In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  As I played, I felt alive again. The fire that Max said I possessed came back to me in small bursts. When Julia knocked on my door, I put down my violin to answer her, feeling breathless, nearly giddy.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” Julia frowned. I shook my head. I didn’t. When I played, time escaped me; everything escaped me. I’d even forgotten about Max, though now with Julia standing here frowning at me, it all rushed back, and I felt his absence again, a weight in my chest. When I’d been practicing for my symphony audition in Berlin, I’d been playing in the bookshop, all hours of the night, Max listening, sometimes even bringing me cups of tea in the middle of the night to keep me awake and hydrated. “Half past ten,” Julia said sternly. “And the boys are still awake. And Friedrich is annoyed. The whole neighborhood is probably annoyed. I’m surprised no one has called the police yet, all the ruckus you’re making.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and truly I was. I didn’t want to keep Moritz and Levin—or the neighbors—from sleep. “Just ten more minutes. I can practice in the closet. It’ll mute the sound. I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  Julia shook her head. “Hanni, no. It’s too late. No more playing.” I opened my mouth to tell Julia about my audition in the morning, about Maestro Philip, but then she said, “We’ve been patient with you, but enough is enough.” And I bit my lip. Julia never understood me, and all these years later, all these miles away from Berlin, nothing had changed. “Friedrich arranged an interview for you at the hospital. They have an opening in the records department. You’re a good typist. It’s only part-time, so that will still give you time to rest, and be with the boys.”

  I was not, in fact, a good typist, or even an efficient one. My fingers weren’t made for the keys of the typewriter, but for the strings of the violin. But I nodded all the same. I would go to the audition tomorrow, and once Maestro Philip offered me a spot in his orchestra I would tell Julia then. Once she saw that I could be paid to play the violin, perhaps she would appreciate it more.

  “Now good night,” she said, her voice softened. She reached out and tucked some wayward curls behind my ears. “Sleep tight, Hanni.”

  She switched off the light and shut the door, and I stood there in the darkness, my violin still in my hand. I lifted it back to my chin. I could finger through the music still, from memory, moving the bow silently through the air, hovering above the strings. I closed my eyes, and then I was back in Gutenstat, in the bookshop with Max.

  Just play him the fire, Max said to me, once. They’ll have no choice but to put you in the orchestra. Max put his hands on my shoulders, and my whole body felt lighter. His green eyes were filled with warmth, and he smiled, revealing his slightly crooked top front tooth. For a moment, nothing mattered but him. Not even the violin. I wanted to reach up, to run my fingers through his brown curls, to feel the light stubble on his cheek against my palm. But I’d been so angry with him for leaving, I’d shrugged him off, continued to play instead. Why hadn’t I kissed him then? Why hadn’t I held on to him?

  Now the violin was all I had. I stood there in the darkness for a long while, fingering through the music, until I could no longer force myself to stay awake. And then, in a restless sleep, I dreamed about myself auditioning, but I was being forced to play my violin for Hitler himself. And when I awoke, sweating, shaking, I had to stifle a scream.

  I snuck out of the house just after sunrise the next morning, before Julia or Friedrich could wake up and say anything more to me. I didn’t want to hear their voices, their doubts in my head while I auditioned. I stopped at the market on Carnaby Street near the boys’ school, wanting some tea and breakfast, but I’d forgotten my ration coupons at home. It was still hard to remember that I needed them, that there had just been a war and that food was still in such short supply. I’d also gotten used to the sight of missing and bombed buildings, so that I barely even noticed the piles of rubble and ash anymore, tucked in among the beauty and the splendor of what still stood in the West End. That was just the way the world looked, here and now. Kind of how I felt myself: bombed out and broken and yet somehow still carrying myself through daily life.

  But today was different. Today there was music, opportunity. And who needed breakfast anyway? As I walked toward my audition, slowly, I played through the piece in my mind. I felt confident I could play it well this morning. The question was whether Maestro Philip would care. He had to care. When I had played in Germany, people had always cared. As Mamele always used to tell me, my playing was my gift. And I knew it still was, whether Julia and Friedrich understood it or not.

