The Holocaust Opera

by Mark Edward Hall

  I could only look at her, unable or unwilling to take issue.

  She snorted at my non-reaction. “Rumor has it he’s writing some sort of modern saga based on the experiences of his ancestors.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” I said in reply.

  The woman looked at me as though I’d said something obscene. “Don’t be such a little twit,” she scolded. “They were in the holocaust. His grandparents were exterminated. His parents managed to escape...barely with their sanity. Now they’re all gone. The boy’s alone, wracked with pain and grief. Can’t you hear it in that music?”

  My hand went to my mouth to stifle a gasp. Of course I could hear it. That’s what the emotion was about, sorrow and grief, not passionate love turned tragic as I’d first imagined. The lady was right. I was a little fool. “Oh, my,” I said shocked. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t, girly. Now you do.” Her piercing blue eyes stared at me from the depths of that seamed face. “Rumor also has it that if you listen to that music long enough you’ll become infected with its message of despair and that eventually you’ll go stark-raving mad.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I replied shocked. “It’s only music.” As I was mouthing the words, I realized that I might be kidding myself. I had already come to the conclusion that there was something extraordinary, perhaps even supernatural, at work here.

  “Well, it’s of no consequence to me,” said the bag lady. “You’ll do what you will. Haven’t you wondered why there’s nobody else on this street?” I glanced up and then down the stark street and realized for the first time, that other than the bag lady, I hadn’t seen another living soul in more than two hours.

  “They scurry like saints with crosses from that music, girly. So beware.”

  The lady turned then and shuffled on her way, her hands over her ears, as if the music was indeed hurting her. I watched her for a long time, speechless, knowing that something else should be said, but unable to find words to describe my emotions. Halfway down the block, she stopped and stared back at me. A flight of noisy pigeons took wing from an alley and my eyes were drawn to their fluttering ascent. When I looked back, the bag lady was gone.

  I became frantic and fidgety. I didn’t know what to do next. I knew what I wanted; I just didn’t know how to go about getting it. I felt like an addict in need of a fix. I knew that I did not have the courage to heed the bag lady’s admonitions. I stood on the sidewalk, whirling around like a mad dervish. I needed to get into that apartment. I could not control my emotions. I had to talk to that boy about his music, his pain. I felt that our lives had somehow intersected, that his pain was now my pain. I sensed that no one else could understand the deep turbulence inside him like I could. I knew of no graceful way to get what I wanted, so finally I just went to the door and knocked.

  I was persistent. He didn’t come immediately, so I stood and hammered. After a while, the music stopped and I heard the clatter of a chain-lock on the other side. The door was finally opened and there stood the young man, six feet tall, handsome, with sad, haunted brown eyes and a jagged scar on his right cheek. I winced when I saw it, and hoped that he hadn’t noticed my reaction. He wore faded blue jeans and a white button-down shirt open at the throat. Around his neck hung a gold chain with the Star of David resting against his hairless chest.

  He just looked at me, his face expressionless. “I’m Roxanne Templeton,” I said. “I...heard your music from the street.” My voice trailed off as I felt color rise in my cheeks.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I replied in a soft voice, but not without a trace of awe. I knew my description paled, however, in the face of those indescribable melodies. “I wonder if you might be in need of a...singer?” What made me say that? I had no idea. In all honesty, I hadn’t known what I was going to say until the words were out of my mouth. I think I would have said just about anything to get close to that boy. My mouth was cottony-dry and I felt like I might pee down my leg any second.

  Finally, a small smile creased the corners of the young man’s generous mouth. “Are you a singer?”

  “Yes,” I replied

  He nodded. “How did you know it was me playing?”

  “A bag lady,” I said. “She told me about you.”

  He stepped past me and looked up and down the street. His face wore a grim look. “I haven’t seen a bag lady on this street for months,” he said. “Since the garbage strike ended. What did she look like?”

  I shrugged. “A bag lady. Gray hair, green cap, bad teeth, piercing blue eyes.”

  He nodded. “And what did she tell you about me?”

  I knew I was really blushing now. I did not want to mention the holocaust. She was probably a crazy old bat who’d made the whole thing up. “She said you were a composer of beautiful melodies,” I said finally, shaping what felt like a pathetically inept smile.

  “She did, huh?”

  “Yes, and I have to agree with her.” I smiled, a little more sincerely this time, and the young man’s face finally broke into a wide grin.

  “Jeremiah Gideon,” he said, extending his hand.

  “How do you do?” I said taking it. His handshake was strong and his fingers were hot, like tines of pure energy, and oh-so-soft. I might have been touching something divine. I fairly swooned, and so help me God, an electric shock sped through my arm and arrowed directly into my heart. My legs shook and for a short, panicky moment I thought they might give way beneath me.

  “Are you just out for a stroll or do you live in this neighborhood?”

  “I’m looking for an apartment.” I told him, and I could hear my voice quavering.

  “I see,” he replied. “Do you often knock on strange doors when you hear music?”

  “This is my first time,” I said. “The melodies were just so beautiful...I...couldn’t leave. I had to hear more.”

