Exile Music Read online

  ALSO BY JENNIFER STEIL

  The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Woman’s Adventures in the Oldest City on Earth

  The Ambassador’s Wife

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Steil

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Steil, Jennifer, author.

  Title: Exile music / Jennifer Steil.

  Description: [New York, NY] : Viking, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038105 (print) | LCCN 2019038106 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561811 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525561828 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.T4485 E95 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.T4485 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038105

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038106

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Cover images: (top to bottom): mountains, Robert Postma; valley (details), Vadim Nefedov; man and woman, H. Armstrong Roberts; little girl, Leon Morris. Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For all who live far from home and in between

  And for Tim and Theadora, who gave me the first two sparks of this story

  Contents

  Also by Jennifer Steil

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Overture

  First Movement: ViennaOne

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Caesura

  Second Movement: Between WorldsTwenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Third Movement: La PazTwenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Fourth Movement: After the WarForty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifth Movement: Old FriendsFifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixth Movement: New LifeSixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature.

  —EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  Tradition is not the worship of the ashes but the preservation of fire.

  —GUSTAV MAHLER

  Overture

  When I think of Austria, I remember what a child remembers—details as vivid as the bright shards of a dream. The coffee-warmed air of the kitchen. The rough fabric of my father’s suits against my cheek. The chalk dust of my classroom tickling my nose. The ice-crusted snow in the Jesuitenwiese meadow that cut my eyebrow open when I fell off the toboggan halfway down the slope. My Anneliese. My parents’ voices in the kitchen as I hovered still and silent by the door, secretly listening. It was important then, to listen.

  I remember the tang of my mother’s apricot jam spread over a thick layer of butter on crusty bread. The fungal stink of my older brother’s dirty sports clothing on the bathroom floor. The earthy scent of the square olive-oil soap that was always slipping into the sink.

  I remember a plum tree in our small communal courtyard that dropped its sour-sweet fruit onto our terrace. They were a dark, dusty purple, more oval than the green ones we would eat in Bolivia. In Vienna, Anneliese’s mother collected the dropped fruits and used them to make tortes.

  I remember my mother’s voice in our parlor, starting off low and gathering the energy to soar. I remember the scent of rosin on horsehair, the vibrations of my father’s viola, how I could feel the notes on my skin even after he stopped playing and I was in bed, listening only to the silence.

  I remember the inky smell of my schoolbooks as I cracked their spines. The sound of Frau Fessler’s ruler smashing into my desk when she caught me with a book on my lap during math class. The way the fruit gummies from Weiss’s got stuck in my back teeth so I had to pick them out with my fingernails. I remember the damp heat of Anneliese’s hand as she folded it with mine for the last time.

  I remember our neighbors’ long coats decorated with flocks of badges saying only Ja. The swastikas on every armband and flag, pinned to every lapel, painted on our sidewalks. They even fell from the sky, flurries of paper spiders dropping onto our heads. I remember the newspapers my parents hid from me under sofa cushions.

  I remember lying awake, twisting the satiny border of my blanket in my fingers, until my mother came and curled around me. I remember her breath on my neck, the ice of her fingers on my spine, stroking my skin until I drifted into dreams.

  The bland quotidian details, the textures of ordinary days, seared themselves most permanently.

  Except for Anneliese. Anneliese, who was neither bland nor ordinary. Anneliese, who was more a part of me than not. Our mothers had birthed us in the same building a week apart and from then on there were no divisions between us. The three syllables of her name were my first song.

  * * *

 
• • •

  I REMEMBER FRIEDENGLÜCKHASENLAND.

  We imagined the place into existence long before the Anschluss, when we were small and preliterate, as we lay sprawled on our stomachs on the floor of her kitchen, scribbling with our pencils on the back of brown paper from the grocer’s.

  “Where do you think we lived before this?” She looked up at me with large dark eyes.

  “We have always been here, Ana. We’ve never been anywhere but here.” Our families had lived in the same apartments in the same small building owned by my grandfather since we were born. I thought for a moment. “I guess before here we were in our mothers’ bellies?”

