A Song for Summer

"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.

"Your parents died together and almost instantly, I understand. What do you think they'd feel if they knew you were going to poison the rest of your life with this hatred? What do you think they would feel if they knew what you were doing to Ellen?"'

But Marek was deaf and blind. Ellen was a danger. Ellen, who came every day and sat quietly and patiently by his bed, waiting for him to become sane again ... Ellen, who was so beautiful and whole and true, would weaken him. Even less than his grandmother did she understand that nothing but hatred must now rule his life. To track down Schwachek, to kill him very slowly and carefully, explaining at each stage what was happening to him and why--nothing else existed. And when this was done, to face prison or hanging on his own account without regret, knowing that Ellen was out of it and safe.

"There will be no more love and no more weddings," he had said when she first came.

But she had not believed him. She thought as the nuns thought, that the shock had temporarily unhinged him. That he should wish to avenge his parents' murder was understandable perhaps, but to make this vendetta his only reason for existing seemed impossible. Surely somewhere the man who cared for every living thing could not be wholly and permanently dead?