In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  “Max?” She said his name softly, and it was hard to tell whether she was happy or sad.

  “Hannalie Ginsberg,” he said, using her full name. “I love you. I want to spend every minute of my life with you. Would you make me the happiest man in Germany and marry me?”

  She didn’t move for a second, and neither did he. They stood suspended, as if time and the world had stopped. But then she nodded and Max took her hand, slipped the ring onto her finger.

  Hanna stared at the ring on her finger, then at him. “I love you, too. But I also love my violin,” she said softly. “There will be another opening in the symphony in the summer. I will audition again. I won’t ever give up.”

  “My wife will be a world-famous violinist,” Max said. He forgot about everything he knew, everything he worried about. It was only here and now, him and her. And he wanted her to have everything she wanted and had worked tirelessly for.

  Hanna stood up on her toes and kissed him, and he pulled her inside the shop. As he was locking the door behind him, she was already reaching for him. A new desire had come over them, and they couldn’t even make it up the stairs to his apartment. They made love right there, on the floor of his shop.

  The next morning, Hanna slipped the ring off before she left and put it in his palm. “I’ll come back for this tonight,” she promised. “Just let me tell Mamele. Let me talk to her about it first before I go home wearing a ring.”

  Max frowned, knowing that her mother and Julia wouldn’t approve, especially not now. Julia hated him more than ever, and Frau Ginsberg was growing sicker and weaker without any medical care. “They’ll try to change your mind about us,” Max said now.

  “No, no,” Hanna insisted, stubbornly. “My mind is made up. You’re stuck with me forever, Max Beissinger.” She kissed him one last time, grabbed her violin case, and then she was gone.

  Hanna did not come back that night. He waited for her after he closed down the shop, and once it grew dark, he began to worry. Recently he’d made her promise not to come see him too late, not to ride the train at night alone. Jews were often harassed by the SA, and worse, sometimes beaten for seemingly no reason. The Fischmarkt across the street had apparently been vandalized in his six-month absence, not with a brick like Feinstein’s had been but with a bright red Hakenkreuz painted across its door in the middle of the night, the windows smashed out from the street with sticks, and then the owner, Herr Sokolov, who was not even a Jew but a Russian whose family had emigrated to Germany after the war, had disappeared. He’d always kept to himself and Max hadn’t known him well, but he had noticed his absence on the street and had to ask Elsa and Johann what had happened to him. They weren’t sure. He might’ve been arrested. He might’ve gone back to Russia. It became less and less unusual for someone to just disappear into what seemed to be thin air.

  It was his biggest fear now that something would happen to Hanna before he could take her into another time. He had seen her, in the future, and she was safe. But that didn’t feel like any sort of guarantee. He didn’t believe that anyone’s future was certain, unmalleable.

  Max waited as long as he could stand it, and when it was half past eight, he ran to the train station and rode the train to Maulbeerstrasse. He got off and ran through the mulberry-lined streets to Hanna’s apartment, and he was out of breath, sweating by the time he knocked on the door.

  Hanna opened the door, her eyes red and puffy. She must’ve told them, and they fought. Maybe they had talked her out of it? “Oh, Hanna, no,” he said, unable to help himself.

  As she said: “Mamele is dying and no one will help her.”

  “What?” It wasn’t what he was expecting at all, but as soon as she said it, guilt washed over him. He should’ve come sooner.

  “She needs a doctor. She can’t even open her eyes. But no one will come. Julia went down the street and tried to telephone almost every doctor in Berlin. But we have no medical insurance. And even if we did . . .” Hanna held her hands in the air, and suddenly it had all become real to her, everything he’d been trying to convince her of since Hitler had begun to come to power.

  “Maybe I could help,” Max said. He wasn’t Jewish and he still had quite a nest egg from his father. Even in Hitler’s Germany, gold still meant something.

