At dinner, he and Paul discussed fission and the more recently tested theory of fusion. They speculated about the size of rings of destruction, of fail-safe zones and of zones of immediate death. My father mentioned how when they had begun testing, the birds had fallen out of the sky. As scientists, they were disassociated from the realities of these statistics, but I was not a scientist and found I could not eat my dinner.
When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I once read, the flowered patterns of women’s black-and-white kimonos were burned onto their skin. This is because white repels the bomb’s heat while black absorbs it. When I got up to make coffee for my father and Paul that evening, I noticed for the first time the pattern of my mother’s kitchen curtains, the curtains that had hung over her sink for as long as I could remember, a pattern of large white flowers against a red background, a pattern, I suddenly decided, that my mother felt was representative of far more than she had ever said.
But my mother never said much, not to my father, and not to me. I had learned when I was young not to question, but I had also learned that sometimes my mother would speak, as if I were not there, and that, if I was very quiet, I would learn some of the things I longed to know.
It was often late at night, when my mother talked to me. We were both prone to insomnia, and would leave our beds for the safer haven the kitchen seemed to provide. I now believe that the conversations that matter, the ones that we remember, the ones where words can actually express what we mean, are those that take place late at night, in kitchens, or in places equally extraordinary in their innocuousness.
The night after President Kennedy was shot, a Saturday, I found my mother at the kitchen table, drinking tea. She favored dark China black or Oolong or Formosa, laced with light cream and a touch of sugar, and she would brew it in a chipped white pot that was stamped Occupied Japan on its bottom.
I poured myself a glass of milk and joined her at the table, and then saw that she was crying. She cried soundlessly, my mother, and the only evidence that she was were the wet channels of tears on her cheeks that she made no move to brush away.
“It’s the children for whom I’m crying,” she said. This was how my mother phrased things, formally, a tendency that I have perhaps inherited along with others more obvious. “It’s not just that they’re fatherless now, it’s how their father died, in slow motion pictures they’re doomed to watch again and again.”
I too, though at fifteen no longer a child, watched those films again and again. They were burned onto my brain as if the chemicals themselves had etched them there, slow motion images of a man, John F. Kennedy, alive and smiling and waving one moment, and slumped, bleeding, in his wife’s lap the next.
“Every time it seems things cannot possibly get worse,” my mother said, “they do.”
A little over a year later, my mother was dead. The refrain of a song from Carousel repeated itself, over and over, as I sat in the front row of a crowded Fuller Lodge for her funeral: At the end of a storm/Is a golden sky/And the sweet silver song of a lark. My mother had loved Carousel, as she had most musicals, but that is not why those were the words that day. Rather, I would like to believe, they meant that in death my mother had finally discovered hope.
Hope was not something that Hana Weissova thought of any more. In July of 1941, the Nuremberg Laws, which effectively reduced Jews to sub-human status, were extended to those living in Czechoslovakia, and Jacob Edelstein, the leader of Prague’s Jewish community, began to study the possibility of ghettoizing Prague’s Jews, a desperate measure he saw as their best chance of survival. In August, Raja and Josef moved in with Hana and Anton, and in September, Anton’s parents, from the Bohemian town of Holîce, followed.
Hana’s parents were with her sister Irena in Vienna, or at least had been the last time she had written. In that last letter Irena had said that they were thinking of going to Shanghai. Perhaps they had. Perhaps that was why the weekly letters had ceased.
Her own letters to Irena had not been returned, a good sign, Hana told herself. She wondered if there was a symphony in Shanghai (Irena played the viola), and what the climate was like; anything would be better for their mother’s rheumatism than Vienna’s dampness.
Every morning, Anton and Josef joined the line outside the American Embassy. Each wore on his arm the two yellow triangles, one inverted against the other, that indicated they were Jews. The gentile citizens of Prague avoided not just them but in particular their eyes, as if to deny their very existence and hence their humanity.
