‘What are they saying?’ Todt asked Hufnagel, who was beside him in the conning tower.
‘They say their lifeboats are taking on water,’ replied Hufnagel, who spoke some English. ‘And they say they have wounded. They are asking for medical assistance.’
Krupp, the medical officer, was on the bridge. ‘We could give them some first-aid supplies, Captain. We have enough.’
One of the lifeboats, which seemed to have an officer in it, began to row raggedly towards the U-boat, the men on board calling out hoarsely. Todt drew the Luger from his holster and fired three shots towards them. There was a scream and the sailors huddled for cover in the boat, dropping their oars. ‘Tell them I’ll use the flak gun on them,’ Todt commanded Hufnagel, who relayed the warning in English. To drive the point home, Todt ordered the machine gun to be trained on the lifeboats. The men in them fell silent, with sullen faces.
The Robert Recorde was settling in the water, but the torpedoes had evidently not done enough to send her to the bottom quickly. One of them, in fact, though it had made contact, had failed to explode. Flames were pouring up into the night sky in long, rolling surges of orange, shedding enough heat to make some of the observers shield their faces. Hufnagel watched through his binoculars. A lukewarm attitude towards National Socialism had slowed his progress through the ranks. Then he had fallen in love with Masha Morgenstern, practically on the morning of the Nuremberg Laws. As a result, he had waited in vain for his own command; while Todt had benefited from accelerated promotion. Hufnagel, not a jealous man, regarded it as part of his duty to encourage and advise his younger commander. ‘She’s full of wood. She’ll burn all night. Like a beacon.’
They were only a hundred miles east of Rockall. Hufnagel was right to be concerned. Fascinated as he was by the blaze, Todt gave the order to the deck gun crew. ‘Five rounds, rapid fire. Amidships. Waterline.’
The blasts from the deck gun lit up the sea and the boats in it. There were cries of rage or despair from the survivors in the lifeboats. For the first few moments it seemed the target was unaffected, despite the gaping holes that the explosive shells had torn in her hull. Then Robert Recorde began to sink fast. She went down by the bows, her rusty stern rising out of the water, ignominiously revealing her rudder gear and her single screw. For a few minutes, the stern of the merchantman towered over the scene, unearthly in the U-boat’s spotlight. Then, with a long groan, she sank into the depths. With the flames extinguished, the night rushed in and the stars began to be visible. The air became icy.
‘Waidmannsheil,’ Hufnagel said quietly to the captain.
Leaving a bridge watch strapped to the deck rail to endure the cold and the rough sea, the crew went below. It was their first kill and some of the excited younger men clamoured for a tot of schnapps, or at least a bottle of beer from the store that clinked in the galley. But Todt did not give the order. Instead, he retired to his quarters and drew the thin curtain which separated him from the crew.
The boat’s gramophone was in the captain’s quarters, connected to a series of speakers attached to the bulkheads throughout U-113. Also in the captain’s quarters was the boat’s collection of gramophone records, personally selected by Todt. These included the Unser Führer set of Adolf Hitler’s speeches as well as recordings of Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner. A hiss from the speakers announced that Todt had put the needle on to a record and shortly, the opening chords of Bruckner’s mighty Eighth Symphony rolled through every compartment of the boat.
This choice was not popular with everyone. Most of the crew were very young and almost all were novices.
Some settled down with eyes closed and folded hands to listen dutifully or doze. Others were restless after being in action. The men had their own gramophone in the forward torpedo room, which also served as the crew’s quarters, with their own collection of records, not all of which were officially sanctioned; but there was no competing with Bruckner. They turned instead, as U-113 surged through the night, to their usual pastimes: looking at photographs of their families and girlfriends, playing chess on little portable boards, or leafing through dog-eared magazines they had already read a dozen times.
Le Havre
Aboard the Manhattan, moored in Le Havre, Stravinsky had been dreaming of the Trylon and the Perisphere. They towered, white as bone, in a de Chirico landscape of empty palaces, twilight skies and marmoreal clouds. He dreamed he was walking slowly towards them, his hands outstretched, knowing he would never reach them. He was not sure what had awoken him until he heard it again – a stifled sob. He wondered if he had been crying in his sleep, something that happened to him from time to time. But the sound was made by someone else.
He raised himself in bed and switched on the lamp. Groping for his spectacles, he put them on his nose and peered at Thomas in the bunk next to his. The boy had buried his face in his pillow, but his thin shoulders were convulsing.
Stravinsky spoke quietly. ‘Child.’
The boy stopped moving. He slowly raised his head from the pillow. His face was a tragic mask, his eyelids swollen. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘I’m a light sleeper.’ Stravinsky inspected his little travelling clock, a parting gift from Nadia Boulanger. It was long after midnight. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I miss my family so much.’
‘You’ll see them again soon.’
The boy dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I will never see them.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘They took them away.’ His lips were trembling. ‘They came in the night with the truck, and took them all, my mother and father, my uncle and my aunt.’
‘Who took them? Where were they taken?’ The boy didn’t answer, and the questions hung in the air. Stravinsky knew that modern Germany was a state in which people were arrested at night and never returned, and nobody asked why or where. ‘But why didn’t they take you, Thomas?’
