A Song for Summer (22 page)

"Wait. Why did you go to the patisserie in Klagenfurt? I don't understand."

"Well, after Marek told us that the slaughterhouse was closed because of foot and mouth disease--"'

"What!" FitzAllan forgot his migraine, sat bolt upright, and groaned. "But that's nonsense. I checked it yesterday."

"Oh, it only happened this morning. Marek came from there--he brought Professor Steiner back and they went right past it and there were huge notices saying CLOSED. I assure you," said Ellen sweetly, "that it's true."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, you can ask Marek."

And if I hadn't been going on your stupid trip I might have missed him, thought Ellen, and smiled at FitzAllan with ineffable joy. He would have dropped Steiner and gone away again and I wouldn't have seen him and he wouldn't have hugged me and thanked me for saving his friend and Isaac wouldn't be hopping up and down now in Chomsky's room. "I must go and serve supper," she said, "though I doubt if anyone will eat very much. It was a sort of party we had after Marek told us we couldn't go, oh it was lovely--and so interesting! I think if I was Professor Freud I wouldn't waste so much time finding out what people had seen their parents do and about incest and all that--I'd take them to Herr Fischer's shop and see what they chose. You wouldn't believe it but Frank didn't pick an animal at all--he chose a conker.

Just an ordinary brown marzipan chestnut--there was a tree in his mother's garden, he said, when he was small! And Sophie ate her crocodile then and there in two big bites; I was really encouraged--I think she may be getting just a little bit tough inside."

At the door she paused and smiled once more at the patently uninterested invalid. "If you want to know what animal I bought," she said dreamily, "I didn't buy anything. I already have one, you see. I have a ladybird!"

The shutters were closed tight over the windows of Steiner's little house. The boat in which Ellen and Isaac had rowed across was hidden in the Professor's boathouse. The night was dark and moonless; hardly a ripple stirred the water.

Ellen had intended to let Isaac go alone; the reunion between him and Marek was something she thought should be conducted in privacy, but Isaac was not interested in privacy. He wanted her to come to Steiner's house; he wanted her to come everywhere with

him always. So Ellen had busied herself checking the dressing on the Professor's wound and making coffee in the little kitchen while Isaac and Marek exchanged their memories of that frightful night. Now, over a glass of cognac, the map spread out on the table, they were discussing the next stage: Isaac's escape from Central Europe.

"The river line is still intact," said Marek. "Uri goes down once a week with the logs; he'll take you. But how to get you into Poland? We can't use the van any more, Franz is dead and they've doubled the guards. We'll have to go properly armed this time and--"'

"Well I think that's completely silly," said Ellen.

"Oh you do?"' said Marek. "You've a better idea, I suppose?"'

"Yes. It's what I was going to do if you'd turned out to be dead," she said.

"Well I'm not dead, so take that wi/l note out of your voice." And then reluctantly: "All right then; how were you going to get Isaac into Poland?"'

"In a train. In a first-class sleeper. A wagon-lit, preferably with Lalique panels and Art Nouveau lamps, because I'm interested in Secessionist architecture," she said primly. "He wouldn't be able to go to the dining car, because being a serious mental case he would have to stay in bed, but I would, because nurses are allowed to eat--and they do quail's eggs in aspic on the Warsaw Express, I've heard, and I've never tried them."

They all stared at her. "What are you talking about?"'

"Chomsky," said Ellen. "That's what I'm talking about. They were thinking of taking him to a spa to recuperate. There's one there in Poland." She pointed to a place near a bend on the Vistula river. "They offered me the chance to accompany him as a sort of nurse and it so happens that I have his passport, so why shouldn't Isaac go instead? Could you get the photo changed?"'

"Not in a hurry. The man who did the forgeries is the one they caught."

"Well, it might not matter--Isaac's the same age as Chomsky, and it would be night time and he'd have his head bandaged."

"It's still a risk," said Marek.

"And not one that you will take. Get his passport and give it to me and--"'

"No," said Ellen. "I won't. You can come along and start shooting people or hanging them out of windows if things go wrong but I'm going to be Isaac's nurse."

