“Sing for me, Gerta,” says Roza, still playing the hopeful song. “Take the melody. Come on.”
“No, no. I…can’t.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, and stops playing. “Help me see this from your point of view. You had a dream and the voice to be a singer—a great singer. I just can’t see why—”
“Why do you think?” I’m not sure I know why myself.
“Did it do something, the starving? To your vocal cords?”
“That’s part of it, yes.”
“But practice will heal that. I’m getting my fingering back pretty well. The muscles will get stronger. It’s just that you don’t even try.”
“No.”
“Gerta. Come on. Stop this now. Are you really going to let them do this to you?”
“They took my voice.” I glare at her. “I have nothing to sing for.”
“No. No. That isn’t true. Don’t let them have that victory. Don’t you dare!” Roza almost chokes on her admonition.
I can’t sit here and listen to this. I go to the wings and grip the heavy green velvet curtain until I feel the fibers crush in my fist.
“You know that feeling you get when you’re playing,” I say after a while, “and you lose yourself in that…that still lake, that warmth, and you kind of…cease to exist?”
She nods hesitantly. “I mean, kind of…no, not really.”
“Well, what do you think, Roza? That I can ever feel that free again? Every time a note rises in my throat, I smell that sick smoke in the air, and my chest gets so tight, because I got used to holding my breath so the ash and fever couldn’t get in.”
She’s quiet for a while. “I know what you mean,” she finally says. “Every time I look down at my hands, I’ll always see them being crushed.”
“But at least when I play my father’s instrument, at least there’s—there’s his presence. I don’t have to think about my own…existence. I feel his hands instead. Someday I’ll run out of his rosin, I’ll have to rehair the bow—but the wood always has him in it. I’d rather have that than try to sing from someplace dry and dead and empty.”
“I understand.” She starts playing the song again and humming.
The last sparrows of the day congregate outside the window. A man with a tuft of white hair comes and stands next to the grieving mother. He has a piece of bread, and he rips it and gives half to the woman. They tear the bread into tiny pieces and roll them between their fingers into fine crumbs, tossing them to the peeping birds. Amazing, to have a piece of bread to share with birds. The man is a millionaire.
“Gerta,” Roza says, “there’s this Chopin piece my mother used to play. She wasn’t a fantastic player, just an amateur like me, but when she played this piece, it would just devastate you. She told me once, ‘Roza, some things you do out of skill; some out of excitement. But some things you do out of brokenness.’ ”
I look down at my own hands. I remember when they were like the hands of the dead, almost. But I’m not dead. I did the work of staying alive, and that’s an accomplishment. This is the time to live.
I clear my throat. “Do you know ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’?”
“Umm…no…oh, wait, Mahler, right? I think I can plink it out if you don’t mind it being…you know, spare.”
“You’ll catch on.” I wink at her. I start a cappella. My throat is tight; my tongue is dry and tastes bitter. But I sing.
Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.
I am dead to the world’s tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song.
When I’m done, Roza holds the last chord as long as the piano will sustain.
“Oh, Gerta,” she says. “It’s not gone. It’s just different.”
Outside, the sky grows dark and it’s getting hard to see. I go and turn on a light over the stage. Back near the door, a shadowed figure tucks quickly into the dark corner of the vestibule.
Roza and I start playing as a sort of roving duet at all the weddings in Bergen-Belsen. Sometimes I even sing, but just harmonies for Roza. Still, I feel my voice loosening up more and more. We’re getting popular. Our patrons pay us in chocolate and cigarettes. The cigarettes we trade. The chocolate is for us.
The few poor rabbis are stretched for time. Wedding announcements—and now birth announcements—take up several pages in the back of Unzer Sztyme. But the weddings are such a mixture of emotions. There are no fathers to ask for permission, no mothers-in-law to impress. Big sisters, grandfathers, adorable toddlers who might want to stand near the radiance of the Queen Bride—gone. Brides and grooms must give themselves away on the invitations.
New friendships are blooming out of the wedding preparations, though. Everywhere I look, there are little circles of women stitching, making the most precious things they can out of scraps of material. You would never know they had such meager beginnings, these veils, bow ties, even wedding rings braided from machine wire.
Lately, the talk of the camp is of a certain gown that’s making the rounds. Not content to show up under the canopy wearing her charity clothes, one particular bride-to-be had her fiancé barter cigarettes with a soldier for his old parachute, which had the perfect drape for a gown. It turned out to be such a great dress, and the only one of its kind in the camp, that bride after bride—whether she’s fifteen or fifty—gets in line to borrow it. Each one adds her own flair to it—a brooch, a colored sash—but underneath we all know it’s The Dress.
* * *
—
Herr Butterman of the camp Central Committee comes to rehearsal today with some news. The Hannover Orchestra will be visiting the camp to give us a concert, and they want our musical society to play with them.
“They say that Marschner will play,” he says. “We’ll make it an evening to remember!”
Wolfgang Marschner, the prodigy. At nineteen—not much older than me—he’s already the concertmaster of the Hannover Orchestra.
