Exile Music Page 3

  I laughed, my boots slipping over the snow. “That’s what I told my mother. Will you wear the tuxedo or shall I?”

  Three

  In February 1934, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party rebel against Austria’s Fascist regime. Four days of violent clashes end with the deaths of several hundred and the dissolution of all political parties other than the Patriotic Front.

  During the four days of conflict and general strikes of February 1934, we had no school and my parents made us stay inside. Police were attacking the workers, they told us. It wasn’t safe on the streets. Willi sprawled on the sofa with a book, sulking, as my parents had also forbidden him to join the socialist paramilitary Schutzbund to fight against the right-wing Heimwehr.

  While my parents were theoretically socialists, they had little time for political activism. I think they thought that music somehow protected them from politics, that as artists they were beyond earthly concerns. But Willi was fourteen, full of unspent passion and idealism. He and my Viennese grandmother were the fiercest socialists in our family, though all of my relatives were staunchly anti-Fascist. Willi closely followed Hitler’s rise in Germany and was perhaps the only one of us with foresight enough to worry.

  Anneliese and I sat on the carpet with our rabbits, Marmalade and Lebkuchen, quarreling about which one of them was going to be the socialist and which the police officer.

  “They should both be socialists.” We looked up in surprise. Willi didn’t often join in our games. “They should join forces to fight against the foxes.” He returned to his book.

  Anneliese and I glanced at each other, unsure whether to tolerate this intrusion.

  “We don’t have foxes. There is no one for them to fight against,” I pointed out.

  Willi heaved himself off the sofa and disappeared into his room. A moment later he dumped a cardboard box in front of us, spilling leaden soldiers onto the floor. “Here you go. Heimwehr for you.”

  Anneliese looked at them all, her dark eyebrows raised. “We need more socialists.” She ran up to her apartment to gather all the rest of her stuffed animals. I raced to my room to collect the rag doll I had been given at birth, a china-headed doll with a cloth body, and one stiff porcelain doll too pretty to be any fun.

  Willi settled back onto the sofa with his book, but after a few minutes he threw it aside. “I mean no insult to Mahler, but if I have to hear that Adagietto one more time I am going to lose my will to live.” He stood and walked to the window.

  “He’s practicing.” It would never have occurred to me to criticize my father for playing. While the strikes had kept them from going to work, neither of my parents neglected their practice. I thought the Adagietto was pretty. It made me think faraway thoughts, as if it were stretching what I knew about the world toward the horizon.

  “I know he’s practicing, Peanut. I just wonder if there’s something more important he could be working on.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. Never mind, Erdnuss. Oh, I feel like a trapped animal!” He began circling the room, swinging his arms wildly.

  Anneliese chose that moment to come crashing back through our front door, arms full of plush socialists, and I returned to the welcome distraction of our game.

  Predictably, the socialist herbivores won the battle and dragged their captive soldiers off to Friedenglückhasenland. There, the soldiers drank too much wine with Nicholas, chased each other with knives, and fell in love with wood nymphs, who escaped their advances by turning into trees. The queen turned the men into women and outlawed soldiers.

  When my mother came home from rehearsing a duet from Giuditta with a fellow singer who lived nearby, she looked pale and strained. The soldiers we’d been playing with lay strewn about the carpet, surrounded by knives I had taken from the kitchen when Stefi wasn’t looking. “What are you playing?” she asked in surprise.

  “Opera,” I said, as if that should be obvious.

  Willi paused in his pacing of the room. “I thought it was politics.”

  My mother unwound the scarf from her neck and began tugging off her gloves, one finger at a time. “The difference between the two is increasingly negligible.”

  Four

  After the death of German president Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merges the roles of chancellor and president and declares himself Führer, immune to all laws.

  Stefi, a blue-eyed nineteen-year-old girl from Lutzmannsburg, was in many ways a third parent to me. She was given the worst of the jobs: toilet training, mashing my early foods, and wiping jam and egg yolk from my face. By looking after our basic needs, she freed my parents to focus on teaching me to read music and books. My room was off the kitchen, next to Stefi’s, so that if I woke in the middle of the night I wouldn’t have to disturb my parents. Sleep, my mother told me, was essential for vocal quality and for steady hands. When my mother was singing out of town, Stefi took over parenting entirely. Several times during my earliest years my mother was away for months, singing roles at the Oper Köln, Hamburgische Staatsoper, and Berlin’s Städtische Oper. Once she sang in Paris. I always wanted to go with her, but she told me it wouldn’t be any fun for me because she would be working.

  I never did get to see Paris.

  When my mother went away, she always brought me back a memento. Sometimes it was an ordinary gift, like a fancy postage stamp or a book of opera stories, but sometimes it was something more unusual, like a piece of chipped crystal from a chandelier at the Paris Opéra that was being replaced, or a silk rose from the set of Arabella in Dresden. I liked these best, because no one else had them and they were secretly famous, having been seen by thousands of people. Even more, I loved them because they meant my mother had been thinking of me while she was working.

