confusion of voices she could not hear what addition he made to the music.
Now, with the hour and the strong punch and the imminence of a new year, the party had become less polite. In dark corners of the room couples kissed and pawed each other, and the voices grew louder and more confident, and the songs became harder for Margaret to follow and understand, full of slang and double meanings that made the older women giggle, the men roar with laughter.
Then, just before midnight, old man Langerman stood up on a chair, called for silence, gave a signal to the accordionist, and said in an oratorical, slightly drunken tone, 'As a veteran of the Western Front, wounded three times, 1915-18, I would like everyone to join me in a song.' He waved to the accordionist, who went into the opening chords of 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles'. This was the first time Margaret had ever heard the song sung in Austria, but she had learned it from a German maid when she was five. She still remembered the words and she sang them, feeling drunk and intelligent and international. Frederick held her tighter and kissed her forehead, delighted that she knew the song, and old man Langerman, still on his chair, lifted his glass and offered a toast, 'To America. To the young ladies of America!' Margaret drained her glass and bowed. 'In the name of the young ladies of America,' she said formally, 'permit me to say that I am delighted.'
Frederick kissed her neck, but before she could decide what to do about that, the accordionist struck up once more, ringing, primitive chords, and all the voices sang out, harshly and triumphantly, in the chorus. For a moment Margaret didn't know what the song was. It was one which she had heard only once or twice before, in surreptitious snatches in Vienna, and the male, roaring voices, obscured by drink, made the tangled German words hard to understand.
Frederick was standing stiffly next to her, clutching her, and she could feel his muscles straining with the passion of the song. She concentrated on him and, finally, she recognized the song.
'Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen,' he sang, the cords standing out on his throat, 'S. A. marschiert in ruhig festen Schritt Kameraden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschlossen.'
Margaret listened, her face stiffening. She closed her eyes and felt weak and half-strangled in the grinding music and tried to pull away from Frederick. But his arm was clamped around her and she stood there and listened. When she opened her eyes she looked across at the ski-teacher. He was not singing, but was watching her, his eyes somehow troubled and understanding.
The voices became louder and louder, full of threat and thunder, as they crashed to the end of the Horst Wessel song. The men stood up straight, eyes flashing, proud and dangerous, and the women, joining in, sank like opera nuns before an operatic god. Only Margaret and the dark young man with the yellow-flecked eyes were silent when the last 'Marschieren mit uns in ihrem Geiste mit' rang through the room.
Margaret began to weep, silently, weakly, hating herself for the softness, clamped in Frederick 's embrace, as the bells of the village churches rang out in thin, joyous pealing, echoing against the hills in the winter night air.
Old man Langerman, beet-red by now, the sweat running off his round, bald dome, his eyes glistening as they might have glistened on the Western Front when first he arrived there in 1915, raised his glass. 'To the Fuehrer,' he said in a deep, religious voice.
'To the Fuehrer!' The glasses flashed in the firelight and the mouths were eager and holy as they drank.
'Happy New Year! Happy New Year! God bless you this year!' The high patriotic spell was broken, and the guests laughed and shook hands and clapped each other on the back, and kissed each other, cosy and intimate and unwarlike. Frederick turned Margaret around and tried to kiss her, but she ducked her head. The tears turned into sobs and she broke away. She ran up the steps to her room on the floor above.
'American girls,' she heard Frederick say, laughing. 'They pretend they know how to drink.'
The tears stopped slowly. Margaret felt weak and foolish and tried to ignore them, methodically brushing her teeth and putting her hair up and patting cold water on her red, stained eyes, so that in the morning, when Joseph came, she would be lively and as pretty as possible.
She undressed in the shining, clean, whitewashed room, with a thoughtful brown wood Christ hanging on a crucifix over the bed. She put out the light, opened the window and scrambled into the big bed as the wind and the moonlight came soaring in off the powdery, bright mountains. She shivered once or twice in the cold sheets, but in a moment it was warm under the piled feathers. The linen smelled like fresh laundry at home in her grandmother's house when she was a child, and the stiff white curtains whispered against the window frame. By now the accordionist was playing softly below, sad, autumn songs of love and departure, muffled and heartbreaking with so many doors between. In a little while she was asleep, her face serious and peaceful, childish and undefended in the cold air above the counterpane.
Dreams were often like that. A hand going softly over your skin. A dark, generalized body next to yours, a strange, anonymous breath against your cheek, a clasping, powerful arm, pressing you…
Then Margaret woke up.
'Be quiet,' the man said, in German. 'I won't harm you.'
He has been drinking brandy, Margaret thought irrelevantly. I can smell it on his breath.
She lay still for a moment, staring into the man's eyes, little jets of light in the darkness of the eye-sockets. She could feel his leg thrown over hers. He was dressed and the cloth was rough and heavy and scratched her. With a sudden jerk, she threw herself to the other side of the bed and sat up, but he was very swift and powerful and pulled her down again and covered her mouth with his hand. He chuckled.
'Little animal,' he said, 'little quick squirrel.'
She recognized the voice now. 'It's only me,' Frederick said.
'I am merely paying a little visit. Nothing to be frightened of.' He took his hand tentatively from her mouth. 'You won't scream,' he whispered, still the small chuckle in his voice, as though he were being amused by a child. 'There is no point in screaming. For one thing, everyone is drunk. For another, I will say that you invited me, and then maybe changed your mind. And they will believe me, because I have a reputation with the girls anyway, and you are a foreigner, besides…'
'Please go away,' Margaret whispered. 'Please. I won't tell anyone.'
Frederick chuckled. He was a little drunk, but not as drunk as he pretended. 'You are a graceful little darling girl. You are the prettiest girl who has come up here this season…'
'Why do you want me?' Margaret desperately took the cue, trying to tense her body, make it stony, so that the inquisitive hand would meet only cold, antagonistic surfaces. 'There are so many others who would be delighted.'
'I want you.' Frederick kissed her neck with what he obviously thought was irresistible tenderness. 'I have a great deal of regard for you.'
'I don't want you,' Margaret said. Insanely, caught there next to that huge, tough body in the dark bed, deep in the night, she felt herself worrying that her German would fail her, that she would forget vocabulary, construction, idioms, and be taken because of that schoolgirl failure. 'I don't want you.'
'It is always more pleasant,' Frederick said, 'when the person pretends in the beginning she is unwilling. It is more lady-like, more refined.' She felt him sure of himself, making fun of her.
'There are many like that.'
'I'll tell your mother,' Margaret said. 'I swear it.'
Frederick laughed softly, the sound confident and easy in the quiet room. 'Tell my mother,' Frederick said. 'Why do you think she always puts the pretty young girls in this room, with the shed under it, so it is simple to get in through the window?'
It isn't possible, Margaret thought, that little, round, cherry-faced, beaming woman, who had hung crucifixes in all the rooms, that clean, industrious, church-going… Suddenly, Margaret remembered how Mrs Langerman had looked when the singing had gripped them all in the room below, the wild, obstinate stare, the sweating, sensual face swept by the coarse music. It is possible, Margaret thought, it is, this foolish eighteen-year-old boy couldn't have made it up…
'How many times,' she asked, talking swiftly, postponing the final moment as long as possible, 'how many times have you climbed in here?'
He grinned and she could see the gleam of his teeth. For a moment his hand lay still as he answered, pleased with himself.
