“Max?” I said. “Is that really you?” I hugged him to me hard, and he felt and smelled just as I remembered him, like mulberries and paper from his bookshop, before the war.
“Is Jo home? I need to talk to him,” Max said, a note of desperation in his voice, and the words I needed to tell him caught in my throat.
So instead I said, “Why don’t you come in. I have fresh brötchen. Tell me where you’ve been all these years. We’ll catch up, hmm?”
Max ate my brötchen, saying he was starving, and it was refreshing to see that wherever he’d been, wherever he’d gone, he hadn’t lost his appetite. It wasn’t until I told him about Johann that he put the food down and stopped eating.
“How could this happen?” he asked, and it was a funny thing to say from a man who’d disappeared himself from our lives for twelve years.
But I told him as gently as I could about the double-decker bus that had jumped the sidewalk as Johann had been walking home from work last summer. “Wrong place, wrong time,” I said, shaking my head. It was a phrase I had been repeating to myself. We had been lucky during the war, escaping relatively unscathed, and then when life was finally righting itself again, and we had settled into a nice life here in West Berlin, misfortune had finally found us.
“Where have you been all these years?” I asked Max. I wanted to change the subject. If I spoke anymore about Jo and what had happened, I would begin to cry, and I didn’t want Max to see me that way. I especially didn’t want Gracie to hear me from the other room.
“I was . . . traveling,” Max said, wiping crumbs from his chin with a napkin, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to just desert your friends for twelve years and then show up again, on their doorstep, after all this time. Max had never handled grief well, and in the years after his father died, he had made a bad habit of leaving, running away. Johann had been quite worried after Hanna disappeared that Max would flee again, or worse, that he would bring harm onto himself. It was good to see him sitting here now, looking so very well.
“I have . . . missed some time,” Max was saying.
“Just like Hanna,” I mused, and it was the oddest thing that she had described her experience of the war to me once, in almost that exact same way. As soon as I said Hanna’s name, his face changed. It lightened, and then he smiled. “She is safe? She is here?”
“Safe, yes,” I said. “Here, no. She’s in Paris now. Playing with an orchestra. She believed you were dead . . . we both did.” It was only Jo who had believed that maybe Max was off somewhere, just being Max or perhaps convalescing. I wished he were here now, to see he was right.
“Paris,” Max breathed. “Is there a train to Paris? I have to see her. She has to know I’m alive.”
If seeing Max had been a shock to me this morning, I couldn’t quite imagine what it would be like for Hanna. But then again, if Johann were to show up on my doorstep, after I believed him to be dead for only eleven months and seven days . . . I was overcome with emotion just thinking about it. “Of course,” I told him. “Whatever you need, let me help you. Just promise me one thing, don’t disappear on us again, okay? Gracie and I will want to see you now that you’re back in Germany.”
Max looked down at the table, then back up at me. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and I wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, disappearing, for what had happened to Johann, or for the fact that he already planned to disappear again. Johann had told me about Max’s illness, about the way grief had disturbed Max’s body as a child, and I’d long wondered if his disappearing was some sort of strange antidote to all that. The only way he understood how to survive in the most terrible of times.
“Come,” I said. “Let me find Hanna’s letter with her address in Paris, and then we’ll get you some money and I’ll get you to the train station, all right?” I stood, and then I realized, taking Max to the train would be the first time I left my house in months.
Hanna, 1950
We played our first concert to a packed audience, thanks to Monsieur Le Bec paying for advertising in all the city’s newspapers, and because we held the concert for free outside in the Tuileries Garden. It didn’t hurt that it was a lovely Saturday in April either; the sun was shining, and the air smelled like springtime: roses in bloom and freshly cut grass. Our pieces were polished from months of rehearsals, and we played a lovely and almost musically perfect concert of European classical composers (excluding the Germans, because everything German was still out of fashion): Ravel, Dvořák, Haydn, and Mahler.