And every evening, Anton and Josef returned home empty-handed. Hana would see their slow approach along the walk below the window by her piano, and every day, it seemed, their feet dragged more and more. Every day their chins hung lower toward their chests, and every day they brought with them into the house a heavy emptiness, an emptiness that even the piano’s music was reluctant to encroach upon.
So Hana would close the piano when she heard the front door open and instead would sit in the silent conservatory. She would listen as Raja, Mother Weissova, and the children came down the stairs from the nursery, hear the men greet the children with false heartiness. “Come into the kitchen,” Mother Weissova would say, “and see what we’ve made,” and then Hana would hear the group recede to the other side of the house.
This is when Raja would join her. Hana was the oldest of the three sisters and Raja the youngest, separated by Irena and four years. She was not yet twenty, Raja, this summer of 1941, but her face had grown lines, and the henna had faded from her curly hair so that it was once again merely brown.
Raja had always been the lively one, the one to play practical jokes, to forget curfews, to sing for no reason, to believe in the joyfully unexpected and hence to receive it. Not musical like her sisters, her talents lay rather in a capacity for happiness, for a giving of herself for which one was always grateful. Where Hana and Irena tended to be inward and moody, Raja was outgoing and always smiling. She had often got on Hana’s nerves.
She was still optimistic, in spite of all that had happened. “No visas today,” she would say, folding herself carelessly into an upholstered chair near the fireplace. “Tomorrow, perhaps.” Hana no longer argued with her about this, no longer said, There will never be visas, because it was always as if Raja had not heard, as if, even, Hana had not said it. Instead, she became an echo. “Yes,” she would say. “Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“Pavel is learning to read,” Raja said this night. “The Grimm, which he is always having me read to him—he read some out loud himself, today.”
“He has probably got it memorized,” Hana said. “He has heard it often enough.”
Raja leaned forward, her hands etching her thoughts before her words. “Yes, that is what I thought, too, at first, so I made a little test. I opened the book randomly, and I put my hand over the drawing, so he would not see which story it was.”
“Which story was it?” Hana asked. As if that would somehow explain things.
“‘Rapunzel,’” Raja answered. “‘Because her beauty so frightened the witch, the witch locked her in a tower, so deep in the woods no one should ever find her.’”
Hana shivered. “How does that one end again? I’ve forgotten.”
Raja laughed. “Oh Hana, you know how it ends: ‘They lived happily ever after.’ That is how it always ends.”
Yes, thought Hana. It is a fairy tale, after all.
That is what the Kennedys had been to us, a fairy tale. Even my sad mother had allowed herself to be enchanted by it, and so its abrupt and horrible ending must have seemed to her as if she had suddenly turned the page to find herself in quite another story.
My mother always went to the piano at those times. Perhaps that’s why I’ve sent Hana there, made it the refuge for her it was for my mother. Hana’s long fingers are, like my mother’s, unadorned, and she tilts her head slightly to the right as she plays, as if she hears the music’s suggestion a moment before she reproduces it on the keys.
I have
never pretended to possess my mother’s talent, and I cannot hope to have Hana’s. I am, unlike them, destined to mediocrity, a piano teacher, a woman whose life is small and whose dissonances are never heard.
It is the soloist’s responsibility to perform a single part, a part not duplicated by other instruments or voices. The solo is meant to emphasize the individual qualities of the instrument for which it is intended rather than its contribution to the total effect. While it is often the case, the solo is not written to showcase its performer.
The piano is used mainly as a solo instrument, and so the pianist tends to be a solitary sort. The pianist, unlike other members of an orchestra, sits alone behind her massive instrument, of which there is only one. Eighteen first violins and sixteen second, twelve violas, ten cellos, eight double basses: This is the bowed string section; and other instruments are similarly grouped. Even the percussionists stand together, there at the back, behind the horns, but the pianist, with her piano, is a section of her own.
