Мариус Габриэль - The Ocean Liner

Raging, she’d scoured every post office for miles around, hunting down his illicit correspondence. He’d simply used other anagrams of his name, even more clownish (Icinio Artú-Rostan and the like). She’d stood like an idiot, burning with humiliation, at the post restante counters, rifling through other peoples’ mail, looking for Storchio’s huge, extravagant calligraphy on the envelopes, while the postmasters watched her in mingled pity and scorn. It had been impossible to track down all Arturo’s aliases. She had followed his footsteps, dogged him for weeks. He had given her the slip every time.

It was a fire she couldn’t extinguish. He promised to renounce Storchio, swore on his mother’s soul she meant nothing to him. But he always found a way to go back to her.

He had been with Storchio when Giorgio had died, six years later. She’d had to face her child’s death alone.

Carla had never forgiven him for that. She should have left him then. But her heart was broken in so many pieces that she was half-dead with grief; and besides, she was expecting Wanda. Where would she go, with her belly out to here, and two children under ten years old?

Well, Rosina Storchio had had her punishments. The son she’d had with Arturo had been born crippled and paralysed, and had died at sixteen. Her voice, small to begin with, had disintegrated through over-use. She’d retired young, and it had been twenty years since anyone had heard of her. It was said that she too was now paralysed, living alone in obscurity. She’d never married.

Contemplating this litany of tragedy gave Carla no satisfaction. Her own pain was still too great to take pleasure in anyone else’s. But she felt that justice had been served.

She undressed now, hoping she would find sleep tonight. She had almost not come to Le Havre. Finding those filthy letters of Ada Mainardi’s had knocked her down, after so many times of being knocked down. She’d started to feel sure that her husband was now too old for these adventures. She’d been wrong.

She’d sat staring at the lake for days, stunned. The telegram boy had come climbing up to the house every day, with ever-more-frantic messages from Artú. She’d ignored them.

At length she had been forced out of her inertia by sheer self-preservation. Their landlord had implored her to pack up and go. If she did not leave Switzerland, he’d warned, she would spend the war here, possibly interned, separated from her children. There was no point in that.

She’d made a bonfire in the garden, and had burned much of the correspondence. Not only the handkerchiefs stained with Ada’s blood, and the little nosegays of hair tied artistically with silk thread, but other letters as well, from other women – because there had been those, too. Artú’s sexual energies, like all his other energies, were inexhaustible.

Even then, she had almost set off not west, to France, but south, to Milan. Yes; she’d contemplated taking her maiden name and slipping back into Italy, to sit out the war alone. Only the thought of the children had stopped her.

At sixty-three, her expression had grown severe, her features jowly. Her body was thickened, her temperament curdled. She no longer cared what she looked like, and habitually wore black. Heavy, heavy, she was heavy, her heart was heavy, her face and her life were heavy upon her.

She should have left Artú after Storchio, but there had been too many things stopping her.

Not any more. Enough was enough.

The next day, the air-raid drills were repeated. The guns began firing at nine in the morning. The children on board the Manhattan were wrought to a pitch of excitement by the commotion, running around howling, arms outstretched in imitation of fighter planes, or plummeting to the deck, trailing imaginary flames. For the adults, the exercise was more trying. Each blast made one’s body jerk involuntarily, or as Katharine Wolff put it more colloquially, jump out of one’s skin.

She and Stravinsky were breakfasting with Thomas König and the German girls who had caused such a scene yesterday. They were all jaded today, particularly the younger of the girls, who was clearly distressed by the guns.

‘I can’t bear to hear them any more,’ Masha said, covering her ears and shutting her eyes. ‘When will they stop?’

‘They are very disagreeable,’ Thomas said in his awkwardly formal way. He reached out to touch her hand in an oddly adult gesture of comfort.

‘I would have thought you would find them very agreeable indeed,’ Rachel snapped at him. She never missed a chance to attack the boy. ‘Isn’t this the very sound your Führer loves most?’

Stravinsky, wearing a black crew-necked sweater, seemed to find that amusing. ‘Ah yes, Thomas is a fervent little Nazi. You should hear him quoting passages from Mein Kampf . Explain, Thomas, what the Führer tells us about modern music.’

Thomas withdrew his hand from Masha’s. ‘The Führer tells us that modern music contains germs which are infecting our society, and by which we are bound to rot and perish,’ the boy said in a monotone, his face flushing scarlet, his eyes on his plate. He had been made to memorise these wisdoms at school, until his expulsion, and his youthful memory retained them; but having to trot them out in front of Masha and Rachel was excruciating.

‘You see?’ Stravinsky said to Rachel. ‘You and the Führer are agreed in your opinion of my music.’

‘I have never said any such thing,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I merely said I didn’t care for it.’

‘And tell us, Thomas,’ Stravinsky said with a malicious glint, ‘where does Hitler say we modern composers belong?’

Thomas gritted his teeth. ‘In a sanatorium.’

‘Once again we cannot fault the Führer’s prescience, for that is exactly where I have spent the last year. My late wife and daughter, indeed, spent most of their lives in a sanatorium.’ He turned to Masha. ‘Do you know Haute-Savoie, young lady?’

‘I have seen Mont Blanc,’ Masha said dully.

‘Ah yes. Very large. Very white. Our sanatorium lay at the foot. One opened the curtains and there it was. Very large. Very white.’ None of them was eating much, but Stravinsky was carefully peeling an apple with a little pearl-handled fruit knife. ‘It was a celebrated sanatorium. No less a person than Marie Curie came there. We used to see her, my wife and I, creeping into the sun to get warm. They were treating her for tuberculosis – Madame Curie, I mean – but the diagnosis was mistaken. She had given herself pernicious anaemia by the unwise habit of carrying radium around in her pockets. She died. Large doses of radiation, as with my music, are less healthy than small ones.’

‘You have a strange sense of humour,’ Rachel commented shortly.

‘I have no sense of humour at all. Thomas can attest to that. He relates to me all the Führer’s excellent jokes, but I am never amused. It must be a deficiency of intellect on my part.’

Rachel merely shook her head at Stravinsky’s whims. She watched Masha constantly, anxiously. She laid her hand on her cousin’s brow now. ‘You are hot. Are you getting a fever?’ Masha seemed not to hear, her face remaining desolate.

‘I understand that you two young people have studied music?’ Stravinsky said.

‘I studied at the violin faculty at the Conservatory in Leipzig for two years,’ Rachel replied. ‘But I was suspended on hygienic grounds.’

‘Your Jewishness was infectious?’

‘That is what they told me. Which was amusing, since the Conservatory was founded a hundred years ago by Felix Mendelssohn.’