“He’s only acting as Professor Steiner’s chauffeur.” And as Leon continued to glare and mutter: “No one could be a liar and do what he did for Achilles,” said Ellen, for whom the tortoise had become a kind of talisman. “You’d have to practically become a tortoise to do that.”
“Well, that’s lying, isn’t it? Pretending to be a tortoise,” said Leon, and stalked off, swinging the monogrammed leather music case which he had not yet managed to reduce to the wrecked state he regarded as suitable for the proletariat.
By the end of Ellen’s second week the weather became properly warm and not only Chomsky but others began to take to the lake. Ellen thus found herself acquainted not only with the Hungarian’s appendix scar but with the thin white legs of the Biology teacher, David Langley, whose pursuit of the Carinthian frit fly did not seem to have affected his musculature, and the brilliantly orange curls covering both Rollo’s chest and his stomach.
Beyond reflecting on the sad difference between the Naked and the Nude, Ellen was untroubled, confining herself to seeing that the children brought in their towels and did not drip water on to the freshly polished corridors.
Others were not so insouciant. Sophie said she couldn’t swim because she had a mole on her shoulder, and Ursula said she wouldn’t because swimming was silly. An Indian girl called Nandi also retired indoors, though what was supposed to be wrong with her perfect body was hard to imagine.
Ellen listened to these dissidents without comment. Then on a particularly fine afternoon she invited the girls to come to her room to admire her bathing costume. “It’s nice, isn’t it? It was terribly expensive.”
“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 Schweigen” 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, lifting 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 cafés, 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 jelly along which there walked, with a purposeful grace, a young woman whose shoulders were draped in a snowy towel.