Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

My grandmother, however, was not taking victory for granted. As soon as Schuschnigg had announced the plebiscite two days earlier, on March 9, she had swiftly drafted flyers in support of an independent Austria, sending out a cadre of her friends and acolytes to scatter them across the city and to paint the sidewalks red and white. Willi and his friends had festooned Vienna with pro-Austria slogans. We were not Germans.

  My mother had been too anxious to eat. Stefi frowned when she came to clear the plates and saw the untouched soup. The radio crackled and the adults shifted their chairs closer to where it sat at the end of the table. Too far away to hear properly, I slid under the table with my book without anyone noticing and crept closer. My mother’s wool skirt brushed my cheek. I wanted to press my face against it but didn’t dare distract her.

  Above me, my aunt Thekla and uncle Tobias, my aunt Klothilde, Klara, Felix, my grandparents, my parents, and Willi leaned their ears toward the sleek Zenith tombstone radio. My parents had debated whether they could afford such a fine radio, but ultimately, sound was too important to them. My mother had purchased the Zenith with her own savings.

  I sat clutching Felix Salten’s Fünfzehn Hasen: Schicksale in Wald und Feld. Fifteen Rabbits: Fate in Forest and Field —a book I’d read so many times I had most of it memorized—against my chest. Anneliese had given it to me for my seventh birthday. Its rabbit protagonists, Hops and Plana, bravely endured attacks by man and beast, dividing their energies between vigilance and love. The floor tiles pressed a chill into my bare thighs, but I didn’t want to stir and call attention to myself. I glanced down at my book.

  “You can breathe for once,” Plana went on, “and feel yourself safe.”

  Hops grew thoughtful, held his head tilted abruptly upward, twitched his nose and said, “We can breathe all right. Oh, yes . . . but we rabbits can never feel safe . . . never! Don’t ever forget that!”

  The book was not helping. Gently, so as not to make any noise, I closed the covers.

  The chancellor’s voice sounded scared. He was resigning! The man we hoped would save us was saying good-bye. He wasn’t saying it in that cheerful way people say good-bye when they know they will see each other again. He wasn’t saying it in a hopeful way that suggested better times ahead. He was saying it in the voice of a ship’s captain reluctantly abandoning his passengers to the mercy of Poseidon. (Not that I would have said or thought of it that way at the time, of course, never having been on a ship. I suppose it’s only in retrospect I think of it like that. I’m at an age where I think mostly in retrospect.)

  Willi’s feet jerked from under the table as he jumped up.

  “The coward!”

  “Willi, shush.”

  “God protect Austria.” Schuschnigg’s final words. God protect Austria because he could not.

  The plebiscite would never happen now. We would not have a say after all.

  There was silence around the table above me. I sat frozen in place, waiting for someone to say something. When I heard not only my mother, but my father, my stoic father, begin to cry, I knew that all was lost.

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE WERE 185,000 OF US in Vienna then. And some 225,000 in Austria. Give or take.

  Mostly take.

  Eleven

  On March 12, 1938, German troops enter Austria.

  On March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, the day the German soldiers came, my mother begged my father to stay home. He had a rehearsal at two o’clock in the afternoon. “Please,” my mother begged. “The streets won’t be safe.” But my father had not become a musician in order to be safe. He became a musician because there was no possible way that he could not be a musician. Thus, no matter what was going on in the world around him, my father would turn up for work. It wasn’t something he considered optional.

  It was late when he returned, long after midnight. Stefi had tucked me in bed and was asleep in her own little room off the kitchen. My mother sat up at the table, staring into a cup of coffee that had long ago lost its heat. I know this because I was not asleep. I needed to hear my father arrive safely home before I could rest. From my bed I listened to the cheering in the streets, the shouts of men. I had propped my door open just an inch, so my mother wouldn’t notice, and lay in that slender strip of lamplight.

  At last I heard the tumble of the locks on the front door. I swung my legs to the side of the bed and sat up, listening.