  “How can you possibly help?” Julia had walked up behind Hanna, put her hands on her sister’s shoulders. Friedrich stood there, too, a little off to the side. Even married to Julia, he appeared somewhat out of place, maybe even a little scared of the force that was Hanna and Julia together. “Did you acquire a medical degree when you abandoned my sister for six months?” Julia asked snidely.

  Max grimaced. He didn’t abandon Hanna. He would never abandon Hanna. But he wasn’t going to argue with Julia, not at a time like this. “Friedrich, don’t you work at a hospital?” He knew very little about Julia’s husband, other than he worked in some kind of lab.

  “I was fired months ago,” Friedrich said, frowning. Of course. That’s why they were waiting on the visas for London, where Jews could still work in hospitals. How easy it was to forget that he’d missed months, not days, when he’d gone into the closet.

  “But you must know a lot of doctors.”

  “None of them will treat a Jew with no medical insurance,” Julia said, exasperated. “Don’t you think we’ve already tried?”

  “Which one is the most in need of money?” Max asked Friedrich, ignoring Julia.

  “We don’t have any money,” Julia spat at him.

  “But I do,” he said.

  “No,” Julia said, firmly. “We can’t take your money.”

  Hanna put her hand on Julia’s arm, and her face softened. “Jule,” she said. “Max and I are going to get married. He’s going to be family. We need his help. We should take his money.”

  “Married?” Julia sputtered. This was the first she’d heard of it. Her surprise stung Max. Maybe it shouldn’t have. Hanna’s thoughts had obviously been consumed by her mother’s health today. But still.

  But then Hanna reached across the doorway and grabbed his hand, squeezed it. “Yes,” she said, quite firmly to Julia. “Married.”

  Friedrich grabbed his hat and stepped outside, ignoring Julia’s anger. “All right,” he said calmly to Max. “Hector Bergameister likes to bet on the horses at the Hoppegarten, and he almost always loses. He lives in a stadthaus near the hospital. We can take the train, you and I.” Neither Julia nor Hanna protested, and the two men left.

  It was the first and only time Max and Friedrich would ever be alone together, and the silence between them was a little uncomfortable as they rode the train into Berlin. “Those Ginsberg girls,” Friedrich finally broke the silence. “They’re a lot to take sometimes, aren’t they?”

  “Hanna feels deeply for the people and things she cares about,” Max said. “But that is what I love about her.”

  Friedrich shook his head a little. “You’ve got it all worked out somehow, don’t you, Beissinger? Best of both worlds. You travel all over, probably have girls all over Europe, and then you got Hanna waiting for you at home.” He raised his eyebrows and elbowed Max.

  “It’s not like that,” Max said.

  “Sure,” Friedrich said. “If you say so.”

  Neither one of them said anything else until the train stopped in central Berlin, and they got off. “It’s too late, you know,” Friedrich said. “Hedy’s been off her medicine for months. Hasn’t seen a doctor in a long time either.”

  “Don’t say that,” Max said. He thought about his own mother, lying in bed in their apartment, Herr Doctor telling his father that all they could do was make her comfortable, but at least he’d come, at least there’d been comfort and morphine for the pain. Death and comfort were one and the same.

  “I’m just telling you the honest truth, before you waste your gold,” Friedrich said. “The girls don’t want to hear it . . . but whether we get Hector to come with us or not, she’s never going to make it through the
week.”

  Hanna, 1950

  Vienna, and Austria, had been divided into four occupation zones by the Allies after the war: American, French, Soviet, and British. I was living in the French occupation zone, but it felt nothing at all like France. Everywhere I went, there was the glorious cadence of my German language again, and it comforted me, even overhearing it in bits and pieces on the street. Though much of the arts district of Vienna was still being rebuilt, war rationing had mostly ended, and you could get meat more easily again. Frau Schmidt made a wonderful schnitzel on the night of my arrival, to welcome me to their home and to their city. And it tasted so much like the Gutenstat dishes of my girlhood, I almost cried.

