The Ocean Liner

by Marius Gabriel

  She had discovered it through his carelessness, his arrogance. He had been receiving the woman’s love letters under a clownish assumed name at the local post office. It hadn’t taken Carla long to identify the woman: Rosina Storchio, the handsome young soprano whose vivid personality was propelling her to operatic stardom at that time.

  But Arturo had not been interested in Rosina Storchio’s larynx. His interests had been in another organ altogether. The letters made that clear. Carla had confronted him with his treachery, screaming. It was a scene to be repeated many times over the course of their marriage, but this had been the first time, and she’d had a lot to learn. She’d still thought she could stop him.

  Raging, she’d scoured every post office for miles around, hunting down his illicit correspondence. He’d simply used other anagrams of his name, even more clownish (Icinio Artú-Rostan and the like). She’d stood like an idiot, burning with humiliation, at the post restante counters, rifling through other peoples’ mail, looking for Storchio’s huge, extravagant calligraphy on the envelopes, while the postmasters watched her in mingled pity and scorn. It had been impossible to track down all Arturo’s aliases. She had followed his footsteps, dogged him for weeks. He had given her the slip every time.

  It was a fire she couldn’t extinguish. He promised to renounce Storchio, swore on his mother’s soul she meant nothing to him. But he always found a way to go back to her.

  He had been with Storchio when Giorgio had died, six years later. She’d had to face her child’s death alone.

  Carla had never forgiven him for that. She should have left him then. But her heart was broken in so many pieces that she was half-dead with grief; and besides, she was expecting Wanda. Where would she go, with her belly out to here, and two children under ten years old?

  Well, Rosina Storchio had had her punishments. The son she’d had with Arturo had been born crippled and paralysed, and had died at sixteen. Her voice, small to begin with, had disintegrated through over-use. She’d retired young, and it had been twenty years since anyone had heard of her. It was said that she too was now paralysed, living alone in obscurity. She’d never married.

  Contemplating this litany of tragedy gave Carla no satisfaction. Her own pain was still too great to take pleasure in anyone else’s. But she felt that justice had been served.

  She undressed now, hoping she would find sleep tonight. She had almost not come to Le Havre. Finding those filthy letters of Ada Mainardi’s had knocked her down, after so many times of being knocked down. She’d started to feel sure that her husband was now too old for these adventures. She’d been wrong.

  She’d sat staring at the lake for days, stunned. The telegram boy had come climbing up to the house every day, with ever-more-frantic messages from Artú. She’d ignored them.

  At length she had been forced out of her inertia by sheer self-preservation. Their landlord had implored her to pack up and go. If she did not leave Switzerland, he’d warned, she would spend the war here, possibly interned, separated from her children. There was no point in that.

  She’d made a bonfire in the garden, and had burned much of the correspondence. Not only the handkerchiefs stained with Ada’s blood, and the little nosegays of hair tied artistically with silk thread, but other letters as well, from other women – because there had been those, too. Artú’s sexual energies, like all his other energies, were inexhaustible.

  Even then, she had almost set off not west, to France, but south, to Milan. Yes; she’d contemplated taking her maiden name and slipping back into Italy, to sit out the war alone. Only the thought of the children had stopped her.

  At sixty-three, her expression had grown severe, her features jowly. Her body was thickened, her temperament curdled. She no longer cared what she looked like, and habitually wore black. Heavy, heavy, she was heavy, her heart was heavy, her face and her life were heavy upon her.

  She should have left Artú after Storchio, but there had been too many things stopping her.

  Not any more. Enough was enough.

  The next day, the air-raid drills were repeated. The guns began firing at nine in the morning. The children on board the Manhattan were wrought to a pitch of excitement by the commotion, running around howling, arms outstretched in imitation of fighter planes, or plummeting to the deck, trailing imaginary flames. For the adults, the exercise was more trying. Each blast made one’s body jerk involuntarily, or as Katharine Wolff put it more colloquially, jump out of one’s skin.

  She and Stravinsky were breakfasting with Thomas König and the German girls who had caused such a scene yesterday. They were all jaded today, particularly the younger of the girls, who was clearly distressed by the guns.

  ‘I can’t bear to hear them any more,’ Masha said, covering her ears and shutting her eyes. ‘When will they stop?’