  “Jakob?” My mother’s footsteps, almost running to the door. “Jakob!” I would have felt relief then had it not been for my mother’s muffled sob. I ran to the door to look out.

  “They’re everywhere,” my father said as he removed his hat and set it on his hook by the front door. “Already they are everywhere. They’re taking people, Julia. I’m sorry I was so long getting home. I wanted to stay out of their way.”

  “What do you mean ‘they’re taking people’? What does that even mean?” My mother’s voice rose an octave.

  “The men—they’re arresting Jewish men.”

  “We need to go. Jakob, we can’t—”

  “We don’t have visas. We need to organize ourselves.” His voice was a deflated balloon. “Have they been here? To this building?”

  My mother must have shaken her head. “I would have heard. They would have been here. Everyone knows who we are.”

  Instead of going to sit in the kitchen as they usually did, they retreated to their bedroom, meaning I had to actually sneak out of my room in order to hear them, my feet going numb away from the warmth of my bed.

  “And Arnold is leaving.”

  “Arnold?” My mother’s voice was bewildered. “When? Where will he go?”

  I could not hear my father’s answer, just the creak of the bed as one of them sat down.

  The door flew open before I could move or formulate an excuse for being up. “Orly!” my mother began, cross. Then she sighed. “Go back to bed, my love. Your father is home.” She took my hand and walked me back to my room, waiting until I was under the covers before turning to go. “No more listening at doors. This is not for you to solve.”

  I lay awake for a very long time. Arnold must mean Arnold Rosé, the first violinist who had been concertmaster of the Philharmonic forever, longer than I had been alive. He was Catholic, but my father said he was born Jewish. He often played me a recording of a duet Arnold played with his daughter, Alma, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. “It was recorded the year you were born,” my father told me. “I always thought of it as your welcoming song.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WOULD BE DECADES before I discovered how we were saved that night. Only after the war was over and I had become another person did I learn that Anneliese had been sitting on the front step when the Nazis arrived. Like me, she had been eavesdropping on her parents, whose conversations had an entirely different tenor from the ones I overheard. She had also crept out of bed, knowing she had to see the Nazis before her parents did. “I’m so pleased you’ve come,” she said, standing to shake their hands. “My parents own this building and they think that the Jews are a scourge.”

  This, of course, was the opposite of the truth. My family had owned the building for generations. “We have only two tenants, an old lady and my cousins. But please come in.”

  “Step aside.” She was a just child, though tall for her age. She may have passed for thirteen or fourteen.

  “Of course. Though I heard you were looking for Jews?” She turned the lock on the door and swung it open.

  The two men glanced at each other. They had many other buildings to get to. “You have no Jewish men here? None at all?”

  “I wish we did, so we could help you round them up. But my parents, they’re very strict.” She beamed up at them. “They would never allow a Jew to live in our building.”

  * * *

 
• • •

  WE WOKE THE NEXT DAY to rejoicing in the streets. Cheering, chanting, music. We could hear it from our apartment, from our beds. They were happy noises, celebratory noises. It didn’t seem possible that our neighbors, our friends, could be celebrating the end of our country. That they could be welcoming the planes roaring overheard. There could not be so many Austrians who wanted to become German. I had to see it for myself.

  Without waking my parents, I ran upstairs for Anneliese. It was unlike me to leave without telling anyone where I was going, but I needed Anneliese. Ever since Fasching she had been trying to make it up to me, though she still couldn’t let me in her apartment. On school days she met me around the corner so we could walk to classes together and sometimes she came over after school if her parents were out.

  I had already tapped our secret knock on the door when I remembered I was no longer welcome. Quickly, I started back down the stairs. But just as I hit the first landing, I heard her door swing open. “They’re not here,” she hissed. “Come.”

