In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  That night they celebrated with a bottle of Sekt and whispered wedding plans. They had no family or friends nearby other than Elsa and Johann, and so the ceremony would be small. It would be too dangerous to ask a rabbi to officiate, so they were going to find a magistrate to do it as soon as they could. Johann would know someone.

  When Max awoke the next morning, he was still smiling, and not even the slight headache from too much sparkling wine dulled his mood. Hanna was still sleeping, past the sunrise, which was something she hardly ever did. He kissed her bare shoulder, got up and quietly got dressed, and went into the kitchen to make her breakfast.

  He switched on the radio to listen to the news as he made coffee, humming under his breath while he worked. But then the words he heard crackling through the air stopped him, midstep: Hitler had convened a special Reichstag session at a rally in Nuremberg yesterday. They’d passed two new laws: the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law. By order of the Law for Protection, Jews were no longer allowed to marry, nor even have any relations with non-Jews. And by the Citizenship Law, neither were Jews considered citizens any longer.

  “Max?” Hanna said. She’d gotten out of bed, wrapped herself in his shirt, and stood at the entryway to the kitchen. He could tell from the expression on her face—a mix of fear and sadness, of anger and disbelief—that she had heard the radio too. But she walked to him, put her hand on his cheek.

  She gently pulled the ring from her finger and tried to put it in his palm. But he closed his fist tightly, refusing to take it back. “No,” he said. “It’s yours. Keep it somewhere safe. I don’t care about Hitler or some stupid law. I am going to marry you, no matter what, some . . . time.” He pulled her close, held her tightly, breathed in the rosin of her skin and the lemon of her hair and kissed her.

  “It’ll be all right,” she murmured, more for her own sake, than for his. “I still have the symphony.”

  But three days later, Hanna received a second letter in the post. This one informed her that her original offer had been rescinded. Due to the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were no longer citizens of Germany and thus could no longer hold positions in a German symphony.

  “What am I going to do now? What am I supposed to do?” Hanna was so angry. She waved the letter in front of his face as they stood in his shop, and he glanced nervously out at the street, hoping no one would choose this particular moment to come in for a book.

  She didn’t wait for his answer, but ripped the letter into shreds, tiny unrecognizable pieces. She was breathing hard, her face bright red. He thought she might cry, but she was too angry for tears.

  Max went to her, wrapped his arms around her. “I am going to take you far away from here,” he said.

  Hanna, 1951–1952

  Even back in Austria, I had trouble forgetting Adelle and the things she had told me at Passover. I tried my best to stop thinking about the past, even about being Jewish, passing the fall holidays with barely any notice except when a phone call from Julia came, for the sole purpose of her wishing me shana tova.

  “I wish you could join us for Rosh Hashanah,” Julia said on the other end of the line. And I said that I wished that, too, murmuring excuses about not having any time off from rehearsal, which wasn’t exactly a lie. But it was not the real reason I wasn’t going to London for high holidays.

  I fell into bed most nights, thankful that I was too tired to dream, and most days I thought only about the music, about my fingers on the strings. I had no time or room in my mind for nightmares, or what-ifs, or wondering about the war. I barely even had the energy to think about Max, to worry if he was alive or dead, if he would find me again or not. If our night in Paris had been real or my imagination. Or about Stuart, either, building a new life in America without me.

  On Sundays, our one day off, I busied myself as a tourist in Vienna, sometimes alone and sometimes with the company of Frau Schmidt, who constantly wanted to be my hostess more than my landlady. I appreciated her kindness, but often I found it was easier to be alone.

  She took me to the Wiener Staatsoper, the opera house, and pointed out that it still had a temporary roof, though reconstruction was under way. Bombs had nearly decimated it. “But once,” Frau Schmidt told me, “Father played his cello here, and I came to see him as a little girl. It was the most beautiful place, and now . . .” She held up her hands. I still didn’t know what had happened to Maestro or how he’d lost his finger during the war, but I bit my tongue and didn’t ask, not sure I wanted to know.

