Exile Music Read online

  * * *

  • • •

  WATCHING MY FATHER perform was a less dramatic experience than watching my mother. While I was pleased to be allowed to sit beneath those hollow gold women on the walls, in my opera dress with my own program in my lap, my father at work just looked like my father. He wore the same black suit I always saw him in before he left the house for a concert, and played the same pieces I had heard him rehearse dozens of times in our living room.

  It was somewhat entertaining to watch the frantic blur of white fists moving up and down the strings and buttons, and the way the men became one body when they played, but I missed the costumes and characters of the opera. I missed the women. It took all of my self-control not to take a pencil from my pocket and doodle in the margins of the program.

  But I was just as proud of my father as I was of my mother, though I struggled to distinguish the notes of his viola from the sea of sound produced by the orchestra. I preferred to hear my father at home, without the distraction of the other instruments. In the Golden Hall, he became a cog in its machinery, like all the other cogs. At the opera, audiences came to hear a specific singer, but in the Musikverein, no one came to hear the third viola from the right.

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE TIME I was nine, I was allowed to sit at concerts or the opera alone, or with Anneliese, whose parents rarely took her to hear music. We sat with our knees leaning together, tracing messages with our fingers on the soft insides of each other’s forearms. Afterward, we waited in the lobby for my father or mother to take us home.

  * * *

  • • •

  “THAT SOUNDED LIKE the national anthem of Friedenglückhasenland.” Anneliese nudged my foot. We were at a café after a charity concert in May 1937, to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie. The Alpine Symphony.

  “Maybe it is the national anthem of Friedenglückhasenland. Though it sounds different when rabbits perform it.” I cupped both hands around my hot chocolate.

  “The orchestra has a carrot section.”

  “And a celery section. They crunch to keep time.”

  “For the finale, they eat the instruments.”

  We started laughing, spraying crumbs across the table. A stout man with grey hair and a monocle frowned at us, making a clicking noise with his tongue. No one can do disapproval with the passion and precision of Austrians.

  * * *

  • • •

  I HAVE SEARCHED so many times for programs from the concerts I attended in the 1930s, but they are not so easy to find. I suspect it is because so many of the audience members who would have gone to those concerts, who would have treasured and tucked away those programs, have been erased.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON JANUARY 16, 1938, I took Anneliese to see my father perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I remember the applause; it sounded like a summer rain on a tin roof. We didn’t know it then, but it was the last time Anneliese’s parents would allow her to go outside of our building with me.

  It was also the last time Mahler’s music would be performed until the war was over. It was the last time that seven of my father’s colleagues would be alive to play it.

  Eight

  On July 19, 1937, the Nazis open the Degenerate Art exhibit to condemn paintings and sculptures they find unacceptably un-German.

  Though I wanted to learn to sing, my mother insisted I start with piano. I don’t know if this was because she suspected my voice lacked potential, or if she simply wanted me to learn the notes on a more tangible instrument. I put up no resistance. Piano would at least differentiate me from my brother. Like my father, Willi played viola. Unlike my father, he was lazy about practicing. While Willi had an ear for music and could mimic any melody, he preferred to be at the pool or stretched out on the sofa with a book. My father didn’t understand how anyone could demonstrate such an utter lack of respect for his talent. It was a constant source of tension.

  Anneliese had begun piano lessons, too, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her having a musical life that didn’t involve me. Although Anneliese’s parents had become stricter lately, no longer allowing her to stay for dinner or go with us to the Prater or the Vienna Woods, they permitted her to come over every afternoon to practice because there was no piano in her apartment. For my parents, a piano was as fundamental a furnishing as a bed or a kitchen table. My mother played to accompany her voice or my father’s viola, while he played to entertain us or to stretch his fingers in new directions. They made it look so effortless, hands flickering across the keys like light, like shadows.

  I was sure that as soon as I began lessons, I would be able to do that too.

  Our teacher, Frau Milch, was quick to disillusion me. When she asked me if I knew what any of the keys were, the only one I could point to was middle C. Thus we began the laborious process of learning the location of each note as well as how it was written.

  Learning piano, it dismayed me to discover, was very hard work. I had thought that my parents’ skills would simply have been passed down in my blood, that as soon as I touched an instrument I would channel both their talent and their education. Not until I had been studying for more than a year was I able to pluck out short pieces and sense the joy that could come from playing. Anneliese, who had her lesson in our apartment after mine, picked up things more easily, but she too was lazy about practicing. It didn’t help that we used up some of her practice time talking and planning games to play at school. As soon as her allotted hour was up, her mother would be hovering at our doorstep to fetch her, though she wouldn’t come in. When I protested the new restrictions, Anneliese told me that her parents thought she needed to be more serious about her studies.

  At least I had the consolation that those studies included piano.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON THE NIGHT of our first recital, Anneliese and I stood in the shadowy wings of the auditorium. My heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my navel, in my palms. Inhaling deeply, I smelled sawdust and face powder. Anneliese found my hand in the dark and squeezed it. Frau Milch droned on about the music we’d chosen, while our parents rustled their programs and recrossed their legs. Anneliese was to go first, then a boy named Thomas, then me.