  Stefi was off on September 3, 1934, the eve of my first day of school. My parents had sent me to bed early, and a new dress was laid out on the armchair by the door. I was looking forward to school, and to showing off that I already knew how to read. Perhaps I would have been more nervous had I not known that Anneliese was to be in the same class. With Anneliese, I was never afraid. Still, my heart was beating too fast for sleep, and my mother had left my door—which Stefi usually shut—wide open.

  “What bothers me most,” I heard my father saying to my mother in the kitchen, where they sat at the table drinking their after-dinner coffees, “is that they don’t even seem to be trying to hide it.”

  “But it’s illegal.”

  “I know it is, Julia. That doesn’t stop them from joining.” I heard the strike of a match and the sizzle as the flame met the tobacco of my father’s pipe. “Don’t think there aren’t plenty of singers in the party as well.”

  “But I don’t know any. I can’t imagine— Do they talk in front of you?”

  “There are few secrets in the orchestra, Liebling. They’re in the air. We can hear them in between the notes.”

  “Seriously, Jakob.” My mother’s spoon clattered into her saucer.

  “I am serious. I can hear them in the trumpeting of Helmut Wobisch.”

  There was silence for a long moment. I tried to imagine my mother’s face. “You’ve suspected him for a while.”

  “And I’ve been right. I just wish it were only him.”

  “How many do you think there are?”

  Another silence. A long exhale. “Eleven? More? Hard to say exactly. Wilhelm Jerger’s been in the party for years.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “It’s hardly a secret what I am. Wouldn’t they have done something about me already?”

  More silence.

  “If they do something about the Jews in this country, they’ll have no music left.” My mother’s voice had turned bitter. “Even Walter is a Jew! Can they seriously eradicate him?” Bruno Walter often conducted the Philharmonic. I had met him several times when m
y father took me to the Musikverein.

  “I don’t think anyone’s saying anything about eradication.”

  “They are across the border. Have you even looked at a paper?”

  I heard the legs of my father’s heavy chair scrape across the kitchen floor as he pushed it back to stand. “I don’t have time to read the papers.”

  It was my mother’s turn to sigh. “You know, Jakob, if you had been on the Titanic, I think you would have been the last one to set down his bow.” But there was a smile in her voice.

  My father laughed. “I wouldn’t have set it down at all. The Rahab would have had to take me playing.” The Rahab, I knew from my father’s bedtime stories, was a demon of the sea. It was this demon the God of the Torah had to crush in order to separate land from water.

  “The Rahab might take you yet, if you don’t take seriously what’s happening around you. Around all of us.”

  “You can’t think that that horrid little man is a real danger to Austria.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Jakob. The things I heard when I was in Germany . . .”

  “It’s true that you probably won’t be getting any work in Germany anymore. Not with—”

  “I know that. That’s what I’m trying to say—”

  “So what do you want us to do? Just pack up and leave? Julia, Schatz, you’re rehearsing a solo show of Lieder at last, and you want to leave? What about our parents, would we take them? Thekla? Klothilde? We need time to think. Besides, they can’t get rid of all of us. They can’t. Imagine what that would do to our sound.”

  “You think Hitler cares about our sound? Jakob, I don’t want to do anything but continue our lives. But I’m not thinking about what we want to do.” I imagined them staring at each other over the table, their words failing.

  “Please, darling, no decisions tonight.” My father’s voice was weary. “We’ve got time to think about all of this. I promise I’ll read the newspaper on Sundays if it will make you happy.”

  There was the rattle of china cups against the sink, and then nothing but their footsteps as they retreated to their room.

  I pulled the quilt over my head and curled around my rabbit Lebkuchen, trying to make sense of my parents’ words. Was my mother right, would Hitler try to come here? Did my father work with people who might endanger him somehow? I was confused. I wished Anneliese were here, or Stefi. Someone to reassure me. Apparently there was more to worry about in the world than impressing the other students with my ability to sound out words.

  Friedenglückhasenland. I whispered the word out loud. That’s where I needed to go.

  Five

  On September 15, 1935, Hitler announces the Nuremberg Laws, which strip German Jews of their citizenship and prohibit relationships between Jews and other Germans.

  On September 26, 1935, Klaus Barbie joins the SS.

  There was only one year Anneliese and I were not in the same class at Volksschule. Our teachers separated us in our second year, when we were seven, in the vain hope that we would make other friends. It wasn’t healthy to have just one friend, our teacher Frau Fessler told us. “It takes many poles to hold up a tent.”

  Anneliese stifled a snort. “We’re a tent?” she whispered, kicking me under my desk. “I always thought of us more as a castle.”

  She and I started school on the same day and in our first year we shared a table, our pencils, and our books. When the teacher wasn’t looking, one of us would draw the head of a bunny and then fold the paper down so the other couldn’t see it. Without looking at the head, the second person drew the bunny’s stomach, and then the first person drew its legs and feet. Sheets and sheets of folded paper bunnies, hatted or crowned, dressed in finery or swimsuits, holding baskets or flowers, piled up on our table. Everything I did—every math problem, every verb conjugation, every recitation of history—I showed to Anneliese for her approval before turning it in. Her opinion mattered so much more than the teacher’s.