  “It will be beautiful again,” I reassured her, though even as I said it, I thought it was like so much else. And like all of us. It would never be quite the same as what it was before the war.

  In January of 1952, we had just begun the new year rehearsing for a Tchaikovsky spectacular. And one chilly morning, I received a telegram from Henry Childs, letting me know he was in the city and asking if I might be free to see him that night for dinner. I had already planned to spend the orchestra’s spring break in London again, but that was still months away. I’d put it in the back of my mind, and I felt strangely nervous to get Henry’s note, to know he was here. I hoped he hadn’t brought Adelle with him.

  “What brings you here?” I asked him, sliding into a chair across the table from him at the Lehár Restaurant in his hotel, the Ambassador. Frau Schmidt had told me this morning that this restaurant had been named after Franz Lehár the composer and that he’d played a concert here long ago. That was before the war, and also before much of the hotel’s facade had nearly crumbled after being hit by aircraft bombs. I wondered if Henry had chosen it simply for its musical connection.

  He stood to kiss my cheek and sat back down. “I’m in the city for a medical conference,” he said. “Julia insisted I check up on you.” He smiled kindly, and I was pretty sure he’d check up on me, Julia or not.

  “Oh, how nice,” I told him. “Well, I am off from rehearsal on Sunday if you want me to show you around. I’ve learned a lot about Vienna. I have a chatty landlady who likes to take me around.” He thanked me, saying maybe he would take me up on it.

  We ordered dinner and made small talk. Henry asked what the orchestra was playing now, and I told him all about Tchaikovsky, the “1812 Overture,” which was my favorite of his pieces and nothing at all like the romance most people associated with his work. Henry smiled, but his eyes seemed far away. “Henry?” I snapped my fingers. “Henry? Is everything all right?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I just . . . to tell you the truth I only decided to come to this conference so I would have an excuse to see you.”

  “Me?” Had Henry learned more from Adelle? My heartbeat quickened.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Julia.”

  “Oh?” I exhaled. “Is she all right?”

  “Oh yes, quite all right. In fact, I want to ask her to marry me.”

  I was confused. “And you are asking me . . . my permission?” Henry nodded. “Henry.” I patted his hand gently across the table. “You do not need to ask my permission. Do you love her?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very, very much.”

  “And you will never leave her for some young . . . Flittchen.” I couldn’t think of the right English word to express what Friedrich had done to Julia. But Henry nodded, understanding all the same.

  “I will never leave her,” he said solemnly.

  “I know,” I said, and I really did know that. I genuinely liked Henry. He had always been kind to me, so willing to listen and help. And I knew he would be that same way with Julia, as her husband. That was who he was not only as a doctor, but also as a man. “I could tell when I was there last spring, you make her very happy,” I told him.

  “Do you really think so?” he asked. I nodded; I did.

  Henry finished off his glass of Riesling, we ordered dessert, and then over chocolate cake Henry suddenly looked up at me. “Hanna, will you play for us, at our wedding?”

  “Play for yo
u?” I thought about Julia’s last wedding. She had walked down the aisle in silence because the piano player had quit the day before, citing illness, though we had all suspected that was a lie, that it was more anti-Semitism than anything else. But no one had ever considered asking me to play, least of all Friedrich who’d never had any appreciation for my violin. “I don’t know if that’s what Julia would want,” I said.

  “She would. She loved it when you played for us at Passover.” He took a bite of his chocolate cake. “She is quite proud of you, you know?”

  My eyes stung with tears at his words, and I bit my lip to keep them from falling. I didn’t want to cry in front of Henry. “That is very sweet of you to ask,” I told Henry. “But maybe you don’t know my sister as well as you think?”

  He took another bite of cake, and then he smiled at me. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think,” he said.

