A Song for Summer
But FitzAllan was adamant. ‘Time spent in research is never wasted,’ he said, waving a slender hand.
From the uproar of Abattoir, Ellen escaped sometimes to Lieselotte’s house on an alp above the village, where Lieselotte’s family always welcomed her with open arms: Frau Becker was teaching her to make Mandelschnitten and Zaunerstollen and Lieselotte’s brothers and sisters never tired of hearing stories about the school. Knowing how much Bennet wanted the villagers to be involved, Ellen had hoped that the Beckers would be able to come to Abattoir but it turned out that the play was due to open on the name day of Aniella.
‘Of course I’m very sorry,’ said Lieselotte with a mischievous smile. ‘We would very much have liked to come, but it’s a special day for us, you’ll understand.’
‘Of course. What happens on Aniella’s name day?’
‘Oh, we carry her picture round the church and sing some hymns. Her relics too. She has very nice relics: not toe bones or finger nails but a piece of veiling from her wedding dress, and a circlet of pearls. I don’t think it’s enough, but you know how people are: so lazy.’
It was when she was coming down the mountain after one such visit that Ellen met Sophie and Ursula running towards her.
‘Guess what, Ellen – Chomsky’s had a nervous breakdown! A proper one!’ said Sophie, her eyes wide and alarmed.
‘An ambulance came and took him away. He’s gone to a nursing home in Klagenfurt. I expect they’ll put him in a straitjacket.’ Ursula was gleeful.
‘It was the scaffolding. FitzAllan yelled at him and he began to sob and wave his arms about and then he sort of dropped on the floor and shrieked.’
‘Oh poor Chomsky!’ Ellen was devastated.
‘And Bennet wants to see you,’ said Sophie. ‘He said to come as soon as you got in.’
‘This is a bad business, Ellen,’ said the headmaster. He looked tired and strained, and the letter from his stockbroker lying on his desk seemed to be very long. ‘I knew that Chomsky was highly strung; I should have been more careful.’
Ellen was indignant. ‘How could you have been? How could anyone foresee what would happen?’
‘Perhaps not. But the trouble is that Chomsky comes from a very wealthy and distinguished family – his father is a high-ranking diplomat who’s served in the Hungarian government; he has connections everywhere. Our Chomsky is the youngest of five brothers who are all powerful men. Laszlo wasn’t quite up to those sort of pressures, which was why they sent him here. As a kind of refuge.’
‘I see.’ Marek’s words came back to Ellen: ‘His appendix was taken out in the most expensive clinic in Budapest.’
‘I don’t think they’ll make trouble . . . sue us or anything like that. But if they did . . .’ Bennet was silent for a moment, foreseeing yet another form of ruin for his beloved school. Then he came to the point. ‘Chomsky asked for you when they took him away in the ambulance. He wanted you to bring some of his clothes and belongings, but mostly he just wanted to see you. I gather his mother and some other relatives are coming from Budapest to visit him in hospital. If you could go there, Ellen, and make contact – I think if anyone can turn away their wrath, it’s you.’
But when, two days later, Ellen knocked on the door of Room 15 in the Sommerfeld Clinic for Nervous Conditions, she saw at once that there was no wrath to turn away.
The clinic was light, sunny and opulently furnished, with deep pile carpets and reproductions of modern art. Chomsky’s room faced a courtyard with a Lebanon cedar and a fountain, and resembled a suite in an expensive hotel rather than a hospital.
But it was the gathered Chomskys, seeming to Ellen to be ranked tier upon tier like cherubim round Laszlo’s bed, that gave the metalwork teacher the look of a potentate holding court. Beside his locker a woman in a superb embroidered jacket and silk shirt was arranging fruit in a crystal bowl: peaches and nectarines, figs and almonds and bunches of blue-black grapes. Her resemblance to her son was marked: the same fervent dark eyes, the same eager movements. Two handsome men, also unmistakable Chomskys, stood by the window: one was smoking a cigar, the other was just opening a bottle of champagne. A grey-haired woman, wearing a silver fox stole in spite of the heat, sat on a chair at the foot of the bed, her fingers clasped round an ebony cane.
