by Aubrey Flegg
‘A powerful violinist, but he’s no fiddle player,’ was the verdict in the pub.
Spring came, and Izaac became restless again. He practised his violin, and played for his pupils, rather as he did in the pub, to amuse. He realised more and more how much he had relied on Louise, until the idea that he couldn’t play without her crept into his mind like a maggot. Her picture, still wrapped, lay propped against the wall. Time and again he was on the verge of opening it when he lost his nerve. What if her picture was no longer as he remembered it? Would she be reproachful for what he had done, or worse, would her eyes now be glazed with the violet bloom of death? On these occasions he would go out and climb the rocks above his house and let the Atlantic storms batter at him until these images faded. So the picture had remained unopened.
The post came by bicycle, ploughing through the blown sand where it invaded the road. There was the monthly envelope with a Swiss stamp and less frequent letters from ‘Wien’ with an Austrian one. This always brought out a smile in the Professor. When an official-looking letter with a Galway postmark arrived, the postman lingered in case the foreigner needed help with it.
When Izaac asked, ‘What does this “Feis Ceoil” mean?’ the postman was already fishing in his pocket for his glasses.
‘Well, now sir, it means Music Festival, sir. Would you like me to read it for you?’ Izaac, not at all affronted, agreed. ‘Dear Mr Abrahams, Knowing your reputation as a distinguished violinist, the Music Festival Board would like to invite you to participate in our annual Feis. We would be greatly honoured if you would conduct a master class for the winners in our strings sections. The fee … ’ The postman, pink to his hair, hastily thrust the letter back at Izaac. ‘We’re honoured to have you here, sir. Will I call for a reply tomorrow?’
‘No, no need.’ He began to close the door and then changed his mind. Would he? Could he? He wouldn’t really have to play. Let them do the playing … Just a bar or two. Yes! If he refused this, he might as well give up music completely. He opened the door; the postman and his bicycle had foundered in the sand. ‘Herr Post!’ he called. ‘Can you spare me five minutes? I will reply!’ As he could find neither ink nor paper it took longer than five minutes. ‘Herr Post’ didn’t seem to be in a hurry and a bottle of stout eased the time.
To be honest, the master class was a disappointment. While there might be splendid fiddle players in the west of Ireland, classical players were few and far between. Izaac found himself with time on his hands so he began to play what the great Fritz Kreisler used to call ‘lollipops’; short pieces to bring a smile to the face of an audience. Izaac was beginning to enjoy himself when he noticed, perched alone on one of the empty seats at the back of his circle, a boy of perhaps six or seven who wasn’t smiling. Izaac looked away … then he looked back. The intensity of the child’s gaze began to bother him. It was a challenge, but Izaac didn’t feel ready for a challenge, he was out of practice. He’d finish with the Schubert ‘Rosam …’ But he didn’t because, without any warning, he found himself remembering the music room at home in Vienna. There were people in the room. They had their backs to him and looked strangely large, but facing him, in a positive drift of scarves, was the Cloud Lady. Her eyes were fixed on him and she was playing for him … for him alone.
It felt as if the Stradivarius was rising on its own. There was only one piece of music that he could play in the circumstances. He tightened his bow, flexed his arm, and played. The Galway audience stirred uneasily. Here was something new, and a little frightening, but Izaac wasn’t playing for them. He was playing for the child at the back just as intensely and just as irresponsibly as Helena had played for him. He played Helena’s ‘Humoresque’, the piece that she had played for him first when he was a three-year-old. The Strad responded. Technically, Helena would have been ashamed of him, but musically her piece had probably only once been performed so well. While Izaac played he watched the boy’s face as challenge changed to awe, and then to rapture. As Izaac lowered his violin he saw the boy turn to the girl sitting beside him with a radiant smile just to share his delight. The girl was Louise.
Izaac waited until morning before he attempted to open the parcel. When he had arrived back from Galway last night it had been dark and he didn’t want his first sight of the picture to be by candlelight. He cut the string. Erich had done a thorough job with layers of tissue, waxed paper, and then corrugated card. Izaac had moved his kitchen table so that the light from the half-door would fall across the picture as he unwrapped it. Now he took a deep breath and lifted the last sheet of wrapping.
Izaac staggered back. He thought he was going to have a heart attack. What appalling trick was this? Adolf Hitler! He dashed to the door, gasping for breath. Rabbits scuttled for their burrows. How could that swine Hoffman have done this to him? He turned to get a kitchen knife to slash the hateful image into strips. Then he hesitated. That frame was not the one he knew; it was a funny shape. He walked back and carefully turned it over. There it was, the so familiar Dutch interior. He carried it to the door. And there she was too, as the Master had painted her all those years ago, as fresh and as demanding as ever.
