Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  “There is something I must tell you about Sonia and me. After I learn about Krüger, I think it will poison the love between me and Sonia. She thinks the sight of her may repulse me. I think I may never be able to meet her gaze again. But that does not happen. Our love grows stronger and we cling to each other as though we are the last two people on earth who have not lost the capacity for love. We promise each other that Krüger cannot pollute the thing that is most beautiful between us. Our bodies and our fates belong to him. But we belong to each other.

  “Sonia, Sonia. Sonia.

  “There is not so much left now. In February in the dead of winter, the ghetto of Kironittska is eliminated. Fewer than a thousand Jews are left to be loaded into trains. Krüger comes to bid Sonia and me farewell. Though he cannot say it, I can see he is sorry we are leaving. He is in love with my Sonia. I can see this and it hurts him that Sonia looks at him with eyes that despise him. This monster, Krüger, is a lonely man. I have been lonely for forty years and I know about Krüger’s loneliness. The train goes for two days, then stops in the freezing darkness. Our baby, Jonathan, dies on this night and it breaks something in Sonia. Other people, mostly old, freeze to death. The train moves off again. There is no water or facilities. Men and women must excrete. The smell shames us. The smell causes us despair. The sound of the children begging for water. Well, you can imagine what it is like. Except you cannot. I carry that journey on the train with me. The train breaks Sonia. It breaks her. All that we have endured and it is the train. My pretty Sonia dies before the Germans are kind enough to put her in the gas chamber. When they open the doors at Auschwitz, Sonia has lost her mind. She has gone on ahead. They have to pry her hands from around our baby, Jonathan.

  “Here is my tattoo, Jack. The Germans love lists, catalogs, everything has its place. Because of my gift as a musician, they know I am coming. I am directed toward the line of life. Sonia and my twin sons go toward the line of death. The boys stand on either side of their mother, protecting her. They know that their mother is no longer there and even though they are only boys, both seem to grow into manhood in that line. They have to lead their mother to her death. Both wave good-bye to me. Secretly, so the Germans will not see. They are marched away into eternity. I try to catch Sonia’s eye, but she is no longer there. I see her walk out of my life and I can still see after all these terrible years, these things that have happened, I can see why she was once called the most beautiful woman in Europe.

  “I am putting on the camp uniform when I am hit by a blow from behind that knocks me to the floor. Then I am kicked in the stomach, then the face. There is commotion and I think a German guard is going to kill me in the changing room. It is Berger, the Jewish ruffian from Kironittska. The one whose boys stole food and were hanged for the crime. All Berger remembers is that I kicked the stools out from beneath his sons. ‘This Jew is mine.’

  “Berger is a Sonderkommando, one of the accursed Jews who is forced to remove the corpses from the gas chambers and take them to the crematoriums. Each day, he comes to find me to beat me some more. He is like some king among the damned. Some Krüger. Finally, he comes to take me away and slaps me and cuffs me on the back of the head. He passes easily through the barracks. Guards in the towers see him and he walks as though he were the concierge in this place. He brings me to a place and I hear Jewish voices singing a Hebrew song in praise of the Almighty. It is dark and the air is filled with black smoke. Then a screaming begins that is like no other sound on earth. Then there is silence. Berger knocks me to the ground again. He yanks me to my feet and pushes me ahead of him where other Jews are gathered and one of them is turning a wheel. Inside a door I am pushed and told to do what he does. There is a stack of dead Jews, hundreds of them. Mostly women and children and old people. I work hard to help remove them. I work beneath the blows of Berger. I drag bodies by the feet. Some are almost weightless. I am dragging one body when Berger stops me and makes me look down. It is Sonia. Then he makes me dig through the pile until I find my sons. I find them and bring them to Berger. He hands me pliers and tells me to pull all the gold teeth from Sonia’s mouth. He yanks her mouth open and pulls out the first one in the most brutal manner. I cannot move, but he hits me in the face with the pliers. I open Sonia’s mouth. I remove a tooth. Berger takes the pliers and begins to pull all the teeth out of her head. This Berger, too, is insane and he is also innocent. Later, there is a Jew who works in administration who has seen me in concert in the old days. He is a great lover of music. He finds out that Berger has me working night and day with the Sonderkommando. This unknown Jew is king of his realm and he puts Berger’s number in a section marked for death. They come to get Berger and I am there when he is taken from a pile in the gas chamber.

  “The rest of Auschwitz is just Auschwitz. You can read about it. My experience is the same. I work. I suffer. I starve. Once I nearly die of dysentery. To survive, I play the music I love in my head all my working hours. I ask that the great composers assemble in my head to play their finest works for me. In squalor, I dine each night in my tuxedo with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Haydn, Puccini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and all the others. Each evening, I dress slowly, taking care with my cuff links and studs and tying and retying my black tie until I get it just right. Before we play, I go to the great restaurants of Europe and I order the finest meals cooked by the finest chefs. I eat escargots glistening with butter and flecks of garlic and parsley, order roast duck with crisp brown skin and pods of fat just beneath the wing bones, eat baguettes dipped in olive oil, and crème brûlées with burnt crusts of brown sugar followed by layers of sweet cream that make the mouth pucker with pleasure. We would eat, not gorge, these great composers and I. Because I live in my head I survive by concentrating on the great silos of beauty I have stored up. I hear music amid the squalor. And I do what I promised myself I will not do under any circumstance: I survive. I disgrace myself by surviving.

