A Song for Summer (14 page)

But Ellen's concerns had nothing to do with him. His life at Hallendorf was over. He had said goodbye to Bennet and given in his keys. By the time the children came out of the dining room, Marek was gone.

Ellen, hurrying upstairs, found Leon sitting up in bed--and totally transformed.

"Marek came!" he said in a voice resonant with hero worship. "He came and it's all right, I don't have to be a great musician, I can just do ordinary things. I can do everything! Oh Ellen, isn't it marvellous? I think he must be the most marvellous person in the world."

She stared at Leon. His face was glowing, his restored and golden future lay before him. It was in defence of this child that she had attacked Marek and sent him away with the memory of her senseless and infantile rage.

"I'm going to get my parents to send me a proper cine camera--you can get them quite cheaply-- well, not very cheaply perhaps--and I'm going to write a script. Sophie can star in it and that will show her beastly mother--"'

Ellen let him babble on. Then he stopped. "Ellen, you always say we have to have handkerchiefs and it's you that's sniffing now."

She tried to smile, wiping her eyes. "It's all right. I quarrelled with Marek, that's all, and now he's gone."

"Oh, he won't bother with that. A man like that wouldn't even notice. Ellen, when I'm grown up I'm going to write Marek's biography-- if he'll let me. He's already had the most amazing life, what with throwing people out of windows and being a hero and having that opera singer in love with him. She's terribly famous too--Brigitta Seefeld--there was a lot about her in the sleeve notes to my record."

Leon had collected almost as much information about his idol as Kendrick Frobisher. "I'm going to be like Eckerman who wrote down everything that Goethe said, or that man Bennet told us about in English--Dr Johnson's friend Boswell. Do you think you could try and remember the things he said to you--because you were good friends, weren't you?"'

"Yes, I think we were."

Never let the sun go down on your wrath. But the sun had gone down; it was sinking spectacularly over the mountains, turning the rock face to crimson and amethyst and gold.

"Only where do you begin?"' asked Leon, pondering his biography.

"At the beginning, I suppose, Leon," she said wearily.

At the place in Bohemia where his mother had driven about with white doves in a washing basket ...

At the place where there were storks ...

The house had been a hunting lodge built of silvered aspen in the ancient forest preserved for their sport by the Hapsburg princes who ruled over the Bohemian lands. In the eighteenth century it was enlarged, became a manor, its windows shuttered, its stuccoed walls painted in the Sch@onbrunn yellow which Maria Theresa permitted to those who served her.

Marek's great-grandfather, the Freiherr Marcus von Altenburg, came there from Northern Germany, fell in love with the countryside--its ancient trees, its eagles and owls and unlimited game--and bought it. He cleared enough land round the house to make a small farm, dug a fish pond, and let the sun in on Pettelsdorfs roofs. It was then that the storks came.

For more than a hundred years the von Altenburgs were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then in 1918 Austria collapsed and Pettelsdorf--now Pettovice--found itself part of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia.

No one at Pettelsdorf greatly cared. Frontiers had marched back and forward in this part of Europe for generations, but the same wind still blew through the fields of oats and rye, the geese still made their way in single file towards the water, the high-cruppered dray horses still pulled their loads along the dusty, rutted roads.

Marek's father, though keeping his German nationality, was happy to throw in his lot with the new republic: Czechoslovakia, under Masaryk, was a model of democratic government. He had in any case married a wife brought up in Prague, a bluestocking reared in a little medieval house behind the castle.

Milenka Tarnowsky's mother was English, her father Russian; she herself spoke five languages, had taken tea with Kafka and earned her living translating articles and poetry. To keep open house for all nationalities was as much a tradition of Marek's home as was the sheltering of wanderers by the monasteries that lined the pilgrim routes towards

the east.

It was an unexpected marriage--that of Captain von Altenburg who lived for his hunting and his trees, and the intellectual girl whose spare, honed poems celebrated a unique and inner vision--but it became a byword for happiness.

No wonder then that the son who was born to them should regard the world as created for his personal delight. There were no divisions at Pettelsdorf between the manor and the farm, the farm and the forest.

