Exile Music Read online

  “But you are a musician!” I protested. “And I am in love with you.”

  She hugged me when I said that, as tight as tight. “I’m in love with you, too, Liebling.”

  “As much as you are in love with Daddy?”

  “The same amount. I love you and Willi and Daddy all the same.”

  “Do you love me more than singing?”

  “I love you more than anyone has ever loved anything. More than Lebkuchen and Liszt.”

  “But more than singing?”

  My mother sighed. “It’s different. But if I were forced to choose whether to lose my voice or my child, I would never choose to lose you.”

  I never asked my father this question; I was afraid his answer would not be the same.

  My father reached for his viola before he got out of bed in the mornings, even before he reached for his wife. Each morning, I drifted up from sleep to the tremors of his strings and would sit up to listen. They were gentle, his morning songs, rough and slightly out of tune. They called me forward and up, into my day, my life. They also signaled permission for me to come to their bed, to pull up the sheet and slide in next to my mother’s warm skin. Only once he had set the viola back in its case and headed for the kitchen did we need to stir. Before the Anschluss, all of our cues were musical.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR NINETEEN YEARS my father had played with the Philharmonic. For nineteen years he had crossed the city swinging his viola case at his side. For nineteen years he believed that music was a common language.

  Close to half of his colleagues eventually became Nazis. Whether this was a result of conviction or a desire to stay employed made little difference to us. There is no record of any musician in the orchestra ever protesting the expulsion of his Jewish colleagues. These men who had played alongside Jews for decades, who had tuned their instruments to those of Jews, who had created harmonies with Jews, these were the men now calling for their exile. For their deaths.

  After my father finally awoke the morning after his last evening at the Philharmonic, he locked his viola into its case and placed it alongside the small cases we were already filling with our few valuables. He would not open it again in Vienna.

  My mother’s work had been declining since 1934, although she had still managed to be cast in a few operas each year. The range of allowable composers and works had dwindled to nothing. No more Meyerbeer. No more Schönberg. By 1938, no one even wanted to be in a room with a Jew.

  My parents had another full-time job now: getting us out.

  Fourteen

  In April 1938, the Nazis require all Jews to register any assets worth more than five thousand Reichsmarks. These were then appropriated to “support the German economy.”

  Not long after the Germans arrived, I made a terrible mistake.

  The moment the Anschluss was announced, swastika pins and badges of the Nazi Party sprouted on the shoulders of my former classmates, of shopkeepers, and of our neighbors. People who knew us. People we had spoken to almost every day of our lives, but who turned overnight into enemies. Anneliese’s mother pinned a swastika to her daughter’s dress every morning, but Anneliese swore she took it off as soon as she was out of her mother’s sight.

  The day of my mistake, we planned to sneak away to the movies while my parents were out in search of visas. We couldn’t be in danger in a cinema, I thought. There was no reason a Jew couldn’t watch a movie in her own city.

  “She’ll kill me if she ever finds out I’m not wearing it,” Anneliese said as we set off, showing me the swastika pin she’d slipped into her pocket. She turned to me, frowning. “Orly. Yesterday I saw Frau Cohen turned out of the baker’s. They wouldn’t even let her buy bread!”

  Anneliese’s astonishment made me impatient. Of course non-Jewish bakers didn’t let us buy bread. Every day there were fewer people we could trust. The butcher wouldn’t sell meat to us. He said, “Don’t you people have one of your own?”

  Anneliese and I continued walking in silence, past a giant billboard proclaiming Judentum ist Verbrechertum. Judaism is criminality. Leering over the words was the giant head of a long-nosed caricature of a Jew. These signs, these noses, were everywhere. Anneliese followed my eyes.

  “Your nose is nothing like that.” She took my hand. I didn’t know how to explain that the noses didn’t even rate in my hierarchy of fear. A shape-shifting unease had become part of us. We were steeped in it, sweating it from our pores. There was nothing our parents could do to protect us from it because we absorbed it through the air.

  I didn’t know how to articulate this to Anneliese, to explain what it felt like to live in my skin. I shrugged.

