A Song for Summer

Sophie said that Marek was a person who found things.

"What sort of things?"' asked Ellen. "Oh ... mouse's nests and fireflies ... and stars with their proper names. And when he shows you it's like getting a present."

A shy French boy, who spoke little English, said Marek had made him understand what fencing was about. "It is not ... that one only tries to hit others. It is a system of the body."

Ellen herself had seen Marek's spoor everywhere. In the prop he had made for the aged catalpa tree in the courtyard, in the rim of the fountain he had repaired, in the newly built frames in the kitchen garden.

So she was surprised that one child seemed to hate him. Leon did not only criticise Marek; he spoke of him with an anger which startled Ellen and alarmed her.

"He's not honest. He's a liar and a cheat."

"What on earth do you mean?"'

"He just is," said Leon. He had come from the practice rooms where she had heard him wrestling with a Beethoven sonata. "He absolutely hates music--he rushes away when the recorder group plays or they're rehearsing the choir. So what is he doing driving about the country collecting folk songs; just tell me that?"'

"He's only acting as Professor Steiner's chauffeur." And as Leon continued to glare and mutter: "No one could be a liar and do what he did for Achilles," said Ellen, for whom the tortoise had become a kind of talisman. "You'd have to practically become a tortoise to do that."

"Well, that's lying, isn't it? Pretending to be a tortoise," said Leon, and stalked off, swinging the monogrammed leather music case which he had not yet managed to reduce to the wrecked state he regarded as suitable for the proletariat.

By the end of Ellen's second week the weather became properly warm and not only Chomsky but others began to take to the lake. Ellen thus found herself acquainted not only with the Hungarian's appendix scar but with the thin white legs of the Biology teacher, David Langley, whose pursuit of the Carinthian frit fly did not seem to have affected his musculature, and the brilliantly orange curls covering both Rollo's chest and his stomach.

Beyond reflecting on the sad difference between the Naked and the Nude, Ellen was untroubled, confining herself to seeing that the children brought in their towels and did not drip water on to the freshly polished corridors.

Others were not so insouciant. Sophie said she couldn't swim because she had a mole on her shoulder, and Ursula said she wouldn't because swimming was silly. An Indian girl called Nandi also retired indoors, though what was supposed to be wrong with her perfect body was hard to imagine.

Ellen listened to these dissidents without comment. Then on a particularly fine afternoon she invited the girls to come to her room to admire her bathing costume. "It's nice, isn't it? It was terribly expensive."

"It's lovely," said Sophie. "But are you going to wear it?"'

"Yes, I am. It was a present from my mother."

"But is it all right? I mean, could one wear a bathing costume? Wouldn't people mind?"'

"Now Sophie, don't be absurd. What could freedom and self-expression possibly mean except that you can wear something to swim in or not exactly as you please? I'm going to try it out tomorrow afternoon."

Marek sat on the wooden seat in front of Professor Steiner's little house drinking a glass of beer. His face was relaxed; the eyes quiet. Above the reeds on the edge of the lake, the swallows skimmed and swooped; the afternoon sun held the warmth of summer, not the uncertain promise of spring. Soon now he must row himself back to the castle; he had been away longer than he intended, but he was in no hurry to return to Hallendorf's fishbone risotto, the racket of the children and Tamara's embarrassing advances.

The journey had gone well. They had reached the border without mishap and found the man they had come for. A year in a concentration camp had not broken Heller. Beneath the emaciated body, the spirit of the debonair Reichstag delegate with his eyeglass and his bons mots was undimmed.

"It won't go on," he'd said, as they drove east through the Bohemian forest. "The rest of the world will wake up to what is going on. God forbid that I should hope for a war, but what else is there to hope for?"'

But he was angry with Marek, whom he had recognised at once, having known him in Berlin. "You shouldn't be doing this; you've other things to do. I was at--"'

Marek hushed him. He didn't want to hear what he heard continually from Steiner. Ten miles from the Polish border they left Steiner with the van and prepared for the last part of the journey on foot. As they crouched in the undergrowth waiting for the darkest part of the night, Marek asked if he had heard anything about Meierwitz.

"He's still alive," Heller had said.

"At least he was a month ago. A woman on a farm was hiding him. He's got guts, that little chap. He could have got out in '34, only--"'

"Don't," said Marek. "It's because of me that he stayed."

"Now that is nonsense," said Heller.