“Raja.” Now it was Hana who reached across for her sister’s hand. “They would not survive. They are not well. You and I—we are the only strong ones.” She splayed her hand, its bony fingers. “And even we grow thin. No. At least here we are home.”
Raja nodded slowly. “Josef and I will go, though. Two fewer mouths to feed, and when we arrive somewhere safe, we will send for you.”
“You have talked to Josef about this then?”
“Josef is my husband.”
“And you have talked to him?”
Raja smiled. “Tonight, I will. We must go. I wish you would at least consider it, Hana. Please.”
“All right,” Hana said. But she knew she would not.
When Raja and Josef left the next morning, Hana was not with the others in the front entry hall to see them off. She sat instead at her piano, but she did not begin to play until they passed beneath her window. Then she took up a Mozart minuet, sprightly and free. She saw Raja pause and look toward the window, and then quickly move on. Raja’s head was held high, and her hand firmly grasped Josef’s elbow. Hana watched the familiar backs of their heads grow smaller and smaller, until they rounded the corner across the street, and disappeared.
I still have not found Raja, a 1946 note in Hana’s diary read. I believe that is cause for hope. I only wish that I had learned to pray, or that I believed in the power of prayer.
I, too, never learned to pray. But, for some reason, I do believe in something. I believe, for example, that when I sit alone playing my piano, my mother hears. I believe that when I play Hana Weissova’s sonatas, Hana’s spirit somehow guides me.
My father was a man of science. “I’m from Missouri,” he’d always say. “Show me.” But my mother was of another sensibility, a woman who understood the very different empiricism of music. My mother, I have begun to understand, knew that music, in its way, was the highest form of prayer.
Like any discipline, music has a language and vocabulary that is uniquely its own. Musical sounds, for example, have four properties: pitch, dynamics, tone color, and duration, and it is these properties which distinguish it from other sounds.
Pitch is the highness or lowness one hears, a specific frequency which in music is called a tone. The distance between two tones is called an interval, and chords, groupings of notes played simultaneously, are comprised of these intervals.
The loudness or softness of music is called dynamics. Composers indicate dynamics in their notation with Italian terms, from pianissimo—very soft, to fortissimo—very loud. The original name of the piano, in fact, was pianoforte, a word which indicated the instrument’s unique dynamic capacity.
Tone color refers to a quality of sound, the certain timbre created by an instrument. A trumpet, for example, is said to have a brilliant timbre, while a cello or an oboe is more mellow, and often more dark in color.
Duration, unlike the other properties of musical sound, is a relative term; it indicates how long each tone lasts in relation to the others in a particular piece. In this relative way of viewing the duration of my life, I have already lived longer than my mother, while the time she was a part of mine comprises barely a third of its duration.
In terms of human history, my forty-some years make no sound at all; and, in terms of geological history, I do not even exist. Pitch, dynamics, and tone color pale beside the impact of duration, but without them musical sound would be no different from any other.
It is that difference that makes music a haven quite unlike others; it is that difference that creates in music a place where one’s self ceases to matter, or even, in a way, to exist.
Nuclear physics has its own language as well. Physicists talk of critical mass, fissionable material, implosion, detonation. In the Los Alamos of the early 1940s the language also included strategy, preemptive strikes, and “the possibility of heavy casualties,” as well as “the importance of overwhelming surprise.”
That I define my father in terms of this language should not be an overwhelming surprise. Unlike my feelings about my mother, my thoughts about my father were always clear and direct, a reflection, after all, of the man himself. My father was, in his own choice words of praise, “a man of action.” He was a “quick study,” “decisive,” “straightforward,” “authoritative.”
The man I knew at home as I grew up was not at odds with the man the histories and biographies have drawn. If a decision needed to be made, it was my father who would make it, just as, if a line needed to be drawn, he would draw it.
I was never of a rebellious nature. The bounds of my existence were very clearly marked, and it did not occur to me to cross them. Even when I became old enough to wonder about some of my father’s decisions, I did not second-guess him. I was not fissionable material, potentially imploding upon detonation, but I was, quite possibly, the result of a strategy that was preemptive and hence left no margin for error.
My earliest memory of my father is a winter one. I am five, and he is kneeling at my feet in our front yard’s snow, strapping cross-country skis to my heavy boots.
What I am seeing is the top of my father’s head—the dark, slicked-back hair, the tops of his protruding ears, the brown fuzziness of his leather bomber jacket’s collar. I see his breath, too, translucent question marks that come up over his forehead and then dissipate into the blueness of the sky.
Behind me, I hear my mother open the front door, and I try to turn, but only succeed in twisting the upper half of my body. My mother, wrapped in a navy blue cardigan that is far too big and that I have never seen before, leans on the doorjamb and twiddles her fingers at me: a wave. I wave back, mittened. My father looks up, sees her, jumps up and runs to the door in what seems like two incredibly long strides. Rooted to my skis, I remain half-turned, watching as my father kisses my mother’s forehead, touches her elbow, and guides her inside. Then, closing the door behind him, he’s back, strapping on his own skis and handing me two sawed-off poles. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”
It does not occur to me to say I don’t know how to ski, that he has never shown me how. My father has said, “Let’s go,” and go I must, and go I do, in short mincing steps and then longer gliding ones to catch up with him. He never looks back to see if I am there, because he knows I am, and I know I must not disappoint him.
