‘But how can you interest a man like that in a girl who wants to blow everyone up? An avowed Anarchist?’
‘I’m not going to interest him in an avowed Anarchist. I’m going to interest him in my intended. For I intend to marry Nini, you know. What she intends is nobody’s business.’
I didn’t tell him about the typhus. He doesn’t have to have all my nightmares.
Daniel has been at the Bristol for five days. The ship on which he was due to return sailed from Genoa and he let it go. Each day he comes and tells me what he has done. He never gets ruffled and if he gets discouraged he keeps it to himself, but it seems to me that his nondescript eyes, the freckles on his nose, are growing darker.
The children are a trouble. When they see him coming they run out of their houses, pursued by the irate voice of Father Anselm from the presbytery, of Helene Schumacher forbidding her girls to go out inadequately dressed into the snow. Daniel only speaks to them for a few minutes and then they are off. Once they became vile slavers on the Gold Coast, dragging the captive Africans to their ships, only to be overcome in their turn by pirates and forced to walk the plank. Once they set off in canoes to find the source of the Rio Negro, beating off crocodiles, piranha fish and savages, and claimed new territory for the Austrian flag. I never saw children play together as they played with Daniel Frankenheimer in the doomed square. I think Maia would have gone through fire for him.
When he could stay a while we talked and I learnt about his family. He was proud of his father’s achievements, but impatient of some of his attitudes to his workers. ‘He’s too paternalistic; he won’t see that times have changed. Unions are here to stay — people want things by right, now, not by the gift of their employers. But he’s got the most terrific flair.’
‘And your mother?’
Daniel grinned. ‘She’s an obsessive. Little and mad; looks like a wolverine — and acts like one too when she’s after something.’
‘What’s she obsessive about?’
‘Well, the family partly — Dad and me and my older sister. But mostly her music school. She was trained as a pianist, you see. And I must say she’s made a marvellous job of it. People are auditioning to come there now from all over the world.’
‘It’s for exceptionally talented children, isn’t that right?’
Daniel nodded. ‘Her people came from Russia originally and she’s based it on the ideas of the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg. Incredibly hard work, the top teachers, but a chance for the children to perform as they go along and be part of the world they’re going to join. When Gustav Mahler was in New York he came to see it and he wrote my mother a letter saying he wished he’d been trained there instead of the Vienna Conservatoire!’ Daniel laughed and cut himself another slice of Herr Huber’s latest leberwurst. ‘Last month the fire alarm went off in our house in Fifth Avenue. My father pulled all the documents out of the safe and the maids rescued my mother’s jewels — but my mother came down in her nightdress and all she was holding was her letter from Gustav Mahler!
Then he went off to the next round of meetings and dinners with recalcitrant and obstinate officials. As he crossed the square, the little ragged boy I’d seen first climbing on St Florian’s shoulder, stepped out from behind a chestnut tree and took his hand.
He has done it! Daniel has performed the miracle! Nini is out; she is free!
I had no warning. I was fitting a customer when a black limousine with a flag on the bonnet drew up outside. The chauffeur got out, opened the door, handed Nini out — and drove away without a word.
She wore the clothes she’d been arrested in and there was a blood-stained bandage round her head.
‘Oh, Nini!’ I said, embracing her. And then: ‘It doesn’t matter about your hair — nothing matters except that you’re safe.’
She winked. Yes, really; this half-starved, exhausted girl winked at me. Then she pulled off her bandage and her hair, uncut, abundant and filthy tumbled round her shoulders.
‘Good God, Nini! How?’
‘I tricked them. I borrowed the bandages from one of the women who’d been shaved and when they came to me I said I’d already been done. They were in such a muddle most of the time, and drunk into the bargain.’
She went to the bathroom and spent an hour there, and then she slept. She slept till early evening and only then, sitting in her dressing gown drinking the broth I’d made for her, did she ask: ‘How did you do it, Frau Susanna? How did you manage to get me out?’
‘I didn’t, Nini. I tried and tried, but I failed. It was Daniel Frankenheimer who got you out.’
She put down her spoon. ‘Daniel? But how? How could he, in New York?’
‘He isn’t in New York, he’s here.’ And I told her the full story. ‘He’s at the Bristol and he’d be glad to see you when you’re rested, but not before.’
‘I am rested,’ said Nini. ‘Actually.’
She then went upstairs to attend to her toilette, which took some time for she chose to regard her bruises as a fashion point needing to be offset by an olive green silk scarf (mine) knotted just so, and this in turn caused other problems.
Which she solved, I do assure you…
Did I look like that when I drove off to the Bristol — my eyes so bright, my hands touching my hair almost as though they were the hands of someone else, the man who soon now…
Yes, I suppose that’s how I looked, but it doesn’t matter. She left an hour ago and I think — yes, really, I think — it’s going to be all right.
No, I was wrong.
Is it because she doesn’t believe in God that she’s so savage with herself and the world? So obstinate and stupid? Can the woman in Salzburg be going through what I’m going through now: the anger, the frustration at seeing happiness thrown away? Surely my daughter can’t be such a fool?
Daniel lost his temper. I don’t blame him; it’s foolish to imagine that the power he exerts can’t have a darker side. I can see why he acted as he did, but he has lost her. He knows this. He left yesterday to catch the Lusitania in Cherbourg.
Nini stayed all night at the Bristol. Perhaps it was the happiness I saw in her face when she returned that set her off. I’ve never known anyone so convinced that happiness is not for her. I could see it all begin — the guilt, the questions.
Daniel came to lunch. He wanted to make the practical arrangements for her to join him in the States, but she began almost at once, bragging about Knapp’s assassination, about the blow struck for the proletariat. It was twenty-four hours since she’d come out of prison, but she seemed already to have forgotten what it was like.
‘I shouldn’t have come out,’ she said. ‘I should have insisted on waiting till everyone was released. It’s only because the system’s so rotten that you could get me out. It’s not till all the swine like Knapp are dead that the People will be free.’
‘Ah, yes, the People.’ Daniel put down his knife and fork. ‘You don’t think it might be possible to help the people without blowing them up? In some more modest way, perhaps? By using democratic means? By working for the eight-hour day and better housing and paid holidays, without bloodshed and carnage. Or is that not dramatic enough?’
‘No, it’s not. You have to make the world see. Kropotkin said blood shed for the revolution is blood shed for humanity, and he’s right. If you’re mealy-mouthed and afraid nothing gets done. You have to be strong and not have scruples, and destroy the Enemies of the People without hesitation.’
I saw the exact moment when Daniel lost his temper; there was this apparent darkening of the eyes and skin which is his response to trouble.
‘I’ve got something to show you, Nini,’ he said. ‘Now. Come with me.’ He pulled her out of her chair. ‘Get your coat.’ And to me, without any of the respect he’d shown me up to now, ‘You’d better come too. Perhaps you can make her see sense.’