  The door to the auditorium was locked today when I arrived, but when I knocked once, Maestro Philip promptly opened it and ushered me inside. It was small, smaller than the auditoriums I’d played in in Berlin, even half the size of the one I used to practice in at the Lyceum. But this would be a real orchestra, a real paying job as a violinist. It was what I’d always wanted, even if I’d never envisioned it quite like this.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Maestro said dismissively, and he waved me toward the stage with his large hand. I walked onto the stage and breathed in the damp earthy smell of the auditorium. In my head I knew it had been ten years since I’d stood on a stage and played an audition like this one, but in my heart it felt as if it had been no time at all. This was home.

  I put my violin up to my chin. I’d brought the music but I didn’t need it, and I didn’t bother to put it up on the stand. And then I closed my eyes, and I played. The music was fire and light, and my fingers moved as they knew how. My arms and my body moved with them. I was alive again. For the first time since I’d come to London, I felt vaguely happy.

  When I finished, I was breathing hard, and I lowered the bow and opened my eyes. Maestro sat in the front row, his face expressionless, and I couldn’t tell whether he’d liked the performance or not. “Well?” I said, anxiously.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Maestro said.

  “In touch?”

  “Leave your contact information with my assistant at the door. I have many violinists coming in for an audition this week. A lot of interest.”

  Why had I assumed I was the only one? That my playing would immediately convince him the way I’d almost always been able to do in Berlin. First, to make it into the Lyceum as a music student, then to come under the tutelage of Herr Fruchtenwalder, who was the best teacher there. And then later still, when I auditioned for the symphony. “You’ll let me know then?” My voice faltered a little.

  “If you don’t hear from me, you can assume I’ve chosen someone else,” Maestro said.

  Max, 1932

  Hanna brought her violin to dinner at Elsa and Johann’s the first time she came with Max to meet them. Elsa had asked Max to tell her to bring it, saying she’d heard so much from Max about Hanna’s playing, she wanted to experience it for herself. But when Max had mentioned it to Hanna earlier in the week as they’d had coffee in between Hanna’s classes at the Lyceum, she had argued against it. “I don’t want to perform for your friends,” she said. “I want to get to know them.” Max had tried to convince her she could do both, but he wasn’t sure she’d listened until she’d shown up at his shop that afternoon, her violin in hand.

  “Come on in,” Elsa said now, softly. She wore the baby wrapped in a sheet across her stomach. “This is the only way Emilia will sleep.” She smiled and ushered them into the dining room. “Stew’s almost ready.”

  Hanna offered to help in the kitchen, and she put her violin down by the fireplace and followed Elsa back, leaving Max and Johann to talk before dinner. “Let’s go outside,” Johann whispered. “Els will kill us if we wake the baby.”

  Max had been to see them only once since Emilia was born six weeks ago. Though she was tiny, little Emilia had disrupted everything. Johann complained he hadn’t slept in weeks, and he and Max no longer met on Saturday nights for ale. But Max had been meeting Hanna after sundown each Saturday, and he realized now, some
what guiltily, he’d barely noticed his friend’s absence. Or the rather large black circles under his eyes.

  “I’d offer you an ale,” Johann whispered, “but I’m afraid to walk into the kitchen. And I don’t think I could drink one. I’d fall asleep right here on the porch step.”

  Max smiled and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. It was too cold to sit comfortably outside, but Johann didn’t seem to notice the January chill, and Max buttoned up his coat and pulled on his hat.

  It was already close to five, and on Sunday, the trains didn’t run very late, so Hanna planned to sleep at his apartment for the first time tonight, to take the train to the Lyceum early tomorrow morning. She’d lied to her mother and sister, told them she was spending the night at her girlfriend Gerta’s place, and Max felt nearly giddy at the thought of being with her all these many hours, this entire night, her sleeping next to him in his bed. It was hard to think of anything else, to listen to what Johann was saying about Emilia not wanting to sleep when it was dark outside.