  “Look, wear this.” She pulled another swastika pin from her pocket. “I have an extra one. At least that way they will leave you alone.”

  I stared at her. Put on a swastika? Betray my parents? Betray almost everyone we knew?

  Anneliese shifted her weight impatiently. “If you don’t wear it we can’t get into the film.”

  “Ana, no, you don’t under—”

  At the same moment, a gang of teenage boys in Hitler Youth uniforms rounded the corner and started toward us. Anneliese pulled her own pin back out of her pocket and fastened it to her collar. Hurriedly, my cheeks flaming with heat and fear, I followed suit, accidentally sticking myself with the pin. I thought I might vomit.

  The rampaging youths hurtled by, looking for an old man to torture, no doubt. As they passed they glanced at us, but only cursorily. They registered our badges and moved on.

  “See? If we wear it to the theater, they’ll let you in. Come on!” She tugged at my hand. But suddenly I didn’t feel like watching a movie. I didn’t feel like walking the streets with Anneliese. I tore the pin from my coat, not even caring if I ripped the fabric.

  I couldn’t look at Anneliese’s face. I didn’t want to see pity in her eyes. I threw the pin into the sewer grate at my feet and turned my face from hers. “I need to go home.”

  My feet quickened on the pavement, but I did not feel them. I did not feel my body at all. I hovered somewhere above my skin, somewhere I couldn’t be hurt.

  “Orly, wait!” Anneliese’s footsteps, coming after me. Breathing hard, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be a fool. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  I whirled to face her. “I need you to protect me, do I?”

  Tears started in her eyes. “Oh, Orly, I don’t know what to do! Everything’s gone mad.” Her skin started to get red blotches like it did when she was upset.

  I started walking again and she kept pace with me. “Orly, I—”

  But I never heard the rest of her sentence.

  “Look who’s here,” came a low voice behind us. “It’s the Büchsenmasseuse. The Jewish Büchsenmasseuse.”

  I didn’t even need to look at his fat, grinning face to know that it was Heinrich Müller, our old tormentor, in a brand new uniform. We were still two blocks from home. The last time he had used that word with us, we had slapped his face. But he knew I couldn’t hit him now. Even Anneliese didn’t dare to slap him now. She took my hand again.

  “How touching. A Jew lover,” he sneered. Something jabbed the back of my thighs, lifted my skirt. I spun around, yanking the material down. I was in my body again now, burning hot. I opened my mouth.

  “Orly, don’t.” Anneliese pulled my hand, this time with force, yanking me back.

  We ran. We ran all the way to our building, Heinrich singing as he huffed along behind us. I recognized the words of his song. “Der Jud! Er ist überall auf der Erde zuhaus und ist so verbreitet wie Wanze und Laus. Der Jud!” The Jew, he is at home all over the world. And is as common as a bug or a louse. The Jew!

  “Where are you going, little Jew? We were just starting to have fun. Anneliese, does your Daddy know who you’re playing with?”

  We fell ag
ainst the wooden door, my hand shaking as I fumbled with the doorknob. Heinrich used his baton to lift my skirt again. “Just wanted to see if it’s true you people have tails.”

  “Stop it, Heinrich, leave her alone.” Anneliese tried to shove him away from the door but he forced his way past us.

  “I think I need to have a chat with your parents about the company you’re keeping.”

  We took the stairs two at a time, Heinrich easily keeping up. I prayed that Anneliese’s parents were not home. As we passed my door, my steps faltered, but as Anneliese continued, I followed. I could not leave her. I could not lead Heinrich to my parents. But we were leading him to Anneliese’s. We should not have come home. We should have gone anywhere but here. Then again, Heinrich had always known where we lived.

  “Mutter! Open up, please open.” Anneliese rarely had keys; her mother was usually home.

  The door swung inward, and Anneliese stumbled into the doughy bulk of her mother. Heinrich was right behind me. I willed myself to look up at Frau Meier. “Let her in, Mutter, please.” Anneliese had turned back for me.