While it is this singularity that initially attracts beginners to the piano, it is also what ultimately drives them away: Few people can devote their lives to a passion that marginalizes them. But those that do find that this marginalization is part of the passion.
My 3:30 Monday student is Karen Maisel. Karen’s father is a mid-level administrator at the Labs, and her mother a third grade teacher at the elementary school. Karen is an only child.
At ten, she is gawky and shy, all arms and legs and avoidance of eye contact. Her obligatory jeans and white t-shirts hang from her as if she were fashioned from coat hangers instead of skin and bone, and her brown bangs fall over her glasses, round tortoise-shell horn-rims whose thick lenses attest to myopia.
Even with the glasses, Karen leans and squints towards the music. Her hands play the notes exactly as they are written, but with nothing behind them, as is usually the case with children of unremarkable talent. Sometimes, after our lesson and before the arrival of Curtis Simon at five, we will sit at my kitchen table awaiting Karen’s mother. Karen’s hands will play with the edges of a placemat, or turn the sugar bowl around and around in careful quarter turns, and her chin will be tucked so low her muttered responses disappear unheard.
I would like Karen Maisel to make the mysterious leap from rote to music, but I am at a loss as to how to proceed. The literature suggests practice, but there is something else besides, a moment when the music, in its course from page to key, passes through the pianist, becomes imbued, colored by the pianist’s essence, and is so transformed.
My own teacher, when I was ten, was my mother, and she taught this lesson early and well. But I realize now that she did not teach me with words but by example: I would hear her rendition of a piece and then my own and the difference was electric.
I cannot, of course, hope to give the same example to Karen. Unlike my mother’s, my playing is pedestrian and unremarkable, a faithful but uninspired reproduction of the notes on the page.
This was not the case, however, with Hana Weissova’s sonatas. No music before or since has communicated itself to me as Hana’s did; I was, in fact, haunted by it. Nights, I lay in bed, awake while my husband slept oblivious by my side, arpeggios and chord progressions playing unbidden in my mind. Pale figures danced wordlessly in unknown rooms. Colors swirled: the gauzy green of a woman’s gown, the deep maroon of velvet curtains tied with gold tassels. Sometimes I was certain I heard voices: my mother’s, as clearly as if she were in the room with me; and Hana Weissova’s, absurdly, as I could not know that voice, and yet it was familiar nonetheless.
The music, too, was colored, and, lying in bed, I could hear and see it as if Hana Weissova sat at her Bechstein playing for me alone. Hana, too, was alone, the solitary figure that all pianists ultimately are.
I was often alone, as a child. Other children in the neighborhood could be seen playing games I could not fathom: tiptoeing single file through the alleys behind the houses; racing along the roads on squat bicycles with high, unwieldy handlebars; swinging bats at softballs in the playground or in the middle of the street. Of course, I did once have a friend. But she has been dead for such a long time now, it is difficult for me to remember what it was like.
I stayed home for my mother. It was not that she wanted me to, or even that she needed me; it was rather that that was where I wished to be. Did I know she would die young, retreat into herself long before that? I think not, but it was nonetheless with her I preferred to be.
Still, we lived separate, solitary existences within the same house. I tiptoed when I moved about; I opened and closed doors as quietly as I could; I worried that the toilet’s flush was too jarring a sound and often put off peeing until the pain was nearly unbearable.
My mother moved through the house like a ghost. I read a great deal, curled in chairs or sprawled on rugs, and my mother would sometimes appear, soundlessly and suddenly. “You’re reading,” she would say, a statement rather than a question, but I would say yes, and go on to tell her about the book.
My mother would tilt her head slightly to the right as I spoke, the way she did when she was playing. She seemed to be trying to make sense of the words, to translate them into something she could somehow understand. But when I finished talking, she would say only, “That’s very nice, dear,” and then she would leave the room as she had entered it, so that I was sometimes unsure she had really been there at all.
