What the Night Sings

by Vesper Stamper

  There is a woman in the camp, a lady whose hair has grown in like patchy grass, who never stops laughing or grinning. Some fool noticed this lunatic quality and gave her the task of “boosting morale” among us. Thanks to her maddening pep, though, it may backfire. She takes her post at the door to the dining hall and greets each person with a saccharine “Good morning, good morning! How are we doing? It’s a beautiful day to be alive! A little warm, a little cold, a little wet, a little dry—depends how you look at it, depends on your perspective! Make it a great day!”

  She is like a cup of warm lemonade buzzed about with wasps. I suppose there must be a way to be friendly and kind, to laugh heartily without making people want to throw you from a bridge. I almost let a remark slip—

  “Time and place, Gerta,” my papa used to say, when my mouth would run faster than my brain. “Wisdom is knowing the time and place.” I wish I could find the time and place to pour this soup over her head.

  In my daydream of Papa, I forget where I am for a moment and how weak my legs still are. The sounds around me become muffled, as though my head were under a pillow. The ding of metal falling on a brick floor, a splosh of liquid—and just before my vision goes completely dark, I feel myself caught under the arms.

  I emerge back into the present to the shrieking of a woman chastising someone over the waste. My sight brightens. The shrieker is none other than the waspy-lemonade woman. It’s in my face that she’s waving her finger, as two others hold her back and remind her—

  “There is plenty now—”

  “We are no longer starving—”

  “The soup will not bring back the dead.”

  Whoever has caught me turns me around: it’s my friend from the medical tent. He has color in his face now, and the beginnings of red whiskers, like his hair. He’s smiling softly, the many-paned window reflecting in his eyes. He sits me down at the table and hands me his own tin cup of soup.

  “Go ahead; I’m not hungry,” he lies. I look down into the cup. What I feel in my belly is different somehow—the hunger of someone who’s suddenly remembered what fullness feels like.

  “I used to be a singer,” I tell him.

  He looks at me, smiles, nods. “Oh,” he says, unsure of how to respond. “I’m sorry, I should have asked, all this time—I don’t know your name.”

  “Gerta. Rausch.” I use my real last name, pausing a moment as I think of the lengths to which Papa went to avoid it. I attempt a handshake but he puts his hand up, politely refusing to shake it. It seems odd that this boy who held my hand in the tent, stroked my forehead and caught me when I fainted will not shake it now. “Yours?”

  “Levi Goldszmit. You can call me Lev.”

  “Lev,” I choose, with a smile. “Nice to really meet you now.”

  “And where are you from, Gerta Rausch?”

  “I’m from Köln, but I’ve lived in Würzburg since I was little.”

  “And you were a singer, you said? Jazz?” He makes a vaudevillian face.

  “I was studying opera.”

  “Opera!” he says, brightening. “Will you sing for me?”

  I’m suddenly embarrassed. I haven’t sung at all since the day of liberation, but actual singing? Not since Theresienstadt. “Not yet,” I say. “I’m not ready.” I point to my throat. “Takes a while to get it back.”

  “Well, God gave you a gift to share with the world,” he says, a bit sanctimoniously, which I think he realizes. He reaches up and tugs his earlobe. “But opera? Isn’t it only old ladies who sing opera?” He laughs at the thought. “How old are you?”

  “It’s May—” I calculate. “Right—I must have just turned sixteen! Imagine forgetting that….You?”

  “Eighteen.”

  I’m shocked. He looks so much older than that. I wonder if he thinks the same about me. Gone from everyone in the camp is any hint of round-faced youthfulness, from the babies, too. Our faces are chiseled stone, even with a month of food in our bellies.

  “And where did you live?” I ask. “Before the war, I mean.”

  “I’m from Poland. My town is Kielce. But my mother is…was German.” He looks blankly at his hands. “So I speak a little.” He smiles again. “Quite well, no?”

  “Getting better!” I laugh. I take a sip of the soup. Somehow it’s the most delicious thing I’ve tasted in years.

