‘I was. I’m not any more – I tried to make Marek see that it’s over. In the camp, after they found out I was a violinist . . .’ but he could never talk about what they had done to his hands. ‘When I cut my finger the other day and it didn’t matter, it was such a relief! I would work really hard. Think about it, Ellen. If I had something to look forward to . . . something we could do together, it might be worthwhile trying to stay alive. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you kneeling there beside that extraordinary suitcase.’
‘Oh Isaac, I love you too but –’
‘Yes, I know. Not like that. But that might come. I think we’d make a splendid team. Perhaps Marek would put some money into it.’
‘Marek is convinced that you’re one of the best violinists in the world and that you’ll play again.’
He shook his head. Pretending to close his eyes, he could still see her, her head bent over her book. He had hoped she would lie down on the bunk beside him; he wouldn’t have laid a finger on her but it would have been something to remember while he sat huddled in the evil-smelling lean-tos in which the rivermen slept as they poled down towards the sea.
‘It’s an hour still till the border, Isaac. Get some rest.’
She looked up and saw Marek’s silhouette against the window. He was still keeping watch and it was all she could do not to follow him into the corridor to draw comfort simply from his quiet presence, his size.
But they got through the first checkpoint without difficulty. The halt between Austria and Czechoslovakia was only a huddle of shacks and a road barrier. The two men who came along the corridor were friendly enough: Czechs with broad cheekbones; peasants without an axe to grind. Ellen gave them her passport and Chomsky’s, putting her finger to her lips to show that her patient was asleep.
They scarcely looked at one of the passports, held the other long enough to make Ellen’s heart thump almost unbearably in her chest.
‘You’re British,’ said one of the soldiers, in heavily accented German, and Ellen saw that it was her passport he was holding.
‘Yes.’
‘Your government should help us,’ he said. ‘They should support us against Hitler,’ and handed it back.
The first hurdle was over then.
She slipped out into the corridor and Marek, in his role as a well-to-do passenger starting a flirtation with a pretty nurse, turned to make way for her. They were travelling through wooded countryside towards Olomouc and Marek told her about the old woman who had sung the wrong songs to Steiner.
‘Only they weren’t the wrong songs, we were being absurd. They were the songs of her youth.’
People started going past them towards the dining car, among them a heavily painted woman in a fur cape who threw Marek a sultry glance from under clogged eyelashes.
‘I’m sorry you can’t come and try the quail’s eggs in aspic.’
‘I don’t want to leave Isaac.’
‘No.’ He had seen how tenderly she leant over Isaac, held his hand. ‘I’ll bring him a bottle of champagne. He can drink it in his bed.’
‘Like Chekhov,’ she said. ‘I was glad he died drinking champagne.’
‘Yes. A good man.’ He pointed out of the window at a stream just visible in the gathering dusk. ‘Do you see that river?’
‘Yes.’
‘My grandfather used to fish in there; it flows past our house about a hundred miles to the west.’
‘The Russian anarchist? The one who wanted to blow up the general but your grandmother wouldn’t let him?’
‘That’s the one. He loved fishing and he loved Chekhov. He was always quoting what Chekhov said about fishing.’
‘God won’t subtract from man’s appointed span the time spent fishing,’ she said. ‘Is that the one?’
Marek nodded. ‘One day about two years before I was born he was sitting by the bank with his rod and my mother came and told them what she’d just heard in town. That Chekhov was dead. My grandfather was absolutely shattered. “To think that I should outlive Chekhov,” he kept saying – and he didn’t go fishing once for the rest of the summer.’
‘He was such a gentleman – Chekhov, I mean,’ said Ellen. ‘I always think of him coughing into little twists of sugar paper down in Yalta and writing to his wife in Moscow telling her not to worry; telling her to stay where she was and to do what she wanted. So he was an odd man for an anarchist to love so much.’
‘Perhaps. But he was not a very good anarchist, if you remember. And Chekhov had been to the penal colony in Sakhalin and written about the fate of the prisoners there. My grandfather was very influenced by that.’
