A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  Méret had nothing to say to this. Was patriotism simple? She had no idea. There were so many countries in her family history about which to feel remotely patriotic.

  “Laudable,” said Rosen, “but patriotism is never enough.”

  “And . . .” she hesitated, not wishing to invoke another response she would not understand. “And there is so little written for solo cello. So much is with piano accompaniment. Papa plays the piano, but Papa is hardly ever at home in the evenings.”

  “Quite so . . . the theatre.”

  “Yes. The theatre.”

  “Then we must find . . . no, I must arrange music for you. I shall be as fast and as cavalier as Liszt was with Bach. Now tell me, who do you really like?”

  In truth she did not dislike Kodály. His Háry János spoke to her as a fairy tale might. The music made her want to laugh and dance, although she did little of either.

  “Schubert,” she said, and meant it. “And Mozart and Scarlatti and Bach and Fauré and Debussy and—”

  “Stop, stop,” said Rosen. But he was smiling as he said it.

  “And what of Johann Strauss? Is he not synonymous with Vienna? Is he not part and parcel with Klimt and Schnitzler?”

  She’d never heard of Klimt or Schnitzler. She thought synonymous might mean “the same as” and took her chance.

  “That would simply be patriotic,” she said. “Besides, one can have too much of a good thing.”

  Rosen was laughing now, happily hoist with his own petard. He rose from his chair, touched her gently on the shoulder, took his cigarettes from his jacket pocket, tapped one against the silver case, lit up and stood, still smiling, almost giggling through the first puffs of smoke, looking out of the window onto the Berggasse.

  When he returned, stubbing out the cigarette with a muttered “filthy habit,” he said, “How right you are, young lady. One cannot waltz through life. The waltz is . . . a pleasant diversion . . . let us save it for a celebration. Now, is there anything you would like to ask me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am to tell Papa when I get home whether or not I am your pupil.”

  “Child, could you not read my face, the pleasure I took in your playing of a miserable work? Indeed, you are my pupil. I have never heard anyone of your age play so well.”

  “And . . .”

  “And?”

  If she understood what he had said about the waltz aright, he had given her her cue.

  “Papa says we live in interesting times.”

  Rosen looked a little baffled, but nodded and agreed.

  “But Papa doesn’t mean interesting, he means bad.”

  Rosen thought for a moment.

  “And your question is?”

  “Papa says the Germans locked you up. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” said Rosen. “Not for long, but they imprisoned me near Berlin, in a camp called Oranienburg.”

  “Was it . . . awful?”

  “Yes. It was awful, but it could have been worse. The Nazis weren’t trying to kill us, they were trying to scare us.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what? Why were they trying to scare us or why did they lock us up?”

  She had meant both and said so softly, wondering if she had not already overstepped the mark. But Rosen sighed and stretched and seemed far more sad than annoyed.

  “They locked up many artists and intellectuals. We were all people who did not share their politics or who had no politics at all—although I find that hard to believe whenever I hear it uttered, and in the long run ‘I have no politics’ is a cardboard shield that won’t stop a single bullet—and the hope was that we would be frightened into conforming or leaving. As you can see, I chose the latter.”

  “Why Vienna? Why not London or Paris?”

  “It’s easier to say why not Vienna than why Vienna? Music flows through the city deeper than the Danube. The opera houses thrill to Wagner every evening, and every afternoon the cafés relax to a thé dansant. Haydn, Schubert, and Mozart all lived and worked here . . . Beethoven even played piano in a café on Himmelpfortgasse . . . to this day Franz Lehár sits at his piano and composes fripperies with a songbird perched upon his shoulder and, who knows, perhaps whispering the melody in his ear? What do you suppose the bird is? A linnet? A nightingale?”

  One hand seemed to pluck the linnet from his shoulder, to cup and hold it at his ear—then the palm opened and released the invisible bird to the air.

  He was playing with her. She realized that. Grown-ups who had little knowledge of children, grown-ups without children of their own, often played more than her parents, and hence overplayed. The mixture of playful gestures and complex words did not win her. She had no idea what a frippery was and Lehár was just a name to her.

  “And if music were not enough,” he went on, strung out on the washing line of his own words, “it is a city of ideas, of Freud and Herzl and Wittgenstein. Did you know the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died here?”

  Of all those names the only one she knew was Professor Freud’s.

  “No,” she replied, “I did not. But I know Professor Freud. He lives in the next apartment block.”

  “Ah, . . . I have not yet had the honour.”

  “I could introduce you.”

  Rosen smiled at the precocity of this, and her brain found time to catch up with her tongue.

  “I mean . . . Papa could.”

  “Of course. Papa.”

  “Papa says . . .”

  She felt the sentence dribble away to nothing.

  “Papa says?”

  “Papa says that you left everything behind when you fled Germany.”

  Rosen gazed around the room, his right hand sweeping in an encompassing gesture, encouraging her to look where he looked.

  “Well, not everything. The cello came with me, the piano followed a day later. And while these bookcases look to me as though they have stood here empty since Franz Josef was a boy, my books will arrive from Berlin any day now to fill them. And behind my cartloads of books, there will be German Jews by the thousand, some lucky enough to take it all with them, some who will most certainly, as you put it, leave everything behind.”

