“They let you go,” Elsa said, hopefully. “Maybe they will let Hanna go, too?”
Maybe Elsa was right, and for the first time since they’d been arrested, he felt the air flowing into his lungs. In another time—he’d seen it with his own eyes—Hanna was safe, missing years of her memory. Maybe she would still come back to him and he could still take her into the closet? Maybe it wasn’t too late?
He waited for days, and weeks, and then months. He wrote letters to the SA, to the Reichstag, trying to get information about Hanna’s whereabouts, and that resulted in him being arrested again. Why should it be a crime for him to love her, to want to know if she was safe?
After another few weeks in jail, they let him go, but they promised him that next time, he would not be so lucky.
Max smelled the smoke first. Just a wisp, like a cigarette lit out on the street. But it quickly intensified, filled his nostrils, an acrid burning sensation.
Something came flying in through the front window of his shop, breaking the glass, a firebomb with a note: Judenliebhaber. Jew lover. As he took a second to look at it, he didn’t notice right away that the flame had leaped onto a book, that the book was burning, and that it was touching another book, which also quickly became engulfed in flames.
Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
The books were going to burn, the shop was going to burn. He would burn, too, if he stayed put. And the closet. What would happen to the closet?
He hesitated for a moment, but then he made a choice. If he didn’t leave now, he might never leave. And if the future he’d seen once was real, Hanna was there, alive, okay.
He opened the door to the closet and ran through it as fast as he could, faster than he had ever run in his life.
Hanna, 1958
I have played the violin since I was six years old, and it has always felt a part of me, another limb, one that is necessary and vital to my daily survival. My violin connects my present and my past, my dreams and my reality. My fingers move nimbly over the strings, my mind forgetting all I’ve lost or misbelieved or imagined. There is only the music that is my constant companion. Nothing but the music. Not Stuart. Not Max. Not now. Not the past, either.
“Hanna,” Stuart interrupts me today. I’ve etched the date, November 6, 1958, in pencil at the top of my music, so I know it is real. I do this every single day and have since I was living in London with Julia. While I sometimes still forget how old I am now, my fingers do not move as they used to. Some days my knuckles swell, and I must cover them in bags of ice when I get home after practice. But Stuart doesn’t know this; I hide it from him, like so much else.
Today, I’m practicing at the conservatory, as I do every day. The orchestra will tour again next spring, and we’ll go around Europe, playing Bach and Vivaldi and Holst. London, Paris, Berlin. As first chair violinist, I must play everything right, everything perfect. Though I already know all the music well, it is not enough. I have to breathe it, too. It has to sink into my skin, into my memory, so I will never ever forget it, a sweet perfume that lingers on and overtakes all my senses.
When Stuart walks in, I rest my violin on my knee and smile at him. Dear, sweet Stuart. You’re an old soul, he told me once, as if trying to explain away our age difference. It was only then that I’d thought: Maybe Stuart really does know me?
“Hanna,” he says now. “You have a friend here to see you.”
My world in New York City is a bubble. Rehearsal and practice. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, and though I am friendly with nearly everyone in the orchestra, I wouldn’t call any of them dear friends. Only Stuart. And it’s only because he thinks he loves me, thinks he understands me. “It must be some mistake,” I tell him, bringing the violin back to my chin.
“No mistake,” Stuart says. “He asked for Hanna. He said the ‘girl who plays violin like fire.’” Stuart laughs. His eyes crinkle. He is both amused and stricken by the accuracy of the description.
But when I look at him again, his eyes have darkened, as if he understands it, truly understands, even after all these years: there really is another man I love, whom I will choose over him, again and again.
I walk out to the front of the conservatory, still clutching my violin. The street is quite noisy, the sidewalk crowded, as it is at all hours of the day in Manhattan. But there is one man standing there, his face pressed to the glass; he is looking for me. I know that it is him, and yet I can’t believe it could be. It has been so long.
“Max,” I call out for him, and he turns. Runs to me.
“Hanna.” He embraces me, and even after all this time his arms are familiar and safe and comfortable. I want to hate him for abandoning me, time and time again. But I can’t. I’m just so happy that he’s here.
I pull back to look at him. I put my hand on his cheek, and he looks exactly the same as I remember him looking in Paris, and that last night in Gutenstat. He appears so young and so very handsome still. He has not changed one bit. I am suddenly self-conscious about the silver strands that have taken over my curls at an alarming rate, and the crow’s-feet around my eyes. But Max looks at me and seems not to see any of that. “You are alive,” he speaks in German. “And you are so beautiful.” He stokes my cheek softly with his thumb.
I have the sensation that Stuart is behind us, watching through the glass, and I turn to look, but no one is there. “Why don’t we go to my apartment?” I say to Max, the German words flowing from my mouth so quickly, so easily, like water from a faucet. The air is chilly, and I left my coat inside the conservatory, but I barely even notice it. Max takes my hand and walks with me through the midmorning rush of lower Manhattan. Everything around me slips away, but him.
I have so many questions for Max: where he has been, what he has been doing. Why he has stayed away for so long, and how the years have not changed him at all. They come out in a barrage of German as soon as we walk inside my apartment and I flip on the lights.