She was silent, thinking of the strange mix of ancestors that had gone to make the man beside her: Russian and English, German and Czech. No wonder he was at home in borderlands.
‘Is this the sort of country Pettelsdorf is in?’
‘Yes. The woods are denser perhaps.’
She thought of it, this tantalising demesne to which only the wounded were admitted. ‘You’ll miss it when you go to America.’ He was planning to sail as soon as Isaac was on his way; this was almost the last time she would see him.
Marek shrugged. ‘It’s best not to get too attached to places in the kind of world we live in now.’
‘Or to people, perhaps.’
She was silent, remembering her mother’s latest letter. They were digging trenches in Hyde Park, she had said, and asked her daughter to come home at once if there was any sort of crisis.
‘Or to people,’ he agreed.
‘Only I don’t know how you would write music without attachment,’ she went on. ‘I suppose it would come out like Buddhist music; sort of prayer wheels tinkling in the wind and those sad horns. Not that I know anything about it,’ she added, suddenly embarrassed.
‘On the contrary, you clearly know a lot about it – and about most other things,’ he said, and wondered why he wasn’t simply kissing her instead of discussing Chekhov and the Nature of Attachment. ‘Even though you do look like a rather delectable ham with that ruffle on your head.’
‘It’s not a ruffle; it’s a proper nurse’s cap,’ she said crossly. ‘I thought if I got one that wasn’t stodgy it would have a resale value. After all, I bought it with your money and I want to pay you back.’
More passengers came past, bound for the last sitting of dinner. ‘Are you certain you won’t come and join me? We’d be back long before we got to the border.’
It was hard to refuse; harder than she could have imagined, but she remembered the fear in Isaac’s eyes and shook her head. ‘Tell me what you ate, won’t you? In detail?’
‘I promise.’
But still he didn’t go. Was he waiting for someone?
‘Isaac is convinced he won’t ever play the violin again because of something they did to his hands in the camp,’ she said. ‘But I watched him when he was helping me in the kitchen. I could swear his hands are all right now; he made piped eclairs and you can’t do those without good coordination. I wish you’d make him see. He wants us to start a restaurant.’
He frowned. ‘Us? You mean you and him?’ Isaac must be seriously gone in love then, or mad. ‘Do you want to do that?’ he asked curtly.
She shook her head. She was about to make her way back to her compartment when a woman in a tight red satin skirt, a frilly gold lamé blouse and an outsize feather boa came along the corridor – a blonde of unbelievable vulgarity who smiled unashamedly at Marek.
And whose smile was returned. Marek excused himself and to Ellen’s chagrin followed the woman’s waggling behind towards the dining car.
One hour, another. The passengers returned from dinner but Marek did not come in with the promised champagne. Then the train slowed down and stopped in the kind of place that was the same all over Europe: custom sheds, army huts in which men sat playing cards, road barriers – and a station at which no one who could help it ever got out.
Ellen opened her nurse’s bag, took out a syringe
partly filled with a red liquid, and stood by the door. Two border guards got on: a young private and a sergeant. The Poles had been fought over too often: there was nothing casual about these lean-faced, unsmiling men.
Ellen’s door slid open. The sergeant went on up the train; the private entered.
‘Passports, please.’
She handed him hers, then Chomsky’s. The soldier motioned her aside. He wanted to see who was in the bed.
Ellen picked up her syringe. Instead of impeding him, she touched the soldier’s arm, indicating that she needed more blood from her patient, soliciting his help.
For a moment it looked as though it would work. She had seen so many strong men keel over in a faint at first-aid classes, and the contents of the syringe, mixed in the art room at Hallendorf, were a good imitation of the real thing. But though the soldier made a gesture of distaste, he did not retreat.
‘Turn him round,’ he ordered.
Ellen touched Isaac’s shoulder and he groaned.
‘Hurry,’ barked the Pole.
