Winter's End

Helen was so tired that she had been afraid she wouldn’t wake up until midday, but at dawn the sound of a door being carefully closed and a key turning in the lock of the room next to hers woke her. At first she had difficulty remembering where she was. Then it all came back to her: Mitten, the capital city, Mr. Jahn, the room that was now her own, and Milena sleeping next door. Milena! Those must be her footsteps moving away down the corridor! Afraid of missing her, Helen jumped out of bed, flung on a shirt, and left her room. Right at the far end of the corridor a tall girl with cropped blond hair, wearing a cook’s white apron tied at the back, was just starting down the stairs.

“Just a minute!” called Helen.

The girl turned. They looked at each other for a few seconds, astonished, and then ran toward each other, each of them needing to touch and hug her friend. The joy of their reunion made them laugh and cry at the same time. It was a while before they were able to talk.

“Milena! What on earth have you done to your hair?”

“Bart cut it for me.”

“Bart slaughtered it! He’s out of his mind!”

“No, not at all. I’ll explain everything. But what are you doing here? I can’t believe it.”

“I ran away from school with Milos. We followed you to the mountains.”

“The mountains? How far did you go?”

“To the mountain refuge.”

“The refuge — but why?”

Their words were tumbling over each other. There was just too much to say all at once.

“Milos wanted to rescue you both from the dog-men. It’s amazing how that haircut changes you! Only your eyes are the same!”

“Milos? Is he here too?”

“No. No, he has an injured leg. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I went to get help and meanwhile they caught him. The Phalangists . . . the police . . .”

Milena put a finger to her lips. “Hush, keep your voice down. You can tell me all about it somewhere else. What about Catharina?”

“Don’t worry — she’s not in the Sky anymore. Milos and I took her to her consoler, Emily — remember her? What about Bart? Where is he?”

“He’s here too, sleeping on the second floor. The men have the rooms down there.”

She had said men, not boys, as they would have said at school.

A door opened and a plump little woman appeared in the corridor, wearing a white apron like Milena’s.

“Hi, Kathleen!” she said in passing.

“Hi!” Milena replied. “This is my friend Helen. She’s just arrived.”

“Welcome to youth and beauty!” said the woman cheerfully, and she disappeared down the stairs.

“What did she call you?” asked the astonished Helen.

“She called me Kathleen, and you must do the same from now on.”

“I’ll never manage it! Where on earth did you fish that up for a first name?”

“It was a singer’s name, that’s why I chose it. I have to hide, you see — my face and hair, my name, everything. Are you working in the kitchens?”

“No, in the restaurant. Cleaning and waiting on tables.”

“Oh, what a pity. I’m in the kitchens. Mr. Jahn put me there specially so that people would see me as little as possible. Do you have an apron yet?”

“No.”

“Then get dressed quickly, and I’ll take you to the linen room to get one. It’s the first thing anyone does here, like getting our overcoats when we arrived at the school. Then we have breakfast down in the canteen.”

Less than ten minutes later, Helen, wearing a maid’s blue apron, was going downstairs with her friend. Milena, who already knew her way around, led her along the second-floor corridor and knocked softly three times at a door on the left.

“Surprise, Bart! Open up!”

The young man put his tousled head around the door and stared. “Helen! We’re all together again!”

“No, not quite,” said Milena, after a moment’s hesitation. “Milos ran away with her, but he was caught.”

Bart’s cheerfulness vanished at once. His face fell. “Caught . . . by the dogs?”

“No, by the Phalangist police.”

Bartolomeo closed his eyes for a second, and lowered his voice. “We mustn’t talk about it here. Let’s all three of us meet outside the cemetery tonight when the restaurant closes. Do you know where it is, Helen?”

“The cemetery? Yes, in fact it’s the only place I do know here.”

“See you this evening, then,” said Bart, ending the conversation as he closed the door of his room again.

Jahn’s Restaurant was really a vast canteen for the local factory workers. It was much larger than Helen had thought the evening before. The double doors didn’t open into the kitchens after all but into a second room full of tables, even larger than the first. Three boys were already busy putting back the chairs that had been perched upside down on wooden tables in this second room too.

