A Song for Summer (12 page)

"As you may know, the play is set in the Chicago stockyards in the Twenties and follows the fate of a group of slaughterhouse workers threatened by a lock-out engineered by their capitalist bosses. The starving workers are visited by the band of the Salvation Army, led by the heroine, Johanna, who brings them soup and tries to convert them to Christianity, but though the workers eat the soup they reject the message of Christ." He paused, raking his silver hair, and sighed. Some of the children looked small; others looked stupid. He had forgotten that the school accepted juniors. "Johanna now begs the capitalists to relent, but though they pretend to listen, they do nothing; at which point she loses her faith, throws in her lot with the striking workers-- and dies of starvation in the snow."

Thus described, Abattoir could not be called a cheerful play, but its sentiments did everyone credit, and as FitzAllan pointed out, no one need be without a part since in addition to the capitalists, the Salvation Army and the proletariat, there were parts for stock breeders, labour leaders, speculators and newsboys, not to mention the possibility of a chorus of slaughtered cattle, pigs and sheep, though this was not in the original script.

Having summarised the play, the director invited suggestions as to how it should be treated.

"Clearly in a Marxist work of this sort the emphasis must be on the persecution of the workers," said Jean-Pierre. "Their fate is paramount. We could show this by lighting them very strikingly--with military searchlights, for example--keeping the capitalists in the shadows."

Rollo did not entirely agree. He felt that the core of the play lay in the three-tiered hierarchical structure of society and proposed a set built in layers of scaffolding: the workers at the bottom, the Salvation Army in the middle and the capitalists on top.

"But not metal ..." said poor Chomsky under his breath. "Not metal scaffolding"--and was ignored.

For Hermine, this was not the point at all: what she saw in Abattoir was a chance for the children to come inffcontact with their own physicality.

"I will make exercises for the hanging motion of the carcasses and the thrust of the knife. They can experience rictus ... and spasms," she said, handing her baby to Ellen so as to demonstrate the kind of thing she had in mind.

FitzAllan now put up his hand. "That is all very interesting and true," he said, and Bennet, watching him, recognised all the signs of a director who had not the slightest intention of doing anything that anyone suggested. "But I have to remind you above all that Brecht invented the Alienation Theory. The

Verfremdungseffekt," he said, breaking into German for those of the children who were looking puzzled,

"is seminal to Brecht's thinking."

A brave child, a small girl with red hair, now put up her hand and said: "What is the Alienation Theory?"'

and was rewarded by grateful looks from the other children.

"Alienation Theory demands that the audience is in no way emotionally involved with the action on the stage. Brecht believed that the lights should be left on during the performance so that people could walk about and smoke cigars ... and so on."

"What do you do if you don't smoke cigars?"' asked a literal-minded boy with spectacles, and was quelled by a look from the director.

"Who's going to do the music?"' asked Leon. "What's going to happen about that?"'

But here too Abattoir showed itself uniquely suited to the requirements of a school whose music teacher, swathed in unspeakable knitted balaclavas from his former pupils, was absent fighting in Spain. For as FitzAllan explained, the workers would sing the Internationale, the Salvation Army would bang tambourines and sing hymns, and the exploitative capitalists would listen to decadent jazz on the gramophone.

"But there must be a ballet," declared Tamara --and a weary sigh ran round the room. "A red ballet with a theme of ... viscerality. It could come to the workers while they slept."

FitzAllan opened his mouth, remembered she was the headmaster's wife and closed it again.

"We'll discuss it in private," he said, treating her to one of his brilliantly boyish smiles.

"Who's going to be the heroine?"' asked Janey. "The one who gives soup to the workers and dies in the snow?"'

"I shall begin the auditions tomorrow," said FitzAllan--and reminding them that the clue to the piece would lie in its truthful and monolithic drabness, he declared the meeting closed.

Although lessons continued in the mornings, the afternoons and evenings were now devoted to increasingly

frenzied rehearsals for Abattoir.

Not only rehearsals but workshops and seminars of every kind, many of which were conducted out of doors.

