Second Violin (45 page)

It wasn’t that Hummel wasn’t making sense, indeed Rod found his argument far easier to grasp than anything Kornfeld had to say, and at least fresher than anything Drax had said so
far . . . but his mind had begun to wander . . . from Hummel to the leaded windows, from the windows to the lawn . . . and from the lawn to memories of cricket at school. He’d adored cricket.
The perfect ritual in the perfect togs. White upon white with an optional cap in a silly colour. He even loved the sound of cricket, the soft thwack of willow on leather, the distant ripple of
applause, like doves taking flight. He remembered the long holiday after his first year at Harrow – he’d tried teaching cricket to his brother on the south lawn at their father’s
country pile, Mimram House in Hertfordshire. He didn’t think Freddie could have been much more than six . . . but it wasn’t so much his not getting it as his utter refusal to want to
get it. Perhaps it was all to do with the boy being left-handed. At the end of a very frustrating afternoon the boy had asked of cricket, ‘But will it get me into heaven?’ It remained
to this day the only question of faith he’d heard his brother ask . . . and remembering this brought him back off a lawn a world away, back through the leaded windows and back to Hummel.

‘. . . After much thought I have reached a conclusion I cannot reconcile with any of my arguments . . . consciousness is the central problem of modern philosophy . . . yet, and I hesitate
to say this, I fear that consciousness itself seems to be an illusion.’

A ripple of applause. The dozy awoke. Hummel looked at them all waiting for questions. There always were questions, even though, as now, there was prolonged and cogitative silence.

Rod thought a bit. He’d missed something vital daydreaming. There’d been a seven-league leap in Hummel’s argument. Rod spoke, ‘An illusion of what? Without consciousness
there can be neither certainty nor illusion. You say “seems”, seems to whom or what? What or who is the entity so deluded or deceived?’

Hummel smiled, and said, ‘I wish you hadn’t asked me that.’

It had come together in an unexpected if intended way. The British had turned out for the Viennese, the Berliners . . . the odd Italian . . . in their re-creation of Red
Vienna. The enlisted men sat at the back, ordered to a concert and as uneasy as if they’d been invited to a nudist camp, Lieutenant Jenkins sat up front, as though representing the absent
commandant, Major Trench.

It had come together. Rod was pleased. He knew he wasn’t a great or even a good second violin, but he was capable and felt he had shown it. Kornfeld was ecstatic, Herr Schnitzler wept
tears of joy, and the audience belted out the applause and demanded an encore. Kornfeld apologised that they had none of them had enough vanity ever to think they would require an encore and hence
had not prepared one – and they left the stage to a second round of clapping.

They were to be followed by Schwitters. Rod took his seat next to Billy Jacks.

‘It’s nothin’ to do with porridge, I ’ope.’

‘The programme says a sonata. That’s a piece for solo instrument.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t found a way of playin’ a tune on porridge?’

Schwitters strode onto the stage. He’d wetted his hair to stick down his errant wisps, and Rod could have sworn he’d concealed the holes in his increasingly tatty black jacket by
dabbing ink onto the shirt underneath. Dignity it seemed, was the vital setting for the absurd.

‘I shall now perform for you ze presto, foursz movement of my Ursonate, originally composed in ze late 1920s, but wiz furzer additions in later years.’

Rod couldn’t see what instrument Schwitters had in mind. Was he going to walk over to the piano? Was he suddenly going to whip out a Jew’s harp from his trouser pocket and start
twanging away?

Schwitters did not move. He stood stock still, almost as though at attention, opened his mouth and began to babble.

It sounded to Rod like . . .

Or was it? No, it was ‘bum’ it was definitely ‘bum’. And it went on for several minutes, perhaps the best part of quarter of an hour, via . . .

to end up pretty well where he’d started at . . .

Rod wondered, in view of Schwitters’ statement about the piece being ‘composed’, whether he had memorised all this gibberish or simply made it up as he went along. It had a
certain rhythm to it, a generous mind might even say a certain music. Jacks did not have a generous mind. As the too-polite applause died down he whispered, ‘What the bleeding ’ell was
that?’