“Do you know how many people can eat here at the same time?” Milena asked. “More than six hundred! You’ll see when mealtimes come — it’s like a huge party.”

“A lot of people must work in the restaurant, then?” guessed Helen.

“Three times too many!” said Milena, smiling. “Mr. Jahn hires everyone who’s ‘mashed potatoes for Napoleon,’ and there are a lot of us, I can tell you! But now we won’t talk anymore until this evening. Keeping quiet is the rule here.”

They went down to the basement in a service elevator that shook its passengers about like some kind of angry monster. Its heavy iron mechanism was visible through the glazed doors.

“The kitchens,” Milena said, when the lift reached the bottom of the shaft. They passed enormous cast-iron stoves and rows of copper saucepans hanging from the walls. “This is where I work, cleaning and preparing vegetables. Bart’s in the delivery area. He loads, unloads, and carries things, and he’s responsible for quite a lot of breakages. He’s really clumsy! And this is the staff canteen. We eat before the customers arrive every day. Come on in.”

She took Helen into an echoing room with a pleasant aroma of coffee and toast in the air. Over twenty people were eating breakfast already. Most of them were young, but some were older. There was much laughter and joking; baskets of bread were passed around, along with bowls of jam and steaming coffeepots.

“Sit here; you’ll be in good company.”

Helen let her friend move away and sat down beside a woman of about forty with dark, curly hair, wearing the maid’s blue apron. She had round cheeks and a slight squint in her left eye; Helen noticed it at once. The woman smiled at her kindly.

“Hello, my name’s Dora. Are you new?”

“Yes, I’m Helen. Do you work in the restaurants too, Miss . . . ?”

“I do, so I can show you the ropes. It’s not difficult. And please call me Dora.”

Later, Helen always remembered those first words they exchanged and the instant liking she felt for this woman: the sense of a secret affinity and the confidence she felt in her for no reason at all. And perhaps, she told herself, it wasn’t just chance that they met in a kitchen underground, a place where things were warm and went deep.

As they talked, she noticed that Dora had some difficulty in using her right hand. The fingers were oddly distorted and reddened at the joints, while her right thumb was permanently half bent.

Mr. Jahn put in a brief appearance. He said good morning to everyone with a sort of shy restraint, then drank some coffee standing up as his eyes wandered over his employees. When his glance met Helen’s, he made her a discreet sign that evidently meant, Everything all right? She replied in the same way: Yes, everything’s fine, and she did in fact feel hopeful.

The day passed at surprising speed. From eleven in the morning onward Helen felt as if she were caught up in a whirlwind. The two restaurant rooms filled up within minutes, and the noise went on until two in the afternoon. Luckily there was one set menu for everyone, so the customers didn’t have to choose what they ate. The waiters and waitresses, all wearing blue aprons, took what the kitchens sent up in dumbwaiters and shouted orders back down the megaphones fitted to the walls: “Ten starters! That’s right, ten!” or “Four main courses, please.”

Helen’s job was simple: she was responsible for a row of six tables. As soon as one of them was free again, she had to hurry to clear the dishes away and clean it. She often had to mop up a spilled jugfull of water, wash the floor, or sweep up the remains of a broken plate. Dora kept an eye on her all the time, helpfully showing her what to do.

As soon as her midday break came, Helen went to her room, fell on her bed, and slept like a log. She woke up just in time to go and eat in the canteen and begin the evening shift. When that was over, she had to help cleaning both restaurant rooms, and it was after eleven at night before she was finally able to hang her blue apron up behind the door of her room and leave Jahn’s Restaurant.

Outside the front door, as agreed, she met Milena, who was waiting for her, muffled up in her black coat. Dora was with her and was amused by Helen’s surprise. Both Dora and Milena wore the same kind of fur cap, which made them look like sisters.

“Don’t worry,” Milena assured Helen at once. “You can talk as freely to Dora as to me.”

They walked together along the roads leading uphill from the square. It was a chilly but clear night. A few dimly lit windows cast patches of light on the somber granite facades, and Milena slipped her hand under Helen’s arm. “Remember the last time we walked like this?”