"I would like her to be my nurse," said Isaac--and Marek turned on him angrily.

"Be quiet, Isaac. This isn't a joking matter. I'm sorry, Ellen, but I absolutely will not allow you to become involved any further. I shall always be in your debt but--"'

"Allow!" said Ellen, putting down her glass. "Allow? How dare you speak to me like that? I nearly turned Isaac over to the police because you didn't trust me enough to tell me what you're doing."

"Ellen, this is no job for--"' "Don't!" She turned on him furiously. "Just don't dare to say this is no job for a woman. My mother and my aunts didn't get kicked by police horses and thrown to the ground for you to go round treating me as an imbecile. Furthermore if war comes no one will bother to distinguish between men and women. Ask the women of Guernica whether anyone cared what sex they were when they bombed the market place. Getting Isaac out is part of fighting Hitler and I won't be left out of it."

She broke off and they turned to look at Steiner. The old man was leaning back in his chair and laughing at some personal and highly amusing joke.

"Wonderful!" he said. "Milenka would be delighted. You should really take her to Pettovice, Marek. She and Ellen are sisters under the skin."

Marek frowned, remembering his first sight of Ellen at the well and how he had thought that one day he might do just that.

"Don't you see how unbearable it is for me to put you into danger?"' he said in a low voice.

But she gave no quarter. "Don't you see how unbearable it is for me not to be allowed to help?"' she answered. "Isaac and I are friends."

Friends? thought Marek, caught by the passion in her voice. Or something more? He had seen how Isaac followed her with his eyes.

He picked up his glass, drained it, and smiled at her. Then: "Since you seem to be an expert on Chomsky's passport, did you happen to see what he put under Distinguishing Characteristics?"'

She beamed back at him. "My

Hungarian's not very good but I did look and he hasn't mentioned it. Which is just as well. Not that Isaac will be travelling in his swimming things, but all the same ..."

Isaac turned over in his bunk and gazed, from under the huge bandage which covered his head, at Ellen.

The soft light of the luxurious sleeping compartment shone on her fluted cap, her snowy apron. She looked like a nurse specially lowered from heaven for his benefit and he did not know how he could bear to leave her.

"You're being angelic, again," he said. "Hush. You're supposed to be asleep."

Everything had gone smoothly. Marek had hired an ambulance and booked the sleeper. He himself had driven them to the station wearing a Red Cross armband, and they had settled Isaac into his quarantined compartment. Then Marek had driven the ambulance away, and returned dressed in his own clothes with his pigskin suitcase and his passport which stated truthfully that he was Marcus Altenburg, a musician. If asked he would have said that he was travelling to a music festival in Warsaw, but he was not asked.

Ellen could see him now, standing in the corridor unobtrusively keeping watch. He had booked a first-class compartment next to Isaac's and hers, and seemed to have it to himself. After they left the train, he and Isaac would go on on foot and she would return to Hallendorf.

Isaac, wearing a spare pair of Chomsky's pyjamas, lay back on the pillow. He was certain that he would be apprehended, either at the two checkpoints they faced on the train or as he reached the Baltic, and if they tried to send him back to Germany he had decided he would kill himself.

But meanwhile there was Ellen.

He put out a hand and she took it and held it. She could see his thoughts working across his face as clearly as if he had uttered them.

"Ellen, if I get out ..."

"When."

He managed a smile. "When. Why don't we start a restaurant? I think I'd make quite a good chef."

"Maybe. But you're a violinist."

"I was. I'm not any more--I tried to make Marek see that it's over. In the camp, after they found out I was a violinist ..." but he could never talk about what they had done to his hands. "When I cut my finger the other day and it didn't matter, it was such a relief! I would work really hard. Think about it, Ellen. If I had something to look forward to ... something we could do together, it might be worthwhile trying to stay alive. I've loved you from the moment I saw you kneeling there beside that extraordinary suitcase."

"Oh Isaac, I love you too but--"'

"Yes, I know. Not like that. But that might come. I think we'd make a splendid team. Perhaps Marek would put some money into it."

"Marek is convinced that you're one of the best violinists in the world and that you'll play again."