‘Ellen!’ cried the invalid, sitting up in bed in yellow shantung pyjamas with his initials on the pocket. ‘You have come!’ His happy shout cut short the Hungarian babble. Madame Chomsky advanced towards Ellen and threw out her arms. Laszlo’s brother Farkas and cousin Pali were introduced, as was his great aunt Eugenie who had been taking the waters at Baden when she received news of the accident.
‘We’ve heard so much about you!’ said Madame Chomsky in German, while cousin Pali, in English, offered champagne and brother Farkas took the suitcase Ellen had brought and found another chair.
Within minutes Ellen found herself in a huddle of approving Chomskys: Chomskys thanking her for her kindness to their Laszlo, Chomskys hoping that the suitcase had not been too heavy, Chomskys offering her a holiday in their villa on Lake Balaton, their mansion in Buda, their apartment in the Champs Elysées. Far from blaming anybody at the school for his accident, they seemed to feel only gratitude to Bennet for having found work for the baby of the family, whom they loved dearly but who had not shown himself to be quite in the ambitious, thrusting mode of his older siblings.
‘Is she not like little Katya?’ Chomsky wanted to know – and was reproved by his mother, who said that Ellen was much prettier than his nursemaid and how could he say such a thing?
An hour later, Ellen had still not been able to take her leave. She had the feeling that the Chomskys would have given her everything they possessed, including their youngest son in marriage. Every time she tried to go she was promised another treat – a new cousin arriving shortly from Transylvania, a slice of the special salami which Madame Chomsky had brought from Budapest because the Austrians could not be trusted where salamis were concerned; the ratio of donkeys to horses in the meat was never satisfactory west of the Hungarian border.
At six o’clock the nurse returned with the empty suitcase for Ellen to take back.
‘We won’t need the passport or the birth certificate,’ she said. ‘I’ve put them in the inside pocket; they don’t like valuable documents lying round in the clinic.’
‘But you must have dinner with us!’ cried Farkas, as Ellen got to her feet. ‘The food is not at all bad at the Imperial.’
Since the Imperial was a sensationally expensive hotel with its own park beside the lake, Ellen said she was sure this was so, but she had to get back to her children.
‘Next time, then!’ cried the Chomskys, kissing her fervently on both cheeks, and Madame Chomsky followed Ellen in the corridor to give her a last bulletin about her youngest son.
‘It may be necessary to take him away to some spa to make a full recovery,’ she said. ‘But I think he just needs to rest quietly till this dreadful play is over. Please tell Mr Bennet he can be sure that Laszlo will not desert him; he will return.’
Ellen smiled, detecting behind the effusive warmth of Chomsky’s mother, a flicker of anxiety lest her Laszlo might be returned permanently to the fold, and promised that she would set the headmaster’s mind at rest.
‘I have put a few little things in, also, for the children,’ said Madame Chomsky as Ellen picked up the case, which certainly seemed to contain more than a passport and a few documents. ‘You will not be offended?’
Ellen shook her head, kissed everybody yet again and was escorted to the bus station by Farkas, still complaining because she would not dine with them.
She had missed the bus which would have taken her past the castle and was compelled to walk from the village. On an impulse she decided to walk along the eastern shore of the lake, along the road which led her past Professor Steiner’s house.
It was a foolish impulse, delaying her by nearly half an hour and pointlessly, for no light showed in the windows; the van wa
s nowhere to be seen. It was time to face the fact that they had gone for good; that there would be no chance now to put things right between herself and Marek.
All the same, she paused for a moment by the path that led to the house – and as she did so she saw someone moving in the bushes. A man, furtive and silent in the dark. Not Marek – this man was smaller, and who could imagine Marek looking furtive?
She hesitated, then began to walk down the path.
‘Is there anyone there?’ she called. If it was a burglar maybe her voice would scare him off.
The man had vanished. Stupidly fearless, as she later realised, she made her way towards the door.