  “Well, come in then,” he said, leading the way down a set of stone steps into a basement flat. “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I told him. “You’re really quite good, you know.”

  “I’m trying to write an opera. Do you sing opera?”

  “No,” I replied in all honesty, scared to death that he would send me away. “Actually, I’m a rock singer, but I have the voice for opera. I could do it if someone would show me how. Besides,” I said, deciding to make a bold move, but shaking in my shoes. “Your music doesn’t sound like opera to me.”

  “Oh? It doesn’t?”

  I shook my head. “No, it sounds more modern, less stuffy,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “I’ve never heard opera with melodies like those.”

  “No?”

  “Uh, uh.”

  He sat down at the piano and began playing the pentatonic scale. “Sing along,” he told me. I was so nervous. I felt like I was auditioning for the most important gig of my life. When I began, it was with a shaky, somewhat hesitant voice, and then as the moments passed I began to sing more confidently.

  “You’re a soprano. That’s good,” he said. “Try this. In the key of C.” He began the introduction to Hoagie Carmichael’s beautiful and timeless, Stardust. Luckily, I knew the song and so I sang it with confidence. When we finally stopped, Jeremiah was silent for a long moment, looking at me. I watched him carefully. His features held the same enigmas and complexities as his music. His eyes held a depth of emotion that astounded me, as though they were windows to some lost and forgotten soul, and what I saw inside that soul, imagined or otherwise, both enthralled and troubled me. There was a war going on inside that boy, and it contained all the elements of the real thing. I saw hate and passion and despair and resolve, and the turbulence was so chaotic, so powerful, that I could not look away. He held my gaze like a hypnotist. I was astonished by his level of passion. It was somethin
g my life lacked. I realized also that it was the kind of passion necessary to attain a profound level of artistic achievement.

  “That was very good,” he said finally, breaking the psychic spell he held over me. “You have a beautiful voice, and a four octave range. I’m impressed. Yes, I believe you could be a great opera singer. Would you like to sing some of my songs?”

  For a moment, I could not find my breath. I couldn’t believe he was asking that question. “Yes.” I hissed, and almost fainted.

  * * * *

  That was the beginning of it all. I still needed an apartment, and a job. I found work almost immediately with a semi-popular rock band, Chained City. Their singer, a girl, had overdosed on heroin the week before and they needed to replace her immediately or lose important gigs. I answered an ad in a local music paper and went to an audition. I was the twenty-seventh one and they hired me on the spot. It was for the money, nothing more. My heart was never in it. I wore the clothes and did all the moves, but from the moment I’d heard Jeremiah Gideon’s music and had looked into those dark, sad eyes, I was hooked; nothing else in the world mattered to me.

  With Jeremiah’s help, I found an apartment. He knew some people in the neighborhood. He asked around and within forty-eight hours I was moving my two suitcases and my guitar into a tiny fourth-story attic that had been converted into a loft apartment. It wasn’t the greatest place in the world, but it faced north and on cloudless, smog-free days I could see a piece of the downtown skyline in the distance. Better still, the price was right. I didn’t care about the pitfalls. The important thing was, I was here, finally, in New York, and I would be working with the greatest young composer in the city. Everything else seemed inconsequential.

  Jeremiah knew his way around town. In the days that followed, he took me to some thrift shops where I purchased enough tattered furniture and used appliances to meet my needs.

  Jeremiah was indeed an enigma. Although he owned the entire building in which he lived, he resided alone in that small basement apartment. For reasons that were unclear to me, the bulk of the building had long ago been sealed off from occupancy.

  This much I managed to glean from him. Mostly, he kept silent about his life, even as I blabbed on about my own. I told him about my wonderful upbringing, church choir, glee club, of my parents’ encouragement to follow my dreams.

  “You’re very lucky,” he said.

  I had to agree. I believe I told him everything there was to know about my life—something I’d never done with anyone before—and he was an attentive listener, but still, he remained maddeningly clandestine about his own past.

  One day, while we were working on some of his gorgeous melodies, I finally got up enough nerve to ask him about his parents.

  He stopped playing and avoided my gaze, perhaps recalling some long lost poignancy. Finally, he turned to me, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “They were old. They had me late in life.”

  “They died?” I prodded.

  “They were in their fifties when I was born,” he said. “I was sort of an afterthought, I suppose.” Although he didn’t come right out and say they were dead, I took this to be an affirmation of that fact.

  “They say children who are born to older parents oftentimes have the spark of genius,” I opined.

  He scowled. “Who are they?”

  I shrugged and gave him a wry smile. “People. I don’t know...I heard that once.” Jeremiah was very modest about his talent. He did not like being called genius and he set me straight almost immediately.

  “You’re an only child?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied. There was a long pause and another one of those sad smiles clouded his face. “You know what I’m trying to do here, Roxanne?” He nodded in the direction of the sheet music on his piano stand.

  I shrugged, remembering again what the bag lady had told me, but never daring mention it to Jeremiah. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be successful at it,” I replied. I wasn’t just being nice. I was telling him the truth. His music went far beyond anything I had ever experienced, and carried me to places I never imagined existed, and did it with textures I’d never dreamed possible. It was as if his talent had taken music to the next step in the evolutionary process. I felt privileged that I had been fortunate enough to be touched by this boy and his genius. If it suddenly ended right there and then it would have been enough to last me a lifetime.