The Temps de Paris published a review the following week, calling our little orchestra a “grand accomplissement” and as I read it over his shoulder, Stuart did not have to translate for me to know that they liked us. We were invited back to do a spring and summer concert series at Tuileries, eight different Saturday afternoons in May, June, and July, and Stuart told me in private that he believed if it all went well, we might be able to secure more patronage, better rehearsal space for the fall, and perhaps even a concert series next year where we could charge admission.
“You did it,” I said to him, as he put the paper down on the kitchen table and poured himself a cup of coffee. He flexed and extended his fingers, what he did when he was tired or sore. I was used to his bent ring finger by now, so that I barely even noticed it, except in times like this, when clearly it was bothering him.
“We did it,” he said, sitting across from me with his coffee. I smiled and didn’t argue with him. We both knew that an orchestra’s success or failure lay as much with the principal violinist as with its conductor. If only Max could see this. But I quickly tried to push the thought away. Max wasn’t sitting here with me; Stuart was.
Stuart slept in my bed every night that spring, and even though we were both exhausted from long days of rehearsal, we would make love in the darkness. It was a weird, unspoken rule between us that during the day, we never discussed it, any of it. We were entirely professional at rehearsal, and even in the evenings when I practiced at home. We talked only about music, about the orchestra; we moved as we always had around the apartment. Except at night, when we got into bed, when we were together. Maybe Stuart understood that deep down I still grieved for Max; I still loved Max, too. Or maybe he was afraid that if he said anything at all, whatever we had would end, it would all fall apart.
That’s why I didn’t speak of it. Because I didn’t want it to end. And sometimes, during the very long warm afternoons of rehearsal that spring, I would count the number of hours until the darkness would come, until Stuart would climb into my bed and touch me again.
By the time our final concert came around at the end of July, the orchestra had grown in great esteem. The concert series was, in fact, going so brilliantly that two other conductors had written to me about positions in their orchestras, one in the south of France and one in Vienna. And though they would both be better-paying, bigger orchestras, I didn’t want Stuart to know other conductors were trying to poach me, and I didn’t even mention the letters to him. I was content right here, in Paris, with him. My salary was still quite small, but I wasn’t starving by any means. I was finally feeling something close to happiness. It was a delicate bubble, my forgotten past always hovering around the edges, threatening to pop it, but most days I did not think about the past. I thought only about the present and what might be my future.
And then, everything changed that final night in the park. We were playing, Saint-Saëns, and I stood for the violin solo, closed my eyes, and played it with my whole body and my whole heart. The night air was sticky, and when I was finished, beads of sweat trickled down my back, pooling underneath my curls in the nape of my neck. The audience applauded and I opened my eyes. And I saw him there, in the second row, clapping wildly: Max.
I blinked, not believing my eyes. It was nearly dusk, and my body was on fire from playing, from the July heat. When I opened my eyes and looked again he was still there; he saw me staring at him, and he smiled.
Stuart l
owered his arms; the song was over, and the audience applauded for my solo. I was supposed to take a bow, return to my seat for the final number, but I could not move.
“Hanna.” Stuart was whispering my name. I held on to Max’s eyes in the audience. “Hanna,” Stuart said again. Max averted his eyes first, turned, and began to walk away.
“I have to go,” I said to Stuart, desperately trying to watch where Max was walking. But there were a lot of people. His head began to bob through the crowd, farther and farther from me. I clutched my stomach like I was about to be ill, and Stuart nodded. It wasn’t a lie. I felt like I might vomit, or cry, or both.
I ran off to the side of the orchestra, following the path I’d seen Max take, and I heard Stuart announce our final number for the evening, our final piece for the summer, Debussy. They would play it without me. I might’ve felt a pang of sadness had I not been so frantic to catch up to Max.
I had lost sight of him, and I stopped, spun around. “Max,” I called out. But the orchestra had begun to play again, the music drowning out the sound of my cries. Ling missed her entrance, her cello meandering in a beat late, and I sat down in the grass, put my head in my hands, and tried to breathe. Had I merely imagined Max here? Was I going insane?
