Days of Your Fathers (4 page)

‘Leave him alone!' Berta cried. ‘Don't you believe me? I will come to you when you like.'

Danno glared at her, suddenly aware of her presence.

‘And are you not ashamed to be talking so with your da on his death-bed?' he roared. ‘You will stand up now and do what I tell you. You will go to the cook and turn your rolling eyes on him and bring me an ounce of sugar and a teaspoonful of baking powder.'

‘What do you mean? You're no doctor!'

‘I am in a manner of speaking, though 'tis sheep I treat the most of.'

‘Sheep?'

‘Sure, if you saw one stand on his hind legs,' shouted Danno, exasperated by her tone, ‘you would know 'tis only human like the rest of us. Be off with you now!'

‘I will not. He shall be on deck if I carry him on my back,' she said. ‘I know your sort. You only want a chance to say we were disobedient. Your sheep will go where you tell them. They have learned that much!'

‘The devil's in the girl!' said Danno. ‘Now will ye listen? The doctor is after telling you your Da must see the captain. 'Tis a lie – though, by Jesus, the shock would have cured
him if it were the sea-sickness he had! But 'tis not the sea, 'tis his stomach.'

‘What do you know?' she asked contemptuously.

‘Am I not telling you I am a veterinary surgeon and the best sheep-doctor in all Eire? And I know that if it were a sheep or a pig or a horse or a saint from heaven and he sea-sick, he would be breathing fast and slow and jerky as if the soul of him were in torment, and not hungry for air and breathing deep, as is your Da. 'Tis what they call acidosis he has, and though the sea started it, 'tis not the sea any longer nor the fear of the sea that turns his stomach now.'

Berta stared at him with shining eyes, from which huge tears of relief spilled on to her cheeks.

‘Will ye go to the cook now,' he coaxed her, patting her hand, ‘and bring me a teaspoonful of baking powder and an ounce of sugar.'

Berta nodded, and vanished down the passage. Meanwhile Danno soothed, groomed and massaged her father as if he had been a thoroughbred recovering from severe fright – which indeed he was. The old man thanked him in scraps of broken English and, when Berta returned with the remedy, took it trustfully and in absolute faith that it was going to stay down.

‘Now keep him quiet, and he'll be better before night,' said Danno. ‘I will tell the doctor 'twas the shock that did it, and he will be speaking of his cure from one end of the ship to the other and that pleased with himself he will order special food for your da.'

‘But you'll come and see him?' asked Berta anxiously.

‘You will have him on deck under the awnings tomorrow afternoon, and I will see him then. And I will send you one of them canvas chairs for him,' added Danno drily, ‘so he shall not be sprawling on the hatches and the doctor and the proud English turning their opera glasses on him and jiggling their feet on the planks.'

By nightfall Mr Feitel had shown a marked improvement. A breakfast of eggs was followed by a lunch of chicken – obtained through Danno's outrageous flattery of the doctor
– and at five o'clock he was sitting in a deck-chair, watching the flying fish in the strip of blue sky and blue water between the awning and the rail, and thankful for his return to so brilliant and curious a world.

A group of his compatriots gathered round him; they were oddly out of place in the South Atlantic, for they had no clothes but those in which they had left their cities, and they all wore cloth caps, bought in the firm belief that a sea voyage demanded them. They seemed to have just stepped out of an office to visit a shop across the road.

‘All the same,' said the chess-player, determined from now on to be a cynic, ‘he is here to watch us.'

‘To watch over us,' Mr Feitel corrected him dreamily. ‘To watch over us.'

‘He is not a police agent at all,' added Berta indignantly.

‘But what did he come here for?' insisted the fat man with the lisp. ‘Would you come down from the first-class for nothing? No! Would I? No! Would Berta? No! Why did he come here? Tell me that!'

He put his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and walked two steps away and two steps back. For him, said his serious expression, there was logic, nothing but logic.

‘I do not know,' Berta answered truthfully.

She was convinced, however, that she did know why he had returned again and again. She blushed. Mr Feitel saw her embarrassment unmoved. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that, while his friends commiserated with him on his daughter's thinness, she was devastatingly attractive to the Gentiles.