Rod said, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue. But remember he’s an artist.’

‘Artist, my arse! It was a load of Chipping Campden, that’s what it was.’

Chipping Campden had proved such an emotive phrase for Billy, it had all but replaced both ‘fuck’ and ‘bollocks’ in his vocabulary since he had first heard Herr Rosen
utter it. It was the compression of all his contempt for England into four syllables – deploying the name of a quaint Cotswold village as an obscenity had a poetry to it that Schwitters might
appreciate.

‘I’ve heard more sense out of any o’ my kids while they was still in the pram. He should stick to carvin’ porridge.’

‘Well . . . he’s down for another number in the second half. I suggest you put your fingers in your ears, or nip out for a fag.’

‘Nah . . . I’ll stick with it. If I catch him actually making sense or using real words I could maybe ask for me money back.’

‘You know, I think you might just have invented a new parlour game. First person in a bollocks-talking contest to accidentally make sense loses.’

After the interval, Rod sat between Drax and Jacks, the big man book-ended by two little men . . . half a dozen blokes recited poetry in German – chunks of Schiller, snippets of Goethe
– another bloke did indeed get on stage, pull out a Jew’s Harp and twang away tunelessly pretty much like a cockney dad bashing away on a pair of spoons under the fond delusion that it
was music, a counter-tenor sang something obscure and excruciating . . . and that left only Schwitters’ second number, whatever that might turn out to be, and the finale, Viktor Rosen playing
Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’ sonata on a Bechstein abandoned by the girls’ school upon their departure, and personally retuned by Rosen himself.

Schwitters took the stage again to an apprehensive silence. All Rod could hear was Drax wheezing, but then Drax seemed to be wheezing a lot lately. Either Schwitters was clutching what appeared
to be a rifle carved out of wood or he’d found a way to set porridge rigid.

‘I sing for you now ze smash hit of 1912, lyrics by George Norton, music by Ernie Burnett.’

Rod hadn’t a clue what to expect. Jacks whispered, ‘I know this one. My old dad used to sing this. Da de da de da da da de dada.’

Schwitters sloped arms and began to sing, his left hand upheld in a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute:

‘Komm to me mein melancholy babeeeee . . .’

And as he sang he turned his head slowly, mechanically, almost as though on a ratchet and gazed a gorgon gaze upon his audience, unflinching, unsmiling, bone-chilling. Rod found the
sentimentality of the words evaporating like Manx will-o’-the-wisp under Schwitters’ withering gaze. For the second verse he held his torso rigid and goose-stepped up and down the
stage. For the third, he unslung his rifle, and aimed it at individuals in the audience, stamping his foot after each phrase to simulate a gunshot.

‘Cuddle up!’

Bang!

‘Und don’t be!’

Bang!

‘Shy!’

Bang!

On ‘shy’, Rod rather thought the wooden rifle was pointing at him or Drax. It was a chillingly effective little stunt. He doubted there’d be two hands put together to clap at
the end of it. On ‘bang’ Drax slumped forward, chin on chest. Rod was amazed. He’d never have thought Drax willing to play along with a piece of Chipping Campden like this –
but as Schwitters left the stage to a gobsmacked silence Drax did not move, and when Rod gently grasped a shoulder and asked, ‘Are you OK, old man?’ he slumped to the floor.

Rosen was approaching the end of the second movement when Drax came to. Rod had laid him out on a sofa in a small room next to the concert hall. He’d been light as a
feather. Rod realised he so rarely saw the man without his Bud Flanagan fur coat that he’d an utterly false idea of his size. He doubted he weighed more than eight and a half stone.

‘How long?’ Drax asked.

‘About ten minutes,’ Rod said.

Drax swung his feet off the sofa.

‘Ach, for twenty years I wanted to hear Viktor Rosen play . . .’

He lost his balance. Rod caught his head and laid him gently down again.

‘Not so fast.’

‘Ach . . . It is only a cold. It has been coming on for days.’

Hummel peered down, spoke up.