Predictably, the play was taking its toll. The director's determination to make the children call up their own experience of being cruel employers was particularly unfortunate.

"He said I oppressed Czernowitz because he came in on Sunday to feed the rats," said Sophie, coming in from one such Method Class in tears, "but I didn't--honestly, Ellen; I loved Czernowitz. I still do. If it wasn't for him I'd never know where anyone was."

Leon had fallen foul of FitzAllan by pointing out that the wicked stockyard owners shouldn't be playing jazz on the gramophone. "Jazz comes from the Blues," said Leon. "It's the music the Negroes used to free themselves, so it isn't decadent at all," he'd said and been thoroughly snubbed.

Worst of all was poor Flix.

FitzAllan had had the sense to see that the talented and unassuming American girl was perfect casting as the heroine, Johanna, but he had insisted on giving her a lecture on the Judas sheep.

"It's a sheep that they set up to go into the slaughterhouse and lead all the others in. It never gets killed, it just goes round and round, but the others do. It seems so absolutely awful to make an animal do that,"

said Flix, who had recently become a Jain and wore a muslin gauze over her mouth in the evenings so that she would not swallow, or damage, the gnats.

The staff were not immune either. Hermine's efforts to put the children in touch with their own physicality were affecting her milk and poor Chomsky's darkest fears had been realised. The three-tiered structure to represent the hierarchical nature of society was to be made of metal and the Hungarian, who had led a sheltered life getting the children to make bookends by bending a sheet of galvanised steel into a right angle, could be seen capering round the gigantic metal struts like a demented Rumpelstiltskin.

Under these circumstances, Ellen found herself more and more grateful for Marek's quiet world of trees and water and plants. For Sophie was right, Marek did show you things--and the showing was like getting presents. Marek found a stickleback nest in

the reeds, he led her to a place where the emerging demozel dragonflies flew up into the light, and when a small barn owl was blown off course and sat like a bewildered powder puff under a fir tree, he fetched her from the kitchen so that she could help him feed it with strips of raw liver. After a short time with him out of doors, Ellen could return to her work and to the comforting of her children with renewed energy.

"Is it possible that someone like FitzAllan could after all produce something good?"' she asked Marek as the director's strident voice came from the rehearsal room.

"Unlikely. But does it really matter?"' "I'd like it to work for Bennet. He's been writing "Toscanini's Aunt"

letters all day-- you know, letters to important people who he thinks might be interested in coming to the play. And Margaret says he's paying for FitzAllan out of his pocket."

Marek leant for a moment on his spade. "Yes, he's a good man. But--"'

He was about to say to her what he had said at the well. That time was running out. Not only was there no money for the school, but the school was threatened from the outside. For how much longer could it exist, this confused Eden with its unfashionable belief in freedom, its multi-lingual staff? Austria was leaning more and more towards the Third Reich; the Brownshirts strutted unashamedly in Vienna's streets, and even here in Hallendorf.

But she knew, of course. He remembered what she had said when she'd asked him for storks. "They'll still be here even if we are gone." It was because time was short that she cared so much about the play.

"It may work out," he said. "I've seen men behave worse than FitzAllan and it was all right on the day."

To Ellen, watching him as he went about his work, it seemed that Marek was not quite so relaxed as he had been; she sensed that some part of him was alert, was waiting for something which had nothing to do with his life in the school.

The impression was strengthened two days later when she saw him come out of the post office in the village. He was putting something into his pocket --a telegram, she thought--and for a moment he stared out across the sunlit square, unseeing. Then the blank gaze disappeared, his usual observant look returned, and he greeted her.

"I didn't know you were coming over. I'd have given you a lift. I've got the van."

"I had some bills to pay and people to see." They began to stroll together towards the lake. The butcher, a little mild man, waved from his shop; the greengrocer sent his boy after her with a bunch of cornflowers, and the old lady who had hissed at her on the steamer rose from a bench and said Ellen must come to her house next time and try her raspberry wine.

