A Song for Summer (31 page)

"I want to be a salamander too," said the

six-year-old son of the shoemaker and was sent to Bruno to be fitted out with yellow spots.

What had happened to Bruno was as great a miracle to Ellen as anything that had happened to the saint.

Coming to look for him late one night, she found him in the art room.

"Don't tell me to go to bed," he said angrily--and she didn't, for she had seen what he was making: the mask that would turn Aniella into an old crone, an uncanny masterpiece fashioned from rice paper and silk in which Lieselotte's pretty features were still discernible beneath the wrinkles.

"They have taken my baby!" cried Hermine, finding the herring box empty and coming distraught to Ellen.

"It's all right, she's with Frau Becker and the others in the sewing room."

"But they will give her bad things to eat-- sweet things, and in the book it says--"'

But when Andromeda was returned, with icing sugar on her cheeks, she smiled and cooed and slept the night through for the first time since she was born.

Problems arose continuously. How would the followers get from the house to the church? Not everyone could go in the flotilla of boats. No one expected the tight-fisted Captain Harrar to offer his paddle steamer, but he did; it would follow at a distance and there would be room for everyone.

When it became clear that even with all the village women sewing, the dresses would not be done, six nuns appeared from the convent, asked for Ellen, and were led to the hall which had been taken over as a workshop. One of these, Sister Felicity, turned out to be an expert botanist and supervised the making of Alpenrosen petals for Aniella to strew over the lake, and headdresses of saxifrage and gentians and cornflowers for the guests. But it was Ellen who made Aniella's wedding gown, fighting Bruno for the last of the muslin and creating a dream dress which had Lieselotte in tears.

Only Ursula still stood aside.

"I wish you'd be one of the bridesmaids like us," said Sophie. "We'll be sailing over the lake with Aniella; it'll be fun. Ellen's got a dirndl for you, she told me."

"Don't be silly," said Ursula.

"No one wore braces on their teeth in those days. People would jeer at me."

"No they wouldn't," began

Sophie--but Ursula had already marched off with her red exercise book.

There was to be as little "acting" as possible, everyone agreed on that. Enacting yes, acting no, but it had been decided that there should be a brief commentary to link the scenes together and to his utter amazement, Bennet himself had agreed to write it.

What am I doing? he asked himself. I'm an atheist; I've been one all my life. Yet now he wrote words for an Austrian saint who lived by God, for an angel lit from behind (if the generator worked) by a Marxist teacher of mathematics. He wrote words to proclaim the treachery of the greengrocer, who had been cast as Count Alexei--and told himself he was an idiot and did not stop.

By now no one remembered any more who belonged to the village and who to the school. Bennet cancelled all afternoon lessons, did not even open the letter from his stockbroker and told Margaret to abandon all correspondence with Toscanini Aunts. Convinced that he faced ruin and derision from such parents as would make their way to Hallendorf, Bennet found he did not greatly care. If this was the end of his beloved school, it was a good one.

Into this creative chaos, there now burst Marek's music.

On the morning of the fourth day he showered, shaved, and went to find Ellen.

"I want Leon--tell him to copy these parts; I need three copies at least. And find me Flix and those Italian twins and the red-haired boy with a scar behind his ear."

"Oliver?"' she said. "You want him?"' "Yes; he can sing. I heard him when he was carving. And Sophie; she can hold a tune. I'll teach them first and they can help the others. Three o'clock this afternoon in the music room."

He then commandeered Bennet's car and drove to the village where he asked to see the leader of the Hallendorf Brass Band and said he expected him and his players next morning at the castle.

"But we're competing in the finals at Klagenfurt in a month," said the leader. "We--"'

Marek said this was a pity, but he expected them at ten, and disappeared into the kitchens of the Goldene Krone, summoned the assistant

chef and told him to fetch his brother and his accordion. Two hours later he was in Klagenfurt, in the school of music, and said he needed a fiddler, a cellist and a viola player for the coming week.

"But that is out of the question. No one will come for a country pageant. They have exams."

