A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  Zoltan was a violinist, another violinist. He was a Jew from Kiev, whether by birth or migration, a staunch Communist, and a musician of such angelic powers that Herbert von Karajan himself arranged his forged papers in order to hire him as concertmaster of the Berliner Staatsoper. As the Reichsquartett, the first chairs of the string section were often called upon to entertain Hitler and his entourage—increasingly so as the war turned and Hitler took refuge in isolation.

  I had chartered planes and cars for the Reichsquartett on several occasions, but before that night had seen Zoltan only from afar. He was a striking man with a command, an authority so complete that it created opinion. Not tall but dark, very dark. He looked Russian because I had been told he was Russian. He looked Jewish because I had been told he was Jewish. But if someone had said he was Italian, Greek, Latin, or Moroccan, I think I would have believed that description without hesitation.

  “So,” Papa said after a moment, looking up at both of us. “There is a train for Saarbrücken departing from Bahnhof Zoo at four a.m.” I knew most of the rest, which boxcar would have an empty crate, which guard could be bribed.

  “Destination?” I asked Papa, usually only a hope or an intention, but still important.

  “Spain?” Papa looked up to Zoltan, who, with only his violin case clutched to his coat, shrugged like a street musician with little money and less choice.

  I dressed quickly, took cash, keys, a knife, never a revolver. I was down the shadows of the staircase when Papa called me back.

  “Hanni,” he said, stroking my hair and smiling. “I want you to go with Zoltan, make certain he is safe.”

  “To the station, of course.”

  “To Spain,” he said, a command.

  “To Spain,” I repeated, thinking it was a joke. He handed me a portfolio. My papers.

  “Good-bye.”

  “See you next week,” I said.

  “To Spain.”

  “To stay?” I asked.

  “If you are so moved.” He closed the door. I was all of eighteen.

  HOLLAND—HANNI IN LOVE

  “The White Rabbit.”

  “The white what?” Hanni asked. I was staring into the darkness off the west wing of the Villa Gabirol, watching Hanni disappear down the rabbit hole of her flat on Iranische Strasse.

  “When I first saw you at the airport,” I said, “I thought to myself, that’s who she is, the White Rabbit. Alice’s White Rabbit.”

  “One woman’s Rabbit is another woman’s Alice.” Hanni smiled. The lantern light made her chamois skin seem even softer, more elfin. “I can’t begin to describe the power of that man—I wondered why Papa had sent me along as chaperon. Which one of us was Rabbit, which one Alice, and what was Wonderland?”

  I poured more coffee; Hanni passed around her biscuits. Isabella propped half her hair above one ear, hugged one knee, kept both eyes on Hanni.

  It took a few days longer than I’d expected. D-day was two months old, after all, and my railroad timetables were worth more as toilet paper. At Bahnhof Zoo, I was lucky enough to find a boxcar with a roomy Bechstein crate. For the price of the piano, I bribed an aesthetically inclined Nazi, who rented me the entire car, no questions asked, through Wiesbaden and Saarbrücken, Metz and Nancy, out of the Occupied Zone, and down into Vichy. I fed Zoltan kipferln when I could, through a small hole at the bass end of the harp. But once we reached the Rhône valley, I sprung my captive from his music box to taste the irresistible smell of fresh summer away from Germany.

  He emptied his pisspot. I had wheeled the door half-open to freshen the car with the scent of the vineyards and the hay. Zoltan stood in the breeze, his clothes a map of Europe, his hair a cratered railway. He stretched his arms to the frame, stretched his fingers, each one moving on its own, playing a ten-part fugue of freedom. I picked his greatcoat from the bottom of the crate, hung it on the hinge to air, and turned back to place his violin on something a little sturdier.

  “Stand back,” Zoltan said sharply, and didn’t so much yank the case from my hands as draw it toward him and fold cross-legged down to the floor of the boxcar in one nervous motion.

