by Eva Ibbotson
‘It’s lovely,’ said Sophie. ‘But are you going to wear it?’
‘Yes, I am. It was a present from my mother.’
‘But is it all right? I mean, could one wear a bathing costume? Wouldn’t people mind?’
‘Now Sophie, don’t be absurd. What could freedom and self-expression possibly mean except that you can wear something to swim in or not exactly as you please? I’m going to try it out tomorrow afternoon.’
Marek sat on the wooden seat in front of Professor Steiner’s little house drinking a glass of beer. His face was relaxed; the eyes quiet. Above the reeds on the edge of the lake, the swallows skimmed and swooped; the afternoon sun held the warmth of summer, not the uncertain promise of spring. Soon now he must row himself back to the castle; he had been away longer than he intended, but he was in no hurry to return to Hallendorf’s fishbone risotto, the racket of the children and Tamara’s embarrassing advances.
The journey had gone well. They had reached the border without mishap and found the man they had come for. A year in a concentration camp had not broken Heller. Beneath the emaciated body, the spirit of the debonair Reichstag delegate with his eyeglass and his bons mots was undimmed.
‘It won’t go on,’ he’d said, as they drove east through the Bohemian forest. ‘The rest of the world will wake up to what is going on. God forbid that I should hope for a war, but what else is there to hope for?’
But he was angry with Marek, whom he had recognised at once, having known him in Berlin. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this; you’ve other things to do. I was at –’
Marek hushed him. He didn’t want to hear what he heard continually from Steiner. Ten miles from the Polish border they left Steiner with the van and prepared for the last part of the journey on foot. As they crouched in the undergrowth waiting for the darkest part of the night, Marek asked if he had heard anything about Meierwitz.
‘He’s still alive,’ Heller had said. ‘At least he was a month ago. A woman on a farm was hiding him. He’s got guts, that little chap. He could have got out in ’34, only –’
‘Don’t,’ said Marek. ‘It’s because of me that he stayed.’
‘Now that is nonsense,’ said Heller. ‘I heard all about that and it was his choice to remain behind. He wanted the glory of –’
The barking of a distant dog put an end to all further speech, even in the lowest of whispers. At three a.m. the moon went in and they took off their clothes and waded across the river, and a man rose silently from a field of rye and beckoned them to follow. Heller would be all right, thought Marek now. He had a forged residential permit allowing him to stay in Poland; his sister had married a Pole and would give him shelter. He had been a flyer in the war and intended to offer himself as an instructor in the Polish Air Force. They would take him; he had the Iron Cross.
From Steiner’s living room came the cracked voice of the old crone he had found in the hamlet in which he had waited for Marek to return. He had led her into the van with the highest hopes: she was poor and toothless, her brown face seamed with dirt. If there was anyone who should have been a repository of ancient music it was Olga Czernova, from whose black clothes there had come the smell of decay and leaf mould as if she had been dug up from the forest floor.
But the tune which now drifted out towards Marek was not a work song from a bygone age, not a funeral dirge. It was ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ from The Pirates of Penzance and it was followed by ‘Lippen Schweiget’ from The Merry Widow. For in the bosom of this old witch there dwelt a girl who had been to the city, escorted by a young man who swore he would marry her. The city was not Prague or Vienna, though Olga knew of them both: it was Olomouc, where once a Hapsburg emperor had been crowned. And in Olomouc there had been music! And what music! Not the boring dirges she had been brought up with, but lovely, lilting tunes played by the town band and sung in the operettas by hussars in silver and blue, and gypsies in layers and layers of twirling skirts . . . And in the cafes too there had been music!
The young man had left her – he was a wastrel – but the tunes of that magical time had stayed with her always. To the increasingly desperate Steiner she had sung the Champagne Aria from Fledermaus, Offenbach’s Can Can and a duet – taking both parts – from a musical comedy called Prater Spring.