“It is a very nice place you have here,” Max says, looking around, ignoring all my questions. He swoops down, kisses me on the mouth, and when I taste him and feel his lips against mine, I can’t think of anything else but him here, and the feeling of being whole again.
He holds my cheeks in his hands, presses his forehead to mine. “I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.” He might be apologizing for dozens of things, for leaving again, for staying away so long, for not writing or calling, for the other women he surely must have been with in all this time. But then he surprises me by saying, “I’m so sorry I didn’t save you, in Germany. I was supposed to save you.”
“Max.” I put my finger to his lips to stop him from apologizing. “I saved myself.” And wasn’t that what Henry said, that I was a survivor? More memories have come back to me over the years, and they haunt me still; they will always haunt me, but I have also come to reckon with what happened to me, and what I did during that time. It was my violin playing, my fire, as Max had always called it, that had saved me. I have come to believe that maybe Henry was right. That I only did what I could, what I had to, to survive.
“I am never going to leave you again,” Max says, holding me, pulling me closer. “Never.” And maybe I am still naive, but he says it so forcefully that I really truly believe him.
I lead Max to my bedroom, and as he unbuttons my shirt, I feel self-conscious about my body, which is different than it was the last time I was with him, much different than when I was such a young girl in Gutenstat. My hips are fuller, my stomach rounder. But Max doesn’t seem to notice any of that. “Your neck still smells like rosin,” he whispers in my ear, and then slowly he kisses a trail down my naked body, from my neck to my calves, and then back up again.
We make love, slowly, sweetly. Our bodies move together, keeping time perfectly. And afterward I lie in his arms, and we whisper to each other. I tell him about everything he has missed, everything I have done: all the orchestras, all the solos. Ju
lia and Henry. My grown-up nephews. The only part I leave out is Stuart. And not because I think Max would be mad but because I don’t know how to describe Stuart to him exactly. Stuart and I are just friends here in New York, but sometimes, some nights when we need each other, we are more than that.
“What have you been doing all these years?” I ask him.
He kisses the top of my head. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” he says.
“Try me,” I say.
“Well,” he begins. “I have . . . lost many years. Skipped ahead in time. One minute it was 1938 and then it was . . . when is it now?”
“November 6, 1958,” I say, recounting the date I’d written on my music only a few hours earlier.
“You must think I sound crazy,” Max says.
“No,” I tell him. “I don’t think that at all. For me it was the . . . trauma. I blocked it out.” I repeat the explanation I had been told myself. “Is that what happened to you, too? Did something terrible happen to you?”
“Yes,” Max says. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“No,” I tell him. “I’m right here.” I turn my body into his, snuggling in closer, entwining our legs as we had done so many times, so many nights. Those early days of our time together are far away, but also, it still feels so close.
“I’m so tired,” Max says.
It is still the middle of the afternoon, and I’m not tired at all, but I don’t want to leave my bed, leave him, so I tell him we can sleep if he wants.
“I love you, Hannalie Ginsberg,” Max says, his voice lazy, his words, slightly slurred.
“I love you, too,” I say.
“Will you play me something? What was the song you played the night we got engaged?”
“The Brahms concerto. His love song for Clara Schumann.” I remember that night perfectly. Everything was still possible, and hopeful. I’d thought that Max and I would be together forever, not like the unrequited love Brahms had been writing about.
I kiss his chest, kissing over his heart, feeling it thump slowly beneath my lips. And then I get out of bed, pull my robe from the bathroom, and grab my violin from where I’d left it on the front table.
I stand at the foot of my bed, close my eyes, and begin to play: the Brahms I’d played that night by Elsa and Johann’s fireplace is in my mind and in my heart, and it pours from my fingers, the way rain pours from a thundercloud, sudden, almost violent.
When I finish the song, my whole body is shaking, and I open my eyes again. “Did you enjoy it?” I ask, breathing hard. Max doesn’t answer and I turn to see if he’s fallen asleep. His head is to the side; his nose is bleeding a little. I put my violin down and run to the bathroom for a washcloth.
“Max, are you all right?” I sit on the bed next to him, dab at the blood. He doesn’t respond, and I grab his shoulders and try to shake him gently awake. But his shoulders feel limp in my hands. His skin is cold to the touch. “Max?”
I put my head on his chest, and where his heart had beat beneath my lips ten minutes ago, now there is only silence.
Hanna, 1959
The concert hall in Berlin has been rebuilt since the war, and as everyone else in the symphony exclaims how stunning it is, to me it looks all wrong, not nearly as beautiful as it once was. But then I am the only German-born of the group, the only one whose zayde brought her to hear the symphony here as a little girl.
Berlin in general looks entirely different, everything so new that it is almost hard for me to walk around the city, to explore the streets and the plazas I used to walk and know and love as a girl. But I force myself to walk them, anyway, and to walk them alone. I break off from the rest of the orchestra who go in search of monuments and museums, and by myself, I retrace the familiar and unfamiliar steps of my past.