  Max, 1936

  After Hanna lost the symphony, Max thought it would be easy to convince her to leave with him. She had nothing left in Germany, after all. Her mother was gone; her country and her symphony had abandoned her. Her teacher was fired from the Lyceum, but then Hanna was no longer allowed in as a student either. Max slowly exchanged all his reichsmarks into gold over the course of a few months, so as not to arouse too much suspicion, and when Hanna snuck into his shop early one cool morning in February, he was ready to tell her his plan. They would leave all this behind; they would be together in another time. They would get married and Hanna would play in a symphony in Paris. And all he had to do was convince her to walk into the closet with him.

  But she removed her head scarf and pulled a letter from her violin case. She smiled and held it up. “They want me in Holland,” she said, the words coming out in a rush.

  “Holland?” His mind was still on the closet, on what he would tell her, how he would explain it to her. He’d taken his father’s journal out and had already decided he would hand it over to her as proof when she questioned him, as she most certainly would.

  “Yes, there’s a symphony in Amsterdam who heard about me and would like me to come there. I just have to get a visa. You could apply for one, too, and we’ll go together. Jews can still marry anyone they want in Holland.”

  Max stood there, his mouth open, not sure what to say. Everything he’d planned to tell her now sounded even more ridiculous in his head than it had moments earlier. “But it might be hard to get a visa and . . . we don’t speak Dutch,” he finally said.

  She laughed as if it were the silliest thing she’d ever heard, then stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth. They were in full view of the window, and he pulled back. “Hanna, stop. We cannot be stupid.” If someone saw them together now, like this, they could both be arrested.

  “The street is empty,” she said, glancing over again now. And she was right, it was. But her letter from Holland had given her hope, and her hope had made her suddenly careless.

  He glanced at the closet at the back of the shop. “Hanna,” he said, “I need you to promise me something. If ever you’re in danger, or if the SA bother you, I need you to promise you’ll come straight here, to me. I have another way for us to leave.” She tilted her head, looked at him funny. “We could even go right now,” he said softly.

  “Go where?” she asked, confused. “Holland?” He shook his head. She waved her letter in the air and smiled. “It’s all going to work out.” She breathed deeply. “I can feel it. And soon we’ll have a wonderful Dutch life together, you and I.”

  “What if I told you that I knew the future?” Max said to Johann a few weeks later, after having drunk two ales. They were sitting on Johann’s porch, late one evening. Hanna was spending the night at her apartment, where she said she could practice more hours, more freely, as she was among Jews and would not arouse unusual suspicion simply for playing her violin. Elsa and the girls were already asleep inside the house.

  Johann was working on getting visas for Max and Hanna through some connections at his law firm. Max had stopped by to check up on that, and then they had begun drinking, and two ales in, Max had blurted out what was really on his mind. If he could get Johann, his oldest and closest friend, to believe him, maybe Johann would help him convince Hanna to believe him too.

  Johann took another swig of his ale and he shrugged. “None of us know the future, Max. We can only hope for the best while preparing for the worst, right?”

  “But I have seen it,” Max told him. “Gone to it. My parents did, too. My father wrote it all down. I found his notebook.” The truth had been rolling around in his head for such a long time, that it was something of a relief to say it out loud, to share it with Johann now. It sounded absurd; he knew it did. But if someone had told him even five years earlier about Hitler, about what their country was becoming and what it was like to live here now, he wouldn’t have believed that, either. Nothing was certain anymore. Nothing was true. The entire world was upside down and backward.

  “Your father was always writing down stories, telling us stories.” Johann shrugged. “He had quite the imagination. You got that from him.”

  “But it is real, Jo. I swear to you.”

  Johann cocked his head to the side, gave him a funny look. “I know this has all been hard on you. It’s not fair and it’s not right. But you have to stay strong for Hanna. You can’t go back to that . . . place.” Max knew what place he meant, though they hadn’t spoken of it in so very many years. After his mother died and his grief had turned into a physical illness, Max had almost died too. He’d been hospitalized in Berlin, unable to breathe right for months, and no official diagnosis was ever determined other than grief.

  But this was different. Max knew it was. How could he make Johann understand? “What if you knew you were going to die?” Max asked him. He thought of Elsa in another time, of sadness and silver spiderwebs in her hair. Of a much older Grace playing something haunting on the piano.

