Willi claimed he hadn’t known. “I thought it was just for theaters,” he said of the superstition. Because backstage workers often used coded whistles to send messages to each other during scene changes, a whistling actor could cause the premature lowering of a set. “But concerts don’t have sets.”
When I was older, I learned that for many years there had been gaslights in the Musikverein and other concert halls. If a flame flickered out, leaving behind a lethal stream of gas, it made a whistling sound, signaling danger.
“Whistling causes evil things to happen,” my father explained flatly. “It curses us.”
There were times, even years later, I would wonder if it had been my whistling that caused it all.
Two
In 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The Dachau concentration camp is established near Munich.
DECEMBER 21, 1933
When I was nearly six, my parents decided I was finally old enough to attend the opera. I wasn’t yet old enough to begin school, but for my parents, music was more essential than words or numbers. Ever since I had learned how to speak, ever since I had first understood what it was my parents did for a living, I had wanted to see them onstage. Opera stories—tragic though most of them are—had been my bedtime reading, alongside stories from Greek mythology and the Brothers Grimm.
Why she chose Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots I will never know. It’s not a very festive opera. Something light and funny—The Bartered Bride or The Abduction from the Seraglio, for example—might have better suited a child’s sensibilities. Perhaps it was simply to hear Rose Merker singing Valentine or Marie Gerhart singing Marguerite, though neither was her favorite. Perhaps that is just what happened to be on the day she decided to take me.
Or perhaps it was intended as an early warning: the god you choose to worship could get you killed.
* * *
• • •
MY OPERA DRESS, pale blue with white lace along the hem and at the edges of the sleeves, made me feel grown-up. My mother brushed my hair until its pale, coppery strands shone like a one-schilling coin and gathered it up on top of my head. Her hair was curlier and darker than mine, glossy like the horse chestnuts we found on the ground in early September. She twisted my hair like hers, and even dabbed a bit of her lilac perfume on my wrists. “There,” she said, stepping back to admire her work. “Pretty as a china doll.”
I twirled, watching my skirt catch the air. “As pretty as you?” My mother looked glamorous in her floor-length, cream-colored silk gown. Embroidered leaves and flowers in the same color spilled down the bodice and over the curve of her hips.
“Prettier!”
This was not possible. No one was as beautiful as my mother.
* * *
• • •
THE OPERA HOUSE was even grander than the Musikverein. I was so busy staring around me that I tripped going up the stairs and my mother had to catch my arm. Above us, tucked into the corners near the ceiling, were statues of children clutching instruments or theater masks, gazing down on us as we ascended. Dozens of chandeliers dangled from the ceilings like upside-down fountains.
“There’s Meyerbeer,” my mother said, pointing to one of the busts carved into the top of one of the walls. “Who wrote this opera. And there’s Mahler.” She nudged me toward a black marble head perched on a pedestal in front of a mirror.
“Shouldn’t he have combed his hair before he let someone carve him into a statue?” My question was sincere: Mahler’s hair looked lumpy and long.
My mother laughed. “We don’t love him for his hair,” she chided.
“Do we love him because he’s Jewish?”
“We love him for the same reason we love everyone in this building. We love him for his music.”
Just as in the Musikverein, everything in the opera house was gilded. Music for me was always associated with elegance, gold, and crystal.
My mother had gotten us seats on the left side of the second balcony so that we could look down at our fellow operagoers filing into their seats. I leaned over the railing staring at the ladies’ dresses and furs until my mother told me to look up. From the middle of the ceiling was suspended the largest chandelier I had ever seen. I wasn’t struck so much by its beauty—it looked like a gigantic shiny pastry—as by its mass.
“It weighs eleven tons,” my mother said. “Fifteen cows. Or twenty grand pianos.”
Gazing at it, I was glad we were not sitting underneath. “How come it doesn’t pull down the roof?”
“Well, the roof is even heavier.”
All of this was making my chest tight.
“Orly,” said my mother, sensing my discomfort, “this building has been standing for a very long time. And it will be standing for a long time more. I promise you, Schatz.
“Now, do you remember the story of Die Zauberflöte?” While we waited for the curtain to rise, my mother entertained me with opera stories and bits of gossip about the composer and singers. When she got to Lohengrin, I made her tell me the story three times. I loved to hear how the knight turned into a swan, how the lady married a man whose name she didn’t know. It all seemed very romantic and mysterious, except for the end. Insatiably curious, I found it maddening that the women of opera, of legend, of myth, were so often forbidden to ask questions of their men, and punished when they did. Psyche, not allowed to see the face of her beloved. Elsa, not allowed to know even the name of her husband, Lohengrin. How terrifying it must have been to marry someone you didn’t know. “I’m going to marry Anneliese,” I announced to my mother. “She lets me ask her questions. And I already know who she is.”
My mother laughed and squeezed my hand. “What a silly duckling you are.” The lights dimmed, and I pulled my spine up as straight as I could and firmly crossed my ankles, locking my feet together to keep them from mischief.
