Clearly weary and overworked, the officer was impatient. ‘Are you a relative?’
‘He has shared my cabin from Le Havre, and I feel the moral obligation to act as his guardian.’
‘Your moral obligations don’t have any legal force here.’
‘At least tell us what the problem is.’
‘Monsieur Stravinsky is a very celebrated composer,’ Masha put in.
‘I know who Mr Stravinsky is.’ The officer, who was an older man named Captain O’Leary, sighed and wiped his nicotine-stained moustache. He opened a folder and took out a passport. ‘We believe the boy is attempting to enter the country illegally.’
Stravinsky fixed his glasses on his beaky nose to look at the passport closely. He flipped through the pages. ‘I can see nothing wrong with it. It seems fully legal.’
‘The passport is legal, but it’s not his passport.’
Masha gasped in dismay. ‘But – but he’s Thomas König. Look at the photograph!’
‘The photograph is the problem,’ O’Leary said dryly. ‘The boy in the photograph looks similar, but he’s older. We often see passport photographs that look younger. One that looks older is a problem – unless the passport holder has worked out how to make time run backwards. According to the birthdate in the passport, he would be eighteen years old. But he looks a couple of years younger. There are other details that make us suspicious, too. In our line of work, you get an instinct.’
‘What do you intend to do?’
‘We don’t know who he is, but we’re going to find out,’ the officer said grimly. ‘We’ll ask the German consulate to start an enquiry to find out if the passport was stolen.’
‘I cannot believe that Thomas would be party to a theft,’ Stravinsky said.
‘We’re not concerned with any crimes committed in the countries of origin, Mr Stravinsky. That doesn’t interest us here on Ellis Island. We’re concerned with an attempt to enter this country unlawfully. If the kid’s papers aren’t on the level, this is as close as he’s ever going to get to the United States.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that he’ll be shipped straight back to where he came from. If the Germans ask for him to be deported, they’ll pay his fare. If not, Uncle Sam will foot the bill.’
Masha was trembling with anxiety, but Stravinsky remained calm and polite. ‘May we speak to young Thomas? There is probably a misunderstanding at the bottom of all this which can be cleared up with a few gentle words.’
‘He’ll be in the holding cells already by now,’ O’Leary said, looking at his fob watch.
‘I would take it as a very great personal favour if you would let me see my young friend for a few moments,’ Stravinsky said quietly. ‘You said you intend to find out who he is. Well, I may be able to get that information far more easily than any interrogation will.’
The officer snapped his fob watch shut and glanced at Stravinsky with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘We’ve processed over a thousand people today. And we’re about to shut the building. But you may have a point. You can see him for five minutes.’
Thomas looked very small in the holding cell, which was also occupied by three adult men, including a heavily tattooed Finnish stowaway and two Central Europeans who wore tickets announcing that they had infectious diseases.
He looked up as the visitors came in; and then he and Masha burst simultaneously into tears. ‘Thomas, Thomas,’ she choked, ‘what’s all this?’
The boy seemed unable to answer. Stravinsky spoke quietly. ‘Thomas is not who he says he is, Masha. His family were Lutherans who objected to Nazi thuggery. For this they were sent to a camp. Thomas’s mother managed to help him escape, using a borrowed passport. He has been sailing, so to speak, under a false flag.’
‘Oh, Thomas!’ Masha knelt beside him and took him in her arms, hugging him tightly. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said, his face buried in Masha’s soft hair.
‘What went wrong, Thomas?’ Stravinsky asked.
‘They asked me to take off my shirt,’ he replied in a low voice. ‘They said I was not muscular enough to be eighteen.’
‘What did you reply?’
‘I said I had been sick.’ He raised his head. He was ashen-faced and trembling. ‘But they didn’t believe me. They looked at the photograph with a magnifying glass, and measured my face with a ruler. They said the picture was of another person. And I am a little taller than it says in the passport.’
‘I don’t think it will do any good to cling to the lie any longer,’ Stravinsky said quietly. ‘We have to tell the truth and face what comes.’