I have invited Sister Louisa and the nuns to come to the concert tonight, Elsa and Grace, too. Elsa and I have plans to go to dinner tonight after the performance. I have tried many times to write Elsa about Max and to tell her what happened, but every time I started to write it, it felt all wrong, confusing, unbelievable. I will talk to her tonight, in person, and I both long for the comfort of sharing the news with someone else who knew and loved Max and dread giving Elsa more heartache.
Though it has been almost five months, I have not quite accepted all of it myself. The doctor at Mount Sinai told me that Max most likely died of a massive stroke, fairly unusual for someone in his twenties, and he asked if I knew Max’s medical or family history. Max only looked young, I’d told the doctor. But, really, he was in his forties, like me. As for his family history, I knew only what he had told me, that his father had died fairly young himself one day in the shop, in the middle of a conversation with a patron. And that his mother had died of illness, even younger. Too soon. At the wrong time. And then the same had happened to Max. His history and his destiny. It felt unbelievably cruel that Max had finally come to me again, and then, just like that, he was gone for good.
I grieved Max silently, inwardly, for a few months. I didn’t tell anyone else or speak of it. I immersed myself in my practice, in my violin. But then at night I would get into bed and it would come back to me again. Knowing he was dead, truly dead, that he would never again wander into my life whenever it suited him, made my head and my body and my soul ache. But it also felt a strange relief that I was no longer waiting, no longer hoping for him to reappear, just like that.
Henry and Julia had taken a transatlantic flight (their first!) to come visit me last month in New York, now that Lev and Moritz are both at university. And when I saw them in person, I couldn’t help myself; all the details about Max came rushing out of me. It was the first time I’d said it all aloud, and I felt better, in a weird way, to have it out there, outside of my head. A real, spoken truth. Max was dead.
Henry said that he was so very sorry for my loss. And Julia bit her lip for a moment and then said, “Well, if you want to look at the good side, you are free now. You can love someone else. What about that handsome distinguished Stuart? I always thought you’d end up with him.”
“Sweetheart,” Henry said, patting Julia’s leg. “Maybe now is not the time?”
Julia apologized, said she hadn’t meant to be harsh. I enjoyed the way Henry tempered her. In fact, I liked her so much better married to him than when she was married to Friedrich. “I’m glad you two found each other,” I said.
“See,” Julia said. “That’s only what I meant. We all need second chances.”
“I have my violin,” I said, and I shrugged her off.
“Well . . .” She touched my hand. “Henry and I are going to get front-row tickets when you come play in London. Mamele would’ve been so proud,” she gushed.
It was the strangest and the nicest conversation we had ever had. I glanced at Henry and then I glanced at her. Her life was far different from how she’d ever thought it would turn out, but she had survived a lot, raised two wonderful boys. “She would’ve been proud of you, too,” I said.
I finally told Stuart everything, just before we all got on the plane to fly to Europe. I went to him last week, after rehearsal, and then I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. As if talking to Julia and Henry had caused this great dam to break inside of me, and everything flooded out. I told him about all my missing years, and how I found them again the night Julia and Henry got married. About missing Max and finding him again too. In Paris and also, last year, in New York.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I hurt you, and I wanted you to understand why. But now you know how broken I am. Why I could never really be with you the way you want.”
“It’s all water under the bridge,” he said, kindly. He put his hand gently on my shoulder. “And you are not broken,” he said. “You have lived through so much, and you have come through so beautifully.”
And he looked at me in that way he had once in his apartment in Paris, as if to say he was here, he was waiting. Whenever I was ready.
It is
both exhilarating and terrifying to be on the stage in Berlin. I stare out into the crowd, looking for Elsa and Grace, but the lights are so bright, the audience so big, that all I can see is a sea of gray and yellow tinted faces staring back at me.
Tonight we are beginning with Bartók’s “Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm,” in 7/8 time, and Stuart stands in front of us counting it off quietly, reminding us to pay attention to the time signature. The time is everything in this piece, in this concert. In Berlin.
The date handwritten at the top of my music reads March 16, 1959. Here I am again, in Germany, playing my violin for a country that raised me and loved me, that cared for me and destroyed me. I have lost so many years. Skipped so much time, Max said, just before he died.
But here I am again.
Then Stuart lifts his arms, catches my eye the way he always does. I put my violin to my chin, stare at him for a moment. His blue eyes shimmer in the stage lights, and he smiles at me.
I lift my bow, smile back at him to say that yes, I am ready now. And then I close my eyes and play.
Author’s Note
I had just started writing this novel when I went to speak to a Holocaust survivors’ group about my last book. One woman there shared with me what it was like to be a little girl in Germany as Hitler was coming to power, and she told me how her family didn’t leave because they were Germans. It was their country, too. And no one truly believed how bad it would get. That stuck with me, and I thought about it as I created Max and Hanna and their world in the 1930s in Germany. Though all the characters in this novel are fictional, as are the orchestras Hanna plays in throughout the book and the suburb of Gutenstat, all the events going on around them are based on historical facts, both before and after the war. I tried to re-create Germany during Hitler’s rise and London, Paris, and Vienna after the war, sticking as close to the facts and true time line and landscape as I could.
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