  Frau Meier’s lips stretched toward her ears, but I couldn’t call it a smile. I knew then I wouldn’t go in even if she let me.

  “Frau Meier.” Heinrich swept his hat from his head. “I felt it my duty to let you know the filth with whom your daughter has been consorting.”

  “Thank you, Heinrich, but I will deal with my daughter myself.” She began to close the door. “I’ll leave you to deal with the Jew.”

  I didn’t wait for her to turn the lock. While Heinrich was still speaking I flew down the stairs and was already halfway to our apartment by the time he started after me. I slipped inside home and closed the door against him.

  But I no longer had any illusion that I was safe.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING I found a paper slipped under our door. Anneliese had written me a story of Friedenglückhasenland, of our rabbits, their planets and solar systems, their lakes and mountains and apples and music and friendships. Curled in a corner of our sofa I stared at it, the promises of our world feeling empty.

  I tried to write my own back to her, but my imagination failed me. My bunnies failed to be adorable, failed to be peaceful. They betrayed each other, starved each other. In the end I crumpled up my story and dropped it in the trash.

  Fifteen

  In mid-June 1938, the Nazis arrest nine thousand alleged criminals, including at least a thousand Jews, and send them to concentration camps.

  My father fought in the Great War. This was something I sensed he was proud of even though he wouldn’t discuss it. Most Jews had fought for Austria in that war. The bayonet he had carried—that he had most likely used—hung on our wall over the fireplace, just above my reach. The blade still shone, bearing no mark of its grisly journeys. Even the two studs on its handle were kept carefully polished. Like the medal he kept in my mother’s jewelry box, it was a symbol of love, of what he had done for Austria. What he was still willing to do. I didn’t like to think about that bayonet. I thought of my father with only a stringed bow, committing music, not murder.

  Austria, it turned out, was not as loyal to us as we had been to it.

  I don’t remember the precise date it happened but I remember the city was warming and the lilacs were in bloom. It must have been a Friday in May, as we had already placed the Shabbat candles on the table next to a small loaf of challah and a vase of purple blossoms. We had no excuse to skip lighting the candles anymore, now that neither of my parents could work. I was in the kitchen with my mother, cutting raw potatoes into pieces after she peeled them with a knife. Not only would no one sell us meat, but we could no longer afford it.

  As the potatoes sizzled in oil, our apartment door blew open.

  This time, no one had bothered to knock. They were all noise and aggression and self-importance as they shouted to my father from the hallway. Borderless fear shot through me.

  But I recognized their voices. The voices of the people who had come to take our home away. These were not the voices of German soldiers. These were not the voices of Nazis. They were the voices of two people I’d known all my life. Our upstairs neighbors. Anneliese’s parents.

  They arrived accompanied by two police officers wearing swastikas. My mother’s hands froze when she heard them. The potato she was peeling slipped between her fingers and fell into the sink. I watched her to know how to feel. To know what to do.

  But she did nothing.

  Through the door to the living room I saw Willi standing on the threshold of his room. Surely he would have something to say? But he stayed silent, unmoving.

  “We have put up with you Jews long enough. You will leave this house tonight,” Herr Meier said to my father in the hall. “Go on and get your things.”

  Still, my mother did nothing! “Mutti,” I whispered. She turned to me then and shook her head.

  “Did you hear me? This is no longer your apartment. There are good Christians who need it.”

  Our home in Alsergrund, the home in which I was born, in which my mother was born, was not our home. I could not absorb that. How could there be life without our home? I wondered where Anneliese was. “You will go live with other people like you in Leopoldstadt.”

  There are no other people like us, I wanted to scream. There are no parents like mine. No one else could lift me up to touch the golden ladies of the Musikverein or bring me pieces of famous chandeliers.

  Leopoldstadt was the second district, a Jewish neighborhood where we often went to have dinner with friends or to go to the theater. It was crowded and noisy. Anneliese and I took the tram there on Sundays, to ride the Riesenrad, the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. It spun above the Prater amusement park, where I hear it still spins today. From the top we could see the river, winding away from us to unknown lands. “Some day we’ll drive a ship down that river,” Anneliese told me. “Someday we’ll take it all the way to Friedenglückhasenland.”

