A Lily of the Field Read online

  Imre went to the theatre for the night’s performance and did not come back. He had a large couch in his office. By one in the morning, having listened for the sound of his return, Méret concluded he was using the couch to sleep on.

  §16

  She called on her father at the theatre on her way home from school the following day. She had not the words to say what she wished to say. She simply knew that she wanted to say something rather than go home to a continuation of last night’s mood. Even if she said nothing her father would fill the silence—he always did—and she would listen. Perhaps they would even go home together.

  She found him in the lobby, sitting alone at a table, the customary scattering of envelopes and papers, scribbles and doodles spread out in front of him, watching sadly as two workmen perched on trestles behind the bar whitewashed the goddess Artemis—golden breasts and red hair still very visible beneath the first thin coat.

  She came up next to him quietly. Put a hand on his shoulder. He knew her touch and did not look up.

  “Would they paint over a Titian?” he said. “The blue behind her head is surely the same colour as the sky in Diana and Callisto? Doesn’t the Diana of the Death of Actaeon sit on a cloak of the same red on which our Artemis sprawls? Thank God I never had the money to buy a Picasso or we’d be watching that go under the whitewash, too.”

  The workmen shuffled their buttocks along to the end of their plank to begin a second coat of whitewash. Titian, Picasso. It was all the same to a five-inch brush and a roller. Imre stood up and put on his jacket.

  “That’s one of many things not to like about Nazis. We live in a world of infinite colours and they see everything in black and white.”

  “No, Papa. Brown and white.”

  Méret so rarely made jokes. It took her father a few seconds to realize she had actually said something funny. And then he laughed so loudly, the men on their plank turned to see what he was laughing at.

  With his left hand he wiped his eyes and with his right handed her a letter from the office of the Reich commissar, Doktor Sauerwald.

  “Here’s another laugh for you. The buggers have sent me a list of plays I may not permit to be performed.”

  Méret glanced down the page.

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

  “Oh, quite,” said her father. “Definitely subversive. A cast of unruly working men and mischievous fairies. Trade unionists and anarchists.”

  “A Doll’s House?”

  “A woman’s place is in the home? Kinder, kirche, küche? Don’t look for logic. There isn’t any. You mark my words it’ll be music next. You’ll find yourself stuck with an approved list of suitably Germanic composers.”

  Later that week, when Professor Kaiserman read out the approved list she was relieved to find that Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were on it. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Mahler were not.

  The decadents and the Jews.

  §17

  On February 14, 1940, Méret turned sixteen and entered the Imperial Academy of Music—still known to all musicians as the Konservatorium.

  She had never auditioned for anything before. The youth orchestra had taken her on the strength of her first recital with Viktor.

  She emerged from the audition having been politely told she was accepted. She found the reserve, the lack of response in the selection panel, disturbing.

  “They’d never applaud a student,” Magda Ewald (trombone) told her. “It simply wouldn’t do. But I can tell you now old Hoffmann was almost in tears and Professor Magnes had to sit on her hands to stop herself clapping. You’re not just ‘in,’ Méret, you’re ‘it.’”

  “It?”

  “Oh, don’t be so dense . . . don’t make me fish around for a metaphor . . . you’re Viktor Rosen’s protégée . . . that should be ‘it’ enough. Were they ever going to turn down Viktor Rosen’s protégée?”

  “Do you really think they remember Viktor?”

  Magda didn’t answer. It was a stupid question.

  The unstupid question, the only question that mattered, occurred unuttered to both of them.

  Where is Viktor Rosen now?