  For two weeks, I’ve been treated and disinfected; I’ve washed and rewashed my one ratty uniform shirt. A team of American medical students comes this morning with a truck full of clothes and shoes. They dump the crates in the dining hall. Some are donations from charity drives. Some are the discards of the dead.

  Two middle-aged women take the reins and organize things. They have some men arrange the tables into long rows, and everyone helps make piles of clothes: women’s, men’s, boys’ and girls’. This brings everybody into the hall, and for the first time I see several of the other women from my orchestra at Auschwitz. We embrace, but there is nothing to say. How odd that we, of all people, would have survived.

  Everyone is overtaken by an intense desire to impose order. We line shoes up by size along the benches and make signs with cardboard and sticks. Each piece of clothing is folded neatly, with reverence, especially the children’s clothes, which have the most items and the fewest takers. Some take the little baby shirts just to put under their pillows, to hold like real children.

  I remember my size before I was deported. I’m so much thinner, but maybe I’ve grown taller. I start at the end of the line and choose a brassiere and matching underpants, blue gray with a little lace along the edge. Pretty nothings from an elegant lady who had something beautiful to wear them under. Or someone to show them to.

  It’s been a year since I’ve thought about Maria Büchner, my stepmother, my maestra. She was magnificent, a goddess. I was too young to study opera, but she heard something in my voice and took a chance, shifting me toward serious study. For my debut, she gave me one of her gowns, pale green taffeta with a pleated skirt and a million crystal beads. I never did get to wear that dress. It could still be hanging on the back of the closet door at home. I clench the clothes in my hands and wonder what she did after we were taken. Did she cry for us? Did she forget us? Could she…could she have been the one who turned us in?

  I shake away the thought and take a navy skirt, black dress shoes and a light blue blouse with a pattern of blossoms on it. It reminds me of the pale sky of a Würzburg summer morning, the white blossoms on the orange trees in the gardens.

  I’m swimming in these clothes, still skeletal, though I know I’ve put on some weight in the past few weeks. I make a pleat in the front of the skirt and roll the waistband over to hold it. Under the skirt, the blouse has to be pulled down practically to my knees just to keep it fitted against me. But these are my clothes now, ones I chose for myself. I step out of invisibility. I have a name. I am Gerta Rausch.

  I am a girl again, in clothes I chose, with a sky full of flowers on my blouse.

  I rummaged through a bin of clothes today, and now I have something extra: a silk scarf with bright yellow butterflies on it. Looking in the mirror hanging on the outside wall of the bathhouse, I wrap it stylishly around my choppy hair, with a careful knot in the middle, the ends hanging down over my right shoulder. Maria used to call it her “market look,” just understated enough to make her resemble a homemaker…but with panache. She knew how to exude glamour even when buying groceries, and I am ready to be pretty again, myself.

  Instead, my reflection is almost comical, with my sunken cheeks and bulging eyes, framed by this yellow-and-white halo. My teeth—God—huge, protruding from my jaw. I practice smiling and feel like I’m lying. I’ve been in the camps for almost two years, but at least ten have been added to my face.

  All of us children knew only the world that our parents opened to us. My father made the choice to hide everything from me. I was too young to question Papa’s new reality or whether my childhood memories were ever real.
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br />   I’m not angry with him. Maybe I will be in time, but right until the night of our capture, I had the happiest life imaginable. We lived in music. We buttered our bread with it. Music walked in the door with Papa or Maria like another member of the family. Yes, the war was hard on everyone, but thank goodness we weren’t Jews, I thought. How awful to be harassed, beaten and humiliated in the street, to not be allowed to work or go to school. At least that didn’t apply to us.

  It never occurred to me to ask why Papa finally stopped playing in the orchestra. Why he never left the house. Why I never went to school in Würzburg but was tutored at home. I assumed it was so I could concentrate on my training. Or because Papa was overprotective.

  Maria doted on me. She was committed to helping me to understand it all: how to dress for the new curves in my figure, to put on lipstick, to make sure my armpits smelled like Eau de Lilac instead of Eau de New Teen. I just assumed the war would end and, in a seamless path, I’d go to conservatory and become a famous diva, like her.