It was just as he expected; she gave out severely to him over his playing. He was contrite; she was unforgiving. How could he have let himself slip like this? It was like old times. There was, however, one difference, and it affected them both. In mid-sentence Louise would pause, and Izaac would look up and see her lip tremble. She would turn away then and come back full of unnecessary bustle. The same would happen to him; some two-note phrase would remind him of the Brundibár lullaby perhaps, and he would have to stop and blow his nose.
One stormy evening when they had both hovered like this on the edge of the abyss, Louise said, ‘Izaac, this has got to stop, we’ve got to stop playing for ourselves; just this once let’s play for them.’
Michael Joyce hesitated above the Professor’s house and looked out over the bay. A luminous half-light lit the sand. The storm had just about blown itself out; he had been checking his boat to see that it was safe, and had thought to call in at the cottage on his way home. When he looked out over the sand, however, he saw that the Professor was out there, but this was a surprise; he had company!
There were two of them walking away from him, the Professor and a girl in a dress of almost luminous green. As Michael watched, the girl broke away from the older man, and ran barefoot on the sand, spinning to let the wind whip at her dress and at her hair. Michael blinked; a whole flock of children had appeared, laughing and swirling about her as if playing tag. They must have come down by bus, Michael thought, and turned towards the road to see. When he looked back, however, all he could see was the Professor. Of the girl and the children there was no sign.
A flock of shore birds flew past Michael in an excited twitter and settled further down the sand. A curlew called. The Professor bent to pick up a seashell, put it to his ear, and then he walked on out towards the sea. Curious, Michael crossed the sand to where the children had been playing; the only footprints he could find were the Professor’s. But he could see where the Professor had turned to watch them play.
For as long as the Professor lived in the cottage, Michael would often see the girl in green, and sometimes see the children playing on the sand. He never told anybody else. It seemed to him to be a purely natural phenomenon.
ABOUT IN THE CLAWS OF THE EAGLE …
In April 2003, while on a visit to Czechoslovakia, my wife and I visited the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, a former Hapsburg fortress, about an hour’s drive from Prague. Our older than usual guide was a cultured, soft-spoken lady, who nevertheless managed to convey to us the horror of the conditions in the camp. One hundred and forty thousand people passed through the camp, most of them on their way to the Nazi gas chambers. Three thousand five hundred died from the appalling conditions in the camp. Our guide concluded our tour with the following words:
‘We mustn’t forget the victims of the Naz
is, and this terrible history mustn’t be forgot. Ladies and gentlemen, that is all. Thank you for your attention and your pleasant company, allow me to wish you a beautiful stay in the Czech Republic.’
It was only after we had left Terezín to return to Prague that we learned that our guide had, almost certainly, as a child, been a prisoner in Terezín. It was with her exhortation in mind that I began to look at the Terezín story. It is a story of horror, but it is also a story of human and artistic triumph. It is the story of Jewish musicians, dramatists, comedians and teachers who not only entertained their fellow prisoners, but composed and performed to the highest level. Not least among these were the children who sang in choirs and played in the seventy-odd performances of Hans Krása’s opera ‘Brundibár’. Sadly, most of these children died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in the period of the war, as did most of the adult musicians and performers in the camp. Many of the situations and incidents that I have described in this book are based on fact, and my characters have been inspired by real people. However, the book is a work of fiction; the scenes and characters are simply as I have imagined them. My main source of information on the musical life in Terezín has been the book: Music in Terezín 1941-1945 by Joža Káras.
Ever since I first visited, and fell in love with Austria and its people in the 1950s, I have been haunted by the question: would I have been able to resist the lure of, for example, the Hitler Youth. My interest in outdoor activities could easily have drawn me towards them and thence into Nazism. As a teenager I was easily impressed by people more confident than I. One of my great heroes of this time was Heinrich Harrer, a climber famous for his ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, and subsequently for his wonderfully humane account of his seven years in Tibet. How, I wondered, would he have reacted to the emergent Nazism of that time? Then, when halfway through writing this book, I learned to my surprise and dismay that Harrer had indeed served in the SS. More recently still the great German pacifist writer, Günter Grass, has confessed to having been a member of the SS. In Erich I have attempted to show how easy it can be to be drawn into a position of prejudice, and how difficult it is to break out of it.
Izaac Abrahams could be any one of the many Jewish child prodigies that sprang from the nursery of culture that was Vienna at the turn of the last century. There is an excellent description of Vienna at that time in Amy Biancolli’s biography of the great violinist Kreisler: Fritz Kreisler. Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy. Though I learned the violin for a year or two as a youngster, my eyes were opened wide by sitting in on a master class conducted by violinist Mary O’Brien in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. Madame Helena Stronski is not modelled on anyone, but she is wholly inspired by the way in which Ms O’Brien worked to bring out the musicianship in her already competent players. I hope she will not wholly disown my Izaac.
