The Spanish Bow

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  "She was afraid to perform?"

  "She was having second thoughts about escaping."

  "She was afraid of being caught."

  "No. It was true she had some concerns about the swim out to the rowboat anchored in the harbor, or being seen as she and Al-Cerraz rowed past the estuary to the open Bay of Biscay, where a larger fishing boat would be waiting for them. But sneaking, swimming, illegal, legal—that wasn't the main problem. She felt terrible about leaving Europe; it was her second try, you'll remember. She'd made it as far as New York in 1929—but that was when she still believed that her son was being cared for. This was worse. If there was any chance that he was still alive in Germany, then she was abandoning him. She'd talked with people who had seen the camps, who had escaped them. She already knew the things we all would find out later, from the photos taken by the liberation troops.

  "She had considered letting herself be arrested and transported on purpose, so she could look for him there—Birkenau, Auschwitz. Friends reminded her that a typical prisoner lasted six weeks in those camps, children less, but she imagined he had eluded such a fate. Talented musicians were recruited into camp symphonies that performed not only death marches, but gay music for the guards and administrators—entire musical productions. A child prodigy might be kept around for years in a camp, like a songbird in a cage, just to amuse some high official. And who was to say that her baby had not become a prodigy?

  "On the train to Hendaye, she leaned her head on my shoulder and described how her son had huddled, wide-eyed, under the piano. 'He pushed aside his curly blond hair and pressed his cheek to the wood, to feel the vibrations as the doctor played over him.' She spoke with such confidence that it was with effort that I pulled away and looked into her eyes, saying as gently as I could, 'You never saw him do that. Aviva—you never saw him. Remember?'

  "I was reminded of something she had once quoted Brecht as saying, about the suspicion with which Jewish refugees were treated—even by their relatives, even by their friends. She had the ambivalence of those who have left someone behind, and that made her unpredictable, a dangerous person with whom to link one's fate."

  "Go on."

  I took a breath and shuffled the pages in my hand, smoothing the edges. I hadn't read from them directly, but I had turned the pages as I'd spoken, following a line here or there with my finger. They had given me direction and support.

  "Go on," Wilhelm said again.

  "I didn't write any more—as I told you."

  He'd been patient for hours—for years, really, considering how long I'd avoided him, led him on, disappointed him. I had become aware of him in 1957, when he started working on the Al-Cerraz biography; I had pieced together his full significance only when the book was published in 1962, under the title Vanished Prodigy. The biographical information under the photo on the flap of the jacket was brief, but it told enough: Wilhelm Erlicht had moved to New York with his adoptive parents when he was seven. He had been a pianist until the age of thirty, when he turned to writing, a shift propelled by his interest in the past, in genealogy and history. And also, the text implied, by what he'd learned of his origins at that age.

  Now Wilhelm stood behind his chair, gripping the blue cloth of his jacket hanging over the chair's back, wrinkling the linen.

  "Take your time," he said. "Don't worry about the order. Just remember, and tell me what happened at Hendaye."

  "Everything went wrong," I said in the flattest voice possible. "Not like the petrol jugs or any of Al-Cerraz's other schemes. Wrong."

  He waited.

  "Wilhelm, I did a terrible thing."

  When I didn't resume speaking immediately, he turned his chair to the side and sat again, hunched over, with his elbows on his knees, cuffs of his trousers raised to reveal worn loafers that clashed with his black silk socks. He had the look of a creative person who has had to adopt the dress code of a more conventional life. He listened without facing me.

  "I don't trust my memories," I said.

  "I'm listening."

  "I don't trust the words. Who can trust words when they can be so easily changed and misunderstood? My name," I said. "Just one example. My mother had wanted to name me Feliz. In Spanish, it means happy—"

  "I know it means happy!" the journalist shouted, startling me. "Then the notary, your brother, your aunt—it was changed to Feliu—your sister in the cellar, your mother coming down the stairs. I already know that story!"

  I leaned back in my chair and held the manuscript to my chest, shielding the back of the last page with my forearms. "I'm sorry, Wilhelm."

  "If you were sensitive about names," he thundered, "you would stop calling me by the name I don't use. My driver's license says William. My friends call me Will."

