“That’s actually why I came,” he said. “I got an offer in America. In New York City. It’s a second-tier orchestra, for now. But if they like me, if everything goes well . . . the conductor of their first-tier symphony plans to retire in a few years’ time, and they might move me up.”
“Wow,” I said. “America. Stuart, that’s . . .” I couldn’t come up with the appropriate word, because I was thinking only of how far it was, how it would take days and days on a boat across the ocean to get there, not merely hours on the train. “Will I never see you again?” I said softly.
“I hope that’s not the case,” he said. “That’s why I came to talk to you now. If things go well and they do move me up in a few years . . . I’ll have complete hiring control. I’ll want to make it the best orchestra in the world, and the only way to do that would be to hire you.”
“Oh, Stuart, you don’t have to say that.”
“It’s true,” he said. “No one plays with your passion, Hanna. The Le Bec Orchestra isn’t the same without you. Nothing is,” he added. I stared very hard at my strudel, trying to avoid Stuart’s eyes. “It will be a little while.” Stuart was still talking. “A few years. So just think about it. Keep it in the back of your mind. Mull it over.” He paused. “And there, of course, would be no strings attached.”
“No strings, in your orchestra?” It struck me funny and I chuckled. He laughed, too, and the tension between us eased. I finally looked at him. He smiled a little.
“I just mean—”
“I know what you mean.” I reached across the table and put my hand on top of his. He didn’t immediately pull away, and I suddenly wanted to tell him that I missed him, that I wanted him, still. That I had never ever wanted to hurt him. But the night I’d been with Max, I hadn’t really thought of Stuart, and I knew the best thing I could do for him was to let him go. To tell him that maybe in America he would find someone who loved him, whose heart didn’t still belong to someone else. But neither one of us said anything at all.
He pulled his hand back, and my palm hit the table. “Your orchestra played quite well,” he said. “You made the right decision to come here. Paris was never going to be forever, for either of us.” He made it sound like he was still talking about the orchestra, but I knew in my heart he was talking about us.
“No,” I murmured. “Of course not.” Because if there was anything my life had taught me, blanks and all, it was this: nothing was forever.
Max, 1934–1935
Grace Eliza Wilhelm was born during a blizzard at the end of November 1934, and Max and Hanna were the first people, other than Elsa and Johann, to meet her. They walked through the snow from Max’s shop, arriving freezing, and wet up to their knees. Hanna carried her violin case above her head, to keep it safe and dry. And inside, the Wilhelm house was warm, and they put their boots by the fire. Elsa brought a sleeping Grace out to the sitting room in her arms. Grace was bright pink, with blue eyes and a full head of coal-colored hair.
“What a beauty,” Hanna said, stroking Grace’s little fingers, glancing at Max, as if she were envisioning their own future, their own child. Max smiled at her, though inwardly he felt sad. He knew they would not have a child together. At least not in the future he had seen. “A future violinist, perhaps?” Hanna said.
Elsa laughed and asked Hanna if she would play something for them. “Maybe she will love your music as much on the outside as she did on the inside?”
But Hanna played only a few notes before Grace began to wail, scrunching up her tiny pink cheeks, raising her clenched fists in the air. Hanna stopped playing and laughed. “I know how you feel, meine Liebling. Sometimes I hate the sound of it too.”
Emilia ran in circles through the house, declaring herself a big sister, and as happy as Elsa looked, Johann looked the opposite: exhausted, pale. “You all right?” Max asked him quietly, away from all the girls.
“Are any of us all right these days?” Johann said.
Max clapped his friend on the back. “You’ll feel better once you get some sleep,” he said. But he knew Johann spoke the truth. Just last week the Nazis had won the election in Freie Stadt Danzig, a semiautonomous German city-state, where other parties had still been permitted to run. And the Nazis still won. So what did that say about their country, about the good people who lived here, freely choosing the Nazis, even when they weren’t forced to?
Frau Ginsberg died before the ground froze, and without Max even being able to bribe one single doctor with gold to come and help her. He had let Hanna down, and he apologized to her and Julia, saying he wished he could’ve done more. Hanna told him that their mother’s heart had been on borrowed time for many years, and that he shouldn’t take any of that on himself. But she lost her usual light for a little while after her mother died, playing the saddest songs on her violin, night after night after night in his shop.
By March of 1935, Julia and Friedrich had secured their visas and were readying themselves to move to London. They tried to convince Hanna to move away with them, but she believed she’d be able to get another audition in the symphony that summer. Nothing was more important to her than to do well and finally secure her spot, and it blinded her to everything else that was happening in their city, their country. Max understood why Julia wanted Hanna to leave so badly, but selfishly, he wanted her to stay with him for as long as possible. He knew that he would save her when it was time. With this peace of mind, he did not try to convince her to take her sister’s offer. Not that she would’ve listened, even if he had.