  It didn’t take long after arriving in my first camp for all of that to change. Of course there was no more perfume or stylish clothing to choose from, and just as I had started my cycles, a few weeks of hunger stopped them altogether. There was nothing to manage anymore. And nothing like beauty to worry about.

  Yet, on sleepless nights, we girls in Theresienstadt whispered together about the future. We still had a bit of innocence left, a sliver of hope.

  “They can’t keep us in here forever, right? We’re just kids. As soon as we get out of here,” I told them, “I’ll continue my operatic training in earnest.” We talked about gowns and shoes and flowers and hairstyles, and carved out of the emptiness a small mental space in which our closets and bellies were full and the road before us was straight. We couldn’t have known what a luxury such thinking was.

  And now I am here, decades older than fourteen. No—only two years older. My chest is as sunken as my eyes, and I wear the brassiere as nothing more than a wishful formality. I am hollow and barren and still a child, an orphan with no one to show me what to do or expect next. I have only what I can remember of Maria Büchner’s advice about life:

  “Find a man who will worship you, and never tell him a thing about yourself. And for heaven’s sake, always carry red lipstick and a mirror!” How utterly ludicrous those words seem now, perched like a cheap toy on the lip of a grave. When you’re dying for so long, old urgencies wither and die.

  Instead, I became consumed with the business of existing.

  * * *

  —

  I come back to myself. In the mirror, a dark line of cloud hangs over the barracks. They are burning.

  I run back across the camp to the old courtyard, where all the inhabitants have been ushered out. The soldiers are hosing the buildings with fire. The flames just kiss the birches nearby and char the undersides of their limbs; ever after, the scars will curl under to protect the fissures left by the fire. But the trees will live and not die; they will put forth new, full leaves.

  A few hundred of us watch the barracks burn until they are just pits of smoking ground.

  “To stop the typhus,” says a woman next to me.

  “It’s about time,” I say, and I mean it. But there is a pang I can’t name, like a part of myself is being erased.

  It’s over, and I start back; the faint sound over the loudspeaker announces supper. I pass the bathhouse mirror again on the way. No barracks remain in the rear view now, just a smoking road to nowhere. I stop to tidy up my novice scarf tying, yellow silk butterflies framing my bony face. Someone else appears in the mirror with me. It’s Lev. He smiles, puts up his hand in a friendly wave. I return his smile and he comes closer. He is wearing a small skullcap now.

  “That’s a very pretty tichel,” he says in his Polish accent. His German is really improving.

  “Thank you,” I say. “A what?”

  “On your head—are you religious?”

  “What? Oh! The scarf. No, no.” I brush the suggestion away with a very Maria Büchner–style wave of the hand. “It’s just—my hair, you know, it’s so shaggy, it shouldn’t be seen by man nor beast.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Well, it’s…nice.”

  It’s strange to have a boy’s eyes on me.

  “I have a little affinity for butterflies.” I shrug.

  “Ah! So did my sister. They were always landing on her. Sometimes, if one was on her, I could get close enough to look at its eyes. They’re like gems, you know, cut with facets.”

  “Yes, I know!” I say, the child in me suddenly taking over. “They always landed on me, too! I could even walk around with one on me and it would just stay there. There was one—a beautiful blue-and-black one—that was always at my window. I would put out my arm and it would sit on my sleeve. It would fly around my room for hours, then perch on me again. I used to think maybe it was an angel.” Oh, the naïveté of those little-girl theories.

  “Maybe it thought you were a flower,” he says.

  What a strange thing to say.

  “Maybe,” I answer with a jaded laugh. “A wilted, anemic flower.”

  “A flower waiting for rain, that’s all.” He stares a little. The second meal announcement comes over the loudspeaker, in German, English and Yiddish. Lev looks at me sideways.

  “Walk with me to supper?”