At first, I stay in the twin tracks my father’s skis have traced for me, but as I become more accustomed to my feet’s lengthy extensions I move parallel to him, although still behind. Under my skis the snow repeats the same soothing sound over and over, sh-sh, sh-sh, its smoothness so reassuring that I fall into it as if we were one.
We ski at the edge of the canyon, and we ski for a very long time. We encounter no one, and we never say a word to each other. It is only hindsight that tells me that what I experienced that afternoon may well have been my only moments of pure joy.
Studies of manic depression indicate that the illness precludes any emotional middle ground. Either the patient is manic—on a high—or depressed, with no halfway point to temper her.
Other studies now suggest that there are a few self-cured manic depressives, who have found that halfway point and tethered themselves there so firmly that both elation and melancholy seem vague memories not even their own. Self-cured manic depressives steer a careful course along a deceptively smooth surface, allowing themselves neither happiness nor sadness. One often feels, in discourse with these people, that one is getting only a polished veneer, but also that, were that veneer to be stripped, there would be nothing beneath it. Self-cured manic depressives protect themselves so well that they have lost their cores along with their highs and lows.
Core, of course, is yet another word in the language of nuclear physics, a word often used in conjunction with the adjectives supercooled, or superheated.
I came across the article discussing self-cured manic depressives in my dentist’s waiting room. The only surprise in it for me was the implication that one would have had the highs and the
lows before one cured oneself.
I do not recall a time I had not firmly tethered myself to that halfway point, a place that is both safe and unremarkable. No tricks of light on water for me: I stand safely on the shore, watching.
Perhaps that is why my playing is doomed to mediocrity. Perhaps in order to convey emotion in music, one must experience the emotions oneself. I do not recall my mother, however, displaying emotion of any kind. Rather, there was only her vague lethargy—except when she played.
When my mother played, the music took on shape and color. Music was the place where my mother could allow her emotions to surface, and it is curious that I cannot do the same. It is possible that I am so afraid of what those emotions will reveal that I cannot allow even their possibility. But how can I be afraid of what I have never felt? Or is it possible that I did once know elation, or sorrow, an elation or sorrow I can no longer recall, but which served as a warning that such feelings were dangerous?
After skiing that afternoon, my father and I arrived home as the sun set behind the ponderosas. My father unstrapped my skis and then his own, and leaned them up against the house. I was still filled with that peculiar sense that I am hesitant to name, a sense that all was right with the world, that nothing could ever hurt me so long as my father was there.
We went into the house and my father called out for my mother. When she did not answer, he said, “Perhaps she’s upstairs” and went to look.
I stood alone in the front hall, still wrapped in coat and muffler, mittens and hat. My heavy boots dripped onto the tiled floor, but the front hall was peculiarly quiet, the ticking of the clock unusually loud against this silence. I concentrated on each tick, so that the sound became the only thing. I knew how to count to ten, and so I counted ten ticks and then started over, I don’t know how many times. It was as if I were not in my own familiar home but somewhere else entirely, as if I were not even myself but had ceased to exist. I would not move. I stood, and I counted ten ticks, and then I counted again.
When my father came back down the stairs, my mother was behind him. And that is where this memory ends.
Though Raja had warned her, Hana was nonetheless surprised when the SS came. They came for the men, they said, strong young men who would help to build a camp where they could live.
Anton left in October. That fall was as cold as the previous fall had been warm, and he left bundled in several layers of sweaters, his warm overcoat, a muffler and hat. Hana stood at the door and adjusted the muffler at his throat, the throat of this stranger who was her husband. “I will see you soon,” she said. “We will all see you soon.” Anton did not answer.
Hana stood on her toes and whispered that she loved him. She kissed his ear, and then his cheek, and then his lips, and said again, “I love you, Anton. Remember that.” But Anton did not answer, and then he was gone.
The winter was long and cold. In addition, firewood was scarce, and by December, Hana began assessing her furniture to decide what was expendable.
Because she was always cold, she bundled up the children, who then complained of being too hot. Mother Weissova had brought the herbs and vegetables from the garden into the kitchen before the frost, and they grew in pots and pans on the counters and windowsills. Father Weiss, meanwhile, grew weaker and thinner, and Hana took to sitting with him in the waning hours of the afternoons. She had never really known this man, her father-in-law, but now they talked for hours, the winter’s thin light filtered by the room’s gauzy curtains.
His name was Petr, and he had been a shopkeeper. Their town had not been large, and so he had stocked both usual and unusual items—fabric and flour, tiny wooden Swiss clocks and bottles of French wine. He knew all of his customers well, knew their histories and their families, knew who was going through a difficult time and so would say, “I will put this on your account, correct?” Even now, in Prague, former customers came to visit him, Jews and non-Jews, the latter sometimes whispering to Hana in the foyer that the fate of Jews should not befall Petr Weiss, who did not seem Jewish at all.