He and Hanna were also making their wedding plans. Max wanted to marry Hanna right away, but she insisted they do it after Julia left the country and after she made it through her audition. She said she was exhausted from fighting with her sister about everything, about him, about her violin. Julia’s disdain for him was palpable. He disliked being in a room with her, even when Hanna asked him over to Maulbeerstrasse each Friday for the Sabbath, in the weeks before Julia and Friedrich left. He wanted to spend their holiday with them, to understand it, to be a real part of it. But Julia glared at him through dinner, and Friedrich kept to himself, if only to be loyal to his wife it seemed. Max dreaded going each Friday, though he never thought of not going, not being with Hanna, not learning the rituals of her religion.
And then, Julia and Friedrich moved away, and Hanna spent the next Sabbath above the bookshop with him, lighting only two candles, whispering a brief prayer, before they enjoyed their supper together.
By spring, it felt as if they really were married. Hanna spent days at the Lyceum, nights practicing in his shop, and then she would walk upstairs and reach for him in bed. He made space for her clothes in his closet and chest of drawers, and she had moved many of her things in. She still kept the apartment on Maulbeerstrasse because it would be too hard to sell now (her mother had owned it outright), and from time to time, if she had to practice or stay too late at the Lyceum, she would still sleep there. But for almost all intents and purposes they lived above Max’s shop, together, as if they were husband and wife.
At night sometimes, when it was just the two of them in the darkness, in his bed, Max could forget about the impending feeling of doom that hung on him like a heavy blanket in all waking daylight hours, the growing hatred for Jews in his country, his worry that Hanna was in danger every time she left his shop. His creeping fear that he would wait too long to take her into the closet, or, that even now with her mother dead and her sister gone, she would refuse to go with him. Military conscription in Germany had just been renewed, violating the Treaty of Versailles, and he knew that things were growing dire, that a war was coming again. But unlike the last war, this would be Hitler’s war, a war against Jews. A war against Hanna.
“I will protect you,” he whispered to Hanna at night, after she fell asleep, sometimes midsentence, her body and mind weary from her extensive practicing. “I will save you,” he promised. Next to him, she murmured something unintelligible in her sleep, rolled in
to him, and he held on to her tightly.
In late May one night, there was knocking on the glass window of the shop. Hanna was practicing at the Lyceum, and though he’d stayed downstairs waiting for her for hours, he knew she wasn’t coming. It was already too late, too dark out. Too dangerous for her to ride the train by herself. He’d just shut his book, blown out his candle, and resolved himself to going upstairs when the knock came on the glass, softly at first, then, louder.
“Herr Beissinger,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice called. “Open up. Please.”
He opened the door just a little bit at first and saw that a woman and her child stood outside. They looked terrified, and also harmless. But then the child, a boy of maybe ten or twelve, saluted with the Hitlergruss, and Max quickly saluted back. The woman shook her head and lowered the boy’s hand. “I’m sorry, the shop is closed,” Max told them, moving to shut the door again. They did not look like Nazis, nor SA, but he could not risk letting strangers into his shop at night.
“Please,” the woman said, putting her hand up to stop him from closing the door. “I am Rachel Feinstein’s sister, Marta, and this is my son, David.” He remembered what Herr Feinstein had told him, Rachel and her sister, Marta, making pamphlets, distributing them.
He looked around at the street to make sure it was empty, ushered them both inside the shop, and quickly closed and locked the door behind him.
“My sister told me your name. She said you were going to help her, and I don’t know if you did. I haven’t heard from her since. But I didn’t know where else to go.” Her face was white, and she gripped her son’s hand tightly. “The SA came to arrest me tonight, and we escaped out the back window. I didn’t know where else to go,” she repeated, her voice breaking on the words. “Please, if you helped my sister. Can you help me? I brought this.” She held out a large round diamond in the palm of her hand and tried to give it to him.
But he did not take it from her. He didn’t want her valuable possession.
“Please,” she said again. Marta began to sob softly, her small shoulders shaking from the weight of her fear. Her son patted her shoulder awkwardly and Max thought of his mother, lying in bed, dying. How much he’d wanted to save her, wanted to breathe for her, and he couldn’t. His heart broke for them.
He glanced at the closet. Maybe he could give them instructions for how fast to run to get to safety, send them in alone? He didn’t want to leave now himself, didn’t want to leave Hanna. But how could he not help this woman and her son?
“All right,” he said. “What I’m going to tell you is going to sound crazy, but I promise you this is how I helped your sister.” He told them about the closet, Einstein’s theory about wormholes, about how he’d taken the Feinsteins and left them in another time where Jews were safe.
Marta stared at him wide-eyed with disbelief. David’s face turned white. “Come on, David.” Marta grabbed her son’s hand and began to back away from Max very slowly. “Please.” She held up her free hand. “Don’t hurt us.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Max said gently. And he understood no matter what he told them, no matter what he said, they were not going to go into the closet, not without him. And if they left his shop, went back outside, Marta would be arrested. David would lose his mother.
“You can have the diamond.” Marta held it out again, her hand shaking. “Please just don’t hurt us.”
“I don’t want the diamond,” he said. “Keep your diamond. You will need it.” He sighed. “Look, I will go in first,” he said. “You only need to follow behind and keep my pace. Your sister was skeptical, too, but she trusted me, and she is safe now.”
He could take them through the closet very quickly. And he should only be gone a few days, a week or two at most, if he turned right back around. He had to help them. Otherwise they’d be arrested or worse.