  “In the winter of 1945, I join one of the forced marches when the Russians were nearing Auschwitz. We march through snow and without food or rest. Many men fall by the wayside and receive bullets. These bullets must have felt like gifts. I am in Dachau when the Americans liberate the camp. I remember none of this. Later I am shown a pile of naked bodies. You know those photographs. Piles and piles of dead scarecrows. The person showing me the photograph is a doctor who has taken the picture. After snapping the picture, he thinks he sees my chest move. He checks my pulse and races me to the hospital tent. My left hand is frostbitten and gangrene has set in. He removes the little finger of my left hand. I can move the ring finger once I awake but it never regains feeling. I have always regretted that this doctor took that picture. He should have left me on that pile. I was going back to Sonia.

  “Ruth finds me in a DP camp, where she is searching for survivors of her family. She hears about a Jew looking for survivors from Kironittska. We get married and because of this I ruin the life of this very good woman. I kiss her and I know she sees in my eye that I am wishing for Sonia. I make love to her and I sometimes whisper Sonia’s name. Shyla and Martha are born and I am also disappointed because they are not the sons that I lost. I love none of them. They disappoint me because they are not my dead family. I cannot love Ruth, Jack. I try and I cannot do it. I cannot love Shyla or Martha. I can only love phantoms. I go to sleep loving all my ghosts and do not wake up until my Shyla leaps from the bridge.

  “So, Jack.”

  Part VI

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I hated the sixties and I especially hate the memories I carry from the noise and bedlam and discourtesy of those cacophonous years. The shouting is what I recall most clearly, then the posturing, then the lack of hygiene. It is the only decade I have lived through that did not have the decency to call it quits when its time had run out—1970, for me, was the worst year of the sixties, by far.

  It made me hate folk music and piety and facial hair and tie-dyed shirts and politica
l rhetoric of any kind. My idea of hell is to be caught in an airport lounge during a snowstorm, listening to an aging hippie songstress whacking away at her scratched-up Martin guitar as she plays “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” “Lemon Tree,” and “We Shall Overcome,” in that order. Once I was a wide-eyed captive of those times and there was no twelve-point program to wean me off the addiction to drivel I succumbed to during that dreary era of the Vietnam War. The greatest tragedy of that war was not the senseless death of young men on strangely named battlefields, but that it turned the whole country stupid overnight. It also made enemies of the closest group of friends I had ever known. We accidentally let ourselves be caught up in the zeitgeist and we were never the same again, any of us.

  After the smoke had cleared, I promised myself I would never lose a friend because of something as subjective and slippery as political belief. “I’m an American,” I announced to all around me. “And I get to think anything I want to and so do you, by God, so do you.” It became my credo, the central theme of my life, but if it had not been for the intolerance and pigheadedness I exhibited with such grandiosity in those years and the weird sideburns and holier-than-thou attitude that I paraded around with, I would have entered into my maturity as uninterested in the world of ideas as any other Southerner. My whole character formed around the issue of Vietnam and it nearly brings me to my knees to admit it.

  The Thursday after Lucy’s party I drove up Highway 17 to Charleston with Ledare riding shotgun. We drove with the windows open and the smells of harvested crops and leaf-brandied rivers filled up the car and the wind slid through Ledare’s honey-colored hair. Mike had sent invitations to both of us, requesting our presence at the Dock Street Theater in Charleston at precisely 2 P.M. No response was requested, but he phrased the invitation in a way that left no room for excuses for not showing up.

  “What’s Mike up to?” I asked.

  “No good,” she said.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “He’s got something up his sleeve,” she said, casting me a quizzical glance. “But he’s kept it secret.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks we wouldn’t show up if we knew what this was all about.”

  No theater in America can match the Dock Street Theater for both its intimacy and understated majesty. It has the hushed feeling of a building holding its breath, and its serenity grants comfort to both actors and audiences. It has the spare look of a Shaker church, and just being there makes you want to rush home to write a play. The stage is the size of a small dance floor; and as we entered I saw Mike watching a camera crew and soundman whom Ledare said he had flown in from the West Coast. I remembered that Mike had told me it was at the Dock Street Theater he had seen his first play as a child, a performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It was so powerful that it had changed the course of his life forever. He grew up loving to watch actors pretending they were someone else, and speaking the made-up lines of strangers in love with the energy and passion of language. Though Mike had started out in the theater, he soon gravitated toward the world of film. In the theater, he said, he could create a sense of vibrancy, tension, and style, but in a movie he could make a whole world by allowing light to imprint shapes on moving rivers of film. One of the first things he did after the success of his first film was to join the board of the Dock Street Theater. Mike never forgot where he came from.