I have an idea. I run to Herr Butterman as he is turning to leave. “Please, sir, would you be able to send a message to the conductor? How would I go about that?”
“Just write it down, dear, and I’ll make sure it goes where it needs to go,” he says.
I grab a piece of manuscript paper and try my best to remember what I learned in school about writing a formal letter.
Herr Direktor,
Gerta Rausch (Richter), former student of Koloratursopran Maria Büchner and daughter of violist Klemens Richter, would like to inquire of the Maestro whether he would permit her to sing “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion, which was to have been her debut before her deportation from Würzburg. She still has the score in her possession. Kindly write with your thoughts on the matter.
Gratefully,
GR, Bergen-Belsen DP Camp
“I’ll see what I can do,” says Herr Butterman, a bittersweet smile tempering the excitement he wore when he made the announcement. I feel only a little guilt over using Maria Büchner’s name to obtain a favor. She owes it to me, I think with self-satisfaction.
Two days later, Herr Butterman finds me at the piano, leaning on the music stand with my left arm and plucking out the melody from “Erbarme dich” with my right.
“Miss Rausch,” he says, “I have good news for you.” He hands me an envelope. “You will make your long-overdue debut.”
It’s the big day. For two weeks, I’ve done nothing but sleep, eat and rehearse for my debut. The orchestra arrives, and I await them by the door of the rehearsal room as they load in their instruments and hang their hats. I’m tingling and restless, excited to rehearse and perform with a real, professional orchestra. All of my childhood memories rush in: I’m standing in the wings, watching Papa take his viola from the case, rosin th
e bow and begin to tune among the chatter, the dinner plans, the gossip.
The double basses and timpani are rolled in, and helping to wheel in a harp is a woman with a turquoise scarf over blond hair, wearing sunglasses and deep red lipstick. As she is about to pass me, she stops suddenly. Slowly she takes off her glasses.
It is Maria Büchner.
“Gerta! I—” She is speechless. She stares at me. I feel a rage begin to well up inside me, and I want to hit her. I want to tear out her hair. I want to smash her with all of the betrayal I feel afresh as I breathe in that damn gardenia perfume. She comes toward me with her gloved hand outstretched, her mouth open and trembling, her eyes wide. She looks simultaneously ashamed and full of tenderness. All of a sudden, she peels off her gloves, letting them drop to the floor, and begins patting my face, as uncontrollable sobs take over her whole body. She actually falls to the ground in a heap.
“I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you!” she says, over and over again. “I tried, but I couldn’t find you.”
It disgusts me, this effervescent and very public show of—what? Repentance? The useless assertion that she “tried”? What am I to do with this mess of tears and rouge at my feet? Absolve her of the death of my father? Of the loss of my innocence?
Here is Maria Büchner, at my feet.
The picture in my head, for three years now, has been this: her watching us being marched to the end of the street, spinning on her heel back into the house, closing and locking the door. Maybe she had a glass of wine, took our photographs off the mantel, listened to a record of Gershwin before taking off her dressing gown and getting back into her feather-and-down bed, shedding nary a tear, moving on to the next unattached man, the next starstruck little girl.
“Forgive me. My daughter. Forgive me.”
My daughter.
I see a string of moments:
Maria and me dancing together, singing the melody to Bach’s “Wachet auf” chorale while Papa plays the motif.
Lying with Maria under her pillowy comforter patterned with red and pink roses, her unpinned hair falling over me while I recover from a nightmare.
Standing onstage in the empty concert hall in Würzburg, learning how to tease the loudest voice out of my belly while Maria stands in the back row of the balcony. “More!” she demands. “Make me weep from a hundred kilometers away!”
* * *
—
Was I wrong? She is human, ordinary. She may have even suffered. Maybe she really is sorry. Crouching down, I want to reach out to her, but my mind is on fire. She lifts her head and strokes my cheek.
“Gerta. Mein Herzchen.” We rise together. She folds me in an embrace that I cannot bring myself to return. I don’t know how she can face me after what she’s done.
“I hate you, Maria,” I whisper in her ear. My eyes are hot, my mouth full of spit. “I hate you.”
“I know,” she says plainly. “You should.”
* * *
—
Marschner’s performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto is transcendent. At least compared to the music we have been making in our little musical society. Together with the Hannover Orchestra, we’ve decided on four selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The choir files into the sliver of stage behind the orchestra, and I take a chair next to the first violin, to the supportive applause of my fellow DPs and the tapping feet of my orchestra mates, who, until we began these rehearsals, never knew I sang. The conductor lifts his baton, and I’m invigorated hearing the familiar passages: the drone of the double bass as the heartrending introduction begins, the strings peeling away layers like birch bark.
The voices begin:
Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen—
Come, daughters, help me lament—
It’s time. Marschner’s solo line plays the opening of “Erbarme dich.” I feel no hint of nervousness. As soon as the first note comes out of my mouth, though, I worry. My voice sounds squeaky, strained:
Erbarme dich, mein Gott,
Um meiner Zähren Willen!
Have mercy, my God,
On my iron will!
