Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  “Why?” I finally asked.

  It was the first of many questions she would be unable to answer.

  * * *

  • • •

  I WAITED FOR ANNELIESE to come, to explain to me that her mother had gone mad. I waited for her to tell me that she was sorry. I waited for her to tell me how things were different in Friedenglückhasenland.

  I waited all day.

  Her mother must have locked her inside. Her father must have beaten her so badly she couldn’t move. Maybe she argued with the Nazis and they took her away. Maybe they had punished her for her friendship with me. I had no way to know.

  * * *

  • • •

  WILLI HAD ALSO BEEN OUT looking for me. When he came home and my mother told him what happened he put his fist through the kitchen window. “We don’t have enough violence in this country?” my mother asked. “We need you to join them?” She stared at him, burning her fury through his skin, until he fetched a piece of cardboard and began fixing it to the window. His hands shook as he tried to slice the cardboard with a knife, as he unpeeled the tape. When he finished, he came and sat beside me in the sitting room on the blue velvet sofa. “What’re you reading, Erdnuss?” I turned my book over to show him the cover. Fünfzehn Hasen.

  “You’re not bored with the rabbits yet?”

  I glared at him and pulled the book to my chest. To me, the plight of the rabbits, stalked by two-legged murderers, felt more relevant than ever. Willi could be such a snob.

  “You and your bunnies.”

  “Today, let her have the bunnies.” My mother stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her face expressionless. “Though that one’s banned now. It was banned in Germany ages ago. Burned or banned, or maybe both.”

  “You’re joking. Those Saupiefken banned a book about rabbits?”

  “Apparently they’re a metaphor.” Normally my mother chastised Willi when he used rude language, but today I had the feeling she didn’t consider the word strong enough. She turned back toward the kitchen, lifted a lid over a pot. The flatulent smell of broccoli filled the air. My mother didn’t cook very often, but Stefi was spending the day with her parents.

  “Let me guess—we’re the rabbits?”

  “Well, somehow I doubt we’re the predators,” she replied drily. I heard the oven creak open and slam shut.

  “Hard to believe the Third Reich is devoting time to reading children’s books.” He pulled me onto his lap. “Wait until they discover the secret Jewish conspiracy in Bambi.” I didn’t smile. “I know a better bunny story. Tell us, Erdnuss, tell us about Friedenglückhasenland. Tell us tales of a better world.”

  As soon as I thought of Friedenglückhasenland, I thought of Anneliese, and my heart went cold. I couldn’t tell the stories without Anneliese. Every word of them had been a collaboration. If she were lost to me, then so was our world. Our sitting room blurred around me.

  “Willi?” I whispered. “Ana—”

  “Hush,” he said. “Mutti told me. But that isn’t Anneliese, Peanut. I think I know her a little by now.” He was quiet for a minute. “How I would like to wring that woman’s neck.”

  For a moment, I agreed, before remembering that if we were to strangle Anneliese’s mother, she would be left alone with her father. “Willi, don’t.”

  He sighed. “How did those two ogres create that child? Tell me that.”

  “They used to be nice.”

  “Used to be doesn’t count.” Willi’s smile slipped away.

  I wriggled back into his arms, back into his familiar smells of damp wool and tobacco. He had taken up smoking at my grandmother’s meetings, although my mother wouldn’t allow it in our home. I wanted to cheer him up. “Well. You would like Friedenglückhasenland, Willi, because it’s full of silence. There’s nothing to ruin your writing.” Willi wrote lots of poems, though I didn’t understand all of them.

  “Do you think I could come to Friedenglückhasenland with you one day?” He sounded wistful. He pulled me closer, tucking his chin over my shoulder. His curls tickled my neck.

  I shook my head. “You don’t have the right passport.”

  “How do I get one?”

  “They aren’t issuing them anymore. You’d need a visa anyway.”

  He fell silent. “So it’s like anywhere else then.”

