The Ocean Liner

Le Havre

Aboard the Manhattan, moored in Le Havre, Stravinsky had been dreaming of the Trylon and the Perisphere. They towered, white as bone, in a de Chirico landscape of empty palaces, twilight skies and marmoreal clouds. He dreamed he was walking slowly towards them, his hands outstretched, knowing he would never reach them. He was not sure what had awoken him until he heard it again – a stifled sob. He wondered if he had been crying in his sleep, something that happened to him from time to time. But the sound was made by someone else.

He raised himself in bed and switched on the lamp. Groping for his spectacles, he put them on his nose and peered at Thomas in the bunk next to his. The boy had buried his face in his pillow, but his thin shoulders were convulsing.

Stravinsky spoke quietly. ‘Child.’

The boy stopped moving. He slowly raised his head from the pillow. His face was a tragic mask, his eyelids swollen. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘I’m a light sleeper.’ Stravinsky inspected his little travelling clock, a parting gift from Nadia Boulanger. It was long after midnight. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I miss my family so much.’

‘You’ll see them again soon.’

The boy dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. ‘I will never see them.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘They took them away.’ His lips were trembling. ‘They came in the night with the truck, and took them all, my mother and father, my uncle and my aunt.’

‘Who took them? Where were they taken?’ The boy didn’t answer, and the questions hung in the air. Stravinsky knew that modern Germany was a state in which people were arrested at night and never returned, and nobody asked why or where. ‘But why didn’t they take you, Thomas?’

‘They didn’t find me, because my mother made me sleep with the neighbour, Frau König.’

‘I see.’ Stravinsky tried to unravel what the boy was saying. ‘Your neighbour’s name is König?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was a relation?’

‘No.’

‘But your name is König, too.’

‘No. My name is—’ The boy stopped, his face panicky.

Stravinsky raised his hand tiredly. ‘You need not tell me your name. Your mother sent you to sleep with this Frau König to keep you safe?’

‘It was an arrangement.’

‘What sort of arrangement?’

‘My mother gave Frau König her things. Her gold sovereigns.’

‘To take care of you?’

‘Frau König’s son died. Last year. So she had a spare bed.’

‘And a passport?’ Stravinsky guessed.

The boy looked up quickly, his tear-stained face scared and guilty. ‘I should not have said anything.’

‘No, you should not,’ Stravinsky said. ‘And you must not say it again. Not to anybody.’

Thomas twisted his hands together. ‘I won’t.’

‘Especially not when you enter the United States. Whatever your name was before, you are Thomas König now. When you show your passport to the immigration officer, you must not flinch. You understand?’

‘Yes,’ the boy whispered.

‘And you must not breathe a word of this to anyone on board. Not to anyone.’ Stravinsky raised his finger sternly. ‘Not a soul. Or you will be sent back to Germany.’

‘I think I would rather go back and die than live alone,’ the boy said in a low voice.

‘That is nonsense,’ Stravinsky said sharply, then looked at him more compassionately. ‘It may seem preferable to you to give up now, but you have a life to live, Thomas. You have a duty to live it for the ones you have left behind. Do some good in the world to repay the evil that was done to you and to them. Otherwise where would the world end up?’ He paused. ‘What were they arrested for?’

‘My father and my uncle said things about the Nazis. They confessed against Hitler in the church.’

‘Confessed? What do you mean? What confession? What church?’

‘They are pastors. Lutherans. They call it the Confessing Church, because they believe they must speak the truth openly, before God, no matter what. They said that the treatment of the Jewish people was wicked. They were warned many times, and my mother begged them to be silent, but they wouldn’t be silent.’

‘And for that they were arrested?’

‘They have been sent to a concentration camp.’

‘So you are not a Nazi, after all?’

‘No. They expelled me from school because I would not give the Hitler salute or join the Hitler Youth.’

‘You were going the same way as your father and uncle? Your mother must have been distraught. How old are you, really?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘That is more believable. You don’t look eighteen.’

‘I watched everything from Frau König’s window,’ Thomas went on. ‘But my mother didn’t even look up at me as they took her away!’ The boy started sobbing in earnest, burying his face in his hands.

‘The reason for that,’ Stravinsky said, ‘was that she did not want to betray your hiding place.’ Thomas quietened, making only those little gasps that had disturbed Stravinsky’s nightmare. Stravinsky took a cigarette from the pack in his bedside cabinet, then thought better of lighting it. He put it away again. ‘Come, Thomas,’ he said at last. ‘Sit with me.’

Thomas groped his way to Stravinsky’s side. Stravinsky put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. ‘Honour your mother’s sacrifice. Do what she asked you to do. You must be the best Hitler Youth in the world now, at least until you are settled in America, and safe from harm. You understand?’

