Exile Music Read online

  I didn’t want to go on any transport. What child wanted to leave her parents? But then, what child was given a choice?

  Unaccustomed to idleness, my parents paced the floors of the cramped apartment, beating out desperate rhythms on the bare floorboards with their feet, dodging arguing children and the elderly huddled on mattresses in the corners. My aunt Thekla and uncle Tobias, in contrast, were still. They stared out the window as if they hoped to catch a glimpse of their son passing by. Klara looked after them, scavenging with me for food, making her parents drink water. She had even gone to the police station to inquire about Felix but had been told no one knew where he was. In the early evenings, we all pressed close to the small radio someone had salvaged from home, trying to predict the future.

  “Mutti, sing,” I would say to my mother when she tucked me in with the other children or beside her on the floor. And she would only shake her head, folding her lips into her teeth. “I’ll sing again when we are free,” she whispered. “I will sing when we are safe.”

  It occurred to me only later that she never even asked if Bolivia had an opera.

  “Is this what war is?” I asked my mother.

  She looked away from me, toward the kitchen, her fingers pinching the fabric of her dress, sliding it back and forth. “No. Yes, in a way.”

  “Will we stay here?”

  “No, my love. We will not stay here. I don’t know where we will go yet, but we will not stay here. Here is already gone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A CALIGINOUS AUTUMN descended on Vienna as we waited for our visas, or what would come in their place. As we made what preparations we could make. Mist clung to our streets and the chill sank into our marrow. I missed going to school. Some people in the apartment had books, and I read them all. I played games with the older girls; I held the babies; I plotted ways to find my way back to Anneliese before we left. If we left.

  Finally, when we had begun to consider various illegal ways to smuggle ourselves out of the country, a letter arrived from the Bolivian consulate saying our visas were ready. My father and I were pulling on our shoes before my mother had even finished reading it to us. “What if someone else gets there first?”

  “They’re our visas, Orly, they can’t give them to anyone else.” But he beat me to the door. I had to run to keep up with him all the way to the consulate, where we discovered there were visas for only the three of us.

  “Regular visas?”

  “Regular as visas go.”

  “I won’t have to plant anything?”

  “My understanding was that you didn’t want the agricultural visas.”

  My father straightened. “Thank you.”

  “I hope you know how lucky you are. I don’t know how many more of these there will be.”

  “I understand. Thank you. We are grateful.”

  Visas for the rest of our family, she said, would—perhaps—come later.

  “But!” my grief-stricken father began.

  “I said, we have three visas. Do you want these three or shall I give them to the gentleman in line behind you?” Her voice was weary rather than unkind. Our misery had numbed her.

  My father closed his mouth and collected our visas. As we turned to go he remembered our last visit and stopped. “And if they agree to be agricultural laborers? My parents?” I tried to imagine this, tried to imagine my stout grandfather planting rows of corn in his pin-striped suits, tried to see my militant grandmother pushing a plow.

  “We will do our best, Herr Zingel.”

  My Vienna grandparents insisted they were relieved. “We’re too old to travel so far from home,” my grandfather announced. “We’re better off somewhere nearby. France, Poland.” He said this as if those countries were real possibilities. As if those countries were safe. My aunts and my Graz grandparents promised to keep trying to join us in Bolivia. Aunt Thekla and Uncle Tobias said they would not leave without Felix.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE NEEDED NOW to find enough money for the ship and the landing fee demanded by Bolivia in return for accepting us. My grandfather gave us a little of it, bills he had hidden away in his office filing cabinets and carried with him in the lining of his jacket. We’ll pay you back, my father told him. We’ll send you money for your own tickets. But it wasn’t close to enough. My mother went out early one morning and was gone for most of the day. When she returned, she had an envelope of bills in her girdle. “But where did you get it, Mutti?” All of our relatives were in our same situation. She gave me a thin smile. “Odiane and Ilse.”

  “Really?” I had forgotten Odiane and Ilse. I guess they were not Jewish. They could still work.

  “Really. There are some good people left, Orly. Some very good ones.”

  When we had counted out just enough schillings to purchase our tickets, we walked to the Italian Line offices in the Opernring.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE QUEUES SENT my spirits plunging. Surely there would not be seats left on any ship for us. We waited all day, stamping our feet and clapping our hands to stay warm, but did not make it to the door. We began rising before dawn to join the throngs, with the hope that one day soon waiting would get us across the threshold. It felt hopeless. There were lines every day of desperate people willing to settle on any available vessel.

  Yet a couple of weeks later, just before closing, we made it inside.

  We can book passage from Italy for three people, the ticket agent told us, but not until April.

  My father looked at him in despair. “We may be dead by April.”

  The ticket agent sighed. Always the same story. “For the money you are willing to pay, I have April. If you can find more, I can get you on a ship in December.”

  My father bought the tickets for April. We could still try to find enough money to leave earlier, he said, but at least now we had something. There was an exit sign in our future. We had to survive four months more. Just four months.