‘They didn’t find me, because my mother made me sleep with the neighbour, Frau König.’
‘I see.’ Stravinsky tried to unravel what the boy was saying. ‘Your neighbour’s name is König?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was a relation?’
‘No.’
‘But your name is König, too.’
‘No. My name is—’ The boy stopped, his face panicky.
Stravinsky raised his hand tiredly. ‘You need not tell me your name. Your mother sent you to sleep with this Frau König to keep you safe?’
‘It was an arrangement.’
‘What sort of arrangement?’
‘My mother gave Frau König her things. Her gold sovereigns.’
‘To take care of you?’
‘Frau König’s son died. Last year. So she had a spare bed.’
‘And a passport?’ Stravinsky guessed.
The boy looked up quickly, his tear-stained face scared and guilty. ‘I should not have said anything.’
‘No, you should not,’ Stravinsky said. ‘And you must not say it again. Not to anybody.’
Thomas twisted his hands together. ‘I won’t.’
‘Especially not when you enter the United States. Whatever your name was before, you are Thomas König now. When you show your passport to the immigration officer, you must not flinch. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ the boy whispered.
‘And you must not breathe a word of this to anyone on board. Not to anyone.’ Stravinsky raised his finger sternly. ‘Not a soul. Or you will be sent back to Germany.’
‘I think I would rather go back and die than live alone,’ the boy said in a low voice.
‘That is nonsense,’ Stravinsky said sharply, then looked at him more compassionately. ‘It may seem preferable to you to give up now, but you have a life to live, Thomas. You have a duty to live it for the ones you have left behind. Do some good in the world to repay the evil that was done to you and to them. Otherwise where would the world end up?’ He paused. ‘What were they ar
rested for?’
‘My father and my uncle said things about the Nazis. They confessed against Hitler in the church.’
‘Confessed? What do you mean? What confession? What church?’
‘They are pastors. Lutherans. They call it the Confessing Church, because they believe they must speak the truth openly, before God, no matter what. They said that the treatment of the Jewish people was wicked. They were warned many times, and my mother begged them to be silent, but they wouldn’t be silent.’
‘And for that they were arrested?’
‘They have been sent to a concentration camp.’
‘So you are not a Nazi, after all?’
‘No. They expelled me from school because I would not give the Hitler salute or join the Hitler Youth.’
‘You were going the same way as your father and uncle? Your mother must have been distraught. How old are you, really?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘That is more believable. You don’t look eighteen.’
‘I watched everything from Frau König’s window,’ Thomas went on. ‘But my mother didn’t even look up at me as they took her away!’ The boy started sobbing in earnest, burying his face in his hands.
‘The reason for that,’ Stravinsky said, ‘was that she did not want to betray your hiding place.’ Thomas quietened, making only those little gasps that had disturbed Stravinsky’s nightmare. Stravinsky took a cigarette from the pack in his bedside cabinet, then thought better of lighting it. He put it away again. ‘Come, Thomas,’ he said at last. ‘Sit with me.’
Thomas groped his way to Stravinsky’s side. Stravinsky put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. ‘Honour your mother’s sacrifice. Do what she asked you to do. You must be the best Hitler Youth in the world now, at least until you are settled in America, and safe from harm. You understand?’
Thomas nodded.
‘Play your part. Be eighteen, not sixteen. Be a good Nazi. I will help you. Thomas König is not such a bad name. Eh? It was a good thing that Frau König kept her part of the bargain. But then, you brought her dead son back to life, and that is no mean feat.’ He offered Thomas his handkerchief. ‘Have you slept at all?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I can’t stop thinking about them. I think they are all dead by now.’
Stravinsky could make no comment on that. ‘You should try to sleep. Would you like me to tell you a story?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Then put your head on the pillow.’ The boy obeyed, lying back and gazing up at Stravinsky with bleary eyes. ‘I will tell you about my first great success. Yes?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘It was a long time ago, in the spring of 1913. I was a young man, I suppose about nine or ten years older than you are now. Nobody had heard of me. I had composed a ballet called The Rite of Spring. It was the story of a young woman who is so full of life that she cannot stop dancing, and in the end dances herself to death. It was to be performed in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, by the Ballets Russes. On the opening night, everybody came in their smartest clothes. They were expecting a pleasant, dull evening – you know?’ Stravinsky folded his arms and bowed his head in imitation of the Dying Swan. The boy nodded. ‘But my music was considered very revolutionary. Nobody had heard anything like it before. It was harsh, what we call dissonant. Do you know what dissonance is?’
‘No,’ Thomas replied.
‘You understand diodes and triodes, but not dissonance? Well, let us say that dissonance is when the composer squeezes lemon-juice in your eyes. You understand?’
The boy nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘So there was the dissonant music, to begin with. The audience started to shout and whistle. They weren’t happy. Other people were interested in the dissonance, and told them to shut up. And then, among all this tumult, the dancers appeared on the stage, young girls and boys. But they danced in a new way. Like this.’ Stravinsky made exaggerated, angular jerks with his arms and head. This brought a slight smile to the boy’s lips. ‘This was also something nobody had seen before. So the audience began to howl and stamp even more, and the ones who were enjoying it began to shout back even louder. But all this was as nothing to what happened when the star of the show appeared. Do you know who Nijinsky is?’