  “You want to hear something crazy?” Johann said now. Max blinked, shivered a little from the cold, and brought his attention back to his friend.

  “What’s that, Jo?”

  “I thought I saw your father, on the train a few weeks ago.”

  “What?” Max’s heart thudded in his chest at the mere idea of his father. How he would love for him to meet Hanna, and to just talk to him again about books and life.

  Johann laughed. “I mean, that’s how sleep deprived I am. I’m hallucinating now.” He shook his head. “But I swore it was him. I even walked up to him, called out, Herr Beissinger!”

  “And what did the man do?” Max thought of the closet door, open in the bookshop weeks earlier, and he felt light-headed. He forced himself to take a slow deep breath.

  “What any sane man would do, run off at the next stop and not look back. But, jeez, I swore it was him. It was the hat—remember the one he used to wear all the time when we were kids?”

  Max nodded. “The brown bowler.” His mother had bought his father that hat once, and after she died, he hadn’t taken it off it seemed for months.

  “Yes, that was the one. This fellow had the same hat,” Johann said. “Els said it was my mind playing tricks . . . That your father was the only father I’d ever known, and here I was a father myself, with no idea what the hell I’m doing.”

  “You’ll figure it out.” Max put his hand on Johann’s shoulder, trying to reassure his friend, though in a way he was also jealous. What he wouldn’t give to see his father again. Even if it wasn’t real.

  “Stew’s ready.” Hanna peeked her head out of the door and interrupted their conversation. She shivered a little. “It’s freezing out here. You boys will catch your death.”

  “Is it?” Johann asked.

  “Yes.” Max stood. “Come on, let’s go inside. Elsa will kill me if I let you freeze.”

  Emilia slept wrapped and snuggled on Elsa’s chest through the whole dinner, and the four of them ate their stew, talking in whispers, trying not to wake her. “We’re really quite normal,” Elsa whispered to Hanna. “I promise we’re not always like this.”

  Hanna smiled and complimented Elsa on her stew, and Max felt a lightness bubbling up inside of him. Something felt right, whole. Him and Hanna. Johann and Elsa.

  Emilia woke just as they were finishing dinner and as Elsa nursed her, Johann stood to clear the table. “Will you play for us?” Elsa asked Hanna.

  “I don’t want to disturb the baby,” Hanna said.

  Elsa shook her head. “Nonsense. She’s eating now and won’t even notice.”

  Hanna glanced at him, and Max smiled at her. He wanted Elsa and Johann to see Hanna, to hear Hanna, to understand how special she was, the way he already did. He was glad she’d brought her violin.

  “All right, well, just a little,” Hanna said. She stood and took her violin from the case, and she went and stood by the fireplace. She closed her eyes, and she played something soft and slow and sweet. Max’s stomach was full from the soup, his skin warm from the fire.

  “Like magic,” Elsa said, as Hanna’s music floated through her house.

  Later, inside his apartment, Max felt jittery with nerves. He and Hanna had been seeing each other for months. They’d gone to movies and met for coffees; Max had been to several recitals, more rehearsals. They’d kissed more times than he could count, quick kisses good-bye at the train station, slow passionate kisses that they savored in the darkness of the theater, which left him hungry for more. And though it had been left unspoken between them, they both knew that tonight could be something more, something bigger. At least, Max thought it could be, hoped it was what Hanna wanted.

  Hanna had seemed jittery, too, as they walked up the stairs to his apartment. She let out a nervous laugh as she told him she had forgotten to bring something to sleep in. And Max walked to his closet, gave her one of his shirts.

  She changed in the W.C. and brushed her teeth (she had remembered her toothbrush) and then she walked into his bedroom. His shirt was much too long on her—it hit at her knees, and she had rolled the sleeves up, but they still hit her wrists. “Hi,” she said, shyly, looking down at her bare toes. Then she looked up at him.

