A Song for Summer

When she got back she found Leon dozing, his colour restored. Lieselotte had remade his bed. Bending down to make sure he was tucked in properly, Ellen saw the corner of a white folder protruding from under the mattress and drew it out.

"I only borrowed it," muttered Leon.

"I was going to give it back."

"That's all right, Leon. Go to sleep." Examining what she held in her hand she found it was a concert programme--and pinned to it a number of sheets of paper covered in Kendrick's handwriting.

An hour later, Marek knocked at the door of Leon's room. The children and Ellen were in the dining room; the boy, as he'd expected, was alone.

"Now then, Leon," he said, sitting down on the bed beside him, "what exactly is it that you want?"'

The tears started to flow again then; the twitchy face screwed itself into a grimace. "I just want you to help me," he sobbed. "That's all I want. I want you to help."

"How?"'

"I don't know anything ... I can't work out the fingering of my Beethoven sonata and I don't know if the quartet I've written is any good. My parents want me to be a musician--my mother's desperate for it, and my sisters too. They help me and help me, but I want someone to tell me if I've got any talent."

"No one else can tell you that."

"But how does one know if it's worth going on? I don't know whether I have any true creativity or--"'

"Good God, Leon, why do you always turn back on yourself? If you feel the need to write music, or play it, then do so, but believe me your creativity is of no interest to anyone. Write something--then it's there. If it's what you wanted to write, if it exists, then leave it. If it doesn't, throw it away. Your beautiful state of mind is totally irrelevant."

"But you--"'

"What happened to me has nothing to do with it. As it happens I was not at all keen on my so-called creativity. I fought it hard and long because I saw that it would take me away from the place I wanted to spend my life in, and the work I thought I had been born to do. If I wrote music it was because I didn't know how to stop. But you--"'

"My mother loves music so much. And my sisters, and my father is a businessman but he'd have liked to be a pianist--he's very good. So I thought ... I wanted. It's not that they force me, but--"'

"Yes; I see." For the first time, Marek felt pity and affection for the boy. "Tell me, Leon, if I asked you what you wanted to do when you grow up, what would you say? Just answer quickly."

"Make films," said Leon in an instant.

Marek smiled. "That has the ring of truth." He sat in silence for a moment, then decided to give the boy what he had asked for--help. "I said no one can judge another person's vocation and I meant that, but ... I think that you are genuinely musical; you will make an excellent amateur--and remember please the meaning of the word. An amateur is a lover of music. You will be a fine facilitator, a person who can make music happen. It is because of people like you and your family that music is heard, that orchestras are formed, and paid for, and that's something to be proud of. But if you ask me whether you have the original spark, well then, I have to say I think probably not."

He watched the boy carefully and saw the screwed up look gradually vanish from his face. Then he leant back on the pillow and smiled--a slow smile of relief and happiness. Released from his burden, he looked like a child again, not a wizened old man.

"They'd believe me if you told them," said Leon. "I know you can't now but one day, if you go back."

Marek got up and went to the window. "Your romantic notions of me are mistaken. I am not at Heiligenstadt renouncing the world. Simply I need a few months in which I am not associated with my former life. But now you have--"'

"I wouldn't say anything. Not ever. I've known you since you came because my mother was in Berlin when you defenestrated that Nazi and it was in all the papers and I saw your picture. But I can keep a secret."

"If you cannot, the consequences would be very serious. I take it no one else knows?"'

Leon hung his head. "Ellen does. Now. Her fiancè sent her a programme of the concert where they played your songs. I sort of borrowed it and--"'

"Her fiancè?"' asked Marek, momentarily diverted.

"Well, she says she isn't going to marry him, but we think she will because he keeps on writing letters and she's sorry for him because he lives in a wet house and his mother delivered a camel on the way to church."

His house would not stay wet long if she married him, thought Marek, and saw Ellen with a red-and-white-checked tea towel on a ladder, carefully drying the chimneys.

"His name is Kendrick Frobisher," said Leon, "and he was at school with you."

"Really?"' The name meant nothing to Marek. He came back to the bed. "You have a close and loving family, Leon," he said. "Not many children are as fortunate. Trust them. Tell them the truth."