by Simon Mawer
“Professor Hubert is a great friend of mine,” she announces. “He is a fine musicologist.”
Memories of the war—folk memories, mediated by films and War Picture Library comics—fade. James nudges Ellie. “I just thought Hubert was an old codger who dispensed sherry at his tutorials.”
“How do you know that?”
“I heard someone say.”
“Actually, he’s a leading authority on Monteverdi.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to a talk he gave at the Bach Festival.”
The woman looks round sharply, as though they have been caught talking in class. She has a kind of haggard beauty, like a cliff face eroded by weathering but still full of grandeur. “You mention the Bach Festival,” she says in her measured, clipped English. “It is there that I know Professor Hubert. I am playing there many years now.”
“Playing?”
“I am a cellist. I am Birgit Eckstein and this is my nephew, Horst von Eberhafen.” There is a rapid exchange of words with her nephew. She turns round again. “We are thinking that maybe you can erect your tent in our garden, if you would like. We are having a big garden. And you may use our facilities—for shower and wash—so that will be like a campsite, no?”
“That’s very kind of you,” Ellie says. “I’m sure it would be much better than a campsite.”
“And maybe you can have dinner with us. Would you like that? I have a simple house, but interesting.”
The car has left the valley and is winding up forested slopes, stuttering across a high, wooded plateau. The sun catches the tops of the hills, imposing a dangerous flush of pink on the black trees. After a while they turn off the road and up a gravel drive. The house—simple but interesting—lies against a wooded slope at the back of an expansive lawn. It is like something out of fairy tales, a Hansel and Gretel house built entirely of wood, clad in wood, even tiled in wood—”It is called Schindel,” Horst informs them, adding that he believes the word also appears in English, as “shingle.” The roof slopes down almost to head height. There are dormer windows like startled eyes. Quaint benches guard either side of the front door, while pots of pelargoniums illuminate the window ledges. A doorbell hangs on a spiral spring.
Frau Eckstein almost apologizes as they climb out of the car. “It is perhaps not as ancient as your Oxford colleges, but it is old, perhaps the oldest in this area. The sixteenth century. You may look if you wish.”
They dump their rucksacks on the edge of the lawn and follow the woman into her domain, feeling more and more like Hansel and Gretel in thrall to their captor. Inside there is the resinous scent of wood, the murmur of flexing floorboards, a sensation of quiet, considered age. They duck beneath beams and edge around posts. The stairs are like companionways, the floors like decking. The whole building creaks and shifts around them like a sailing ship under way through the tides of history. Occasional gaps between the floorboards give glimpses into the room below. “That does not make it a very private place,” Frau Eckstein observes, laughing to signal the little pleasantry. “But the bathroom is at least of the twentieth century.”
And indeed, amongst all the woodwork, the bathroom gleams like a pathology lab. There is a white bath, and a bidet with its vague suggestion of sexual impropriety, and a shower cabinet that might be suitable for beaming you up to some orbiting starship. But when they return to the ground floor it is to the pièce de résistance: the music room.
They stand at the door and peer in. The interior is redolent with beeswax. A grand piano stands at the center like a coffin on a catafalque. Cellos, half a dozen cellos, some cased, some naked, gather round like solemn mourners. Photographs of the dead decorate the walls like saints in a chancel. One shows a balding, stout figure and is inscribed with a flourish de Birgit con cariño, Pablo. “Casals,” Frau Eckstein remarks with a careless wave of one hand. Another frame encompasses the austere, aquiline face of Paul Tortelier. “We were very close,” she explains, picking the picture up and gazing at it fondly. “At the conservatoire in Paris.” She replaces it with loving care and indicates another, which shows a younger version of herself, rather stern, rather beautiful, sewn into a long, flared dress and standing beside a mustachioed man with piercing eyes. “Toscanini.” And another—”Furtwängler”—before she looks at Ellie and James with careful eyes, as though measuring them up for something, the cooking pot perhaps. “Do you enjoy the cello?”
“I love the cello,” Ellie says. “I saw Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar at the Royal Festival Hall. She was wonderful.”
The woman sighs, a fraction impatient. “Ah, Jackie, dear Jackie. Great talent but rather too much emotion, I fear. Emotion will always find you out in the end.” She touches one of the instruments. “This is my Guadagnini. Perhaps I will play it for you after supper. Would you like that?”
Of course they would, even if, in James’s case, they really wouldn’t, because the whole stuff of classical music, the seriosity of it, the long gowns and stiff collars and tailcoats, bores him. Guadagnini? What the fuck does that mean?
“But first you must make yourselves comfortable. You must pitch your tent, must you not? Before it gets dark. I am sorry I cannot offer you a room, but with Horst here, you see we have no place. It is not a big house. But it is a bit like being children again, no? Pitching your tent on the lawn, I mean.”
Ellie seems delighted at another little point of contact. “I used to do that with my brother!”
“Of course you did. Everyone does.” Which somehow makes it less remarkable. “And you must use the bathroom if you wish. This, I remember, is the bad thing of camping, that you often have no bathroom.”
So they pitch their tent in the dusk, keeping their voices low to avoid being overheard, giggling like children as they crawl around inside the tent and try to sort things out. What do they think of their hostess?