Maria stands in the wings, chewing her lip. The audience is a vast, dark field of unpredictable creatures moving and fidgeting. All I can feel is judgment, not the freedom I was expecting, the release of all this pent-up breath.
Since the Nazis took us, I’ve spent every minute trying to be invisible, to become smaller to avoid beatings, hiding in the safety of being last-chair viola. What made me think I was ready for this?
And that is it. I seize up completely. I can’t remember a single additional lyric.
I am caught. Discovered. Nothing I thought about myself is true: I am a fraud. Frozen and shrinking, I stand stunned onstage until the orchestra has finished the piece, Marschner coming to my aid and playing the melody I should be singing. At last—at long last—the piece ends, and I walk off with as much dignity as I can manage.
The chairs are folded and moved against the wall. Tables are furnished with treats unseen since before the war. The hunger of the people is a force of its own, and they practically climb on Marschner to touch the edge of his jacket—not just because of his celebrity, but because art entered with him through the gates of Bergen-Belsen.
I press myself into the farthest corner of the wings, wanting to dissolve into the wall and forget that I ever opened my mouth tonight. Someone is coming toward me, and before I open my clenched eyes to see, I know who it is.
“Gerta,” Maria whispers, “are you all right? Why not come out and have something to eat?”
A sideways glance at her unleashes a stream of tears I didn’t even know stood in my eyes. She embraces me. I have no choice but to melt into her arms, and I heave and gasp.
“My love, mein Liebling,” she whispers, and lets me cry. “My love.”
I sink to the floor, and she descends with me. I cry myself to exhaustion.
“I didn’t betray you, you know,” she says, stroking my hair. I pull away and look at her. Her face is calm. “I know you must have wondered. I can feel it when I hold you. But I promise, I never could have done that. You were my Gertalein. Child of my heart.” Maria takes a deep breath. “God, that was the worst day of my life….I thought if I just played along…”
She sighs and readies herself to tell me the story. “After they took you away, I was standing there, just staring, thinking about who I could speak to, bribe, anything I could do to save you and Klemens. Not five minutes later, another squad showed up, this time the Hitler Youth. Kids. Like you. They pushed past me into the house and took everything. They dragged me out and took me to the police station and…well, you don’t need to know that. The next morning, they took me out to the Residenz square. One of the Hitler Youth put a sign around my neck and told me that they had taken our home as a fine for my being a ‘Jew lover.’ And I was, Gerta. I loved your father. And I will never apologize for loving that great, gentle man.”
My chest aches, thinking I could have blamed Maria.
“He loved you, too,” I reassure her. “I know he did.”
We stare across the stage. “It was Rudolf. Your father’s student.”
I sit back hard against the wooden wall. “Rudolf?”
“He put the sign around my neck himself.”
The realization dawns. “So that’s why he stopped coming. The Hitler Youth.”
“Your father was returning from a concert one night when the first deportation crossed right in front of him. He saw Rudolf there, in the uniform. From that point on, we could see what was coming—there was only so long before they caught on to your fake Ahnenpass. We tried to leave the country, but it was impossible. The tighter we felt the noose, the more we threw ourselves into music—for your sake. We tried not to pass our fear on to you. We wanted to keep you innocent and free. But we also wanted you to have a skill you could take with you, so you could feel capable. That’s why I tried to teach you charm as well. It’s a form of diplomacy.
And you did it, Gerta. You absorbed the instincts we hoped for you. Do you see?”
“I think so.” My throat tightens, thinking of Papa standing by the window, chewing his pipe.
“I want you to understand something, Gerta. No one starts operatic technique at fourteen—that’s ludicrous. Yes, there are those rare prodigies, but they’re mostly parroting. The voice has only one ally: time. Age and experience are king. They ripen you—not just your voice, but you. You lived, Gertalein, thank God. You’re young. You have time ahead of you to heal. There is a deepening ahead. Don’t think about tonight. Get right back onstage the very next chance you get.”
“I will, Maestra. I promise.” Soberly, I tuck my arm under hers and lean on her shoulder. We’re quiet for a while.
“How did you end up in Hannover?” I ask.
“Marschner contacted me about your letter. I’ve been staying with friends since I was evicted, living from place to place, concert to concert. Everywhere I went, I tried to follow a thread, some clue to find you. This time I got lucky. It’s just been me and this bag of clothes. And these. I would have given them to you before you went onstage, but I didn’t think you’d receive them from me until you knew the whole story.”
She takes out a paper package. Inside—the green taffeta gown, and a framed photo of the three of us by the lake at Bad Windsheim.
I look at her, knowing the truth. “There never was going to be a debut, was there?”
“No, Gerta. There never was a debut.”
It all makes sense. Maria giving me her clothes. Papa stuffing the good viola case with rosin and strings. Always catching Anna Müller humming my solo. The ceaseless training, even too young. They were trying to give me options. And hope.
“Gerta, you will leave here soon, don’t worry. You’ll start your life. You’ll even be happy, sometimes. And I’d…like to be part of that.”
What the Night Sings Page 11