The Only Poet (26 page)

W
hen Elisaveta woke she rang the bell for her coffee, but Marta did not come. When she had rung again and nothing happened, she thought, ‘This is the third time Marta has not come this month. She is getting old, probably she will not stay with me much longer. But I will not know what to do without her, she has been with me ever since I was a little girl.' Her eyes brimmed. ‘I am still young, but I am being left alone as if I were very old. Everybody is going away from me.'

She reached out for the bottle of rose water and the pad of cotton wool she kept by her bedside to repair the damage done by the tears she shed so much more frequently than was wise in an actress. Then she picked up the script of her new part, which had fallen to the floor when she had at last dropped off to sleep, and began reading the lines to try to drive out of her mind the thought of her husband, David, who might be alive, who might not. With the Nazis there was no knowing, and no hoping.

Dropping it, she pouted the smiling defiances of an imaginary happy woman while she pulled on her dressing-gown, which had to go unmended now that she lived alone, then went along the corridor, drawing back the curtains and wincing as the strong morning light fell on her tired eyes. She went to the kitchen to make the strong coffee her nerves needed before she could face the day.

‘No,' she murmured, ‘I don't want to go on a trip to Paris – not unless you can move Paris out of France, to some new, exciting country. I've been to France so often. And I don't want any diamonds. I don't want any jewels – unless you can get me some stone that's a cross between a diamond and a pearl. That I might like – though I can't be sure.'

The problem was to say the lines, not as if the woman were a complete fool and meant it, or meant to be funny, but as if she were a sensible woman who was talking nonsense because the cause of her dissatisfaction was so wounding to her pride that she could not name it, yet at the same time to keep on the plane of comedy, even light comedy.

Soon, however, she ceased to say the lines. She was seduced into gentle contentment by the clean white and green paint of the kitchen and the glittering stove and pots and pans, all very bright in the spring sunshine, by the bowl of hyacinths on the dresser, by the good coffee and rye bread and butter, and, above all, by the view she saw between the checked curtains of her window.

People thought it strange of her to live so far away from the centre of the town, in the most distant apartment house, right up on the heights beyond the navy dockyard. Indeed, it cost her a fortune in taxis after the theatre. But it was halfway to being in paradise, looking down on the town from these windows. It might be one of the smallest capitals in Europe, beautiful Copenhagen, but it was like the seat of a king in a fairy-tale. Even when she had dreamed of it as a girl in her father's parsonage at the other end of the country, pouring into the dream all she could imagine of beauty, and knowing nothing of ugliness, she had not seen it as lovely as it was.

Beneath her windows the little white houses stood on the sloping hillside among the budding lilacs with the touching, hopeful quality of a new suburb; there young people were beginning life, or old people ending lives that had been successful enough, since they were still together and had the means for comfort. All turned their faces toward the wide, high floor of the dark-blue sea, crisped now to white horses by spring winds, strewn with the hundred islands, dark with pine trees, bright with the wakening maples and birches, stretching to the white bar of the southern horizon.

At the foot of the hillside the red-roofed cottages of the old fishing village and the long, low, butter-coloured buildings of the naval establishment hid all of the docks save the funnels and masts. From that the raised causeway, blue water and gentle surf on the one side, emerald salt marshes on the other, ran to the tortoise-shaped rock on which the city lay. With its gables and towers it made a shape as clear, as easy for the eye to grasp, as an intaglio on a ring. Its colour was red, a soft drowsy red with nothing harsh in it, the colour that some rose petals turn in potpourri. Behind it rose the pointed hills, dark with firewoods, and above them the pyramids
of
the snow peaks, all angular, all shapely and austerely cut yet not ungentle, like the houses and churches in the city below.

‘Spring is here,' thought Elisaveta. ‘Someday soon I will get old Sven to take me to the fisherman's pavilion on the other side of the city, where they give one those lovely prawns, just out of the water and cooked.' Sven was the oldest actor in the State Theatre and he had been very kind to her since David had gone, taking her about to pretty places that were not too noisy and yet were a distraction, and being patient with her when the distraction failed and she wept. She poured out another cup of coffee.

‘No,' she murmured, ‘I don't want to go on a trip to Paris – not unless you can move Paris out of France …'

Then it was that she saw what was happening. She set down her cup and saucer on the table so that the coffee spilt. She ran to the window and grasped the ledge and stared, her mouth falling open as if she were dead, as she might well soon be. The causeway was no longer dust-coloured, empty save for an occasional lorry or tradesman's cart, as it always was at this hour. It was dark with a moving column of men and vehicles more brutal than lorries, monstrous even when seen from a great distance. Crying out, she ran from the kitchen into the living-room and turned on the radio. A voice, smug with successful treachery, was shouting that the city need feel no further fear, for Hitler had taken it under his protection.

Elisaveta threw herself down on the divan, sobbing and cursing and drumming with her fists on the Chinese silk coverlet. A part of her which remained calm thought wistfully ‘I am not a great beauty, I am not a great actress, I am only so-so. It is not fair that I should be asked to take part in great events of history. I could have borne with misfortunes that are like myself, within a moderate compass. I could have nursed David through a long illness. I could have kept my dignity if the Director had taken a dislike to me as he did to Inga and pretended that I was old long before I really was, and made me play character parts.

‘I could have gone on all my life long being patient if David and I had had a child and it had been delicate or stupid or wayward, but all this abduction and killing and tyranny, I cannot stand up to it.

‘When Truda married and left the theatre and it was a question who should play the leading parts, the Director said to me, “Now, Elisaveta, this you can play and that, but not Hebbel's Judith and not Ann Whitefield. You have not the big bones, you have not the broad veins.” I wish somebody would come and say to me: “You cannot be expected to live under Hitler. You have not the big bones, you have not the broad veins.'”