  “Papa says it could not happen here. But he says it in the same tone of voice with which he says ‘let Papa kiss it better.’”

  She could tell Professor Rosen was weighing up what he might say next. He was holding in the balance her urgent questions and her tender age.

  “Your father is a kind and clever man. Without him I might be stranded at the border, or searching fruitlessly for an apartment. But . . .”

  He let the word hang, just as though he had his foot upon the sustain pedal. A prolonged “but” dying away in the vast emptiness of the room, only to be caught at its faintest.

  “But . . . you hear the music in your father’s voice aright. He cannot kiss it better. This is beyond repair. It could happen here. It will happen here.”

  “Will you tell me? Will you tell when you think ‘it’ will happen here?”

  “If I have foresight enough to know, I will tell anyone who will listen, but first of all I shall tell you. I will leave before it happens here. And if I leave, you will be the first to know.”

  “And should I leave? Should Mama and Papa leave?”

  “It’s not for me to say. It is for your father to decide. And, of course, you’re not Jewish.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “In a year or two or five who knows? Right now it is all the difference in the world. But we are forgetting something vital as we redraw the map of Europe.”

  “We are?”

  “The piano. You have prepared a piece for the piano?”

  “Yes. But I have another question.”

  “Ask, child.”

  “Whatever happens when I play the piano, I am still your pupil? You said I was your pupil.”

  “And so you are.”

  “Whatever happens?”

  “Whatever happens.”
<
br />   She played what Papa called her party piece, as she had played it at family gatherings since the age of five. It had been played by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children over a century and more—hammered out in dissonance and delight for parental pleasure.

  A Beethoven bagatelle in A minor: Für Elise.

  But she played it to perfection, and brought a smile to Rosen’s lips.

  §3

  Vienna: February 12, 1934

  At the end of the street, the red and cream trams turned around and the conductor would emerge with a long, hooked pole and reverse the steel arm that skated along the overhead wires to pick up the current. It was a common sight to see trams stand idle awhile, two crews chatting and smoking as their routes and shifts met a five-minute overlap. There was even a glass and iron hut with a dull copper roof and a belching, coal-burning stove to accommodate them on winter mornings such as this.

  But these trams had been idle too long, and when the conductor locked the doors and took his leather bag of small change and walked off to the hut, a word was whispered down the long queue that in its present context baffled her.

  “Strike.”

  On the tabula of the mind she tried to write the word. Streik? Streich? In fairy tales, the ones her father had read to her when she was very small, giants and ogres were felled by a streich—often tripped up by cunning, giggling boys and girls. It was close to meaning a prank. But who was playing a prank on whom?

  It was close to meaningless.

  “Strike.”

  Suddenly, her mother was behind her, a hand upon her shoulder, saying, “You must come home, now.”

  “But . . . but . . . school. It is Monday. A school day.”

  The hand slipped from shoulder to upper arm, gripping her firmly and pulling her out of the queue.

  “Don’t argue. We are going home. Today you must study at home.”

  Her mother took her by the hand and walked her back the way she had come.

  “But I have art today. I can’t possibly miss art!”

  “You shall miss everything until all this is over. Do you hear me? You must not go out of the house until all this is over.”

  “Until all what is over?”

  In the afternoon. As the light of day faded. In her room. She paused in practicing her scales at the sound of raised voices—a misnomer, only her mother’s voice was ever raised.

  “Why must you get involved? It’s got nothing to do with us!”

  She could not hear her father’s reply. Only a tone of voice she knew well . . . the reasonable, placatory, futile, gentle music of a gentle man.

  And then her mother once more.

  “For Christ’s sake, Imre, are you trying to get us all killed?”

  Her father did not come home between opening up the theatre and the night’s performance. Méret and her mother ate in near silence. Méret not daring to ask any questions, her mother mouthing only platitudes about Méret’s studies, telling her she was bright enough to miss a few days at school. Besides, nobody else would be going to school, either, so what was lost?

  At night she heard noises in the street. Not close by but not distant.

  In the morning, her father came into her bedroom, hugged her and told her she was a lucky girl who’d been given another day off school.

  On the second night she heard gunfire, not pistols or rifles but big guns, cannons, echoing across the city from the workingmen’s apartments in Karlmarxhof.

  Her bedroom door opened quietly. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, smelt the dark scent of cologne and tobacco that seemed always to wrap itself around her father, inviting her to bury her face in his clothes, and then heard him whisper, “It’s alright. She’s sleeping.”

  In the morning the barber called. It was her father’s treat to have the barber call on him, rather than he on the barber, two or three times a week. When she was smaller she had thought it fun to let Herr Knobloch daub her face with foam from the brush and pretend to shave her. But blade never touched flesh—the gleaming edge of his cutthroat razor lay folded in a stainless steel bowl—only the back of a plastic comb shaved the white blobs from her top lip and hairless chin.

  Today, her father stretched out in the chair he kept at his desk in the study, the razor gliding gently, bloodlessly across his cheeks, exchanging wisdom with Herr Knobloch.

