The Song Before It Is Sung

by Justin Cartwright

  So these are the reasons for Conrad's presence here: the bisecting of lives, Conrad's, his father's, von Gottberg's, Mendel's, Elizabeth's and Rosamund's, linked by seawater, landscape, lies and delusion; and it is his task to give a coherent account of these lives, and so perhaps of his own. His father's way of making some sense of his life after his disgrace was to depict himself as an iconoclast, even an anarchist, against all forms of sycophancy and presumption. Conrad remembers him telling his mother that the security police had delivered a dead dog to his office. His father thought it was hilarious, but Conrad, aged eleven, was devastated. He wondered, too, how the dog had died. A few months later his mother died of breast cancer and the two deaths seemed to be related in some way.

  That night he sees the lighthouse signalling from Trevose Head out into the night. There is something about lighthouses, now doomed, that touches us deeply. It's probably the blind, hopeful attempt to reassure small fragile boats; lighthouses offer their steady pulse of light against the utter unpredictability of the sea; it's an offer of safety. He goes to bed between slippery purple sheets. Outside he can hear the implacable sea, groaning and chafing on the shore. The beam of the lighthouse just touches the top corner of his window and for a moment the lace curtain flares.

  The churchyard extends along a small peninsula, not far above the sea, and the gravestones are all out of the vertical, except for the five or six new ones; these are of marble and reddish granite and are interlopers in this dulled lichen-starred tumbledown place beneath the modest church spire of grey stone. He walks into the church and sits at the back next to a font and a strangely domestic cupboard. Apart from the undertaker's men and the Vicar, there are about twenty people, most of them old and resigned, but there are also two blonde girls of about nineteen in short black suits and little round hats, as if they have strayed here from an erotic Italian movie. Before she reads an extract from To the Lighthouse, one of the girls says in a clear but still unformed voice, 'To the Lighthouse was my grandmother's favourite book.'

  She licks her glossed lips before reading:

  What people had shed or left — a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded shirts and coats in wardrobes — these alone kept the human shape and the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the flutter of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself, or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

  The girl stumbles slightly on obeisance and smiles, as if to indicate that she has done her best with a word as archaic as this one. She ends by saying, 'My great-grandmother Elizabeth loved this place.'

  Later, after a wheezy hymn, the second girl takes her turn at the lectern. She holds a piece of paper up briefly, the evidence.

  'Great-Granny Elizabeth asked that this letter be read at her funeral. It is from Axel von Gottberg, and it is dated August 1944.'

  Darling Elizabeth

  You said not so long ago that the glory has passed from the earth.

  You and I will never meet again on this earth, but I hope to be reunited with you somewhere. You are the love of my life and we have been cruelly separated by circumstances and history, but I believe that we will again be happy as we were in Oxford's meadows and by the sea in Cornwall when we were young and free. I think it is the fate of our generation to be consumed by history. But I am sure that from this conflagration a new Europe will be born, and new people. Darling Elizabeth, whatever awaits me here in Germany, I will for ever remember and cherish my love for you and our friends. It was a happy and blessed time. We will meet again, of that I am sure. In sorrow, Axel.

  'My great-grandmother has written here, on the letter: Tell them that I loved Axel. In August 1944, Count Axel von Gottberg was hanged on Hitler's orders.'

  The small group of mourners, including Conrad, is deeply affected by the two readings; the unmistakable sap-rising sexual quality of the two girls, their express contrast with the exhausted, harrowed old people, the keen appeal to their shaky hope that their lives may have had purpose, and the suggestion that their lives in addition may have had poetry; and then the final churning declaration of love for Axel von Gottberg, an authentic modern martyr. All this is overwhelming. Conrad is the last to leave the church behind the coffin on its short trip to the churchyard. He stands riven some distance from the others as the coffin is lowered. The two girls embrace each other and he cannot avoid seeing that their buttocks are lean and nervous. He feels the connection between sex and death sharply and personally.

  Conrad wonders why Elizabeth wanted Axel's last letter read at her funeral. The most likely explanation is that she wanted her life to have some nobility and substance by linking it to von Gottberg's, in the way that old actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor promoted the lover of fifty years before, the remarkable person in their lives, even if they have had many less satisfactory lovers, drink- and drug-crazed, since. After a certain age, a life exists not for what it really was, but for its mythological qualities.

  Conrad finds train journeys at night melancholic. The distant, dead towns and the still stations flash by. All human activity is reluctant. When he arrives at Paddington it is almost midnight and he feels cold and alone. He wonders where Francine is sleeping tonight. Perhaps she is in one of those dog kennels at the hospital, waiting for someone's big day to go wrong, a baby half-drowned in a water-birth, the idiot husband in his swimming costume shaking with fear, or a baby becoming stuck sideways on the way out. She is trained to make instant decisions. Or she could be alone in their small hidey-hole while John ministers — just for a few nights, I promise — comfort to his panicky daughter, who is not panicking about her exams but about the prospect of a fatherless future. These scientific people believe the world can be ordered by logic, but there is no logic in human relations, something that Elizabeth Partridge's funeral has demonstrated.