  The case opened, he lifted the purple velour cover off the violin. The violin itself, a rich matted brown, not too shiny, speckled with age, long and graceful, a Guarneri, I found out later, built more for intimacy than power. Zoltan twisted the pegs, loosened the strings, removed the bridge and tweezed the sound-peg out through an f-hole. Pulling a curved wood-knife from a side compartment, he pried the top off the fiddle to reveal a cheap Swiss clock, three red sticks, and enough wire to inspire a quartet of executions. The bomb was dismantled, the dynamite wrapped in the velour. With greater care, Zoltan skimmed off the old glue from under the top of the fiddle, and asked me to hold the wood while he unscrewed a bottle hidden within his trousers. With the flat of the knife, he spread a fresh coat around the edges, reassembled and clamped the violin, and returned it to its case.

  “Thank you,” Zoltan said, with the brusque bow of a Russian, turned to the door of the boxcar, and vomited onto the tracks.

  This was his story:

  The quartet had been invited to play for Hitler at his East Prussian camp in Rastenburg. Mussolini, defeated and in exile, was coming for tea, and his considerate host thought that a little music might ease the pressures of conversation.

  Papa arranged the travel documents for the quartet, a chartered plane from Rangsdorf to the Rastenburg airfield. He brought the tickets around to Zoltan’s flat on Oranienstrasse on the night of the nineteenth and, with them, the three sticks of dynamite and the alarm clock. With Papa assisting, Zoltan performed a similar operation on the Guarneri, setting the bomb to detonate at five-thirty the next afternoon, when the quartet would be half an hour into their concert, somewhere near the climax of their transcription of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Hitler liked to look over the shoulder of the first violin. The plan was foolproof.

  They arrived at Rastenburg early in the morning and slept late. They were practicing in the early afternoon when a red-eyed guard burst in and shouted at them, How can you make music while the Führer lies bleeding? Another assassination plot had preempted theirs! Zoltan felt the bomb just above his collarbone and thought about his noble suicide, and how much more painful death would be once the Gestapo impounded their instruments.

  But the distress at the camp was general enough, and the musicians’ hut distant enough from the center, that Zoltan was able to take his violin and greatcoat to the latrine, and climb out of Rastenburg through the barbed wire without raising an alarm. He was about to dismantle his bomb when a Gestapo officer drove up.

  As Zoltan stood, the officer recognized him immediately, and jumped at the chance to transport such a famous passenger all the way back to Berlin. Communications had apparently been cut because of, or perhaps as part of, the assassination attempt, and this officer had heard nothing. So they drove through the afternoon, talking about Strauss and Wagner, Zoltan waiting for the officer to stop for a meal, a crap, anything that would allow him to disengage the bomb. But Gestapo officers are made of sterner stuff, and as five-thirty approached and they were still one hundred miles east of Berlin, Zoltan resorted to prayer.

  The bomb did not go off. Six, seven, ten o’clock, still nothing. The officer shook Zoltan’s bowhand vigorously and left him at a bar on the corner of Iranische Strasse. He made his way down the block to our flat.

  “Without disengaging the bomb beforehand?” I asked Hanni, not quite putting two and two together. Hanni smiled.

  “You are a journalist, Holland,” Hanni said. “I was a young girl, in love with the greatest violinist in the world. The first sight of Zoltan in Papa’s apartment, those eyes—it was only years later that I asked myself that same question. Or why he hadn’t dismantled the instrument in the darkness of the crate, or merely thrown it away.”

  “And the answer?”

  “About the bomb? That was the least of my questions. Listen.
”

  I spoke to Zoltan about Papa, about Mama, about myself and New York. He listened, told me of his triumphs, in Moscow, in Leningrad, of Paris in the teens and New York in the twenties. The light of the afternoon faded. After six hours, he took the clamps off the Guarneri and played me folk songs and lullabies, the fullness of the violin soaking into the worm-eaten boards of the boxcar, until my eyes closed and I let him make love to me. It was not the first time, but it was the first time, and it was wonderful.

  The train sped up now that I wanted it to slow down. From Montpellier to Sète, to Béziers and Narbonne. Zoltan did nothing but play the violin and make love. Zoltan played everything he could remember—Vivaldi from his student days with Auer, Tchaikovsky from his Russian period, and Bach, Bach from Berlin and Bach from the world. The partitas, the sonatas, the concertos for solo violin, the Concerto for Two Violins, the Triple Concerto, transcriptions of preludes and fugues and piano sonatas. And then the folk songs and lullabies, melodies that watered some half remembrance of bedtime and Mama, tunes both primitive and comforting.