  “I mean,” Knobloch was saying, “it can’t happen here, but all the same . . . you can’t help worrying . . . I mean . . . where’s it all going to end? A bloke doesn’t feel safe in his own home. What with Heimwehr bully boys and those Nazis taking their orders from Germany . . . I ask you, are we part of Germany now?”

  Most days Imre could make Knobloch laugh—gently pricking at the bubbles of his workingman’s pride and his workingman’s half-hearted mix of opportunism and socialism. Today he didn’t even try.

  “Not yet,” he said simply.

  “Not yet? You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes. One day. And perhaps soon.”

  “What? Greater Germany? I’m not German. You’re not German. I ask you, Herr Direktor, what is Germany? Brown shirts, boiled cabbage, and jackboots. What is Vienna? A good cup of coffee and a fag. That’s Vienna. Caffs and barber shops . . . and . . .”

  “Theatres,” Imre concluded for him.

  “Yeah. Sorry. O’course. Theatres too. Not that I ever been in one.”

  “You should. We serve a good cup of coffee and we sell fags.”

  Now Knobloch laughed. Now Knobloch noticed Méret.

  “Hello, young lady.”

  Her muttered reply was scarcely audible. She loved to watch the morning ritual of her father’s shave. It was better than any parade, as good as any film at the cinema. Because her father was the star, relaxed and trusting and pampered—waited on cheek and jowl. And the touch of magic as his face was revealed, strip by strip, the peeling away of layers, a gentle flaying, as the razor skimmed across his skin. She knew the strokes of the razor by heart. Knobloch never varied. He had mapped the face so well, knew which flick of the blade would catch what bristle. She loved to watch. She hated to speak. Knobloch was so friendly it was . . . scary.

  “Remember when I used to shave you?”

  Now he leaned down and dabbed a single fleck of foam onto her top lip. Now he grinned, now he laughed.

  Her father was standing. Smiling.

  “Knobloch, Knobloch. You will get us all shot.”

  Just before her father wiped her lip clean, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. The old joker had given her a Hitler toothbrush moustache. Even her father thought it was funny.

  §4

  Méret perceived the politics of her time and place in the only way a child can. In pieces. A jigsaw she would never be able to arrange into a whole. Her father made efforts to explain to her what had happened, but her mother stopped him with, “The girl is only ten, Imre.” Just as she had said at all the punctuation points of Méret’s life—“only seven,” “only eight,” “only nine.” She wondered if one day her mother might mention her age without the prefacing “only.” When she was twenty-one would she be “only twenty-one”?

  What she knew was what she saw—sandbags set out at street corners to shield machine-gun emplacements—slogans painted onto brick walls—young men in uniform, some in black trousers, some in brown shirts, some, oddly, in white socks—emblematic of she knew not what. What she knew was what she heard: cries in the street, whispers in the cafés, the occasional explosion, the less occasional sound of gunfire, the rumble of an armoured car across the cobblestones; arguments between her parents that were hushed the moment they could see that she was listening.

  It was an unassembled pattern of fragments, and as such she perceived her native land aright. Austria was an unassembled pattern of fragments.

  Two weeks later, at her sixth visit to Rosen’s apartment, she arrived to find the floor littered with packing cases and books, and Rosen sitting in the middle, not, as was his habit, in a neat tw
o-piece black suit, but in braces and shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled back, blowing the dust off a book.

  “We will begin a little late today,” he said. “I have to clear a way through or you’ll never find a spot to put down your cello. Indeed, I cannot get to the piano. The complete works of Count Tolstoy have become an obstacle course.”

  She had never seen so many books. When she was very small it had seemed to her that her father possessed all the books in the world. They lined all four sides of his study—under the window, over the window—and reached right up to the ceiling. Then, one afternoon, he had taken her to call on Professor Freud and she realized that her father possessed most of the books in the world but that Professor Freud possessed more. Herr Rosen had almost as many as Freud and she wasn’t counting the volumes of sheet music.

  Stacking up the Russians on the shelves she noticed the title of one very fat book, in faded gold along its spine: Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Prince Peter Kropotkin.

  “May I ask,” she said, “what is a revolutionist?”

  “One who makes a revolution. Or are you no wiser with that definition?”

  “It is something that revolves. Like a wheel?”

  “In a sense. It is a change in the order of society. In that sense it revolves and another group finds itself at the top. As though a wheel of people had been spun. In France a hundred and fifty years ago, the poor took over, killed the rich, and made all the changes they could . . . from fixing the price of bread to changing the names of the months in the calendar.”

  “How odd. Why would they do that?”

  “I’ve never really understood it myself. But it has a romantic feel to it. And, of course, a descriptive quality. November means nothing. It isn’t even the ninth month. Brumaire . . . now that really says something about the autumn, doesn’t it?”

  “Foggy?”

  “Yes, foggy.”

  “And where would we be now on the poor people’s calendar?”

  Rosen had to think about this.

  “I can’t be certain. It’s a long time since I studied history . . . but tell me, what was the day like as you walked here?”

  “It was windy.”