Geese patrolled his mother's hammock as she worked at her translations; his father's hunting dogs tumbled with Milenka's popeyed Tibetan terrier and the mongrels he rescued from the village. As soon as he could sit on a horse, Marek rode with his father on the neverending work of the land, sometimes staying away for days.

He was a person much addicted to abundance. "I don't like either, I like and," said the five-year-old Marek when the cook asked which kind of filling he wanted baked into his birthday beigli. "Apricots and poppy seed and walnuts," he demanded--and got them.

But if the house servants spoilt him, the men in the fields did not. The woodcutters and charcoal burners and draymen who were his heroes knew better than to indulge the boy who would one day be the master, and thus the servant of their demesne. When he was overcome by one of his rare but devastating attacks of temper, it was in the hay barn or paddock that Marek took refuge, kicking and raging till old Stepan, the head forester, brought him back, tear-stained and purged.

That he would follow in his father's footsteps was something so obvious that Marek never consciously questioned it, so when a fuss was made about his music, he simply ignored it.

It had shown itself early, his talent, as it so often does. When he was three he had requested the bandmaster in the local town to make way for him so that he could conduct the band himself. Two years later he wrote a song in six-eight time for the birthday of a neighbouring landowner's daughter whom he passionately loved. He played the piano of course, and the violin, and had taught himself most of the instruments he found in the village band which played for funerals and weddings.

But what was so strange about that? Everybody in Bohemia was musical; half the horn players in the Vienna Philharmonic were

Czech; their singers swarmed in the opera. Even when that clichè happened and the local music teacher said he could teach the boy no more, Marek refused to be deflected.

"I'm certainly not going to start roaming the world with little bits of my native earth in a pouch like poor Chopin," he said.

Efforts to send him away to be educated had never been successful. He had discharged himself without fuss from an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen in Brno, and from the British public school recommended by his grandmother, the redoubtable Nora Coutts, who lived in a wing of the house drinking Earl Grey tea from Harrods and bullying him about the syntax of the English language.

Even when at last he consented to go to the University of Vienna it was to read Forestry and Land Management. But Vienna is not a good place for a man fleeing from music. By the time he met Brigitta Seefeld, Marek's course in life was set.

He was twenty years old sitting with his friends in the fourth gallery of the Opera, when the curtain went up on Figaro.

Seefeld was not singing Susanna, that life-affirming fixer; she sang the Countess, to whom in "Dove Sono" Mozart has given perhaps the most heart-rending lament for lost love in all opera.

Marek was overwhelmed. He heard her again as Violetta in Traviata and Pamina in The Magic Flute. The voice was ravishing; ethereal, silvery yet full and strong. That she was beautiful--fair-haired, blue-eyed, in the best tradition of the Viennese--was not a disadvantage.

Arriving at the door of her dressing room carrying a rather large arbutus in a pot, Marek had intended only to pay homage, but within a month the diva had led him firmly up the three steps that ascended to her bed: an absurd bed decorated with gilt swans--a present from an admirer after her first Elsa in Lohengrin.

It was not only the bed that was absurd: she herself was vain, self-regarding and extravagant, but when he held her in his arms (and there was plenty to hold) he felt as though he was embracing the great and glorious traditions of Viennese music. He wrote the Songs for Summer for her, and years afterwards his songs still came to him in Brigitta's voice.

It was a public liaison, much approved of by the gossipy Viennese. Brigitta lost no opportunity to parade her new admirer (now known as Marcus, the German version of his Christian name, for his descent as a Fre@iherr was very much to her taste). Marek would not have broken it up: Brigitta was more than ten years his senior and he had all the chivalry of the young. It was she who sent him away, "just for a little while." She had dramatically overspent her salary and needed to audition a rich protector.

"If I go now I won't come back,"

Marek had said.

She didn't believe him but he spoke the truth.

It was now, in the spring of 1929, that he went to Berlin, with its pompous architecture, its vile climate--

and its superlative cultural life.

In Vienna he had been absorbed in his affair with Brigitta--now he made friends, and one friend in particular.

