A Song for Summer

But here too Abattoir showed itself uniquely suited to the requirements of a school whose music teacher, swathed in unspeakable knitted balaclavas from his former pupils, was absent fighting in Spain. For as FitzAllan explained, the workers would sing the Internationale, the Salvation Army would bang tambourines and sing hymns, and the exploitative capitalists would listen to decadent jazz on the gramophone.

"But there must be a ballet," declared Tamara --and a weary sigh ran round the room. "A red ballet with a theme of ... viscerality. It could come to the workers while they slept."

FitzAllan opened his mouth, remembered she was the headmaster's wife and closed it again.

"We'll discuss it in private," he said, treating her to one of his brilliantly boyish smiles.

"Who's going to be the heroine?"' asked Janey. "The one who gives soup to the workers and dies in the snow?"'

"I shall begin the auditions tomorrow," said FitzAllan--and reminding them that the clue to the piece would lie in its truthful and monolithic drabness, he declared the meeting closed.

Although lessons continued in the mornings, the afternoons and evenings were now devoted to increasingly

frenzied rehearsals for Abattoir.

Not only rehearsals but workshops and seminars of every kind, many of which were conducted out of doors.

Predictably, the play was taking its toll. The director's determination to make the children call up their own experience of being cruel employers was particularly unfortunate.

"He said I oppressed Czernowitz because he came in on Sunday to feed the rats," said Sophie, coming in from one such Method Class in tears, "but I didn't--honestly, Ellen; I loved Czernowitz. I still do. If it wasn't for him I'd never know where anyone was."

Leon had fallen foul of FitzAllan by pointing out that the wicked stockyard owners shouldn't be playing jazz on the gramophone. "Jazz comes from the Blues," said Leon. "It's the music the Negroes used to free themselves, so it isn't decadent at all," he'd said and been thoroughly snubbed.

Worst of all was poor Flix.

FitzAllan had had the sense to see that the talented and unassuming American girl was perfect casting as the heroine, Johanna, but he had insisted on giving her a lecture on the Judas sheep.

"It's a sheep that they set up to go into the slaughterhouse and lead all the others in. It never gets killed, it just goes round and round, but the others do. It seems so absolutely awful to make an animal do that,"

said Flix, who had recently become a Jain and wore a muslin gauze over her mouth in the evenings so that she would not swallow, or damage, the gnats.

The staff were not immune either. Hermine's efforts to put the children in touch with their own physicality were affecting her milk and poor Chomsky's darkest fears had been realised. The three-tiered structure to represent the hierarchical nature of society was to be made of metal and the Hungarian, who had led a sheltered life getting the children to make bookends by bending a sheet of galvanised steel into a right angle, could be seen capering round the gigantic metal struts like a demented Rumpelstiltskin.

Under these circumstances, Ellen found herself more and more grateful for Marek's quiet world of trees and water and plants. For Sophie was right, Marek did show you things--and the showing was like getting presents. Marek found a stickleback nest in

the reeds, he led her to a place where the emerging demozel dragonflies flew up into the light, and when a small barn owl was blown off course and sat like a bewildered powder puff under a fir tree, he fetched her from the kitchen so that she could help him feed it with strips of raw liver. After a short time with him out of doors, Ellen could return to her work and to the comforting of her children with renewed energy.

"Is it possible that someone like FitzAllan could after all produce something good?"' she asked Marek as the director's strident voice came from the rehearsal room.

"Unlikely. But does it really matter?"' "I'd like it to work for Bennet. He's been writing "Toscanini's Aunt"

letters all day-- you know, letters to important people who he thinks might be interested in coming to the play. And Margaret says he's paying for FitzAllan out of his pocket."

Marek leant for a moment on his spade. "Yes, he's a good man. But--"'

He was about to say to her what he had said at the well. That time was running out. Not only was there no money for the school, but the school was threatened from the outside. For how much longer could it exist, this confused Eden with its unfashionable belief in freedom, its multi-lingual staff? Austria was leaning more and more towards the Third Reich; the Brownshirts strutted unashamedly in Vienna's streets, and even here in Hallendorf.

But she knew, of course. He remembered what she had said when she'd asked him for storks. "They'll still be here even if we are gone." It was because time was short that she cared so much about the play.