  “No, I mean before we lived in our mothers’ bellies.”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “The belly is where we start.”

  Anneliese shook her head, the ends of her long hair dancing across the paper. “How could we not have existed? We must have been somewhere.” She traced the outline of her lips with the rubber end of her pencil as she gazed up at the ceiling. At the left corner of her mouth, a faint scar curved upward so that even at rest her lips suggested a smile. “I know where I was,” she said definitively. “I was in Friedenglückhasenland.”

  Friedenglückhasenland. Peace, Happiness, and Rabbits, all stuck together in a single word to make a place.

  I stared at her. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t existed before I emerged from my mother in some bloody and uncomfortable way she described in only the vaguest of terms. But I wanted to have always been with Anneliese. I wanted to have come from the same place, to belong to the same land. “Was I there?” I looked at the rabbit lying next to me. “Was Lebkuchen?”

  She looked at me, her eyes drifting to a world only she could see. “Don’t you remember? We lived in a palace with Mutti Hase. The mother of all bunnies. She was the queen. She still is. She’s about a million years old. No—a billion. She is the wisest person in the world. She knows the names of all of the dinosaurs and has lived on all of the planets. She can talk to trees and turn herself invisible. She has two other children, Alezia and Nicholas. Do you remember them?”

  I closed my eyes. “I remember Alezia’s red hair.” She began to take shape in my mind, tall and thin. “They were both dancers. Russian dancers.”

  “Until Nicholas starting drinking too much wine. He could have been so famous but he started putting wine on everything. He even put wine sauce on his vegetables.” Anneliese glanced toward the bottles clustered near her family’s waste bin. Her father’s bottles. “He couldn’t balance on his toes anymore.”

  “But not Alezia,” I added quickly, anxious to save one of them.

  “Not Alezia.”

  “There was a Vati Hase, too, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. Only he died. But not of old age.”

  My belly tightened as I thought of all the ways I was discovering that daddies could die. “He died of silliness,” I offered.

  “Yes. He decided to be a soldier but didn’t kill anyone, so they killed him.”

  “It was silly of him to become a soldier.” My brother Willi wanted to be a soldier, and the prospect of his absence was gnawing away at me like a hungry rat.

  “Your daddy was a soldier.”

  “I know, that’s what I just said.”

  “No, your real daddy. Your Vienna daddy.”

  “I know.” Like most Austrian men his age, my father had served in the Great War. He’d even received a medal, the Kriegserinnerungsmedaille with crossed swords on the back, reserved for frontline troops or the wounded.

  “Aren’t you proud of him?”

  I shrugged. My father never talked about the war. “I guess. I’d just rather there were no soldiers. None at all.” My father made sense only as a creator of music, not as a uniformed killer.

  Anneliese bent her neck so our foreheads touched. I could feel the warmth of her breath against my lips, her eyes so close they blurred together. “There are no soldiers in Friedenglückhasenland,” she whispered. “No one can get in. The country is surrounded by stone walls and when invaders try to get in the wind just blows their hands off the doorknob.”

  “There are no cars either,” I whispered back. “That way we can run across the streets whenever we want without looking. It’s so quiet there you can hear the apples dropping off the trees. We can hear the moles tunneling into the earth. We can even hear the hairs of the rabbits brushing together when they hop.” I closed my eyes. I have never wanted to be anywhere as much as I wanted to be in Friedenglückhasenland then. “No one is lazy and everyone walks everywhere.”

  We lay there, eyes closed, our foreheads pressed so close I felt our skin would grow together. That we could become one girl. “Orly. We have always existed.”

  First Movement

  VIENNA

  One

  In May 1928, the Nazi Party gains twelve seats in Germany’s elections.

  My parents fell in love when they were still students at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst. While women were unwelcome in the Vienna Philharmonic and in the music world at large, opera required them. For this reason, my mother trained her voice rather than her fingers, even though her fingers had always been rather good at piano.

  On a rare warm spring day my father had stopped on the shores of the canal to play to the lilacs, the passing boats, and the birds. My mother, who recognized him as well as the song he played, had paused to add her voice. “I couldn’t help it,” she told me. “I love that song.”

