My mother, were she still alive, would have been about the same age as Hana Weissova, and so I assign Hana my mother’s features, which were delicate and finely etched. My mother had the pale smooth skin and dark dark hair that were hallmarks of beauty in her day, and she had lovely long fingers that leaped across the piano keys with an abandon she did not otherwise exhibit.
My mother-in-law, though also the same age, is of such a different appearance that I would not think to put her into my imagined Hana. My mother-in-law is small but sturdy—peasant stock, as she herself points out—and, much unlike my mother, she is quick to voice her opinions both loudly and definitively.
My mother-in-law is also very funny. She makes me laugh. She is the only person I have ever known who can do this, and, when I think about her life, and in particular those years in Auschwitz when death rained from the very sky, I cannot understand why this should be so.
“But it is very funny,” my mother-in-law will tell me when I ask. She has a Polish accent that I find peculiarly enchanting, and she will say, with this accent, “It is all a big joke, don’t you see? Why should we think it matters, or that we do? We do not—and that is the joke.”
This is not one of the things she says that makes me laugh.
Hana Weissova had two children, a daughter and a son, and her husband, a man she loved for his stolid predictability, taught economics at Charles University in Prague, which was (and is) the oldest university in Europe. She herself had studied in Vienna, and the prestige of that association assured her employment, when she desired it, though in 1938, with her children so young, she preferred, for the most part, to stay home.
What Hana had bequeathed me included five sonatas, a fantasy, a set of exercises modeled on Bach but which experimented with chromatic chords, and a much annotated symphony which had apparently never been completed to her satisfaction. There were also two sets of notebooks—one set comprising her thoughts on her compositions, and the other, much larger set, a sporadically kept diary.
She’d begun the diary in August 1945, when she returned to Prague from Terezín, and its early entries were an attempt to recreate the life she’d had before she’d been relocated to the camp. Apparently she had found this exercise too painful, and, after scratching diagonal lines across her few futile attempts, she had written simply: Anton, 1915-1944; Pavel, 1937-?; and Heidi, 1939-1944.
Perhaps it was because I had time. I had too much time, in fact, and I found myself often thinking about Hana Weissova. At first, my imaginings were vague and momentary: I would picture her at her piano, her long ringless fingers flying across the keys.
But as I read the diary, the scenes became more vivid. While Hana’s crossed-out recordings of her life in Terezín were cryptic and quick compared to her evocations of her life after the war, they nonetheless were enough to fuel my imagination. People spoke; they moved about rooms; they grew as real to me as my own family—maybe more so. Hana acquired dimensions, an essence, a core. I found myself thinking about her more and more often, and found her story recreating itself in my mind. I know that the reproduction of sound involves its translation into electrical impulses, which can then be played back as a recording of the original sound. My imagining of Hana’s life, I would like to think, employed a similar principle, one in which I was the medium that facilitated the reproduction.
She was worried about Heidi’s chicken pox. She knew it was foolish; she hadn’t worried about Pavel’s, but he seemed so much sturdier than his baby sister, and always had. She sat up through the night next to the baby’s crib, listening to Bartok turned down low on the radio set, and to the occasional news reports that interrupted the music. It seemed certain that the British were going to hand Czechoslovakia to Hitler, that dreadful man. To Hana, it made no sense: Czechoslovakia was not England’s to give.
When Anton woke her at dawn, she realized she must have dozed off in the chair, and realized, too, an odd dream he had interrupted: a small Rumpelstiltskin-like creature with Hitler’s moustache and impenetrable eyes, stamping its foot through the floor of the nursery and demanding the child in the crib. Hana reached out to touch the sleeping baby’s forehead, to brush away the remarkable blonde curls, and Anton in turn touched Hana’s shoulder. “Come to bed,” he said, and she did.
It was a scene she would replay in detail, over and over again, for the rest of her life.
