A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  She knew she should say something, rattle off her identity. She knew why he’d turned his into a list—it defied the numbers they had tattooed on their left arms—but she couldn’t do it. She felt an idiot staring back at him with nothing to say for herself.

  He seemed not to mind. The fist that had been hanging down opened. In the palm were three dried and dusty apricots.

  “Prenez! Prenez, before the bastards see me.”

  She snatched them from him.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Canada, mam’selle. The land of plenty. All good things come from Canada.”

  She was about to thank him when he whispered, “boche,” pulled himself back onto the roof, and clumped off to position himself and his bucket of tar over one of the many damp stains on the ceiling.

  In the prisons in Vienna she had been fed only bread and water. On the train she would have starved but for Signor Cresca sharing his focaccia and salami, and since she arrived in camp she had eaten what everyone else had—a vegetable soup in which one might search for the vegetable and a hard, grey bread served with a sickly, rancid margarine. Despite everything she had said about sharing, Magda had given her half a sausage without telling how she came by it, saying “you’ll be better when your stomach contracts and you learn to live on nothing.” She knew now she should save half the apricots for Magda. She ate half and set the rest aside.

  Ten minutes later she ate those, too.

  That night she asked Magda what Canada meant.

  “It’s the Effektenkammer, the dumping shed where everything that the Germans steal from the dead ends up. All those clothes you and I picked from yesterday came from there. Your own clothes were too good. They’re back in Germany by now and whoever owned what you’re wearing is dust.”

  She thought of the dust that had coated the apricots she wasn’t going to mention, and how she had thought, and dismissed the thought, that they looked as though they had sat for several days at the bottom of someone’s coat pocket.

  §47

  She was still copying music two days later and the Frenchman was once again working on the roof. She heard the tap at the window and looked over to see his head pop down and pop up again almost as quickly. She turned to see what he had seen: the door opening and the Sturmbannführer who had rescued her on the ramp coming in, flakes of fresh snow gleaming on his greatcoat and cap. He took off both. Knocked them free of snow, scarcely glancing at her.

  She clasped her hands in front of her the way Magda habitually did. It spoke piety. Or if not piety, obedience. It told the right lie. He noticed.

  He looked from her to the cello propped on its stand.

  “Does it play?”

  “It does, sir.”

  “Then prove me right.”

  It was a momentary déjà vu. He was older and far superior in rank to the Hauptsturmführer who had put her on the train, but his manner was almost identically lackadaisical. As though all this was nothing much to do with him—just a job like any other—and that he’d been happier and more purposeful in some university or other before the war, teaching theology or art history, and if he stuck you on a train to Auschwitz or put a gun to your head it was all a bit of a bore and he might just as well have signed up for a folk song society as the National Socialist Workers’ Party.

  She cradled the cello and played him the Kodaly she had first played for Viktor Rosen the day they had met. It was miserable, and she felt he deserved misery.

  When she had finished he said, “You cannot be happy with the tone, surely?”

  Happy—now there was a word devoid of all meaning in the present context.

  She told him what she had told Alma Rosé. “At home I had a far finer cello, a Mattio Goffriler.”

  “And where is it now?”

  “I suppose it might well be where I left it. In my parents’ apartment.”

  “And you are from where? Vienna?”

  “Yes sir, Vienna.”

  “And your name?”

  “Méret Voytek.”

  She dearly wanted him to ask why she was where she was—a chance to explain herself and the mistake they had made. But she knew she could not plead and had to be asked.

  He didn’t ask. He stood up and slipped his arms through the sleeves of his greatcoat.

  “I am Sturmbannführer Graf Galen Furst von Schönbeck. Be ready at seven on Friday evening, wear your uniform, and this time play something German.”

  §48

  The next day at first light was her first time with the band that played to the slaves. They assembled where the men’s and women’s camps met, within yards of the ramp at which the transports arrived, on a banked mound of earth, seated on stools.

  They saw the men out to work or die with a foxtrot and paused before the first exodus of women. It was fully light now, the floodlights were off, and a transport that had discharged its human cargo in the middle of the night was still parked at the ramp, all its doors open, a mess of abandoned property scattered in the mud and snow.

  From where she was sitting Méret could see the remains of tinned and bottled food, items of clothing, hats and capes, walking sticks and crutches, pans and bowls and cutlery—all the expectant junk of survival that she’d seen on the train with the Italians—and, half buried in the sludge, the shiny head of a china doll like the one she used to have.

  She left her seat.

  Magda called out to her in a stage whisper, “Méret. Sit down. For God’s sake, sit down.”

  It was only a few feet away, she might reach it and retrieve it before anyone spotted her.

  “Méret!”

  And as she reached down for the doll she saw that it was not a doll but a baby, its head glazed with frost, its body all but trampled into the ground.

  Magda got up and dragged her back.

  An SS guard approached but turned away as soon as he saw them seated again. Then the women began to pour towards the gate and the band struck up a waltz from The Merry Widow.