  “It’s not like anywhere else.” I was indignant. “There is no money! People just give things to each other. And they drive around in carrots that are completely silent! It has the best cinnamon rolls in the world and there are hardly any boys at all!”

  “A paradise indeed.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” I told him as gently as I could. “I’m sorry for you that you don’t have a country of your own.”

  He turned my shoulders so that he could see my face. “Erdnuss,” he said. “I’m not sure any of us do.”

  Twelve

  In March 1938, street violence against Jews escalates in Vienna.

  The next afternoon they came for us. My father had gone out to work, or rather to discover whether he still had work, although my mother had pleaded with him to stay home. She had already been told not to bother coming to rehearsal. Stefi had not come. The streets were no longer safe for us, if they ever had been. Willi had gone out for a paper, defying maternal orders. But I, her youngest, was home. My mother was sitting over her third cup of coffee—we were no longer allowed in our cafés, she told me—not sipping it as she gazed into the middle distance. Kept home from school, I lay on the blue couch with a book, red-eyed and trying not to think about Anneliese. We listened to the German planes descend on our city. We listened to the end of Austria.

  There wasn’t anywhere left we could go. We could not go to the parks. We could not sit on public benches. We were banned from theater and opera and cinemas. We could not swim in public pools. We could do nothing but pace the streets or sit in our apartments like rats in a trap. Our world had shrunk so fast it made my head spin.

  The knocking brought us both to our feet and the coffee cup crashing to the floor. “Don’t answer it,” my mother ordered, watching the milky coffee leak across the tiles. I tiptoed to her, slipping my hand into hers. It was ice cold.

  Again, the knocking, followed by the shouting. “Aufmachen, Juden!”

  I felt my mother trembling under her dress. “Open or we will break down this door.”

  “Go to your room, Orly. Go to your room and hide. Under your bed, somewhere.” I didn’t want to leave her side, but I obeyed her, running into my room and closing the door. A second later I heard them in the kitchen, their boots on our floors. “You’re alone?”

  “I am alone.” There was no tremor in her voice. Her voice she knew how to control.

  “You won’t mind if we search the apartment then.”

  I glanced around my room. There was nowhere they wouldn’t find me. I could crawl under the bed or into my wardrobe, and those would be the first places they would look. Both of them were too big and too heavy to shift. All of our furniture in Vienna was heavy and immovable. Permanent. Or so we thought.

  I was too big to try to flatten myself under the quilt. A humming had started up in my ears that made it hard for me to think. I had dropped to the floor to start under the bed when the door opened behind me. “Gut! On your knees already! Filthy girl, come with us.” Two men stood in the doorway, their arms wrapped in swastikas, their guns as shiny and black as new toys. Two men with guns, I thought, to fetch a ten-year-old girl? Then I looked at them more closely. I knew the dark-haired young man; he was the older brother of one of my schoolmates. “Fritzl?” I said, astonished.

  “Shut up, Jew!” He yanked my arm. “Where is your toothbrush?”

  The demand confused me. Were we going overnight somewhere? Down the stairs they hauled us, jubilant with their success. My mind reeled with the discovery that Fritzl, who kn
ew us, was a Nazi.

  I wanted to say something to my mother, to apologize for my failure to hide, but these men did not need further provocation. Outside, they flung us to the pavement and shoved a bucket of cold, dirty liquid stinking of lye toward us. “Go on,” they said. “Do a proper day’s work for a change.” The Schuschnigg plebiscite slogans we and our neighbors had painted on the pavements with such nationalistic passion only days before had become the means of our humiliation.

  I slid to my knees close to my mother, trying to see her face. I wanted to lift her back to her feet, to tell her to sing, to show these men who she was. “Orly, don’t argue,” she whispered.

  We did as we were told, crowds gathering around us as more and more of our neighbors came to watch or were forced to their knees beside us. A proper day’s work for a change. The heat those words aroused.

