Exile Music Read online

  At every recess, Anneliese and I raced each other to the playground to meet by the swings. Pushing our toes in the dirt, we told each other stories of our life elsewhere, our adventures in a country where rabbits nibbled pomegranate seeds at the movies and solved arguments with poetry contests or football matches.

  In the mornings, I slipped new pages of our story into her school satchel where it hung on a hook outside of her classroom. Friedenglückhasenland was part of a nearby planet called Rose of Erta, I wrote. Its allies included the countries of Katzenland, Steinland, and Hamsterhimmel. These were those three islands inhabiting its inner sea.

  The next morning there would be a new page slipped into my own satchel. “In Katzenland everything is made from apples,” Anneliese wrote. “There is apple tea and apple cookies and roasted apples and apple juice. All of the music is created from sounds that apples make falling, which is the most beautiful sound in the world.”

  At the bottom of the page was an addendum: “P.S.—In all of Rose of Erta there is no Herr Kahn to slam his ruler down on your desk when you are trying to read something far more interesting than he is.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS SEPARATED from Anneliese, I resolutely refused to be happy. My mother had always said I was a stubborn child. When I was eighteen months old, she says, she took me with her to the post office to send a few letters and a parcel to her aunt in Graz. The postal clerk, apparently feeling festive, held out a tin of cookies to me, gingery Lebkuchen baked for Christmas. Clearly, this man had never had children, or he would have known better than to hold out an entire tin of Lebkuchen in front of a toddler. Despite my mother’s admonition to take just one, I reached in and grabbed a fistful. Furious and embarrassed, my mother ordered me to put them back. But the harder she tried to pry them from my fingers, the more tightly I clutched them, until they crumbled into a damp dust in my hand. If I couldn’t have them, no one would.

  The postman was apparently unusually forgiving of my rudeness, but my mother never forgot that particular incident, reminding me of it every time I resisted a parental command.

  Whenever I felt angry with my mother, I reminded myself that I came from somewhere else. I convinced myself that I had formed in Friedenglückhasenland. Anneliese and I agreed we had shared the womb of Mutti Hase, been born together, and lived in her palace for many years. We had only been born to separate mothers in Austria by some clerical error. “But it doesn’t matter,” Anneliese said. “Because we landed in the same building.”

  I wasn’t cross with my mother very often. My mother was everything beautiful and good in the world. She smelled like lilacs and lemons. Her voice sent delicious shivers across my skin, even when she was singing something as simple as Brahms’s “Wiegenlied.”

  When I explained to my mother that even though I first existed in Friedenglückhasenland, I eventually chose to be born a second time in Vienna, she smiled.

  “Why Vienna?”

  The answer was obvious. “You were here.”

  “Erdnuss,” she said. “I’m honored. Of all the mothers you could have chosen.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR the school gave up keeping us apart. “You’d think you’re Ianthe and Iphis, you two,” my mother said, half exasperated, half amused. It was entertaining to imagine myself as Iphis, a girl brought up disguised as a boy. Her father had sworn to kill her at birth if she wasn’t a boy, so her mother had kept her sex a secret. I thought of all the freedoms that granted Iphis—she could wear trousers and walk the streets alone, like my brother Willi. Like Odiane. I wondered if people on the street made fun of Odiane for the way she dressed, or if they just thought she was a boy and left her alone.

  When Iphis was very young, she became close to another girl named Ianthe. Like Anneliese and me, they were always together. They studied together and played together and—I liked to think—invented worlds together. Eventually, they fell in love. When they became betrothed, Iphis’s mother Telethusa panicked. What would happen on the wedding night when Ianthe realized her love was a woman? She wept in despair, praying to the goddess Isis for rescue. And because two girls cannot be married, the night before the wedding the gods took pity on Iphis and changed her into a boy.

  This ending had always bothered me. While I envied the freedom of boys, I didn’t want to actually be one. I did not want to become hairy and thick, with a scratchy beard. I liked the smooth curves of my face. If Isis was so powerful, why couldn’t she just make Ianthe happy that Iphis was a girl? Perhaps Ianthe had fallen in love with Iphis because she sensed her feminine nature, and would be repulsed by her abrupt maleness, by the coarse hairs sprouting on her face. Just as in so many fairy tales, we never got to find out what happened after that marriage. This was a serious flaw. Think of all of the things that could go wrong with a marriage! What if you discovered you had married a man who would hit his own daughter?

  Six

  In July 1936, Hitler orders mass arrests of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roma. The SS establishes the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

  The first time I heard my mother sing, I took Anneliese with me.

  My grandparents chaperoned us that day in December 1936. My father’s father didn’t often make it to the opera, overwhelmed as he was with his work. He was a remote man, though not unkind, and often let us sit in the big chair in his office and look through different types of lenses. My cousins and I would compete to see who could read the tiniest words on his eye charts, without magnification. I usually won, though possibly because I sneaked in to memorize the charts when no one was around.

