La's Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Feliks did not come from that world, and yet he seemed so at home in it. He would never be accepted by the people among whom La lived, and who had accepted her; and yet they were kind to him. He was a stranger and they had taken him in.

  The thought came back to her as she drove back along the winding lanes: What if the stranger who had been taken in was not what he claimed to be? What if the man who accepted the kindness of those who took him in, secretly contemplated the defeat of that very kindness? She shook her head, as if to rid it of the unwelcome thought. She had set those doubts to rest some months ago, and she did not want them to recur. Feliks was exactly whom he claimed to be. He was a Pole who had lost the sight in an eye in the defence of his country, and, indirectly, of hers. That was all there was to it.

  FELIKS JOINED THE ORCHESTRA. On the first occasion he played he was shy and did not stay for the cup of tea that everybody else took at the back of the hall once they were finished. La looked for him, but he was gone. “Who is that flautist?” asked one of the violinists from Bury. “That good-looking man?”

  “A Polish airman,” La replied.

  “He can certainly play, can’t he?”

  “I think so.”

  In December they performed for the first time. Their first concert was in the hall they practised in; the village was abuzz and turned out in force, even Agg and Mrs. Agg, who sat in the front row and clapped loudly even after the applause from the rest of the audience had died down. The second concert was at the air base, where their final piece was interrupted by the sound of aeroplanes taking off. Tim could attend for only half of the concert; he was fetched out to deal with some emergency and did not appear again until the end, when tea and cake were served by two women volunteers in light blue air-force overalls.

  Tim asked her about Feliks, and whether he had settled in at the pig farm. “I think so,” she said. “If you thought Madder’s Farm was tough, then you should see where he is now. The farmer is a perfect tyrant, and there’s not much difference between Feliks’s accommodation and the sties the pigs live in.”

  Tim laughed. “He’s resilient. All these Poles are.” He paused. “You found a flute for him?”

  La looked across the room, to where Feliks was standing, talking to the two sisters from Bury. She wondered whether there was something else behind the question, but decided there was not. She told him about the trip to Cambridge and the discount the man in the music shop had given her.

  “I’m glad,” said Tim. “And I’m glad you’re keeping an eye on him. You know, he wasn’t very popular with a couple of other Poles we had at the base. They seemed to be a bit …”

  La waited. Tim made a face, as if to portray stand-offishness. La relaxed.

  “Keeps himself to himself?” She wondered how she could put it to Tim that it was probably a social matter. The problem about being direct, was this: Tim himself was not a gentleman. That did not matter to La, who was largely indifferent to such distinctions—or at most observed them wryly. But it was difficult, she thought, to explain to one who was not a gentleman that others might dislike another because he was.

  “Not so much that,” said Tim. “It’s just that they seemed not to take to him. It’s as if they were a bit suspicious of him.”

  La lifted her tea-cup to her lips and took a sip. She felt cold inside.

  “But you never know with these types,” Tim continued. “Look at the French. They’re always bickering with one another. You’d think that they’d all agree to get behind de Gaulle, but not a bit of it. Maybe it’s the same with the Poles.”

  La hesitated. Perhaps now was the time to say something to Tim. She could tell him about the Frankfurt incident, but what exactly would she say? That she thought that Feliks had let slip that he had an uncle in Frankfurt? Did she really have to bring up something as slender as that?

  She swallowed hard. She had her duty. “How well do you know him?”

  “Dab?”

  “Yes.”

  Tim shrugged. “Quite well, I think. I ended up looking after him, as you know, arranging things. He was a bit of a lost soul. I suppose I got to know him better than some of the others because he speaks such good English. It’s always easier when you feel that the other chap is taking in what you’re saying. He understood everything—even jokes. Sometimes you tell a joke to a foreigner and he looks at you blankly. That can be a bit tricky.”

  La said that this was not what she had meant. “About his background? About where he comes from?”

  Tim looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to dash. We’ve got rather a lot on our hands, even if it is Christmas.” He drained his cup. “Dab’s past? Polish Air Force. Wormed his way in with our boys after he was picked up in Romania. That’s where their air force fled after the Jerries and the Russians gobbled their country up. Didn’t I tell you about that? Poor chaps. Most of them went to France first, of course, but some of them had the foresight to see that France would fold like a pack of cards. He didn’t intend to stay there long—and he was shot down on his first sortie. Just like that. He came here to carry on the fight. That, as you know, was not possible.”

  La nodded. She had heard that before, when Tim had first mentioned Feliks. She wanted to know about what happened before France. “So he would have been checked up on?”

  “Of course. Everyone is. There’s a Polish command that vouches for people. They know who’s who.” He paused. “You’ve got doubts about him?”

  “I just wondered …”

  Tim smiled. “I really don’t think that Dab’s anybody to worry about. He’s very much a gentleman, you know.”

  La broke into a smile.

  “Have I said something funny?”