  §18

  June 1940

  Heaven’s Gate Internment Camp

  Port Erin, Isle of Man

  It felt like going on holiday. His suitcase packed for a summer week by a lake in Hungary with his parents. It wasn’t a holiday. It was one prison to another. As prisons went Szabo had liked Heaven’s Gate. It had been home for six months. Ever since the British declared him an enemy alien and stuck him on a train to Liverpool last November. Hungary hadn’t joined the Axis. It would, inevitably—under Hitler’s wing Hungary had seized its slice of Czechoslovakia, had swallowed the Subcarpathian Rus whole after but a single day of independence. It hadn’t joined yet, but it would. He had had the misfortune to be born in Vienna—capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that other “sick man of Europe”—an empire that had dissolved itself before the last war had even finished, when he was just a boy. Many of his fellow prisoners were Viennese. He had family in Vienna—great aunts, aunts, uncles, and cousins—and had visited it many times in his childhood. “Viennese” was not a badge he would wear with any pride—it was an inappropriate label not worth the effort it took to shrug it off.

  Once, a guard had asked, “Hungries, Austrians, Krauts. Wossa difference, then?”

  He had replied in Magyar, a language few Englishmen had ever heard and which resembled no other language in Europe.

  “Wossat mean then? That ain’t no German.”

  “It means—Hungary is a large, faraway country of which you know fuck all.”

  He had liked Heaven’s Gate. He had not gone hungry, no one had hit him, no one had even shouted at him. He had found time to practice his flute. He had found time to study, although not the texts or materials he needed to study, so study had perhaps become merely reading. Not the same thing by any stretch. He had arrived utterly ignorant of the work of Dornford Yates and P.G. Wodehouse and was leaving thinking of them as an important insight into the lives and mores of his captors—the English.

  Arthur Kornfeld—the real Viennese—came in and threw himself down on the cot that Szabo had just stripped back to mattress and pillow.

  “I know where you’re going.”

  “How many cigarettes did that cost you?”

  “None. I just asked Jenkins. Far too decent even to think of hinting at a bribe.”

  “Decency? It will be the death of men like Lieutenant Jenkins.”

  Kornfeld bounced up again like a jack-in-the-box.

  “Karel, do you have no curiosity about your own fate? I tell you I know and you launch a debate on the English character!”

  “Australia,” Szabo said simply. “It’s bound to be Australia.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. You’ve got the wrong pink bit. All the others are going to Australia. You’re going to Canada. A ferry back to Liverpool, then a ship to Canada.”

  Szabo unhooked his overcoat from the back of the door and draped it across his suitcase. All his actions saying “ready” and frustrating Kornfeld.

  “I’m sure they have their reasons,” he said almost casually.

  “I’d be more inclined to say they have a plan.”

  “Plan? No, Arthur. If they had a plan they would never have locked us up. We were far more use to them in universities and laboratories than we ever were here. Do you think they even know what a nuclear physicist does? Do you think they’ve even heard of Schrödinger or Dirac?”

  “Depends on who you mean by they. The home secretary? The prime minister? Probably not. Jenkins, our immediate captor—he only knows because we’ve told him, and he’s logged it in what passes loosely for his mind because it might come in handy for filling in a crossword puzzle some day. But somewhere out there somebody knows and pretty soon they’ll realize who we are . . . what we are . . . what we have . . . what we know. Think of them as children. Think of Europe as the drawing room and England
as the kindergarten of Europe. They are innocents. They actually boast of not having been invaded since 1066. When in fact all that means is that they have lived outside of the mainstream of Europe. They are innocents.”

  “Innocents or blunderers. And can we trust either to win this war?”

  “Trust me. They have a plan.”

  Szabo looked out of the window. A charabanc was parked on the tarmacadam that had been the rounders court when Heaven’s Gate had been a girls’ school. He surely did not have long now.

  “Why do people say ‘trust me’? Simply to ask for something or state something implies trust, as trust is the basis of such intercourse. But to emphasize trust implies distrust. Invokes distrust. Saying ‘trust me’ has the opposite effect. It begets distrust. Saying ‘trust me’ means you cannot trust me. As certainly as, ‘I will still respect you in the morning,’ means that I most certainly will not.”

  “You know, Karel, I do hope you find good company on the ship. A week with no one to listen to your aphorisms will drive you insane.”

