkc's [''.logics, I read: "Dedicated to the Princess I Thurn-und-Taxis."1 Thurn-und-Taxis? Something is familiar! Only this much: Tur. Oh, I know: the Tower of ivy.

* * * * *

"Russenkinder, ihr habt Besuch! Russian children, you have a visitor!" It was Maria the stove-tender, who had come dashing into the empty classroom where we, my sister Asya and I, the only boarders still there at the school,2 were impassively turning the pages of our readers and waiting for tomorrow, for an Easter Day that held no promise. "A man," Maria continued. "What kind of man?"-"Ordinary. A regular man."-"Young or old?"-"But I've told you already: ordinary. Not young and not old, just right. Hurry along. Only Fraulein Assia,3 brush your hair back off your forehead, otherwise your eyes are covered up, just like the kind of dog they use to catch rats."

The "Green Room," the very private room, the head mistresses' room, and also the room for receiving guests. Rising from a green chair to greet us is someone we know, someone hard to recognize; he was always in shirt sleeves, but now he's wearing a stiff collar; he always carried a beer tray, but now he has a hat and a walking stick; he looks so untamed in the company of the headmistress, against the background of those green curtains—it's the proprietor of the "Angel," the Engehwirth, the man who owns our wonderful country inn, the father of our summertime friends, Carl and Marilee.4
"Herr Meyer is kind enough to invite you to visit him tomorrow, to see his family, for the whole day. He will drive by for you at six thirty a.m. and return you here at the same hour in the evening. If the weather is favorable. My permission has already been given. Say 'Thank you' to Herr Meyer."
Rooted to the spot from happiness and from the sacredness of the place, we say shyly—I for some reason in a bass voice, Asya in a treble chirp—"Thank you." A silence. Herr Meyer, no less suppressed by the holiness of the place than we are and pressed, perhaps, by the vise of the unaccustomed collar, looks at his feet, which really are hard to recognize in their new shoes. For some reason, I have the notion that he wants very very much to wink at us on the sly. No one sits down. As we are leaving Asya at least gets the inspiration and the courage to inquire whether Carl has gotten bigger and how high he comes up on his father.

* * * * *

The empty dormitory. Maria has just turned down the lamp. Tomorrow! Under my eyelids I see, first the steeply rising road, then, around a certain bend, more known than seen, grown into its two-sided frame of willows, the beloved Bauerbach, cold, Undinian,5 part stream, part cascade, which they always forbade us to set foot into because of its icy water and in which, head-to-foot, and in our clothes, we once... And then comes the roadside chapel with the cross at the turn-off, and then we go left off the road, and then—now it's close as can be!—coming out from behind the foliage of plum and apple trees, I see first the gasthaus6 and then the actual Angel, a chubby angel with wings, a very old angel so they say, but one who looks as young as can be, so much younger than we are! just three years old, the beloved, rotund angel above the door to the house out of which Frau Birtin is coming to greet us, and most important of all—Marilee and Carl, Marilee destined mainly for me, Carl for Asya.

Tomorrow! At six thirty a.m. If the weather is good.

* * * * *

My first glance goes to the window. Actually, two first glances—to the window and the clock. All is well: bright sky and five o'clock. I button Asya into all six back buttons of her bodice. Hm what should we do about clothes? We can't go in everyday dresses-it's Easter, but in a holiday dress we can't go up in the trees or under the trees. "When I get there, I'll change into an old dress of Marilee's!"-"And what'll I do? (Asya says, slighted.) On me Marilee's dress will touch the floor!"—"Well, you 11 change into Carl's trousers! (And seeing that she's already in tears.) Well then, you'll put on Marilee's smock. It will reach right to your knees. And we'll roll up the sleeves!"
The bell for breakfast—for us alone. The Headmistresses are asleep. We eat breakfast alone with Maria. The breakfast is, as always, coffee made from oats without sugar (which the whole boarding school as a body, "voluntarily" and for good, on the • lay of its foundation, apparently, renounced for the sake of "poor children") and bread without butter, but spread in recompense with a red nauseating vegetable glue which is eaten without disgust and, when possible, for everyone (i.e., by licking everyone's off), only by the eternally hungry, unhappy, omnivorous, exceptionally gluttonous Brazilian girl, Anita Yautz. "Oh, Fraulein Assia, you've gummed up the whole oil cloth again! Let me eat up the rest for you, because you've only got fifteen minutes left."