  Méret sat holding the bow against the strings, wanting the glass wall to descend and cut her off, but it did not. And no act of will on her part invoked it. All she had was the sieve, and the world was leeching through.

  “Méret, play something. For God’s sake, play anything!”

  She hit a badly fingered note. The band was so off-key it scarcely mattered—but she now knew the answer to the question she had silently posed to herself the day the Nazis had taken over the youth orchestra. “Why or when would the Nazi party ever have need of an orchestra?”

  This was why.

  This was when.

  §49

  She donned the navy-blue pleated skirt, the white blouse, and the lavender-coloured headscarf that was the uniform of the Frauenkonzentrationslager Orkestra. The bullet-damaged cello stood next to her, a matching bullet hole in the case. She waited for von Schönbeck.

  “You are clean? You have washed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The commandant’s wife is peculiarly sensitive to smells. To body odour. You must always wash.”

  He led her out of the main gate. Free air smelt no different from prison air. Both were grease in the mouth and nose. She wondered that Frau Commandant could smell the live stinking flesh above the dead stinking flesh.

  They followed a track that led towards the smoking chimneys of the crematorium. She had seen the porters of the dead—the leichenkomando—pushing handcarts piled with bodies along this track. Then they veered off through a garden gate and a hedge, across a rose garden, its twisted stems stark in the bareness of winter, a crown of thorns waiting to be furled, and in the back door of a large villa—grey pebbled walls and high leaded windows, like something to be seen on a suburban road a few miles from the city centre. A house kept spotless by a do-nothing wife and two maids, from which a husband commuted into town each day.

  They had set out a wooden stool for her in the drawing room. She removed her shoes in the kitchen and sat barefoot, head
down, waiting for the appearance of her audience. It was the reverse of every concert she had ever given, and when the audience entered it was she who stood. When they sat, she sat.

  Then nothing.

  Frau Commandant seemed disinclined to look at her. A girl of ten or so seemed restless and fidgety. The commandant looked not at her but at von Schönbeck.

  She took in the room. It was almost a parody of life—the life she had left behind less than two weeks ago. It was like no home she had ever lived in—a sideboard displaying Dresden and Meissen china, modern German furniture in light colours without wear or tear, so different from the lived-in chic shabbiness and hand-me-downs of her parents’ apartment with its litter of papers and books and sheet music—but it was a home. It was home to the po-faced woman and the restless girl. In the shadow of death this was, she realized, “normal.” One could shut out death almost like drawing the curtains on a winter’s night.

  Von Schönbeck whispered, “What will you play?”

  And she whispered back, “The third suite for cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, in the key of C.”

  Von Schönbeck announced the piece, took his seat on the sofa next to the child, and nodded at her.

  She played the prelude with her head down. A minute or so into the allemande, as the piece became more lively, she dared to look up. Each dancing swing of the bow gave her the excuse to raise her head. Frau Commandant was looking at her own hands, the child still fidgeted, but Herr Commandant was concentrating intensely, as one would less on a piece of music than on a discursive argument. A look he maintained until the last notes of the gigue that ended the suite—as though not being moved, he had striven to be moved.

  She had not expected good manners, or any manners, but when she had finished the commandant said thank you to her and clapped von Schönbeck on the shoulder, saying, “Gut, gut.”

  Walking back, she said, “May I ask a question, sir?”

  Von Schönbeck nodded.

  “Why did I play for the commandant?”

  A long intake of breath. She knew at once that he had understood the question.

  “He likes to like music. I do not mean by that that he does like music. He knows nothing about music. He likes the idea of music. It goes with his idea of himself, his position and his status. It is a problem.”

  “A problem, sir?”

  “A problem for us—not for you—for us in the party. We need men like the commandant. But we cannot make them cultured. The uniform confers power. It does not confer taste. But it is our problem, and not one to be addressed in a time of war. Your problem is simple—to learn how to please him without making him look or feel ignorant.”

  An unwise maxim along the lines of a silk purse and sow’s ear sprang to mind. She kept it to herself.

  “Do you know the rest of the Bach suites?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By heart?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you’ll have no problem keeping him happy.”

  They walked on, captor and captive, strolling like old friends under a sky seared red with burning flesh, a sweet, cloying smell in their nostrils.

  Von Schönbeck did not speak again until they reached the door to the music block.

  “You were very good, by the way. But your cello sounded like a plywood tea chest.”

  §50

  Two months had passed. It was April, a warm April, and the snow had thawed rapidly. The sun shone, warm breezes blew. Occasionally there were April showers and the roof of the music block began to leak once more.

  The orchestra had just returned from playing out the morning work detail. The roofers were at work, patching up with felt and tar.

  When Pasdeloup tapped at the window, it was Magda who heard him first. She opened the window, three or four of the women pressing up behind her to see what he wanted or, better still, what he had.

  “Where is the pretty Viennese?”

