A Song for Summer

For three days Marek shut himself up in his old room in the stable block. People who came to knock on his door did not do so twice, and even Tamara respected his wishes and stayed away.

His intention at first was simply to adapt some of the well-known folk songs and hymns of the district, orchestrating them for such instruments as were to hand and teaching the smaller children a simple accompaniment.

Then on the first day Ellen had come in with a tray, for he had made it clear that he would not come in for meals. The tray contained a plate with a pork chop, a helping of mashed potatoes and some garden peas. For dessert she had given him fresh fruit: a bunch of black grapes, a peach.

A pot of coffee was keeping warm under a cosy. She put the tray down and for a moment he saw her: the asymmetrical hair, the concerned eyes and strongly marked brows.

"How's it going?"' he asked her.

"It's amazing. The exact opposite of Abattoir. People are coming from everywhere to help. We've even found a fierce horse for Count Alexei--it used to pull the dustcart and it's a stinker. And believe it or not, they all want Frank to be the angel: a huge, ferocious angel like Raphael with enormous wings and--"'

But Marek had stopped listening. She saw the sudden withdrawal into his own thoughts and left him. As soon as she was gone, he dropped the manuscript paper on to the floor. Two hours later, he had written what came to be called the Aniella theme.

My God, this is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her. It wasn't quite like that, of course, but it was true that he had wanted suddenly to express the sense of joy in simple things which characterised her. But now he was done for. The growling march for the evil knights was already in his head, and now the interaction of Aniella's theme with that of the angel in the grotto.

"Idiot!" he told himself, facing days

without sleep and an amount of work out of all proportion to the occasion--but nothing now could have stopped him.

In the evening she came again with the fresh supply of manuscript paper he had sent out for, and a supper tray.

"I need a large Thermos of coffee," he said. "Black. Nothing else."

When she had gone he went to the window and stretched. It occurred to him to wonder if he would have written this music if Ellen had agreed to be Aniella; if she had given in to the clamour of those who wanted her to be the pageant's star. But she had not considered it even for a moment.

"It would be completely wrong for me to do it; I'm not Austrian and I'm not a Catholic. I'll help in any way I can but there's only one person who can do it--you must see that."

And they had seen it. Lieselotte would not have to act--she was Aniella--and by insisting on this uncomplicated and well-loved girl, Ellen had brought the village round behind the enterprise to a man. But it had touched Marek, as it had touched Bennet, that she had meant what she said when she'd insisted that she herself did not want to act or sing or be singled out in any way.

"What if it rains?"' asked Frau Tischlein. She was the old woman who had warned Ellen of the wild children at Hallendorf. Now suddenly the wild children were everywhere; in the village, in Lieselotte's house ... suggesting, rehearsing ... They were even in the church, where hammering and sawing could be heard all day, for Lieselotte, at her own insistence, was to be flown upwards to the tower.

"It won't rain," said Frau Becker.

"God would not permit it when we are working so hard in his name."

They were certainly working hard. The scheme for the pageant seemed to grow spontaneously like a river gathering tributaries. Lieselotte's own house was too high up the mountain to be used, but a similar wooden house not far from the grotto was commandeered. To this house the villagers brought flowers for the window boxes and tubs of ornamental shrubs, and when Rollo fixed an imitation morning glory up one wall, it became the house in the painting.

"I want to be a salamander too," said the

six-year-old son of the shoemaker and was sent to Bruno to be fitted out with yellow spots.

What had happened to Bruno was as great a miracle to Ellen as anything that had happened to the saint.

Coming to look for him late one night, she found him in the art room.

"Don't tell me to go to bed," he said angrily--and she didn't, for she had seen what he was making: the mask that would turn Aniella into an old crone, an uncanny masterpiece fashioned from rice paper and silk in which Lieselotte's pretty features were still discernible beneath the wrinkles.

"They have taken my baby!" cried Hermine, finding the herring box empty and coming distraught to Ellen.

"It's all right, she's with Frau Becker and the others in the sewing room."

"But they will give her bad things to eat-- sweet things, and in the book it says--"'