  “Are you scared?” she whispered, her breath wafting chocolate across my face.

  I shook my head. Then, realizing she couldn’t see me, I whispered back. “No, but I’m glad you’re first!”

  She pulled me closer, and then swiftly, her hands were on my cheeks and her lips found mine. Her warm, soft lips, slightly sticky and sweet. For luck, she said.

  “. . . and first to play for you tonight will be Anneliese Meier, playing ‘Kinderball.’” As our parents broke into polite applause, I gave Ana a push toward the lights. “Hals und Beinbruch!” Break a leg!

  I watched as Anneliese approached the piano bench, smoothed her skirt beneath her, and lifted her hands to the keys. While her cheeks had flushed and strands of her dark hair stuck to her forehead, her hands did not tremble. As I listened, I became aware that someone was watching me. Turning my head, I saw the dim outline of Thomas lurking in a corner of the stage behind me. How long had he been there? I pushed the thought of him from my mind. Thomas was not important.

  Anneliese played her piece with fierce near-perfection, fumbling only one note near the end, and then exited the other side of the stage. Thomas brushed by me. I was dismayed to hear that he had chosen “Unter Bäumen,” the same piece I had chosen, though he played it with an unsuitably martial precision.

  And then I was there, in the middle of the stage, a blaze of nerves and sweat under the lights. I dried my hands on my skirt as I tucked it under me. The piano keys were cool and familiar. I lifted my wrists.

  I cannot remember a second of my performance, only the rising of my r
ibs as I played, a feeling that my fingers were propelled by pulses of electricity that shot from my heart down my arms. It was a simple little piece, but to me it was Mahler, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky.

  “Much better than Thomas!” Anneliese hugged me.

  As we started toward the door to find our parents, we passed Thomas, still shoving music into his bag backstage. He puckered his lips and made a kissing sound. “I saw you,” he whispered.

  “So?” Anneliese stared at him until he turned away. “What are you, the kissing police?” The way she said it made me laugh, my worry melting away. Everyone kissed people they loved, didn’t they? No one thought it strange when I kissed Stefi good night.

  Our parents met us in the street, by the stage door. My parents shook Anneliese’s hand and kissed my cheeks. “Not terrible,” my father said, smiling. “That was lovely, Orly,” said my mother, drawing me into the curve of her arm. “Does Anneliese want to come with us for a cake?”

  Anneliese looked pleadingly at her parents, who had greeted us formally, and refrained from commenting on my performance. When her mother shook my hand, her pale blue eyes gave me such a piercing look I felt she could see all the way down to my heart. That she could see the imprint of Anneliese’s lips on mine.

  “Perhaps another time,” said her father, buttoning his fur-collared coat. “If there is one.”

  Anneliese’s mother smiled without her teeth. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you, we’ve bought a piano! So there is no longer any need for Anneliese to trouble you.”

  Nine

  On February 12, 1938, Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg meets with Hitler in his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, hoping to find a way to avoid war with Germany.

  My hands were full of shining things—buttons, ribbons, and rolls of orange crepe paper—as I leaned on Anneliese’s doorbell. Every year, we made our costumes for Fasching together and today we planned to begin transforming ourselves into flowers. This was Anneliese’s mother’s idea; she could make exquisite blossoms out of crepe paper, peeling apart rows and rows of stiff petals. Anneliese said she’d rather be a grape vine so she could wear green and walk around holding bunches of her favorite fruit, but her mother thought grape vines too suggestive of wine and Bacchanalia. Last year, she had helped us to sew twin harlequin costumes, but this year we wanted to be something that reminded us of country holidays, of life outside the city. Anneliese’s mother had become obsessed with nature. She made Anneliese eat a pastelike Birchermüesli made of oats and hazel nuts and apples for supper and gave her lectures about the healing air of the mountains. She had even stopped eating meat, telling us that “flesh foods were damaging to spiritual health.”

  Anneliese was taking forever to answer the door. “Ana! I’m going to drop everything!”

  I heard her footsteps, fast and then halting, arrested by her mother’s voice, too low for me to hear the words. Ana’s voice rose in protest, her mother’s tone growing sharper, until I could discern a few phrases—remember the danger . . . not an association . . . your friend—but nothing that made sense.

  Finally the lock on the door turned. “Thank goodness! Here, take some of this, it’s all slipping and sliding.” I held out my arms but Anneliese just stood there, her arms hanging limp at her sides. “Ana?”

  “Now isn’t a good time,” she whispered, her brow creased and her eyes trying to say something to me that her mouth could not.

  “But we planned—”

  “I know what we planned. My mother, she says you can’t come in.”

  I stared at her, crinkling the paper against my chest. A button fell and rolled down the stairs. We listened to it descend.