  “No. No. Not at all.” She did her best to hide her relief. It was just as she thought: she had been imaginative because she was living in times when the imagination could so easily be over-fired. War made heroes of some, she thought, but for most of us it made us frightened—and suspicious of our fellow man. She would not be like that, no matter how unpleasant life became. She would not.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, La’s orchestra, which she had thought might grow weaker, actually strengthened. Word got round, and new players asked to join. There were more people from the base and more, too, from Bury. In the spring they gave another concert, this time in a church in Bury, and the local newspaper reported it in glowing terms. “They may be amateurs,” the press report read, “but they are determined. And what spirit they have! This is what Hitler hasn’t taken into account: the determination of the ordinary people of these islands to get on with their lives in spite of everything that he throws at them. Watch out for La’s Orchestra, Herr Hitler!”

  Feliks settled into his new job on the pig farm, and reported to La that his rooms were no longer damp. The pig farmer, he said, was a generous man, in spite of having a reputation for meanness in the area, and the work was rewarding. He had managed to save much of his pay, as the farmer fed him, and apart from his visits to the local pub at weekends there was nothing for him to spend his money on.

  As he had promised, he came to work in La’s garden once a week. It was spring now—they were on the cusp of summer—and the herbaceous border Feliks had planted was beginning to get some colour. He had cut back some of the shrubs which had got out of control, and he had expanded the vegetable garden. La now grew carrots, kale, lettuce and beans as well as her large crop of potatoes. Feliks announced that he would try to get hold of Jerusalem artichokes and rhubarb, both of which could be left to get on with growing and required little attention. “Soup and pudding will be taken care of,” said La. “Thank you.”

  “But what about the course in between?” he asked.

  “Henry’s hens provide me with eggs,” said La. “If an egg is cracked, we can’t sell it, but it never goes to waste.”

  Food: people now thought about it all the time, with a dull, nagging obsessiveness. La knew that she was lucky: her vegetable garden provided her with mo
re than enough staples, and the eggs made a big difference. But what people wanted, as always, was what they could not get: meat, butter, sugar, coffee. The forces did better, of course, and pilots never went without. One of them, who played in her orchestra, brought her chocolate from time to time and slipped it to her after the rehearsal. She made it last, breaking off half a square after dinner each night and letting it dissolve slowly on her tongue. When hostilities ceased—as they had to do—she imagined herself eating large bars of chocolate in their entirety, gulping them down and unwrapping another bar while her mouth was still full with the previous one. If gluttony was a deadly sin, then it was only such in peacetime; in war the deadly sins were permitted; surely they were. People took pleasure where they could find it, and with gratitude—chocolate, love, anything that used to be in plentiful supply but which was now hard to find, or rationed.

  Eighteen

  IT WAS A SATURDAY in August. Feliks had been working in the garden and La had fallen asleep in a deck chair under the willow near what remained of her lawn. She awoke suddenly and found that he was sprawled out on the grass beside her, his feet resting against the first hummock of the potatoes that had replaced the lawn. At first she thought that there was something wrong; that he had become ill from exertion in the heat, but then she noticed that his eyes were open, staring up at the sky, and that protruding from his mouth was a blade of grass that he was sucking. He was lying to her right; his left side towards her. She noticed the profile of his nose; it was perfect, she thought. It was what made him so handsome.

  “You know,” she said. “If somebody came and took away your nose, you’d look very different.”

  He took the blade of grass out of his mouth. “What an odd thing to say. Anybody would look different.”

  She laughed. “Yes. Sorry, I was just thinking aloud. But it’s more true with some people than with others, don’t you think? I know of some people who would look the same, with or without their nose. Mrs. Agg, for example. Her nose … well, her nose is neither here nor there, if you ask me.”

  He continued to stare at the sky. “You are very strange. They say that English people are peculiar, but you must be very peculiar to say things like that.”

  La was silent for a moment. It was rare for them to talk in this relaxed way; it meant nothing, she knew, and the spell would soon be broken. He would get to his feet and carry on with his work in the garden—or suddenly pack up and leave, as he often did. But for now she was enjoying the moment.

  “Don’t Polish people say silly things from time to time?” She glanced at him. “Or are they too sad?”

  He reached out to pluck another blade of grass.

  “We are not always sad. We were very happy when we got our freedom back in 1918. We went mad with joy. The whole country.”

  “And that was the last time anybody was happy?”

  He seemed to think for a moment. Then, “When we showed the Russians that we would fight for our freedom and when we beat them. We were happy then. That was 1920.”

  “And now?”

  There was a silence. La shifted slightly in her chair and looked up through the leaves of the willow to the clear sky above.

  “Now we’re too busy,” he said. “We’re too busy to think much about whether we are happy or sad. We’ve got one thing on our mind. To get the Germans out.”

  La nodded. “Why are they there in the first place?”

  “Because they are. They’ve invaded.”

  “But why?” La pressed. “How would a German explain it? What would a German say?”

  “We would say that the Poles could not run their own affairs. That everything was chaos and that the German invasion was the best thing that had happened to Poland. That is what they would say.”