  Frau Fessler was not the only person irritated by our constant togetherness. Heinrich Müller, a thuggish little boy with fair hair and fat cheeks who went to the boys’ school nearby, often stalked after us on our way to school, delighting in interrupting our games. There have always been bullies, after all, even before they started wearing the official badges of the SS. Heinrich threw rocks into our marble games and stole the pictures we drew. He yanked out strands of my bright hair yelling, “Look, Orly’s on fire!” One morning on the sidewalk outside the school gates, he emptied a bucket of water on the chalk map of Friedenglückhasenland we’d been sketching on the pavement. Furious, and without thinking about the repercussions, I stood up and slapped his fat face, as hard as I could. “What is wrong with you?” I shouted at him. “Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

  He stood there for a moment, his pink face growing pinker, stunned that a girl had had the audacity to hit him. I could tell he was tempted to hit me back, but he was too clever. He knew he would get in just as much trouble as I would, if not more. “Because you’re a Büchsenmasseuse.” He hurled the word at us as if it could pierce our intimacy.

  I couldn’t move. The word slipped around in my brain; I couldn’t grasp it. It had something to do with us, with our bodies, with how we were together, but I wasn’t sure how it was meant to wound.

  This time it was Anneliese who hit him. “And you’re nothing but a Bürger von Krokodilland!”

  I turned to her, astonished. “He’s a what?”

  At that moment, Frau Fessler appeared at the gate to drag us both away by the arms.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT DIDN’T SURPRISE ME that Anneliese would strike a boy. After all, she had learned punishment young. The previous summer, when my family took us out of Vienna to Zell am See, she swam with something over her suit, a blouse or even a dress. I teased her for this—I cringe when I remember it, but it’s true—prancing around her in my skimpy suit, trying to pull the blouse from her shoulders. As she twisted away from me, I glimpsed the raised stripes of angry pink welts underneath. “Ana?” I had started, unsure of what they were.

  She wrapped her arms around her rib cage. “Doesn’t your father hit you?”

  Mute, I shook my head. I knew that many fathers hit their children. Even some mothers. But I’d never seen such scars on someone my age.

  Anneliese squinted into the sun. “They’ll get better.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. “But why? Why does he do it?”

  She shrugged her small bony shoulders and looked away. “I don’t listen?”

  That night while she slept next to me I lifted her nightdress to kiss that blameless flesh of her back, my lips barely brushing her skin. How soft and small she was. Letting her nightdress fall, I curled beside her like a sentry, careful not to press too close against her wounds.

  Later on the afternoon that Anneliese and I smacked Heinrich, after Anneliese’s father had taken a belt to her again and my mother had told me I would be going to bed without stories for a whole week, we sat at my kitchen table drawing on the backs of sheet music my father no longer needed. “I think my father might be from Krokodilland,” she said in a low voice so Stefi wouldn’t overhear.

  When I thought of Anneliese’s father, a fat banker whose only role in the household other than funding it seemed to be to mete out punishment, I felt like throwing up. I wished I were brave enough to slap his face. I had given Anneliese my pillow to sit on, feeling very grateful that my father didn’t hit me.

  “What’s Krokodilland?” The question had been burning a hole in my tongue.

  She looked up. “You know. The country next to Friedenglückhasenland. The one with all the mean people. The Krokodills. I figured I couldn’t get in trouble for calling Heinrich a citizen of Krokodilland. We’re the only ones who know what it means.”

  “Oh, I know, I remember. The country t
hat doesn’t have any trees.” I leaned forward and trapped one of Anneliese’s feet between mine, anxious to contribute. Friedenglückhasenland was circular, a belt of a country with a hole in the middle. A vast sea filled that hole, and three large islands. But surrounding it all, I reminded her, was Krokodilland. “The Krokodills always want to start wars against Friedenglückhasenland.”

  “But Friedenglückhasenland refuses to fight. It has never fought a war.”

  “Because the bunnies would rather pick cherries.” I plucked another from the bowl between us.

  “Or learn ballet steps.”

  “Or go ice-skating.”

  “It has magical protections, because the Krokodills are always trying to get in.”

  “Everyone wants to get in.”

  “Yes, because in Krokodilland people eat nothing but lederhosen.” She smiled at me, her teeth stained pink by the cherries we were eating. My mother had said no sweets before dinner, but Stefi whispered to us that we weren’t really breaking a rule because the cherries were sour.

  “And the children never get to celebrate their birthdays.”

  “And it is against the law to celebrate holidays or have a peaceful time together.”

  “Where there are no vegetables. All there is to eat are stinging nettles that tear at your throat when you swallow and burn forever.”

  “And all of the animals are poisonous.”

  “Even the humans!”

  “Yes, especially the humans.”

  We grinned at each other, and spit the pits of our cherries into the bowl between us.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, the school separated us.

  The distance between our second-year classrooms infuriated me. I did my work but refused the advances of the other children, only interacting with them when it was strictly required. No matter how many times the teacher spoke to my parents, I remained on the periphery of my classroom.