Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
The Song Before It Is Sung (12 page)
Conrad wonders why Elizabeth wanted Axel's last letter read at her funeral. The most likely explanation is that she wanted
her life to have some nobility and substance by linking it to von Gottberg's, in the way that old actresses like Katharine
Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor promoted the lover of fifty years before, the remarkable person in their lives, even if they
have had many less satisfactory lovers, drink- and drug-crazed, since. After a certain age, a life exists not for what it
really was, but for its mythological qualities.
Conrad finds train journeys at night melancholic. The distant, dead towns and the still stations flash by. All human activity
is reluctant. When he arrives at Paddington it is almost midnight and he feels cold and alone. He wonders where Francine is
sleeping tonight. Perhaps she is in one of those dog kennels at the hospital, waiting for someone's big day to go wrong, a
baby half-drowned in a water-birth, the idiot husband in his swimming costume shaking with fear, or a baby becoming stuck
sideways on the way out. She is trained to make instant decisions. Or she could be alone in their small hidey-hole while John
ministers —
just for a few nights, I promise —
comfort to his panicky daughter, who is not panicking about her exams but about the prospect of a fatherless future. These
scientific people believe the world can be ordered by logic, but there is no logic in human relations, something that Elizabeth
Partridge's funeral has demonstrated.
Back in his flat he discovers Osric asleep in his bed with a girl. The girl awakes and shrugs apologetically. There is a strong
smell of marijuana. He rinses his mouth at the sink and wraps himself, fully dressed, in the blanket, which Osric used two
nights before, and lies on the sofa. The girl comes in to speak to him. She is wearing a T-shirt that comes just to the top
of her thighs, so that she must hold it down. She sits matily on the sofa next to him. Five minutes before he had never seen
her, now he is a few inches from her round small mouth and he is breathing her warm, marijuana-and-wine-scented, breath.
'I'm very sorry. Ricky is wrecked. I did say we shouldn't be here, but he said you were coming back tomorrow. Do you want
to fuck me?'
'I can't have sex with Osric, Ricky, just through there. Sorry. Even though you are very beautiful.'
She is not exactly beautiful, but pretty, and with a gone-off-the-rails look, tousled and lewd.
'You're very good-looking. Even in that blanket.'
She gets up and leaves the room. She is no longer holding the T-shirt down. Her naked buttocks remind him for the second time
today of a certain type of Italian film where a woman is always the provocateuse.
Now he can't sleep. He shouldn't have slept in the train. There is a duty imposed on you by someone's death, an instruction
to renew yourself in any way you can. He gets up and knocks gently on his own bedroom door. He can always say he has to go
for a pee if Osric is awake.
She appears at the door, smiling, walking gingerly. Conspiratorially.
'I thought you would change your mind.'
'You were right,' he whispers. 'What's your name?'
'Emily.'
'I'm Conrad.'
'Yes, I know. Ricky told me a lot about you.'
'What, for example?'
'Oh lots of interesting things. But let's not worry about him, he's like totally mashed.'
A MEMOIR OF PLESKOW
FOR MY NIECES AND GRAND CHILDREN,
FROM AUNT ADI
WHEN THE PIGS were slaughtered, the snow was red with their blood. It was a redness of extraordinary intensity in that landscape
of dark green and pale violet. As a child I found the slaughter frightening, yet I couldn't resist being present. Other animals
died quietly, unaware, but pigs sensed danger. They would struggle and squeal when they were sent for, but the men from the
village knew how to hold them in secret embraces that immobilised their slippery bodies. The only place to hold them, said
the pig man, was by the ears or by the hocks. I wondered if other animals had handholds. Children think about strange things.
The women came from the village to gather the blood. In those days, just before the Great War, they wore long aprons to the
ground covering their tight bodices, which were always grey or black. They carried buckets and enamel basins to catch the
blood that was used to make the
Blutwurst.
Later, when the Jews were so horribly treated, I wondered if there wasn't something in the race memory concerning blood: the
real Mecklenburger loved
Blutwurst,
made from this blood falling on the snow in the forest. We children played in a forest that stretched from the waters of the
Baltic to the swamps of Poland. In their seasons, the women made sausage,
Mettwurst,
the sausage we children loved most. Blood, snow, the squeal of frightened pigs — these are memories I will never forget. And
in summer, earth, mushrooms and the blood of wild boars, not so much things as states of mind, of a feeling that our poets
and philosophers and generals glorified, the sense that the German soul was forged out of elemental materials. We children
were not, as children are now, shielded from death. Far from it: we understood that death could be glorious.
Frau Rickert, the forester's wife, was known as the best sausage-maker in the village. In her cottage, Qual, there was an
open fire. A huge pot was suspended over the fire from a tripod and here she boiled the blood down and added thyme, salt,
pepper and marjoram so that in my childish imagination the blood that had fallen on the snow and splashed on to the women's
aprons was scented and benign. When the priest in church spoke of the blood of Christ and its transformative powers, I would
think of how the blood of a pig in Frau Rickert's skilled hands became sausage. She was a wonderful woman, warm and friendly.