‘Put it in,’ she kept saying, while Steiner begged uselessly for the old songs she had learnt in the forest. ‘Go on. This is the part where he finds out she’s really a princess.’
And Steiner had done so, meaning to erase the disc later, for it was hardly suitable for despatch to Bartok’s Ethnographical Music Collection in Budapest. But now he decided to leave it, for he too had been young and sat in cafes, and Olga’s final screechings reminded him of the moment when he had seen Marek return from the phalanx of trees and knew that he was safe. It got worse and worse, the waiting for the boy.
Marek, sitting sleepily in the sunshine, heard Steiner moving about in his kitchen, preparing the evening meal. He made no attempt to help him: Steiner’s kitchen, like his house, was tiny – it was this which had made Marek refuse the Professor’s offer of hospitality and go to work in the school. Then he heard himself called.
‘Marek, come here a minute!’
Steiner’s only luxury in his exile was a large and very powerful telescope through which he watched the stars. But not only the stars . . . He was the least voyeuristic of men but it amused him to watch the people on the steamer, the animals wandering on the high pastures, the holiday-makers picnicking on the island.
Now though the telescope was trained on the castle and as Marek put his eye to it he could see, as if to touch it, the grass at the foot of the steps, the punt drawn up beside the boathouse . . . and the wooden jetty along which there walked, with a purposeful grace, a young woman whose shoulders were draped in a snowy towel.
And behind her, in single file like a brood of intent ducklings, came four . . . no . . . five little girls. They too moved with a look of purpose, they too were draped in snowy towels. Marek could make out Sophie with her long plaits and the bad-tempered English girl with a passion for Red Indians.
But it was the woman who led them who held his gaze. Ellen now had dropped her towel, and brought one arm up to gather in the masses of her light brown hair and skewer it on to her head – and what Steiner had suspected was correct. She wore a blue one-piece bathing costume which entirely covered all those places that such a garment is structured to conceal.
As if on a string, the little girls dropped their towels also and copied her movements, trying to scoop up and tether their hair as best they could – and, yes, they too were wearing bathing suits.
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ said Steiner.
‘Nor I,’ said Marek, thinking of the hollows and sinews of Tamara’s body as she lay splayed across his path, the white limbs of the Biology teacher and Chomsky’s notorious appendix scar.
Still watching the young woman, he saw her nod to the little girls, and then she dived neatly into the lake and one by one the children followed her: some jumping in, some diving, and the cross English girl going down the wooden steps.
In the water she turned to see that all of them were safe and then she struck out into the lake, swimming strongly, but several times looking back to see that all was well – and behind her came her brood, fanned out in a V exactly like the ducklings that nested in the reeds.
He stood aside to let Steiner have another look.
‘How seemly,’ said the old man, and Marek nodded.
It was the right word for the behaviour of this concerned and purposeful young woman. For a moment Marek let his mind dwell on Nausicaa, the golden girl at the heart of the Odyssey, who had left her maidens to bring help and succour to the weary Ulysses as he came from the sea. But the high-minded analogy was replaced by a different thought: that it was a little bizarre that the first person he had come across in that strange place whom he would have enjoyed seeing naked, was so resolutely clothed.
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Ellen had not expected that there would be morning assemblies at Hallendorf, but there were. Three times a week the whole school met in the Great Hall which ran along most of the first floor of the castle. Instead of pictures of school governors, the Royal Family and shields embossed with the names of prize winners, the hall was decorated with posters bearing rallying slogans and a frieze painted by Rollo’s art class showing workers getting in the harvest, for the proletariat, of whom most of the children at Hallendorf knew remarkably little, were very dear to their hearts.
On the platform at the far end of the hall was a piano and a large radiogram attached to an amplification system which had been about to be renewed when yet another letter came from Bennet’s stockbroker. There was also a screen and a magic lantern.