  Twenty-one

  On January 30, 1939, Hitler announces his desire to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.

  On December 3, 1938, my parents’ driving licenses become invalid. “Good thing we don’t own a car,” says my father.

  On December 5, we are no longer allowed to sell our jewelry. “Good thing we have nothing left,” says my mother.

  On December 12, a new law is passed stating that we will not be allowed to leave the country with anything other than “items for personal use.” I look at my parents with bewilderment when we hear this announced on the radio. “What else do we have?”

  On the first day of Chanukah, I present my parents with a handwritten book of stories from Friedenglückhasenland, written on scraps of paper torn from food cartons and discarded wrappings and held together with a piece of string. I suggest we light candles—one of the other families has a menorah—but my mother just looks out the window and pretends she doesn’t hear me.

  In February, we walk past Fasching parades and celebrations. It seems a long time ago that I cared about Fasching, that I cared about anything as frivolous as a costume. We see a German man in a long-beaked stork mask handing a swaddled infant to a blond Austrian maiden. A group of children marches by in Roman costumes, followed by a pack of Amazon warriors. When a group of adults dressed as the blue-green Rhine begin acting out the rape of the Danube, my parents pull me away.

  On February 23, You Can’t Take It with You wins an Oscar for Outstanding Production. Had we registered this, we might have noted the appropriateness of its title.

  On February 28, the Reich’s transport minister announces Jews are banned from dining and sleeping cars on trains. Our anxiety increases. Surely we will be banned from regular cars next? I wonder if we could walk to Italy. I wonder if maybe we should start now.

  We huddle in the apa
rtment around the radio, awaiting a knock on the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  THOSE FOUR MONTHS stretched out over an eternity. When my father offered to sell his viola, my mother took it from him until he promised he wouldn’t. “I married a violist,” she said. I bit my lip to keep from reminding her that he had married a singer. Twice more we were moved to different and smaller apartments, where even more of us were crammed together in increasingly desperate conditions. My parents grew thinner, my bones pushed closer to skin, my aunt and uncle became strangers. We began taking our meals from the soup kitchen opened by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the same organization that would eventually play a large role in our new lives in Bolivia.

  During all of this—the paperwork, the incessant trips to embassies, consulates, and police stations—the idea of leaving for a new country remained in the realm of fantasy for me. I was nearly eleven. I had never lived anywhere but Vienna. Everyone I had ever loved, every food I had ever tasted, every game I had ever played was here. I simply could not imagine inhabiting a different landscape. Nor could I imagine a journey on a ship. While I had often traveled on trains for summer holidays and to visit relatives, I had never seen the ocean. I am not sure I had even seen a photograph of an ocean liner.

  All of my parents’ preparations were happening, therefore, at a distance from me. Even in the final days I did not believe I would never again sit in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, or climb the steps inside the opera house, passing beneath the sculptures of half-dressed children wielding instruments. I did not believe that the waiters at Sperl would never again set a silver tray in front of me bearing whipped-cream-bedecked hot chocolate and strudel. I could hardly entertain the thought that I would never play with Anneliese again. Anneliese was irrevocable.

  While it’s true I had already lost the domestic landscape of my home, lost my Stefi, whom I mourned nightly, lost my proximity to Anneliese, this city was the only context in which I could imagine myself. Its streets terrified me, teeming with the boisterous, shouting Nazis and the regular, ordinary people joining in their sadistic fun, but they were still my streets.

  Twenty-two

  On March 15, 1939, Czechoslovakia ceases to exist.

  Afew weeks before we left Vienna, in early April 1939, I sneaked out of the apartment for the last time, in the darkest part of morning, before anyone else was awake. So that my parents wouldn’t panic, I left a note saying I would soon return. They would worry anyway but it couldn’t be helped. As I made my way through the dim streets, I pulled my coat around me and almost wished for the protection of that swastika pin. Almost, but not quite.

  I walked fast with my head down and made it to the cemetery this time without anyone seeing me. When I was sure no one I knew was on the street, I walked the rest of the way back to the building where we had been happy and where we had been made miserable. Our stolen home. It was so cold my toes went numb in my thin leather shoes. I knew it was dangerous to walk alone where someone might recognize me, that it was dangerous to walk through Vienna’s streets at all. Yet what other streets did we have to walk? My heart hurtled ahead of me, fearing the expression on Anneliese’s face almost more than the dangers all around me.

  I stood in a darkened doorway across the street from our old building. I listened for the church bells that would tell me Anneliese would soon be on her way to school. I stood there forever, freezing, petrified, waiting. Wondering if I would find her changed. Wondering if Frau Floch would emerge to slice off my last dress with her butcher’s knife.

  The bells had rung before she flew out of the house, late, her coat half on, skirt flying up around her, and her blouse untucked.