  The Orchestra von Frankreich was larger than Le Bec’s—the violin section alone having twice as many players—and we rehearsed on an actual stage. Not in a concert hall, since the grand ones were still being renovated after being bombed in the war, but inside a school that had been closed down after the Anschluss. The orchestra rented the space from the French government now, and the former school auditorium was the orchestra’s home, both for rehearsal and concerts. This orchestra had started up only a year before Stuart’s but our maestro, Herr Krauss, was older than Stuart and had been a well-respected cellist, then maestro in Vienna even before the war. I wasn’t sure what had happened to him during the war exactly, and I didn’t ask either, though, whatever it was, he was missing his middle finger on his right hand, which did not fail to remind me of Stuart each time he raised his arms to begin, and his four good fingers dangled precariously close to my head.

  As the Orchestra von Frankreich charged admissions and wanted to appeal to people in all sectors of the city, we rehearsed music by French, British, Russian, and American composers in equal measure. Some of it was new to me, having never played much music by American composers in Germany, or in Paris, and I threw myself into learning it, practicing so much, so many hours, that in my first few weeks in Vienna I had to ice my fingers before bed each night. But then I would fall into a deep sleep, without the time to think or breathe or live anything else but the music. Which was just the way I wanted it.

  I received weekly letters from Julia, and once a month, on a Sunday, she would telephone me to catch up. But we would only talk for five minutes, so as not to run up the charges too high. She had gotten a job minding the neighbor’s children, which seemed like a bad fit to me, but she claimed she enjoyed it, since they were little girls and she’d never had any of her own. Her letters contained anecdotes of taking care of the girls, and about the boys’ accolades in school and sports. She barely mentioned herself, or Friedrich. But when I wrote her back, I did much the same, telling her only about rehearsal and Frau Schmidt’s cooking, and how it reminded me of Mamele’s before she got sick.

  Stuart wrote me only once the whole fall, and really, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t. He included nothing personal, only of the pieces they were working on in Paris: I was missing Holst’s The Planets, one of my favorite orchestral suites, and I felt a little jealous, thinking of them rehearsing it in the basement without me. But when I wrote him back, I told him only about our first concert, which we played to a sold-out audience. And how Maestro said it was nearly unbelievable, given that not too long ago people were still struggling to buy food. And about the American composer Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which was completely new to me, but which I could now play from memory.

  I wrote to Elsa, too, letting her know of my new address and asking her to let me know if she heard again from Max, but she wrote back, saying she hadn’t heard from him in a while.

  I tried not to think about Stuart, about Elsa, about Max, nor about what Henry had told me in London. If I didn’t think about it, didn’t believe it, didn’t remember it at all, then it could not have happened.

  The past was still an infinite blank, but most days I did not dwell on it. I lived and breathed music. And when I slept, I dreamed only of the adagios I had practiced too many times before bed, and the new American symphonies that awaited me when I awoke in the morning.

  We played a concert in December, just before Christmas, our last of the fall season. The entire auditorium was decorated in red and silver garland, and a large ornamental tree sat just behind the violin section onstage. I might have been the only member of the orchestra who was Jewish, but I might not have been. Though many of them spoke German and English, like me, I hadn’t become close friends with anyone in the orchestra. I knew them all by name and waved and said guten Tag. I engaged in small talk from time to time, especially with the older Austrian gentleman, Hanz, who sat right next to me. But I never would’ve told any of them, not even Hanz, that I did not celebrate Christmas. I wondered if all the Austrian Jews had disappeared during the war, just like the German ones, or if people just didn’t talk about such things anymore.

  The Christmas pieces were easy, requiring very little practice on my part, and for the first time since I’d moved to Vienna, I began to feel a tremendous longing that December: for my sister, for Stuart, for Max, for answers about my past. I had trouble sleeping again; my dreams were restless. And when, during the Christmas concert, I gazed into the audience and my eyes caught on Stuart’s face, I thought for sure I was imagining him there, the way I might have imagined Max in Paris. An apparition of my wanting. But then I found him waiting for me backstage, afterward. He raised his good hand to wave, smiled sheepishly, and I knew he was real.