In the absence of prayers and hymns – and indeed of God – the assemblies, taken by members of staff in rotation and by any children who volunteered, were hard work, but Ellen found them genuinely moving, for in their own way they concerned themselves with the struggles of transcendence, uplift and the soul. There was one in which Bennet read from The Freeman’s Worship by Bertrand Russell, a philosopher whose unsavoury private life did not prevent him from penning some discerning thoughts about the human condition. Rollo gave one about Goya, who had emerged from illness and despair to become one of the most compassionate painters of human suffering the world had ever known. Jean-Pierre, abandoning his cynicism, told them what the early manifestos of the French Revolution had meant to the huddled poor of Paris – and an American boy projected slides of Thoreau’s Walden, that unassuming segment of Massachusetts which for so many became a touchstone for what is good and gentle on this earth.
But when Leon gave an assembly, Ellen found herself homesick for the boring, familiar routine of hymn singing and gabbled prayers she had known in England, for there was something disquieting about his performance.
She had come in at the last minute and stood at the back. The hall was full and silent, but Leon, seated at the piano, did not begin.
He was looking anxiously in Ellen’s direction – not at her but at the door. Then it opened and a man entered quietly and stood beside Ellen. She had not met him yet but there could be no doubt about who he was – indeed it was strange how correctly she had imagined him: the size, the strength, the relaxed way he leant against the wall with folded arms. The warm greenish-blue eyes fitted too, as did the thick light hair falling over his forehead. Only the large horn-rim spectacles covering part of his face surprised her. She had expected him to be keen-sighted, a forester out of a fable, and thought how absurd she had been.
As though Marek’s entrance was a signal, Leon began to play. He played a movement from a Beethoven sonata and he played it well. Both staff and children were silent, for if Leon was difficult to like, his talent was undoubted.
When he finished, he rose and went to the front of the platform, commanding the hall as all these stage-trained children had learnt to do. He was very pale and surprisingly nervous for such an extroverted and bumptious boy.
‘That was Beethoven’s Opus 26 – the one with the funeral march – and it’s Beethoven I’m going to talk about. Only not all of his life – the part of it that happened in Heiligenstadt when he was thirty years old.’
He cleared his throat, and once again he looked at the back of the hall, his gaze, which had something frantic about it, fixed on the man who stood unmoving beside Ellen.
‘Heiligenstadt is a village outside Vienna. It’s pretty with linden trees and brooks and all that, but that wasn’t why Beethoven went there. He went because he didn’t want to be seen; he wanted to hide. He was terrified and wretched and trying to escape from the world. He was going deaf, you see, and it was there that he finally gave up hope that the doctors would be able to cure him.
‘It’s awful to read about the things he did to try and heal himself,’ Leon went on. ‘He poured yellow goo into his ears, he syringed them, he swallowed every kind of patent medicine, he stuck in hearing aids like torture instruments, but nothing made any difference. So he decided to die.’
Leon paused and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. No handkerchief, thought Ellen, blaming herself, and her heart smote her at the emotion generated by this unprepossessing boy.
‘But he didn’t,’ said Leon. ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ and he threw that too intense, slightly hysterical look towards the place where Marek stood. ‘He wrote a thing called The Heiligenstadt Testament, which is famous. He started by telling people to be good and love one another and all that, but the part that matters is what he wrote about art. He said if you have a talent you had to use it to go further into life and not escape from it. I’ll read that bit to you.’
He took a book from the top of the piano and first in English, then in German, read the words with which the unhappy composer had reconsecrated himself to music and to life.
‘So you see,’ said Leon fiercely. ‘You see . . .’ and Ellen saw Bennet turn his head, frowning, to follow Leon’s gaze as it travelled yet again to Marek, still standing with folded arms beside the door. ‘You have to go on. Beethoven went back to Vienna and he wrote another seven symphonies and the violin concerto and Fidelio. He wrote dozens more string quartets and the Missa Solemnis and the Hammerklavier . . . All right he was grumpy and bad-tempered, he hammered pianos to death and the people who came to see him fell over his unemptied chamber pots, but he never gave up. And when he died, all the schools in Vienna were closed. Every single school was closed so that the children could go to the funeral. Our school would have been closed,’ said Leon, as if that clinched the matter.
