The Ocean Liner

by Marius Gabriel

  Masha looked at it blearily. ‘A book is always a good thing. First, what’s your name?’

  ‘Thomas König.’

  Masha patted the space beside her on the bunk, where her suitcase lay open. ‘Then come and sit with me, Thomas König, and show me your book.’

  The boy opened the book eagerly on his lap. ‘It’s about the World’s Fair in New York. I’m— I’m going there.’

  ‘You must be very excited, Thomas König.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ He showed her the photographs, some of which were in colour. ‘This is the Trylon, and this is the Perisphere. The Perisphere is eighteen storeys tall and 628 feet in circumference. The Trylon is sixty storeys tall. You can see them from five miles distant.’

  Rachel was on the point of pushing the youth out, with his cropped head and his proudly displayed swastika. But Masha, for some reason, was willing to indulge him. ‘That is very tall.’

  ‘And look, this is the Court of Power. It’s joined on to the Plaza of Light. These are the fountains which play music and are lit in colours at night. And here is the Singing Tower of Light.’ He bent his narrow head over the photograph. ‘It says “Westinghouse”. That’s an American electrical company. They have a display of all the ways electricity can be used.’

  ‘Including to extract confessions?’ Rachel asked.

  Masha laid a finger on her lips to silence her cousin. ‘What else?’

  He turned to a page he had marked. ‘This is the General Electric Pavilion. Do you see this apparatus? It creates a lightning bolt of ten million volts. The onlookers are blinded and deafened.’

  ‘Isn’t that frightening for them?’ Masha asked gently.

  ‘Yes, but I will go there nevertheless. I’m not afraid.’

  ‘You are very brave.’

  ‘There are a lot of statues of naked people. Both men and women. But you don’t have to look at them if you don’t want to. And all the film stars are there. Johnny Weissmuller comes every day. He is Tarzan, you know. His name is German, but he is Hungarian.’

  ‘So much the worse for him,’ Rachel said dryly.

  ‘And Gertrude Ederle. She was the first woman to swim the English Channel. Her parents were Germans.’

  ‘Have you done?’ Rachel demanded.

  The boy began to stammer again. ‘There are inventions of all kinds – and – and – there are robots and machines—’

  Masha laid her hand on the book. ‘Tell me, Thomas, why do you want to show me these things?’

  ‘I invite you to come and see them with me, Fräulein.’

  Masha uttered a little sound like a laugh. ‘How kind of you.’

  ‘I have two tickets.’ Carefully, he took the bright coupons out of the inside cover of the book. ‘This one is for a child and the other is for an adult. The adult one is for you. Look, they have the Trylon and the Perisphere printed on them. You see? And underneath it says “The World of Tomorrow, Admit One”. Take it.’

  ‘I will not be going to America, but thank you.’

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘Thomas, this ticket surely belongs to a relative. An uncle, perhaps.’

  ‘No, it’s yours. I am giving it to you.’

  ‘What has got into your head?’ she asked wonderingly.

  His ears were glowing red again, but he met her eyes. ‘If you get off the boat in Southampton, you will not be able to see the World’s Fair with me,’ he said. ‘And if you go back to Germany, they will kill you.’ There was a silence. The boy got up, all elbows and knees. Even his thighs were flushing now. ‘You may keep the book as long as you like. I’ve read it all.’ He presented it to her, and bowed formally. ‘You mustn’t lose the ticket, Fräulein, or you will have to buy another.’

  He hurried to the door, and waited there with his face averted until Rachel, without a word, let him out.

  When he reached his cabin, Thomas found Stravinsky lying on his bunk, half-undressed, with one arm flung over his eyes.

  ‘You have to do something,’ he said sharply.

  Stravinsky peered at him with bleary eyes. ‘About what?’

  ‘About Fräulein Morgenstern.’

  ‘Is that where you have been? To her cabin?’

  ‘I gave her my ticket to the World’s Fair. But I don’t think she will use it.’