  Back in his flat he discovers Osric asleep in his bed with a girl. The girl awakes and shrugs apologetically. There is a strong smell of marijuana. He rinses his mouth at the sink and wraps himself, fully dressed, in the blanket, which Osric used two nights before, and lies on the sofa. The girl comes in to speak to him. She is wearing a T-shirt that comes just to the top of her thighs, so that she must hold it down. She sits matily on the sofa next to him. Five minutes before he had never seen her, now he is a few inches from her round small mouth and he is breathing her warm, marijuana-and-wine-scented, breath.

  'I'm very sorry. Ricky is wrecked. I did say we shouldn't be here, but he said you were coming back tomorrow. Do you want to fuck me?'

  'I can't have sex with Osric, Ricky, just through there. Sorry. Even though you are very beautiful.'

  She is not exactly beautiful, but pretty, and with a gone-off-the-rails look, tousled and lewd.

  'You're very good-looking. Even in that blanket.'

  She gets up and leaves the room. She is no longer holding the T-shirt down. Her naked buttocks remind him for the second time today of a certain type of Italian film where a woman is always the provocateuse.

  Now he can't sleep. He shouldn't have slept in the train. There is a duty imposed on you by someone's death, an instruction to renew yourself in any way you can. He gets up and knocks gently on his own bedroom door. He can always say he has to go for a pee if Osric is awake.

  She appears at the door, smiling, walking gingerly. Conspiratorially.

  'I thought you would change your mind.'

  'You were right,' he whispers. 'What's your name?'

  'Emily.'

  'I'm Conrad.'

  'Yes, I know. Ricky told me a lot about
you.'

  'What, for example?'

  'Oh lots of interesting things. But let's not worry about him, he's like totally mashed.'

  PART TWO

  11

  A MEMOIR OF PLESKOW

  FOR MY NIECES AND GRAND CHILDREN,

  FROM AUNT ADI

  WHEN THE PIGS were slaughtered, the snow was red with their blood. It was a redness of extraordinary intensity in that landscape of dark green and pale violet. As a child I found the slaughter frightening, yet I couldn't resist being present. Other animals died quietly, unaware, but pigs sensed danger. They would struggle and squeal when they were sent for, but the men from the village knew how to hold them in secret embraces that immobilised their slippery bodies. The only place to hold them, said the pig man, was by the ears or by the hocks. I wondered if other animals had handholds. Children think about strange things.

  The women came from the village to gather the blood. In those days, just before the Great War, they wore long aprons to the ground covering their tight bodices, which were always grey or black. They carried buckets and enamel basins to catch the blood that was used to make the Blutwurst. Later, when the Jews were so horribly treated, I wondered if there wasn't something in the race memory concerning blood: the real Mecklenburger loved Blutwurst, made from this blood falling on the snow in the forest. We children played in a forest that stretched from the waters of the Baltic to the swamps of Poland. In their seasons, the women made sausage, Mettwurst, the sausage we children loved most. Blood, snow, the squeal of frightened pigs — these are memories I will never forget. And in summer, earth, mushrooms and the blood of wild boars, not so much things as states of mind, of a feeling that our poets and philosophers and generals glorified, the sense that the German soul was forged out of elemental materials. We children were not, as children are now, shielded from death. Far from it: we understood that death could be glorious.

  Frau Rickert, the forester's wife, was known as the best sausage-maker in the village. In her cottage, Qual, there was an open fire. A huge pot was suspended over the fire from a tripod and here she boiled the blood down and added thyme, salt, pepper and marjoram so that in my childish imagination the blood that had fallen on the snow and splashed on to the women's aprons was scented and benign. When the priest in church spoke of the blood of Christ and its transformative powers, I would think of how the blood of a pig in Frau Rickert's skilled hands became sausage. She was a wonderful woman, warm and friendly. Whenever we appeared in the village she would call to us and give us a piece of her cake, which she made with cherries in summer and walnuts in winter. We were treated by the villagers with the utmost friendliness, although the children were uneasy with us. I don't think we realised then that life in the Schloss, not in reality a castle but a large Palladian-style house, built by my grandfather, was utterly feudal. We had a coachman, the foresters, an English governess, at least ten women who worked unpaid one week a month in the house doing the cleaning, washing and ironing in the wash-kitchen, as we called it, and a cook with three assistants. There were also four gardeners, grooms and the cow and pig men; some of the foresters were gamekeepers and carried guns. One of these was Werner H, who shot the American airmen in the winter of 1945, the last time I saw blood on the snow. It had stained the snow between their parachutes and seemed to be spreading outwards.

  In the early days, as the Great War ground on somewhere far away, I used to take Axel, who was six years younger, out to the forest to see the foresters at work. They were always cutting trees or clearing the rides and we would join them for their lunch in forests so deep that to us children they were enchanted. As a child you marvel at simple things, at the realisation that there is a huge amount to discover and to learn and I think one of the purposes of fairy stories, which we loved, was to teach children about the natural and the supernatural worlds. At Pleskow these worlds did not seem separate to me. The forest was the portal to another world. I tried to make Axel act in my little plays, which were all based on fairy stories, to amuse our parents.

