A Song for Summer

Hungarian's not very good but I did look and he hasn't mentioned it. Which is just as well. Not that Isaac will be travelling in his swimming things, but all the same ..."

Isaac turned over in his bunk and gazed, from under the huge bandage which covered his head, at Ellen.

The soft light of the luxurious sleeping compartment shone on her fluted cap, her snowy apron. She looked like a nurse specially lowered from heaven for his benefit and he did not know how he could bear to leave her.

"You're being angelic, again," he said. "Hush. You're supposed to be asleep."

Everything had gone smoothly. Marek had hired an ambulance and booked the sleeper. He himself had driven them to the station wearing a Red Cross armband, and they had settled Isaac into his quarantined compartment. Then Marek had driven the ambulance away, and returned dressed in his own clothes with his pigskin suitcase and his passport which stated truthfully that he was Marcus Altenburg, a musician. If asked he would have said that he was travelling to a music festival in Warsaw, but he was not asked.

Ellen could see him now, standing in the corridor unobtrusively keeping watch. He had booked a first-class compartment next to Isaac's and hers, and seemed to have it to himself. After they left the train, he and Isaac would go on on foot and she would return to Hallendorf.

Isaac, wearing a spare pair of Chomsky's pyjamas, lay back on the pillow. He was certain that he would be apprehended, either at the two checkpoints they faced on the train or as he reached the Baltic, and if they tried to send him back to Germany he had decided he would kill himself.

But meanwhile there was Ellen.

He put out a hand and she took it and held it. She could see his thoughts working across his face as clearly as if he had uttered them.

"Ellen, if I get out ..."

"When."

He managed a smile. "When. Why don't we start a restaurant? I think I'd make quite a good chef."

"Maybe. But you're a violinist."

"I was. I'm not any more--I tried to make Marek see that it's over. In the camp, after they found out I was a violinist ..." but he could never talk about what they had done to his hands. "When I cut my finger the other day and it didn't matter, it was such a relief! I would work really hard. Think about it, Ellen. If I had something to look forward to ... something we could do together, it might be worthwhile trying to stay alive. I've loved you from the moment I saw you kneeling there beside that extraordinary suitcase."

"Oh Isaac, I love you too but--"'

"Yes, I know. Not like that. But that might come. I think we'd make a splendid team. Perhaps Marek would put some money into it."

"Marek is convinced that you're one of the best violinists in the world and that you'll play again."

He shook his head. Pretending to close his eyes, he could still see her, her head bent over her book. He had hoped she would lie down on the bunk beside him; he wouldn't have laid a finger on her but it would have been something to remember while he sat huddled in the evil-smelling lean-tos in which the rivermen slept as they poled down towards the sea.

"It's an hour still till the border, Isaac. Get some rest."

She looked up and saw Marek's silhouette against the window. He was still keeping watch and it was all she could do not to follow him into the corridor to draw comfort simply from his quiet presence, his size.

But they got through the first checkpoint without difficulty. The halt between Austria and Czechoslovakia was only a huddle of shacks and a road barrier. The two men who came along the corridor were friendly enough: Czechs with broad cheekbones; peasants without an axe to grind. Ellen gave them her passport and Chomsky's, putting her finger to her lips to show that her patient was asleep.

They scarcely looked at one of the passports, held the other long enough to make Ellen's heart thump almost unbearably in her

chest.

"You're British," said one of the soldiers, in heavily accented German, and Ellen saw that it was her passport he was holding.

"Yes."

"Your government should help us," he said. "They should support us against Hitler," and handed it back.

The first hurdle was over then.

She slipped out into the corridor and Marek, in his role as a well-to-do passenger starting a flirtation with a pretty nurse, turned to make way for her. They were travelling through wooded countryside towards Olomouc and Marek told her about the old woman who had sung the wrong songs to Steiner.

"Only they weren't the wrong songs, we were being absurd. They were the songs of her youth."

People started going past them towards the dining car, among them a heavily painted woman in a fur cape who threw Marek a sultry glance from under clogged eyelashes.

"I'm sorry you can't come and try the quail's eggs in aspic."

"I don't want to leave Isaac." "No." He had seen how tenderly she leant over Isaac, held his hand. "I'll bring him a bottle of champagne. He can drink it in his bed."