  ‘They are very disagreeable,’ Thomas said in his awkwardly formal way. He reached out to touch her hand in an oddly adult gesture of comfort.

  ‘I would have thought you would find them very agreeable indeed,’ Rachel snapped at him. She never missed a chance to attack the boy. ‘Isn’t this the very sound your Führer loves most?’

  Stravinsky, wearing a black crew-necked sweater, seemed to find that amusing. ‘Ah yes, Thomas is a fervent little Nazi. You should hear him quoting passages from Mein Kampf. Explain, Thomas, what the Führer tells us about modern music.’

  Thomas withdrew his hand from Masha’s. ‘The Führer tells us that modern music contains germs which are infecting our society, and by which we are bound to rot and perish,’ the boy said in a monotone, his face flushing scarlet, his eyes on his plate. He had been made to memorise these wisdoms at school, until his expulsion, and his youthful memory retained them; but having to trot them out in front of Masha and Rachel was excruciating.

  ‘You see?’ Stravinsky said to Rachel. ‘You and the Führer are agreed in your opinion of my music.’

  ‘I have never said any such thing,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I merely said I didn’t care for it.’

  ‘And tell us, Thomas,’ Stravinsky said with a malicious glint, ‘where does Hitler say we modern composers belong?’

  Thomas gritted his teeth. ‘In a sanatorium.’

  ‘Once again we cannot fault the Führer’s prescience, for that is exactly where I have spent the last year. My late wife and daughter, indeed, spent most of their lives in a sanatorium.’ He turned to Masha. ‘Do you know Haute-Savoie, young lady?’

  ‘I have seen Mont Blanc,’ Masha said dully.

  ‘Ah yes. Very large. Very white. Our sanatorium lay at the foot. One opened the curtains and there it was. Very large. Very white.’ None of them was eating much, but Stravinsky was carefully peeling an apple with a little pearl-handled fruit knife. ‘It was a celebrated sanatorium. No less a person than Marie Curie came there. We used to see her, my wife and I, creeping into the sun to get warm. They were treating her for tuberculosis – Madame Curie, I mean – but the diagnosis was mistaken. She had given herself pernicious anaemia by the unwise habit of carrying radium around in her pockets. She died. Large doses of radiation, as with my music, are less healthy than small ones.’

  ‘You have a strange sense of humour,’ Rachel commented shortly.

  ‘I have no sense of humour at all. Thomas can attest to that. He relates to me all the Führer’s excellent jokes, but I am never amused. It must be a deficiency of intellect on my part.’

  Rachel merely shook her head at Stravinsky’s whims. She watched Masha constantly, anxiously. She laid her hand on her cousin’s brow now. ‘You are hot. Are you getting a fever?’ Masha seemed not to hear, her face remaining desolate.

  ‘I understand that you two young people have studied music?’ Stravinsky said.

  ‘I studied at the violin faculty at the Conservatory in Leipzig for two years,’ Rachel replied. ‘But I was suspended on hygienic grounds.’

  ‘Your Jewishness was infectious?’

  ‘That is what they told me. Which was am
using, since the Conservatory was founded a hundred years ago by Felix Mendelssohn.’

  ‘A Jew. And now a banned composer, like myself. What does Hitler teach us about Jews and taste, Thomas?’

  Thomas writhed. ‘There is no Jewish art,’ he replied automatically, the colour rising into his face again, ‘but the – the Jews have succeeded in poisoning public taste.’

  ‘There you have it. So much for Mendelssohn.’

  ‘I’ve often wondered why Hitler bothers himself about such subjects as music,’ Katharine said.

  ‘Because he is himself an artist,’ Stravinsky replied.

  ‘If he were really an artist,’ she said, ‘the world would be a safer place.’

  Stravinsky shook his finger emphatically. ‘Oh no. Artists are the most dangerous people on earth. Your army general may kill a few thousand, but your artist thinks nothing of exterminating millions.’ He turned back to Rachel. ‘What about your young cousin, Fräulein Morgenstern? Is she musical, too?’

  ‘Masha is an amateur pianist of some talent. But she was not permitted to enter any conservatory. Also on the grounds of being infectious.’