‘What is he?' he asked.

‘He doctors animals,' said Berta faintly.

‘Animals! Do animals have doctors? What kind of animals?' asked the chess-player.

‘Sheep,' answered Berta, waiting for the outburst of comment.

It came. When the hands had ceased to wave and the mouths to gabble, Mr Feitel murmured:

‘He doctors sheep? So gentle, so humble that even sheep he cares for? My daughter, the man should be a Jew.'

‘He is not,' said Berta.

‘In the eyes of God he has a Jewish heart. Has any one of you seen prejudice in him? Has he ever shown that he shows a difference between Jew and Gentile?'

‘No,' the fat man admitted. ‘But he is a fool.'

‘You have well said the man is a fool. To such God allows greatness and from such shall come deliverance,' said Mr Feitel impressively.

Danno Flynn appeared at the after end of the promenade deck. There was no immediate evidence of greatness in him, nor did he descend to them in a manner befitting the deliverer of Israel – for he slid down the rail of the ladder to the main deck – but he undeniably had an air, and he was not in the least put out by the eyes that, almost reverently, gazed at him.

‘Sure and I knew me old cock would be on deck!' he exclaimed.

He seemed to slap Mr Feitel on the back, but his patient felt the hand alight firmly, gently, giving strength.

The chess-player moved his lips, rehearsing a speech that he had just composed in his school English; he considered that there were still too many mysteries unsolved.

‘Pardon me, noble Mr Doctor, will you have the kindness to tell me please whether it is your purpose to practise in Brazil?'

‘'Tis not me purpose, 'tis the curse that is on me,' answered Danno. ‘For, God help me, I am the biggest fool in Eire!'

Mr Feitel smiled benignly and began to talk to himself in a soft sing-song. Danno looked at him anxiously.

‘Now be off with you!' he said, waving his arms at the little group as if they had been an obstinate herd of sheep. ‘And let you not be troubling his reverence with your foreign talk and him with no strength to listen to his own!'

Mr Feitel's friends hastily moved on. The deck had become for them a street, with a person in authority to prohibit loitering.

Berta laughed.

‘He is not light-headed,' she said. ‘He is praying for you.'

‘'Tis very civil,' Danno answered. ‘But he should be sleeping now.'

He stood behind the old gentleman's chair and gently stroked the prominent veins of his temples. In two minutes Mr Feitel was asleep.

‘Why are you leaving your country if you did not have to?' Berta asked.

There was no longer any tone of cross-examination in her voice; she asked with the trust of a child that she would be answered.

‘'Twas like this, Biddy,' answered Danno. ‘A little yellow man came to me house, and he telling me that he was spending a great fortune to raise sheep on the far mountains of Brazil, and begging me to work with him – for if the sheep didn't die on him, 'twas only because the ewes were barren. I will not, says I, for what would I be doing in India? 'Tis not India, he says, 'tis America. Then do you go to my uncle, says I, who is in Wyoming these thirty years and as good a man with the sheep as I am meself. So he told me 'twas South America and pressed a thousand pound into me hand, but I would not take it. Will ye come so far as Dublin with me, Mr Flynn, he asks. I will that, I said – for he was a friendly little yellow man and free with his money, God forgive him! And when we had drunk three parts of the whisky in Dublin, he would have me come to London and drink French wines. And how many days we were in London I misremember, but I signed me name on a paper and when the drink passed from me I found meself in a first-class cabin on the raging ocean, with all the money in the world in me pocket and a two-year contract.'

‘But that is terrible! It's criminal!' she cried, all her pity for the exiled welling up.

‘It was surely!' he laughed. ‘But 'tis no fool that I am after all, for would not a man be glad to leave his country for a sight of your sweet face?'

‘Then we'll comfort each other, Daniel,' she said frankly, linking her arm in his. ‘There is only a week more before we land, but it shall be a happy week for us.'