I had, though, lengthy imagined conversations with her. During these talks, she would reach out to brush my hair from my face, or to touch my hand or shoulder, something she never did, in life. My imagined mother was both witty and wise, able to solve the most difficult problems in remarkably simple ways. She had a lovely, musical laugh, and bright dancing eyes that cherished me in their unwavering gaze. My imagined mother wished for me love, and fame, and fortune, and she was there at my side to share all these things, and more.
I have read that a propensity for melancholy may be genetic, though I have also read that it is a learned trait. Artists tend towards melancholy, as do the naturally solitary, the painfully shy.
My father was neither melancholy, nor solitary, nor shy. He was a serious and straightforward man—no-nonsense, one biographer has said—but also capable of unexpected laughter at a “good one,” and backslapping camaraderie with the men with whom he worked.
My father adored my mother; I might even say he worshipped her. And yet it is clear to me, in retrospect, that he had no idea that the more expansive he grew, the more she shrank. My mother’s essence waned smaller and smaller, until, one winter, she was gone.
For Hana, it was another autumn. Jews from Bohemia and Moravia streamed into Prague, their home provinces having been declared off-limits to them.
The Germans showed a remarkable efficiency in moving large numbers of people from place to place. The final chilling degree of this efficiency would not be realized until after the war, but even in Prague, in the fall of 1941, it was something one could not help but nearly admire.
The large house became crowded with refugees. At first, it was relatives, but soon the connections were less clear, and farmers and peasants shared rooms with store clerks and bakers with whom they’d had nothing in common in their prior existences.
At the same time, food became more and more scarce. Mother Weissova, head now of a kitchen with too many cooks, improvised huge pots of broth stewed from whatever Raja managed to bring home. Rose petals from the garden were carefully saved to brew tea, and even leaves and twigs added substance and flavor to what otherwise would have been little more than boiled water.
Raja was often gone. Hana suspected that she was a member of the underground, but the one time she asked, Raja only laughed.
In early October, though, Raja came home and said they must prepare to leave at once. She told this to Hana while curled in her usual chair by the fireplace. Several Bohemian women sat in a far corner, patching clothes, and so Raja spoke in French.
“Leave?” Hana sai
d, with a short laugh. “Leave and go where? We are two young couples, two young children, and one old couple. We are too many people—and there is nowhere for us to go. Here, at least, we are home.”
“This will not be home much longer,” Raja said, watching the Bohemian women, who had stopped talking and seemed to be listening. “Parlez-vous Français?” she said to them, and they laughed. Satisfied, or pretending to be, that they could not understand her, she went on. “You know Terezín? The old fortress?” Hana nodded. “They are making it into a camp, for the Jews of Prague.”
“A camp?” Hana pictured an idyllic cabin, set by a lake, amid pines.
“A labor camp. The Germans are setting them up in all their occupied territories, places where they use Jews as slave labor.” She paused. “I have heard worse,” she said in a lower voice.
“What could be worse?” Hana laughed again, wondering if her laugh had ever been without this bitter edge.
Raja leaned forward and reached for Hana’s hand. “I have heard that there are other camps, whose purpose is to kill Jews. I have heard that the Nazis are trying to find the most efficient way to do this.”
Hana shivered. “Even the Nazis could not do such a thing,” she said, and found she could not seem to breathe. “Where have you heard this?”
Raja let go of her hand and sat back again. “Please do not ask me these things, Hana. If you do not know, you cannot say.”
“I would not say!”
“I know you would not mean to,” Raja said. “But if you do not know, you cannot. Please, Hana. We must leave.”
Hana looked around the room, looked beyond it, picturing the house’s other rooms, its garden, its proud stone facade. She pictured her children, now grown so thin, her husband and his haunted eyes, her mother-in-law and her accusing ones. And Father Weiss, nearly always in bed now—it was not possible.
“It is not possible,” she said.
“Hana—”
“Your information may be wrong.”
“My information is not wrong.”
Dissonance Page 3