Thomas nodded. ‘I’m ready. I will go back to Germany.’
‘Let’s see about that. Be strong, Thomas,’ Stravinsky said. ‘Come, Masha. We need to see Captain O’Leary again.’
‘I knew,’ Masha said breathlessly to Stravinsky as they climbed the stairs, ‘I knew he was no Hitler Youth. He is too good for that.’
Sitting in Captain O’Leary’s office, five minutes later, Stravinsky lit a cigarette. The immigration officer puffed on a cigar. The two men were reflective in their clouds of smoke.
‘What seems to have upset the boy most,’ Stravinsky said at last, ‘was that he saw his mother arrested and led to the van by Gestapo men. He was at an upper window in the house next door, you see, watching everything. She could have looked up at him, but she didn’t. This haunts him. I think it will haunt him to his dying day. Now. I invite you to consider the state of mind of a mother who does not look at her child one last time. She has prepared for this day. Dreaded it, but prepared for it. Her husband and his brother have embarked on a course of action, based on conscience, which will inevitably lead to all their deaths. But she believes in her heart that her child, her only son, should not be destroyed because of that. So she has prepared. You follow?’
O’Leary nodded, examining the coal of his cigar.
‘As they lead her to her death, she knows that her son is watching. But she does not look up at him. She knows that if she does, she may break down. The child may break down and cry out to her. And all will be lost. So she keeps her eyes on the ground so as not to betray his hiding place. It must have cost her a lot not to look at her child one last time. Don’t you think?’
O’Leary swung in his swivel chair and busied himself with some papers. ‘I guess so,’ he said gruffly.
‘His mother has taken his true identity with her to her grave. Her parting gift to him is a theft. A theft that has saved his life. I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s an interesting notion.’
‘I guess it is.’
‘Now I invite you to consider another mother, a widow who has also lost her son. Perhaps because she needs the money, or perhaps out of pity, she gives her son’s passport to her neighbour. It is, at the very least, an action which saves a life. But what happens if you make your enquiry with the German consulate, Captain O’Leary? A message is sent to Berlin. The Gestapo are alerted. They make an arrest. An interrogation, with all the usual refinements. Trial and certain death for Frau König. The boy she saved is sent back to Germany, where he too faces imprisonment and death. Has any of this added to the sum total of human happiness? Or has it simply added to the burden of grief which already weighs this world down too heavily?’
O’Leary cleared his throat. ‘I don’t deal with the burden of grief, Mr Stravinsky. I deal with rules and regulations.’
‘Of course you do,’ Stravinsky replied. ‘So do I. Music is nothing but rules and regulations. They are the very first thing every musician learns. The lines, the dots, the numbers; so many beats to a bar, so many notes to a stave, the iron laws of key and tonality. Without these rules and regulations, music is impossible. You would just have noise. And yet—’ Stravinsky lit another cigarette. ‘And yet there is space for human creativity to creep between those iron bars. We bend them, we slip through them from time to time. Without those moments of mercy, all of music would be mer
ely a prison. And so would the world be merely a prison.’
‘You’re asking me to break the rules.’
‘Merely to bend them. If it’s of any relevance, Captain, Thomas König is among the more decent human beings I have come across in a long life. I believe he would be an asset to your country. More importantly, his death would impoverish the world to no purpose.’
‘I’m not planning to kill him.’
‘Others are. You know that.’
‘That’s not my business.’
‘Here,’ Masha said. She leaned forward and laid something on O’Leary’s desk. It was a string of small, deep-red rubies. They lay like beads of blood among the tarnished gilt and creased leather of the multifarious passports. ‘Take these. Let him go.’
‘No, Masha!’ Stravinsky said urgently. But it was too late to withdraw the gesture.
O’Leary laid down his cigar and picked up the string of rubies. He cupped them in his palm, admiring their colour. ‘These look valuable.’
‘My father was a jeweller. They are called pigeon’s blood rubies. They come from Burma. They’re rare. They are all we have left.’
‘And this kid – whom you met on board ship – is worth it to you?’