There was no chance of me squirming during Les Huguenots. Stunned by the heady mixture of music and violence, I sat like a stone. I didn’t cough, I didn’t swallow, I didn’t change the crossing of my ankles. (Later, when I undressed for bed, I would notice an indentation remained on the top of my right foot, so hard had I pressed it into the buckle of my left shoe.) I imprisoned my mother’s hand in mine.
I had thought, somehow, that music was meant to tell only beautiful stories, love stories. But here was a story in which every single character was murdered, in which a father murdered his own daughter. I felt sorry for both the Catholics and Protestants—even though it was mostly the Protestants who got killed—because they were not allowed to fall in love with each other.
During the interval, I shook out my stiff legs as we walked to the lobby bar. My mother ordered me an apfelspritz and herself a glass of champagne, which she explained was a grown-up version of the same drink. I looked longingly at the cakes, but my mother said we could go to a café afterward. As she was paying, a woman with long, glittering earrings and a spiraling tower of fair hair touched her elbow. “Julia? I thought it was you!”
My mother turned to greet the woman, introducing her as a singer she knew from work, but I failed to catch her name. I was distracted by another woman—was it a woman?—just behind her. Dressed in what looked like a man’s tuxedo, she had combed her short, dark hair straight back. Instead of tipping her weight into one hip or wobbling on heels, she stood with her legs a foot apart, comfortable like a man. When she saw me staring, she smiled.
“I’m Odiane,” she said, her voice warm and low as she offered me her hand.
I took her dry fingers in my damp ones. “Are you a girl?”
Odiane laughed, but my mother reached for my elbow and pinched it. “Orly! That’s not polite. Odiane, please forgive my daughter.” She turned back to me. “Odiane is a pianist. And a composer.”
“Pleased to meet you.” I curtsied, hoping it might make up for my rudeness. I didn’t know that girls could d
ress like that. I didn’t know that women could stand that way.
The bell chimed while we were still drinking, and we had to finish quickly before the lights went down. I wanted to follow Odiane back to her seat, but she and the blond woman quickly disappeared in the throng.
“Mutti, how do you know her?”
“I told you. From work. She’s a mezzo.”
“No, Odiane.”
“Ah.” My mother glanced down at the program in her lap. “She lives with Ilse.”
“They’re sisters?”
“More like roommates, I think.”
I thought about this. I wondered if Anneliese and I could be roommates. “Why does she dress like that? Odiane, I mean?”
“Some women like to wear trousers. Even the First Lady in the United States sometimes wears trousers. And Marlene Dietrich, the film star. Though I don’t recommend that you start. Frau Fessler would not approve.”
“Do you think Odiane wears trousers all the time? Are there girls who do that?”
My mother took my hand. “Erdnuss, you’ll find a bit later in life that there are all kinds of girls.”
* * *
• • •
“LISTEN TO HER,” my mother said, rapt, when Rose Merker was onstage. “Just listen.”
But I could not absorb anything other than the massacre unfolding before me. Near the end of the opera, three of the characters sang about their visions of heaven. Which sounded nice. But then at the very end, the soldiers were all shouting: “God wants blood!”
By the final act, my right foot was asleep and I had to limp out of the opera house. The sky was a painting, smudged blue and black on one of the longest nights of the year. I was grateful to be outside, away from the sadness still ringing in my ears, despite the frigid air that numbed them. The shops and cafés around the plaza radiated light and life, letting out bursts of cinnamon- and chocolate-scented air every time a door opened.
It was a treat to be allowed out so late. Elegant women in long gowns swept past us, on their way to assignations at the Café Sacher or the Imperial Hotel. I looked around for Odiane and Ilse, but they had vanished. Men in long, dark coats began emerging from the back of the opera, carrying instrument cases. My mother wrapped her scarf twice around her neck. Vocal cords worked best when they were kept warm.
“What do you think angels look like?” I asked my mother, my mind adrift in a kind of fugue state. “I think they look like that woman in the blue coat, with the furry hat.”
My mother looked where I was pointing. “Angels have such expensive tastes?” She smiled. “I don’t know if I believe in angels. For that matter, I am not so sure I believe in heaven.”
“But everyone believes in heaven.” So many of the Catholic children in our neighborhood, on the playgrounds, referred to heaven as if it were the country next door. Anneliese believed in heaven.
“Not Jews,” said my mother firmly. “Jews don’t believe in heaven.”
“We don’t?” I thought about this. “So what happens when we die?”
My mother turned to me then and crouched down to hug me, even though it meant that her dress dragged on the ground. “Liebling. What do you say to some hot chocolate?”
“At Café Sacher?” Visions of that chocolate cake were already dancing in my mind. I was easily distracted.
“What about Café Sperl?” Café Sperl was one of the oldest in Vienna and my mother’s favorite. She liked the fact that the waiters still wore the same suits they wore when she was a child, that the café still had the same marble tables, the same crystal chandeliers. She started going there when she was small, because it was close to the Theater an der Wien, where her parents would take her to performances.
I hesitated. It was a long walk to Café Sperl. “Come on, we’ll take a taxi,” said my mother, smiling.
