“Yes, that is my magic at work.”
When the weather is good, they always take a walk around the Prater, newly opened to the public by the emperor. Open carriages, like so many boxes of chocolates, carry Viennese bonbons—elegant women in wonderful hats—and next to them, gentlemen on horseback who bow to their acquaintances as they pass. Those on foot go as slowly as they can, in order to relish their surroundings. There are dogs on leads, monkeys in chains, much-loved parrots in silver-plated cages. Jacob has ordered his daughter a special little English carriage, just for these walks. Magda and Anusia accompany Eva in this sweet little vehicle most often, sometimes only Magda. There is a rumor that she is also Jacob’s daughter, but illegitimate. When you look at her closely, she really does look like Jacob—she is tall, with an oval face, white teeth, more distinguished than Eva even, so that those who do not know them sometimes take Magda for Eva Frank herself. People also say that they all look alike, like members of those blackamoor tribes the emperor sometimes shows as living freaks and monsters.
A machine that plays chess
A certain de Kempelen created for his amusement a machine depicting a Turk in an elegant Eastern costume, with a dark face, shiny and polished, and quite friendly-looking. This machine sits at the table and plays chess, so well that so far no one has beaten it. It would seem that during the match it thinks and gives its opponents time to consider their next move. It rests its right hand on the table and moves the pieces with its left. If the other player makes a mistake and breaks a rule, then the machine shakes its head and waits until its opponent recognizes and corrects his mistake. The machine does all of this on its own, having no external power attached to it.
The emperor has gone mad for this machine. He has lost to it repeatedly, but apparently some people in France have defeated it. Can that be possible?
“If a machine is capable of doing what man can do, and even doing it better than man, then what is man?”
He asks this question over tea, sitting with the ladies in the garden. None dares to answer. They wait for him to say something. He has a tendency to speak at length, and often asks rhetorical questions that he himself answers a moment later. Now, too, talking of life, that it is an entirely natural and chemical process, even though it was initiated by a higher power—he doesn’t end this sentence with a period, rather just suspends it, so that it hangs in the air like pipe smoke. Only when he issues orders do his sentences end with periods, and this brings everyone relief: at least then they know what’s going on. At the very thought of saying something in such company, Eva flushes and has to cool herself down with her fan.
The emperor is still interested in the latest achievements in the field of anatomy. To keep “Sibylla” company, he has purchased a wax model of a human body without skin, the circulatory system marked; when you look at it, you see that the human body, too, resembles a machine—all those tendons and muscles, the coils of veins and arteries, which look like the skeins of embroidery floss used by his mother, the joints that look like levers. He shows Eva Frank his acquisition with great pride—it is once more the body of a woman, this time with her skin removed, the threads of her veins wound through her muscles.
“Could not all that be shown upon a man?” asks Eva.
The emperor laughs. They lean in together over the wax body, their heads almost touching. Eva gets a distinct whiff of his breath—like apples, no doubt from wine. The emperor’s bright, smooth face suddenly turns red.
“Maybe people do look like that without their skin, but I do not,” Eva says freely, provoking him.
The emperor bursts out laughing once again.
One day, he gifts Eva a mechanical bird in a cage. When it is wound up, it flutters its tin wings and releases a chirp from somewhere inside its throat. Eva brings it back to Brünn, and the little bird in the cage becomes the main attraction throughout the court. Eva winds it up herself, always with the greatest solemnity.
The custom they have is that when the emperor wishes to see the lovely Eva, he sends a modest coach for her, without any coats of arms or decorations, in order not to call attention to her visits. Eva, however, would prefer to travel to him in the imperial carriage. Once it came for her and her father, when she was staying in that large apartment with him on the Graben. For the emperor’s mother has taken a liking to Jacob Frank and permits him to come into her private rooms, where she spends a considerable amount of time with him. Apparently they sometimes even pray together. The truth, however, is that the empress likes hearing the stories of this exotic, pleasant man with his Eastern manners, a person without anger or any type of impetuousness. Jacob confesses to her in great secrecy how they were baptized in Poland, having been for years now in the true faith. And he tells her of Kossakowska, with whom the empress in fact has quite a bit in common, tells her of how that good woman helped them come into the bosom of the Church and took such wonderful care of Jacob’s wife, may she rest in peace . . . This is to the empress’s liking, and she inquires further after Kossakowska. They also often talk about very serious subjects. The empress, for instance, ever since ending up with all of Galicia and Podolia after the partition of Poland, dreams of a vast empire down to the Black Sea, including the Greek islands. Frank knows more of the Turkish lands than her best ministers, and so she asks him for all the details of everything: of sweets, of food, clothing, whether the women wear undergarments and if so what kind, how many children there are per family on average, what life is like in the harem, and whether the women aren’t jealous of one another, whether the Turkish bazaar isn’t closed for Christmas, what the Turks think of the inhabitants of Europe, whether the climate in Stamboul is better than Vienna’s, and why they favor cats over dogs. She pours him coffee herself from the little jug and convinces him to add milk to it—such is the latest trend.