‘No, Max. It is longer than that, you have coughed and wheezed almost since we met.’

‘Can you be surprised? We have had some terrible rain this summer. I have caught a cold. No more than that.’

Rod said, ‘Colds don’t cause you to pass out.’

Drax said nothing to this, looked back as though silently imploring Rod to change the subject.

‘I think you should see the MO.’

Kornfeld said, ‘Medical Officer? What Medical Officer? We don’t have a Medical Officer.’

Rod got Jenkins out of the concert.

‘’Fraid he’s right, old man. We’ve no resident MO.’

‘What? For a hundred men?’

‘Are there a hundred? I’ve never really been able to count. But no, it sort of never got organised.’

‘It’ll have to be organised,’ Rod whispered. ‘It looks more like pneumonia than a common cold to me.’

Jenkins knelt down next to Drax.

‘Max, old chap, how are you feeling?’

Drax responded with a fit of wet-coughing, drenching his handkercief in sputum.

‘I shall be fine,’ he lied.

Jenkins took Rod into a corner.

‘I think you’re right. I’ll find the major. Something will have to be done.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I do hope so. But you know as well as I how elusive the good major can be. Hasn’t been to roll call for a week. Hasn’t set foot in the mess for longer. And written on the wall
in the enlisted men’s latrine is “What’s the difference between God and Trench?”’

Rod looked blank.

‘Sorry, it’s an old gag – I thought you might have heard it. It goes . . . ‘God is everywhere, Trench is everywhere but here”. But, I’ll find him.’

Trench was blunt.

‘I know your sort. You’re a rabble-rouser, Mr Troy. You’re the thing the Army hates most. A barrack-room lawyer.’

‘I’m not in the Army and neither is Professor Drax.’

‘I’m so glad we agree on that because I have no provision for medical treatment of civilians.’

Even now Rod had only half of Trench’s attention. He was standing behind his desk, rifling through piles of paperwork.

‘There’s surely an MO for your men?’

‘In Douglas, yes. If one of my chaps gets ill I’d have to send to Douglas.’

‘Then send for him for Drax. He’s ill. Quite seriously ill. I think it might be pneumonia.’

‘No can do.’

‘Then send for a GP from one of the villages.’

Trench banged a fist down on the pile of paper.

‘You see this lot? Army regulations. Army bumf. Comes in by the barrowload every day.’

His other hand lay flat on a second smaller pile.

‘You see this lot? Home Office bumf. Right now jurisdiction over your raggle-taggle bunch of Germans and Jews is with the War Office. Any day now it shifts to the Home Office. Don’t
ask me why. All I know is the transition means twice the bloody bumf, and it gets bigger every day. If I have power to summon a civilian GP . . .
if
. . . who knows, the regulation might be
in this lot somewhere. But right now I don’t have that power.’

Rod said, ‘Isn’t there a doctor in camp? All these degrees and diplomas, surely one of us knows something about medicine?’

Siebert said, ‘You may recall I mentioned that there is one remaining Nazi?’

‘Vaguely,’ Rod said.

‘Massmann.’

‘Eh?’

‘Massmann, he’s the Nazi. He’s also a doctor.’

‘Oh bugger. Have I met him? I don’t think I’ve met him.’

‘Takes his meals in his room since they shipped out all the others. You and Billy might pay him a call. The rest of us are known to him, most of us have clashed with him at some time. He
has a room to himself on the top floor.’

‘A room to himself?’

‘Did you think any of us would share with him?’

Massmann’s room was in the attic, high in the gable. Enough room for a palliasse, a constantly hissing cold water tank, a washbasin and little else. Rod and Billy peered in through the
open door. The room was higher than it was wide or long. Just as well – Massmann appeared to Rod to be close to six foot six and as skinny as Hummel. He was stretched out on the palliasse,
one hand behind his head, the other clutching a book. Rod tapped politely on the door. The eyes flickered up to look at him, but Rod could swear not another muscle in his body moved – the
eyes were the enviable Aryan blue, the skin taut across his forehead, the cheekbones high and his skin pale.