As soon as one of the familiar, tuxedoed waiters had greeted my mother and settled us on one of the soft, embroidered banquettes, I returned to my preoccupations. “Do you really not believe in heaven, Mutti?”
“I think maybe I am afraid to believe in heaven, because then I will have to believe in hell.” She turned her face from me, as if checking to see who could overhear us, the glow of a chandelier turning strands of her hair into a rosy dawn. The elderly couple to our left continued to dig into their strudels, and the table on our right was vacant.
“Do no Jews believe in it?”
Her eyes found mine again, their dark centers reflecting my pale face. “I’m sure many Jews do believe in a kind of afterlife. But your father and I are focused on the life we are in. Because no one knows what happens after this one. So why not think about what we have?”
“But what if we are wrong and there is a heaven and hell?” I stroked my fingers across the cool marble of the tabletop.
“Then we are wrong. But as long as we do our best in this life, we don’t have anything to worry about.” She picked up a menu and glanced at it, though she must have known it by heart. “Now, Topfenstrudel?”
I nodded, accepting the change of topic. Topfenstrudel, with its layers of pastry and soft cheese dotted with raisins, was one of my favorites. We never had Topfenstrudel at home; it was too tricky to make. The emperor’s cook once said that you have to stretch the dough so thin you can read a love letter through it, and my mother didn’t have that kind of patience.
Because she was in a generous mood and I was, after all, about to turn six, my mother let me take three small spoonfuls of the whipped cream on the top of her Franziskaner and dab it into my hot chocolate. “Would you like to go hear your father play one day this week?” she asked, as if this were not a rhetorical question.
“Oh, Mutti!” I sat up straighter than ever before. “And you too? The next time?”
“The very next time.”
It wasn’t until my mother had finished her Franziskaner and I was halfway through the strudel did I remember, with a tight feeling in my chest, the very end of the opera. “Is it true what the soldiers in the opera said about God?”
My mother looked up from the newspaper she had gone to fetch from the selection spread out on the table by the door, her brow creased. “Is what true?”
“That God wants blood.”
My mother pushed the paper aside, almost as if she were angry with it. “Meine liebste kleine. What kind of god would that be? If there is a god, Orly, he would want nothing but peace. We have had enough of war. Now, no more religion talk. It’s bad for the soul.”
* * *
• • •
ANNELIESE WAS AT OUR DOOR the next morning, wrapped up in her red woolen coat and hat, before I had finished getting dressed. “Did you really go? Did you see the whole thing? Were the singers very good? Were they as good as your mother?” Anneliese had never seen my mother perform—even I hadn’t yet seen her—but she loved when my mother sang us “My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo” as we walked to the park or when we finished our homework. My mother sang all the time, even when she wasn’t singing opera.
“Close the door, you’re letting the cold hallway air in!” I was still on the floor, lacing my boots. Ana stepped into the apartment, pulling the door shut behind her. “It was magical and scary and I got to go to Café Sperl after, in the middle of the night. I wish you could have come!” Anneliese’s parents didn’t let her stay out late at night.
“Me too.” Ana sat down next to me, pulling her knees into her chest.
“When my Mutti sings, then you can come to see her, can’t you?”
“Maybe.”
I finished lacing my boots and stood up.
“Don’t forget your bunny!” Stefi emerged from the kitchen to pass me Lebkuchen soft and cinnamon-brown like the cookies he was named after. She was taking us to the Riesenrad. “And your hat.”
“I don’t need a hat! I’m never cold!”
“Me
, too, I never get cold!” Anneliese echoed, leaping up and twirling in the hall. “Even when we’re sledding or skating and having snowball fights and—”
“I don’t care if neither of you ever gets cold, you’re wearing hats or we don’t go. Come on, get moving, both of you.” Stefi handed me my scratchy wool hat and pulled on her coat.
I grabbed Ana’s arm and dragged her out the door. Not until we got down to the street and had raced ahead of Stefi did I tell her the most interesting thing I had discovered.
“Ana, I met a woman last night who was dressed as a man.”
“You mean in trousers? Lots of women wear trousers now.” She skipped ahead of me.
“No, not just trousers, she was all dressed up, in a tuxedo. And she had short hair.” I jogged to keep up. Stefi was a whole block behind us, calling our names.
“Really? Did she really look like a man?”
I considered this. “You could tell she was a woman. She was pretty, but in a different way.” I didn’t know how to express the way Odiane had carried herself, the way she walked and talked as if she had every right to be like she was. “She lives with a singer who works with my mother.”
“Was the singer dressed in a tuxedo too?”
“No. She had long blond hair up on her head and a green dress. My mother said they were roommates.”
“Maybe they didn’t have a man to go with so they were pretending to be married.”
“Maybe. But they live together.”
“Maybe they are married!”
“Can girls marry girls?”
“I don’t know.” Anneliese took my mittened hand in hers and we stopped to allow Stefi to catch up. “But if they can, I’m marrying you.”
Exile Music Page 2