Isaac Meierwitz was a violinist, well known as a virtuoso soloist--but known too as something more: a true musician who continued to play chamber music, sat at the first desk of the Berlin Akademia and taught needy students without charge. Marek had met him at Professor Steiner's house. Outwardly he looked like everybody's idea of a Russian Jew: small, pop-eyed and splendidly neurotic. Meierwitz was allergic to egg white and sopranos, saw ghosts, and kept his grandmother's pigtail in the case which held his Stradivarius, but he had the heart of a lion. He drank vodka like mother's milk, needed almost no sleep, was a first-class swimmer and a repository of unbelievably awful jokes.

Isaac was only a few years older than Marek but he know everybody. He introduced Marek to Sch@onberg and Stravinsky, took him to Wozzeck at the Kroll, and to hear Schnabel play Beethoven sonatas at the Volksbuhne, wearing a lounge suit so that the workers would feel at home. He found cellars where the gypsies were not graduates of the Budapest Conservatoire but true Zigeuners, and cabarets where the chicanery of politicians was

blisteringly exposed.

One day as they were walking through the Tiergarten after an all-night party, Isaac said he thought it was time he had his concerto.

"I have my immortality to think of, you know." "Good God, Isaac, surely your immortality doesn't depend on a violin concerto by somebody like me!"

But Meierwitz was serious. "You're almost ready. And remember, if anyone but me gets to play the premiere, I'll haunt you to my dying day!"

Soon after this Marek was offered a two-year contract at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the Mecca of all musicians and a true honour for a man still in his early twenties.

He had loved America, become completely absorbed in the music making there. At the end of his stint he took six months off and went to live in a hut on the Hudson River. One day, walking by the water, he heard the theme for the slow movement.

Violin concertos have a distinguished provenance. Beethoven, Sibelius, Brahms, all wrote only one but they were written in blood. When he had finished it, Marek sent the score to Berlin.

Meierwitz cabled at once, full of superlatives. A premiere was arranged with the Berlin Akademia for the following spring, with Marek himself conducting. The year was 1933. Marek now took off for the Mato Grosso in Brazil to study the native music there. He was out of touch with civilisation for the whole winter--

even so, later, he was amazed at how naive he had been.

He sailed for Europe in the spring of 1934: the South American papers had made light of Hitler's doings and Meierwitz had written to say that he'd been promised permission to give the premiere and was staying on in Germany to do so. The Bremen ran into a storm. Marek arrived a day late and went straight to the concert hall to start rehearsals. He found the new music director waiting, full of smiles and affability.

The premiere was attracting much attention, he said; to have Herr von Altenburg back in Germany was an honour.

Marek took little notice. He was waiting for the

soloist. He had phoned

Meierwitz's flat when the ship docked and left a message.

Then a young man, blond, friendly with innocent blue eyes walked on to the platform with his violin.

"I'm Anton Kessler, Herr von Altenburg," he said, bowing. "I have the honour to play your concerto.

Believe me, this is a great day in my life."

There was a dead silence in the concert hall. Then: "No, Herr Kessler, you do not have that honour. This concerto is dedicated to Isaac Meierwitz and he and he alone will play the premiere."

The members of the orchestra shuffled their music; Anton Kessler flushed.

"Surely they told you ... Meierwitz has been ... Meierwitz is a Jew; there is no possibility that he should appear as a soloist."

Marek turned to the director. "I was told that Meierwitz would be playing. I had a letter to that effect before I sailed."

The director smoothed his brilliantined hair. "I think there must be some mistake. Meierwitz has been taken ... Meierwitz has left. He refused the chance of emigration. He made difficulties and this is something that the Third Reich cannot allow. I assure you no harm will come to him, and Herr Kessler is an excellent musician. Please, Kessler, show Herr Altenburg."

The blond young man moved to the front of the platform and the theme which had come to Marek out there by the Hudson River sang out over the hall. He played well.

"Stop," said Marek.

Now he looked around the hall more carefully. Other faces were missing: the first horn, a man called Cohen, the second flautist ...