  My papa and I walk down the cobblestone streets of Köln to the concert hall. I’m six today, walking into Papa’s rehearsal with my new red dress and hair ribbon. The streets are narrow, and the second stories of the medieval houses lean over us like ancient guardians. Papa lets me carry his viola until it gets too heavy and my arms give out. I remember the first day I made the whole walk by myself, the day he didn’t have to carry me in one arm and the case in the other.

  I’m thinking of the piece we’ll be singing in music school today, a fun Schumann chorus, and I’m suddenly transported. I see myself as a grown-up, onstage in front of hundreds. I hear the breathing, the clearing of throats, the accidental springing up of a seat as the audience adjusts and the conductor lifts his baton to begin.

  I see my papa, to my left, first-chair viola. He is an old man in this vision, bow poised on string, smiling at me with wrinkles rimming his eyes. My gown moves like feathers under my fingers. I inhale.

  Ich hör’ meinen Schatz, den Hammer er schwinget,

  Das rauschet, das klinget, das dringt in die Weite,

  Wie Glockengeläute, durch Gassen und Platz.

  I hear my sweetheart, the hammer he swings,

  The echo, the clinking, comes to me from afar,

  Like the sound of bells, through streets and squares.

  “What’s that tune you’re humming, Gertalein?” Papa asks, stirring me back to the street stones. I blush.

  “Oh—the angel sang it to me,” I say nonchalantly. I press my face to the viola case and smile to myself.

  “The angel!” he says, feigning shock.

  I giggle. “Yes, Papa, it’s a butterfly angel.”

  “Does the butterfly angel visit you often?” he demands, grabbing my ribs and tickling me.

  “Yes, Papa, it visits me every night!” I say through my laughter.

  “Well! You must tell it something for me!” Papa pauses and kneels, looking into my eyes. Despite the hilarity a moment before, a shimmer of tears appears in his. “Tell the butterfly to always give you a song to sing. Will you demand that of your little friend?”

  I touch my nose to his. “Yes, Papa.”

  He smiles. “And tell it to visit me with a song once in a while.” He lightly pinches my earlobe, and I chuckle through the empty space where my front teeth used to be.

  We arrive at the stage door. My legs feel strong, and I start humming again as I look over my shoulder at the distance we have come, without my needing to be carried, the viola case safe in my arms. Papa pushes the heavy door open and kisses the top of my head.

  It’s a cool morning, and even though I’m
twelve now, I don’t have a choice—it’s cod-liver oil and Latin recitation and the endless, tedious Wohlfahrt viola études.

  But in the afternoon, it’s the walk through the Residenz palace gardens, Papa and Maria on either side of me, holding my hands as we stroll to rehearsal. We always allow a bit of extra time to observe how the flowers are evolving with the seasons. I remember my first summer here in Würzburg, after that dreadful winter when I left the ghost of my mother behind in the burning city. The small town’s cozy, winding streets and stooped buildings enfolded my fear like a grandmother’s arms.

  There was one day when we left the house and the air felt different, softer. Past the SS guards standing sentry, Papa and I walked through the scrolling iron gates, stopping at every place where a bulb pushed its new leaves through the warming ground. Everything seemed greener, more porous, as though air could flow more freely than it had only yesterday.

  Around the fountain, sculptures hid like tree sprites under the topiaries—cupids playing flutes and tambourines, or ladies dancing in their rain-worn stone gowns next to the huge pots of orange trees.

  When Papa and I came to Würzburg, I joined the choir for the children of the symphony musicians. There are about forty of us now, aged six through sixteen, representing a range of ability to control our limbs and our voices. Our director is Maria Büchner herself, the renowned Koloratursopran diva. She also happens to be my stepmother.

  She is magical. She transforms the unruly bunch of us into a heavenly host of cherubim, hovering a thousand feet above the city rooftops.

  These Thursdays are outside of time, a choir in clouds. Frau Büchner wrangles impossible harmonies from our voices. Her hands flutter winglike, all of us hypnotized as she pulls notes forth from us as if spinning lace-weight yarn. New memories continue to enshroud those old ones: the fading face of my mother, a name that once was mine—what the word Jewish meant.