  ‘Thomas,’ Stravinsky said wearily, ‘didn’t you promise me that you would stay in character? That you wouldn’t betray yourself to anyone on board this ship?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas replied tersely.

  ‘Well, then? What good Nazi would bother himself with the fate of a Jewess?’

  ‘They will kill her there!’ the boy burst out. ‘Don’t you understand? You cannot be so cold!’

  ‘You remind me of my own children,’ Stravinsky replied ironically. ‘I feel quite paternal when you insult me. Are you in love with this female?’

  Thomas’s face twisted. ‘I am only a boy in her eyes.’

  ‘That is certainly true, and remember that you are even younger than you claim. I hope you understand that there is no chance of her returning your feelings.’

  ‘My feelings have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘It seems to me they have a great deal to do with it. What is she to you?’

  ‘She is beautiful,’ Thomas shot back. ‘The most beautiful girl I ever saw.’

  ‘I assure you she is quite an ordinary young person,’ Stravinsky said gently.

  ‘She is not ordinary. She is sensitive, and kind, and gentle, and special. How can you think her ordinary?’

  ‘And you love her.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it.’

  ‘You are certainly a very strange boy,’ Stravinsky commented. He stared at the pale, passionate face. ‘What do you expect me to do, Thomas?’

  ‘You must think of something. You are the only one she respects. It’s your duty!’

  ‘I warn you, Thomas, if you give yourself away because of this infatuation, they will turn you back in New York, and you will be sent home to Germany.’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘You must help!’

  ‘If I agree to think about it, will you leave me in peace? I have a migraine.’

  ‘Yes, I promise.’

  Stravinsky covered his aching eyes again. ‘Then not a sound more out of you until morning.’

  Thomas sat hunched on the edge of his bunk as Stravinsky drifted into an uneasy sleep. His mind was in turmoil. He had blurted out his feelings without thought. But from the instant he had seen Masha Morgenstern, something magical had entered his life, something that made him feel strong enough and brave enough to endure the loss of his family and face the terrors of an unknown future.

  It was as though, in the arid desert that his young life had become, he had stumbled across an oasis, a pool full of sweet water that rippled and shimmered and that might sustain him.

  In her presence he felt a quiet joy, in her absence an empty yearning. He had fastened on her, and though he could not have said why, he knew that what he felt was as intangible as the air he breathed, and as real.

  Was this love, as Stravinsky had called it? He hadn’t thought of it as that. Love, he had been taught, was what you felt for God. But God hadn’t given Thomas much cause to love Him. His father, always so remote and severe, had climbed proudly into the Gestapo truck, and had embraced martyrdom in the name of love. He had led with him his brother and their wives, leaving Thomas an orphan.

  He had always seemed more real in his church than in their home, where he was so often silent. When the Brownshirts had picketed Saint-Johannes, turning away parishioners and breaking the stained-glass windows, his face had been alight with joy. He had marched past the glowering faces and threatening rifle butts with his head held high.

  That was admirable, to be sure. It was in the tradition of Martin Luther, the founder of their church. But what Thomas felt was something different. It was not a desire to die, bu
t a desire to live. God could do without him. God was already claiming truckloads of lives. If he was to serve, Thomas would serve Masha. If he was to love, he would love Masha. He knew that there was a gulf between them, and it was unlikely that he could ever bridge it, but the thrilling, breathtaking fact of her existence was enough to give his life meaning.

  Stravinsky cried out quietly in his sleep, an inarticulate sound of grief. Thomas covered him gently with the blanket, soothing him. Here was another strange, dry man, who had imperceptibly taken the place of his father. He trusted Stravinsky, and trusted that he would find a way to keep Masha Morgenstern from marching, as his father had done, to her doom.

  A bitter wind swept off the Channel, scouring the superstructure of the Manhattan. On the promenade deck, sheltered by the canvas awnings that the crew had stretched to keep out the wet, Toscanini and Carla huddled under rugs. Both had been wretchedly sick. The mountainous grey waves rolled past, queasily glimpsed by the light that was flaked off Manhattan by the gale.