  ‘Her lack of professional formation no doubt explains her dubious enthusiasm for my music.’ Having peeled the apple smoothly, he sliced it into four quarters, and gave one to each of the others. ‘If you find the time lying heavy on your hands, I have a little work for you.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘I have with me the partial score of my symphony, but the manuscript is in rough, with all my corrections and scratchings-out. Perhaps I could prevail upon the two of you to copy the work out in fair?’

  ‘What will you pay?’ Rachel asked swiftly.

  ‘Rachel!’ Masha exclaimed in dismay, lifting her head. ‘It will be an honour to do the work – without pay, of course.’

  ‘You want payment in dollars, I presume?’ the composer asked Rachel, ignoring Masha.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Very well, I will pay fifty cents per manuscript page. There are some eighty pages. And I will subtract twenty-five cents for every error. Two errors, no pay. Three errors, you pay me.’

  ‘There will be no errors.’

  ‘That remains to be seen.’

  ‘And you will supply pens, ink and manuscript paper at no cost to us,’ Rachel pressed.

  Masha, embarrassed by Rachel’s businesslike dealings, dug her fingers into her cousin’s arm. ‘We can find our own materials,’ she hissed.

  ‘I will supply materials,’ Stravinsky conceded. ‘But for any page that you spoil, you will pay me ten cents. Delivery to be before we dock in New York.’

  Rachel held out her hand. ‘It’s a deal.’

  They shook hands solemnly. ‘Thomas will bring the manuscript to your cabin this evening.’

  ‘I cannot believe, Igor,’ Katharine said quietly to him, ‘that you are entrusting your precious manuscripts to these perfect strangers. For all you know, they will sell them, and you will never see them again.’

  ‘Fräulein Morgenstern is completely honest,’ Thomas said sharply, glaring at Katharine. His face was now flushed with anger, rather than discomfort. ‘You have no right to doubt her.’

  ‘This is the first time I have heard a Nazi vouching for the honesty of a Jew,’ Katharine said in a dry voice.

  Stravinsky smoothed his greasy, blonde hair wearily. ‘I am going back to bed. These guns tire my mind and make my head ache.’

  As they all left the dining room, Rachel fell into step beside Stravinsky. ‘Was it your idea to send the Hitler Youth to our cabin the other night?’

  ‘Not at all. It was Thomas’s own idea. He’s not a bad fellow for a National Socialist.’

  ‘He’s infatuated with my cousin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the way he moons over her?’ Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Thomas was walking close beside Masha behind them, listening intently to what she was saying. His face was rapt. ‘I find it repellent. Disgusting. He’s like a dog that licks one’s hand, but wants to bite.’

  ‘We all know that Nazis have sharp teeth,’ Stravinsky said, ‘but this one is just a puppy. You should be able to kick him away easily enough.’

  ‘I shall do my best,’ Rachel said grimly.

  Thomas König arrived at the girls’ door, carrying a portmanteau holding Stravinsky’s manuscripts. The boy was awkward, as he always was in the girls’ presence. Rachel greeted him coldly, but Masha invited him eagerly into the little cabin.

  ‘Imagine, Rachel. Original manuscripts from the hand of Igor Stravinsky!’

  ‘Just imagine,’ Rachel said ironically. ‘Let’s hope the great man is neat in his writing.’

  ‘He’s always so neat in his personal appearance. Quite fastidious, isn’t he, Thomas?’ She patted the place next to her on the bunk. ‘Sit here beside me.’

  The boy obeyed, pressing his hands between his knees. Rachel opened the portmanteau reverently. The sheaves of pages inside were densely written, with plentiful crossings-out and scribbled lines in French and Russian. Odd bits of paper, scraps of envelopes and even margins torn from magazines, were glued here and there with lines of music scribbled on them.

  ‘Oh, what a lot of dots,’ Rachel commented sardonically.

  Thomas cleared his throat. ‘Herr Stravinsky says you need not copy out his annotations. Only the staves.’

  ‘My heart is beating fast,’ Masha said, handling the pages as though they were holy writ. ‘This is such a privilege!’

  Thomas glanced at her face, and then away again. He found being in this cabin, with its scents, its articles of feminine clothing strewn around, and above all, the proximity of Masha Morgenstern, overwhelming. His heart, like Masha’s, was beating fast.