  Who in Leopoldstadt would take us in? It’s almost laughable to me now that I imagined we would have to find someone with a spare bedroom. As if anyone had a spare bedroom. As if we would ever again be permitted to have any space of our own.

  Even as I wondered all this, a more pressing question was throbbing in my mind. How would Anneliese find me?

  My father finally spoke. His voice was low. I had to strain to hear him, my knife hovering over the cutting board. “We own this building. My wife was born in this apartment.”

  “Do you know, Jew, that if I denounce you, you are going to go straight to a camp?”

  My mother and I turned as one, stepping quietly toward the door. My father was standing between the door and the hallway closet, where my mother’s height had been scratched into the paint of the doorframe with a pencil each year of her girlhood. The marks were still there, next to marks for me and Willi. We were taller than she had been, every year.

  No one was going to hurt my father. He was ours. Other fathers had already been taken, already stolen from their families and sent to the camps. They could not take mine. I would not let them. I curled my fingers around my knife. What did I think I was going to do? Go after Herr Meier with a potato knife? Stab Anneliese’s father? Any one of his broad fingers could have flicked it easily from my hand. And then there were his two Nazi friends.

  One of the police officers who had entered with the Meiers walked down the hall into our living room and looked around as if it were his already. When he saw my father’s bayonet, he moved to lift it from the wall. Willi took a step into the room but my father shook his head at him.

  “With that weapon I fought for my country, for Austria.” My father’s voice was clear and strong, though I saw his fingers twitching by his sides. “With that I defended her.” Under the bayonet was his certificate of honorable discharge: You are herewith assured of the
Fatherland’s gratitude.

  I knew Anneliese’s father hadn’t fought in the war. He had been too sickly, she said. Some kind of childhood lung infection.

  My father picked up a silver-framed photo from the mantel over the fireplace, turned it toward the officer. I knew that photo well; it had always stood there. It showed my father young and round-faced, smart in his uniform, bayonet in his arms.

  “I give this to you, to remind you who we are.”

  I didn’t understand why my father would give them something so dear. That image was precious to me. I expected the man to smash it, to send it to the ground with the rest of our hopes. Instead, he tucked the photo of my father into his jacket.

  He had known, before it dawned on the rest of us, that nothing in that apartment was ours anymore.

  There ended my memories of my first home. With the blur of our departure. With the monsters at our heels. With the sound of my knife, dropping useless to the kitchen floor.

  Sixteen

  In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries meet in Evian, Switzerland, to discuss what to do with Jewish refugees. Nearly all refuse to relax their immigration quotas. Australia says it has no “racial problem” and is uninterested in importing one.

  We moved first to 2 Czerinplatz, where we were crowded into a one-bedroom apartment—a forced communal apartment called a Sammelwohnung—with my Vienna grandparents, Aunt Thekla, Uncle Tobias, Aunt Klothilde, my cousins, and a dozen Jews from other families. My grandfather had lost his ophthalmology practice. My aunt Klothilde had been expelled from the Medical University of Vienna, along with the rest of the Jewish students. I remembered her telling us about the day a band of Nazis had lined up in front of the steps to her classroom building, to keep Jews from entering.

  The apartment was filthy and stank of excrement. The toilet was always overflowing. We slept in our clothes on the floor, pressed tightly together. We had left almost everything behind—the piano, our books, Willi’s soldiers, the green-and-white dress my mother had made me for my first piano recital. Stefi. I had no memory of life without Stefi. She had always been there, chastising me for ripping another skirt, insisting that I stay at the table until I finished my dinner. Yet there was hardly any time to say good-bye. She had been out buying bread when they came for us and returned just as the men were prodding us through the apartment with their guns, as we gathered the few things we could carry. She clutched the dark loaf of rye to her chest like a child. No one bothered to speak to her. She was not Jewish.