This choice was not popular with everyone. Most of the crew were very young and almost all were novices.
Some settled down with eyes closed and folded hands to listen dutifully or doze. Others were restless after being in action. The men had their own gramophone in the forward torpedo room, which also served as the crew’s quarters, with their own collection of records, not all of which were officially sanctioned; but there was no competing with Bruckner. They turned instead, as U-113 surged through the night, to their usual pastimes: looking at photographs of their families and girlfriends, playing chess on little portable boards, or leafing through dog-eared magazines they had already read a dozen times.
Le Havre
Aboard the Manhattan, moored in Le Havre, Stravinsky had been dreaming of the Trylon and the Perisphere. They towered, white as bone, in a de Chirico landscape of empty palaces, twilight skies and marmoreal clouds. He dreamed he was walking slowly towards them, his hands outstretched, knowing he would never reach them. He was not sure what had awoken him until he heard it again – a stifled sob. He wondered if he had been crying in his sleep, something that happened to him from time to time. But the sound was made by someone else.
He raised himself in bed and switched on the lamp. Groping for his spectacles, he put them on his nose and peered at Thomas in the bunk next to his. The boy had buried his face in his pillow, but his thin shoulders were convulsing.
Stravinsky spoke quietly. ‘Child.’
The boy stopped moving. He slowly raised his head from the pillow. His face was a tragic mask, his eyelids swollen. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘I’m a light sleeper.’ Stravinsky inspected his little travelling clock, a parting gift from Nadia Boulanger. It was long after midnight. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I miss my family so much.’
‘You’ll see them again soon.’
The boy dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I will never see them.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘They took them away.’ His lips were trembling. ‘They came in the night with the truck, and took them all, my mother and father, my uncle and my aunt.’
‘Who took them? Where were they taken?’ The boy didn’t answer, and the questions hung in the air. Stravinsky knew that modern Germany was a state in which people were arrested at night and never returned, and nobody asked why or where. ‘But why didn’t they take you, Thomas?’
‘They didn’t find me, because my mother made me sleep with the neighbour, Frau König.’
‘I see.’ Stravinsky tried to unravel what the boy was saying. ‘Your neighbour’s name is König?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was a relation?’
‘No.’
‘But your name is König, too.’
‘No. My name is—’ The boy stopped, his face panicky.
Stravinsky raised his hand tiredly. ‘You need not tell me your name. Your mother sent you to sleep with this Frau König to keep you safe?’
‘It was an arrangement.’
‘What sort of arrangement?’
‘My mother gave Frau König her things. Her gold sovereigns.’
‘To take care of you?’
‘Frau König’s son died. Last year. So she had a spare bed.’
‘And a passport?’ Stravinsky guessed.
The boy looked up quickly, his tear-stained face scared and guilty. ‘I should not have said anything.’
‘No, you should not,’ Stravinsky said. ‘And you must not say it again. Not to anybody.’
Thomas twisted his hands together. ‘I won’t.’
‘Especially not when you enter the United States. Whatever your name was before, you are Thomas König now. When you show your passport to the immigration officer, you must not flinch. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ the boy whispered.
‘And you must not breathe a word of this to anyone on board. Not to anyone.’ Stravinsky raised his finger sternly. ‘Not a soul. Or you will be sent back to Germany.’
‘I think I would rather go back and die than live alone,’ the boy said in a low voice.
‘That is nonsense,’ Stravinsky said sharply, then looked at him more compassionately. ‘It may seem preferable to you to give up now, but you have a life to live, Thomas. You have a duty to live it for the ones you have left behind. Do some good in the world to repay the evil that was done to you and to them. Otherwise where would the world end up?’ He paused. ‘What were they arrested for?’
‘My father and my uncle said things about the Nazis. They confessed against Hitler in the church.’
‘Confessed? What do you mean? What confession? What church?’
‘They are pastors. Lutherans. They call it the Confessing Church, because they believe they must speak the truth openly, before God, no matter what. They said that the treatment of the Jewish people was wicked. They were warned many times, and my mother begged them to be silent, but they wouldn’t be silent.’
‘And for that they were arrested?’
‘They have been sent to a concentration camp.’
‘So you are not a Nazi, after all?’
‘No. They expelled me from school because I would not give the Hitler salute or join the Hitler Youth.’
‘You were going the same way as your father and uncle? Your mother must have been distraught. How old are you, really?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘That is more believable. You don’t look eighteen.’
‘I watched everything from Frau König’s window,’ Thomas went on. ‘But my mother didn’t even look up at me as they took her away!’ The boy started sobbing in earnest, burying his face in his hands.
‘The reason for that,’ Stravinsky said, ‘was that she did not want to betray your hiding place.’ Thomas quietened, making only those little gasps that had disturbed Stravinsky’s nightmare. Stravinsky took a cigarette from the pack in his bedside cabinet, then thought better of lighting it. He put it away again. ‘Come, Thomas,’ he said at last. ‘Sit with me.’
Thomas groped his way to Stravinsky’s side. Stravinsky put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. ‘Honour your mother’s sacrifice. Do what she asked you to do. You must be the best Hitler Youth in the world now, at least until you are settled in America, and safe from harm. You understand?’
Thomas nodded.
‘Play your part. Be eighteen, not sixteen. Be a good Nazi. I will help you. Thomas König is not such a bad name. Eh? It was a good thing that Frau König kept her part of the bargain. But then, you brought her dead son back to life, and that is no mean feat.’ He offered Thomas his handkerchief. ‘Have you slept at all?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I can’t stop thinking about them. I think they are all dead by now.’
Stravinsky could make no comment on that. ‘You should try to sleep. Would you like me to tell you a story?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Then put your head on the pillow.’ The boy obeyed, lying back and gazing up at Stravinsky with bleary eyes. ‘I will tell you about my first great success. Yes?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘It was a long time ago, in the spring of 1913. I was a young man, I suppose about nine or ten years older than you are now. Nobody had heard of me. I had composed a ballet called The Rite of Spring. It was the story of a young woman who is so full of life that she cannot stop dancing, and in the end dances herself to death. It was to be performed in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, by the Ballets Russes. On the opening night, everybody came in their smartest clothes. They were expecting a pleasant, dull evening – you know?’ Stravinsky folded his arms and bowed his head in imitation of the Dying Swan. The boy nodded. ‘But my music was considered very revolutionary. Nobody had heard anything like it before. It was harsh, what we call dissonant. Do you know what dissonance is?’