But before she could obey there was the sound of a dreadful and ear-splitting scream from the next compartment. A second scream followed, and the soldier elbowed Ellen aside and went out into the corridor. Seconds later the door was pushed open and a woman hurled herself into the soldier’s arms. Her blonde hair was matted with sweat, her scarlet lipstick was a smear across her trembling mouth – and she was totally and spectacularly naked.
‘Help me! Help me!’ she yelled. ‘Protect me! He tried to rape me, the brute!’
Her thin arms closed round the soldier’s neck like a vice: the scent of her cheap perfume, her stale deodorant, pervaded the corridor.
The Pole was twenty-one years old and prepared for anything but this.
More doors opened; distressed passengers appeared; an old man and his wife . . . the sleeping car attendant. Then the door of the compartment from which the woman had erupted opened once more – to reveal Marek in a loosely knotted bathrobe, his hair on end. The sight of him caused the woman to become even more frenzied. ‘You must take me with you!’ she screamed at the soldier. ‘You must look after me!’ She began to cry, rubbing her face into his, pressing her body against the rough uniform. ‘I’m afraid!’
Trying to free himself, he dropped the passports.
‘She’s lying,’ said Marek. ‘She said she’d do it for a hundred marks. She’s a lying bitch.’
More passengers appeared, and the guard . . . then the sergeant who was in charge of the young Pole. Speaking furiously to the soldier, he tried to loosen the woman’s hold, but she only clung tighter, babbling and weeping.
The sergeant spat, then pulled her free with a vicious gesture. ‘Out,’ he gestured to his underling. ‘Out!’ – and picked up the two passports and handed them to Ellen.
Five minutes later, the train was on its way.
Marek had chosen the town of Kalun for an overnight stop before the journey on foot to the River Rats.
Situated on a tributary of the Vistula some two hundred kilometres north of Warsaw, it was an austere and somewhat gloomy place which had survived the wars, sieges and other horrors of the past centuries with its buildings more or less intact.
In the guide books, Kalun advertised itself proudly as a spa, but it was some way from rivalling Baden-Baden with its clientele from the Almanac de Gotha and its Kurpark full of magnificent trees. No royal visitors had come to Kalun incognito and raced pretty girls through the woods in wheelbarrows; the Empress Sissi had not taken the small grape cure there as she had done in Merano – and Goethe, who had spent thirteen summers in Karlsbad, had almost certainly never heard of Kalun, let alone set foot in it.
But the Poles, ever a hopeful race, had dug out a series of springs in the rocks above the little town and sent their sulphurous and evil-smelling water through into the bath houses of the spa hotels. Doctors had been persuaded to come and offer treatments for an impressive list of ailments; wheelchairs plied to and from the pump rooms, and a whole posse of attendants pummelled and immersed and weighed the sick and elderly for a quarter of the fee required in the spas of France and Germany.
Marek had booked three rooms in the Kalun Spa Hotel, an austere building with endless corridors and cavernous rooms permeated with the smell of hydrogen sulphide. The arrival of Isaac with his nurse in this sepulchral building passed without incident: the passport numbers were registered; the ambulance returned to the garage. Tomorrow a telegram would come necessitating Isaac’s return for family reasons, but now he was requested to select the ailment for which he wished to be treated.
Consulting the impressive list on a kind of menu pinned to his door, Isaac unhesitatingly chose otorhinolaryngological disease, something which no one could prove he did not have, and was borne off in a sedan chair by two gleeful male nurses for a course of hydrotherapy and massive immersion in radioactive mud. The disease had been losing ground among clients and his choice had given great pleasure.
Marek had tried to persuade Millie to stay till the morning and travel back part of the way with Ellen; the girls seemed to get on well together. But Millie had an engagement in a Berlin cabaret; she was returning in a few hours on the sleeper. Ellen had suggested she come and rest in her room but though Millie came she was not exactly resting. She was in fact sprawling on Ellen’s bed, chain-smoking de Reskes and reminiscing about the days in Berlin when she had known Marcus von Altenburg and his friend.
