Marek had taken no notice, but now, as he drove through the prim, uncaring villages towards Steiner’s house, there was little they could say to each other. Their long quest for Isaac had ended in tragedy; Steiner was hurt; the van had had to be left, hidden in a shed at Pettovice, to be dismantled and refitted as an ordinary lorry. Steiner’s folk song collecting days were over.
“You must get back to work, Marek,” the old man said eventually. “You must book your passage to America. I shall stay and edit my papers and if you get in my way I shall be extremely cross. My house is too small for the two of us.”
Marek managed a smile. “I won’t stay long. Just long enough to see that your arm is healed.”
The bullet fired through the windscreen by the Nazi louts who had ambushed Steiner had only grazed the skin, but there were splinters of glass more deeply lodged.
“My arm is healed,” said the Professor angrily. “Let me tell you, Marek, I will not endure being fussed over.” Dear God, he thought, what will make this obstinate man understand where his true destiny lies? “There’s nothing more you can do for Meierwitz.”
“I should like to have buried him,” said Marek grimly.
There had been no choice but to take the injured Steiner to Pettelsdorf. The van could only limp along at a snail’s pace, the glass was shattered; there was no possibility of crossing the border and bringing him home. Remembering the fearless way his people had come forward, Marek could hardly bear to think that he had endangered them. He had scarcely brought the van to a standstill than it was removed, hidden. No one asked any questions-not Janik or Stepan, not Andras in the mill; everyone was instantly alert, everyone understood. Lenitschka, usually so voluble, took Steiner upstairs in silence while the maids fetched bandages…
But with his mother he had quarrelled straight away. “You had no right to keep your work a secret. We want to help, all of us. We want to fight this evil. We could have sheltered your fugitives and made everything easier.”
She had always been politically aware, reared among intellectuals. From the day Hitler burnt the books in front of the university, Milenka was implacably engaged against the Nazis. Nor was his grandmother an ally.
“Your mother is perfectly right,” said Nora Coutts, emerging from her room to interfere with Lenitschka as she dressed Steiner’s wound. “You have always been in danger of patronising women. I’ve told you before.”
He’d made no headway either in getting them to apply for emigration visas.
“You must see the way it’s going,” he’d said. “Please.”
And he had repeated what he had told them already: that it was a Czech voice, issuing from a thug in a Nazi uniform, that had boasted of Isaac’s murder.
“You go ahead,” Milenka had said. “Knowing you’re safe is the only thing that matters. If you go, and prepare the way for us, we’ll follow.”
He knew that she lied. His father would not leave, and while he stayed she would be with him. They were strung together on one bow, these two unlikely people; their lives together made the melody that was Pettelsdorf.
For Steiner the week of pain and grief for Isaac had been shot through with a strange joy.
He’d been thirty years old when he first saw Milenka at a poetry reading in Berlin. She was nineteen, a bird-thin girl whose soul one could enter without subterfuge, for she hid nothing. He fell terribly in love… and lost her to someone who should have been utterly unsuitable and turned out to be her other half-this man who shot too many animals and read too few books.
Since then he had seen her in Berlin or Prague, had taken her to concerts; laboriously, grindingly, turning love to friendship — but he had never dared to come to her home. Now, nearing the end of his life, he was enormously thankful that his image of her was complete. That he had seen her at her desk, pushing aside the cat that sat on her papers… assuring herself that the goose they were to have for supper was not a goose she knew personally, but came from a neighbouring farm… That he had stood beside her in the moonlit garden listening to the orioles and heard her read once more, the poem he had heard first in her deep, slightly husky voice:
Steiner played no games with himself. He did not pretend that Marek was the son they might have had; there was far too much of the Freiherr von Altenburg in the boy. But when Marek had come to him to ask for his van, and Steiner realised he could share his adventure and his danger, he had been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.
“We need some petrol,” said Marek now. “And I’d like to check the oil.”
“There’s a garage about ten kilometres away; on the other side of the village.”
Marek nodded and drove on.
The rain had stopped but the children in the bus had fallen silent. Sabine, her curls matted with sweat, was sitting beside Ellen; she had been sick three times and did not seem to be finished yet.
There was another hour at least to their destination. Sophie too felt sick. It was partly the motion of the bus, but mostly apprehension. Everything had gone wrong with this trip. If FitzAllan had been taking them Sophie wouldn’t have minded what they were going to do so much, but it was Ellen. She’d had to step in at the last minute when FitzAllan developed a migraine, and the idea of getting Ellen into trouble was unbearable.
“I wish we hadn’t come,” she said to Leon. “I wish we could tell her and turn back.”
“Well we can’t,” said Leon. “We promised Flix we’d help.”
But Flix didn’t look very good either. She too had had to stop once to be sick and Frank, whom she’d enlisted because he was supposed to be tough and fearless, was fidgeting and scowling, and now, in a throwback to his earlier schooling, he put up his hand and told Ellen that he needed to be excused.
Ellen nodded and asked Herr Tauber to stop at the next convenient place, but Frank’s phraseology only confirmed her in the feeling that something strange was going on. Frank did not ask to be excused; he expressed the need to perform his bodily functions with Rabelaisian vigour. As she wiped Sabine’s face with a damp flannel she looked down the bus, wondering what was wrong. Too many of the children had felt unwell. She’d been with them when they went by bus to the circus in Klagenfurt, and only Sabine and one other child had been sick.
Frank passed her and she saw that beneath his usual sullen expression there was something else; a kind of fear. He was sitting next to Flix and that was unexpected too; Flix usually had little use for him.
“There’s no need for us to go on with this expedition,” she said, standing up to survey the children. “Absolutely no need. We can go back without the slightest difficulty.”
For a moment the faces turned to her looked hopeful. Sophie half rose in her seat and was pulled down by Leon. Then Flix, still pale and puffy-eyed, said, “No. We want to go on. We have to.”
Frank returned, they set off again. The road was steep now; they had left the lakes behind.
“I’ve got a headache,” said Janey miserably, laying her head against the window.
Ellen, comforting her, could have said the same. She also blamed herself very much for not having aborted this expedition from the start.
“It’s a perfectly ridiculous idea,” she’d said to Bennet, when he told her of FitzAllan’s determination to show the children a proper slaughterhouse. “A man who eats nothing but nut cutlets wanting to expose them to all that.”
Bennet agreed. “I told him in any case that hiring a bus would be far too expensive.”
But here he had been undermined by Herr Tauber, who was married to Lieselotte’s aunt and had come to work in the grounds after Marek left. The beneficial mafia operated by Lieselotte’s relatives was growing, and Herr Tauber now offered his bus for the price of the petrol only, if it would help the school.