The Song Before It Is Sung (24 page)
Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
CONRAD IS WRITING every day. By assembling this story on paper - he writes in wire-bound notebooks in the Bodleian Library
— he finds a strange calmness. He has heard it said by a writer that he doesn't know what he thinks until he has written it
down, and this seems to be true also for him. He was gratified to find that his name was still on the library's roll as a
member of the university, and his reader's ticket, which bears a picture of him looking like a Moonie, allows him access to
Duke Humfrey's Library, where he sits late into the winter gloom. Sometimes he brings a pile of papers with him; sometimes
he delves into the library's collections. At the end of the day he cycles seven miles back to Emily's cottage. After six months
or so, she more or less gave up her plan to be a good rural mother, but she and the children come from London most weekends
and she is happy for him to look after the place in return for his room.
He likes the children, a boy of six called Jamie, and a little girl of four whose name is Lamoxie, a name that apparently
came in a vision, but which Emily now believes may have to be changed to something more sensible as she is already being teased.
They have taken to kissing him when they arrive on a Saturday morning. He wonders if this kissing is a form of anxiety caused
by the fact that they are not sure who their fathers are, or whether kissing is so commonplace in expensive little private
schools that they kiss anything animate.
When he leaves the library, the gas lights are lit and they are suffused gently by the damp air, so that if you didn't know
better you might think this light contained particles of minute, Cheddar-cheese-coloured matter hovering around the lamps.
Cyclists go by, past the Radcliffe Camera, up the Broad or down Holywell. They call happily to each other above the sound
of the bikes on the road; his youth is going by. Sometimes he cycles home via Holywell, in the hope of hearing music escaping
from the Music Rooms, and then he goes on past New College, with its glimpses of silhouetted figures in the quads beyond,
and then he swings up Longwall Street and Magdalen in honour of Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, whose lives, as he labours
in the library, he is trying to shape. He struggles sometimes with the fear that in the process of writing about them he is
trivialising their story or introducing new falsehoods into it. As he progresses he has to decide what material to ignore
and what to include. But he sees that there is no objective truth possible. To the one overwhelming fact, as far as he knows,
he and Ernst Fritsch are the only living witnesses.
When he finally reaches the house down a long, bumpy farm road, he lights a fire and heats some soup and reads or watches
television. One night he sees with a shock that his friend Osric has been kidnapped in Baghdad. Two nights later he is out,
after a miracle escape through a tiny window. He is selling his story. A happy, contemporary, ending. Conrad wonders if he
was encouraged to escape because the Iraqis couldn't stand another night at close quarters with him.
As for himself, he is happy spending most nights alone out here. But he doesn't lead a hermit's life. He finds that he has
friends who have stayed on or come back to Oxford; and he has been invited to eat at high table in various colleges, a sort
of sacrament. He sees himself being absorbed into the fabric of the old place, so that he is just one more hopeful and slightly
seedy seeker after truth, bicycling in the gloom, walking by the river, breathing the damp air, longing in a subdued way for
the peace of the mind.
It's spring now, and sometimes he takes a break from the library, and walks down the High to Magdalen, where the fritillaries
are out in the meadow beside Addison's Walk. They are curious flowers, speckled and venomous. He sees, more faintly with every
passing day, Axel von Gottberg and Elya Mendel striding along and now he hears only snatches of their conversation and their
ill-matched laughter.
IT IS A HOT summer. The barley and wheat fields of Mecklenburg are strewn with poppies and cornflowers, though it is common
knowledge that there were far more flowers along the roads and in the fields in the old days before fertilisers. Yet Mecklenburg
has remained strangely untouched. It is not true calm, of course, but the narcolepsy of communism that has kept it this way.
The only discordant notes are the brutal public buildings, barracks, schools and oddly non-specific factories - all moribund
- set down according to some five-year or ten-year plan in the middle of a village or in a field. A woman is selling strawberries
outside her small bungalow. Conrad pulls in. He asks for a large punnet. The strawberries are sandy and she offers to wash
them. He accompanies her to the back of the house and he watches her as she rinses the pale sand — the sand of the Mecklenburg
plain - from them. She is wearing a pinafore, with tabs at the side, in a blue-flowered pattern. She seems to be taking a
long time deliberately, perhaps because she has nothing better to do. She tells him that there is no work in the area and
that they are obliged to grow strawberries. She stands rather wistfully by the gate as he draws away, reaching occasionally
across for a strawberry. They are the most richly flavoured strawberries he has ever eaten, also containing in some unexplained
fashion the essence of the countryside.
Erdbeeren,
earthberries, after all.
He drives on through sleeping villages. He loves this unhurried process through an unknown country. He stops for a drink at
a Café by a green river, which runs steadily — he imagines — towards the Baltic, through reeds and stands of birch. He is
served by a woman who appears surprised to see a customer at all, let alone a foreigner. It is chicory coffee,
Ersatzkaffee,
which East Germans have learned to prefer to the real thing.
