Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Thank you for telling me my business,” said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner.

“You say you’re a Czech.”

“I don’t say I am; I am,” said the prisoner unruffledly.

“So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.”

Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed.

“Your name is German.”

“Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.”

“The dogs?”’

“There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk-you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round—”’ He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis-and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital-the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill-if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives.

It was to him that Marek spoke. “Most of the people in here understand what has happened-that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business-interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler-is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.”

“So what is it you want?”’ asked the commandant.

“A piano,” said Marek.

As he came out he found a knot of excited people standing in the street.

“I told you,” cried a young man, scarcely more than a boy, who rushed up and threw his arms round Marek. “I told them it had to be you! I said if someone had defenestrated Unterhausen it would be you! But you aren’t German, are you? How did you get here?”’

“How did you get here?”’ said Marek, suddenly angry. “You can’t even be seventeen.” were they interning children now?

“I told them I was older,” said Leon. “When they came to take my father, I wanted to come too. My mother and sisters are in a camp on the other side of the island.”

Leon’s father, Herr Rosenheimer, now came forward to shake Marek’s hand. Though he had filed naturalisation papers the week before his arrest and his export-import business employed more than four hundred British workers, he seemed to be without bitterness, and had persuaded the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) to save the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers, so that he could keep in touch with the stock exchange.

Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the er/while flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse… and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate.

But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories-and Leon, whose reminiscences would lead to Hallendorf and thus to Ellen, had straight away to understand that there would be no discussion of the past.

“There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,” he said. “We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed-anything. We’re going to give a concert.”

“Of your music?”’ asked Leon eagerly. “No. Not now.”

“Of what then?”’

Marek looked round at the weary men, the drab streets, the barbed wire.

“There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?”’

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” said the flautist.

Marek nodded. “Exactly so.” For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his er/while representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig. Would it seem sacrilege to the old man to put on his masterpiece with an exhausted chorus of amateurs and an orchestra which, if it could be found at all, would be a travesty of what Bach had demanded? Yet it was this monumental work, which embraced the whole of the human condition, from the painful pleading of the Kyrie to the blaze of jubilant ecstasy of the Resurrexit, that these bewildered exiles needed and deserved.

Marek made up his mind. “We’re going to perform the Mass in B minor,” he said. “And no one had better release us till we’ve got it right!”

After the fire Marek had spent several weeks in hospital in Prague. He’d been moved there from the local nursing home when it became clear that although his apparent injuries had cleared up quickly-a burn on his temple where a beam had glanced his forehead, the smoke inhalation which had saved his life by rendering him unconscious before he could go far into the building-there was something else most seriously wrong.

At first the doctors and psychiatrists who examined him, the nuns who nursed him, put down the patient’s other symptoms to grief for his parents’ death, but as time passed and he became wilder and more distressed, the possibility of brain fever or dementia was seriously discussed.

Marek had not resisted the move, for the contacts he needed to carry out what he now saw as his life’s work could be assembled best in Prague, where the headquarters of resistance to the Germans had recently been established.

It did not take him long to prepare a dossier on the man who had set his home alight and killed his parents. Oskar Schwachek, who had also killed Franz by the river and tried to murder Meierwitz, was a Sudeten German who since the age of fourteen had been a member of the Nazi party-a fire raiser as a child, a disturbed and vicious adolescent and now, at the age of twenty-five, a killer who put his evil talents at the disposal of those who wanted to hand Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis.

Stepan and Janik had seen him near the house on the day before the fire; old Lenitschka, who had perished with the Captain and his wife, had warned them. Every servant at Pettelsdorf was looking out for him and every member of the resistance.

“But I want him alive,” Marek said.

“I want him to know who kills him. And he is not to be shot. It will happen slowly… very slowly.”

During those days of convalescence when the specialists conferred and the nuns prayed over his bed, there were only two visitors Marek did not want to see.

The first was his grandmother, Nora Coutts. She had been going for one of her famous walks when the fire began and had survived unscathed. Nora had lost her only daughter, whom she adored, and her son-in-law. She looked ten years older and something had happened to her mouth, which had been set in a firm line and now, on occasion, had to be covered with her hand. But Marek’s obsession with his vendetta, which grew with his returning strength, shocked her deeply.