  ‘Yet again you have betrayed me,’ Carla said. ‘Yet again. After so many betrayals and humiliations.’

  ‘Is now the time to discuss this?’ he growled into his blanket.

  ‘I found her letters when I was packing in Kastanienbaum.’

  Toscanini grunted. ‘I hope you were entertained.’ But he glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes.

  ‘I was disgusted. An old man like you. Shameful.’

  He drew his bushy eyebrows down, huddling deeper into the rug, wishing he could shut out her voice, which shook with anger and pain. ‘I do not expect you to understand.’

  ‘Understand!’ Carla retched futilely over the bowl she held. Her stomach had long since emptied. ‘No, I do not understand. I found the menstrual bandages she sent you. The posies of her pubic hair. Flowers from my little garden. What kind of woman sends such things to a man?’

  ‘A woman such as you could never understand.’

  ‘A sexual maniac. Pathological. And younger than your own daughters.’

  ‘She is not younger,’ he muttered.

  ‘She is barely older than them. She was their friend. What would they say if they knew? Did you think of that, Arturo? As for the correspondence, I have never read such obscenities. They appalled me.’

  ‘Why did you persist in reading, then?’

  ‘The folly of it, Arturo. What if her husband comes across these things? She will end up like poor Gretel Neppach.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic.’

  ‘Melodramatic! If this thing is discovered, you will be ruined. We will all be ruined. What possessed you to take such a risk?’

  ‘Her marriage is unhappy.’

  ‘You were jealous of her husband, you mean. He is young and virile. While you can barely empty your bladder.’

  ‘In any case, it is all over now.’

  She retched again, groaning. ‘Did it take another war to end it?’

  ‘What did you do with the correspondence?’ he asked, his voice barely audible above the wind that battered the canvas awnings.

  ‘I burned the flowers from her little garden.’

  ‘And the letters?’

  ‘I have brought them to you. So that you can see your folly.’

  He made no reply, but he thought, thank God, they are all that’s left me.

  ‘She must be a madwoman. And you are the same. A mad old man. Psychopathia sexualis senilis. That is what Dr Eisenberger called it.’

  He opened one eye. ‘You showed the correspondence to Eisenberger?’

  ‘I asked for his opinion on your sanity. He said it was a form of sexual dementia of the elderly. He attributed it to syphilis.’

  ‘I do not have syphilis,’ he snarled, glaring at her. ‘You had no right to show my private letters to that prating Swiss fool. Is that what you were occupied with all this time, while I waited for you in an agony?’

  ‘I nearly didn’t come.’ She lay back in the deckchair, exhausted. ‘I wish I were dead. You have broken my heart for the last time.’

  ‘You have never understood my passionate nature, Carla.’

  ‘Haven’t I supported you for forty years? Looked after your business affairs? Nursed you when you were ill and put up with all your madness? And you say I do not understand you.’

  ‘There is a dimension of me that you never shared. That you always refused to share.’

  ‘The old story again. Your justification for licentiousness. It’s finished, Artú. I am leaving you.’

  ‘I will never give you a divorce,’ he said quickly.

  ‘A divorce?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I will not dignify your treachery with a divorce. Besides, unlike you, I believe in the sanctity of marriage.’

  ‘What are you talking about, then?’

  ‘A legal separation. I will go my way and you will go yours. I want nothing more to do with you.’

  ‘What about the children?’

  ‘You old fool, do you think they don’t know by now what you are? Worry about your public, rather. When they find out that the great Toscanini is a fraud, a lying, deceitful wretch who cannot keep his hands off women half his age, then you will have something to worry about.’

  ‘Carla, I cannot live without you.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before.’ She heaved herself to her feet with difficulty. She had once been a ballerina, her body alive with grace. In the past forty years her body, like her face, had grown heavy. What had once been a grave beauty had become lumpishness. ‘I’m going to my cabin. You may stay here and freeze to death, for all I care.’

  Toscanini watched her make her way down the deck, tottering as the ship surged. She had been allocated a stateroom to herself, a great honour on such a crowded voyage, but the door was clearly locked to him.