But it should befall other Jews? Hana thought but did not say. She was suddenly aware of the dichotomy, of her Jewishness, a fact to which she had previously paid no more attention than the color of her hair or her eyes. One afternoon she mentioned this to Father Weiss, propped up against his many pillows, his strong features cast in relief on his too-thin face, his still-thick grey hair combed neatly back from his forehead by his wife that morning.
“We are not any different,” Hana said to him. “I do not understand.”
Father Weiss smiled, and patted her hand where it lay beneath his on the comforter. “Ah, Hana,” he said, “but we are different. We are God’s chosen people.”
“Biblical bunk,” Hana said. “Who in the twentieth century would believe such a thing?”
“I do not disagree with you that the Bible is, as you call it, ‘bunk,’ but the Jews, because of that bunk, are different. Think of it, Hana: For 5000 years, against all kinds of odds, our people have persevered. We have been exiled, vilified, forbidden to worship our God, scapegoated, and sometimes murdered, but still we have chosen to be Jewish. A lesser people would have compromised long ago.”
Hana held his cup to his lips while he took a sip of tea, then set it down again on the bed table. “All right,” she said, “that is all true. But my question is what is it that we would be compromising? What is it that Jews must cling to so tenaciously that they will die for it?”
Petr smiled. “Why, our Jewishness, Hana. The very thing that sets us apart.”
“I don’t understand. Why do we want to be set apart?”
“Because if we don’t do it, others will. We say we are special, that we are ‘chosen,’ before they say we are wicked, purveyors of their Satan.”
“But why be apart at all? Why not simply be like the others, so they will not be tempted to single us out?”
“They will always single us out, Hana. We may marry non-Jews who in turn marry non-Jews. Our Jewishness may become a mere fraction of our genetic whole, but it will always be there.” He raised a cupped hand to his mouth in the manner of a secret sharer. “‘Have you not heard Petr Weiss had a Jewish great-grandmother on his father’s side?’ they will say. They will whisper behind their hands, watch you for those telltale moves that prove your Jewishness. Have you not heard that Hitler’s maternal grandmother may have been Jewish?”
“Yes, and I find that hard to understand as well.”
“They wish to understand him, Hana; that is why they make these explanations. All humans wish to understand, and when things defy their understanding they will seek answers in folklore or rumor. The Gentiles have been taught that a Jew is a certain way, and evidence of this way is proof of Jewishness. It might as well be science.”
“But we are no different!”
“Hana, Hana. We are. We are tenacious and we are clever. We are learned and we care for one another. A Jew always knows another Jew, and will turn to him first, in need. Tzedaka makes us different, and history. We cannot to pretend to be like them, Hana, because we are not.”
Hana looked across the bed to the window, its panes etched in frost, then back to her father-in-law’s Aryan blue eyes. “I don’t want to be different,” she said.
“I think that is not true, Hana. I think you want to be very different. It is just that you do not want your Jewishness to be what makes you so.”
It was so true it startled her. Why hadn’t she seen this herself? She rose, and smiled down at him. “I’m going downstairs now, Father. What shall I play for you today?”
He smiled back, meeting her eyes so that she knew they understood each other. “There is that lovely Hebrew song, ‘Dodi Li,’ do you know it?” He hummed the first five notes.
“Father,” Hana said. “We played that at our wedding. Instead of the Mendelssohn, remember?”
“Why yes,” Petr said. “So you did.”
“Dodi Li”? How would I know the name of a Hebrew
song? I had even heard the notes Father Weiss hummed, a haunting and familiar melody I was certain was new to me.
The conversation about Jewishness I recognized as a variation of one I’d had with my mother-in-law, so perhaps the song was one she’d mentioned as well. I went into the kitchen and called her, then, as the phone rang, visualized her making her way through her North Buffalo flat to answer.
“‘Dodi Li,’” she said, and then she hummed it as well. “Perhaps you heard it at someone’s wedding—it’s often played. What made you think of it?”
The question caught me off guard, and I realized all at once how much time I’d been spending daydreaming Hana Weissova’s life. I told my mother-in-law bits of music often came into my head unbidden, but that since this one had come with a distinctively Hebrew name, I’d known at once who to call.
“And so, how is my son?” she asked, apparently satisfied by my answer, and I told her some more lies, all the while wondering how I’d come to be obsessed by a woman whom I’d never known.
The resting place at the end of a musical phrase is called a cadence. Some cadences are unresolved or ask a question, and are called incomplete; others meet the first’s expectations or answer its question and so are called complete. The ear demands complete cadence: imagine a song that ends one note too soon, or one note too late.
A melody—Dodi Li, for example—is comprised of sequences of incomplete and complete cadences, and in an extended piece of music, these repetitions and variations can be recognized as the piece’s theme. In music, every question has an answer; every expectation is met and completed.
It is only in life that such resolutions are not possible: Expectation is one thing, completion quite another.
It is difficult to talk to Paul about music, but I sometimes try nonetheless. “What do you think of the Shostakovich?” I’ll ask him when I return to the den after playing it. Paul is leaned far back in his recliner, reading the Lab news in the Monitor.
“Hm?” he says, without looking up.
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