* * * * *

Six-thirty. A quarter to seven. Seven. The weather is not glorious, the weather, when you really look at it, is mediocre: the whole sky is covered with clouds, but at least there's no rain. Not yet. Seven-thirty. He's been delayed, of course, at the market and he'll be here this minute, this very minute. Why Herr Meyer, a grown man, really can't consider those few drops rain! The drops increase; at first come trickles, then streams. At eight o'clock the younger headmistress appears, Fraulein Henny. "Children, be ready for church in half an hour. Herr Meyer, of course, won't come now."
At eight-fifteen a special bell rings for washing overshoes. It rings for us alone.

* * * * *

What is the preacher talking about? Asya, the youngest one in the whole school, the one who always falls asleep from the sermon, now, for the first time, isn't sleeping. She isn't sleeping, she is quietly and profusely crying. But even worse than "he didn't come," is another thought: but what if he did come all of a sudden? And, not finding us, went away? Today, after all, is Easter Sunday and the whole town is going up to the "Angel," and Herr Meyer is carrying produce, he can't wait.

On the way back Fraulein Henny says to me: "And why aren't you saying anything, Rwsenkind? Assia, for example, is crying. Didn't you want to go see your friends, up on the hill?"—"Oh I knew it all the time, I always know. It would have been just too wonderful!" And suddenly I break out into, instead of tears, the famous couplet:

Behut Dich Gott, es war zu schon gewesen!
Behut Dich Gott, es hat nicht sollen sein!

(God protect you, it would have been too wonderful! God protect you, it was not destined to be!) "I am glad of your love for poetry, Marina, but it's too early for you to know Scheffel."7-"I didn't read it, Mama is always singing it."

* * * * *

After the usual Sunday lunch—"the red animal," as we, not knowing the name, called it—and stewed rhubarb, we wash our hands in the empty dormitory at the ring of a special bell, a bell they ring for us alone. And the sky, now that it has washed out its tears, is marvelous! All out of breath Maria comes and says: "Russenkinder, Fraulein wants you to hurry up and get dressed in your very best."—"We're in our best now."—"You don't have lace collars?"-"No." Maria beams: "I do. And I'll lend them to you because... it's not nice for me here either!" She runs and returns with two collars: huge point-lace capelets with curlicues that fall down below the belt, exactly like a gigantic starfish, in the center of which my head is supposed to emerge—a point-lace star for me and a hand-knitted one for Asya. On me, mine reaches my stomach; Asya's reaches her knees. "Now you are as lovely as little angels!" (Oh, the "Angel," the "Angel"!)

... An excursion. An excursion alone with Fr. Henny to the same old Schlossberg—and in Sunday dresses, too, in dresses that go nowhere and do nothing... one whole Fr. Henny for only the two of us...
Getting into our jackets—I get into one that pushes me out everywhere, Asya into an excessively capacious one that seems to go its way in life separately from her—and adopting the pace of joyless children and shades, we go downstairs.
A carriage, a landau in fact, in all the depth of that word and all the gleam of that object. A deeply lacquered landau, drawn by two chocolate horses that glow the same way. Deep within sit both Frauleins wearing something black, beaded with bugles, impenetrable, triumphantly-funereal, both wearing black hats with purple nosegays and holding lily-of-the-valley nosegays in their hands. "(icM ill, cliildirn1 " Shyly I put one loot on (lie step ii|> "Since you're older, Marina, sit down opposite me, and you, Assia, since you're younger, sit opposite Fr. Henny." (Which is better: the crab-like, froggy, huge, unblinking eyes of Fr. Paula, or the lapdog eyes, peeping out through lap-dogian shags, the incessantly blinking reddish-blue eyes of Fr. Henny?) The landau, in perfect silence, floats away.