  “I’m trying to write a body of music that captures the spirit of what it must have been like in the death camps,” Jeremiah said. “Are you familiar with the holocaust?”

  I winced. Here it was, finally, the confession. “Well, sort of,” I replied. “Isn’t everybody?”

  He emitted a small humorless laugh. “No,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “There’s an entire generation of children growing up now who are being denied the truth. People are saying that Jews made it all up to get sympathy, and in some schools they’ve stopped teaching it altogether. They say it’s too morbid. Today, everything has to be politically correct. We have a tendency to deny the horrific, or make light of it, even as our modern society has turned into the most violent in history. Go figure.

  “History is supposed to teach us about the mistakes of our past so that we don’t repeat them, but it can’t happen when we have this tendency to rewrite it to suit the politically correct whims of the day. It just so happens that now, more than sixty years after the fact, for whatever reason, society has decided to deny the extinction of millions of innocent human beings.”

  I nodded, not knowing how to reply. My knowledge in these matters was sorely lacking. “Your parents were there, weren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Jeremiah said. “They were at Auschwitz, the Nazi death factory in Poland.” A quicksilver tear traced a line down his scarred cheek.

  I couldn’t bear to see him in pain. “Jeremiah,” I said. “That was then, this is now,” not realizing until it was too late what a lame thing it was to say.

  “Oh, so you think I should get on with my life and stop dwelling on the morbid, huh?”

  “I think it’s non-productive to dwell on a past that can’t be changed.”

  “That’s the trouble with this world. People try too hard to forget. They believe that forgetting is healing. It’s a mistake, I tell you. We must always remember. Remembering is healing. If we forget, then we’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Don’t you see?”

  I sat looking at him. I suppose I didn’t see. I’d read about the holocaust, of course; had studied it in school, in fact, but it was just a story in a text book; another bland assignment on the rocky road to graduation. There was no way I could begin to grasp the terrifying reality of what it had actually been like there. I’m from the Midwest; the members of my family had never been kidnapped, raped, humiliated, tortured, or gassed. My life had been a sheltered one. Concepts of that magnitude of cruelty and suffering were beyond my ability to fathom.

  “I want people to imagine it,” Jeremiah cried out. “I want them to feel it as if they were there. I want them to taste it, to suffer the same indignations. I don’t ever want the citizens of this planet to forget what happened to those wonderfully-brave people. I want everyone in this world to be stripped for a moment of every conceivable human dignity, to live in total despair without the luxury of even hope.” Jeremiah’s voice dropped to an angry whisper, his entire body trembled, and tears coursed down his cheeks. “That way they’ll remember, and that’s what I want my music to convey!”

  “It sounds to me like you want all of civilization to keep on suffering—”

  “Yes,” he shouted. “I do! Everyone is to blame for what those people had to endure!”

  “Jeremiah, it was one crazy madman—”

  Jeremiah became very animated, jumping up from the piano bench and pacing, gesturing with his arms and h
ands, his eyes wildly turning in their sockets. “So when the next crazy madman comes along, are we going to fall right in step behind him? I’m telling you it was more than one person who did it. It was a mindset. It was mass hysteria. The darkest caverns of human nature. Hitler alone didn’t hold the machine guns on those people and herd them like cattle into the gas chambers. He alone didn’t sterilize them without anesthetic. He alone didn’t rape them and torture them and strip them of every conceivable human dignity...” Jeremiah stopped and was silent for a long moment. His throat worked, but no more words came out, only these tiny little choking sounds. Tears were streaming down his cheeks and I had never in my life felt more empathy for a person than I did at that very moment. When he began speaking again, his voice was filled with resolve. “I will be successful at conveying the feelings inside me,” he said. “I’m determined. I must send my message to the world.”

  “A message of despair?” I shot back.

  “Yes!”

  I then began debating with the same ferocity as Jeremiah. I suppose his anger was contagious, because it began to swell within me as well. “I must confess then,” I said, “that from the moment I first heard you play, I could feel your anguish and your sorrow, and yes, your despair. At the same time I was uplifted, as if there was an entire world of hope in it for all of us. That’s what your music did for me.”

  Jeremiah took me by the shoulders, forcing me to look directly into his wet eyes. “Are you absolutely sure about that, Roxanne? Are you positive that hope is what you’re hearing in my music?”

  “Yes!”

  Jeremiah smiled then, but beneath the smile I saw something I couldn’t quite pigeonhole. It could have been fear, or anger, or even relief. I wasn’t sure and I was suddenly quite confused about everything.

  “Jeremiah, the human spirit is not capable of existence without hope,” I said. “You’re no exception. It’s part of what makes us human. How do you think the ones that survived that horrific time did it? They never let go of the dream. I may not be very old, or wise, but this much I do know. Whether you want to admit it or not, hope is there in your music, larger than life. Hope is there inside you. It’s the part I’m attracted to.”