  "I'm sorry. I apologize."

  "Your childhood, your early career—I've listened for hours. But this is more than a professional interest. If you blame yourself for what happened to her, then tell me exactly what happened. If you're trying to tell me you killed Al-Cerraz, or that you informed on him, then just say it. You've made it clear that you thought he had ruined your life."

  "He did ruin my life. I helped him to do it."

  He crossed the room and refilled both our glasses, and then walked back quickly, ignoring the trail of drips he left behind on the wooden floor. He pressed my glass into my hands without making eye contact.

  I said, "This is how you get your stories? By shouting at people?"

  "Of course not."

  We sipped our drinks in silence for a moment before I spoke again.

  "You're believing your own book. I understand you felt the need to present every remote possibility. But you know I wasn't involved in anything like that.... "

  "I never named you. I simply said that he'd made enemies among musicians and artists."

  I ignored him. "He didn't die in Europe that month. He went on to finish his one-act Don Quixote the next year—"

  "Discovered after the war; published and produced posthumously, to bad reviews," he corrected. "Proving that even a dead composer doesn't always get a break."

  "Posthumous only if he was dead. I'm sure he wasn't."

  "Maybe he had written it before October 1940," William said. "It was in your custody, and you sent it—or Varian Fry mailed it earlier."

  "But can't you see what it was about?"

  "It was a defense of fascism. Don Quixote as Franco, the misunderstood hero."

  "Oh, William!" I let the disappointment creep into my voice. "Don Quixote as Franco? Al-Cerraz's Don Quixote was a woman."

  "Franco dressed perversely as a woman. The image invented by Picasso."

  "No, no. If it were merely metaphorical, the best guess would be Don Quixote as the Republic of Spain. But this Don Quixote was based on a real woman. The only woman Al-Cerraz was thinking about that year."

  I leaned forward, trying to meet his gaze. "Aviva was the dreamer among us. She believed in the impossible: your survival."

  He looked away and cleared his throat, masking his feelings with professionalism. "So the critics were wrong in panning it as unfashionably fascist."

  "Absolutely wrong."

  "And the long-suffering British patron?"

  "He was crushed."

  "I don't recall you correcting the critics' misinterpretations."

  "I did not."

  "Cigarette?" William said after a while.

  "No, thanks."

  "Bother you?"

  "A little."

  He lit up anyway.

  "Let's start again in Hendaye. Easy things first. Tell me how it looked, when you first saw it."

  Beautiful. Hopeful. Marseilles had been more industrial, more polluted. But Hendaye reminded me of Campo Seco: clean air, the smell of the sea.

  Arriving by train, you see all the red roofs, the curved, overlapping ceramic shingles. Then the white walls of the connected houses. Narrow streets veering off at unexpected angles, but everything orderly. Wooden balconies and b
right green wooden shutters. Potted red geraniums. Arches of gray stone embedded in the white walls above each tall, narrow window.

  Farther out from town, there is a wide sandy beach, and hotels lined up along it, fronting the Bay of Biscay, with some sea stacks just offshore that look like squashed brown hats.

  The center of town sits on the eastern bank of the Bidassoa River, just where it meets the Bay of Biscay. There is an old fort, some narrow rusted cannons cemented into an ancient Basque seawall made of gray stone, with tiny wild violets growing in the cracks. At its mouth, the little river widens, making a protected pocket of water—a natural harbor, blue and sparkling. That's where all the little boats anchor— fishing boats and sailboats with their wooden dinghies rocking next to them.

  The boundary between France and Spain runs directly down the middle of the river, through the boats; and another town, Hondarribia, is visible just across the harbor—nearly a mirror image of Hendaye. When the clock tower in Hondarribia chimes, it is audible in Hendaye, and when the Basque fishermen head out of Hendaye's harbor to fish off the wide beach, they rub shoulders with Hondarribia's Basque fishermen. At sunset the lighthouse on the French side winks at the lighthouse on the Spanish side. And the green hills rise up behind both towns, enfolding them.