  My fury warmed me as I channeled the violence of my emotions into my tiny toothbrush. What would I use for my teeth tonight? My mind could focus only on the smallest problems. I had looked up to see elderly Herr Grunberg the tobacconist pushed to the ground in front of me, and been unable to bear seeing anything else. I looked only at the paint below my fingers, and my mother’s wrist, red and raw, to my left, to be sure of her.

  By early evening, our ranks had swelled. My clothes were damp from spilled water, my fingers burning from the lye and my toes numb with cold. Our fellow Viennese stopped to laugh or to spit on us. I started humming to myself so as not to hear what they were saying, but it was hard to drown it out. I paused to switch hands, and my breath caught in my throat when the girl next to me put her hand on mine. The scent of celery and sage nearly made me sob with relief. But terror immediately followed. “Ana!” I whispered in disbelief. “Ana, you’ll get in trouble.”

  “I am not the one in trouble.” The ferocity of her scrubbing rivaled mine. She had covered her hair with a kerchief and her father’s glasses disguised her face. Our neighbors had not recognized her yet.

  “You will be.” I looked up, to see if anyone had noticed. “Keep scrubbing, swine!” taunted a teenage boy who had seen me pause. Flushing, I bent back to the pavement. Ana kept her scarf on and her head down. With her brush she wore a hole in the word Schuschnigg. Had she brought her own? Surely a soldier hadn’t dragged her from her home? I whispered still more quietly. “Ana, I’m serious. Your mother . . .”

  “My mother,” Anneliese spat.

  “Ana.” I was afraid of Anneliese’s mother. I was afraid of what she would do to Anneliese almost as much as I was afraid of what the Nazis would do to her for talking to me.

  “Orly, I will say this one more time and hope you believe me. What I am, you are. What you are, I am. Promise me you believe me.”

  I couldn’t look at her, but I nodded at the ground. I no longer needed fury to keep me warm.

  “Promise me, Orly!”

  I risked a brief glance at her, though not a smile. “I promise. I promise you.”

  Thirteen

  In late April 1938, the Gestapo rounds up some fifteen hundred Jews deemed “unwilling to work” and sends them to concentration camps.

  I never went back to school after the Anschluss, although I knew some children did. My mother was afraid of what might happen to me on the streets. I worried I would never share a classroom with Anneliese again. Even if my mother were to let me out of her sight, I’d have to go to a Jewish school now. When Anneliese and I met in the hallway of our building, she told me that the crucifix at the front of the room had been replaced with Nazi flags. She and her classmates were expected to sing “Deutschland über alles.” (I swear I don’t sing, Orly; I just mouth the words.)

  Against my parents’ wishes, Willi insisted on going to a swim meet a week after the Germans arrived. “Are you insane?” my father shouted at him. “Do you have a death wish?”

  “The kids on my team are nice, Vati. They know me. And no one else is any good at the butterfly. They need me.” My mischievous spark of a brother had always been popular in a way I never was. People sought his company—girls especially. He made them laugh with his imitations of cabaret and film stars, put them at ease with his lopsided smile. Everything about school came easily to him, though he was too lazy to achieve top marks, and he excelled in fencing and swimming. He could not imagine himself unloved.

  “That doesn’t matter anymore. Are you not paying attention?” My father’s shoulders trembled with the effort of raising his voice. “Are you somehow missing that this city is now wallpapered with swastikas, as if Hitler has branded the entire city? Have you missed the flags from every building, from the trams, the light posts?”

  “I’m paying attention, Vati. I was paying attention when you were still refusing to think about anything but music. But allow me to think I know who my friends are.” With that, he turned and slammed out of the apartment.

  By the time Willi got home that night it was dark and I was already in bed, though wide awake. My mother had not moved from the front window since 6:00 P.M., when she expected Willi home from the pool. When she heard his key in the door, she flew at him, ready with sharp words for making her worry. But after he closed the door and stepped into the light of the kitchen, she stopped midsentence. I crept to the door of my room and peered out.