  “Max.” Johann put a hand on his shoulder. “We all die sometime. But you need to hang in there, a little while longer. For Hanna. My contact at the embassy believes the visas will come through by fall.”

  And then from inside the house, Grace began to wail, and Johann jumped up quickly. “I should get her before she wakes Elsa,” he said to Max. “We’ll continue this another night.”

  Max nodded, watched his friend walk inside the house. But they never would continue their conversation.

  Hanna, 1953

  The week before I left for Julia’s wedding, a letter came from Stuart. He would be taking over the first-tier orchestra in the fall, and he anticipated he would have a spot for me. Let me know, he wrote. If you want it, the seat is yours. If not, I will have to begin auditioning soon. Please want it. Remember what I said, no strings attached.

  I smiled, remembering how the tension had eased between us when he’d said that to me the last time I saw him, over strudel. And the truth was, as a violinist I did want it. The first-tier symphony in New York City? I might never get a chance this amazing again. But then, as a woman who felt something for Stuart I couldn’t hide, I wondered, how could I be near him every day? How could I be with him and continue to breathe? But what if Max never returned again? Then why shouldn’t I be with Stuart? Why should I deny myself whatever happiness I could find?

  I wrote Elsa: Did we both imagine Max? Did we both need him so badly that we conjured him to us?

  Elsa wrote back: He will find his way back to you again. If there is anything I know in the world, it is that Max loves you. Max will do whatever he can to be with you.

  If Max truly loved me, why had he left me alone for so long? Whether it made sense or not, I knew I would continue to love him, continue to take him back if he popped back into my life again. That wasn’t fair to Stuart. But what was fair to myself? I’d told Julia once that my violin was the greatest love of my life, so why was it so hard to do what I knew would be best for my career?

  I couldn’t decide what to say, and so
I put off writing Stuart back until I would return from the wedding, hoping that after a week away in Wales the right answer would come to me, somehow.

  Julia and Henry were getting married in a small ceremony, only a handful of guests. Henry’s mother owned an estate in South Wales, and the wedding would be held there, in her rose garden. On the train ride in, I thought about Stuart, who’d also grown up in Wales, and how he’d retreated to Wales when he could no longer play his violin. The misty green pastures rolled by outside my window, and they seemed to be the only thing in Europe completely untouched by the war. It was so beautiful here; I could see why Stuart needed it when he’d been hurting. And suddenly I allowed myself to miss him, more than I had in a long time.

  But I shook it off as I got off the train. This weekend was to be about my sister and about Henry. Not about me or Stuart. Lev had driven Henry’s mother’s large black automobile to the station to pick me up, and Moritz sat in back with me on the short ride to her estate.

  “Can he really be old enough to operate this thing?” I asked Moritz, skeptical that my oldest nephew was nearly a man, though, it was true. He looked the part. And he was driving very slowly, like I made him nervous.

  “Tante, I’m almost old enough,” Moritz said. His voice cracked a little, reminding me that at thirteen, he was caught between being a man and being a boy.

  “No way.” I ruffled his hair. “You are staying young forever.”

  He laughed and asked if I’d practiced my violin for the wedding. “I hope so,” Lev chimed in from the front. “Mother has been quite nervous about everything going off without a hitch.”

  Julia’s request was simple: she wanted me to play Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” which she knew as the more popularly named “Here Comes the Bride,” as Lev and Moritz walked her down the aisle. She’d always imagined she would hear it at her wedding, she said, and that didn’t happen for her in Berlin when she’d married Friedrich. I told Julia I would play whatever she liked, not sharing with her the song’s history or that Wagner was known for his anti-Semitic beliefs. Herr Fruchtenwalder never assigned his pieces because of this. Julia had no idea and I’d thought it silly to mention all that and spoil her wedding dream. I would play what she wanted. I truly wished great happiness for my sister and for her to have a long and loving marriage with Henry.