  Willi also joined us that night at the opera. My grandmother preferred him over me because he was an enthusiastic participant in her political salons, while I would get bored and end up daydreaming under the chairs with Lebkuchen. Every other week she invited a select group of friends to discuss both literature and politics. When the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was outlawed in the wake of the 1934 rebellion, she had been incensed. “What kind of future can there be for a country that doesn’t allow pluralism?” she raged to my brother. “We’re going to end up like Germany.” She and Willi helped the Kultusgemeinde to settle German Jewish refugees in Vienna in 1935, after new German laws took away their citizenship. It was my grandmother’s fault Willi was always threatening to join the resistance—any resistance group that talked of standing up to the regime, to Hitler. It frightened my mother.

  When I tried to talk with my grandmother about things that mattered to me, like stories and animals, she grew impatient. “I don’t have time for these frivolities,” she’d say crossly. “You need to pay attention to the world. Important things are going on.”

  Fortunately, in our family opera was not considered frivolity.

  Sitting between Willi and Anneliese, I was overcome with contentment. Willi bent over his book—something in French I could not decipher—as we sat waiting. Anneliese and I leaned our heads together over the program. She always smelled like celery, as if she had just come from making soup. Almost everyone I needed was in this building. Only my father was missing, but that was often the case. When my mother was performing, he was also at work.

  Slowly, the lights faded. The curtains drew apart, revealing the inner courtyard of a palace and the vicious, gossip-singing maids. The dissonance of the opening chords startled me, flooding my veins with fear. Notes and voices scraped at me, strummed my nerves. I pulled Ana’s hand into my lap and pressed it between mine.

  “Wo bleibt Elektra?” a servant began, her voice soaring over me. “Where is Elektra?” The others paused in their scrubbing of floors, their beating of laundry, to lacerate their mistress with song.

  My mother sang Chrysothemis, Elektra’s gentler, pragmatic sister. She was the only one in the opera whose heart did not bend to murder, my mother said.

  “Ich kann n
icht sitzen und ins Dunkel starren wie du.” I cannot sit and stare into the darkness like you, sang my shimmering, shivering mother to her Elektra. “Ich hab’s wie Feuer in der Brust.” In my breast there is a burning fire.

  I had heard my mother’s voice before, nearly every day of my life, but never like this. I had never heard it expand to fill a space so vast, soar to the highest of the balconies. Anneliese tugged her hand free of mine so she could lean forward into the sound. That is my mother! I wanted to stand up and cry to everyone around me.

  “Eh’ ich sterbe, will ich auch leben!” she sang. Before I die, I also want to live!

  When the lights came up for the interval, I felt I had been blasted back into my seat. This opera was not so much music as a summoning. A calling forth of the fiercest of human emotions from the pit of my belly. I sat there, unmoving, until a line of operagoers stood to our right, waiting for us to rise so they could get to the aisle. “Come, Peanut.” Willi took my arm and hauled me to my feet. “You too, Ana. Clear the way!” Slowly, our bodies cramped from sitting, we joined the crowd.

  My grandparents ran into friends in the lobby and stayed there to chat, while we headed to the bar for a snack. The café was at least half the reason I’d looked forward to going to the opera. Anneliese was unusually quiet, even when Willi braved the line to fetch us hot chocolate and a slice of Himbeerschnitten. We stood by the window of the salon, gazing out at the gilding of our city by the early evening sun, as we licked raspberries and cream from our forks. “Ana,” said Willi, smiling at her, “has the opera put you into a trance?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just . . .” She looked away from us. “I wish my mother . . .”

  I knew what she wanted to say. And I wanted to say to her then that I had often envied her for having a mother who was home every evening to tuck her into bed, who made her cakes in the afternoons, who never traveled outside of the city except to go to a lake in the summers. My parents worked all summer, performing and teaching at festivals across Germany and Austria. The Vienna Philharmonic closed for the summer because the concert hall was too hot. The windows could not be opened, as street noise interfered with the music. In the winter, it was often too cold, but the orchestra sent for soldiers to run around the place, panting and sweating in the Golden Hall until it warmed a degree or two.

  But that night, I didn’t envy Anneliese her mother. So I said the next best thing.

  “But Anneliese, your mother in Friedenglückhasenland—our mother—she sings too.” I passed her the fork we were sharing.

  The shadow of a smile crept across Anneliese’s face, but she didn’t join in like she usually did. “You’re so lucky, Orly,” she said quietly. “You don’t even know how lucky you are.” She took a bite of torte and sucked on the tines of our fork.

  “Oh, but we do!” Willi said gaily. “We have you, Anneliese, to tell us stories! We are the most fortunate people on earth.” Among the many reasons I loved my brother Willi, his kindness to Anneliese ranked high.

  “Kinder,” said my grandmother, appearing by our table. “Enough talk.” She wasn’t the kind of woman one could ignore, standing inches taller than any other woman in the room. The way she wore her hair, swept into a shelf of wide curls on the top of her head, made her even more imposing. After a longing look at the last smears of cream on the plate, which we didn’t dare to run our fingers through in front of her, we returned to our seats.

  During the second half, I drew Anneliese’s hand onto my lap and held it with both of mine. This time, she didn’t pull away.

  Even those who live are covered with blood, my mother sang. And marked by many wounds.