Thomas nodded.

‘Play your part. Be eighteen, not sixteen. Be a good Nazi. I will help you. Thomas König is not such a bad name. Eh? It was a good thing that Frau König kept her part of the bargain. But then, you brought her dead son back to life, and that is no mean feat.’ He offered Thomas his handkerchief. ‘Have you slept at all?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I can’t stop thinking about them. I think they are all dead by now.’

Stravinsky could make no comment on that. ‘You should try to sleep. Would you like me to tell you a story?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Then put your head on the pillow.’ The boy obeyed, lying back and gazing up at Stravinsky with bleary eyes. ‘I will tell you about my first great success. Yes?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘It was a long time ago, in the spring of 1913. I was a young man, I suppose about nine or ten years older than you are now. Nobody had heard of me. I had composed a ballet called The Rite of Spring. It was the story of a young woman who is so full of life that she cannot stop dancing, and in the end dances herself to death. It was to be performed in Paris, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, by the Ballets Russes. On the opening night, everybody came in their smartest clothes. They were expecting a pleasant, dull evening – you know?’ Stravinsky folded his arms and bowed his head in imitation of the Dying Swan. The boy nodded. ‘But my music was considered very revolutionary. Nobody had heard anything like it before. It was harsh, what we call dissonant. Do you know what dissonance is?’

‘No,’ Thomas replied.

‘You understand diodes and triodes, but not dissonance? Well, let us say that dissonance is when the composer squeezes lemon-juice in your eyes. You understand?’

The boy nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘So there was the dissonant music, to begin with. The audience started to shout and whistle. They weren’t happy. Other people were interested in the dissonance, and told them to shut up. And then, among all this tumult, the dancers appeared on the stage, young girls and boys. But they danced in a new way. Like this.’ Stravinsky made exaggerated, angular jerks with his arms and head. This brought a slight smile to the boy’s lips. ‘This was also something nobody had seen before. So the audience began to howl and stamp even more, and the ones who were enjoying it began to shout back even louder. But all this was as nothing to what happened when the star of the show appeared. Do you know who Nijinsky is?’

‘Well, Nijinsky was the greatest dancer in the world, but between you and me—’ Stravinsky twirled his forefinger around his ear. ‘He was a little crazy. In fact, more than a little crazy. And his dancing was crazy, too.’ His dark eyes opened very wide to express insanity. ‘Completely crazy – or so it seemed to those bourgeois people who had come to see frilly tutus and nice legs. So instead of watching and listening, they began to fight each other, right there in the theatre. They made so much noise that the performance could hardly continue. I was very angry. I got up from my seat and I told them, “Excuse me, but go to the devil, all of you.” And I walked out. I left them to fight and stamp and scratch each other’s faces and insult my art. I walked around the Champs-Élysées in a temper. But I could hear the rioting from streets away. It was a disaster.’

‘You said it was your greatest success,’ the boy said sleepily.

‘And that is true. The next day, the newspapers were full of the story. Everyone was talking about The Rite of Spring. And the next night, all of Paris came to see what these crazy Russians were doing. By the end of the week, everybody had heard of Igor Stravinsky. I was the most celebrated madman in France. So you see, my greatest success was a disaster.’

The boy smiled, but his eyelids were heavy now. ‘I would like to have seen that.’

‘The sight of a stockbroker punching a hole in another stockbroker’s opera hat is a touching spectacle. But close your eyes now, Thomas.’ He watched the boy’s face slacken as he drifted into an exhausted sleep. He reached out and touched the short blonde hair lightly. This motherless lamb had slipped away from the wolves. The son of Christians who dared criticise the regime, a crime which had carried a death-warrant, he had assumed the name of a dead boy. And his mother had taken his true identity with her to her grave. Her parting gift to him, a theft that had saved his life.

When he was certain Thomas would not wake again, Stravinsky sighed heavily, and lay down beside him, wondering whether sleep would come again.

‘I have good news,’ Katharine told Stravinsky the next morning at breakfast. ‘Our baggage has arrived during the night. And so have our papers. Just in time – we sail tomorrow.’ Stravinsky nodded without much interest as he stirred his coffee. He had slept badly, she thought. The dining room was even more crowded today, the waiters rushing to and fro with laden trays. The ship was being joined by passengers all the time, and the atmosphere of urgency was growing. ‘Where’s your little Nazi?’ she asked.

‘Still asleep. He passed a bad night.’

‘You seem to enjoy his company.’

‘He tells me about things.’

‘The World’s Fair?’

‘He’s particularly interested in the scientific displays.’

She pulled a face. ‘These Fascists and their worship of machinery.’

Igor seemed unable to even hold his head up. He spoke to his coffee. ‘One day, I suppose, we will see an orchestra of robots play a symphony written by a calculating machine.’