Izaac’s home is based on my parents’ apartment as it was in Vienna in the 1950s, close to the Volksgarten where the lawns were then still being mown with scythes.
In 1938 Hitler had the idea of creating what he intended to be the largest collection of art in Europe. As an aspiring art student he had applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and had been rejected. He never forgave Vienna for this rejection and so chose Linz, his home town, to be the site for his future gallery. The great Jewish art collections were to be his principal source of art, but as his armies swept west and east across Europe this soon turned into wholescale looting of galleries and collections in the conquered states. The Jeu de Paume in Paris was one of his collecting points. Situated in the Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre, it is now a museum of modern art, but during the war, lorries drove in at night from the Place de la Concorde stuffed with looted art. Old masters and the realistic art of the nineteenth century were what appealed to the Nazis. Picassos, Van Goghs, and other ‘degenerate’ works were separated out to be sold. Göring was a regular visitor, travelling in his private train to Platform 1 in the Gare de l’Est. He seldom paid for what he carried away.
It had been known for some time that the atmosphere in the salt mines in the Austrian Lake District was perfect for storing pictures. Altaussee is every bit as beautiful as Eric and Louise found it. The salt mine where the art was stored can be visited. Because of the atmosphere, the timber of the Nazi shelves looks as new today as the day it was put in. So does the box marked ‘Marble, do not drop,’ that once contained a bomb designed to destroy the whole collection. A level or two lower in the mine, reached by a wooden slide, is the chapel where I imagined Louise’s picture being stored. This fascinating story is told by Peter Harclerode and Brendan Pittaway in The Lost Masters. The Looting of Europe’s Treasurehouses.
As always, Norman Davies’ Europe, A History, provides the backbone of my research. There have been numerous television documentaries and videos on the Holocaust in recent times. The Internet is a valuable source of information but I find it is necessary to verify everything I use, checking where possible against a reliable source such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or Norman Davies.
This is the final book in the Louise Trilogy. In Wings Over Delft we met Louise as she was in life, three and a half centuries ago. In The Rainbow Bridge and In the Claws of the Eagle I have used the tools of fantasy to bring Louise to life, while in reality the only way that Louise could come to life would be through the eyes of those who looked at her portrait, or perhaps those who read her story.
Aubrey Flegg
About the Author
AUBREY FLEGG was born in Dublin and spent his early childhood on a farm in County Sligo. His later schooldays were spent in England, but he returned to Dublin to study geology. After a period of research in Kenya he joined the Geological Survey of Ireland; he is now retired. Aubrey lives in Dublin with his wife, Jennifer; they have two children and three grandchildren.
As well as the Louise trilogy, he has published two other books for young people: the first, Katie’s War, is about the Civil War period in Ireland and won the IBBY Sweden Peter Pan Award 2000. His second book, The Cinnamon Tree, is a story of a young African girl who steps on a landmine.
Wings Over Delft is the first book in the acclaimed Louise trilogy, followed by The Rainbow Bridge and In the Claws of the Eagle. Wings Over Delft won the Bisto Book of the Year Award 2004, Ireland’s most prestigious children’s literature prize, and the Reading Association of Ireland Award 2005. It was also chosen for inclusion in the White Ravens 2004 collection – a selection of outstanding international books for children and young adults made by the International Youth Library in Munich.
Aubrey’s books have been translated into German, Swedish, Danish, Serbian and Slovene.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.obrien.ie
First published 2006
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–410–9
Text © copyright Aubrey Flegg 2006
Copyright for typesetting, editing, layout, design
© The O’Brien Press Ltd
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Flegg, Aubrey M.
In the claws of the eagle. - (The Louise Trilogy; bk.3)
1.Portraits - Fiction 2.Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -
Fiction 3.Ar
t thefts - Fiction 4.Young adult fiction
I. Title
823.9’14[J]
The O’Brien Press receives
assistance from
Editing, typesetting and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd
Cover artwork by Henriette Sauvant
Author photograph: Jennifer Flegg
Other Books by Aubrey Flegg
WINGS OVER DELFT
Book 1: the Louise trilogy
Delft, Holland, 1654. Louise Eeden reluctantly agrees to have her portrait painted. Things are moving too fast in her life. Everyone believes she is engaged to Reynier DeVries; she is chaperoned and protected – a commodity to be exchanged in a marriage that will merge two pottery businesses. In the studio with Master Haitink and his apprentice, Pieter, Louise unexpectedly finds the freedom to be herself. Friendship grows into love, but unknown to Louise, her every move is being reported, and behind the scenes a web of treachery is gradually unravelling. Then fate, in the form of a careless watchman at the gunpowder store, steps in …