She sobbed for a little while, and then thought: ‘And it is all wrong. It is like having suddenly to start acting without any make-up on in the middle of the lounge at the Excelsior Hotel, or in the silk department in Lacherman's store, to have to face these tremendous events in the familiar places where one has lived all one's everyday life. It would have been better if these horrible things were happening to one in some fantastic country which one had reached only after many days' travel.'

It had been at the holiday resort which everybody in the city went to in summer, which she had visited two or three times a year ever since she had become an actress, that they had taken David away. It was on the road going through the pinewoods to the lake with the overhung cliff called the Trolls' Castle, to which every family in the kingdom had at some time or other made an excursion, that the grey automobile had stopped and the four men had got out and thrown the raincoat over David's head. It was there that David had fallen to the ground and been kicked by the heaviest man in the crutch of the loins. As she heard again his scream, she prayed at one and the same time that he would come back to her again; that he had long been dead.

Then the automobile had driven off in the direction of the frontier, and she was left alone, looking about her in horror at the pinewoods she had known so long, as if they had lied to her.

There had been nobody on the road, for it was lunchtime. She had run into the woods and had found a picnic party and had stood in front of them with her hands stretched out, as if it were of them she was asking mercy, and had said: ‘My husband is a Jewish refugee, he is David Adler, the writer. The Nazis have come in an automobile and kidnapped him. What shall I do?'

The men and women and children had sat quite still on the grass, holding bitten slices of bread and sausage in their hands, staring at her in hostility because, though they were kind, she looked so strange, what she said was so strange. When they understood, they had gathered round her in a circle, helpless as if the sun had turned black. They looked about them at the forest as she had done, as if they were victims of a betrayal, as if they had been asked to a bridal and had found themselves at a funeral, their dress improper and an unexpected grief taking advantage of them. Their country which had always promised small delights, small comforts, small, swiftly terminated sorrows, and had kept its promise, would henceforth, now that the Nazis had come, practise such bizarre deceptions against which the mind could not forearm itself, being committed to health.

‘Whom shall I turn to now?' she wondered. ‘Who will be strong enough, who will be a refuge in whom I can find shelter, and remember the time when everything was healthy, so that I do not go mad? I will be poor, of course. Even if I could bear to act now, they would not let David's widow play in the State Theatre. Probably they will steal my savings. But that does not matter. It is seeing horrible things I will mind. My head will go. Even if it had not been David whom they took away in the automobile, even if it had been a total stranger I had never set my eyes on before, the mere sight of what happened would have shattered me. I am afraid of going mad, all alone. Who will come to save me now?'

Old Sven was too old. He had wept sometimes at the thought of the Nazis coming; now he would be utterly overcome, no shelter for her but a charge on her kindness. Besides, it was not an actor to whom one would wish to turn at this time. If there had been a great actor in the State Theatre, then that would have been all right; he would have been co-creator with the greatest men whose works they had performed. He would have been wise, as they were. But there was nobody at the State Theatre now who was more than an interpreter; one might as well look to a violin apart from its player for comfort in a crisis.

If one knew a great author, though he might be helpless as a child in material matters and in human relationships, and perhaps even naughty as a very naughty child, he would have wisdom. He would know what to put in the other pan to counterbalance the evil that was dragging down the scales. Because writers, if they were good, really knew something. She did not care for books and rarely read one from year's end to year's end, but she knew from the plays in which she had acted that writers were not just trying to amuse people or to make money. They were making clear a pattern in life that was there but had not been noticed by ordinary people. Often in her own life, something would happen to her that would strike her as important and strange, and yet not altogether unfamiliar; as if she had been told long ago that that was how it would be in such circumstances. Then she would remember, ‘But, of course, that is what the play
A Pack of Cards
was about! That was what Feierabend was trying to say …'

Well, there was Egon, and there was Nils. They were certainly the greatest dramatists in the country; and some said they were among the greatest dramatists in Europe or in the world. Their plays were performed in Germany and France and England and the United States. They were wise; she had learnt that over and over again. And she was so sure of their friendship that as soon as she had thought of them she stopped weeping and got up from the divan and set about dressing. As she filled her bath she wondered which of the two she liked better. She knew them equally well; she had acted in all the plays they had written during the last ten years, and each had been her lover. As she lay in the warm water she wondered which she would find the kinder friend. She had always thought of them as being, as nearly as is possible for two human beings, of exactly the same value. They were, indeed, so much alike physically that people often took them for relatives; of middle height and slim though not unsturdy, with strong blue eyes and light-brown hair and high cheekbones, they might have been fishermen from the islands constrained to an elegance unusual even in dwellers in the city. For they had beautiful clothes and shoes and gloves, all from London, much more beautiful than those worn by the shipping millionaires who could have bought them up ten times, successful though they were. They practised their dandyism as a joke, because of its incongruity with the other characteristics they had in common; for they were alike in being grimly industrious, quietly indifferent to the opinion of the community, and able to pass at a moment's notice from life as it is lived by intellectuals to life as it is lived by sailors and farmers and timbermen. They seemed to have nothing in common with the bourgeoisie into which they had been born. They were a mixture of peasant and aristocrat. Of course the resemblance was not necessarily innate. They had probably developed it in the course of their lifelong friendship; for as neighbours' children they had gone to school together, they had left home together to go to Berlin University, they had worked side by side in a shipping office and had been sent to work for the firm's correspondents in London and New York at the same time.

They had both had plays produced when they were twenty-five. Fame had come to them soon and simultaneously and shortly afterwards they had married two very beautiful girls belonging to the best families in the city, girls of very much the same type, Magda and Hildegarde.