She played, that evening, with the Symphony, a program of Beethoven and Brahms. The Tyl Theatre was filled to capacity, and the audience was spotted with stiff men in the uniform of the SS, tall blonde women in low-cut black gowns hanging eagerly to their arms. At the intermission, Hana went out to the lobby to have a cigarette with Anton, and as she approached him, standing alone by a pillar, a large group of officers and women nearby erupted into sudden raucous laughter. Anton at once reached out his arm and pulled her to him.
When they went out for drinks afterwards, the same group occupied the tables next to them, tables which had been pushed together to accommodate them. Hana and Anton sat silently at their table, their hands entwined beneath it, and listened to the sound of the German consonants which seemed to contain no vowels or softness, and the laughter which interrupted it. After one drink, Anton paid their bill and, still holding hands, they walked home in the still-warm September night. There is so much to say, Hana thought as they walked. And there are no words to say it.
When they arrived home, they went upstairs to check on the sleeping children, and Hana told Marya, the nanny, to go to bed. Heidi’s chicken pox had begun to scab and her fever had abated. Hana watched the baby’s hand steal toward her forehead in sleep, and she gently moved it back beneath the covers.
Downstairs again, Anton poured them each a brandy, and Hana sat down at the Bechstein and began a Bach fugue. Out the music poured, out into the autumn night, and then it was gone.
In the cold winter of 1939, the Germans came to Prague to stay. They said that Anton could no longer teach and that Hana could no longer play with the Symphony. Jewish children would not be permitted to attend the public schools, though Pavel and Heidi were too young to be affected by this.
Prisoners in their own home, Hana and Anton began to bicker. Hana found fault with the ashes carelessly tapped outside of ashtrays, and Anton complained he could not think for the sound of the piano that filled the house day-in and day-out. Often, even now in winter, he went outside to the garden and spent long hours sitting on a wrought-iron bench, smoking and staring at the broken brown stalks that reached through the snow.
To Hana, when she happened to glimpse him through a window, he looked like a man of only two dimensions, a man without hope. Her disappointment in his lethargy became a living thing within her, one that prodded and drove her, to create, create. She composed frantically, as if the wind that rattled the windows were something more threatening than mere wind, and she ignored even the children, who soon learned to avoid the conservatory when their mother sat before the Bechstein.
They had learned to avoid their father, too.
After these bouts of composing, Hana was strangely calm. She would go upstairs to her room and bathe, pin her hair up carefully and then put on a black evening dress, as if she were going out to perform. Out in the hall, she would call to the children, and then together they would go outside to the garden and coax Anton inside. A family once again, all were careful in their roles, mindful of both lines to be said and lines not to be crossed. Who are these people? Hana sometimes wondered. And what was it I once felt for them?
Hana’s sister Raja and her husband Josef came to dinner, bearing black market bread and salamis beneath their coats. Josef was a jeweler, and he wore thick-lensed wire-rimmed glasses to compensate for his occupational nearsightedness. Raja, much younger than her husband, to whom she had been married for only a year, sported newly-hennaed hair, bright and unnatural in the dim light inside the house.
After dinner, they put the children to bed (Marya had left when Eichmann issued the e
dicts, in January) and then sat with brandies at one end of the dining room table. Hana watched her younger sister with an amused detachment, speaking little, though the others did not seem to notice.
Raja leaned closer across her brandy and lowered her voice. “Josef is going to get us American visas,” she said. “He has a friend.”
“Ha!” Anton spit out suddenly, and they all turned to him, wide-eyed. “You think that American visas will help us? You think that Americans will help us? We are Czechs—no, worse—we are Jews. The Americans do not care about us. The Americans do not wish to know we exist.”
“Anton,” Hana said, reaching to touch his hand. He would not look at her.
“Anton is right,” Josef said in his quiet voice, running a finger around the rim of his glass. E, Hana thought, noting the height of the brandy. “But Czechs are not Germans. They will not allow the—hate—that is in Germany to happen here.”
