In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  “Boys, you’re worrying me,” I said. “Where is she?”

  Simultaneously they pointed up the winding staircase, toward her bedroom. “I’m sorry,” Moritz said. “She made us promise not to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Both boys looked at the floor, and I dropped my bags and ran up the staircase. The illness that had killed our mother had been terrible, the coughing, the weakness. But if Julia had the same thing, she could at least get good medical care here in London, unlike Mamele who’d had that ripped away from her by Hitler. Friedrich worked at the hospital for heaven’s sake; she would have access to the best doctors.

  Her bedroom door was shut, and I knocked on it. “Julia, it’s Hanna. I’ve come for a visit.” She didn’t answer. “Can I come in?” She still didn’t answer, so I turned the knob and walked inside.

  The room was dark, the air smelled musty, and Julia made a lump underneath the covers in her giant messy bed.

  “What are you doing here?” Her voice was hoarse, raspy. “Did the boys call you?”

  “No.” I’d forgotten my own worries for the last few minutes. “The symphony is on break, and I missed you and the boys.” It was only partly a lie—I had missed them. “I’ve come for a little visit.”

  “Without calling or writing me first?”

  I switched on the table lamp and sat down on the edge of her bed. Her hair, which was curly like mine, but which she usually had pulled back in a proper, neatly coiffed bun, was a mess, like a great wind had come and thrown curls everywhere. I pushed a few away from her face. “Are you sick?” I asked her gently. “Like Mamele was?”

  She sat up, pushed my hands away from her face, and pulled her hair back with her hands. “Goodness no, Hanni. I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “You don’t look healthy as a horse. You look horrible,” I shot back, finally honest with her in a way I hadn’t been when I saw her in April. She hadn’t looked great then, either, but I’d thought she just wasn’t aging well. Or she was tired from the trip. “And how long have you been in this bed? It smells stuffy in here.” I ran my finger across her nightstand and it came back dusty. “It looks like you haven’t cleaned in ages.”

  “He’s gone,” Julia said, her voice breaking on the word gone, as if she couldn’t quite get it all the way out without choking on it.

  “Someone died?” I was genuinely confused about who she meant, and why she hadn’t telephoned to tell me. And why she made the boys keep it from me.

  “Not died,” Julia choked out. “Gone. Friedrich left me.”

  “Friedrich?” I was still confused. I didn’t know my brother-in-law all that well. We hadn’t ever been close or really even talked much, not in Germany, not when I lived here. But he and Julia had been together since I was ten years old. It had never occurred to me that they might be having problems, that he would leave Julia. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” I was still thinking it was just a misunderstanding, that Julia was being overly dramatic. “Why would he leave you?”

  “He fell in love with someone else.” Julia held her hands up in the air. “A young, pretty British nurse who works at the hospital.”

  “Dumme Arschloch.” I felt a wash of such sudden and deep anger on Julia’s behalf that I slipped back into our native German for the insult.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have your life in Paris now. You’re finally happy. After all these years! The boys and I are just fine. You don’t need to concern yourself with us.”

  “Yes, I can see that. You look fine indeed.” There were so many times I’d been frustrated with Julia for not understanding me, my passion for violin, my love for Max. But maybe she had only wanted me to be happy all along? She’d just had a different idea of happy than I’d always had. Now that she believed I had it, that she’d seen me in Paris, glowing, as she’d called it, she didn’t want to do anything that might take it away from me. Not even ask for the help that I could see she so desperately needed.

  I climbed into the bed next to her, got under the covers, and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m not fine either,” I told her, perhaps the most honest thing I’d ever said to her. “Max is still alive,” I said. “He came back and left me again, just like he always did.” Julia squeezed my hand under the covers. “And that’s not even all of it,” I said. “I’ve also been having this . . . affair with Stuart.”

  “Oh, Hannalie.” She sighed, and I wasn’t sure if she was frustrated with me, as always, or relieved that she wasn’t all alone. “Leave it to you to make sure your life is more of a mess than mine. So what are you going to do now?”