  “You’re here?” I breathed it as a question, still not certain it was him. I reached up my hand to touch his face; his cheeks were rough with gray stubble, which also made him look older than he had only a few months ago, when I’d left him in Paris clean-shaven.

  “Should I have written?” he asked, gently removing my hand from his face. “I was worried you would tell me not to come if I did.” I probably would have.

  “Hanna, Fröhliche Weihnachten.” Hanz wished me a Merry Christmas in German and tapped me gently on the shoulder on his way out. He eyed Stuart with suspicion.

  “You, too, Hanz,” I answered back in German. “Don’t eat too much stollen.” He’d been telling me at rehearsal yesterday about his weakness for the Christmas pastry, and it had made me long for Mamele’s jelly doughnuts, which she used to make from scratch for me and Julia for Hanukkah when we were little girls.

  He walked out and I turned back to Stuart. “I’m glad you’re here,” I said to him, in English, now. “Would you like to get a drink? Or are you hungry?” I reached my hand out, grabbed his, more out of habit than of anything else. Now that Stuart was near me, I wanted to touch him, to hold on to him.

  “I am a little hungry.” He gently extricated his hand from mine, clenching his fist and holding it firmly at his side. My fingers stung a little from the rejection, or maybe they were just still sore from too much practicing.

  “There is a place, a few blocks away,” I told him, forcing a smile. “The strudel almost tastes like home.” Though as soon as I said it, I thought of Herr Brichtman’s bakery near the Lyceum, the first time Max and I ever kissed, eating strudel there together, and I quickly looked down at my feet.

  “You know I am never one to turn down pastry,” he said with a chuckle, and I suddenly felt so homesick for him, for our apartment in Paris, that I had to bite my lip in order not to cry.

  Stuart and I walked outside into the frosty December air. The street was bustling with people, shopping for last-minute Christmas gifts. Twinkling lights hung from storefronts, illuminating the dusting of snow on the sidewalk that had fallen while I was playing the concert, and the air smelled hopeful, like pine, fresh snow, and chimney smoke. I buried my hand that wasn’t carrying my violin in my coat pocket to keep it warm, and also to keep it from reaching for Stuart again.

  We walked inside the dimly lit bakeshop, sat across from each other, and for a few moments, we ate our strudel, not talking at all. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, not the least of which was how much I missed him, and how so
rry I was for hurting him. Not knowing what to say at first, I picked at my strudel with my fork, saying nothing at all.

  “Ling left the orchestra,” he finally spoke. “She’s with child and says she’s too big to play the cello right now.”

  “Oh no,” I said, not sure whether I felt sorrier for the orchestra or Ling’s baby. She was not the warmest person. “Did you have trouble replacing her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I suppose they won’t. It was quite easy to replace you.” He stopped talking, opened his mouth, then bit his lip. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “No, I know, of course.” I imagined someone beautiful, and decidedly French, who took my place, not just in the orchestra, but in Stuart’s apartment. I stared at my strudel, moving it around the plate with my fork, but I was no longer hungry for it.

  “I just meant that . . . there was a lot of interest. A lot of people auditioned for your seat. Le Bec’s little orchestra has been doing quite well. I’m sure they will replace Ling easily too.”

  It hit me that he said they, and now he was calling it Le Bec’s orchestra, not ours or, more rightly, his. “And what about you?” I asked.

  “I was getting other offers last summer too,” he said. He put his fork down, his strudel barely eaten, folded his hands in his lap. “I wouldn’t have taken them. But then . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But then I left,” I said.

  “Yes, I mean, I don’t blame you. This job will be better money for me. On ne peut pas vivre que de pain, as the French say.”

  “You cannot live on love alone?”

  “Bread,” he corrected me. “On bread alone.”

  I began to blush furiously at my bad translation, my assumption that he was leaving because of me, not because of the money. “Of course, yes,” I said. “I’m glad to hear you have something better, too.”