  When she had vanished, he lowered his chin on to his chest. How was he going to face an existence without Carla? His art had been his life, and she had taken care of all the rest for four decades. She had been the roof under which he had sheltered.

  Of course he had been unfaithful to her. But the daemon that possessed him demanded the regular sacrifice of a young woman’s body. Sometimes two or three at a time. The daemon insisted that he obey its commands to sin, to lose himself in passion without considering the consequences. To be as wild as those ancients who rutted with every woman they met, with goats and birds and trees and stones. Without that wildness, the daemon would withdraw its gift, and he would be nothing.

  His gift was everything to him – this ability to bring out the best in a performer, an orchestra, a lover.

  He allowed the thought of Ada Mainardi to come into his mind. The gulf of separation was sickening. He missed her with a pain that was like death. And mingled with the pain, that rush of desire to the heart.

  Those last weeks in Kastanienbaum had been dreadful. The agonising difficulties of seeing Ada for more than a fleeting moment had driven him half-mad. And then, out of a clear sky, the thunderclap of Gretel Neppach’s death. The daughter of his dear friend, Bruno Walter; that lovely girl, who for years had been begging her husband for a divorce. Instead, he had shot her as she slept, and then turned the revolver upon himself.

  The tragedy had burst on them all like the judgment of a wrathful God. The days after it had been a slow nightmare: the wretched funeral, at which the only other mourners had been the Walters and Ezio, Gretel’s lover. The pitiful spectacle of Bruno, shattered by grief, begging him to take his place at the Lucerne Festival. Of course, he’d had to agree. But how had he managed to conduct Mozart in Bruno’s place? Mozart 40! The G minor symphony! With the tears streaming down his face on the podium!

  And of course, Carla was right, in her blunt way. It could have ended like that with him and Ada. If Mainardi had lost his reason as Neppach did, who knew how it could have ended?

  As much as the eruption of war into their lives, it had been those two revolver shots that had sobered them. That what if.

  There had been moments ove
r the course of the affair when he would have welcomed a bullet in the heart, either to end the wretchedness, or because Ada had given him a joy he would not experience again in his life.

  Yes, he had been mad. A madness that Carla would never understand. He clutched the blanket in his hands as he remembered Ada, in that hotel room, crouched between his thighs, his manhood quivering in her mouth. Those terrible kisses that had sucked his soul from his body.

  And then he, in turn, returning that cannibal kiss, intoxicated by her, addicted to her, while she cried out Artú, Artú, you are my god.

  Yes, he had begged Ada for those flowers from her garden, for the handkerchiefs stained with her blood, the downy curls from her sex. He had been unable to think of a life without her. And now it was here, that life without her. She in Fascist Italy, he on his way to America. It was not likely they would ever meet again, in this world or the next.

  How would he survive, without Ada, without Carla?

  Southampton

  The SS Manhattan steamed up the silver Solent with black clouds trailing from her stacks and spreading into the leaden morning sky. The overnight crossing had been rough, but not unbearably so, and scores of passengers had turned out of their bunks early to be on deck for the arrival at Southampton. They were visible from shore, crowding the rails in groups, muffled against the cold.

  The sky over the docks was filled with hundreds of elephantine barrage balloons. The docks themselves bristled with anti-aircraft batteries. Anxious Tommies with Lewis guns peered from little molehills of sandbags. Along the wharf, dozens of troop transports were moored, steady tides of khaki cannon fodder trudging on to each one. A quarter of a million men were bound for France.

  In her hotel smoking room, poised against a view of the harbour, Fanny Ward, the Eternal Beauty, was entertaining the Press.

  ‘Miss Ward, are you afraid of bombing?’

  Miss Ward bridled. ‘I’m not running away, if that’s what you mean. I’m returning to New York to fill several stage and radio engagements.’

  Nobody was so ungentlemanly as to ask what those engagements might be, or to point out that she was leaving behind her beautiful Berkeley Square apartment, with its antiques gathered over a long career in silent films and vaudeville.