  I couldn’t find my brother’s face. Blood poured from a cut in his forehead and both eyes were swollen and purple. His shirtsleeves were torn and he had lost his jacket. He stood with his arms dangling as though they didn’t belong to him, and did not speak.

  “Sit,” said my efficient mother, who was already readying a washbasin and cloth. Then, as she touched the damp cloth to his split skin, her composure slipped. “My beloved boy.” She choked on the words. “Those beasts.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I WOKE the following morning, the house was silent. Alarmed, I ran down the hall to my parents’ room. Sun danced across the dirty glass of the windows and no birds sang. It was late. My father was a lump under the covers. I tried to think if I had ever seen my father lying still under the covers after dawn. Next to him my mother sat with a book on her lap, staring at the wall in front of her.

  “Liebchen,” she said, turning when she heard me. I bounded into bed beside her.

  “Is daddy sick?” I lifted the scratchy wool blanket gingerly, trying to find his face.

  She shook her head. The lump next to her did not stir. His face was closed, curled into his chest.

  “Sweetheart, your father lost his job last night.”

  “What? Why? Did he forget his notes? Did they think he was bad?”

  Again she shook her head. “I’m not sure your father could ever be bad.”

  “Then what?”

  “It wasn’t just your father. They got rid of all of the Jews. Some of them they sent away.” All of the Jews. All of them.

  “Who? Where?”

  My mother swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her white nightgown twisted around her body. “I’m not sure. Viktor Robitsek, certainly. Max Starkmann. Arnold Rosé. Armin Tyroler. And he even received the Ring of Honor from the city of Vienna! This is the kind of person they want to disappear?”

  “They want us to disappear? Why don’t they want the Jews in the orchestra? Aren’t Jews good at music?” Even as I asked this I knew it was a stupid question. Jews created at least half the music I knew.

  My mother seemed to immediately regret her outburst. But really, what could she say? My mother wasn’t a liar. “We’re good at everything we want to be good at. Sometimes I think that’s why they hate us.”

  “Really?”

  She sighed. “No. I don’t know. But some people think we make too much money, we write too many books, we sing too much. Maybe they think we don’t leave enough room for them.”

  “I don’t understand.” I looked at my father, wanting him now to stay asleep.

 
; “I’m glad,” she said, and pulled me close to her side. “I’d be worried if you did.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I WOULD MAKE PANCAKES, I decided. My father loved pancakes. My mother and I often made pancakes on Sundays she was home. Today wasn’t Sunday, but no one was going to work.

  It was easy to find the right page in the cookbook; it was rumpled and stained, speckled with dried batter. In the silent kitchen, I cracked an egg against the bowl, stirred in flour and water, brushed a pan with oil. Carefully, I poured the batter into the pan and turned to look for the coffee.

  When I returned to the stove, flames danced from the cookbook. I had propped it too close to the burner. Dropping the coffee on the floor, I reached for the measuring cup of water and dumped it on the pages. Too late; the book had turned to ash.

  “I know that recipe by heart, my love,” my mother murmured into my hair as I curled next to her in bed, disappointed tears rolling down into my ears. “I don’t need the book. There will be no shortage of pancakes in our future.”

  I opened my eyes and tipped my head back to look at her, scanning her face for censure, but it was soft. Between us on the bed, long strands of my pale apricot hair mixed with her darker auburn curls. Combing them together with my fingertips, I admired the range of hues, the contrasting textures. “It looks like a fire. The colors of flames, our hair all together.” I thought of the cookbook, the heat that devoured it.

  My mother tilted her head slightly to see them. “No, my love, look again. Our hair together is a sunset.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A NIGHT LONG AGO, when my mother had been cross with my father for staying out too late or working too long, she had said, half in jest, “Don’t ever fall in love with a musician, Orly. You can’t compete with his instrument.”