There was no quiet interlude. Only a day after the interned had departed for Douglas, Liverpool, and the waiting boats for Canada or Australia, a new lot arrived. Tired, baffled, scared.
As ever, Max Drax staged a welcome, effusive and insistent in the same airy breath of Old World charm.
They dragged one of the dining tables into the hall—a desk for Kornfeld to set his papers on. Not that Kornfeld gave a damn, but Drax was adamant that in the absence of anything resembling proper records on the part of the British, they should keep their own.
“Once, we were a tribe,” he had said, speaking as a Jew.
“Once, we were a nation,” he had said speaking as a German.
“Now we are a family.”
And it had fallen to Kornfeld, neither Jew nor German but willing to accept the broad strokes of Drax’s brush, to keep the documents of the family album up to date. It had also fallen to him to keep them dry.
Oskar Siebert, an exiled Viennese policeman who had been there longer than any of them—hard, after all, to convince anyone that you might be the one Viennese cop not actually in the Nazi party—had his share of the table taken up with a row of teacups and the largest teapot in the history of catering, and was relishing a trick he had learnt from the endless battalions of English women, who poured tea at every opportunity, of lining up the cups and pouring a continuous stream of tea. Alas, it was not a lesson he had learnt well.
Suddenly, he heard a ghost speak.
The dying words of Goethe.
“Mehr licht!”
But it was only old Drax asking someone to throw the light switch as the first of the newcomers came in from the breaking storm.
A huge man, six foot two or more, in a crumpled Savile Row suit that showed its class through every crease, seemed to be leading a motley of twenty or so.
Drax addressed him, as he did every arrival until experience taught otherwise, in German.
The big man replied in flawless English that he was, “fine with English,” and Kornfeld readily deduced that this was yet another long-term resident, doubtless convinced of his own Englishness, caught in the net of a foreign birth and contradictory truths. They were getting more common. And they always led. Some with a belligerent resentment, others with a calm affability that told everyone—Wops, kikes, and Krauts—that it was all “cricket” and everything would be alright “by close of play.” He’d come to think of it as the modus operandi of men like Lieutenant Jenkins. And this man was one of those.
“I’m Rod Troy,” he said. “Of Hampstead.”
Drax intervened, introduced Kornfeld, explained the purpose of keeping records, and asked, gently, insistently, if he would not mind stating for said records his origins.
Troy was not offended in the slightest.
He called out across Drax to Kornfeld, “I’m Rodyon Troy, from Vienna. I think you’ll find quite a few of us are.”
Now Drax was shaking his hand, a joyous two-handed grip, and Kornfeld found himself facing the other kind of English foreigner—the belligerent. Short, surly, saturnine.
“Abel Jakobson. Danzig. Now, where’s me bleedin’ tea?”
Siebert pushed a cup in his direction, glanced at Kornfeld, eyes rolling momentarily, sarcastically, to heaven.
“Right here, Danzig. Hot and wet as they say in your part of London.”
“What part o’ London might that be?”
“Oh . . .” Siebert feigned thinking. “Whitechapel or Stepney. Not far off the Mile End Road I shouldn’t wonder.”
“You’re a smartarse, ain’t yer?”
“I should say I am.”
“An’ a copper, too, if I ain’t mistaken?”
“Touché, Herr Stepney. Touché.”
Kornfeld moved on to the only part of this process that remotely interested him. The assembly of his string quartet. They had lost their second violin when Anton Bruch had departed on the same train as Szabo.
“Do you by any chance play the violin?”
But Abel Jakobson did not.
Nor did the skinny man with the big ears who stood next in line.
“Josef Hummel, Vienna. I play nothing.”
A gentle man with a troubled face, followed by another belligerent. A man as well dressed as Troy, almost rippling with wealth and dignity, but with little of his patience.
There was something vaguely familiar about his face. No . . . not vaguely, something precisely familiar . . . the only thing eluding him was the name.
“Viktor Rosen. Berlin. I play the piano and I play it better with sugar in my tea.”