A sharp old witch.
Rather beautiful. A kindly witch.
Did you see her fingers? Lobster claws. All that cello-playing.
And what was that Gwadaninny business?
Guadagnini. The cello maker. Second only to Stradivarius. Don’t you know anything? It’s probably worth hundreds of thousands.
Not as much as Horst, I’ll bet. Von Eberhafen, no less.
Prussian?
Nazi?
What was she doing during the war, do you think?
Playing to the troops, I suppose.
And Horst? Strutting around eastern Poland shooting Jews in the neck?
He’d only have been about ten.
Hitler Youth, then. Longing to get into action and shoot Jews in the neck.
* * *
They take turns to use the bathroom. The kindly witch has put out towels for them. “Make yourselves at home,” she says, seeing James climbing the stairs. “Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Is that all right? Just come in and find us in the dining room.”
The dining room is on the opposite side of the hall from the music room, a wood-paneled cigar box of a space with a tiled stove in one corner and wall lamps that mimic gas lights. They sit at a polished slab of wood while a small, silent woman—”This is Frau Weber”—brings food in from the kitchen. Conversation is awkward and incidental—how lovely the house, how beautiful the dining room, how fine the setting.
“We had only gas lighting until after the war,” Frau Eckstein explains, “but when my husband came back we decided to move finally into the twentieth century.”
Her husband? Suddenly there is a human shape amongst the inanimate shadows in the corners of the room. Where is her husband? And where has he returned from, with his ideas of finally joining the twentieth century?
“Your husband?” James asks.
“My husband is not alive now. He was sent to the Eastern Front and the Russians took him prisoner. He did not come back until 1952 and then he was no longer”—she pauses and considers carefully what words to use—”the same. Physically. So he did not liv
e many more years. But at least he died in freedom.”
Horst reaches across the table and takes his aunt’s hand. In his precise, perfectly enunciated English, he explains. “Onkel Julius was a courageous man. A doctor of medicine of great learning who did not like the National Socialist ideas of science. That was why he was sent to the Russian front.”
“But it was also why he survived being a prisoner,” his aunt adds. “Because it was a skill that the Russians valued. So he survived in the camps as a doctor and at last he came home.”
There is a silence while they contemplate this, the kind of silence you wish someone would break. James offers himself up as a sacrificial lamb: “My father was in the army. During the war. The Royal Army Service Corps. RASC.”
“I am sure he was also a brave man.”
“I don’t know about that. They used to say Run Away Someone’s Coming.”
Frau Eckstein looks puzzled. “I do not understand. Did your father run away?”
Ellie giggles. Lamely, James explains. “Royal Army Service Corps, R-A-S-C. Run Away Someone’s Coming. It’s a joke.”
“Ah, an English joke.”
“Ironic English humor,” Horst adds.
Frau Eckstein does not attempt a smile. “I expect he did his duty,” she decides, “just as my husband did. That was all that most Germans wanted to do. The sadness is that now their courage cannot be acknowledged by the nation, only by their families and friends. Do you see what I mean? Great Britain can celebrate in public while we can only weep in private. Both my husband and my brother—”
“That is, my father,” said Horst.
“—they died for what? A country that no longer even exists.” She thinks for a moment, then looks as though she has made up her mind. “Do you know what my brother did? Of course you do not. How could you? My brother was a member of the so-called Kreisauer Kreis. How would you say that? The Kreisau Circle? This was a group which met to plan for a Germany after National Socialism, for when the country would be finished with the Hitler regime. They were arrested, many of them, after the…” She hesitates. For the first time her otherwise impeccable English lets her down and she glances at her nephew for help. “Das Attentat vom zwanzigsten Juli.”
“The plot of July against Hitler,” Horst explains.
“My brother—Horst’s father—was brought before the Volksgerichtshof—“
“—the Nazi People’s Court.”
“And was sentenced to death. But he cheated them of that.”
Horst wears the expression of a mask—unwavering, as though his face were pressed out of papier-mâché and glued in place. “He hanged himself in his cell,” he says. “I was six years old. My mother told me he had died in the war. It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I learned the truth.”
Frau Eckstein puts her knife and fork to rest as though to bring the discussion to a conclusion. “While Frau Weber clears the table, I think I will play something for you,” she says, rising from her chair. Solemnly they follow her to the music room, like mourners going to view the deceased. One expects flowers round the coffin, relatives in black, guttering candles. Horst sits at the keyboard while Ellie and James take two chairs as instructed and wait in dutiful silence. Frau Eckstein hitches up her skirt and sits down, pulling the cello—the beloved Guadagnini—into the open embrace of her legs. Her nephew gives her a note on the piano and there is a moment of strange discord while she tunes her instrument. Then she settles. “Bach, of course,” she announces. “The cello suite in C minor. The prelude.”
And she begins, making exact, articulate movements of hands and arm, like a craftsman assembling something out of intricate pieces of wood. But what emerges from this complex labor is not a thing but an ephemeral sound emanating from the body of the instrument like a human voice from the depths. The woman’s eyes are closed. Her head, her whole body, sways to the tempo of the music. It seems to James, who is entirely ignorant of these things, that she is drawing her bow across the raw, exposed surface of her nerves. And the whole room resonates to the cry.