‘I hope I’m not around to see that day.’

‘One never knows what one will see in one’s lifetime,’ he said.

She laid her hand over his. ‘We are leaving Europe tomorrow, Igor.’

‘And perhaps for the last time,’ he replied.

‘You’re depressed. But remember, you’re going to a new life. Leaving behind the past, with its sorrows.’

‘I’m leaving my dead behind. My wife, my child, my parents. A man should not be separated from his dead.’

‘That’s morbid,’ she said.

He raised his eyes heavily to hers. ‘I feel that I am leaving half of myself behind me. I don’t think I will ever compose again.’

‘Oh, Igor, no.’ Shocked, Katharine pressed his hand, trying to shake him out of this mood. ‘Don’t say that. What about your Symphony in Cigarette?’

‘I will never complete it. My life’s work has been a failure.’

‘It hasn’t. You are still at the forefront of music.’

‘I’m a little old to be a daring young composer any more,’ he replied sardonically, ‘don’t you think, my dear?’

Katharine poured him more coffee without replying. Since the 1920s, Igor had been in a liaison with Vera de Bosset, a love affair to which poor Katya, a chronic invalid, had acquiesced, sometimes nobly, sometimes with feeble rages. And now Igor had lost Vera, with her huge eyes and long limbs, who could express herself in dance or in brilliant, witty paintings; she was the half of himself that was being left behind. Wife, daughter, mother and lover – Igor had lost all four female archetypes in the last year. What would Jung have said?

Across the room, Rachel and Masha Morgenstern were also in elegiac mood. In Rachel’s case, it was mock-elegy.

‘Ah, my dear Masha,’ she said, spreading marmalade on her toast, ‘we are the last two rosebuds on the bush. The last breath of perfume before the bottle is stoppered forever. Cultured, pretty, gay, in us you see the last two kneidels on the plate, before it is taken back to the kitchen and scraped into the bin.’ She bit a corner off her toast, and continued with her mouth full. ‘The last two bublitchki the fat man just couldn’t eat.’

‘I get the picture,’ Masha cut in. ‘You need not continue.’

‘What are you staring at?’ Rachel asked, noticing that her cousin’s attention was elsewhere. She looked over her shoulder and rolled her eyes facetiously. ‘Oh, of course. The great Stravinsky-Korsakoff. Honestly, I don’t know what you see in that man. He’s as yellow as a lemon this morning, and looks twice as sour.’

‘It breaks my heart to see him so sad.’

‘Indeed, he is sadder than the last latke that has been left on the saucer, and is starting to curl at the edges.’

‘You cannot be serious for one moment, can you?’

‘I could try, if there was anything to be serious about.’

‘But there is not?’

‘There is not.’

‘Well, I am glad your life is so free of trouble, dear cousin Rachel. Have you finished your breakfast?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then let us go to the promenade deck, and watch you vomit it up for the seagulls.’

Rachel clasped her hands prettily. ‘Oh, can we? What an appealing idea. Let’s not delay.’

But as Masha rose from her chair and turned to go, there was a ripping sound. The coat which she always wore had caught on the edge of the table. She clutched at the fabric in dismay, turning pale. ‘Rachel! My coat!’

‘Quick, take a hold of it.’

‘Help me.’

Rachel snatched up the torn hem of Masha’s leather coat, rolling it in her fingers. ‘Quickly. Back to our cabin.’

In this somewhat ungainly fashion, with Rachel holding Masha’s coat absurdly like a page lifting the train of a queen, they made their way out of the dining room. Stravinsky did not look up as they passed, but Katharine stared at them curiously.

Luckily, the cabin which they shared with a young Hungarian woman who spoke neither German nor English was temporarily empty, the bunks unmade and feminine clothing scattered all over the floor. They locked the door, and Masha carefully took off the coat.

The tear was a bad one, and the contents of the hem were sliding out, a thin chamois leather pipe. Masha unfolded the soft leather to reveal a string of dark-red rubies. ‘They nearly fell out in the restaurant. The stitching has all ripped away.’

‘Can you fix it?’

Masha shook her head. ‘I can’t sew like our grandmother.’

‘Let me try.’ Rachel got the little sewing kit out of her suitcase and sat down to inspect the coat. ‘The mend will be conspicuous,’ she said seriously, for once not making a joke of the situation. ‘What if the American customs officers notice it?’

‘Do you think they would confiscate the stones?’

‘They will make us pay duty.’

‘With what? We haven’t got a penny.’ The German authorities, indeed, had allowed each of them to take only the farcical sum of ten Reichsmarks, less than five American dollars, out of the country. And one suitcase of clothing apiece.