  I wasn’t exactly sure of the answer myself until I said it out loud to her: “I’m going to follow my greatest love,” I told her.

  “Max?” she asked.

  “My violin,” I said.

  I spent three weeks in London with Julia and the boys, but then it was time for me to go. I had a train ticket to Vienna for the following morning; I had accepted the first violin position there, and orchestra rehearsals would begin in three days’ time. I was both nervous and elated about starting over again, about moving to a new city where I understood the language. In a weird way I already believed it would feel like home.

  I’d managed to get Julia up and out of bed during my stay; I’d helped her clean up the house and shop for food and cook meals. She said she could no longer afford Betsy without Friedrich’s handsome salary, and she wasn’t sure whether she could afford to keep the house forever either. Friedrich was still making the payments, and giving her a small monthly allowance, because she’d told him it was the only way he could continue to see the boys on weekends. But who knows how much longer he will even care about them? she’d said to me, holding her hands up in the air. And suddenly it didn’t seem so silly that I had always loved my violin so much. Julia had never loved anyone or anything besides Friedrich, and now, she told me, worst of all, she wasn’t at all sure what she would do with herself.

  “Typing at the hospital wasn’t so bad,” I said with a false air of cheeriness, but Julia quickly shot back that she didn’t want to work anywhere near the hospital. Friedrich and his Flittchen both still worked there.

  “You’ll find something else,” I told her, though I honestly didn’t know how easy it would be for an older woman with no real skills to find something in London these days. “You could always move to Vienna with me.” Though it wasn’t like I had anywhere for her to stay. I’d already gotten a place to live—the conductor’s daughter and her husband had offered to rent me the extra room in their home, a duplex in the French-occupied quarter of Vienna just a few blocks from where we would rehearse.

  “I wouldn’t uproot the boys,” Julia said with a frown. “London is the only home they’ve ever known. I’ll figure something out. I always do.”

  On my last day in London, I was out buying groceries for Julia, making sure she would have a supply for the rest of the week after I left, and on the way there, I found myself walking that familiar path toward the hospital, walking inside, and then taking the lift up to the fourth floor. Henry’s office was still right there, looking as it always had. I had forgotten to call him after Julia’s visit in the spring. My excuse was that I’d been consumed with the orchestra, but the truth was I hadn’t exactly wanted to call him either. I wasn’t sure I still wanted to revisit the past. But then the past, Max, had shown up anyway. Now I had even more questions, and even fewer answers.

  I knocked gently on the door, half hoping he wasn’t inside. But he opened up, straightaway. “Hanna!” he exclaimed. “What a lovely surprise. Come on in. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m visiting Julia while the symphony is on break,” I said. Henry frowned, and I remembered he and Friedrich were friends. Or they used to be, anyway. I quickly brought the subject back to me. “Actually, I’m moving to Vienna tomorrow, to play with a new symphony. I couldn’t leave London without stopping in to say hello
to you. It’s been a while.”

  “Vienna?” Henry raised his eyebrows in surprise. “But I thought you loved Paris?” Julia must have mentioned how happy I’d seemed when he’d come to her house, looking for me last spring.

  I cast my eyes down to the floor. “It’ll be a bigger symphony,” I said. “Better paying, too. And besides, I’ll understand the language. French was proving impossible for me to learn.”

  “Ahh,” Henry said, as if he understood. But I wasn’t sure how he could, when I couldn’t exactly understand it myself. I already missed Stuart, and I’d been such a coward; I’d written him a letter rather than telephoning him to tell him about Vienna. I’d told him exactly what I’d told Henry, better pay, speaking German again. But no matter what I wrote or said to Henry now, part of me longed to return to Stuart and the comfort of our apartment, our orchestra there. But I also held on to the note Max had left me on the hotel pillow. He would come back for me again. And when he did, I would go to him. I always did. It was something I hated about myself, but it was also something I knew in my heart as truth. I would forgive and love Max, no matter how many times he left me, whether it made logical sense or not. And that wasn’t fair to Stuart.

