Strange Music (27 page)

They were home by now. As soon as they were through the door she flung her arms around him and kissed him passionately; something about his use of that phrase ‘at the time . . .' worried her.

‘There's a deeper level to it,' he said. ‘Something I only realized a few days ago when I was skimming through that sketchbook. There's no face. I didn't give Tony a face.'

She was even more worried now; there was a hint of controlled agitation in his manner – a tension between wanting to tell and wanting not to tell. ‘But it's only about four inches high, darling, hardly—'

‘No. It's nothing to do with the size of the sketch. Even if I'd drawn it . . .' He paused and then abandoned that line of explanation. ‘I don't know if it was the same for you, but I found . . . after a while in the
KL
. . . I no longer looked at faces.'

‘Other prisoners' faces,' she said.

‘Yes, of course. You never looked the
SS
in the face.'

‘Well . . . there was one – ss
-Aufseherin
Heugel – Irma Heugel – who sometimes insisted I look her in the face, and hit me when I forgot, and then after a few weeks of that she'd hit me for doing it. That was her game. One of them. They didn't hang her – just prison.'

‘But I'm talking about fellow prisoners. Even if I
did
look at them, I didn't expect to get any information. Because they were expressionless. They told you nothing. They weren't blank, but they were sort of frozen in some set attitude. I only realized this recently. There was a man who swept our ward, the medical experiments ward, twice a day and he had a permanent . . .
mask
– you couldn't call it anything else – a mask of idiot cheerfulness. Olive-coloured skin and pale turquoise eyes. Blank. Filled with meaningless cheer. But he wasn't the only one. There were hundreds like him – with different frozen expressions – but never changing. Me, too, probably.'

‘Has it upset you?' she asked. ‘You haven't shown any—'

‘No. Upset me? No.' He paused; the stillness was only faintly stirred by his breathing. ‘Upset me? No, but it disappointed me. Shall we go for a walk? We could go to the Plume of Feathers? See if they'll do us a sandwich?'

Angela was now on the borders of her third trimester, so it wasn't the way she would have chosen to pass this summer evening – but . . .

They fed Pippin, bathed her, read her a story, popped her into her portable cot, and left her happily enjoying a second bedtime story with Rachel at the Wilsons.

‘You said “disappointed,”' Angela reminded him as they set off through Gideon's Coppice. ‘The fact that you only remembered—'

‘Yes, I know. Disappointed. What I meant was . . . every time I think I've put Mauthausen behind me . . . No! It's not a deliberate, conscious thing. It's not something I'm
striving
to do. Every time I think it has just withered and faded into the background—'

‘Like the way mountains lose all detail and turn blue or gray or . . . just one single colour, anyway . . . as they fade into the distance?'

He turned the image over in his mind and said, slightly surprised, ‘Yes! That's exactly right. It's still big – because, of course, it's a mountain – but there's no detail and only a bleached-out tone to it. Every time I think the memories have done just that –
pfff!
back comes something vivid.
Still
vivid. Like remembering how facial expressions became meaningless. And it disappoints me because now I've got to wait for
that
to fade into a blue-gray emptiness. And then I wonder what else is locked away in here' – he tapped his forehead – ‘waiting its turn? It's a thousand-headed Hydra.'

‘And all this came about because you looked at that sketch of Tony?'

He did not answer at once. They were approaching the tree beneath which Eric had discovered the body of Marianne's father – another reason why Angela had not relished this particular outing. ‘I still feel guilty, you know,' she told him, ‘despite everything Marianne says.'

Felix stopped and stared at her in surprise. ‘But the man knew exactly what to expect. You told him. Marianne told him. He accepted it because he was so cocksure he could pick holes in it. He thought it was another milk-and-water document like the so-called ‘official' Wannsee protocol. You saw that patronizing twinkle in his eye. Believe me – he forfeited every claim on your conscience, or Marianne's, when he agreed to read it in that spirit. I know he was Marianne's father and in some perverse way she loved him so much she could only hate what he had become, but the world is better off without him.'