“Yes, crossing our bridge. I feel as if I’ve lived ten years since then.”

“So do I!”

Dora went ahead. She seemed to be very much on her guard, stopping and looking around intently whenever they came to the corner of a road. Twice she decided that they should retrace their steps and take a different route.

“The idiots — they hide in porches, but they can’t keep from smoking. You can see their cigarettes glowing two miles away.”

“What idiots?” asked Helen.

“The security police on night duty. I’d advise you to avoid them as much as you can.”

“So how do I spot them?”

“Easy. They’re all over the place. They’re muscular and stupid, and they go around in pairs.”

Higher up, Helen recognized the roads she had gone along the night before on Mitten’s motorbike. They stopped for a moment.

“Jahn’s Restaurant is over there,” said Dora, pointing. “Just beyond the factory. See it?”

Three tall brick chimneys reached toward the sky. In the absence of any wind, gray smoke was rising slowly from one of them. Helen could also see the Wooden Bridge to the north, with several fires flickering below it, and farther away, the Castle. Its dark mass dominated the city on the other side of the river.

When they reached the cemetery, the three women thought at first that Bart hadn’t come to the meeting place. They waited a little while on the grassy promontory, watching the roads below for his arrival. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and they could hardly make out its pale disk. Helen blew on her numb fingers to warm them.

“Would it really be so dangerous to talk down there where it’s nice and warm?”

“Yes,” said Dora. “The Phalange has spies everywhere. There are ears listening where you think you’re safest: in the corridors, in the canteen, even in your room. Mr. Jahn is closely watched. If anyone was caught criticizing the regime in his restaurant, they could arrest him and close the place down within the hour. It’s the same in the city, as you’ll find out. At least up here we’re sure of not being overheard, we can see people coming a long way off, and the people behind that wall couldn’t care less what we talk about!”

As if to contradict her, the rusty gate of the cemetery opened with a long, low, moaning sound, and the tall shape of Bartolomeo emerged from the night.

“Were you waiting in the cemetery?” Milena was surprised.

“Yes,” he said, coming toward them. “Know anywhere safer and quieter?”

“Don’t you find it scary being around all the dead people?” asked Helen, impressed.

“No, the dead don’t make trouble. It’s the living I don’t trust. Now, tell me about Milos.”

Helen cleared her throat and began at the beginning: their climb to the school roof, the extraordinary spectacle of the staff at their annual assembly, Van Vlyck, how they went to free Catharina, who turned out to be free already. Then she did her best not to leave out any of what followed: their flight, the night in the bus, their freezing wait in the snow, Milos’s terrible fight. As her story went on, Bart shook his head, sighing. He had known that his friend was fearless and generous; he’d never thought he would take on two men and six dogs with his bare hands to protect him.

“He really did that?” he murmured incredulously.

“Yes, he did,” Helen confirmed. “But he’s paid such a price for it!”

She found it hard to keep back her tears as she described the way the men had thrown Milos’s racked body on the sleigh like the carcass of an animal.

“Dr. Josef thinks he’s alive,” she finished, then blew her nose. “He said that if he wasn’t, they wouldn’t have taken him away so quickly.”

“I’m sure he’s right,” Dora comforted her. “Try not to worry.”

And she opened her arms. Helen fell into them, and all four stood there in silence for several seconds. In the quiet night it was like a mute prayer for their friend, a prayer that he was still alive and well. Bart and Milena too were in each other’s arms, standing very close.

“What about Basil?” Bart asked at last, in a voice full of concern. “Did they keep him in the cell? Did Milos say anything about that?”

“No,” Helen lied, promising herself to tell him the truth some other time. She just didn’t feel brave enough to do it at the moment. “And what about you two?” she asked. “Tell me what happened to you.”

They told her about their crazy expedition into the mountains, their journey down the river in the boat, their meetings with so many people who were sure that they recognized Milena as her own mother.

“Are you really that much like her?” Helen smiled. “Now I understand about your hair. But why did you turn back?”