  “Lots of us are from Vienna. I’m from Vienna. Am I not pretty?”

  This set them giggling. Pasdeloup stuck to his guns.

  “The cellist,” he said simply.

  “Méret, Méret, your boyfriend’s calling.”

  She moved up to the window. Either he was hanging on by his toes or someone was holding him, for he had both arms extended, fists out like a teasing father asking a child to choose.

  He opened both hands and gave her apples—not dried, just blotched and wrinkled, apples from last year’s harvest. Then his hands dove into his pockets and he produced two more.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “as the men march out, whatever you are playing, work in a few bars of the Marseillaise. The bastards will never notice but all the French boys will.”

  “Of course. It will be our—”

  “Boche!” he cried and vanished upward like a genie, back onto the roof. All heads turned to the door.

  An SS guard had entered and behind him two men in stripes lugged in a packing case about five feet high and two across. Stencilled on the front were a series of numbers and a dozen or more words, but all Méret could see were two :

  VOYTEK

  AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

  The guard took an iron jemmy, prised off the front, and left without a word.

  They never received packages. And a package this size was unheard of. They approached like children, curiosity mingling with the sense of danger, silently daring each other to look.

  Méret yanked at the loose panel. It clattered to the floor. Inside was her cello case, and inside the cello case was her Mattio Goffriler cello.

  Things moved so fast. She was at the centre of a storm as hands plucked the case from its packing and the cello from its case.

  “My God,” a voice was saying, “it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  She did not see who thrust them into her hand. Four sheets of paper, bound together with a staple, headed:

  And there followed a list of everything her parents had ever owned, the entire contents of the apartment in Vienna, room by room, ending in the one she had occupied.

  And she realized the Germans had killed her parents to obtain her cello.

  §51

  Summer 1944

  In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they built a city for the atom bomb. The locals called it “Dogpatch.” They built another pile, factories the size of apartment blocks, cyclotrons to enrich docile uranium to fissile uranium-235, and they built an outdoor dance floor.

  Szabo was a physicist in the hands of engineers, in the hands of the United States Army. It was the Chinese box, every layer revealed another. Except that the peeling away of layers revealed nothing beyond the fact that they existed. No one in any layer was supposed to know what anyone in any other layer was doing. No one was supposed to know the ultimate purpose of the experiment. How many knew they were building a bomb? If they knew, did they comprehend that this was a bomb like no other?

  He designed the pile, observed the metamorphosis of the elements, and on occasion, on warm summer nights when the girls who pulled the levers and pushed the buttons that made the thingamajig in a process they none of them understood, turned up to work with flowery cotton dresses tucked under their overalls and baskets of fruit and bread and beer, he would look long into the deep, deep, darkening blue Tennessee sky, awed by nature even as he twisted it, shattered it, and rewrote it, and take to the dance floor.

  He had never met a physicist who did not have two left feet. He wasn’t bad by that standard, but he had neither the coordination nor the nerve to jitterbug. He waited till the evening mellowed, until the young men had retreated to the edge to drink and laugh, tired and sweaty after lifting women off the floor and over their heads for fifteen minutes of un-European frenzy.

  He found himself embraced by a pretty young blonde, strawberry patterns on her dress, bright red lipstick offering permanent temptation, a hint of moisture on her forehead, nut-brown eyes that looked once into his and then buried themselves in his shoulder as the two of the
m performed a slow shuffle on the boards, the mute smooch of the trumpet competing with the pressure of her hips to tell him it had been far too long since he had had a woman.

  It was, not that he had noticed, a ladies’ excuse-me.

  At the tap on her shoulder, the strawberry-girl looked up, over his shoulder, into the face of the competition, smiled at Szabo and said, “Some other time, prof. Looks like you’re in demand tonight.” He turned to accept the embrace of Zette Borg.

  It had been months. Perhaps more than a year.

  The soft cotton of the working girl’s dress replaced by the slippery sheen of a silk blouse—the girl’s natural, erotic scent suddenly drenched by something French and expensive and oh-so-prewar that masked Zette Borg.

  The band was playing “Night and Day,” they were under the stars, there was something resembling yearning burning inside of him, and she said, “Leo sent me. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  Szabo had a single man’s accommodation. Tarpaper roof and walls as thin as tissue paper, so they drove out onto the highway, passed two motels, and checked into the third as Mr. and Mrs. Parker.

  “There was something wrong with Smith?” he asked as she kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed.

  “No. Parker is who you are now. Brown envelope in my handbag.”

  He fished it out.

  An Arizona driving license with a number but no name, and a British passport in the name of Charles Parker.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “The army is a great place for paranoia. Anyone at our level who works at Los Alamos has to have an alias. Even any visitor at the scientific level. Would you believe Niels Bohr is known as Nick Baker? That accent and they give him the name of a cheap American gumshoe.”

  “And I, with my accent, I am Charles Parker?”

  “I don’t suppose you can play the saxophone, can you?”

  “I don’t understand that, either.”