Then a hand come round behind her and she was pulled backwards on to the grass.
It began like all the other journeys they had made. Marek drove the van to the checkpoint and the guards examined their papers only perfunctorily.
‘Got any good tunes?’ Anton joked, and they played him a bit of the old lady singing ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ and he waved them through.
After twenty kilometres they turned north west towards the German border and presently Marek left the van and Steiner drove down a rutted lane and parked in a clearing. There was no hope of recording anything here; they had been here too often. He could only wait and pray while Marek plunged into the densest part of the forest to meet his contact and – if their luck held – the man for whom they had searched so long. And the waiting today was going to be harder than ever. The news that Meierwitz had broken cover and was on his way at last had come with another piece of news that they had been half expecting. The line of rescuers was breaking up: one man had been arrested and shot; the Sudeten Nazis had joined the Germans in patrolling the no man’s land between the borders.
But when Marek had reached the meeting place, the man they knew only as Johann was there – and with him someone whom at first he did not recognise. Meierwitz had been a portly person, fond of his food, with an engaging tuft of reddish hair and bright black eyes. This man was thin and hunched and he shivered in the summer night.
Afraid to shine his torch or speak, Marek only put out his hand – but Isaac knew in an instant.
‘You!’ he whispered incredulously. ‘My God, Marek – you!’
He managed to hold his emotion in check as they made their way towards the van but then, wrapped in a blanket, given coffee from a Thermos, the tears he had managed to control through his years of flight and danger and imprisonment could be held back no longer.
‘You,’ was all that he could say, over and over again. ‘My God, Marek – you.’
Then Steiner came out of the driving seat and embraced his former colleague, and for Isaac there was another shock as he saw that this eminent and venerable scholar had involved himself in his rescue.
They set off then; Steiner drove and Marek sat in the back with his friend. There were several hours of relative safety before the next hazard, the crossing of the border into Poland. Marek took care to make light of his search, his obsessive determination to set Meierwitz free, but Isaac guessed, and it was a while before he could speak calmly of what had happened in Berlin after the Nazis came to power.
‘I was determined to play your concerto, and I told them so; I suppose I threw my weight about a bit; there was so much fear everywhere I didn’t want to add to it, and I was damned if I was going to leave the country till I’d played your piece. Even so I was surprised when they agreed. It was a trick, of course; it was quite a shock to them when they turned round and found there was hardly a decent musician left in the country. Then when they were sure of you, they came to arrest me.’
He’d spent nearly a year in the concentration camp and then been transferred and managed to escape. ‘A woman I’d never set eyes on hid me on her farm. She wasn’t Jewish, she wasn’t musical . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It’s knowing you’re endangering people that drives you mad.’
He wanted to know about the concerto. ‘Who gave the premiere?’
‘No one. You’re giving the premiere and that’s the end of the matter.’
‘No, Marek. Don’t be obstinate. I shan’t play again professionally. It’s been more than two years; that’s too long to get my technique back, and in the camp my hands . . .’ He broke off, biting his lip. ‘You must get someone else.’
‘Well I won’t, so let’s hear no more about it. What happened to your Stradivarius?’
‘I left it with my landlady in Berlin. Do you remember her – the one that went off into a faint whenever there was a thunderstorm?’
They spoke then of the unimportant things they remembered: the duck they had found wandering down the Kurfürstendamm and adopted; a girl called Millie who had stood on her head on the table at the Lord Mayor’s banquet; the trombone player who’d got his girlfriend’s shoe button stuck up his nostril before the first night of Tristan.
‘And you’re not married yet?’ Isaac asked.
‘No.’
‘Your standards are probably too high,’ said Isaac, ‘with those parents of yours. What about Brigitta?’
Marek shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages. Stallenbach is looking after her, I believe.’
They had driven for three hours before Isaac, knowing that his respite in the warm dark van was nearly over, said: ‘And what comes next?’
‘Well firstly,’ said Marek, ‘I want you to dress up as a Jew. A proper one.’
Isaac stared at him. ‘Are you mad?’