  “So,” Henry was saying now. “Back to a German-speaking country. You are confronting your past in a way then, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? I still don’t remember it.”

  He nodded. “Are you still having the same dreams?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure if I was or not. Stuart used to tell me I’d wake up screaming sometimes, and even though I no longer remembered the dreams the next morning, if Stuart said it happened, I trusted him that it had. The last dream I remembered was the one I had the night I spent with Max, but now, a few weeks later, I almost believed that entire night was a dream. Max was here, and then he was gone. Max was alive, or was he dead? Everything had changed, and nothing had changed. I had been waiting him for so long and was more confused than ever.

  Henry sipped from a mug of coffee on his desk. “I asked your sister to have you telephone me a few months ago,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I was so busy with the orchestra and then . . .” I held my hands up. My excuse sounded as flimsy out loud as it had felt in my head.

  “Perhaps you weren’t ready to hear from me then?” Henry smiled kindly and offered me the familiar chair inside his office. I sat down.

  Though I was different than I was when I’d come here a few years back, older, more confident, a real bona fide violinist, I couldn’t help myself: I still felt like a lost little girl in this chair. “I really can’t stay long,” I said, moving to the edge, ready to jump up and run out at any moment.

  “Of course,” he said. “And I have an appointment as well. But I have something I’ve been wanting to tell you.” I smiled nervously and waited for him to continue. My hands were shaking, and I clasped them together in my lap. “I came across someone a few months ago who thought they could’ve seen you during the war.” His words tumbled out in a rush, as if he believed I might run out of his office before he could finish. He would not be wrong to think that. Part of me wanted to.

  “Seen me?” I could barely breathe.

  “Do you want to hear this?” Henry asked kindly. “Do you want me to tell you more?”

  “No,” I said quickly. Then: “Yes. I don’t know . . . How did you meet this person?” I asked. “What is their name?” Max Beissinger was on the tip of my tongue, though I knew it wasn’t him. He didn’t know where I’d been in that time either.

  “I’ve been working with some survivors of the camps at the hospital. Talking through their trauma with them.”

  I thought of all my Jewish friends in Berlin: Gerta and Fritzie, and Herr Fruchtenwalder. I had kept them in a space in my mind, where I only remembered the happy things about them, where I never let myself consider what had become of them in those ten years, during the war. It was quite warm in Henry’s office, and I began to sweat.

  “I have been working with one woman,” Henry said, “who told me there was a women’s orchestra in her camp. When she mentioned it to me, I immediately thought of you and your violin. I asked her if she remembered any of the women who played the violin there.” He paused, and stared at me, trying to judge from my face if he should keep talking. My entire body felt frozen, suspended. “She didn’t know their names,” he said tentatively. “But she described one violinist who maybe looked like you . . .”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said quickly. “It wasn’t me.” It couldn’t have been. I couldn’t have been in a camp, in a women’s orchestra? I would’ve remembered that. The first orchestra I’d ever been in was in Paris. And Herr Doctor even said it, I was too healthy to have been in a camp, of such good weight in 1946.

  “Well, it very well might not have been,” Henry said. “But what if it was?”

  “I have to go.” I stood suddenly, bumping into his desk. His coffee tipped, spilled over the side of the cup, and Henry lunged to catch it, keep it from falling over entirely. “I’m sorry,” I said to Henry. “I can’t . . . I don’t want to.”

  “Hanna,” he called after me. “Please don’t run away.”

  But that’s exactly what I did. I ran the whole way back to Julia’s. When I got there, I ran into the bathroom and I vomited, barely making it to the toilet in time.