  Anneliese’s parents had gone out early, she told me when I got inside. They had wanted her to go with them but she had pretended to be sick. “I was just going to come see you. Those traitors!” She shoved a stockinged leg into a leather boot. “Including my parents.” Her face looked tight, her eyes as anxious as mine. I noted she wore a white sweater with a red skirt, the colors of the Austrian flag. “I’ll get my coat.” She didn’t say out loud that she thought I was in more danger than she was. She didn’t have to.

  We wouldn’t go far, I told myself as we clattered down the stairs. Just far enough to see what was going on. It couldn’t be risky to look out our front door. This was still our city. This was still our own neighborhood. We pushed open the heavy door against a surge of jubilant noise coursing down our street. The crowds were all moving the same direction, away from Alsergrund, surging in the direction of the Ringstrasse.

  “They’re having a parade?” Anneliese gripped my hand.

  I stood silent for a moment, unwilling to understand. “What are they celebrating, Ana? How can they?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t want to be German.”

  Our feet began moving, swept along in the current of people. “Where is everyone going?”

  “My parents said Hitler’s giving a speech in the Heldenplatz.” She glanced at me. “Don’t worry, we won’t go there. I don’t want to see that man.”

  Women in their hats, girls, men, everyone lined the streets, the surge of their bodies restrained by human chains of police officers. Jolly music played, a marching tune conveying the opposite of everything that was to come.

  Foreboding paralyzed me. I recognized the flags our neighbors were waving as the Nazis proceeded down the street with their machinery, legal at last. Rolling, walking, and riding sleek, fat horses. A muddy river of brown flooding our city, spiders on their arms. I clutched Anneliese’s hand as the crowd jostled and shoved us along, foolishly longing for the quieter carrotmobiles we had invented years ago, the tiny carts that dominated the streets of Friedenglückhasenland, powered by wind generated by the swish of Japanese fans.

  The Nazis barreled noisily through our streets toward the Heldenplatz, and children scrabbled for the toy flags the soldiers tossed down as though they were sweets. Those swastikas were everywhere now, unfurling from balconies, falling down across the faces of our buildings like masks. Crawling across everything I loved.

  “Juda Verrecke!” I heard a voice cry. “Perish the Jews!” our neighbors answered.

  Except Anneliese.

  Fear rose from my belly. Could people tell I was Jewish? Was there anything about my face that gave me away? The rust color of my hair? The green of my eyes? My hand in Anneliese’s went limp and cold. Then suddenly, she was pushed forward, propelled by the rapturous, roaring crowd. My hand was empty.

  “How dare you!” I heard her voice somewhere in the crowd before us. “You are not Austrians!” She would get herself killed.

  “Anneliese!” I plunged after her. She had been to our house on the Friday evenings we lighted candles, had even spent a Pesach at our table. Yet Jewishness had never been a topic of our conversation, just as we had never discussed the color of our skin or eyes. Religion wasn’t something that had concerned me until recently.

  My family wasn’t particularly observant. Sometimes we lit candles on Shabbat, but only if my parents were not performing. It would have been impossible for an observant Jew to work as a musician in organizations that required them to play on the Sabbath. Yet their work created no inner discord for my parents; for them, singing or playing was a kind of prayer.

  On Pesach, we gathered at my grandparents’ apartment for Seder. We answered the four questions, we searched for the hidden matzoh. But there wasn’t much else to differentiate us from our Christian neighbors. We listened to the same operas. Our parents sipped the same Einspänners and Franziskaners, took tiny bites of the same Apfelstrudels and Imperialtortes. We hiked in the Vienna Woods together on weekends. Anneliese took me with her to the Ostermarkt, where we marveled over the pyramids of colored and sugared eggs. It never even occurred to me that eggs were religious symbols. Surely eggs were eggs.

  I struggled to catch up to Anneliese, but the crowd closed around her. I stopped to let them flow past me. She would turn around. She would come back for me.

  Something struck my arm and I looked down to see a chubby, blond toddler grinning up at me. He was vigorously waving a red-and-black swastika flag. I stepped backward. I wanted to be home. Turning, I moved upstream through the jubilant sea of the raised arms of my neighbors and friends, a salute so synchronized it almost looked rehearsed. Ordinary people, turned into an army.