  I was relieved she was one of the few to survive the opera’s bloody ending, and proud that her words Orestes! Orestes! were the last the audience would hear that day. It was her voice that would linger in their ears as they filed out onto the street.

  Seven

  In July 1937, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps opens the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

  After that first time, I heard my mother sing Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier and Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. I was there when she sang Elsa in Lohengrin, Constanza in Abduction from the Seraglio, and Liú in Turandot. But nothing ever equaled the first ringing notes of her Chrysothemis.

  From then on, my grandparents or my aunt Thekla, my mother’s older sister, often took me to see my mother perform. Thekla, short and round with glossy black curls, was my favorite aunt. She had been the first to move from Graz to Vienna. Once she had found jobs at both the radio station and in a dress shop, she had sent for my mother, introduced her to friends, and paid for her training. If not for her, my mother would never have become a singer.

  Now, Thekla talked about books on Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft, and wrote short plays for the station. At least once a week she and her family ate dinner at our apartment. Afterward, she often sat on the edge of my bed and told me stories about the scandalous life of Alma Schindler.

  “Once there was a very clever little girl,” my aunt Thekla began, settling beside me on the bed. “Her mother was a singer, like yours. And her father was a painter. She loved to play the piano and to make up songs.” Her fingers were light on my back, tracing designs through my nightdress.

  “Like ‘My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo!’” This was a perennial favorite, especially when my mother or father sang it while waltzing about the room, arms swinging loosely from the shoulders and spine curved forward. It was the kind of song that I would like to have made up—jaunty and fizzing with mischief. My parents were not snobbish about popular music. My mother was as likely to sing me “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home” as she was to sing me Lieder. Still, I don’t think my mother would have told me these stories, at least not in such remarkable detail.

  “I’m not sure Alma was terribly interested in gorillas, but yes, perhaps. Her father approved of her passions for music and literature, when it was not at all fashionable for fathers to encourage their daughters’ minds.

  “But he died when she was only thirteen and her mother married someone else, which made her very cross. Alma continued to write music, but by the time she reached her teenage years, men were already distracting her. There was the painter Klimt, the first to steal a kiss, when she was only seventeen. Next was her music teacher Zemlinsky, who fell madly in love with her. It must have been very hard for her to focus on arranging musical notes when someone was trying to kiss her. Even worse if she wanted to kiss him back.”

  The idea of kissing anyone—but especially a boy—was nausea inducing. Stefi had told me that adults put their tongues in each other’s mouths when they kissed, which struck me as both awkward and unsanitary. “Not my parents,” I had insisted. “They would never do such a revolting thing.”

  “Oh yes, they would!” Stefi had laughed. (I never dared ask my parents if this were true, afraid of the answer.)

  Aunt Thekla went on.

  “Many of Austria’s most brilliant men ended up falling in love with Alma. Imagine trying to get work done with so many lovers! Klimt, Zemlinsky, and then Gustav Mahler.

  “Mahler insisted that Alma give up writing her own music if she were to become his wife. So is it any wonder she was so unhappy? How he thought that an intelligent woman would be content to manage a household is a mystery to me.”

  I turned on my side and opened my eyes. “So why did she marry him?” I couldn’t understand the appeal of a bossy husband. Mahler sounded like Anneliese’s father.

  Aunt Thekla considered this. “Because he was in a position of power. Because he wrote beautiful music. Because genius is alluring. Maybe all of these. I don’t know. Gustav was a very important man, the director of the opera. Maybe she felt that was the closest she would ever get to fame.”

  “Couldn’t she be famous by herself?” It seemed so unfair, to have to live on borrowed fame.

  “An excellent
question. And one perhaps we’ll save for another night. Good night, sweet pea.” Abruptly, and despite my protests, she stood. “Mahler did eventually agree to publish some of Alma’s songs. But by then it was too late. She had forgotten how to arrange the notes.”

  “Is that why she’s married to Herr Werfel now?”

  “So many questions! Maybe your dreams can answer them.”

  Alone in the dark, I kept myself awake trying to imagine why anyone would choose to marry fame rather than to be famous. I wished Aunt Thekla would come back. I wished she could tell me bedtime stories every night.

  Many years later I realized that Thekla didn’t tell me these stories because she admired Alma. On the contrary: they were cautionary tales.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY COUSINS KLARA AND FELIX—Aunt Thekla’s children—were older than I was, older even than my brother, and sometimes came along to the opera. Klara studied piano and voice and was always at the top of her grade at school. Unlike me, she was quiet and difficult to read. But she was kind. I admired her, though she didn’t fill me with the unbridled joy that her wilder brother did. I adored Felix, who was never serious about anything. He and Willi liked to hold me upside down by my ankles and spin me in circles, or lie on their backs on the floor and balance me on the soles of their feet like a flying angel. Felix could tell riddles for hours without repeating himself. He and Willi took me swimming at the Gänsehäufel and taught me the butterfly.

  He got his élan from his mother. His father, my uncle Tobias, managed a knitwear factory and was silent and dull. But I suppose every family must have one steady member, one predictable pair of shoulders to carry its weight. After all, Aunt Thekla would not have wanted to marry a famous man.