Whenever we appeared in the village she would call to us and give us a piece of her cake, which she made with cherries in
summer and walnuts in winter. We were treated by the villagers with the utmost friendliness, although the children were uneasy
with us. I don't think we realised then that life in the Schloss, not in reality a castle but a large Palladian-style house,
built by my grandfather, was utterly feudal. We had a coachman, the foresters, an English governess, at least ten women who
worked unpaid one week a month in the house doing the cleaning, washing and ironing in the wash-kitchen, as we called it,
and a cook with three assistants. There were also four gardeners, grooms and the cow and pig men; some of the foresters were
gamekeepers and carried guns. One of these was Werner H, who shot the American airmen in the winter of 1945, the last time
I saw blood on the snow. It had stained the snow between their parachutes and seemed to be spreading outwards.
In the early days, as the Great War ground on somewhere far away, I used to take Axel, who was six years younger, out to the
forest to see the foresters at work. They were always cutting trees or clearing the rides and we would join them for their
lunch in forests so deep that to us children they were enchanted. As a child you marvel at simple things, at the realisation
that there is a huge amount to discover and to learn and I think one of the purposes of fairy stories, which we loved, was
to teach children about the natural and the supernatural worlds. At Pleskow these worlds did not seem separate to me. The
forest was the portal to another world. I tried to make Axel act in my little plays, which were all based on fairy stories,
to amuse our parents.
Axel was the dearest small boy. He was extraordinarily bold for someone so young, always wanting to climb on the huge Hanoverian
horses that pulled the logs out of the forest. He loved the feel of horses, and would reach up to kiss their huge gentle muzzles.
At haymaking he would climb to the highest point on the cart, a tiny excited figure, as the hay was brought in. Out in the
fields enormous cases of water sweetened with raspberry juice were brought to the workers and as we rode out we children would
sing a song about the harvest that I have never forgotten:
Wheat, barley, rye and corn, don't forget our Saviour is born.
Some of the peasants were very superstitious and believed in the spirits of the forest and the streams and the lakes. They
had little rituals, like looking for mistletoe growing in a thorn tree, which could point the way to hidden treasure. For
a while Axel was obsessed with the idea that he would find treasure, and I would follow him, half believing as he ran wildly
about with a switch of mistletoe directing him. It was cut for him by Rickert, who was Axel's hero. Sometimes the women would
dance, forming arches with joined hands, through which they would all pass in turn. I now think it was a form of magical protection.
When someone died in the village, the bees were the first to be told, a pagan custom that survived. The Mecklenburgers were
only freed from serfdom after the Napoleonic wars; they were born to obey. After all, what is a hundred years in the making
of a people? We were little princesses and princelings, but as the war progressed, even there at Pleskow I began to notice
that not everything was well.
Most Prussian nobles were deeply contemptuous of the ordinary people. They saw them as a lesser species, canon fodder for
the Junker ideal. But our mother was famous for her left-wing views. She knew every villager and every servant personally
and was loved by them, not because she was the Grafin, but because she was genuinely devoted to their welfare. Your grandfather,
Johann-Albrecht, shocked me by declaring one day in 1916 that the war was lost. Up until then we believed it was going well.
He said that there was still time for an honourable peace. His brother, my Uncle Berthold, came back from the front severely
wounded and never until his dying day offered one word about his experiences. I see now, seventy years later, the themes that
were to dominate our lives: the Prussian tradition of service, the idea of the honour of Germany and the importance of men
in uniform, who represented a higher duty that women never questioned. Even in 1916 when my father came back to the house
exhausted and pale and declared the war lost, it was taken for granted that it fell to our class to secure a just settlement.
We were one of the first families in Mecklenburg to have modern central heating and I remember my father lying in a deep bath
for nearly two hours that day. His uniform — the uniform of the legendary 19 Potsdam Regiment — was taken away to be cleaned
while he soaked away the shame of war. We children waited downstairs in the big hall which looked up the driveway of oaks
from one side and down to the lake on the other.
When he emerged, staggering slightly like a man who has been on horseback, he was wearing a suit made before the war in London
from the finest Harris tweed. He hugged us all and handed out gifts from Israel's and Wertheim's, shops which had a magical
appeal. Axel had never been to them and I had only been once, but I used to make up stories about the Christmas displays with
- perhaps I imagined this - live reindeer harnessed to a sleigh and an enormous Christmas tree decorated with lighted candles,
nuts and raisins. We children were given gingerbread, our favourite cinnamon biscuits and also picture books with popup castles
and medieval towns. There were toys for the younger children. It must have been October, because the potatoes were being lifted,
when I heard my father tell my mother he doubted if he would still be alive by Christmas. But in fact the Kaiser called him
back to an important job in Berlin on the general staff. After children's supper we went up to the music room and played and
sang for my father, before our governess, an Englishwoman called Barty - Miss Bartwill from Harrogate — took us up to bed.