“To fight,” said Bart. “You know I’ve just been walking among the graves here. It may be silly, but I like it. Even at night. At school I’d sometimes go to the cemetery instead of seeing my consoler or walking around the town. Milos thought I was crazy. He said it was no way to use our few hours of freedom. But I like such places; I don’t find them sad, not at all. They make you think of your own life and what you’re going to do with it. And that’s what Milena and I decided: we made up our minds to do something with our lives. We want to fight back against the Phalange.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Helen ironically. She had spoken without malice, more with the melancholy feeling that they were powerless.

“Yes, that’s all,” said Bart, unperturbed. “And we may have more weapons than you think.”

“Meaning?”

Bartolomeo turned to Milena. “Will you explain?”

Milena took a deep breath. “It’s a love story, Helen. Do you want to hear it? Even at midnight outside a cemetery, in the freezing cold?”

“Go on.”

“Right. It’s the story of a girl of twenty who has a lover. One day she notices that her stomach is swelling a little too much. And then her lover leaves her; he goes off into the wide blue yonder and never comes back. The girl cries her eyes out, and a few months later she has a baby, a little girl, and calls her . . . Let’s say she calls her Milena. Are you with me so far?”

“I think so. Go on.”

“OK. The young mother is quite pretty, and she sings rather well.”

“No,” Dora interrupted gently. “She isn’t ‘quite pretty’; she’s staggeringly beautiful. And she doesn’t just sing ‘rather well’; she’s a contralto and her voice is miraculous. Put it that way and it makes a difference, doesn’t it? She joined a choral society when she was fourteen, and all the other girls who sang with her, like me, for instance, suddenly decided to give up singing and go in for drawing or painting or something else instead! She was a soloist at sixteen. At nineteen she was engaged by the Opera House, and all the concert halls in the country were fighting over her. You have to put it like that if Helen’s going to understand. Now you can go on!”

“All right,” Milena continued. “So yes, she sings very well. One day a big red-headed guy happens to hear her singing in a Requiem Mass in a church. This guy is a policeman. He’s married, and he has a family of kids, all redheads like him. He’s not a music lover; in fact he’s something of a brute. Don’t ask me why, but this woman’s voice knocks him sideways. He falls madly in love. He makes advances to her. She doesn’t want to know him. He persists. He pesters her. He leaves his wife and children for her. She still doesn’t want to know him. He’s beside himself with pain and rage. He swears that she’ll pay for it. His name is Van Vlyck. Are you still with me?”

“Van Vlyck!” Helen was trembling. “The man I saw at the staff assembly?”

“That’s him. With less of a paunch, not so much beard, and more hair, I expect, but the same man.”

“I saw him break an oak table with his bare fist.” Helen remembered. “It still makes me shudder to think of it.”

“Then you know what kind of man he is. I’d rather leave you to tell the rest of the story, Dora. I don’t think I can manage it.”

Dora spoke softly in her beautiful, deep voice, even when she had terrible things to say. In the cold, her breath made little clouds of white vapor that dispersed at once.

“The real love story, Helen, is about a whole nation falling in love with a voice. The voice of Eva-Maria Bach, Milena’s mother, as you know now. You can’t imagine how everyone loved that voice. It was natural, rich, dramatic, deep. It touched the heart. I was Eva’s friend; I had the privilege of accompanying her on the piano when she sang lieder in recitals. She put so much sensitivity into them, such perfection. I never got used to it. I was always transfixed with admiration for her as I sat at the keyboard. But in ordinary life she was cheerful, lively, incredibly funny. We had some really good laughs together, even onstage! And she sang traditional tunes too, the songs of the ordinary people. She never would give those up. That’s why they adored her, even if they didn’t know much about music. She brought everyone together. She hated violence. And then the coup came and the Phalange seized power. Eva joined the Resistance. Shall I go on, Milena?”

Milena bowed her head and scraped the ground with the toe of her shoe. “Go on. I want to hear it again.”

