A Song for Summer

"I heard all about that and it was his choice to remain behind. He wanted the glory of--"'

The barking of a distant dog put an end to all further speech, even in the lowest of whispers. At three a.m. the moon went in and they took off their clothes and waded across the river, and a man rose silently from a field of rye and beckoned them to follow. Heller would be all right, thought Marek now. He had a forged residential permit allowing him to stay in Poland; his sister had married a Pole and would give him shelter. He had been a flyer in the war and intended to offer himself as an instructor in the Polish Air Force. They would take him; he had the Iron Cross.

From Steiner's living room came the cracked voice of the old crone he had found in the hamlet in which he had waited for Marek to return. He had led her into the van with the highest hopes: she was poor and toothless, her brown face seamed with dirt. If there was anyone who should have been a repository of ancient music it was Olga

Czernova, from whose black clothes there had come the smell of decay and leaf mould as if she had been dug up from the forest floor.

But the tune which now drifted out towards Marek was not a work song from a bygone age, not a funeral dirge. It was "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes" from The Pirates of Penzance and it was followed by "Lippen Schweigen" from The Merry Widow. For in the bosom of this old witch there dwelt a girl who had been to the city, escorted by a young man who swore he would marry her. The city was not Prague or Vienna, though Olga knew of them both: it was Olomouc, where once a Hapsburg emperor had been crowned.

And in Olomouc there had been music! And what music! Not the boring dirges she had been brought up with, but lovely, lifting tunes played by the town band and sung in the operettas by hussars in silver and blue, and gypsies in layers and layers of twirling skirts ... And in the cafes too there had been music!

The young man had left her--he was a wastrel --but the tunes of that magical time had stayed with her always. To the increasingly desperate Steiner she had sung the Champagne Aria from Fledermaus, Offenbach's Can Can and a duet--taking both parts--from a musical comedy called Prater Spring.

"Put it in," she kept saying, while Steiner begged uselessly for the old songs she had learnt in the forest.

"Go on. This is the part where he finds out she's really a princess."

And Steiner had done so, meaning to erase the disc later, for it was hardly suitable for despatch to Bartok's Ethnographical

Music Collection in Budapest. But now he decided to leave it, for he too had been young and sat in cafès, and Olga's final screechings reminded him of the moment when he had seen Marek return from the phalanx of trees and knew that he was safe. It got worse and worse, the waiting for the boy.

Marek, sitting sleepily in the sunshine, heard Steiner moving about in his kitchen, preparing the evening meal. He made no attempt to help him: Steiner's kitchen, like his house, was tiny--it was this which had made Marek refuse the Professor's offer of hospitality and go to work in the school. Then he heard himself called.

"Marek, come here a minute!"

Steiner's only luxury in his exile was a large and very powerful telescope through which he watched the stars. But not only the stars ... He was the least voyeuristic of men but it amused him to watch the people on the steamer, the animals wandering on the high pastures, the holiday-makers picnicking on the island.

Now though the telescope was trained on the castle and as Marek put his eye to it he could see, as if to touch it, the grass at the foot of the steps, the punt drawn up beside the boathouse ... and the wooden jelly along which there walked, with a purposeful grace, a young woman whose shoulders were draped in a snowy towel.

And behind her, in single file like a brood of intent ducklings, came four ... no ... five little girls. They too moved with a look of purpose, they too were draped in snowy towels. Marek could make out Sophie with her long plaits and the bad-tempered English girl with a passion for Red Indians.

But it was the woman who led them who held his gaze. Ellen now had dropped her towel, and brought one arm up to gather in the masses of her light brown hair and skewer it on to her head--and what Steiner had suspected was correct. She wore a blue one-piece bathing costume which entirely covered all those places that such a garment is structured to conceal.

As if on a string, the little girls dropped their towels also and copied her movements, trying to scoop up and tether their hair as best they could-- and, yes, they too were wearing bathing suits.

"I've never seen that before," said Steiner. "Nor I," said Marek, thinking of the hollows and sinews of Tamara's body as she lay splayed across his path, the white limbs of the Biology teacher and Chomsky's notorious appendix scar.