* * * * *

At first come the old houses, then the happy houses that look out into fields, fields of happiness... Then spruce hills that rise up at a distance and move in close up... The hills of the Schwartz wald...

Where are we going? But what if (mad dream), but what if— we're going there, to the "Angel"? But it's the wrong road; that road is uphill, this one is level. And it's the wrong set of gates; those have St. George and these have St. Martin... But if we're not going there—where are we going? Maybe, nowhere? Just an excursion?

"Why is it you don't ask, Russenkinder, where we are going and where these horses come from?"—"You mustn't question grown-ups (Asya)."-"It's better, for sure, not to know (I)."— "Good manners are admirable (to Asya). Idle thoughts are dangerous! (to me). We are going to..." and suddenly a chord of sounds strikes my ear: Tur-und-Taxis. And the lightningbolt vision of a tower of ivy. At this moment, now that I stop to reflect on it for the first time, I understand: Thurn, which I took for Thur, gave the French tour (a tower), and Taxis, by its sound similarity with the botanical Taxus, the exact meaning of which I didn't know at the time (yew tree, yew) gave ivy.

Tur-und-Taxis. A tower of Ivy.

* * * * *

There was no tower at all. There was a white house with dark window eyes, dark, as they always are during the day, deep, nocturnal eyes that so much resembled the ones turned on us by the young woman who rose from the terrace and descended on us in a brown cloud—all chestnut brown, all dark brown, as dark brown-eyed as the dog that accompanied her, and with hair in the same chestnut brown bangs, a woman with no resemblance to any other.

"I am sincerely grateful that you brought the children with you. Alone in school, at Easter? Poor creatures! What are their names? Marina? Azia? What beautiful names, just like Italian. Russenkinder you say? But the older one, for. someone her age, is a Riesenkind too (a giant child).

The woman has a marvelous voice, which takes hold of your heart, which sings, and which is also the same chestnut brown. ("Yesterday I was listening to a 'cello and it sounded exactly like your brown eyes." Thus wrote Goethe's aged mother to the young Bettina.) "Are you glad, Azia, that you came?"—"Yes, Hebe Fran. (Sweet lady, a phrase that also designates the Virgin.)"-"You mustn't say 'Hebe Frau,'you must say 'Frau Furstin'(princess)," Fraulein Paula interposes. "Can you really correct children, and such a little child too! (And, suddenly remembering.) Of course, my dear Azia and Marina, you should always obey Fraulein Paula, but today we will all, Marina, and Azia, and I..."—"And Tiras," Asya puts in. "Oh of course, Tiras too, we will all ask her to be lenient toward the little freedoms we take and our little faults, because Tiras and I, no less than you children, do make mistakes. Isn't that so, Tiras?"