After an hour he is coming closer to Pleskow and he imagines he knows the landscape. It becomes more wooded and in the woods
lakes gleam dully, pewter-hued. The road dips sharply to von Gottberg's ancestral villages, which cling to the estate. Here
a village woman collected pig's blood for sausage and as a boy von Gottberg discovered that Frau Rickert always kept a piece
of her famous cake for him. And it was from here that Liselotte and Aunt Adelheid and the fatherless children escaped the
Russians, driven away long before dawn in a cart by the loyal Wicht, behind Donner and Blitz, to the safety of their second,
smaller house across the Elbe in the British-occupied zone. It was an appalling journey of three days and nights. In the middle
of the village, with its small baroque church and cottages and windmill, a concrete block of no obvious function stands without
windows or doors.
The road now rises and at the top of the hill he catches sight of Pleskow, an Italianate palace standing on a lake, and he
remembers Rosamund describing to her cousin Elizabeth how proud Axel had been to stop the car here to demonstrate mutely to
her why his lands and forests and house were a part of his soul and spirit. Conrad, too, stops the car and stands by the road
for a few minutes. The water of the lake below is briefly ruffled as a gust breathes on it. Out of the car it is very hot.
He longs to dive into the cool, vegetable depths of the lake.
Now he turns through a housing estate, and sees the driveway down to the house, and the holm oaks that von Gottberg's greatgrandfather
planted and the huge medieval barns that line the driveway. One half of the house is covered in scaffolding. There are a few
cars parked under the trees and a band is unpacking its instruments from a van. The members of the band wear a green uniform
with peaked caps. At the house itself he is greeted by Angela and Caroline, who take him to speak to Liselotte in the vast
entrance hall, which looks out on to the lake. She is ninety-four years old now and her daughters have warned him that her
blindness has become almost total since he first met her.
She shakes his hand and says in near-perfect English, 'I am so glad you could come for this great day.'
Off the main hall, with the Swedish stove, is the drawing room, which is decorated with a classical frieze, not yet fully
restored, and there they offer him tea or coffee or a beer. The house, Pleskow, is in the hands of a trust after years of
wrangling. Today the tea-house, where Axel von Gottberg and Claus von Stauffenberg met, is to be opened by the Mayor as a
monument to the resistance. It is also the house where Axel and Elizabeth spent almost the whole night talking. The resistance
has entered the historical record, even here. It is hoped that tourists will, in time, come to visit. Conrad walks down to
the lake; the band is now setting up alongside the tea-house which is, he sees now, a small pavilion. The grass and the reeds
have been roughly scythed down to the lake, giving a fair impression of the rolling lawn that was once there. He walks up
to the family cemetery, on a hillock beneath some enormous Douglas firs. Like the Jewish cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg, it lies
in ruins, as if standing stones are a reproach. He remembers a verse:
The marks of pain trace countless lines through history.
He can't remember where he read it. A tomb, half underground, has been prised open by the action of roots over the years,
and this reminds him of how long ago everything happened here, everything that has so gripped and convulsed him.
From the tea-house he hears the band now starting to play what his parents would have called oompah-music A few people are
milling around. A microphone is being set up on the balcony of the tea-house. The lake below the house is, as Adelheid wrote,
violet and shimmering like the wings of a dragonfly.
The ceremony to open the tea-house is under way. The Mayor talks of the heroism of the resisters. He praises particularly
the self-sacrifice of Axel, Count von Gottberg, a noble son of Mecklenburg and a true patriot. When he has finished, the microphone
is passed to Liselotte, who says how delighted she is that her husband should be honoured in this way; then she declares the
tea-house open. A plaque is unveiled, which reads:
In this small house, Axel, Count von Gottberg of Pleskow met with others in an attempt to save Germany from the Nazi tyranny.
In August 1944 he was executed with friends in Berlin-Plotzensee. It is our sacred duty to heed their example.
There is ragged applause. Now Conrad is summoned so speak. In carefully prepared German he reads:
When I was a student at Oxford University, at the same college as Axel von Gottberg, although nearly sixty years later, my
teacher was Professor E.A. Mendel, who had been a close friend of Axel von Gottberg before the war.
Professor M
endel gave me all the papers in his possession relating to that period, and particularly to Count Axel von Gottberg. I have
been working on a book, soon to be published in Germany, called
A Tragic Friendship.
The tragedy lay in the fact that the war caused a great rift between them. Professor Mendel believed that the events of the
past century, which hang over us still and cast a deeper shadow in Germany than anywhere else, arose from the mistaken idea
common to both fascism and communism that it is possible to build a terrestrial paradise, where all conflicts will be resolved
and all values will be harmonised. I think we know now, after the heavy price paid in my country and yours, that this will
never happen, but that we must instead accept things as they are and refuse to be deceived.