Axel wanted to play with his new toys, but Barty turned down the lamps and made us say our prayers. Later Axel crept into
my bed. Did Papi kill lots of English? he whispered, thinking no doubt of Barty, whom he loathed.
Soon after my father went back to Berlin a week later, I noticed that there was a change of mood at Pleskow. Now rations were
short; almost nothing came up from Berlin or Schwerin any longer and we were increasingly living off the land. Only Rickert
and Werner H were left of the foresters, although two young boys were drafted in to help them. I had the feeling that if it
were left untended much longer the forest would close around us.
Money had never had any value here as there was nothing to buy, but now we were returning to subsistence farming and gathering.
My job was to gather mushrooms, which grew in the deepest parts of the woods around the house. With our terrier, Bolly, I
crawled through the thickets, spurred on by a sense of duty. It had been a long, hot summer. The fields were full of cornflowers
and poppies, streaming out through the wheat in waves, like spilled paint. The autumn that followed was warm and damp, perfect
conditions for mushrooms. In front of the house an old catalpa was a rich russet colour and the leaves of the trees my grandfather
planted round the house, which he had collected from all over the world, were turning too. My favourite mushroom was the
Steinpilz,
which the French call the
cepe.
You couldn't mistake it for anything else. In certain places that the foresters showed me, you could find clusters of
Pfifferling,
the chanterelle, which was a light sulphur-yellow in colour. The curious
Spitzmorchel,
with its cap like a honeycomb, was another favourite.
Bolly couldn't find mushrooms, although I tried to teach him, but he loved our trips into the deepest, dampest thickets. Once
he put up a huge wild boar, which apparently couldn't believe that this tiny dog was not intimidated by his uneven, yellowing
tusks and turned, crashing into the undergrowth. The woods were full of boar and Rickert would set snares for them and shoot
them when he could, to make up the supplies. Foxes were killed and fed to the dogs, but had to be skinned and cured before
the dogs would touch them.
After all these years I see myself, just twelve years old, crawling through the undergrowth day after day, and coming back
to the house with baskets full of mushrooms, my hair full of pine needles and holly and my apron scented and stained. In reality
I probably went out to the woods ten or twelve times, but what I remember so well is the fervour I was in, with Bolly barking
excitedly and the rising smell of damp leaf-mould and the mushroomy scent as I used a small knife to lift the mushrooms, their
skins as strange and minutely pocked as human flesh, sometimes dry and sometimes moist. Mushrooms are of mysterious origin.
I was slightly scared of them because of their brooding, furtive nature. Although I could recognise the amanites and the yellow
stainers, all my mushrooms had to be inspected by cook who discarded any that were broken or dog-eared or excessively slimy.
Every so often she would find a poisonous mushroom and show me the little sac around the base and ask me to smell it. Her
rule was that if a mushroom smelled strongly of mushrooms, it was fine. But by the time I arrived, bedraggled at the wash-kitchen,
I was so infused and stained and perfumed by fungus and resin and leaf mould that I could no longer distinguish the smells
one from another.
Even now this strange mycological odour transports me back to my childhood in Mecklenburg, when the world still seemed innocent
although on the Somme hundreds of thousands of soldiers were dying.
As a child you can't really comprehend the meaning of far-off events; you live more like an animal, in the present world of
the senses and within the dimly perceived horizons set by the adults. We children created our own world. By and large we were
still allowed to run free when, after the summer of 1916, we were not sent to school, but taught by Barty. My father decreed
that we were not allowed to speak English, so Barty had to speak German. Her German was heavily accented and comical to us
and sometimes we mocked her. I wondered how we were contributing to the war effort by giving up English, but I still read
my English books when I was alone. My favourite was
Wind in the Willows,
and it seemed to me impossible to imagine that we were at war with Ratty and the industrious Mole:
Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little house.
Just that line would set me off into a magical world.
Axel - a little Junker in the making - loved war games and he and Bolly would set out to ambush me as I crawled in the undergrowth.
I usually knew when they were coming because Bolly would begin to yap furiously, although I always pretended I was taken by
surprise. By the end of that year we were eating swedes at practically every meal. To this day I can't bear the sight or smell
of them. The winter, the peasants said, was going to be a hard one and before the end of November ice had formed on the lake,
at first tentatively producing a sparkling necklace around the shore and then, one morning, the whole lake was glazed over,
the ice so clear that we could see the water-plants beneath. My mother went on a daily round to see the villagers, the bereaved
mothers, the sick, the destitute. Nobody starved even when the chickens stopped laying because of the extreme cold, but we
had to cut our supplies of sausage and ham so that my mother could distribute food to the worst affected. Strangely, in this
deprivation I remember at Christmas that year the foresters cut Christmas trees for each of us, which corresponded in size
to our age, and beneath the three trees, beside the Swedish stove, my mother had placed our presents, beautifully wrapped.