‘I have learned the value of a human life,’ Masha replied.
‘This wasn’t a very wise thing to do, young lady. Trying to bribe a public official in this country will get you ten years in jail.’ O’Leary spilled the stones back on to the desk. ‘Put them away, now.’
Masha took back the necklace with shaking fingers.
O’Leary stretched his arms above his head. They could hear his joints clicking. ‘I’m retiring in three weeks’ time. I could lose my pension over this.’ Masha and Stravinsky said nothing. The officer opened Thomas’s file and thumped a stamp into the passport. He rose tiredly to his feet. ‘I’m going home to my dinner now. Take the kid home to his.’
Stravinsky put his arm around the boy’s shoulders as they walked back up the gangplank. ‘Have you eaten today?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I can’t stop thinking about them. I think they are all dead by now.’
Stravinsky could make no comment on that, except to say, ‘But you are alive.’
‘Thomas,’ Masha said, clinging to his other arm, ‘we almost lost you!’
Rachel met them at the top of the gangplank. ‘I see you have rescued little Adolf,’ she greeted them ironically.
‘Really, Rachel,’ Masha snapped with unaccustomed fierceness, ‘you can be obnoxious sometimes.’
The arrival of Manhattan at the Chelsea Piers the next morning was a grand occasion. Mr Nightingale and his staff distributed streamers and confetti for the passengers to throw over the side of the ship; and a tumultuous welcome was waiting on Pier 86 as the liner docked. The large crowd was made up of joyous relations and friends who had been waiting anxiously since the outbreak of the war for their loved ones to return, reporters from all the New York papers eager to interview the many celebrities on board, and hundreds more who had no connection to the Manhattan, but who loved spectacles such as this one, and who had come to be swept up in the emotion of the occasion, as autumn leaves are swept up by the wind.
News of the ship’s encounter with the German submarine had preceded her arrival. Commodore Randall’s coolness was the toast of the harbour. Horns, sirens and hooters praised him in a deafening chorus. Fireboats sprayed high arcs of water, making rainbows dance in the morning air, and altogether the occasion was more reminiscent of the first launch of a great ship than a quiet return to harbour.
In the staterooms and cabins, and in the crowded public areas, all was bustle and preparation to disembark – for some, preparation for a new life. For many, it was also a time for farewells.
Masha and Rachel came to Stravinsky and Thomas’s cabin. Masha was carrying Stravinsky’s manuscript, together with the fair copy she had made so laboriously.
‘I managed to finish it last night,’ she said, smiling, ‘and there are no mistakes, I promise.’ She handed the bundle to him. ‘I know that you gave me this work to distract me from my unhappiness during the voyage. It helped me a great deal. I will never forget your kindness.’
Stravinsky took the manuscripts from Masha and uncapped his pen. He wrote something on the original, and then handed it back to her. ‘I will keep your fair copy, Fräulein. You may keep this thing of mine as a memento.’
Masha stared at the manuscript, upon which he had written, in his large, sprawling hand, ‘To my friend Masha Morgenstern, SS Manhattan, September 1939.’
‘I cannot accept this,’ she said, turning pale. ‘I’m not worthy of the honour.’
‘In my eyes you are worthy,’ he replied. ‘It may be useful to you. I hope it does you some good one day.’
Thomas, too, had a gift – for Rachel. He unpinned the little enamel swastika from his lapel, and gave it to her. ‘My mother asked me to wear this until I arrived in America,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s the last thing I have of her. I want you to keep it.’
Rachel, who now knew what had been revealed at Ellis Island, accepted the gift awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t very nice to you during the voyage, was I? But then, I didn’t look beneath the surface.’ She closed her fingers around the pin. ‘I will keep this nasty thing to remind me to take nothing for granted.’ She kissed him.
Arturo Toscanini tapped at his wife’s stateroom door. He heard her voice from within, and turned the handle.
Carla was lying on her bunk with a black satin sleep mask over her eyes, the curtains drawn across the porthole. The light inside was dull, even though it was a bright winter’s afternoon.