She responded with a tight little smile and, taking his arm, she pushed him onward, down the path, saying, ‘Oh, darling, you are so strong in things like that.'

‘Well . . .' He gave a sardonic grunt. ‘That's more or less what we were talking about, isn't it – when will our freedom be one hundred per cent?'

The silence between them was thoughtful rather than tense.

‘I ran across another Mauthausen survivor last week,' he said at length. ‘A designer. A brilliant designer – three-dimensional stuff as well as illustrations and book design. He has no discipline in himself but he understands the discipline of the medium, the materials, the intention. He throws his own wildness at it and the result is . . . electrifying. Fogel is very excited because he's just what Manutius needs as it expands into serious adult books on philosophy . . . maths . . . psychology . . . all that.'

‘Does he have a name?' she prompted.

‘Oh, sorry.' He laughed. ‘Germano Facetti. Italian, obviously. A young resistance fighter. Our paths never crossed in Mauthausen. He was sweeper-upper and keep-
alles-in-Ordnung
in the headquarters block.' Felix laughed again. ‘And you'll never guess. The other day he had a row with Fogel – because he's quite temperamental – and he came back to the design studio, to the corner where he works, he must have been worried that he'd gone too far, because he did the same thing as you: he took everything off his pinboard and sorted it all out and smoothed out the scrunched-up bits and then pinned them all back up again, lined across and down like soldiers on parade . . .'

Angela felt the hair prickle on the nape of her neck. She did not join his laughter. ‘You're right – we won't ever be
really
free, will we? I thought I'd be free after the hanging movies.'

‘But . . .?'

By now they were out of the woodland, walking uphill across the open fields. She stopped.

‘But?' he prompted again.

‘Listen!' High above them a pair of skylarks were singing their endless songs, one almost overhead, the other down the valley a bit, toward the church. ‘Eric says they're like manic auctioneers, inviting lunatics like us to bid on their territory.' She sighed. ‘To anyone else at the Dower House it would seem ridiculous to be holding this conversation in such a tranquil landscape on such a beautiful evening.'

‘There was a skylark over Mauthausen one day, I remember. Birds were pretty rare. It brought on a fantasy of flying away – a helicopter landing and taking me away – taking me here to England.'

‘Fantasy, all right,' she said.

‘Suppose it had happened, though – to you. If a plane had spirited you away to England, would you have joined up and fought against Germany?'

The ‘manic auction' of the skylarks came flooding back.

At length she said, ‘I'd have offered my technical skills in electronics to the English, yes. But would I have pointed a rifle at an ordinary soldier in the Wehrmacht and pulled the trigger? No, I don't think I could have done that.'

As they resumed their walk he said, ‘The English can't possibly realize how lucky they are. No foreign armies have fought across these fields or up and down these lanes for almost a thousand years. No foreigner has kicked them out, confiscated their goods, demanded a tax or a ransom. All this has been theirs and only theirs all that time. To them it must seem the most natural thing in the world. But Nicole was telling me at the midsummer party – we were talking about this very thing – she told me she had an uncle who is still alive at eighty and he has property near the border which was French – his family's – until eighteen seventy, then Prussian, then French again, then German in nineteen fourteen, then French again in nineteen eighteen, then German in nineteen forty, and now French again. And that's just in
one
lifetime!'

‘And we live among them – Nicole and Marianne are even married to them. I mean, the Americans are the same, and still they can't really comprehend it. They think we and our parents and grandparents all just had a bit of bad luck, a deviation from normality. They'll never grasp that it
is
normality for us, that borders are
always
changing, and that power, currency, law . . . everything – changes along with them . . .'

‘So? Are we finally giving up our attempts to persuade the English it's their duty to balance France and Germany
within
Europe?'