  “Let’s wrap it up in about ten minutes,” Mike said to the crew, who were working with precision and speed. “Everybody knows the drill. Once we get started, my guests are not to be aware you boys are in the building. Comprende? You’re neither to be seen nor heard. We’re not after art here. I just want this recorded,” he said as Ledare and I moved down the front aisle.

  “What union rules apply here?” the man setting up camera angles asked and his voice was teasing.

  “None, mousedick,” Mike said, smiling. “South Carolina’s a right-to-work state. Ever since Fort Sumter they’ve hated everything that even reminded them of the word ‘union.’ ”

  “What’s this for?” a cameraman shouted from a rear balcony.

  “Just a home movie,” Mike said, clapping his hands.

  As we approached Mike, he clapped his hands again and his crew disappeared and we did not see them again. His preparation was exacting and precise. We were the first to arrive.

  “You’re early,” Mike said. “Early makes me nervous.”

  “Then we’ll leave,” Ledare said.

  “No, I’ve staggered the time of arrival for everyone. Capers and Betsy were supposed to get here first, but they’re late. Go up and take your seats. You’re on stage left. The food’s to die for and there’s plenty to drink.”

  “What’re our roles?” Ledare asked.

  “Today, we improvise. Anything goes. Everything out on the table,” Mike said. “It’ll become clear to you when everyone shows up.”

  A movement caught my eye in the back of the theater and I turned to see the straight-backed silhouette of General Rembert Elliott standing at attention beside the back rows. He was joined by a taller gray-haired man and it surprised me when I saw my own father walking down the aisle dressed in his judicial robes. Together, they had driven up from Waterford. A woman cleared her throat behind me onstage and I turned to see Celestine Elliott, who must have entered by the stage door, watching her husband approach with a look that could have shattered chrome.

  When he saw his wife, General Elliott halted in his tracks and watched as she took her seat on the left side of the stage. I knew that they had not seen each other since the disastrous visit to Rome and had only communicated through the offices of their attorneys. The general bowed to me and Ledare with exaggerated formality.

  “It scares me, Jack,” Ledare said as we watched them make their way to their places.

  “What?” I asked.

  “When I’m seventy, I want all my mistakes behind me. I want thirty years of good and brilliant living behind me. Look at them. The judge, the general, Celestine. They’re all in agony. I couldn’t bear it if I thought the rest of my life would be as painful as my past.”

  “Introspection’s a mistake,” I said. “Be happy drifting along the shallows.”

  “That’s no answer,” she said.

  “I agree,” I said. “But at least it’s a game plan.”

  Capers Middleton gave a shout of greeting to everyone as he and Betsy made their bold, confident entrance from the rear. Everything about them seemed exaggerated to me as if their metabolism was burning a bit brighter than the rest of ours. Their smiles seemed like grimaces to me. Like every politician I had ever seen, Capers’ eyes took in all the players in the room at a single glance. I saw him nod at Ledare, but the gesture was condescending, dismissive. When Capers left someone behind, it was permanent and he granted no right of appeal, unless, of course, he found he needed a favor from that person along the way. With businesslike economy, he steered Betsy to their seats on the stage, wasting no time on small talk with Mike or us. Though it was vitally important to Capers that he seem in command of every situation, I could tell that he was nervous in the midst of this gathering from our mutual pasts.

  Mike checked his watch and looked toward the side door of the Dock Street. My father had taken his place behind a desk on a raised platform with a judge’s gavel on the desk. He hit the hammer twice on the oak desk, more to break the extraordinary tension than anything else. He looked more broken than old, and I realized how much I had neglected him since my return to Waterford and my clumsy attempts at caring for my mother. I tried to make myself feel about him the way I thought a son should about his father, but I could not fake an emotion that was not there. Pity surged through me unbidden when it was love I was after. My father stood up, smoothed out his robes, and adjusted his tie and collar. Then he sat down and resumed his seat like the rest of us.

  Mike had arranged the seating brilliantly. At the back of st
age center was the judge’s chair and table and directly to the right was a handsome high-backed chair. Flowing from this centerpiece were comfortable plush chairs, set in big semicircles and facing each other. They were color-coordinated, lending an atmosphere that was both convivial and homey. On the left sat Ledare, Celestine, and I; next to me was a chair as yet unoccupied. Across from us were Capers, Betsy, General Elliott, and another unoccupied chair. Behind each of our chairs had been placed several taller wooden chairs. High above me on the left, I caught the barely perceptible movement of a cameraman adjusting a lens.

  Mike stood at center stage, next to the judge, near the high-backed chair, where he could see all of us easily. “Welcome, my friends, and thank you for joining me today. I want all of you to know that you’re being filmed and recorded. If you feel like speaking out, just raise your hand and Judge McCall will grant you permission to speak. When I take my seat, this will become like a court of law. The judge will preside. He is the only paid participant tonight. The rest of you are here because you’ve all been important to me in some way. I’m bound by my love and admiration for you. I’ve known most of you my whole life.