  Max, 1934

  In the beginning of August, President Hindenburg died of lung cancer. Hitler quickly announced that he would be combining the positions of president and chancellor into one, and that he would now be everything to Germany, Führer. Soldiers were required to take a personal oath of allegiance not to Germany anymore, but to Hitler himself. Die Führer was their country and their country was him. It made Max sick to his stomach to think about it. And Elsa, whose belly seemed to be growing larger and larger by the day now, announced to him and Johann and Hanna one Saturday night over supper at their house that her country would never be Hitler’s country.

  “If none of us believe it, then he will not be Germany. We will be Germany,” she said. Johann shushed her, telling her it was dangerous to even say such things out loud. And Elsa said, “So what are they going to do, arrest a woman with child?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” Johann said quietly, lighting a cigarette after dinner and leaning back in his chair. He offered a smoke to Max, but Max declined. Hanna didn’t like the smell of it on his clothes or the taste of it on his breath and she would complain when she kissed him after he spent a night out with Johann. He did not want to do anything to upset her tonight, as he had already decided that later, after dinner, he would finally give her the ring in his pocket. In these last few weeks, they had fallen back into their old routines. All the anger she’d had for him had finally subsided. And with not even the kindly old gentleman Hindenburg to temper Hitler now, Max wanted Hanna to move above his shop with him, so they would be close to the closet, able to leave at a moment’s notice.

  “I don’t know,” Hanna chimed in now. “I tend to agree with Elsa. There are more of us than there are of them. Chancellor? Führer? Why does that matter?” She still did not believe that Germany had become something terrible, unsafe for her, despite all evidence to the contrary. It was easier for her to believe she wasn’t in danger, no matter how much Max had tried to convince her or read to her the same developments in the news he was reading.

  Elsa smiled at Hanna now and asked if she would play something for them. “The baby likes music.” Elsa put her hand to her stomach. “He kicks to and fro whenever you play for us. Dancing.” She laughed a little. She had already told them she believed this baby to be a boy with all her heart. Max knew it was a girl, but he didn’t tell her that. They would find out soon enough.

  Max hadn’t seen Hanna with her violin since her failed audition last month, and he was surprised when he’d met her at the train tonight, and she’d been carrying it. Elsa asked me to, she’d
said with a shrug. And he had smiled, happy to see her looking like herself again. She seemed more relaxed, more happy tonight, than she had in weeks too.

  Hanna took her violin out of its case now and stood in front of their fireplace. “What shall I play?” she asked them. “Something happy or something sad?”

  “How about something German?” Johann took another puff of his cigarette and blew the smoke out in a circle in front of him. “It would do us all good to remember what is still German and beautiful.”

  “Brahms it is then.” Hanna put her violin under her chin, closed her eyes, and began to light up the room with her music.

  Later as Max and Hanna walked back to his apartment, Hanna was still humming Brahms under her breath. She held on to her violin case in one hand, his hand in the other. “Did you know that Brahms wrote that concerto for Clara Schumann? He loved her desperately but could never be with her. It’s a song about their unrequited love.”

  “What a sad story,” Max said. “The song was so beautiful when you played it. I never would’ve guessed it.”

  “Love is always beautiful,” Hanna countered. “It just doesn’t always have a happy ending.”

  The night was quiet, but the swollen August moon illuminated their pathway home. It was easy to feel what Elsa and Hanna still felt about Germany on this starry summer night. It was their home, their country, more than it was the führer’s. The familiar Hauptstrasse, where Max had spent his entire life, the mulberry blossoms that lined the sidewalk, turning his shoes yellow as he walked, the glint of moonlight on the window of his shop that illuminated the Beissinger on the sign: all that felt more real than the news erupting in the papers, day by day, worse and worse. But he could not be sentimental and naive. He knew that, but still, just for the night he wanted to pretend that the world was all right, that being in love was the only thing that mattered.

  Just as they got in front of the shop, Max stopped, put his arms around Hanna, kissed her gently, and then stepped back. “We are going to have a happy ending,” he said. His hands were shaking, but, at long last, he pulled the ring from his pocket and held it out in front of her.