  A tram swept by, its roof displaying a massive swastika. Across the street I could see a curly-haired girl who used to be in my class; my former math teacher; the waiter from the coffeehaus at the end of the block, their arms all flying upward. They threw flowers to the soldiers, blew kisses as they marched past, cheering the death of our country.

  This was not how to greet an enemy. My neighbors—the butcher, the cellist, the lawyer, the hairdresser, the elderly woman who always sat in the park feeding pigeons, watching us play—celebrated the arrival of the men who had promised to wipe me and my family from the earth. Maybe they just didn’t understand Hitler’s plans, I told myself. They couldn’t possibly want to hurt my merry brother, my elegant mother. They couldn’t possibly want to hurt me.

  “Orly!” My mother magically appeared in the crowd behind me. Turning toward her, tearful with relief, I reached for her hand. Yet just as my fingers closed around the fabric of her sleeve, Anneliese’s mother, Frau Meier, materialized beside me. Had they come together, noticing Anneliese and I were both gone? This seemed unlikely. The moment I saw Frau Meier’s face I felt afraid. This was the woman who had given me Lebkuchen—both the gingerbread cookies and the rabbit named after them. Who had wiped the tears from my eyes when I tripped over my own feet and fell up the stairs, my lower teeth puncturing my lip. Who had cooked for me countless times when my mother was traveling and while Anneliese and I told each other stories in the next room. Despite her recent distance, I couldn’t believe the ten years we had known each other now meant nothing.

  Yet Frau Meier was unrecognizable, disfigured by feverish emotion. Her face split into a delirious and unfamiliar smile, her glazed eyes slid over me. She was happy about this, about whatever was happening. And my mother, reaching to fold me to her side, was not.

  As we turned to weave through the crowds toward the relative safety of our home, I heard Ana’s mother call after me. “Orly!” I looked back at her. “Where is she?”

  I gestured into the crowds, mute. I hoped Anneliese hadn’t gotten herself into trouble.

  “Where is she, you little Jew! Where is my daughter?”

  I stopped, my feet suddenly unable to
move forward. I had been called a little Jew—and worse—by people on the street, but never by Anneliese’s mother. It took my mother a minute to realize I was no longer by her side. As she turned back, Frau Meier stomped toward me. “Did you bring her out here to defend you, Orly? What have you done with her? You stay away—” She placed her meaty hands on my shoulders and began to shake me. “You stay away from my little girl, you dirty little—you little pig!” With that last word she shoved me with such vigor I lost my footing and fell back into the street, where the passing horses had left a steaming pile of excrement. It was still soft and warm. For a moment I lay still, feeling it soak through my stockings and skirt, the bottom of my blouse.

  Anneliese reappeared through the crowd at that moment, her face transforming into a horrified question at the sight of me struggling to my knees in the street. She halted so suddenly she tripped up a surge of merry revelers, who cursed her as they moved around us. “Orly! Who—?”

  Moving faster than Anneliese, my mother stooped to lift me, stinking and dirtied, into her arms. I could not remember the last time she had carried me. Squeezing me to her chest, she made it all the way back to our building, hurling herself through the crowds, up the stairs to the apartment, and into the bathroom. My body began to tremble. With the bathroom door closed, she undressed us both, peeling off layers of clothing and piling them in the laundry basket. My legs folded under me and I sat huddled on the throw rug, pulling my knees to my chest. “I’ll be right back.” In the kitchen she heated the kettles of water, traveling back and forth as I sat paralyzed.

  Go to Friedenglückhasenland, I told myself. You will be all right there. But for the first time, my mind refused to drift away. I was stuck here, in the present, in this bathroom, reeking of horseshit. Then my mother was lifting me again, settling me into the warm water, settling herself underneath me, wrapping her arms around my ribs.