  But they can never agree on what he had been playing. She says it was Handel’s “Flammende Rose,” while he says it was definitely Brahms’s “Zwei Gesänge.”

  “It can’t have been,” she argued. “I didn’t even know ‘Zwei Gesänge’ then.”

  “But ‘Flammende Rose’ wasn’t written for viola,” he pointed out.

  Ultimately, the song didn’t matter.

  They were so young. They had Willi when my mother was still a girl of seventeen. After that, they figured out how to avoid having another child for a decade.

  I was born on Friday, January 13, 1928, the same year Wolpe’s satirical opera, Zeus and Elida, premiered, the same year the curtain rose on Weill and Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, and the same year Schoenberg composed Von heute auf morgen. Jewish musicians of Europe were busy creating.

  It was a happy year for my parents. While their salaries were modest, they had the good fortune of relatives who had chosen more practical careers. My mother’s parents were flourishing bakers in a village near Graz. My father’s father, an ophthalmologist, owned our three-story apartment building on Seegasse. My grandparents spent the early years of their own marriage in what would become our apartment, but once their children were grown they moved a block away to a smaller apartment on Pramergasse, over my grandfather’s practice. Anneliese’s family lived directly above us on Seegasse, the rooms of their apartment mirroring ours. On the top floor were the Windens, an elderly couple with no children who often invited Anneliese and me in for cake or a strudel. It was a quiet building, except for us.

  Anneliese and I were the laces that tied our two families together, though our parents had never been close. Her banker father’s mind was occupied with figures and balance sheets while my father’s preoccupations rarely ventured beyond the body of his viola, of the orchestra. My mother, whose concerns were with cavatina, recitative, and cabaletta, had no shared vocabulary with Ana’s mother. Once in a while they happened upon a shared enthusiasm for a pastry recipe, but beyond that they regarded each other warily across the borders of our doorsills.

  As children, neither of us thought much about money, the privilege of having enough not to have to think about it. A privilege, like so many others, that I failed to appreciate until it was lost.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY VERY FIRST MEMORY is a sound: the long shimmer of my father�
��s bow across the strings, the upward flight of my mother’s voice, filling the air of our apartment in 4 Seegasse as I lay on the living room floor, drawing.

  My second memory is tactile. When I was old enough to stay silent and still, my father took me to the Musikverein before one of his rehearsals with the Vienna Philharmonic. My mother must have been there, too, or my nanny, Stefi, to whisk me away when the musicians finished tuning their instruments, but I don’t remember anyone except my father, who hoisted me into the air, his hand over mine as he pressed my fingers against the belly of one of the golden women whose heads propped up the first balcony. The long sides of the rectangular room were lined with these figures growing out of pillars, their arms folded across their ribs, their cone-shaped breasts pointed toward the ceiling. A pianist and a cellist were warming up onstage, and under my fingers I could feel the women tremble along with the notes, the oscillations of the music. “Wood vibrates with sound,” my father explained. “Almost everything here is wood, even the parts painted to look like stone.”

  “Or gold,” I whispered, stroking the shuddering belly.

  “Or gold,” he agreed, lowering me to the ground.

  I looked around me at all of the gold that was not gold, the stone that was not stone, the seemingly stable floor that hid a trap door. Even the organ was fake, my father had told me, created to disguise a series of changing organs installed behind its façade.

  “Isn’t there anything here that is real?”

  My father laughed, but low, so only I could hear him. “Only one thing in this building is real, Liebling: the music. All else is deception.”

  That room was the Golden Hall, the jewel box where my father became part of a larger instrument, a larger organism: the Philharmonic itself.

  My third memory was my brother Willi’s fault. He was the one who taught me to whistle, neglecting to mention to me the prohibition of the practice within the hallowed Musikverein. I had thought I was making music, that my lips were an instrument I was learning to play, so I was shocked at the pressure of my father’s fingers on my arm, the force with which he marched me to the closest exit and literally tossed me through the doors onto the street. “Nie! Never in here.”