He has gone too far. He has lost them, or annoyed them. He sees the Mayor's wife fanning herself with the programme. They
want to hear — and why not? — something uplifting.
Professor Mendel was very fond of a quote from Alexander Herzen, who asked,
Where is the song before it is sung?
To which Mendel replied,
Where indeed? Nowhere is the answer. One creates a song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those
who live it step by step.'
I
believe it is true to say that Axel von Gottberg lived his life according to his principles and beliefs, step by step. As
Major-General Henning von Tresckow, one of the brave resisters, said,
Not one of us can complain about his death. The real worth of a human being begins only when he is ready to lay down his own
life for his convictions.
I
am honoured to have been invited to say a few words on this great day, in the presence of Axel von Gottberg's wife, two daughters
and family. Thank you.
The audience claps warmly.
Now they file into the tea-house for cakes and beer and tea. Conrad stands next to Liselotte with the two sisters and a great-granddaughter,
to greet the guests as if he is part of the family. He is introduced to local dignitaries and outlying members of the family.
Later, when they have all gone, he asks Liselotte if she minds if he goes for a swim in the lake.
'No, of course not,' she says. 'I wish I could see you swimming. Axel and I loved to swim.'
'I know.'
He undresses in the bathing hut, which appears to have been used for many years to store odd bits of machinery and implements,
so that in the gloom he sees a toothless rake of an old-fashioned design, a few shovels with broken handles and some pieces
of what may have been an outboard motor, including a propellor, oil filters and fly-wheels. Over the lake there is now a dove-grey
haze, which hangs more thickly in the small bays. The sky above is gauzy and pale, the blue of the
egg
of a wild bird, not true but lightly stippled.
The remains of a jetty stretch out from the bathing hut, but the few whole planks are broken or rotted. He lowers himself
into the water. It is warm. He wades out a few yards, clear of the reeds and the weed, and then ducks his head under; the
water has a distinct taste, of grass and freshwater fish and gentle decomposition. He is swimming in Axel von Gottberg's lake.
He sets off strongly in the direction of the church in the village, whose baroque tower is poking above the haze on the far
side of the lake.
This was von Gottberg's terrestrial paradise, his own lake, his own landscape, his own history. Conrad had not mentioned,
of course, that it was Mendel's chief complaint against his old friend that he believed all values would inevitably be harmonised
in some mystical synthesis. And as he swims steadily onwards, he thinks that — intended or not - this is Mendel's legacy to
him, that he should understand — actually there is no other choice — that a life is made, day by day, as best you can.
After that awful day when he looked at the film, it took him six months to recover. He suffered from terrible headaches, so
bad that he thought he was about to have a stroke as his father had. At times he thought he was going mad. He could not complete
simple tasks. He would start on something, perhaps turning on the kettle, and forget what he was doing. Compulsively he would
shift Mendel's papers, all seventeen boxes of them, emptying each one on the floor, but before he could begin to sort them
he would lose heart, change his clothes or shower or toast a piece of bread. His meals bore no relation to the time of day
and he slept or woke without pattern, so that sometimes if he found the television on he would watch a programme about alligators
in the Everglades or fusion cookery for five minutes and then he would go to his computer to try to write. But every time
he wrote a word, he thought of von Gottberg's death and he was paralysed. It was as though there was a direct connection between
his writing, the act of writing, and the event he had witnessed, although he couldn't see why that should be.
One day as he tried fitfully to read a book by W.G. Sebald, he came across a striking passage:
It
does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did
not exist at all, only various spaces between which the living can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think
about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, and that only occasionally,
in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
He was not sure of Sebald's exact meaning, but he realised that he had been expecting something from the indifferent dead
that they were unwilling to offer him. He was expecting some answers. Gradually, over months, order was restored to his thoughts
and he began to write his account of the friendship of Axel von Gottberg and Elya Mendel, organising the hundreds of letters,
the recorded conversations and the memories of friends, as well as archive material. He did not mention the cursed film that
he dropped into the river. Gradually his account took shape and at the same time he saw himself slipping back into his own
life, as if he had been away, inhabiting the life of another.
He swims on. Here in von Gottberg's lake he feels closer to him now than he has ever been. It seems a minor thing, a trivial
thing, but this warm, vegetable-scented water affects him deeply, in just the way that scents linger in a room after someone
has left it or as a forgotten childhood can be summoned by the smell of food or plants. He is finally freed of the horror
of von Gottberg's last moments, which once he foolishly and recklessly imagined would increase his understanding.
From across the still lake-water he hears the band playing on. The sound reaches him in snatches each time he surfaces.
No, the dead do not speak in clear sentences, nor do they give advice.