"You've made a lot of friends in a month," said Marek.

"It's mostly Lieselotte," she said. "But I love this village, don't you?"'

They reached the fountain and she paused to take a stale roll from her basket and crumble it into the water for the carp. By the gate to the churchyard, they came to Aniella's shrine: a little wooden house on stilts like a bird table.

"Does she get fed too?"' he asked as Ellen stopped once more.

She shook her head. "Just on cornflowers." She took a single flower from her bunch and laid it among the offerings the villagers had brought. "She's such a sensible person--and her candles burn straight and true," she said quietly.

Marek looked at her sharply, but she had turned away. "I must go for the steamer," she said.

"I'll take you back. I've finished with that old devil in the woodyard. But we'll have some coffee first at the Krone. The landlord's in a splendid mood because he's landed an entire conference of dentists for his new annexe. His wife thought he'd never fill it and lo, twenty-three dentists are descending in July!"

"Oh I am glad! They work so hard, those two."

They found a table under the chestnuts, and Marek ordered coffee and Streuselkuchen. Ellen's coffee came with a glass of clear cold water, but Marek's, by courtesy of the landlord, was accompanied by a full measure of schnapps.

"Goodness, can you drink that so early in the morning?"'

"Most certainly," said Marek, raising his glass. "Water is for the feet!"

She had collected a posse of sparrows and

pigeons with whom she was sharing her cake.

"Everything isn't hungry, you know," he pointed out. "Those carp, for example."

"No," she said. "Perhaps not. But everybody likes to eat."

He watched her as she skilfully distributed the food so that even the bluetits at the back were not upstaged by the pigeons, and remembered her each night in the dining room, assessing, portioning out the food fairly, keeping order without ever raising her voice.

"You remind me of my grandmother," he said. "She was English too."

"Goodness! I didn't know any part of you was English. Is that why you speak it so well?"'

"Perhaps. I spent a year in an English school. A horrible place, I must say."

"Is she still alive your grandmother?"' "Very much so."

She waited, her head tilted so that a handful of curls fell over one shoulder. It was not a passive waiting and presently Marek conceded defeat and began.

"Her name was Nora Coutts," he said, stirring his coffee. "And when she was twenty years old she went to Russia to look after the three little daughters of a general in the army of the Tsar. Only of course being British she used to go for long walks by herself in the forest; even in the winter, even in the rain."

"Naturally," agreed Ellen.

"And one day she found a woodcutter sitting in front of his brazier under a clump of trees. Only he didn't seem to be an ordinary woodcutter. For one thing his brazier wasn't burning properly and for another he was reading a book."

"What was the book?"'

"The Brothers Karamazov. So my grandmother smelt a rat, and quite rightly, for it turned out that the young man was an anarchist who belonged to a freedom movement dedicated to the overthrow of the Tsar. He had been told to keep watch on the general and tell his superiors when it would be a good time to blow him up without blowing up his wife and children. They minded about blowing up women and children in those days," said Marek, "which shows you how old-fashioned they were.

"Needless to say, my grandmother thought this was not a good idea, and by this time the young man had fallen in

love with her because she had red hair and freckles and was exceedingly nice. But of course by refusing to blow up the general, he was in danger from the anarchists, so he and my grandmother ran away together and when they got to Prague they stopped running and settled in a pink house so small you could heat it with matchsticks, and gave birth to a daughter who grew up to write poetry and be my mother ... And who, if you met her, you would probably like a lot."

She waited to make sure he had finished. Then: "Thank you," she said, "that was a lovely story. I liked it a lot."

Marek leant back in his chair, pierced by a sudden regret. His time here was almost over; he was going to miss this untroubling and selfless girl.

"Come," he said, "I've got something to show you."

He led her back across the square and up a narrow street which sloped up towards the pastures. At the last house, with its lace curtains and pots of geraniums, he stopped and knocked.

A frail, elderly man with a limp came to the door and Marek said: "I've brought Fr@aulein Ellen to see your animals. Is it convenient?"'