He shook his head. Pretending to close his eyes, he could still see her, her head bent over her book. He had hoped she would lie down on the bunk beside him; he wouldn't have laid a finger on her but it would have been something to remember while he sat huddled in the evil-smelling lean-tos in which the rivermen slept as they poled down towards the sea.

"It's an hour still till the border, Isaac. Get some rest."

She looked up and saw Marek's silhouette against the window. He was still keeping watch and it was all she could do not to follow him into the corridor to draw comfort simply from his quiet presence, his size.

But they got through the first checkpoint without difficulty. The halt between Austria and Czechoslovakia was only a huddle of shacks and a road barrier. The two men who came along the corridor were friendly enough: Czechs with broad cheekbones; peasants without an axe to grind. Ellen gave them her passport and Chomsky's, putting her finger to her lips to show that her patient was asleep.

They scarcely looked at one of the passports, held the other long enough to make Ellen's heart thump almost unbearably in her

chest.

"You're British," said one of the soldiers, in heavily accented German, and Ellen saw that it was her passport he was holding.

"Yes."

"Your government should help us," he said. "They should support us against Hitler," and handed it back.

The first hurdle was over then.

She slipped out into the corridor and Marek, in his role as a well-to-do passenger starting a flirtation with a pretty nurse, turned to make way for her. They were travelling through wooded countryside towards Olomouc and Marek told her about the old woman who had sung the wrong songs to Steiner.

"Only they weren't the wrong songs, we were being absurd. They were the songs of her youth."

People started going past them towards the dining car, among them a heavily painted woman in a fur cape who threw Marek a sultry glance from under clogged eyelashes.

"I'm sorry you can't come and try the quail's eggs in aspic."

"I don't want to leave Isaac." "No." He had seen how tenderly she leant over Isaac, held his hand. "I'll bring him a bottle of champagne. He can drink it in his bed."

"Like Chekhov," she said. "I was glad he died drinking champagne."

"Yes. A good man." He pointed out of the window at a stream just visible in the gathering dusk. "Do you see that river?"'

"Yes."

"My grandfather used to fish in there; it flows past our house about a hundred miles to the west."

"The Russian anarchist? The one who wanted to blow up the general but your grandmother wouldn't let him?"'

"That's the one. He loved fishing and he loved Chekhov. He was always quoting what Chekhov said about fishing."

"God won't subtract from man's appointed span the time spent fishing," she said. "Is that the one?"'

Marek nodded. "One day about two years before I was born he was sitting by the bank with his rod and my mother came and told them what she'd just heard in town. That Chekhov was dead. My grandfather was absolutely shattered. "To think that I should outlive Chekhov," he kept saying--and he didn't go fishing once for the rest of the summer."

"He was such a gentleman--Chekhov, I mean," said Ellen. "I always think of him coughing into little twists of sugar paper down in Yalta and writing to his wife in Moscow telling her not to worry; telling her to stay where she was and to do what she wanted. So he was an odd man for an anarchist to love so much."

"Perhaps. But he was not a very good anarchist, if you remember. And Chekhov had been to the penal colony in Sakhalin and written about the fate of the prisoners there. My grandfather was very influenced by that."

She was silent, thinking of the strange mix of ancestors that had gone to make the man beside her: Russian and English, German and Czech. No wonder he was at home in borderlands.

"Is this the sort of country Pettelsdorf is in?"'

"Yes. The woods are denser perhaps."

She thought of it, this tantalising demesne to which only the wounded were admitted. "You'll miss it when you go to America." He was planning to sail as soon as Isaac was on his way; this was almost the last time she would see him.

Marek shrugged. "It's best not to get too attached to places in the kind of world we live in now."

"Or to people, perhaps."

She was silent, remembering her mother's latest letter. They were digging trenches in Hyde Park, she had said, and asked her daughter to come home at once if there was any sort of crisis.

"Or to people," he agreed.

"Only I don't know how you would write music without attachment," she went on. "I suppose it would come out like Buddhist music; sort of prayer wheels tinkling in the wind and those sad horns. Not that I know anything about it," she added, suddenly embarrassed.