  Axel was the dearest small boy. He was extraordinarily bold for someone so young, always wanting to climb on the huge Hanoverian horses that pulled the logs out of the forest. He loved the feel of horses, and would reach up to kiss their huge gentle muzzles. At haymaking he would climb to the highest point on the cart, a tiny excited figure, as the hay was brought in. Out in the fields enormous cases of water sweetened with raspberry juice were brought to the workers and as we rode out we children would sing a song about the harvest that I have never forgotten: Wheat, barley, rye and corn, don't forget our Saviour is born.

  Some of the peasants were very superstitious and believed in the spirits of the forest and the streams and the lakes. They had little rituals, like looking for mistletoe growing in a thorn tree, which could point the way to hidden treasure. For a while Axel was obsessed with the idea that he would find treasure, and I would follow him, half believing as he ran wildly about with a switch of mistletoe directing him. It was cut for him by Rickert, who was Axel's hero. Sometimes the women would dance, forming arches with joined hands, through which they would all pass in turn. I now think it was a form of magical protection. When someone died in the village, the bees were the first to be told, a pagan custom that survived. The Mecklenburgers were only freed from serfdom after the Napoleonic wars; they were born to obey. After all, what is a hundred years in the making of a people? We were little princesses and princelings, but as the war progressed, even there at Pleskow I began to notice that not everything was well.

  Most Prussian nobles were deeply contemptuous of the ordinary people. They saw them as a lesser species, canon fodder for the Junker ideal. But our mother was famous for her left-wing views. She knew every villager and every servant personally and was loved by them, not because she was the Grafin, but because she was genuinely devoted to their welfare. Your grandfather, Johann-Albrecht, shocked me by declaring one day in 1916 that the war was lost. Up until then we believed it was going well. He said that there was still time for an honourable peace. His brother, my Uncle Berthold, came back from the front severely wounded and never until his dying day offered one word about his experiences. I see now, seventy years later, the themes that were to dominate our lives: the Prussian tradition of service, the idea of the honour of Germany and the importance of men in uniform, who represented a higher duty that women never questioned. Even in 1916 when my father came back to the house exhausted and pale and declared the war lost, it was taken for granted that it fell to our class to secure a just settlement. We were one of the first families in Mecklenburg to have modern central heating and I remember my father lying in a deep bath for nearly two hours that day. His uniform — the uniform of the legendary 19 Potsdam Regiment — was taken away to be cleaned while he soaked away the shame of war. We children waited downstairs in the big hall which looked up the driveway of oaks from one side and down to the lake on the other.

  When he emerged, staggering slightly like a man who has been on horseback, he was wearing a suit made before the war in London from the finest Harris tweed. He hugged us all and handed out gifts from Israel's and Wertheim's, shops which had a magical appeal. Axel had never been to them and I had only been once, but I used to make up stories about the Christmas displays with - perhaps I imagined this - live reindeer harnessed to a sleigh and an enormous Christmas tree decorated with lighted candles, nuts and raisins. We children were given gingerbread, our favourite cinnamon biscuits and also picture books with popup castles and medieval towns. There were toys for the younger children. It must have been October, because the potatoes were being lifted, when I heard my father tell my mother he doubted if he would still be alive by Christmas. But in fact the Kaiser called him back to an important job in Berlin on the general staff. After children's supper we went up to the music room and played and sang for my father, before our governess, an Englishwoman called Barty - Miss Bartwill from Harrogate — took us up to bed. Axel wanted to play with his new toys, bu
t Barty turned down the lamps and made us say our prayers. Later Axel crept into my bed. Did Papi kill lots of English? he whispered, thinking no doubt of Barty, whom he loathed.

  Soon after my father went back to Berlin a week later, I noticed that there was a change of mood at Pleskow. Now rations were short; almost nothing came up from Berlin or Schwerin any longer and we were increasingly living off the land. Only Rickert and Werner H were left of the foresters, although two young boys were drafted in to help them. I had the feeling that if it were left untended much longer the forest would close around us.

  Money had never had any value here as there was nothing to buy, but now we were returning to subsistence farming and gathering. My job was to gather mushrooms, which grew in the deepest parts of the woods around the house. With our terrier, Bolly, I crawled through the thickets, spurred on by a sense of duty. It had been a long, hot summer. The fields were full of cornflowers and poppies, streaming out through the wheat in waves, like spilled paint. The autumn that followed was warm and damp, perfect conditions for mushrooms. In front of the house an old catalpa was a rich russet colour and the leaves of the trees my grandfather planted round the house, which he had collected from all over the world, were turning too. My favourite mushroom was the Steinpilz, which the French call the cepe. You couldn't mistake it for anything else. In certain places that the foresters showed me, you could find clusters of Pfifferling, the chanterelle, which was a light sulphur-yellow in colour. The curious Spitzmorchel, with its cap like a honeycomb, was another favourite.