Tiras. A setter, chocolate-colored, not red; smooth-haired, not shaggy; if he is a setter, not an Irish setter. His eyes, when you inspect them more closely, are greenish, but their glance is the same as his owner's. Embarrassed by the newness of the place and the grown-ups' concentration on us, we pet the dog timidly, for now, with seeming indifference, for we know that in our own time, when the adults get involved in talking, we'll make up for it.
The afternoon tea was indescribable. To paint it in all its colors, you would have to paint a picture of our whole previous, six-month-long hunger in the boarding school, and, what is perhaps worse for children than hunger, the whole indescribable boredom of that Spartan menu: farina soup, lentils, rhubarb; pea soup, potatoes, rhubarb. Rhubarb, rhubarb without variation. Because, of course, it was growing in the garden, and the rhubarb was cooked without sugar. Yes, and fierce had to be the hunger and bitter the boredom to make two little girls, who are not the least greedy and even less bloodthirsty, dream for hours at a time about someday catching with their hands and grilling on the lamp the tender, magical, blue-dappled trout, "Henny-trout," which wail gliding in iln- j'.inlfii Ixook ;in\C ilini heads Asya, who al lirsl Iranol on her feet, is now st:m straight—at the white house in I lie dark fur of evergreen needles, and we pick up the last "barkings" of Tiras, who, instead of getting the ride he expected, is being taken by his mistress into the house and with whom we would so eagerly make an exchange—and not only of place! Within, deeper than the ear, caught, preserved, prolonged by the inner ear, is the inexpressible voice: "Gott behut Euch, Hebe Fremdenkinder! (God protect you, sweet children from a foreign land!)

A week later, when the white house had already receded finally into the evergreen, the spruce trees had finally closed and shut, the voice had finally disappeared into the depths, Fr. Paula in the very same green room handed Asya and me each a package. In the one marked Marina, was the book Heidi and a second book Was loird aus ihr werden (What Will She Be?) with Dir (you) written in a beautiful slanting hand above the "ihr," and after "werden "—Hebe Marina? (What will you be, sweet Marina?) In the package marked Azia was a box with blocks, from which you could make not only an elevator, but a whole New York, the New York where her marriage to Edison would be celebrated.

* * * * *

Rilke's Duino Elegies. Tur-und-Taxis. The Tower of Ivy.
-1933

1. The Austrian-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) met the Princess Thurn and Taxis in Paris in 1909 through his friend, the philosopher Rudolf Kassner. He remained on terms of friendship with her from then until the end of his life. In 1910 the Princess invited him to stay at the ancient residence of the Taxis family, the Chateau of Duino in Dalmatia on the Adriatic. The first two elegies were written at Duino in May 1912; parts of the third, sixth, and tenth elegies also date from this time.

2. In the school year of 1904-05 Asya and Marina were boarding students at a school in Freiburg, Germany.

3. The various spellings in this prose work of Anastasia Tsvetaeva's familiar name, Asya, reflect the difficulty Maria and, later, the Princess have in pronouncing it.

4. During the summer of 1904, between their year at a French pension in Lausanne and the Freiburg school, Marina and Asya lived with a German family.

5. An adjective formed from the name Undine, hence, "Undinian," means, "related to the water sprite Undine." Undine is the title of a pseudo-folk tale in verse written by the Baron Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque (1777-1843), a German novelist, and published in 1911. Undine falls in love,with a mortal man but their union ends unhappily.

6. German. "Country Inn."

7. Joseph Victor von Scheffel (1826-1886)-a minor poet.

8. Professor Tsvetaev was director of the Rumiantsev Museum until early in 1909. At that point the theft of some engravings from the museum was discovered. Although Professor Tsvetaev was able to name the guard who had removed the engravings and to recover most of them, the matter reached the office of one Alexander Nikolae-vich Schwartz, minister of culture at that time. Schwartz attempted several times to disiinlil I'lnli-ssiii r.vi-l.irv. hi', ii'|iuil>, war nol .irrrpliul hy tin.: Small1 as w:n ranting dismissal ol' Ihc iluri lui Nnnrllirlrss llu' duties nl Hie directorship were placed in another person's (lands late in I hi' suminer ol 1910. In (he spring of that year, Marina's and Asya's friend Kllis (sec Note 85 to "Voloshin") had cut some pages from a book in the Rumiantsev Museum reading room. It is not clear what, if any, connection this second incident had with the removal of the directorship from Professor Tsvetaev.

9. The Russians were defeated by the Japanese in 1905. The outcome of the Russo-Japanese war proved symptomatic of the extreme weakness of the Tsarist government.

10. Johanna Spyri's Heidi was first published in 1880-81.