The soldiers were no longer amused. One of them dismounted and grabbed Sigi. He wriggled free and cut across behind the black charger.
‘You must run, you must run!’ he shouted, tugging at my skirt.
And Rip followed. Sigi after all was a member of his house and he barked defiance at the stamping horses… managed to rise on his vestigial hind legs… to nip the black charger in the fetlock.
Oh God, those seconds that pass so quickly that one cannot believe one cannot call them back and undo the horror they contain.
He was a good horse, the black; there was nothing vicious in him. He only reared up to escape the irritation of the yapping dog — and brought his forelegs down again. Not really very hard, but hard enough. Rip only had time to yelp once, and then he lay still.
There was so much blood — so unbelievably much blood for such a little dog.
The accident changed the soldiers’ mood. Their faces turned ugly, sullen, foreseeing trouble. And all hope of quietening Sigi’s madness vanished.
‘You see! You see how they kill!’
I had pulled Rip’s body clear; I wanted to cover him; I did not think it was fitting that he should lie there so mangled, so… exposed, and I took off my travelling cape and laid it across his body.
Then Van der Velde’s limousine turned into the square. Kraszinsky rushed up to him, and the impresario strode over to the horsemen.
‘Get hold of that boy,’ he ordered. ‘Take him to my car. Hold him down till I come.’
They responded at once to the authoritative voice, the velvet-collared overcoat. Two men dismounted and grabbed Sigi, still clutching my blood-stained skirt, and dragged him away.
Then my cab came. I seized my suitcase. Delivery, the end of the nightmare — Gernot and the sea!
I was pulled back savagely, my arm wrenched behind me. ‘Oh no!’ said Van der Velde. ‘You’re coming too. You landed me with this hysterical little tyke and you’re going to take the consequences.’
‘I can’t. I have to go. I have a train to catch.’
Van der Velde laughed and twisted my arm tighter. He was enjoying himself. ‘You can go when he’s played — because he’s going to play if I have to tie him to the piano stool.’
The soldiers were on his side. I was linked with the boy in blame for the accident. ‘Want any help sir?’ one of them shouted.
Van der Velde marched me across the square, pushed me in beside the child, slammed the door. As he started the engine I saw a misshapen figure in a grotesquely flowered hat come out of the apartment house: Frau Hinkler dressed for the concert. She stood for a moment on the steps, then began to walk towards the soldiers… to run…
I was very quiet in the motor. My suitcase had been left on the pavement, but I still had my purse with the tickets. Nothing else mattered; my blood-stained skirt, my missing cloak… not even the sobbing child on the seat beside me. As soon as the car stopped in a crowded place I would get out and run for a cab. Van der Velde would not dare to pursue me where there were people. There was still time.
We came to the busy section by the opera. The car stopped. I reached for the handle of the door.
Van der Velde was in front, but Sigi saw what I was doing. ‘You’ll be all right now,’ I whispered to him. ‘You can see no harm has come to me.’
He didn’t answer. He had stopped sobbing; he made no noise at all, but he had begun to shiver. It was bad that time in the square when his uncle didn’t come home, but this was far, far worse. His whole body shook as if with a frightful fever.
If he had tried to pull me back, or screamed, I’d have made my escape, but he made no attempt at all to stop me. He just sat there, looked at me — and shivered.
So I stayed.
I suppose I must try to describe the concert, but the truth is, I don’t remember much.
In the artist’s room we tried to wash off the blood and tidy ourselves. Van der Velde led me to one of the press seats in the front row. Then he made an announcement: there had been a traffic accident on the way to the hall; he craved the audience’s indulgence for the child.
It was a good move, of course. There were sighs and whispers, a fluttering of programmes: the poor little waif. Then the impresario came down to sit beside me and make sure that I wouldn’t try to escape. The idea was that Sigi would be able to see me and know that I was safe.
What a joke!
He came on to the platform, bowed his concert master’s bow, began to play. He played the Beethoven sonata, the Chopin mazurkas, the waltz in F… There was not one moment, between the pieces, when he even glanced my way. For this child, who an hour ago had been completely mad, nothing existed except the piano.
I could have left in the interval; even Van der Velde saw that the child had forgotten me, but it was too late. The train had gone.
The concert ended in an ovation. There were cries of ‘bravo’ and ‘bis’; he was recalled again and again; a woman in a silver fox plucked a rose from her bosom and threw it on to the stage. My last glimpse of Sigi was of a dark head appearing briefly between the circle of well-wishers that surrounded him — newspaper men, autograph hunters, agents — and then vanishing once more.
That was three weeks ago and I haven’t seen him since. When the Kraszinskys returned to the apartment house, Frau Hinkler screamed such abuse at them, holding Rip’s body in her arms, that Van der Velde took them back to a hotel. He smells money now and is prepared to see the Kraszinskys decently housed. The cheque for Sigi’s concert clothes came through the post and now he is on a concert tour of Germany.
There’s one thing I still don’t know; whether the fuss, the acclaim was because he looked so young and there had been an accident, or whether he has a proper and lasting talent. I didn’t hear him, I was too wretched — and anyway I wouldn’t know.
No, I’m lying. After the encore that Van der Velde had specified, there was a fourth. Sigi chose that: it was the Mozart Rondo in A and I heard that.
I heard his music.
I think I have lost Gernot.
We do not telephone, but this time, for something so important, he would surely have phoned? If he still loved me he could not be so cruel as to deny me a chance to explain. Or he would send me a letter telling me where I could get in touch with him. But in all the weeks since I missed the train there has been no word.
So I think that something was damaged permanently when I failed to come to him. I have never before not kept an assignation, you see. Once I had a broken ankle, but I still came. Once, in a blizzard, I was ten minutes late, but I have always come. And I think that he cannot forgive me. For I have no illusions about myself and Gernot von Lindenberg. In the eyes of God we are equals, and perhaps in bed (where God, so strangely, often seems to be present) but in the eyes of the world we are desperately unequal. There must be a hundred women waiting to step into my shoes.
Alice guesses that something is wrong. ‘Is it the little dog, Sanna? Is that why you’re sad?’ she asked me.
No, it is not the little dog. I miss Rip very much — we all do in the square — but he was ten years old and died in an instant. Each time I look out of the window in the early morning I wait to see him come down the steps to fetch the paper and then remember he is not there — but it is not the little dog. What has happened to my face cannot be laid at Rip’s door. How do the cells in my skin, the follicles of my hair, know that I have lost Gernot? ‘A woman is as old as her elastic tissue,’ a pompous friend of Professor Starsky said once, and my tissue has become profoundly inelastic. Nini has taken to bringing me hot milk at bedtime. Soon, if this goes on I shall be wearing navy blue with touches of white.
Oh God, no. Not that. Gernot will write, he will phone, he will send Hatschek. I cannot have to live without him!