"Ask them," said Marek briefly--and handed over his card.

The principal backed away. They were true, then, the rumours he had heard.

"Yes, sir; of course. I'll send the best players I've got."

"They'll need strong shoes," said Marek. "Ten o'clock at the castle."

In the days that followed, Bennet, watching Marek's rehearsals, saw every one of his educational beliefs thrown over.

"I can't sing;" said Sophie, "my mother says I have a voice like a corncrake,"--and was treated to a blistering attack on people who at the age of twelve were still under their mother's thumb. "If you were an Arab you'd be married by now," said Marek. "I decide who can't, and no one else. Now open your mouth and sing."

Leon, after three hours of copying music, said he was tired and was treated to a stare of such contempt that he changed his mind, and reached for another pile of manuscript paper.

"You're late," said Marek to the students of the Klagenfurt Academy, emerging from their car.

"I'm sorry, Herr Altenburg. We had a puncture."

"Don't let it happen again. Here's your music. I want it by heart tonight. You represent continuity; you'll go from venue to venue accompanying the narrator. In the last scene you'll be playing in the tower of the church."

"Herr Altenburg, I can't; I have vertigo." And as Marek looked at him: "All right--I'll get the chemist to fix me something."

But with the youngest children from the village and the school Marek was gentle. He played the tune for Aniella once, and again and for the third time. He played the tune for the wicked knights (to be enacted, unexpectedly, by the greengrocer, the butcher--and Chomsky) and the music for the wedding feast. And he told them that they must be strong and trust him while they learnt to play their triangles and shake their tambourines and bang their drums in the right way, because while this happened the tunes would go away.

"But they'll come back," he said, "all the tunes will come back and you'll see how important you are," and they nodded and let themselves be led away by Freya to practise.

Odd things happened. A boatload of dentists from the conference booked into the annexe of the Krone overheard a rehearsal.

"You're short on the woodwind," said one of them. "I play the clarinet--I can go and get it."

And he got it, and cut a symposium on Geriatric Orthodontics and said he could stay till the pageant. A girl on a walking tour turned out to be a singing student from Paris and stayed also--perhaps because of the music, more probably because of the dentist who looked like Cary Grant.

Odder still perhaps was a plaintive letter from Sophie's mother to complain that her daughter hadn't written.

"I forgot," Sophie told Leon, half appalled, half excited. "I forgot to write to her!"

"About time too," said Leon. He had graduated to being Professor Steiner's assistant in transcribing parts and had begun to see what hard work really meant.

Then came the day when Marek led the youngest children to Aniella's house for a rehearsal, and told them to beat their drums and shake their tambourines and their triangles in the way that they had learnt--

and as Lieselotte came out of the door, the assembled musicians began to play, and they saw, these obedient, small musicians, where they fitted in--that by themselves they were nothing, but now, with everybody joining in, they were part of something glorious.

And it was then that the little fat boy who loved mathematics put down his triangle and sighed and said:

"Oh gosh! It's better than the calculus."

It did not rain.

At seven in the morning, the dentist who played the clarinet was woken by the chambermaid at the inn and went downstairs to find a small, fierce-looking

child standing in the hall.

"I want you to take out my brace," said Ursula.

The dentist, scarcely awake, blinked and rubbed his eyes.

"What?"' he said stupidly.

"My brace. They didn't have them when Aniella was alive."

"My dear, I can't do that. I don't have the right equipment; it would hurt, and in any case--"'

Ursula stood unmoving. She had woken at dawn and trudged on foot round the lake. Now she dredged up a word she scarcely ever used. "Please," she said.

In the house on the alp, Lieselotte woke and stretched and was suddenly terrified.

"I can't, Mama. All those people ... I can't. You must tell--"'

But at that moment Ellen came up the path, carrying the basket of pins and needles, of scissors and glue, that had become a symbol of all that went into the making of Aniella's name day, and kissed her friend, and looked so pleased and happy, and so calm, that Lieselotte's panic abated and she decided she could after all swallow a cup of coffee and eat a roll.