‘We are about to dock,’ he said. ‘You should get ready, Carla.’
‘There is no hurry.’ She didn’t remove the mask.
He stood at her bedside, looking down at her. ‘I didn’t mean you to find those letters.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ she replied dryly.
‘I mean that I would have burned them. I had intended to burn them. But everything happened so quickly. I forgot all about them. I left them behind.’ He hesitated. ‘It had already ended between me and Ada. When Neppach shot Gretel, the shock was terrible. You were right in what you said. We couldn’t go on after that.’
‘So it took the death of a young woman to prise you away from her.’
‘I am sorry, Carla. Truly sorry. I never wanted to wound you.’
‘But you were too selfish to avoid it.’
‘I was in love, Carla.’
‘Ah,’ she said quietly. ‘That explains everything.’
He sat on the bed beside her, and took her hand, with its short, unvarnished nails. ‘I love you. But I was in love with her. The difference is . . .’
‘You need not tell me what the difference is, Artú.’
‘But do you understand? You are my life. You are the mother of my children. I could not survive without you. We have spent a lifetime together. But with you, I am an old man. With her, I was young. Time had not passed. The fire had not burned down.’ He stared at her masked face. ‘Do you understand?’
Her mouth was bitter. ‘What are you telling me all this for? Do you think it’s going to make me change my mind?’
Tears trickled from the corners of his eyes, sliding along the wrinkles on his face. He bowed his white head down until his forehead was resting on her thigh. ‘There is a demon inside me, Carla. I cannot control it. I cannot. Because it is the same demon that gives me my art. It gives me my life.’
At last she pulled off her mask and sat up, pushing him away. ‘Do you think I don’t have my own demon, Artú? Do you think I don’t want my own pleasures, my own life? But I gave everything up for you. So that you could have your life, your pleasures. I asked very little.’
‘I know you did,’ he sobbed.
‘I asked only for some dignity, some respect—’
‘I know, I know.’
‘But you wouldn’t even give me that.’
; ‘I cannot live without you.’ He seized her hand again and covered it with wet kisses. ‘Forgive me, Carla, forgive me!’
Carla looked at him with a mixture of disgust and pity. ‘You beg me not to leave you, and in the same breath you tell me you will not give up your women.’
‘I will give them up. I will give them up. I swear it, Carla. We will start a new life together. Look.’ He jumped up and pulled the curtains open. Through the window, the towers of Manhattan could be seen, crowded together in the morning sun. ‘Look, my dear. Everything is new today. We’re not too old to start again.’ He smiled at her tremulously, the light making a halo out of his white hair.
‘You are an old fool,’ she said. ‘But I am even stupider.’ She heaved herself off the bunk. ‘Let’s go.’
Fanny Ward, the Indestructible Ingénue, had prepared for her own interview carefully, starting before dawn. One of the things she most regretted leaving behind in London was her lady’s maid of the past twenty years. Lucy had been a treasure. Getting ready to face the flashbulbs and the microphones was terrifying these days. But she had faced it without Lucy to help her dress and put on her make-up, and now she gave the assembled newspapermen her gayest smile.
‘I really don’t think I can fit any more of you in,’ she protested as they crowded her little stateroom. Some of them remained in the doorway, angling their cameras over the heads of the men in front of them.
Miss Ward had positioned herself against the window, as she always did, but there was no escape from the cameras. The popping and sizzling of the flashguns was dazzling, heating up the room as though a miniature battle were being fought in it. Panic rose in her breast. They were too close, too bright. She was going to look ghastly. The best she could hope for was that sub-editors would blue-pencil the photographs as too frightful to publish.
‘Please, my dears, have mercy with your flashguns.’ She dabbed the sweat that had begun to clog her face powder.
‘What can you tell us about London, Miss Ward?’
‘Oh, my dear man. Too, too sad. Like a plague city. The streets deserted at night and everything buried in sandbags. No gaiety, no bright lights, so triste. I wept to see it like that.’
The Ocean Liner Page 26