  “Hi.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back They stood a few feet apart and neither one of them moved for a few moments. They had been spending a lot of time together. But this was different, and they both knew it. “We don’t have to do . . . anything,” he finally said, taking a step closer to her. “We can just go to sleep.”

  She reached out for his hand, laced her small fingers into his large ones, weaving them together. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” she said. “Unless you want to go to sleep?” She tugged his fingers lightly. She was teasing him. She knew he did not want to just go to sleep.

  He unlaced his fingers and moved them to the buttons on her shirt, that she’d just buttoned up. He undid the top one and then she moved her hand up. “Let me,” she said. Her fingers unfastened the buttons deftly, one by one, with precision, the same way they played the violin. With confidence, expertise.

  She was completely naked underneath his shirt, and with the buttons undone, the curves of her breasts, her pale flat stomach, were exposed. She took his hand back and guided it to her bare skin, just below her breasts. And when he touched her, she shivered a little. “Are you cold?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m just so . . . alive.”

  And that was the way he felt, too, alive.

  Hanna, 1946

  A week went by, then two, and Maestro Philip did not call. At first I was waiting by the telephone in Julia’s kitchen, but as the weeks went on, I began to understand it was never going to ring for me. I scoured the papers looking for news of other orchestras holding auditions, but that was the only one in London at the moment. And then I couldn’t put Julia off any longer, and I finally went to interview for the job she wanted me to have typing up records in the hospital. My mind and body felt numb as I followed the directions Friedrich had given me to the hospital, walking down Carnaby Street in the rain. I was young still; there were many years ahead of me. And I pictured the rest of my life with no violin, no Max: a large empty void, filled with long boring days and sleepless nights. I could barely breathe.

  The woman who interviewed me for the job didn’t ask too many questions, and if she noticed that my hair was a frizzy mess from the misty rain outside, or that I was, in general, a mess and altogether uninterested in the job, she pretended not to. “You can start first thing tomorrow, Miss Ginsberg,” she told me. “Nine a.m. sharp.”

  “You look sad, Tante,” Moritz said to me later that evening at supper. Julia and Lev looked up from their food, looked to him, then me, while Friedrich smoked his cigarette and read his paper, not bothering to listen. Lucky for him, cigarettes weren’t rationed in London, because he seemed to smoke them an awful lot. I couldn’t stand the smell. I didn’t know how Julia
could bear to kiss him.

  “No,” Julia said. “Tante isn’t sad. In fact, she’s very happy today because she got a new job.”

  “Playing in the orchestra?” Moritz’s eyes widened, and Lev kicked him under the table. Moritz groaned and rubbed his leg.

  “A real job,” Julia said brightly, “at the hospital where Papa works.”

  “The hospital?” Moritz sounded almost as disappointed as I felt. “I can tell a joke to cheer you up,” he offered.

  “Darling, I told you.” Julia’s voice was stretched thin. Moritz wore on her patience. “Tante is happy. She doesn’t need jokes. Eat your supper.”

  “Roses are red, violets are blue,” Moritz began, looking back at me, a mischievous grin on his face.

  “Friedrich.” Julia held her hands up, exasperated. “Can you do something about your son who doesn’t understand how to behave like a gentleman at the supper table?” Friedrich took a puff of his cigarette and shrugged.

  “A monkey like you.” Moritz was still telling his joke, and he cast a sideways glance at Lev, the monkey in this rhyme. Lev was concentrating very hard on his food and pretending not to notice. “Belongs in a zoo.” Moritz chuckled.

  I smiled at Moritz, so he knew I appreciated the gesture, even if he was about to get sent to his room for it. Then I stood. “Excuse me.” I felt suffocated in Julia’s large house, with Julia’s rules, Julia’s family, Julia’s idea of a real job, Friedrich’s smoke hovering over the supper table. “I’m not very hungry tonight.”