‘They were such fun. You should have seen Isaac in his evening clothes all dolled up for a concert – he always had a white carnation; it had to be white, red wasn’t any good – and handmade shoes. You’d think he was a proper little monkey but when he played – my God, it would make the hair stand up on the nape of your neck. That soulful music and then he’d be out on the town till the small hours, dancing and cracking jokes. It’s awful to think what they’ve done to him.’
‘Do you ever think of leaving Germany?’
‘I think of it. But I’ve a mother and a brother – my father pushed off. Working in the cabaret helps . . . and sometimes . . . you know, I get other work. I can make good money like that.’ She stretched out her arm and watched the gold bangle on her wrist with pleasure. ‘He had no call to give me this; he paid me for what I did and I’d have done it for nothing. But Marcus is like that; he’d give anyone the skin off his back. People used to think he was rich, but he wasn’t, he just never seemed to count up what he had.’
‘How long did you know them in Berlin?’
‘Oh, most of the time Marcus was there – and I went on seeing Isaac till the Nazis came. They were such friends those two; it did you good to see them. So different. . . Isaac never stopped finding people to help Marcus; it was he that got him a break as a conductor. And they weren’t ever jealous of each other like people so often are when they’re in the same line of business. Even over women, though it must have been hard for Isaac.’
‘What must?’
‘Well, he’d pick up some girl in a nightclub maybe and bring her back to his table, and chat her up – he was always falling for women – and Marcus wouldn’t say much; you could see him making himself quiet, sort of trying to be like one of his trees so that Isaac could have her, but by the end of the evening it was Marcus the girl wanted.’
‘It doesn’t seem fair.’
‘No. But what’s fair about life – turning a nice bloke like Isaac into an outcast because he’s got a nip in his foreskin.’ She broke off. ‘Sorry, don’t mind me. But I can tell you, when I met Marcus at the station and he asked me if I’d be willing to make a bit of a diversion if it was needed so as to help Isaac get through, I was as pleased as Punch. And I’ll tell you though you haven’t asked: no, I didn’t do it with Marek, not on the train – not ever, in point of fact, though I’d have done it like a shot. It was strictly business.’
Ellen smiled at her, ‘I wish you’d stay longer, Millie. You’ll be so tired travelling back tonight.’
But Millie s
hook her head. ‘I have to go, Ellen, but if ever you come to Berlin . . .’
‘Or you to London.’
There was a knock at the door and an elderly maid announced the arrival of the taxi for the station.
The girls embraced.
‘Take care,’ said Millie. And at the door: ‘Are you in love with Isaac?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘No. I’m terribly fond of him, but –’
‘Oh that!’ Millie waved a dismissive arm. ‘He’s got it badly over you.’
‘It’s just because I found him and sheltered him. As soon as he’s out in the world again he’ll forget me.’
‘Maybe.’ Millie put on her scarlet beret, adjusted the angle. ‘What’s funny is that I don’t see Marek trying to be a tree.’
The dining room of the Kalun Spa Hotel was a cavernous room whose heavy swagged curtains, dim chandeliers and dusty Turkish carpets gave off an air of sombre melancholy. It was as though here the authorities had finally given up hope of putting the town on the map of Great Spas of Europe, had accepted the fact that Queen Marie of Romania or Alfonso of Spain would never now drink the evil waters of the pump room. The few diners already assembled were in the last stages of disintegration, sitting in wheelchairs or precariously propped on cushions with their walking frames beside them; the smell of hydrogen sulphide blotted out the odour of frying onions from the kitchens and the waiters were as ancient and arthritic as the guests.
Entering the dining room, Ellen saw Marek at a table by the window scribbling something in the large menu, bound in maroon leather, provided by the management. As she reached him, and he got to his feet, she realised that what he had been writing, between the announcements of liver broth with dumplings, boiled beef with noodles and other delights – was music; and for a moment she felt as though a door had been opened on his other life; a life from which she must always be excluded, whatever he wrote on menus.
‘Please don’t let me disturb you,’ she said.
He shook his head, put away his propelling pencil. ‘It’s of no importance. I’ll finish later.’
‘Like Mozart,’ she said.