  Our duty that first afternoon, in addition to meeting the local Gestapo chief and attempting to dress ourselves more appropriately for the next day's concert, was to notice all these details and to understand where one nation ended and the other began, and how each guarded its border.

  But there is a detail I haven't explained. I told you we had a Gestapo officer helping us to find better clothes in Hendaye—and not just that. He had been attached to us since our departure from Marseilles, an official escort. He was young—twenty-three or twenty-four. I will not tell you his name, because I know that, given your propensity to research things, you will look him up. I don't know if he is living or not, if he had any descendants, but if so, it would not be right to bother him or them about this. He crossed our paths this one week only, and it was to his misfortune, as well as ours. I will call him Kreisler—it's close enough.

  The motorcycle-riding officer we had met briefly at the Villa Air-Bel had been the one to recommend Kreisler, who was an acquaintance of his daughter.

  "Are you thinking of marrying her when this whole thing is over?" Al-Cerraz asked him.

  The young guard's ears flushed red. He said, "The SS does not encourage us to marry. Only to procreate. To spread the Aryan race."

  Al-Cerraz rolled his eyes. "You boys have all the fun."

  Kreisler had blond hair, stubbly on top, shaved close around the ears. The back of his head and soft, lined neck looked like an infant's. I asked him if he'd played piano as a child. No, he told us, he had sung in a choir. He had been a regular police officer in Stuttgart, until his police branch was absorbed into the state police. He liked France. He had always wanted to visit Spain, and he ticked off the musicians he knew on his fingers: "Albéniz, Granados, Cassadó, Casals..."

  Just after the train pulled out of Marseilles, he asked us for our autographs. Aviva thought it was a trick and refused. In Toulouse, he disembarked and bought flowers for her. That softened her up a little. At the next stop, he came back with sandwiches—ham for Al-Cerraz and me, beef for Aviva, though she hadn't mentioned any dietary preferences. It was clear to all of us: He knew who she was, or rather what she was. And still he maintained his deferential attitude, and several times left us unguarded, for a quarter of an hour at a time.

  When Al-Cerraz chided him on his leniency, Kreisler grew suddenly officious. "I have two primary directives," he said. "First is to safeguard this man's health." He nodded toward me and opened a bulky leather valise to present another basket of cherries, of the type I had received at the Air-Bel a month earlier. "Second is to escort you for your own welfare, to beware of thieves and so on. My superior officer takes a great interest in musical objects, and in Maestro Delargo's bow in particular."

  "Other than that, we're free to get into trouble," Al-Cerraz teased him.

  "No, please. That would be a bad idea for all of us."

  After we settled into the hotel rooms that Hendaye officials had provided for us, we asked Kreisler for permission to see the town, and he granted it. Al-Cerraz, Aviva, and I walked from the town center to the ancient seawall and harbor, and back to the train station. Then we walked a little farther, to see where the train tracks led. The tracks followed a slim bridge very high over the river, where the Bidassoa narrows. Just upriver, a second high bridge echoed the first—this one had a road over it. At the foot of the road, there was a French guardhouse on the Hendaye side, and on the bridge itself we could make out a small convention of dull green and brown uniforms, the glint of medals and belt buckles and the flash of rifles well-oiled for the dictators' impending meeting.

  No one seemed to think it strange that the three of us were out walking, squinting toward the water and the bridges, although a shopkeeper called out to us, "You must be very famous to require all this protection."

  The townspeople hadn't been told about the more famous men expected the next day. But they'd been told about the concert, and a select number had been invited, or ordered, to the train platform to hear us play. The members of a local civic orchestra had been told to report as well, with their instruments and every piece of sheet music they owned; they would perform some patriotic music to introduce us. But they didn't seem to know why there would be music on this day, why the train platform instead of the church or the grassy park by the seawall. Or they pretended not to know.

  The two dictators were to meet the next afternoon in Hitler's private railcar. With one well-placed undercarriage bomb, French resistance could have deprived the world of two dictators, had anyone been aware of the plan. Meanwhile, afternoon gave way to evening, and the station's parking lot filled with motorcycles and official cars. The café across the street was crowded with gendarmes sipping double espressos, in preparation for a long vigil. Normal train traffic on the route had been interrupted, for security reasons. Officially, the tracks both south and north were "under repair."