‘No. There’s a dark hat there, and a long coat.’
‘We’re going to try to get into Poland with me dressed as an orthodox Jew?’
‘Exactly so.’ Marek grinned; it had taken him months to fix up a suitable escape route for Meierwitz, who had no ambitions to join the Polish Air Force or become a partisan in the resistance, and he was a little proud of the route he had devised. ‘Have you ever heard of the River Rats?’
Isaac frowned. ‘Wait a minute . . . aren’t they those Jews that make their living poling timber down the rivers? Weird people – very religious – who live on rafts and don’t talk to anyone much?’
‘That’s right. People always think Jews are entirely urban, but these people are skilled woodsmen, amazingly so. I got to know them when I went round on business with my father. They take logs vast distances down the Niemen and the Vistula and along the waterways, sometimes as far as the Baltic. They’re expecting you.’
‘My God!’
‘It’s as safe as anything can be. They exist outside frontiers – no one bothers them; they’re too poor. When you get to Königsberg they’ll put you on a Swedish cargo boat; there’ll be papers waiting for you. It’s all fixed up.’
Isaac was silent, thinking of the long journey travelling through the dark, inhospitable waterways of Poland with these uncouth and pious strangers.
‘Why?’ he asked under his breath. ‘Why will they take me?’
But he knew. He himself had scarcely set foot in a synagogue; his mother had been baptised, but Hitler had created a new kind of Jew – someone who existed to be hunted and killed – and these unknown men had accepted him as a brother.
Some ten kilometres inside the border they stopped. This was where they said goodbye to Steiner and continued on foot.
‘I don’t know what to say, Professor,’ said Isaac. ‘The words “Thank you” hardly seem to cover it.’
Steiner shook his hand. ‘Nonsense. And remember you will always be welcome in Hallendorf. I’m on my way back now. My house is small as you know, but there will be room for you and you won’t have to sleep on the verandah like you did when you came with the quartet. Austria is still free, so who knows?’
Isaac nodded. Austria was still free, that was true, but without a permit to stay he would be a fugitive once more, at best put into prison, at worst deported back into the Third Reich.
They had been driving through thick mist. Now it began to rain – steady grey sheets obscuring everything. Only Marek could have made any sense of the
terrain in which they found themselves.
‘Keep close,’ he said.
He had given Isaac a compass, pepper to head off pursuing dogs, money – but in this Stygian world of dripping trees and cloud it would be a nightmare for him to try and find his way alone. They had just two hours of darkness still to find Franz and ford the river into Poland.
The barbed wire had been cut; everything seemed to be in order, but Marek could not shake off the feeling of unease that had been with him since the beginning of the journey.
They had reached the river. Nothing now except to wait for the cry of an owl repeated three times. The rain was relentless: the ground, the sky, the river merged in a sheet of greyness.
Then it came . . . once . . . twice . . . and they saw Franz’s shadowy figure on the far bank.
But the third cry did not come. What came instead was the sound of a shot – and they saw Franz throw up his arms and fall.
‘Go back, Isaac,’ hissed Marek. ‘Quickly. Run.’
‘I won’t go without you.’
‘You’ll do as I say. Try to get back to Steiner and warn him. I’ll follow but I’ve got to see if there’s anything I can do for Franz. He may not be dead.’
He disappeared in the direction of the river bank.
The sound of a second shot came minutes later.
Leon had made good his boast to direct a film and give Sophie a leading part. The leading part turned out to be the only part, because even his devoted parents had baulked at sending a new cine camera and the one they had found was turning out to be more complicated to handle than he had expected. There was moreover no sound equipment, so the role he had created for Sophie – that of Terrified Girl reacting to a Nameless Thing – was silent.
Sophie had written to both her parents begging them to come and see Abattoir. Even without her tambourine she felt that her role as a Salvation Army girl, largely hidden by a poke bonnet and surrounded by twelve others, would make it possible for her not to disgrace herself – and if they both came then perhaps – just perhaps – they would find that they still cared for each other and buy a house which would always be there and they would move into it, all together like a proper family.