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, his hand. It had been so long since I had felt him, since he had touched me, but even after all this time, I knew, it was unmistakably him. I reached my hand up; his fingers laced through mine. “Hanna.” My name, in his voice. How I had longed to hear that again. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Your orchestra is playing without you.”
I stood and leaped into his arms, buried my head in his chest. “You’re here. You’re really here.” I kept repeating the words, not believing them, so I said them again, and again. “You’re really here?” His shirt still smelled the way his shop had once, earthy, like wood and books, and for a moment I was back in Gutenstat, nearly twenty years ago, a young girl with a whole heart and a faraway dream I completely believed was within my reach.
I stood back and looked at him. And he was exactly as I remembered. I reached up and touched his face, and every line, every crevice, felt exactly the same.
“Will you come with me?” he asked, holding out his hand. I glanced back to the orchestra. Stuart’s back was to me; he was conducting, and I had never viewed him from this angle before, the way the music poured from his shoulders, mirroring the same passion I felt in my fingers as they rode my violin. Preludes was half finished, no one in the audience noticing my missing part, but me. “Hanna,” Max said. “I don’t have much time.”
And though playing in an orchestra was all that I’d ever wanted, and though I had been happy just an hour ago, I turned away from the music and took Max’s hand.
I could not take Max to my apartment, to my home I shared with Stuart. Not because he would be angry that I had been with another man, but because it wasn’t fair to Stuart. None of this was. But I tried not to think about Stuart, and instead I took Max to the Hotel du Paris, where Julia and the boys had stayed in the spring. I paid for a room—Max did not have any francs with him. Never mind that I couldn’t really afford such a nice hotel. Max was here! Nothing else mattered. I had so many things to ask him. Where had he been, and what had happened to him, and me, during the war?
But then we opened the door to our room. I put my violin down on the settee, and we did not bother to turn on the light before we were embracing each other, before Max was unzipping my black dress, and I was pulling at the buckle of his belt, his pants. My body, my hands, knew these things, this man, and they took over for my mind, which might have been feeling something akin to alarm if I’d stopped to allow it. But I didn’t stop.
My skin was hot and feverish, and so was his. It was this fever, this fire, that consumed me, that kept me from asking all the questions I should’ve been asking, and just kissing him instead, touching him. Max lifted me up, placed me gently on the bed, kissed the center of my collarbone, my true heart, the place where my body formed the v for violin, as he used to tease me.
I ran my hands across his back, my fingers knowing his body as well as they had ever known the violin. Max was Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major, the first concerto I’d ever played onstage by heart.
“What did you mean, you don’t have much time?” I asked him later, lying in the darkness, our bare legs entwined, my head against his chest, listening to his heart beat softly in my ear. “I am never letting you go again.” I turned on my side and wrapped my arms around him, kissing his neck.
He kissed the top of my head. “Tell me what happened to you . . . how you got here? Elsa told me a little, but tell me all of it.” Elsa. So that explained how he had found me. Elsa and I had written a few letters over the years. She knew I was here; I’d invited her and Grace to come to the concert series in Paris this summer, but she’d politely declined, saying it was too far to travel and they were saving money to go visit Emilia in Holland at the end of the summer. In truth I believed she was depressed since Johann had passed, not that I blamed her for it.
It had been a while since I’d recounted the whole story to anyone, even since I’d really thought about it myself. But then I began again, my voice ringing out in the darkness, telling it all to Max. How I awoke in the field, the kindness of Sister Louisa, the doctor in Berlin who told me I had experienced a trauma and Henry Childs who’d tried and failed to help me remember it. The ten years missing and the entire war I couldn’t remember! Julia bringing me to London. Stuart bringing me here.
Stuart. My betrayal to him took my breath away when I said his name, and I stopped talking for a moment. Max stroked my shoulder with his thumb, not seeming to notice that part. “Ten years,” he mused quietly.