  It was then that I found the Esau Letter—Papa had bound it with one of my purple hair ribbons and stuffed it into a side pocket of the portfolio among my papers. I shared pages with Zoltan, stories five hundred years old. Shared history, shared music, souls, bodies in a perfect fit. By the time we reached the Spanish border at Port Bou, I had been moved. As long as Zoltan kept playing the violin, we would win the war, I knew it. My duty was to keep him playing.

  I calculated that our best chance at a safe crossing was to approach the border as refugees on foot. At a makeshift camp on the road out of Port Bou, I bought a homespun dress for myself and some sackcloth for Zoltan from a group of French Jews who had been turned back from the frontier that morning. By midafternoon, we stood in a light drizzle at a crooked border hut on the high rocks above Figueras—a gypsy fiddler and his wife, paperless, nationless.

  I hadn’t counted on an aficionado for a guard. On a slow afternoon, he had all the time in the world to drink brandy and listen to Zoltan play. I knew we wouldn’t cross.

  “No gypsy ever played like that.”

  “My friend”—Zoltan smiled with the half-closed eyes of a gitano—“there was a time when only the gypsies played like that.”

  “Before my time.” The guard smiled back.

  “Five hundred years before,” Zoltan said, and returned the instrument to his chin.

  “Get out!”

  “Please, Don Guard,” I cried, in an exaggerated Iberian scraping motion. “We must get through to our parents in Rosas.”

  “Get out!” he said again, and threw open the door. “Go back to Paris, or Vienna, or whatever concert hall you came from. Gypsies, pfah!” and he spit in Zoltan’s eye.

  Zoltan calmly wiped his face, wiped the rosin from the strings and the parts of the fingerboard and top where it had left a light dusting, placed the violin back in its case, covered it with velour, closed the case, and held the door for me.

  “A true gitano never held the door for his wife.”

  “Five hundred years ago,” Zoltan said, and stepped down into the rain.

  “I have a young son at home who would like that fiddle.” The guard opened the door with the toe of his boot. “Perhaps we could come to an arrangement.” Zoltan took my arm. We marched back down the path.

  Dressed as gypsies, we were unacceptable to the overfed innkeeper of Port Bou. Damp and depressed, we took inadequate shelter beneath an overhanging rock in a fog-shrouded olive grove. We sang songs, talked what little hope we could into the nightfall—a new guard in the morning, a new disguise, sun, perhaps …

  I fell asleep. I dreamed Beethoven, the Concerto in D, Zoltan and Carnegie Hall. I was dressed all in velvet, our immaculate son on one side, my splendid Papa on the other, in a box, stage left. The broken octaves, the long, rippling arpeggios, the hazelnut-and-sugar melodies, all glided up to us, each one dispatched with a chuff of Zoltan’s chin, of his eyes. I gripped our son’s hand with pride; he had eyes only for his father. The concerto ended, the audience leapt to its feet. I shuddered awake.

  Zoltan was lying on the ground. He had rolled out of our shelter, face up in a puddle of water. His fists were clenched around an imaginary fiddle, an imaginary bow. His lips foamed, the water ran into his eyes, but he couldn’t blink. A grating sound, an over-rosined bow pressing too hard on the G-string, rose from some crackling edge of his body. I pulled him in out of the rain, cradled his head in my lap, not knowing whether it was his nightmare or mine that had suddenly seized him by the throat. Words, sounds, came out of his mouth, not Russian, but a garbled kind of Spanish. The rain was a torrent, there was nowhere I could go. I held Zoltan and sheltered myself in a sort of madness until morning. By then he had lost consciousness, the sun had risen. His long fiddler’s fingers slowly unwound, and I could read the wrinkled paper in his left hand:

  My dearest Hanni,

  The inevitable is the inevitable. Violins can stand anything except rain and heat. I will love you, always.

  Zoltan

  In the other hand, an empty vial and a discernible pulse.