A charabanc drove into the village square and disgorged a busload of tourists, but no one had time to bother with them. Everyone was gathered outside the little wooden house, the rows of waiting animals in their place, and the sun shining out of a clear blue sky. Then the head boy of the village school stepped forward to speak Bennet's words: "We have come together to celebrate the name day of Saint Aniella who was born here at Hallendorf on a morning such as this ..."

And as Lieselotte stepped out of the door, Marek brought in his musicians--and the pageant began.

No one who was present ever forgot it. They had rehearsed it separately in every combination, but now, coming together, it took on a life of its own. An amazed recognition, a kind of wonder at what they had made, lifted them out of themselves. Propelled by Marek's music through the familiar story, they constantly found new meanings, new gestures, which were yet always part of the whole.

And those who had come to watch were drawn in also.

When a small hedgehog stumbled, a woman on the edge of the crowd came forward to help her, blurring the separation between watchers and participants, which was so much a characteristic of the day. Frank's father, who had threatened to withdraw his son from school, could be seen elbowing his way to the front as they reached the grotto--the only example of bad manners to be seen all day.

Even the unexpected things, the mishaps, turned into marvels.

"Are we sinking?"' asked Ursula, sitting in Aniella's boat, forgetting her sore mouth.

"No." But it was true that the rim of the brocaded canopy (the best bedspread of Frau Becker's aunt) had dropped into the water and was slowing the boat ... slowing it more and more, so that it echoed uncannily Aniella's reluctance to go to her wedding.

Outside the church, the dustcart horse, who had a dozen times walked up the church steps in rehearsals, reared and refused--and the peace-loving greengrocer became a red-faced, furious seducer, kicking his mount with his heels as if he really was Count Alexei of Hohenstift.

The trick with the mask worked--even those who had been warned hissed with distress as Lieselotte became a wrinkled crone--and Rollo had been more than generous with the blood.

And then, like a hand reaching down from heaven (or from the bell tower, where the brave dentist was perched on a joist and the vertiginous violinist played gallantly on) came Marek's music, a high, pure skein of sound in which all the themes reached resolution, drawing the girl up and up for her apotheosis.

And as Sister Felicity's flowers drifted down from the heights, caught in a moment of enchantment in the spotlights, there came from those who packed the body of the church--not clapping, not cheering --but a sigh that seemed to be one sigh ... and then it was done.

"We'll do it again, won't we?"' they promised each other--Frau Becker and Jean-Pierre, the butcher and Freya, everyone hugging everyone else ... forgetting the troops mustered on the border, forgetting the final letter from Bennet's stockbroker. The old woman who'd

said it would rain was kissing Sabine, Chomsky and the greengrocer wandered arm in arm, and the reporters from the local newspapers clustered round Lieselotte, photographing her with her bridesmaids, her animals ... "This won't be the last time," they told each other. "We'll do it every single year."

There was a party, of course; the kind of party that just happens but happens rather better if there is someone in the background, putting butter on rolls, opening bottles of wine, of lemonade ... fetching hoarded delicacies out of the fridge.

Ellen had excused herself from the proceedings and for an hour or more had been sending plates of food up to the terrace with its strings of fairy lights, and the music playing on the gramophone now so that everyone could dance. The dentist was dancing with Ursula; Chomsky with Frau Becker's aunt

--and Leon's father with Sophie.

"And if her mother and father had come it would have been a miracle, I suppose," Ellen had said to the headmaster, watching Sophie's vivid face, "and there aren't a lot of those."

"No. But it might work out best like this. Leon's parents have invited her to stay in London; they're good people. She may be someone who has to get her warmth from outside the family."

Later Bennet had taken her aside and said: "We owe this to you, Ellen. If you hadn't befriended Lieselotte and made the links with the village, none of this would have happened."

She had shaken her head--yet it was true that some of what she had imagined that morning by the well and spoken of to Marek, had materialised this day. People had come from everywhere ... had received with hospitality what was offered ... the lion, just a little, had lain down with the lamb.