  “Tomorrow then?”

  She shook her head. “She says you can’t come at all anymore. She’s gone mad, Orly, she says it’s too dangerous.”

  I couldn’t move away from her door. Not at all? To the apartment I had freely entered for the entire decade of my life? I could smell frying dough, hear something sizzling in the kitchen. “She’s making Faschingskrapfen?” My mouth watered. Every year her mother made doughnuts that oozed apricot jam and we ate them when our costumes were finished.

  Anneliese reached for my hand. “I’ll bring you one later. When she’s not being so stupid. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded and turned before she could see my tears. As I ran back down the stairs to our apartment, I wondered if we would still go to the processions together. I had never celebrated Fasching without Anneliese. I didn’t want to go without her.

  Our apartment was silent. My parents were both at work and Willi was studying. I dropped my armful of materials on the dining-room table.

  “Erdnuss, is that you?” Willi appeared in the doorway of his room. “I thought you were making your costumes? Oh no, what is it?”

  I shook my head and tried to swallow my tears.

  “Her mother—”

  Willi wrapped his arms around me. I rubbed my forehead against the wool of his sweater. “What did she say, that cow? Here, come sit with me.” He pulled me to the sofa in the parlor and held me on his lap, though I was too big for it.

  He listened as I told him what she said, his forehead wrinkling. “That woman has some nerve. In our building!”

  But I didn’t want his anger. I didn’t want to punish Anneliese’s mother. All I wanted was to be let back in.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE MORNING OF THE PROCESSIONS, Willi came to my room, holding something behind his back. “Close your eyes.” I sat up in bed, clutching Lebkuchen to my chest. Something heavy and smelling of glue descended over my head. Rough edges weighed down my shoulders. I opened my eyes to darkness and reached my hands up to feel it.

  “Don’t worry, Peanut, it’s just a costume. Look—” He adjusted the heaviness on me so that I could peer out small eyeholes and turned my shoulders so I could see myself in the dim mirror over my bureau. Willi had made me a giant bunny head out of papier-mâché. It was painted a light brown, with pink on the ears and nose. Its small mouth turned up at the corners.

  “I was hoping you’d come with me to watch the parades. Mutti and Vati have already gone.” My father was playing on a float with a group of musicians from the Philharmonic, and my mother was riding with them.

  I stared at myself. It was a beautiful bunny head. But the smell and the heaviness overwhelmed me. I lifted it off. “I just need to breathe a little.”

  Willi sat down next to me. “You don’t have to wear it. I’ll wear it for you if you don’t mind being seen with a giant rabbit.”

  “I’d rather be seen with a giant rabbit than any human I know.” I smiled at him. “Maybe we can take turns.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HE STAYED WITH ME the whole day, holding my hand as we watched the strange sights go by: the Old Viennese Ladies’ Band, country girls with giant headdresses, a steam train replica, a demonstration of sausage making, and even a miniature Riesenrad. We waved to our parents as they passed, my father’s elbow moving furiously up and down as he played and my mother blowing us kisses, looking elegant in a long violet dress with flowers on her hat. We added our voices to a group singing “I Want to Be in Grinzing Again.” We mostly carried the bunny head, but having it with us made me feel both protected and part of things.

  Anneliese had gone to the festivities with her parents. We didn’t see them. When Willi and I came home, we found Anneliese had left two doughnuts on our doorstep with an apologetic note. “I didn’t have a choice,” she wrote. “You are my forever favorite flower.”

  I crumpled the note in my hand and carried the doughnuts into the kitchen and stuffed them in the trash.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT after that. No longer was Anneliese’s door open to me every time I knocked. No longer did her mother send up little plum tarts on Fri
days. No longer did her father take his hat off and give a little bow when he saw me in the hall. A hundred times a day my feet started for the stairs. A hundred times a day, I stopped them.

  Ten

  On February 24, 1938, Schuschnigg gives a speech urging his country to fight to maintain its independence.

  My father tucked his viola into its case a few minutes before 8:00 P.M. on March 11, 1938, when Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg would make his final speech. He and my mother had just played Brahms’s “Sonata for Viola and Piano in F Minor, Op. 120 No. 1,” distracting us until it was time to switch on the radio. My mother had said she didn’t feel like singing, but her fingers were steady on the piano keys. My grandparents and our aunts and uncles had come for dinner. The adults were restless. My mother paced nervously from the kitchen to the table, reminding me of Willi. He had pushed his chair back from the table and was whispering with my grandmother. When I glanced down at the book in my lap, no one told me to stop reading. The music hadn’t eased the tension; it sounded like Eurydice slipping back into the darkness of Hades. I set down my fork and knife and hoped someone would suggest dessert.

  My parents had had high hopes for Schuschnigg, for the plebiscite that would determine our future. The whole country was to vote on whether to become part of Germany. How could we possibly lose? It was inconceivable that Austrians would vote to dissolve their own country. Only crazy Germans could voluntarily submit to someone like Hitler.