  It was slow going with Zoltan over one shoulder, his fiddle, our few things and papers over the other. A hundred yards away, a passing farmer helped me drape my burden across his burro and hurried us down to the police barracks. The nearest hospital was over the border in Figueras. As an emergency patient, Zoltan was free to cross the border. I had to stay in France. The guards asked for his papers and took the entire portfolio, Esau Letter, purple ribbon, and all. It was only as they shuffled him down into Spain on a filthy stretcher that I called out for the violin lying on his chest. No one listened. I waited for three days, until I had been told twice he was dead. Without papers, without violin, without Zoltan, I turned my face to Berlin. The Jews were still waiting in their camp, in mourning, singing songs of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. It was Tisha B’Av, and I was pregnant.

  Other women have told me, in the intervening forty-seven years, that they knew, absolutely knew, the moment the sperm found the ovum, or if not then, with the first light of the new day. The Earth felt fresher and brighter, some said, or, in the cases of others, it was as if the air were heavy with thunder and foreboding.

  But in a world so suddenly changed, how was I to recognize such ordinary symptoms? I walked north from Port Bou toward Perpignan, then east, into a battlefield, the sounds of the Allies landing on the Mediterranean beaches echoing into the mountains. It wasn’t until mid-September, six weeks later, wrapped in the safety of an eiderdown in a chalet hidden by the benign peak of Hornegli in the Bernese Oberland, that I heard a gentle Swiss accent say, “Dein chliine cheng werd nöchste Früelig gebore”—my child would be born at lambing time.

  Under the care of Frau Freund and her husband, I stayed warm through the winter, put on weight, and regained my sanity. When they first found me, wandering dazed alongside the tracks of the Montreux–Zweisimmen milk train, I was scratched, bruised, and painfully thin, but moving under the star of the constellation that watches over the innocent and the mad. It was only years later, when I returned to the continent with Leo, that I was able to retrace my probable route with the help of a historical atlas of the war. Somehow, I had lit upon the right combination of trains and barges, footpaths and orchards, to thread the delicate needle between the fleeing Vichy troops and the advancing Americans. If the Freunds had not stopped me, I would have walked through to Berlin by the end of the summer.

  Cattle and Hornegli protected the village of Schönried from news of the war. The Freunds, being Swiss, were kind and credulous, lacking all natural curiosity. Before they suspected I’d regained my sanity, I had the presence of mind to tell them I was the American wife of a famous French violinist, who had been caught in the crossfire of advancing troops. Despite the official posture, no one was fundamentally neutral, not even the Swiss, not even the Freunds. Frau Freund had a brother who had made good in Munich. I played
it safe.

  Why? Why hadn’t I given up, given in to the weeks on the road, the certain death of Zoltan, the probable death of Papa? I had watched, even participated, in many of the atrocities the Nazis committed during the first five years of the war. I had lost, it was true, the father of the child I was carrying. But I’ve met many survivors of the war since, people with stories far more ghastly, who had lost entire families, children, babies. Looked at in a certain light, Zoltan was, after all, only a man I had met on a train.

  So what reflex led me to give the right answer to the Freunds? Why did I drink readily of their kindness? Why did I allow them to pamper me, clothe me, why did I look at them with friendly smiles, why did I treat them like my own family? Why did I ultimately run away in the extremis of my eighth month?

  You are too young, Isabella, and you, Holland, have been spared the insanity of the pregnant woman. I survived not out of any notion of duty to or love for an unborn child. He was emphatically not a child in my womb. A voracious thing-fetus-tadpole, sapping strength, wits, and humor, call him what you like, he was not a child. He was my passenger. I was his travel agent. I set that life into motion, I wrote half the ticket. I survived to carry my passenger to Berlin—whether by first, tourist, or baggage class.

  I ate and rested and waited for the snow to begin its spring drip into the valley. I allowed a rich widower-farmer to woo and engage me. On April Fool’s Day I stole him blind. By nightfall I had ridden the train past Zurich to the German border.

  For ten Swiss francs, I found an eight-year-old boy to ferry me across the Rhine. For another one hundred, a munitions trucker drove me to Donaueschingen and brought me up to date on the Allied advance. The Americans and the British had crossed the Rhine on the west, the Russians were only a few days east of Berlin. For the cost of my overseeing the stewpot, a bargeman, with a cargo of metal scrap bound for Regensburg, carried me down the Danube, past the rock of Sigmaringen, the spire of Ulm, the great abbey of Kelheim, and settled me in the mail car of a train bound for Leipzig.