“Eva joined the Resistance. So did I. When it got too dangerous, we left the capital. They were checking every car leaving by the roads, so we traveled in horse-drawn carts, hidden under covers. We went on giving recitals in secret for months, in provincial towns, then in little village halls, sometimes for an audience of only fifteen. I wore my fingers out on dreadful pianos that were badly out of tune! But none of that mattered. Eva said that whatever happened, we mustn’t give up. The barbarians weren’t going to silence her. And word went out all over the country: ‘Eva-Maria Bach sang here. Eva-Maria Bach sang there, and there, and there . . .’ While she still sang, the Resistance wasn’t giving up. You’d have thought that hope depended on her voice. Such persistence infuriated the Phalange. They had to silence her.

“They finally caught up with us in a little northern town early in winter. Van Vlyck was in command. They broke the door down and burst in, howling like animals. Half of them were drunk on beer. We were just finishing Schubert’s song An die Musik, “To Music.” I shall never forget it. Eva said, ‘This was bound to happen sometime. Thank you for accompanying me . . .’ and I thought she was going to say ‘on the piano,’ but she said, ‘Thank you for accompanying me all this way.’ Those were the last words I ever heard her say. The platform was very high. Two men tipped the piano over into the orchestra pit. It shattered with a terrible sound of jangling notes and broken wood. They took everyone in the hall away. As for me, I was given special treatment: they threw me down on the floor. One of them held my right hand flat at the edge of the platform under his boot, and another man hit it with the butt of his gun, crushing it. He brought his weapon down on my fingers and wrist at least twenty times. I fainted. When I came around, someone was shouting at Eva, ‘You get out of here! And don’t let us ever see your face in this country again!’

“I didn’t understand. I was naïve. They let her escape into the mountains with a few companions. One of them, I learned later, was Bart’s father. They let them all go, but only to have more fun killing them. On Van Vlyck’s orders, they set the dog-men on them. I’m sorry, Bart. I’m sorry, Milena.”

Milena was weeping silently.

“Oh, my God!” groaned Helen, and she took her friend in her arms.

“I spent four months in their prisons,” Dora went on, “and then they let me out. The city had changed a lot in a very short time. People looked suspiciously at each other. No one dared speak to anyone else in the streets or on the trams. I wasn’t a musician anymore. I became a cleaner. All the theaters had been closed. And they’d opened the arena.”

“What arena?”

“The arena where they stage their fights. You’ll find out all about that. You’ll find out quite soon enough. I looked for Milena everywhere. She was only three years old, and I was her godmother, you see. I managed to get inside over ten orphanages, but I couldn’t find her. I ended up thinking they’d . . . thinking they’d got rid of her. I mourned her for fifteen years until last week, when she walked right into the canteen with her short hair and her big blue eyes. It was like seeing Eva resurrected from the dead, coming toward me. I nearly fainted. But it’s better now. I’m beginning to get used to it.” Dora wiped her eyes, sighed, and smiled again. “Well, I think that’s the whole story, isn’t it? We’d better go down again. You’re all frozen, and so am I. And tomorrow morning we’ll have to —”

“Just a moment,” Helen interrupted her. “Bart said we may have weapons to fight them. What weapons?”

“Our weapon,” he said, “is Milena’s voice. Dora says she has her mother’s voice. Younger, of course, but Dora says it will be exactly the same in a few years’ time. And she says it’s a voice that can inspire people and rouse them to action.”

All three of them looked at Milena, who stood there with her head bent, and they were all secretly thinking the same thing: she looked so frail, so fragile, a young girl freezing in her black coat, eyes red with weeping, one tear still hanging from the end of her nose. How could anyone imagine that what she had in her throat could “rouse people to action”? She herself didn’t seem to think so at this moment.

“That’s what you said, Dora, isn’t it?” Bart said, as if reassuring himself. “You said her voice could rouse the people?”

“That’s what I said,” Dora agreed sadly. “But they’d have to hear it first.”

All four of them set off, arm in arm. The moon came out again, shimmering on the slate roofs of church belfries and the steely river.

“Did you go back to playing the piano?” Helen ventured to ask after they had gone about a hundred yards.

“No, I’ve never played again,” sighed Dora.

“Because of your hand?”

“It wasn’t my hand that refused to do it. A hand can be retrained. But my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”