The Piper on the Mountain

Chapter 12

THE MAN WITH THE FUJARA

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The light in the room had mellowed into the fine, clear gold that came between the mountains at the onset of evening, and its clarity, sharp as wine, seemed to be the appropriate colour of the quietness that had descended after the young people were gone, marshalled away decisively by Karol Alda to his grandmother’s farm by the southerly col; after Paul Newcombe had accepted his polite but firm dismissal with a shrug, between offence and relief, and gone off to see about his return to Vienna next day; after the young constable had withdrawn to the outer room to clatter out the transcription of his notes on the typewriter, and Mirek Zachar had taken his Jawa and gone thankfully off-duty, with a light heart and his job completed.

“Lieutenant,” Charles Freeling began very carefully and gravely, when the three of them were alone, “on behalf of my embassy I want to express our appreciation and admiration of the way you’ve handled this very difficult matter, and the consideration you showed towards these young people. I needn’t tell you what a great shock this has been to us. We shall take up the matter of the Alda plans, of course. Clearly my country has done a great injustice to him, which ought to be set right. But it seems that he does not wish his case to be brought into prominence again at this late stage. For that I am grateful. We are none of us free agents, and absolute justice would seem to be a luxury we cannot always afford. At a time when technical and cultural co-operation between our countries is making such progress, is it worth while to allow old irregularities to obtrude? Publicity could do so much harm. We are being obliged to admit to a wrong. But since, after all, the man is dead…”

Within one hour Sir Broughton Phelps had become “the man,” an inconvenience, disowned, deprecated. This morning they would have been rolling out red carpets for him and listening enthusiastically to his fishing stories.

“Gentlemen,” said Ondrejov, leaning back in his chair and spreading his great arms on the table with a gusty sigh, “I am merely a policeman, with a straightforward job to do, and I shall do it. I shall pass on the relevant information to Major Kriebel, and Major Kriebel will make his report in the proper quarter. After that it is out of our hands. But I think you need not worry too much. Here the newspapers do not go in for lurid reports of murders. And even if they did, you see the chief occasion for it is already lost. There will be no charge, there will be no trial. As you say, the man is dead.”

Freeling looked at Blagrove, and Blagrove looked at Freeling, and visibly they bit on the reassurance, and found it sweet.

“And as for what you report and publish in England, provided you do no further injustice to Mr. Alda or to this country, that is no responsibility of mine. ‘Sir Broughton Phelps Dies in Landslip in the Tatras’! It’s all one to me,” he said equably, “whether you see fit to add that he had a bullet-hole in him before he fell. It’s enough that I was able to put it there, and in time. England is your own house, gentlemen,” said Ondrejov. “Set it in order yourselves.”

Outside the farmhouse windows looking westward, shadowed by the deep overhang of the eaves, the sky was smouldering in reds and yellows and livid greens, the flamboyant refractions from the dust of the talus, the funeral fires of Sir Broughton Phelps. In a high-backed wooden chair Mrs. Veselsky presided, bolt upright, eighty-three years old, and as clear-cut as the steely profile of Krivan, her lace cap and embroideries formal as a queen’s regalia, her face proud and serene as she watched her grandson. Toddy and Christine, most readily adjusted, least involved, least changed of them all, hung enchanted over the grand piano that filled one end of the room, where Alda had spread out for them, on an embroidered shawl, the assembly of the pipes of Slovakia.

They passed from hand to hand, smoothing them and marvelling at their intricate decoration, the six-finger-holed labial pipe, the double pipe, the end-hole koncovka, the transverse folk flute, the children’s reed-pipes, the ragman’s whistle, the whole complex family from the toy fanfárka to the great fujara. Not the same they had left in the hut over the col; this one was at least six inches longer, and even more wonderfully painted and carved and inlaid.

“Well, anyhow,” said Dominic, with his sore cheek against the cool tiles of the empty porcelain stove, Tossa close beside him in the shadowy corner, and peace on his eyelids like the palm of a warm hand, “you must admit that even when I got myself into a fight, I did find myself a genuinely defensive weapon.”

Alda laughed, stroking the long golden flank of his pipe gently. He raised the mouthpiece to his lips and the fujara shook out its strange, shimmering banner of notes, forked and flying, as his fingers vibrated on the holes. He drew out the improvisation long and lovingly, brought it circling down like a skylark from the wild heights of air into the nest of one lingering, full, fluting note, out of which the melody rose plaintively and slowly, unfolding with such deliberation that they followed it like creatures bewitched, feeling their way, knowing it before they knew that they knew it.

Through bushes and through briars

I lately took my way…

The incredible sunset was fading. To-morrow there would be nothing left but the transient layer of dust on the stones in Zbojská Dolina, waiting for the first cleansing rain, the new rock town in the bottom of the bowl, and the almost-empty saucer at the foot of the scar. But there would still be the recurring springs, and the chestnut goats, and this music; as long as anything remained, these would remain.

Sometimes I am uneasy

And troubled in my mind…

No, that belonged to the bushes and briars of old distress. Tossa’s mind, newly adult, embraced its responsibilities with awe but without fear. Chloe Terrell would be getting back from Slovakia a new daughter, out of her power, wiser, older, larger than she.

Sometimes I think I’ll go to my love

And tell to… her… my mind.

But not yet, not here, not in this land, where they had bumped full tilt into death together, and she had been startled into mistaking a moment’s human warmth and solidarity for something rarer and more personal. He mustn’t touch her now, however much he longed to. She was hardly out of her chrysalis, she had to have time to try her wings.

But if I should go to my love,

My love he will say nay…

He’d almost forgotten that this was really a woman speaking, but Tossa had remembered it. She was singing the words in her husky whisper, close beside him, and her hand, hidden in the shadowy corner between them, felt for his hand, and closed on it warmly.

“If I show to him my boldness

He’ll ne’er love me again.”

There was no urgency now, and no danger; and yet when he turned his head and saw her smiling at him in the dimming light, her eyes looked to him just as they had looked before she left him in the chapel, only to wait for him, against orders, at the edge of the trees: clear, assured, roused and glad.

“Wouldn’t it be a marvellous world,” said Tossa, staring ahead into a future as uncertain and dangerous as the future had always been, and yet as attractive and promising, “where we could go straight up to one another and ask what we wanted to know? Where all the secret formulae turned out to be songs, and all the rifles were fujaras!”

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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

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[A 3S Release— v2, html]

[July 18, 2007]