“Van Vlyck!” Helen was trembling. “The man I saw at the staff assembly?”
“That’s him. With less of a paunch, not so much beard, and more hair, I expect, but the same man.”
“I saw him break an oak table with his bare fist.” Helen remembered. “It still makes me shudder to think of it.”
“Then you know what kind of man he is. I’d rather leave you to tell the rest of the story, Dora. I don’t think I can manage it.”
Dora spoke softly in her beautiful, deep voice, even when she had terrible things to say. In the cold, her breath made little clouds of white vapor that dispersed at once.
“The real love story, Helen, is about a whole nation falling in love with a voice. The voice of Eva-Maria Bach, Milena’s mother, as you know now. You can’t imagine how everyone loved that voice. It was natural, rich, dramatic, deep. It touched the heart. I was Eva’s friend; I had the privilege of accompanying her on the piano when she sang lieder in recitals. She put so much sensitivity into them, such perfection. I never got used to it. I was always transfixed with admiration for her as I sat at the keyboard. But in ordinary life she was cheerful, lively, incredibly funny. We had some really good laughs together, even onstage! And she sang traditional tunes too, the songs of the ordinary people. She never would give those up. That’s why they adored her, even if they didn’t know much about music. She brought everyone together. She hated violence. And then the coup came and the Phalange seized power. Eva joined the Resistance. Shall I go on, Milena?”
Milena bowed her head and scraped the ground with the toe of her shoe. “Go on. I want to hear it again.”
“Eva joined the Resistance. So did I. When it got too dangerous, we left the capital. They were checking every car leaving by the roads, so we traveled in horse-drawn carts, hidden under covers. We went on giving recitals in secret for months, in provincial towns, then in little village halls, sometimes for an audience of only fifteen. I wore my fingers out on dreadful pianos that were badly out of tune! But none of that mattered. Eva said that whatever happened, we mustn’t give up. The barbarians weren’t going to silence her. And word went out all over the country: ‘Eva-Maria Bach sang here. Eva-Maria Bach sang there, and there, and there . . .’ While she still sang, the Resistance wasn’t giving up. You’d have thought that hope depended on her voice. Such persistence infuriated the Phalange. They had to silence her.
“They finally caught up with us in a little northern town early in winter. Van Vlyck was in command. They broke the door down and burst in, howling like animals. Half of them were drunk on beer. We were just finishing Schubert’s song An die Musik, “To Music.” I shall never forget it. Eva said, ‘This was bound to happen sometime. Thank you for accompanying me . . .’ and I thought she was going to say ‘on the piano,’ but she said, ‘Thank you for accompanying me all this way.’ Those were the last words I ever heard her say. The platform was very high. Two men tipped the piano over into the orchestra pit. It shattered with a terrible sound of jangling notes and broken wood. They took everyone in the hall away. As for me, I was given special treatment: they threw me down on the floor. One of them held my right hand flat at the edge of the platform under his boot, and another man hit it with the butt of his gun, crushing it. He brought his weapon down on my fingers and wrist at least twenty times. I fainted. When I came around, someone was shouting at Eva, ‘You get out of here! And don’t let us ever see your face in this country again!’
“I didn’t understand. I was naïve. They let her escape into the mountains with a few companions. One of them, I learned later, was Bart’s father. They let them all go, but only to have more fun killing them. On Van Vlyck’s orders, they set the dog-men on them. I’m sorry, Bart. I’m sorry, Milena.”
Milena was weeping silently.
“Oh, my God!” groaned Helen, and she took her friend in her arms.
“I spent four months in their prisons,” Dora went on, “and then they let me out. The city had changed a lot in a very short time. People looked suspiciously at each other. No one dared speak to anyone else in the streets or on the trams. I wasn’t a musician anymore. I became a cleaner. All the theaters had been closed. And they’d opened the arena.”
“What arena?”
“The arena where they stage their fights. You’ll find out all about that. You’ll find out quite soon enough. I looked for Milena everywhere. She was only three years old, and I was her godmother, you see. I managed to get inside over ten orphanages, but I couldn’t find her. I ended up thinking they’d . . . thinking they’d got rid of her. I mourned her for fifteen years until last week, when she walked right into the canteen with her short hair and her big blue eyes. It was like seeing Eva resurrected from the dead, coming toward me. I nearly fainted. But it’s better now. I’m beginning to get used to it.” Dora wiped her eyes, sighed, and smiled again. “Well, I think that’s the whole story, isn’t it? We’d better go down again. You’re all frozen, and so am I. And tomorrow morning we’ll have to —”
“Just a moment,” Helen interrupted her. “Bart said we may have weapons to fight them. What weapons?”
“Our weapon,” he said, “is Milena’s voice. Dora says she has her mother’s voice. Younger, of course, but Dora says it will be exactly the same in a few years’ time. And she says it’s a voice that can inspire people and rouse them to action.”
All three of them looked at Milena, who stood there with her head bent, and they were all secretly thinking the same thing: she looked so frail, so fragile, a young girl freezing in her black coat, eyes red with weeping, one tear still hanging from the end of her nose. How could anyone imagine that what she had in her throat could “rouse people to action”? She herself didn’t seem to think so at this moment.
“That’s what you said, Dora, isn’t it?” Bart said, as if reassuring himself. “You said her voice could rouse the people?”
“That’s what I said,” Dora agreed sadly. “But they’d have to hear it first.”
All four of them set off, arm in arm. The moon came out again, shimmering on the slate roofs of church belfries and the steely river.
“Did you go back to playing the piano?” Helen ventured to ask after they had gone about a hundred yards.
“No, I’ve never played again,” sighed Dora.
“Because of your hand?”
“It wasn’t my hand that refused to do it. A hand can be retrained. But my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”
Gus Van Vlyck was still in a furious temper. He was angrily pacing the corridors on the fourth floor of the high-rise building occupied by the Phalange headquarters, chin jutting out, eyes blazing. He marched into his subordinates’ offices without knocking and found a good reason to get angry at every one of them. Then he went out again, slamming doors behind him, returned to his own office, and for the tenth time made phone calls to people who kept telling him the same thing: there was no more news. As he hung up, he crashed the handset down hard enough to split it, swearing furiously.
It was not the loss of Mills that had upset him so much, still less the death of Pastor, whom he hardly knew. He had felt some slight compassion for the regional police chief on hearing of his terrible end. After all, this was the man who had obeyed his orders fifteen years ago when he’d set the dogs on Eva-Maria Bach. Many men wouldn’t have had the guts to do it, and Mills deserved respect if only for his absence of qualms. But as for mourning his death . . .