  “Ana!” I took off after her at a sprint, but as she had stopped the second she heard my voice, I collided with her, knocking us both over. “Orly!” She dragged me to my feet and around the corner. “You’re alive, you’re alive! Come, farther away.” We ran toward the Lichtenstein gardens, toward clusters of trees and bushes, toward obscuring greenery, and fell to the grass. Our breath coming fast, we lay on that frigid April lawn side by side, our hands clasped. My Anneliese. Her soft, thin arms, her bruised legs, her skin. “I’m leaving,” I said. “Right away.”

  “How will I find you?” she asked. “How?”

  “You can’t. I will find you.”

  My mother had forbidden me to tell anyone where we were going. “Not even Anneliese,” she had said. “Promise me, Orly.” I had never kept a secret from Anneliese. How could I keep this one, this most important one? But then I thought of her father’s belt, and what it might draw from her.

  “I will write to you. You mustn’t move, Anneliese. You must stay here. You must wait.”

  “But I need to write to you. How can I not write you?”

  “I’ll send you our address when I can. When this ends. Just don’t move. Stay right here so I know where to find you. Promise me.”

  “I don’t want to let you go. It’s been horrid, Orly, I can’t—”

  We stayed there longer than we should have, until the sun rose in the sky and warmed the air, until we could hear people entering the park around us. Finally, I knew it was getting too late. I couldn’t let my parents worry too long; I didn’t want them to try to look for me. This fear drove me to my feet, pulling Anneliese up with me. Letting her go, I linked my thumbs and raised them over my head, my fingers fanned out on either side, like wings. The international sign language for “I am a citizen of Friedenglückhasenland. I come in peace.”

  Smiling, tears sliding down her cheeks, she linked her own thumbs above her head in response, her fingers fanned out on either side, her thin elbows forming a diamond around her head.

  Then I turned and I ran.

  Twenty-three

  On April 28, 1939, Hitler renounces Germany’s nonaggression pact with Poland.

  We walk all the way to the train station. We have four days to get to our ship in Genoa.

  At the Südbahnhof, the SS holds each of our precious belongings aloft, displaying them to the entire station. My mother’s spare dress. My father’s top hat. The stuffed rabbit named Lebkuchen, who is everything I have.

  “I don’t think you’ll be needing this in Bolivia.” I watch as the man rips Lebkuchen apart, searching her stuffing for hidden wealth. He doesn’t even give her remains back to me, though I salvage one small bit of fluff from the dirty floor as we’re prodded forward. I refuse to cry in front of these men.

  My father is—miraculously—allowed to keep his viola.

  The last thing we hear in Austria is the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks, beating out a song of exile.

  Caesura

  There is so much I do not remember. Things my mother and father remember, things the dead remember.

  I do not remember the failures in Evian, where no asylum was offered. My mother never told me that it wasn’t just Austria who abandoned us. My father never told me the world had given Hitler permission to do with us what he wanted.

  I do not remember the five thousand disabled children cavalierly slaughtered, their tender young bodies stretched awkwardly upward by the faceless hands I saw in photos many years later.

  I do not remember the roving bands of teenage boys urging each other to deeper hatred, greater crimes.

  I do not remember when journalist Dorothy Thompson reminded the American public that eradicating the Jews had always been part of the Nazi platform. I never heard her too-lonesome voice reminding the world that the Nazis were doing exactly what they had always said they would do.

  I do not remember the little girls with their dark braids, holding their mothers’ hands as they were prodded into train cars.

  I do not remember when the Wagner-Rogers Bill, the bill that might have saved twenty thousand children, was defeated.

  I do not remember November 23, 1938, when the Nazis reminded the world
that the Jews would be wiped out if no one evacuated them. Even though I was there. Even though I should have been listening.

  I never saw the skeletal women. The skeletal men. The skeletal children, their eyes still absurdly hopeful. The children.

  I do not remember the inside of the train cars bound for the camps.

  I do not remember watching my family members murdered. Waiting for my turn.

  I do not remember the mountains of shoes, hair, bones. I do not remember the bulldozing of the bodies, the obscene flapping of desiccated breasts and buttocks.

  I do not remember the drawings of the children. The drawings that survived, the children who didn’t. The thin-stemmed flowers, the black-capped soldier, the man with the drooping mustache. The crayon-sketched rainbow, insisting the world still contained beauty.

  I don’t remember because I was too young. Or I wasn’t there.

  My parents gave me that.

  Second Movement

  BETWEEN WORLDS

  Twenty-four

  My mother, who had always had all of the answers, didn’t have them anymore. She knew how to tie my shoes and how to make a frog with her fingers and how to plait hair. She knew songs in many languages; she knew when a piano was only slightly out of tune; she knew how to take a breath so deep it would last for an entire song.

  Now, as we hurtled away from Austria, she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where we would stay in Italy. She didn’t know whether there were rabbits in Bolivia. She didn’t know if Bolivians had toilets inside their houses. She became impatient with me when I asked.