  ‘You have removed your swastika badge,’ Rachel said, looking down at him.

  ‘Yes, Fräulein.’

  ‘Are you disobeying your mother’s wishes out of sensitivity for our feelings?’

  He swallowed. ‘I know that the Fräuleins find it distasteful.’

  ‘You needn’t bother on our account. We are Germans, like yourself, and quite used to seeing the thing everywhere one looks. Put it back on.’

  ‘It’s quite all right.’

  ‘It is not all right,’ Rachel snapped. ‘In Germany, we are obliged to wear a yellow star so that the world can see we are Jews. I don’t see why you shouldn’t wear a swastika to tell the world you are a Nazi. Put it back on.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Masha said.

  ‘Why should I leave him alone? Put it on, I say.’ She watched while Thomas, his fingers shaking somewhat, fished the pin from his pocket and reattached it to his lapel. ‘We are also obliged to change our names to “Sara” or “Israel”. I think we should call you “Adolf” from now on.’

  ‘He’s just a boy,’ Masha said, leafing through the manuscript, her soft brown hair falling around her face. ‘He doesn’t understand these things.’

  ‘He understands, all right. Don’t you, Adolf?’

  ‘I understand,’ Thomas said, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Look at the facility with which Stravinsky writes,’ Masha exclaimed. ‘It simply pours out of him, wherever he is. He scribbles on whatever comes to hand. Can you imagine having such a quantity of beauty in your head?’

  ‘I can’t imagine transcribing such a quantity of rubbish at fifty cents a page,’ Rachel retorted. ‘I hope you’re going to do the lion’s share. I have better things to do.’

  ‘But what if I make mistakes?’

  ‘Then you will pay for them. You heard the great Stravinsky-Korsakoff.’

  ‘If the Fräulein wishes,’ Thomas said in a small voice, ‘I can check the pages for any errors.’

  ‘You’re very sweet, Thomas,’ Masha said, laying her hand on the boy’s knee. He started as though he had been burned with a red-hot iron.

  ‘You’re not going to disembark – are you?’ he said in a whisper, his pale grey eyes fixed
on hers.

  Masha sighed. ‘I’ve been told that I can’t.’ She smiled sadly at Thomas. ‘I still have your ticket to the World’s Fair. I can’t really keep it, you know. I’ll give it back to you.’

  Thomas felt a flutter of dismay. The ticket was his only, tenuous link to Masha once they arrived in America. ‘Oh no. It’s yours. I beg you to keep it. You don’t have to go with me. You can go any day you choose.’

  Rachel was observing the boy narrowly. ‘Young Adolf is in love with you, Masha.’

  At once, the blood rushed into Thomas’s face, reaching the roots of his hair. Rachel laughed mockingly. Masha shot her a reproving glance, and then patted Thomas on the knee again. ‘Pay no attention to her. She’s a dreadful tease.’

  But Rachel’s malice – or perhaps that gentle hand on his knee – was too much for Thomas. He jumped to his feet, made them a bow, and hurried out of the cabin.

  ‘You’re cruel, Rachel,’ Masha said. ‘Why do you torment him?’

  ‘I hate the sight of him. Besides, it gives me a little pleasure.’

  ‘He’s a sensitive boy.’

  ‘Oh, very. He has the hots for you.’

  ‘Really, Rachel. It’s nothing so adult as “having the hots”. And it’s a reason to show him some consideration.’

  ‘There was a dwarf in our apartment building in Leipzig. She was tiny, like a child, even though she was thirty years old, with little stunted arms and legs. But do you know, Masha, she could play the violin with surpassing sweetness. I don’t think I ever heard a sweeter tone. She asked me to give her lessons from time to time. Her arms were too short to hold the violin under her chin, so she played it like a cello. They came for her, the SS men, and took her away.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more horrible stories,’ Masha said, with tears in her eyes.

  ‘They didn’t show her much consideration. I saw two of them swinging her like a sack between them, laughing on the way to the van. I said nothing, because I knew I would be next. By now she has been exterminated. Don’t waste your pity on that boy. He’ll be back in Germany baiting Jews while you and I are begging for our bread on the streets of New York.’