“Do you know what happened to me in that time?” I asked him. Max shook his head, and I asked him where he had been, what he had been doing all this time.
He didn’t say anything for a few moments. “I’m going to save you,” he finally said, kissing my head softly.
“I’m safe here. We both are.” The weight of all the years, all the worry, was unbelievably gone, and my body felt lighter, weightless. I had so many more things to ask him, to say to him, but I was suddenly so tired.
Max pulled me closer and I inhaled the familiar scent of his skin. And then I heard myself murmuring that we could finally get married now, after all these years. But it didn’t make any sense out loud the way it all made sense in my head, and I closed my eyes.
That night I dreamed a vivid dream that for the first time in so long was not a nightmare. I was back in Berlin, walking through the Opernplatz, holding hands with Max. But there was no war, no Nazis, no books burning. We were laughing, happy; the air was warm and bright, and Max kissed my ear and whispered, You are my fire, Hanna. I will save you. You just have to let me.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, I could still feel Max from my dream, and I remembered he was here, in real life, too. But then I rolled over, and his side of the bed was empty. I ran my hand over the impression of his body, still in the sheets. “Max,” I called out, but his name only echoed into the empty hotel room. I remembered what he said: I don’t have much time.
Then I saw the note on his pillow: Hanna, I will love you forever. I have to leave again for now. Don’t be angry, please! I will find you again in the future, as soon as I can. I promise. Love always, M.B.
Max, 1934
He awoke the morning after coming back through the closet with the worst headache he’d ever had in his life. And then, the vague recognition that maybe he had stayed away too long, that maybe, like his mother, and his father, he was dying? He certainly felt like he was dying. His entire body was weak, the pain in his head so bad that the ache ran through his teeth, to his neck and his shoulders, all the way down through his torso to his toes. Lying in his bed above the shop, he ached so badly, and he could remember his time away only in pieces, in feelings at first: Elsa was sadness, spiderwebs of gray in her hair. Hanna w
as happiness and fire, a violin solo in a flower garden.
He slept fitfully, in and out of consciousness, his pain so bad, he could not get out of bed. And then after a day, or maybe two, he awoke again, ravenously hungry and desperate for Hanna.
She had just been next to him, sleeping. He had made love to her, whispered with her in the darkness. She had played her violin, like lightning on a humid summer night.
But his bed was empty, and he wasn’t at all sure now what was real, what had been a dream, or what had really happened in another time.
The future was intoxicating, he knew that much. He understood why his parents had gone again and again. Once he’d hugged the Feinsteins good-bye, he’d suddenly needed to know what had happened to Hanna, that she was safe. And then he’d found her? Yes. Elsa had helped him do it. Hanna was alive and beautiful and playing her violin in Paris. She told him she had skipped ahead in time, that she was missing years. And then he had known one thing to be true: He would save her. He had come back here to save her.
He walked downstairs to the shop, the morning sunlight streaming in through the front glass window, illuminating a coating of fine dust on the counter, and he ran his forefinger across it, streaking a line. The note he’d left for Hanna here was gone, and so were many of the books in the shop; the shelves half empty. He had been gone for longer than a week, even two; the realization hit him hard and swiftly, a punch in his gut that made it momentarily hard to breathe. He needed to find Hanna now.
He walked outside, and the brightness of the sunshine blinded him. He squinted, inhaled the scent of mulberries, and noted the feeling of the air on his face: warm, humid. It was spring, at least, maybe summer. Next door, there were people inside Feinstein’s shop, the smells of fresh baked bread wafting out onto the street. But Feinstein’s name had been painted over on the awning above the glass storefront, and now it just said: Bäckerei. His stomach rumbled, but he didn’t stop in to satisfy it. If he had been gone awhile, Hanna would be worried. His hunger now was a penance for whatever pain or stress he’d caused her.
In Another Time Page 18