Masha, who had inherited a house in Berlin, had been forced to relinquish her title in the property to the State before she could get a ‘Jewish Passport’, entitling her to leave. Then, too, there had been the crippling emigration taxes which had been imposed on the family for the privilege of letting the two girls escape. The necessary documents required filled a thick dossier.

Nor was there any great welcome waiting across the Atlantic. To have had even a remote chance of entering the United States, the Morgensterns had been compelled to find several sponsors willing to give affidavits. They were required to prove that they could support themselves which, considering that they had been robbed blind by the Nazi state, was almost unfeasible. They had then been given numbers in a waiting list within the small quota established for Germany. The girls had been forced to undergo a humiliating physical examination at the United States consulate. It had all seemed impossibly hard until, at the very last moment, their numbers had come up. They had left Bremen with the iron gates almost literally crashing shut on their heels.

This little string of red stones represented the final gasp of a once-wealthy family, now reduced to pauperdom.

The girls stared at one another, the last two latkes on the saucer. ‘I could wear them round my neck from now on,’ Masha suggested.

‘Everybody would see. They would be stolen long before we reached New York.’

‘On board this ship? Surely not.’

‘My dear cousin, what planet do you think you inhabit? We are Jews.’

‘But not everybody hates Jews.’

‘When you find someone who loves us, would you kindly let me know? I’ll just have to make as good a job of it as I can,’ Rachel said.

Masha nodded. She watched Rachel sewing the maroon lining, her fair head bent over the work, and reflected – but did not comment – upon the interesting fact that this was the first time since leaving Germany that Rachel had neglected to vomit up a meal. ‘You’ve never told me whether you were ever in love, Rachel.’

‘Haven’t I?’

‘Not a word. You never talk about yourself.’

‘Perhaps there’s nothing to talk about.’

‘I don’t believe that for one moment. Why are you so enigmatic?’

Rachel examined her stitches closely. ‘I’ve learned to keep myself hidden away, like these rubies.’

‘So there was someone!’

Rachel lifted her shoulders. ‘Perhaps there was a certain someone.’

‘Tell me about him!’

Rachel’s smile had a certain secretive quality. It lifted the corners of her eyes, turning her high cheekbones into little apples. ‘You’re too young.’

‘Nonsense,’ Masha scoffed. ‘I told you about Rudi, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you told me about Rudi.’

‘Well, then. What was his name?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘At least tell me his first name!’

‘I can’t even tell you that.’

Masha was fidgeting with excitement. ‘Somebody famous, then!’

‘No. Not famous.’

‘What, then?’ Masha’s eyes opened very wide. ‘Married!’ she gasped.

Rachel drew up the crimson thread carefully. ‘No, not married.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’ She laid her hand on her mouth. ‘Oh. I’ve guessed.’

‘Have you?’

‘A Gentile. And your family objected.’

‘You’re very clever,’ Rachel said, ‘but that was not the difficulty.’

‘What was the difficulty, then? Tell me!’

‘Stop asking questions. You’re distracting me.’

‘And you’re exasperating me!’

‘If I don’t make these stitches neat, the customs men will confiscate our precious rubies.’

‘It’s not fair,’ Masha exclaimed. ‘I told you all about Rudi.’

‘Of course you did. You are incapable of keeping a secret.’

‘There shouldn’t be secrets between us.’ When Rachel didn’t reply, but just kept smiling and sewing, Masha went on plaintively, ‘I think you’re very unkind to keep things hidden from me. I know hardly anything about you, and we’re first cousins. We used to have fun when we were children, didn’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘We used to play duettinos by Clementi together on the piano, do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘And then they started keeping us apart. When I asked to see you, they said you were a bad influence.’

Rachel seemed wryly amused. ‘Did they indeed? Well, you should be warned.’

‘But we only have each other, now. And I like your influence.’

Rachel lifted her cool blue eyes to Masha’s. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes. You’re rather cynical, you know. You don’t have a good word to say about anybody. But I’ve grown to like that. It makes me feel grown-up.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m too romantic. I know it. I always have stars in my eyes. You help me to question things.’

‘Well, the question before us now is whether this repair will pass muster,’ Rachel replied, lifting the hem of the coat to show her cousin. ‘What do you think?’

Masha examined it critically. ‘A man on a galloping horse might not notice.’

‘We shall have to be content with that. Be careful not to catch it on anything again, or you’ll be scattering precious stones like the girl in the fairy tale. Let’s go and get some sun.’

They went up to the deck together, with Masha none the wiser about this mysterious love-affair of Rachel’s.

‘At least,’ she begged, ‘tell me his initials.’

‘No.’

‘How can you be such a tease? You’ll make me hate you!’

‘I hope not,’ Rachel said gravely; but no matter how Masha pleaded and bullied, Rachel refused to be drawn further on the subject.