“One night, all over Germany, they broke all the glass,” Raja said. “SS men, but boys and women too, they went into the Jewish section and they broke all the glass. No glass was left unbroken. They beat whatever Jews they found, and some they beat to death. I have heard this. It is true.”
“Oh Raja!” Hana laughed. “‘I have heard this? It is true?’ Hitler said he did not want Czechoslovakia, and where is he now? Irena has always written weekly from Vienna, and now we have not heard from her since August. What we hear these days is not true. There is nothing true left in Prague, but most especially what we hear is not true.”
“And every day we hear your music,” Anton said. He said it quietly, as if to himself or perhaps not at all, and yet the effect was as if he had shouted it.
Hana stood, and walked to the piano in the adjoining room. “I will show you what is true,” she said, and then she began to play what she had been creating throughout the winter.
While little of this was recorded in detail in Hana’s notebooks, the drama opened itself before me as if it were a film and I its sole observer. And when Hana rose and went to the piano, I rose as well, and played.
The sound of the piano’s strings is reinforced by a soundboard, a large sheet of wood that strengthens their vibrations. In addition, the modern piano’s sound is controlled by three pedals: the damper, on the right, which causes the strings to continue to vibrate after the keys have been released; the una corda, on the left, which shifts the piano’s action so that fewer strings are touched by the hammers; and the center sostenuto, which sustains a note just played even as another replaces it. Upright pianos often do not have a sostenuto pedal, an absence which also alters a tone’s inevitable decay after it is sustained. “Move along! Move along!” urges the upright piano, a decidedly 20th century vehicle.
Research now suggests that a talent for playing a certain instrument, or for seeing things a certain way, is genetic. The entire science of genetics bases its premises on the thesis that we are products of our parents, that it is nature and not nurture that determines who and what we are.
My father was among the men who pored over a map of Japan and decided: Hiroshima, Nagasaki. While genetics suggests that I pay this heritage its due, I prefer to believe I have eluded its grasp. Instead, I am left to imagine the horror my father wrought.
My mother was delicate, and she died young, of tuberculosis, a disease that by 1965 was rare enough to be noteworthy. My mother’s name was Katherine, a name I for some reason looked up in 6000 Names for Your Baby the last time I was in the bookstore.
Katherine, it said. (Greek): pure.
Leon, my father’s name, means “brave lion,” which suggests that, genetically speaking, I am a pure, brave lion.
I much prefer the note for Anna in the same book: “Full of grace, mercy, and prayer.” And among its many derivatives is Hana, which is, of course, mere coincidence.
In November, I switch my before-dinner drink from gin-and-tonic to rum-and-Coke. I’m not much of a drinker, but Paul likes a martini when he gets home from work and I usually join him.
After more than twenty-five years of marriage, routines seem as much a part of oneself as any genetic code. And so when Paul comes home on that November day each year when I’ve switched my drink, he says, “I see it’s suddenly winter again,” and, as always, he is right.
Because suddenly, it was winter. That is how it happens in New Mexico, from summer to winter with no interlude in between. In New York state, where I have also lived, there is fall, a season that allows one to become accustomed to darkness and cold once again. It was fall when I met Paul at Cornell, and so it is a season I have longed for ever since.
Cornell sits on a hill high above Lake Cayuga, its meandering roads and paths intersecting sudden gorges that, like those in Los Alamos, are startling in their depth. The fraternity houses are at the northern end of the campus, on the road that spools away to lands that still hold farms and sometimes long stretches without them.
Paul belonged to a Jewish fraternity, but, because I am not Jewish, it was not a distinction I made at the time. I have since come to believe that it is these groups themselves that somehow enforce their separateness—all the while insisting it is its opposite they desire. Perhaps there is a security in staying with those most like one, just as there is a perception that those who are not have something to which one should aspire.