‘Let you not be talking so, Biddy!' cried Danno, much
shocked by the nearness of her and the openness of her speech. ‘Would I be telling you of your eyes and your hair and the shape of you like a young tree and it heavy with fruit? And would I be kissing you in dark places till I was drunk with the scent of you and the white skin that is of a queen surely, and would I let you go then, and you the world's wonder and the love of my heart? I will not be parting from you and his reverence, I tell you. It's a poor bargain I have to offer you with no country of my own and no women to greet you in the street, saying – there goes the beauty that is the wife of Danno Flynn. But let you have patience for the two years, and you will not be lonely.'

‘I will not, surely,' she answered, unconsciously falling into the lilt of his speech. ‘But if I do not go with you I shall be lonely to the end of my days, and the women crying for pity of me.'

Firefly

I could not guess why he had so urgently insisted that I should dine with him. To share our memories, he said. It seemed most unlikely that any memories of mine could be of value. The war had been over for two years and what little I had known about the shady characters operating in Bucharest in 1940 was out of date. If Rumanians, they were probably dead; if British and more or less alive, they had returned to their peacetime occupations.

It was still his job to gather information from Eastern Europe. Today it would be fashionable to call him a Spy-master. But in these early nineteen fifties we did not simplify the paramilitary trades so coarsely and outright. However, I suppose that even now I ought not to mention his name. The rest can be told.

I had never known him show impatience in the old days. But there in the restaurant he did, when the waiter delayed his bill. He ordered me – almost – to come back with him to his flat. We would have our coffee in peace, he said, and shoved me into a taxi. As soon as we arrived, he switched on his formidable radio. It was not a commercial job; it had been constructed by someone who knew more about electronics than cabinet-making.

The voice we heard was unmistakeable. It was the light contralto of Firefly, travelling up the Wallachian rivers, across the passes of the Carpathians and the Hungarian plain, and over Vienna to his London flat still as clear as in the Bucharest studio. So that was it. He wanted, I thought, to talk about her. But even on that entrancing subject I had little to contribute. He had been on far more intimate terms with her than I was.

‘You knew her,' he said, as if that were an unforgettable privilege. Well, in a way, it was.

‘Only through you.'

‘Yes, but you understood us both. Wasn't it you who told me that I must not try to take her home in a match box?'

I may have done so. If I did say something about collecting glow-worms in match boxes, it was not very profound. I merely meant that I couldn't see Firefly as a refugee in London, whoever paid her rent.

She came of a family of Transylvanian horse-dealers and was of pure Rumanian blood, bathed from birth in the folk music of her country. She belonged more to the concert hall than cabaret, though to look at her one would not think so. She dressed theatrically. It was not only her voice which she wanted admired. The wonder to me was that she ever had the resolute patience to become so great an artist.

Fragility had been my first impression of her. It was quite wrong. Though she was small-boned and delicate as any princess in a fairy tale, she was far too robust a character to be in need of care and protection. Her face, too, was small, eaten up by eyes. They were deep grey, intelligent eyes – spiritual, if you like, at any rate in the sense that I always felt her somewhat flashy outward appearance to be completely irrelevant.

Her contralto was clear as some full-throated bird outside the window, making a last passionate announcement of home and territory before going to roost. There were no primitive, gipsyish sobs and trills. The voice licked the atmosphere with little spurts of flame. I had a curious sense of watching it back across lost Europe into that unknown studio – watching it rather than hearing it.

He demanded that I should listen more carefully.

‘Would you say she was happy?' he asked.

That seemed a damned silly question. I could no more tell from her voice whether she was or not than one can tell whether some whining pop singer is as miserable as he sounds. I replied that she was always happy.

‘No! She was always gay. That's not the same thing. She was never content with herself. It stands to reason. She
couldn't have developed into what she is if she had not always been looking for something more to give.

I felt that he had become too emphatic and professional. His face, once bronzed by the Black Sea sun, now looked tired and white with two cavernous blue lines from nostrils to chin. Like some self-confident consultant he was too inclined to meet and hold my eyes. Challenge or analysis? Surely to God he couldn't be thinking of extracting Firefly to the West at this late date?