  La lay quite still. She was staring up through the leaves as he spoke, and she continued to do so. There was a bird in the branches, almost directly above her, as if unaware of her. She watched his tiny, jerky movements. She did not say anything.

  Feliks said something else—something about Russia—but she did not hear it. I cannot let this pass, she said to herself. I cannot ignore it now.

  She sat up. “Feliks,” she said. “Do you know what you just said?”

  He did not move, and La remembered that he might not be able to see her. He was lying to her right, with his left side towards her, the side of his bad eye. She moved her hand slightly, in a wave-like movement. He did nothing. He could not see her.

  “About Russia?” he said. “About Stalin wanting his revenge?”

  She felt her heart hammering within her. “No. Before that. I asked you what a German would say about Poland, and you said We would say …”

  He remained still. “No, I didn’t say that. I said something else.”

  “But you did. You said it.”

  He sat up, quite abruptly, and La gave a start. He turned to her. “I said that the Germans would say something about chaos and bad government, if they told us what they really think. They do not think that the Poles can run a country, or deserve to do so.”

  He rose to his feet. “I’m going to tie those beans,” he said. “Then I’m going to have to go.”

  “I must pay you,” she said. After the first few months, when he insisted that he was paying for the flute, La had taken to giving him money for his work in the garden. He had been reluctant to accept it, but she had insisted. Now she got up out of her deck chair and went into the house to fetch the coins from her purse.

  Inside, she stopped for a few moments in the corridor. Perhaps it really was a slip of the tongue; he’s speaking a foreign language, after all, even if he speaks it very well. That must be it. We and they are easily confused; anybody might make such a mistake.

  She took the coins out to him. He seemed to have forgotten the incident, and talked to her about the four rows of beans of which he seemed very proud.

  “You will have a very good crop,” he said. “You wait and see.”

  LA LISTENED TO A STORY on the radio. It was about a woman who lived in a small town in Kent who took a lodger, a commercial traveller. The traveller had a leather suitcase in which he kept his samples; he sold brass fittings to hardware stores, and the case sometimes made a clinking sound when he set it down. He was a good tenant; he paid the landlady his rent every Friday morning, and he was always neat and tidy. On Sundays he went by bus to a Catholic church before he came back for lunch with his landlady. He often had a small gift of something for her—a jar of marmalade, a small parcel of lamb chops. He was married, he said, but his wife was living in Belfast, where she was looking after her infirm mother. They would get together again when the mother was no more: she could not last forever, he said.

  The landlady found one evening that her lodger had left his sample case on the landing. She picked it up and took it to his room. She knocked, but he did not reply, and so she opened the door gently. He was sitting at the table near the window, writing something in a book. When he saw her come into the room, he closed the notebook and stood up. He seemed very uncomfortable that she was holding the sample case, and he took it from her quite roughly. She was surprised, but understood that men sometimes became short when they had been working too hard and were tired.

  The lodger kept odd hours, but that was not unusual for a commercial traveller. He went off to the railway station and took trains to various parts of the country. He had clients all over England, he said.

  He seemed to have no friends, or none that she knew about. He came from Manchester, he said, but he had no family up there any more. He was a loner, she thought; she had had lodgers like that before, and they were no trouble.

  La listened to this. It was a trite story and she knew exactly where it was leading. People were always being told to be on the look-out, to be careful of what they said and to whom they said it. The landlady would come into the room and discover a transmitter, or a code-book perhaps. It was all too obvious.

  And it was uncomfortable. She turned o
ff the wireless and went to stand by the window. It was afternoon and the shadows were lengthening. That evening they would have an orchestra rehearsal, and she had matters that would occupy her mind. She was copying out a part for one of the trumpeters—slow, laborious work that she did not enjoy—and she should be doing that rather than listening to the radio. Ridiculous story—like a simplified morality play for the unsophisticated. Did they really want to have everybody looking into everybody’s business, just in case …

  After a few minutes she went back to the wireless and turned it on again.

  “… at his trial,” said the voice. “The landlady was there, and one or two intelligence people who had been involved in the case. The judge said very little. The case had been one of the worst he had seen; the information sent back to Germany could have cost the lives of many innocent people. There was a sentence provided for by law and that was the sentence that he now felt he must impose.

  “They took him away. He showed no emotion, even when his landlady looked at him from the public benches. He gave no indication of recognising her. He said nothing.

  “In prison he refused food, right up to the time that they took him from his cell. His legs failed him at the end, though, and they had to carry him to his death; he died a coward. Afterwards he was buried in an unmarked grave. They never knew his real name, but they were sure that he was an Englishman.”

  That was the end of the story. La turned away from the wireless in her irritation. Why had they called him a coward? She thought that he must have been brave, not a coward at all, taking all those risks and then saying nothing. That was brave, even if he was on the wrong side, on the side of darkness. And anybody’s legs would fail them if they were made to walk to their death. What did they expect?