  Down on the tarmac, Lieutenant Jenkins had appeared with a clipboard, wearing his uniform, as Kornfeld had once so pithily put it, “thrown on like a couple of potato sacks.” He was gazing around in his habitual lackadaisical way in the hope that someone would turn up without him having to go and look for them. He didn’t need to scratch his head; metaphorically, Jenkins was always scratching his head. And even at this distance Szabo could hear the soft sighs of bafflement and exasperation. The clipboard surely held a list of names. And his name was surely on that list. He would not keep Jenkins waiting. The thought that the fate of Europe lay in the hands of Englishmen like Rowly Jenkins and Bertie Wooster was an awful prospect.

  §19

  There was no quiet interlude. Only a day after the interned had departed for Douglas, Liverpool, and the waiting boats for Canada or Australia, a new lot arrived. Tired, baffled, scared.

  As ever, Max Drax staged a welcome, effusive and insistent in the same airy breath of Old World charm.

  They dragged one of the dining tables into the hall—a desk for Kornfeld to set his papers on. Not that Kornfeld gave a damn, but Drax was adamant that in the absence of anything resembling proper records on the part of the British, they should keep their own.

  “Once, we were a tribe,” he had said, speaking as a Jew.

  “Once, we were a nation,” he had said speaking as a German.

  “Now we are a family.”

  And it had fallen to Kornfeld, neither Jew nor German but willing to accept the broad strokes of Drax’s brush, to keep the documents of the family album up to date. It had also fallen to him to keep them dry.

  Oskar Siebert, an exiled Viennese policeman who had been there longer than any of them—hard, after all, to convince anyone that you might be the one Viennese cop not actually in the Nazi party—had his share of the table taken up with a row of teacups and the largest teapot in the history of catering, and was relishing a trick he had learnt from the endless battalions of English women, who poured tea at every opportunity, of lining up the cups and pouring a continuous stream of tea. Alas, it was not a lesson he had learnt well.

  Suddenly, he heard a ghost speak.

  The dying words of Goethe.

  “Mehr licht!”

  But it was only old Drax asking someone to throw the light switch as the first of the newcomers came in from the breaking storm.

  A huge man, six foot two or more, in a crumpled Savile Row suit that showed its class through every crease, seemed to be leading a motley of twenty or so.

  Drax addressed him, as he did every arrival until experience taught otherwise, in German.

  The big man replied in flawless English that he was, “fine with English,” and Kornfeld readily deduced that this was yet another long-term resident, doubtless convinced of his own Englishness, caught in the net of a foreign birth and contradictory truths. They were getting more common. And they always led. Some with a belligerent resentment, others with a calm affability that told everyone—Wops, kikes, and Krauts—that it was all “cricket” and everything would be alright “by close of play.” He’d come to think of it as the modus operandi of men like Lieutenant Jenkins. And this man was one of those.

  “I’m Rod Troy,” he said. “Of Hampstead.”

  Drax intervened, introduced Kornfeld, explained the purpose of keeping records, and asked, gently, insistently, if he would not mind stating for said records his origins.

  Troy was not offended in the slightest.

  He called out across Drax to Kornfeld, “I’m Rodyon Troy, from Vienna. I think you’ll find quite a few of us are.”

  Now Drax was shaking his hand, a joyous two-handed grip, and Kornfeld found himself facing the other kind of English foreigner—the belligerent. Short, surly, saturnine.

  “Abel Jakobson. Danzig. Now, where’s me bleedin’ tea?”

  Siebert pushed a cup in his direction, glanced at Kornfeld, eyes rolling momentarily, sarcastically, to heaven.

  “Right here, Danzig. Hot and wet as they say in your part of London.”

  “What part o’ London might that be?”

  “Oh . . .” Siebert feigned thinking. “Whitechapel or Stepney. Not far off the Mile End Road I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “You’re a smartarse, ain’t yer?”