I myself was at Cornell that weekend with a young man whose mother had gone to Vassar with my own. The mother lived in Irondequoit, a wealthy suburb of Rochester, and I was studying at the Rochester Institute of Music. It was Homecoming Weekend at Cornell and the son, apparently, was desperate for a date. This was in 1968, one of the last years during which such things would seem to matter.
He was tall and gangly and unfortunately beset with bad skin, and, try as I might, his name has disappeared too far into my memory to ever be recalled. He met me at the bus station in Ithaca, and he was driving a new, metallic green Mustang convertible. I remember the car, and its creamy white leather seats, and I remember complacent cows watching us from the sides of a gently winding highway, but I do not recall a thing we said to each other.
I stayed at a sorority house filled with women my own age with whom I could find nothing in common. They knew I went to the Institute, though, and led me proudly to their badly tuned upright, demanding Beatles’ songs while they drank Screwdrivers and chain-smoked Larks and Newports.
The football game was not memorable, though the autumn colors against a bright blue sky and the singular smell of burning leaves were. After the game my date and I walked across the campus slightly apart from the group I assumed we were a part of, not even bothering to forge a conversation where no commonality lay. When we arrived at his fraternity house, where the party would be, we made no attempt to stay together.
Perhaps it’s the nature of the only child that makes her an observer, a watcher, a percher on the edge of things. Whatever the case, I was content to sit on a couch in the corner, nursing a long-gone-warm gin-and-tonic. Then one of the sorority girls spotted me and pulled me to an out-of-tune upright disarmingly similar to the previous night’s; I remember a moment of disorientation when I wondered if it weren’t the same instrument. They didn’t care about the tuning, of course; it was the semblance of accompaniment they were after, a background to their atonal singing.
When Paul sat down next to me on the bench and set down a fresh gin-and-tonic, I was playing “Michelle” for the third time. “You’re what’s-his-name’s date,” he said, and I nodded. “I’m his roommate. Paul Kramer.”
“Anna Holtz.” I stopped playing and took a sip of the drink. No one noticed; the singing continued, in all of its assorted keys.
“This will seem like a stupid question,” he said, “but you’re not related to Major General Leon Holtz?”
“I’m his daughter.”
“Wow,” he said, in the parlance of the day. It belied his enthusiasm, which was, as befitted a graduate student in nuclear physics, considerable.
So I could
say I owe my marriage to my father, although that would not be precisely true. While Paul was suitably awed by my pedigree, it would not have been enough to sustain his interest. I am certain that it was I Paul fell in love with, a love I am rather fond of recalling now, these many years later, when it seems to have resolutely settled into something quite other. This is not to say Paul and I are not contented with each other, or with our life together. It’s rather that, or so it seemed to us at the time, we were once in love. It is only when such things are over that we realize what it was we once had, although we are unable to recreate the emotions that briefly sustained us. What is left rings hollow, like the many instruments that are now found only in museums: generated in enthusiasm but disappointing in their manifestation. It is difficult to know whether the failure of imagination occurred at the inception, or some time later. It is easy to look away, and move on to the next exhibit.
My father took to Paul at once. By 1969, he had retired from active duty, and spent his days tending a rather spectacular rose garden in the backyard of his house. This house, in which I had grown up, was one of the nicest ones then in Los Alamos, set far back on a road that wound through ponderosa, and edged by a deep-walled red rock canyon.
While my father showed Paul his roses, I walked down the path to the canyon’s edge. It was June, a hot month, but a coolness seemed to rise from the chasm, and a pair of hawks floated lazily at the level of my eyes. On the far side of the canyon, new houses were sprouting in a subdivision—aluminum-sided ranches surrounded by the stumps of the ponderosas razed to make room for them.
This was during the uranium boom, when enterprising businessmen grouped together and leased land from the Indian tribes, then hired cheap Indian labor to dig the ore out. Uranium was everywhere in the four states region, a coincidence whose providence was not lost on my father, who was one of the men getting rich.
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