‘Well, Nijinsky was the greatest dancer in the world, but between you and me—’ Stravinsky twirled his forefinger around his ear. ‘He was a little crazy. In fact, more than a little crazy. And his dancing was crazy, too.’ His dark eyes opened very wide to express insanity. ‘Completely crazy – or so it seemed to those bourgeois people who had come to see frilly tutus and nice legs. So instead of watching and listening, they began to fight each other, right there in the theatre. They made so much noise that the performance could hardly continue. I was very angry. I got up from my seat and I told them, “Excuse me, but go to the devil, all of you.” And I walked out. I left them to fight and stamp and scratch each other’s faces and insult my art. I walked around the Champs-Élysées in a temper. But I could hear the rioting from streets away. It was a disaster.’
‘You said it was your greatest success,’ the boy said sleepily.
‘And that is true. The next day, the newspapers were full of the story. Everyone was talking about The Rite of Spring. And the next night, all of Paris came to see what these crazy Russians were doing. By the end of the week, everybody had heard of Igor Stravinsky. I was the most celebrated madman in France. So you see, my greatest success was a disaster.’
The boy smiled, but his eyelids were heavy now. ‘I would like to have seen that.’
‘The sight of a stockbroker punching a hole in another stockbroker’s opera hat is a touching spectacle. But close your eyes now, Thomas.’ He watched the boy’s face slacken as he drifted into an exhausted sleep. He reached out and touched the short blonde hair lightly. This motherless lamb had slipped away from the wolves. The son of Christians who dared criticise the regime, a crime which had carried a death-warrant, he had assumed the name of a dead boy. And his mother had taken his true identity with her to her grave. Her parting gift to him, a theft that had saved his life.
When he was certain Thomas would not wake again, Stravinsky sighed heavily, and lay down beside him, wondering whether sleep would come again.
‘I have good news,’ Katharine told Stravinsky the next morning at breakfast. ‘Our baggage has arrived during the night. And so have our papers. Just in time – we sail tomorrow.’ Stravinsky nodded without much interest as he stirred his coffee. He had slept badly, she thought. The dining room was even more crowded today, the waiters rushing to and fro with laden trays. The ship was being joined by passengers all the time, and the atmosphere of urgency was growing. ‘Where’s your little Nazi?’ she asked.
‘Still asleep. He passed a bad night.’
‘You seem to enjoy his company.’
‘He tells me about things.’
‘The World’s Fair?’
‘He’s particularly interested in the scientific displays.’
She pulled a face. ‘These Fascists and their worship of machinery.’
Igor seemed unable to even hold his head up. He spoke to his coffee. ‘One day, I suppose, we will see an orchestra of robots play a symphony written by a calculating machine.’
‘I hope I’m not around to see that day.’
‘One never knows what one will see in one’s lifetime,’ he said.
She laid her hand over his. ‘We are leaving Europe tomorrow, Igor.’
‘And perhaps for the last time,’ he replied.
‘You’re depressed. But remember, you’re going to a new life. Leaving behind the past, with its sorrows.’
‘I’m leaving my dead behind. My wife, my child, my parents. A man should not be separated from his dead.’
‘That’s morbid,’ she said.
He raised his eyes heavily to hers. ‘I feel that I am leaving half of myself behind me. I don’t think I will ever compose again.’
‘I will never complete it. My life’s work has been a failure.’
‘It hasn’t. You are still at the forefront of music.’
‘I’m a little old to be a daring young composer any more,’ he replied sardonically, ‘don’t you think, my dear?’
Katharine poured him more coffee without replying. Since the 1920s, Igor had been in a liaison with Vera de Bosset, a love affair to which poor Katya, a chronic invalid, had acquiesced, sometimes nobly, sometimes with feeble rages. And now Igor had lost Vera, with her huge eyes and long limbs, who could express herself in dance or in brilliant, witty paintings; she was the half of himself that was being left behind. Wife, daughter, mother and lover – Igor had lost all four female archetypes in the last year. What would Jung have said?
Across the room, Rachel and Masha Morgenstern were also in elegiac mood. In Rachel’s case, it was mock-elegy.
‘Ah, my dear Masha,’ she said, spreading marmalade on her toast, ‘we are the last two rosebuds on the bush. The last breath of perfume before the bottle is stoppered forever. Cultured, pretty, gay, in us you see the last two kneidels on the plate, before it is taken back to the kitchen and scraped into the bin.’ She bit a corner off her toast, and continued with her mouth full. ‘The last two bublitchki the fat man just couldn’t eat.’
‘I get the picture,’ Masha cut in. ‘You need not continue.’
‘What are you staring at?’ Rachel asked, noticing that her cousin’s attention was elsewhere. She looked over her shoulder and rolled her eyes facetiously. ‘Oh, of course. The great Stravinsky-Korsakoff. Honestly, I don’t know what you see in that man. He’s as yellow as a lemon this morning, and looks twice as sour.’
The Ocean Liner Page 6