He had finished his speech. Sniffing once more, pushing back his hair, he walked over to the radiogram. ‘I’m going to play a bit of the Ninth Symphony to end up with. At least I am if the blasted gramophone works,’ he said, descending from the heights.
But as the triumphant strains of The Ode to Joy rang out across the hall, Ellen felt a momentary draught beside her.
The man at whom this strange assembly had been directed, was gone.
It was Ellen’s habit to get up early and make her way round the grounds before anyone else was up. The lake was at its loveliest then; the mist rising from the water; the birds beginning to stir.
But as she wandered, she garnered. Into a trug she kept for the purpose, she put the yo-yos she found tangled in fuchsia bushes, the roller skates left dangerously on the steps, the dew-sodden exercise books and half-knitted khaki balaclavas which (had they ever been finished) would have much reduced the chances of the International Brigade in their fight against Franco.
On the morning after Leon’s disquieting assembly, having collected a broken kite, a pair of braces and a damaged banana, she made her way towards the well in the cobbled courtyard behind the castle, to dredge up a gym shoe which she had noticed the night before.
But there was someone else who valued the peace of the early morning. Marek did not sleep in the castle itself. He had a room in the stable block reached by an outside staircase. It was furnished as simply as a monk’s cell – a bed, a table, a chair – and visitors were not encouraged.
Now he made his way down the steps, carefully locking the door behind him, and strode off across the cobbled courtyard on his way to the shed where the tools were kept.
The girl bent over the well did not at first see him, and he would have gone past, but at that moment she lifted her head and smiled and said ‘Hello’.
‘Not a frog, I hope?’ he asked, fishing his spectacles out of his pocket and going across to her, for her sleeve was wet and a small tuft of moss had caught in her hair.
She shook her head. ‘No. And if it was I wouldn’t kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he’d turn into a frog but not the other way round. What it is is a gym shoe, but I can’t get at it. It’s stuck on a ledge.’
‘Let me have a look.’
She had the idea that if it was necessary he would have torn up the iro
n grille screwed into the ground, so marked was the impression he gave of power and strength. But he merely rolled up his shirt sleeve and presently he fished out the shoe which he laid on the rim beside her.
‘I spend so much time picking gym shoes out of wells and yo-yos out of trees and sodden towels from the grass,’ she said when she had thanked him. ‘I wanted to teach them to be tidy by showing, but there’s so many of them and there’s only one of me. I suppose some of them will never see.’
‘But some will.’
He had sat down on the stone rim beside her and as she looked up at him, grateful for his encouragement, he found it necessary to correct the impression he had formed of her. As she swam out with her brood, she had seemed strong-willed and purposeful. Since then, Chomsky’s besotted ravings, Bennet’s praise and the legend of the icon corner had led him to expect a kind of St Joan wielding a bucket and mop. But she looked gentle and funny . . . and perhaps vulnerable with that wide mouth, those thoughtful eyes.
Ellen too found herself surprised. If Marek’s broad forehead and shaggy hair, his sojourn in the stable block, accorded well enough with the image of a solitary woodsman, his voice did not. He had spoken in English, in deference to the custom of the school, and his voice, nuanced and light, was that of a man very much at home in the world.
‘There was something I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘Bennet said you’d help me. I want us to have storks at Hallendorf. I want to know how to make them come.’
His face had changed; he was silent, withdrawn.
‘Perhaps it’s silly,’ she went on, ‘but I think the children here need storks.’
The silence continued. Then: ‘With storks it isn’t necessarily a question of needing them. It’s a question of deserving them.’
But she would not be snubbed.
‘Sophie deserves them. And others too. Storks mate for life.’
‘It’s too late this year, you know that.’
‘Yes. But there’s next year.’