  “I should say I am.”

  “An’ a copper, too, if I ain’t mistaken?”

  “Touché, Herr Stepney. Touché.”

  Kornfeld moved on to the only part of this process that remotely interested him. The assembly of his string quartet. They had lost their second violin when Anton Bruch had departed on the same train as Szabo.

  “Do you by any chance play the violin?”

  But Abel Jakobson did not.

  Nor did the skinny man with the big ears who stood next in line.

  “Josef Hummel, Vienna. I play nothing.”

  A gentle man with a troubled face, followed by another belligerent. A man as well dressed as Troy, almost rippling with wealth and dignity, but with little of his patience.

  There was something vaguely familiar about his face. No . . . not vaguely, something precisely familiar . . . the only thing eluding him was the name.

  “Viktor Rosen. Berlin. I play the piano and I play it better with sugar in my tea.”

  §20

  Szabo spent a week under canvas in the Liverpool borough of Huyton. It appeared to be some sort of housing project, commandeered by the military, crudely fenced off with barbed wire and stuffed full of wogs. As the interned entered, the council workmen had left. The neat, semidetached houses had walls and roofs but neither doors nor windows. The English packed their captives in half a dozen to a room.

  A near silent, oh-so-polite lance corporal—stopping short of calling him “sir”—showed Szabo to what might one day become the back lawn or, the English being English, the potato and cabbage patch of this unfinished house, and pointed at a small green tent.

  “Is that it?” Szabo said.

  “’Ouses is full. ’Slutely chocca.”

  “Supposing it rains?”

  A voice behind them chipped in, “Then I’ll bring you an umbrella.”

  A lieutenant of he knew not what regiment. A carbon copy of Rowly Jenkins—good grief, did they make them on a production line like Ford cars?—scruffy, déshabillé, simply oozing that familiar mixture of class and incompetence. The scientist in Szabo hated it. The flautist warmed to it at once. It would be as well to get to know him. Who knew how long he’d have to live in a tent.

  “Karel Szabo,” he held out his hand and had no truck with the past tense. “I teach physics at Cambridge.”

  The officer shook.

  “Rupert Feather. I read history at Cambridge. But don’t ask me anything about it. Can’t remember a damn thing. Even been known to get the date of the Battle of Hastings muddled up.”

  “Muddled up with what?”

  Feather hooted with laughter.

  The
lance corporal didn’t even smile and Szabo readily deduced that England was always at war. Not necessarily with Germany but with itself.

  Two nights later it rained. Dripped through the ancient canvas and down the back of his neck.

  Entirely to Szabo’s surprise, about half an hour before dusk, Feather showed up with an umbrella.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re one of the lucky ones.”

  “How so?”

  “Tent to yourself when other buggers are crammed into rooms like sardines into tins.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  At the end of the week, the lance corporal led half a dozen Tommies around the camp, yelling, “Bound for South Australia”—banging on walls and shaking on tent poles.

  Szabo had had enough of tents, enough of England. He stood with his suitcase packed hoping to be steered off to a ship, any ship, regardless of what Kornfeld had told him about Canada. What did it matter? Canada? Australia? The pink bits on the map.

  But Lieutenant Feather pulled him out of the line with, “Not you, old son. You’re one of the lucky ones.”

  “You keep telling me that. I find it hard to believe.”

  “Canada for you.”

  “When?”

  “Dunno. And if I did I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Then let me go to Australia. It is warm. It is dry.”

  “Sorry. No can do.”

  But the next morning he called in person, bending double under the tent flap.

  “It’s today. You’re off.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Szabo. “I’m one of the lucky ones.”

  §21

  The SS Harlech sailed for Canada on July 3, 1940. Two thousand prisoners and, it seemed, almost as many crew and guards, steaming westward in the shadow of a Royal Navy destroyer.

  They had cleared the coast of Donegal. An army captain in charge of their guards addressed as many as could fit into the main dining room of the ship.