  Returning to the hotel, Al-Cerraz volunteered to Kreisler, "Maestro Delargo seems to be rubbing his hands. I hope the gout is not starting to bother him again."

  That alarmed our Gestapo guard. He immediately called the front desk and inquired after local sources of cherries.

  "Maybe it was the prawns he ate for lunch," Al-Cerraz volunteered between phone calls.

  "He ate prawns?" Kreisler asked, looking queasy himself.

  Al-Cerraz adopted a guilty expression. "We tried to stop him. He's the one you should be keeping a closer eye on."

  The mischief I had known from our earliest train touring days had not been purged from Al-Cerraz's soul. I glared at him, incredulous, hoping that this tomfoolery had some purpose. In the meantime, Kreisler came and went, bringing me every type of produce he could procure at the last minute, including that item his superior officer's grandmama had vouched for. Over the course of an evening, I spooned the contents of three entire jars of preserved cherries into my mouth. Ever since, I haven't been able to look at a cherry without feeling sick.

  Each jar bought us a half hour or so of freedom from Kreisler. We three gathered in Aviva's room; I looked out the window while Aviva and Al-Cerraz leaned their heads over a map sketched on a matchbook and took turns reading from a pocket-sized phrasebook:

  "Kaixo," Al-Cerraz said.

  Aviva repeated: "Kaikso."

  "The x is like 'shhh.' Kaixo." He pushed on. "Zer moduz?"

  "Zer moduz"

  "Nola esaten da hori euskaraz?"

  "Oh, Justo—I'm not going to remember that."

  "But that way you can point to things and find out how to say them in Basque. It will help you with everything else."

  "We 'll be with them for a few days at the most, until the next boat from Portugal. I don't plan to talk," Aviva said. "Only to list
en."

  "All right. Then here's one you should learn to recognize: Kontuz!"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Caution."

  ***

  At one point when Kreisler returned to the room for the third or fourth time, cherry compote in hand, Al-Cerraz told him that he and Aviva were getting married. It astonished me how far he dared go.

  "After the concert?" Kreisler asked.

  "Just after."

  "So this is an early honeymoon for you, so to speak."

  Aviva's face lit up.

  "Does that mean you'll let us go have a night on the town, just me and my girl?" Al-Cerraz asked.

  Kreisler looked pained. "It's late. It's dark. Everything is closed. Better tomorrow, after the concert." He smiled. "After the concert, you have a nice dinner, you two alone. I will pay for the champagne."

  That fit their—our—plans perfectly. Al-Cerraz's wizardry seemed to be working its spell again.

  When Kreisler left again, Al-Cerraz went over the plan—what time we were expected at the station in the morning, to inspect the delivered piano and rehearse under Gestapo supervision, the point at which I would explain to Kreisler that my arthritis had flared up and I could not play, how they would execute a modified program. Then they would return to the hotel, leave again for their dinner—and wait by the seawall for that precise moment when the sky's peach blush faded to pink, then light purple, then blue, and the twin lighthouses winked on, alerting the fishing boat hiding beyond the sea stacks that they would be arriving. Then around the curve of the seawall and down the ancient steps to the quiet harbor, and to any of several anchored rowboats, floating there, waiting.

  And I—I was not going with them. They had invited and urged me several times, but I hadn't the will. Instead, I accepted my land-based role in the charade. When Kreisler noted Al-Cerraz's and Aviva's absence, I would share his alarm that my friends had sneaked off for a romantic beach swim and not reappeared. Some gendarme would no doubt find the twisted, damp pile of discarded clothing—pants and shirt and lady's dress—on the seaweed-covered tidal rocks at the beach's farthest east margin, where the rocky hills sloped toward the shore. Two drownings. By that afternoon, Hitler would be well on his way east, and Franco south, and every local gendarme would be wiping his brow in relief at having survived the incursion of police and intelligence agents from two other nations. By comparison, the drownings of two visitors would stir little excitement. I would stay another day, frequenting cafés and restaurants and socializing with minor officials if it was required, and then return on the train on October 24, as my ticket stated.