* * *
When the piece comes to an end there is a silence louder than any of the extraneous sounds, louder than the shifting of a chair or the breathing of any of the listeners or the faint touch of her bow on the floor as she lays it down. She opens her eyes and looks at her audience. Ellie is in tears. “That was wonderful,” she whispers, and it was, full of wonder even to James’s untutored ear.
“How do you do that?” He feels foolish as soon as the words are uttered, but the woman smiles kindly on him.
“You know the Oxford joke about lawns? Professor Hubert told it to me when we were in your college: a tourist from America sees the lawn in an Oxford college and asks to the gardener how he can have a lawn like that. He would like one at his house back home. What is the secret? And the gardener says, well, you plants it and you waters it, and then you rolls it and you mows it for two hundred years…”
She does it quite well, even an attempt at the gardener’s accent. You rolls it and you mows it. They laugh.
“So, it is almost like that with playing the instrument,” she says. “Not two hundred years, of course, although this instrument itself has more than that, but many years and much playing. Every day for, perhaps, eight hours. It is not practice, it is study. Like you study the subject you do at university. Only for a lifetime.”
Attempting irony, James says, “That counts me out, then.”
“You play no instrument?”
“I fiddled about with the guitar for a bit. Strumming chords, not much more. R&B, pop, you know the kind of stuff.”
But she doesn’t really. She doesn’t know Rhythm and Blues. She knows of the Beatles—”some good harmonies”—she knows about Elvis Presley. But not the Rolling Stones or the Animals or anything of that kind.
“I think,” Horst decides, clearly bored with the conversation, “that we go back to the dining room where Frau Weber has presented one of her excellent Apfelkuchen.”
And over the apple pie they talk of other things, of where Ellie and James are going, both in the next days and in life; and where Horst is going—into politics, as a member of the SPD and a devotee of its leader, Willy Brandt—although in the immediate future he is accompanying his aunt to Prague.
“Prague?”
“Tomorrow we are going.”
“I have some master classes at the conservatoire,” she explains. “And then a concert with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. It is something I have done for years now. This time it will be the Dvořák. Maybe”—she smiles—”maybe it is always the Dvořák. But I will also play the Brahms Double Concerto with a young Russian violinist. The conductor will be Gennady Egorkin. Do you know Egorkin?”
“By name,” says Ellie.
“He is celebrated,” she says reprovingly, as though mere recognition of the name is not sufficient, “both for his conducting and his piano. One of the great musicians of our age. But he is known also for his—how do you say it?—outspokenness against the system. At the present time he cannot travel to the West, I believe, but to Czechoslovakia this is possible.”
“Only yesterday we met some other musicians going to Prague,” James says.
“Who are these musicians? Perhaps I know them?”
“I don’t think so. A group called the Ides of March.”
“A chamber group?”
“A rock group.”
Her face falls.
“American,” James explains. “Four of them. Long hair, Mexican mustaches, torn jeans. Guitars and drums.”
“Oh.” For a moment she looks downcast, but then she manages a glimpse of optimism. “Yet Prague is still a beautiful city, even with such people. One of the most beautiful cities in the world. And what is happening there now deserves our support, do you not think? Even the support of your Ides of March.”
Of course they agree. It is wonderful, really, the way the people are having their say. And how they are all behind Dubček and his
allies. Even Ellie, who hasn’t yet worked out a way to brand the reformers as bourgeois lackeys of the capitalist world, agrees. Indeed, she waxes positively lyrical about Dubček’s socialists as she and James eat their strudel. Perhaps Czechoslovakia is showing the way to the future. Socialism with a human face. Isn’t that wonderful? An ideal. Something to believe in.
“I don’t think so,” says Frau Eckstein drily. “I think I have already seen too much of idealism and belief to have any faith in either.”
* * *
They leave the house into a night that has the chill of high places beneath a cloudless sky. The moon casts a bleak, monochrome light as they blow up their airbeds, lay out their sleeping bags and struggle to undress within the narrow confines of the tent. Ellie seems changed both by her confession in Strasbourg and by Frau Eckstein’s playing. There is something fragile about her, something tearful and dependent which is quite unlike the girl he thought he knew. They cling together like a couple adrift after a shipwreck. “Isn’t she wonderful?” she says, speaking of Frau Eckstein. “Isn’t she just the most beautiful woman?” Her head is nestled against his neck. For the first time ever, he feels that she has some kind of dependence on him.
“You’re in love with her.”
She punches him lightly in the ribs. “With her music.”
“It was all right.”
“All right? The music was judging you, you weren’t judging the music.”
“I said it was all right.”
“It is not enough to find it all right. You’ve got to find it,” she pauses, considering, “transcendent.”
“I don’t even know what transcendent means.”
“Uplifting. Outlifting. Is there such a word? Taking you out of yourself, out of the world. Transporting you out of the material world and into something beyond.”
“That sounds like religion. You don’t have religion.”
“It’s just a feeling. Like getting high.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have sold that weed.”