She threw up her hands and let them drop, flopping at her side. ‘Ever since I got to know Alex – a man of the world, a man who knows more than he'll ever allow you to guess . . . he knows so much about the world that he can't see the slightest reason why England should get bogged down in parochial little squabbles in Europe. That's Alex almost word for word.' A new thought struck her. ‘Speaking of Nicole . . . she said something else, just the other day . . . we were discussing the English and she pointed out they have no word for
patrie . . . Heimat . . .
and Marianne had a word . . .
hem . . .
something—'

‘
Hembygd
– I've heard her use it.'

‘Something like that. Anyway, Nicole pointed out that probably every European country has a word for that bit of country where you're born. Where you come from. Where you really belong. But the English don't, because for them there's never been any difference between
patrie
and
pays
. . . between
Heimat
and
Vaterland
.
That's why they don't understand us. And never will.' She let out a brief, explosive sigh, partly of exhaustion, partly of satisfaction at having nailed the idea down at last. ‘However,' she went on, ‘for me, concrete music is so much more rewarding than . . . all that. I must get that skylark, or I could see if Ludwig Koch has a good one.'

And so their conversation drifted along this well-trodden path, though each knew that the subject they had started by discussing . . . the questions Felix had raised . . . the answers she had not given – they knew that all of these had been merely shelved . . . yet again.

Wednesday, 18 July 1951

Apart from their castle out in the sticks, the von Ritters had a villa on a peninsula jutting out into a small lake in Mölndal, on the eastern outskirts of Gothenburg. The steelworks were in Eskilstuna, two hundred miles away on the far side of the country.

‘This is one incredible place,' Willard murmured, linking his hands behind his head to brace himself off the pillow and drink in the view from their bedroom, which was at the top of a romantic turret in the style of a French château. It was not yet eight but the day was already a little too hot for comfort. ‘Honey?'

He glanced slantwise across the bed and found it empty.

He rose, slipped on his pyjamas and dressing gown and padded to the door. There he heard her labouring up the winding stair. He went down to meet her but it was too narrow for him to offer her any practical help. ‘You look all in,' he said.

‘Thanks!'

‘No, I mean it. We'll take a vacation when everything's wrapped up here.'

‘Wrapped up!' Her eyes almost vanished upward in their sockets but she waved away any further conversation until they achieved the stairhead. Even then she waited until they were in their room and the door was shut.

‘Oh,' Willard said. ‘I was welcoming the draft.'

She shook her head. ‘Her hearing is amazing and she understands English perfectly – she has some remarkably lucid moments.' She sat on the edge of the bed and slumped. ‘I don't know what we're going to do with her. She couldn't possibly come to the Dower House and—'

‘We can afford – or
you
can afford the absolute tops in care for—'

‘Unh-unhhh. This has been her home for donkey's ears.'

‘Years.'

‘She'd just curl up and die if we moved her anywhere. No, Pappa has left everything to me precisely because he knows I won't touch a penny of it. So there's absolutely no question that—'

‘Well, honey, that's something I want to talk about.'

But as he drew breath to do just that she cut in: ‘No, Willard – darling, darling Willard. No! I realize how much it would mean to you. And I, too, long for all the things we could do with it, but to me it's stolen money.
Worse
than stolen. Every
krona
is a Jew's life, a Gipsy's life, a resister's life, a Red Army soldier's life. I won't touch a penny of it for us, for our own personal use.'

‘But that's absurd!' he said angrily.

‘I'll tell you when I'd make an exception.'

He bit off what he had been going to say and listened.

‘If Siri or Virgil . . . if any of us had an accident or got desperately ill and only some hideously expensive treatment would save us, then that would cleanse the money. It would be “absurd” – as you say – not to use some of it then. And I will also use it to pay for every visit I have to make to Sweden . . . everything connected with Mamma's affairs. Clearly she'll have to stay here. And I'll have to visit quite often, too. That also is reasonable and it's what Pappa wants.'

‘Why d'you always talk about him in the present tense?'