He walked to the counter, scribbled a quick note for Hanna, then walked back to the closet and held out his hand. Marta shook her head. But David looked at his mother, then at Max, and he let go of his mother’s hand and walked to the closet.
Hanna, 1951
I returned to London in April when the orchestra went on a short break, and it happened to coincide with Passover. Julia wrote me that she wanted to make dinner to celebrate the holiday, that it was time for the boys to understand where they came from now that they were getting dangerously close to being grown men. I hadn’t celebrated Passover in so many years and I was actually eager to visit and share it with them, to spend a few days with people I loved.
On the train ride there by myself, without a day of violin practice to consume me, I was hit by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. It reminded me of the way I felt in Berlin, just before I auditioned for the second time and Max had disappeared on me again.
Max and I had been engaged then, and for a little while, I’d worn his mother’s ring, felt its extra weight on my finger each day when I practiced. It reminded me that I loved two things: the violin and Max. The violin had my heart all day. Max had it all night.
I was so angry when I saw the note he’d left for me on the counter in his shop. I’d taken the ring off my finger, left it there. I had one love, only one love. My violin had never left me, never hurt me, never let me down. I practiced and I practiced and it behaved the way I wanted it to. But after I took the ring off, I longed for it back again. I noticed its missing weight, every single time I played.
This past year in Vienna I had felt so much the same, though I did not allow myself to fully feel it until I took a day away from my violin and sat on the train. I missed Stuart, and it pained me not to know when, or if, I’d ever see him again. And I still longed for Max, too. I didn’t know where he’d disappeared to, or if, or when, he would find me again like he’d promised. Another note, another city, another time. Everything had changed and nothing at all had changed. Except I still had my violin.
And my sister and my nephews. I had them now, too, I reminded myself. That was why I’d been so excited for this break, for this trip back to London. Things were not the same as they had been before the war. I was a concert violinist now; I had a family.
But still, it was hard to shake the feeling of loneliness. It rode with me, all the way to London.
Lev and Moritz met me at the train station in London by themselves, and I felt better as soon as I saw them. Lev, at fourteen, looked so much like a man, much like the young Friedrich I remembered courting Julia in Germany that when I stepped off the platform and saw him there waiting for me, I gasped. At almost twelve, Moritz was taller than me, but he still had the face of a little boy, thank goodness.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked, as Lev took my suitcase, and Moritz offered to carry my violin. There weren’t too many people in the world I’d let carry it, but Moritz was one of them. “She’s not hiding out in her bedroom again, is she?”
“No,” Moritz answered, inspecting my violin case to see if it still looked as it had years ago, then tracing his forefinger over the Orchestra von Frankreich sticker I’d pasted on near the handle. “She’s cooking. Matzo balls for soup.”
“Ah.” It had been many years since I’d eaten a matzo ball, not since Mamele had passed, or maybe longer, as matzo was not easy to find in Germany after Hitler came to power.
“And I’m old enough to go everywhere alone now,” Lev informed me. His voice was deep. He even sounded like Friedrich.
“Of course you are.” I ruffled his hair a little just to annoy him and make Moritz smile. He did not disappoint. Even an almost twelve-year-old Moritz still found me amusing.
“I have to tell you something.” Julia accosted me as soon as the boys led me inside their new home. It was a flat, not a house, in central London, not the West End. Much smaller and less fancy than their old place, but I felt immediately more comfortable here. It reminded me a little of the apartment we’d grown up in on Maulbeerstrasse, with its small front parlor between the front door and the kitchen. “Boys,” Julia said.
“Go put Tante’s stuff in Moritz’s room. The boys are rooming together while you’re here,” she said to me, and I shrugged, really not caring where I slept.
She wiped her hands on her apron and grabbed me in a hug. Then she stepped back and looked at me, pushed a wayward curl behind my ear. “You look wonderful,” she said. “Vienna agrees with you.”
She appeared to have gained a little weight back, and her color was much better than when I’d seen her last. Her hair was messier, out of her usual bun, framing her face, but surprisingly, the messiness suited her. “So do you,” I told her. “I’d say the unmarried life agrees with you.”
“Well . . .” she said. “That’s actually what I need to talk to you about. I’ve met someone.”
“Julia! That’s great news. Why didn’t you write to me about him?”
“I wanted to tell you in person. It’s sort of a . . . well, you know him.”
I didn’t know anyone in London except for her and Friedrich, as well as some of the musicians in the Royal Orchestra, and then it dawned on me. “Henry Childs?” I asked, surprised.
She bit her lip a little and nodded. “He came to see me after you first left for Vienna because he was worried about you, and then, well, we started talking and we have a lot in common.”
I had no idea what on earth Julia and Henry Childs had in common—Henry wasn’t even Jewish for one thing—but then, I didn’t know very much about Henry at all. The majority of the time we’d spent together had been spent talking only about me and my foggy past. But he had always been so very kind to me, and I was glad that Julia seemed happy. “Good for you,” I said.
“Henry was worried that it might upset you . . . He’s coming tonight, for the Seder; I mean, if that’s all right with you?”
In Another Time Page 22