Then, one Sunday afternoon toward the end of sixth grade, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Barbara Stewart playing with a cocker spaniel puppy in her yard. It was black, not blonde, but I knew a cocker spaniel when I saw one, and I opened my window so I could listen as well as watch.
“Here, Tony,” Barbara said, and the puppy raced to her and licked her face. “Good dog,” Barbara said, then threw something. “Go get the ball.” The puppy ran off. Then the scene repeated itself. I watched. I listened. And then I gathered myself up, went outside, pushed through the Scotch pine, and made friends with Barbara Stewart. And with her dog, Tony.
Six years later, two years after my mother, Barbara Stewart was dead. Barbara’s parents gave Tony, whom they couldn’t bear to have around, to a family in Española. I wished they’d asked me. But I soon went off to Rochester, where my studies demanded enough time that a dog didn’t seem a possibility. Nor did friendship, though I watched others flourish around me. I watched, and I listened, and I wondered at how easily it was done. Easy for others, I should say.
My mother had taught me without ever saying a word that one shouldn’t burden another with one’s troubles. All around me, girls whined about boys, and other girls commiserated or laughed or stole the boys away. But it wasn’t something I could do. Sometimes, in my bed late at night, I’d have conversations in my head with Barbara Stewart, conversations unlike any we’d ever really had. Barbara would explain the way friendship worked, the things that mattered to other girls, and why those things didn’t matter to her or me.
Then I would realize that Barbara was dead, so that, of course, those things no longer mattered to her. But I had no such excuse. I was different, and I could feel that difference so acutely that at times it had an almost physical pain, a sharpness that jabbed and then twisted. I sometimes wondered if a heart, when broken, could hurt that way, could jab and twist. What a foolish girl I was.
They were all there, at Terezín: the strings, the woodwinds, the horns, the percussion. And they were all playing in an open square as the line of transports Hana, Pavel, and Heidi were a part of pulled into the camp. Even old Werner Friedman, who’d retired from conducting the year before, was there, his baton etching the rhythms a moment before they were played.
There were cobbled streets and stone buildings, two and three stories high. Everywhere, people were working: hammering at the rising frames of buildings; carrying stones and bricks from one place to another. A group of children sat before the orchestra, striking makeshift drums and tambourines in time. Overhead, the sky was a brilliant June blue.
This is not so bad, Hana thought, a child tucked snugly under each of her arms. At a large stone outdoor oven, she saw loaves of bread being shoveled in by a man she recognized as Mr. Beltok, the baker. Under a grove of fruit trees, two old men pondered a chessboard set on an upturned wooden crate.
The orchestra was playing Beethoven’s Ninth, and now it moved into the final movement, the Ode to Joy. The children rose and set down their instruments, filed into two rows in front of Mr. Friedman, and, at his cue, their perfect voices rose into the afternoon. Hana was at first surprised to hear this difficult piece being sung by children.
But now their transport abruptly stopped and swarms of soldiers appeared. “Achtüng! Achtüng!” they cried, hurrying everyone off, forming them into tidy rows. Then they began a roll call, interminably long while the sun beat down, and then the lines were directed to pass by a table and chair where a thin-lipped blonde officer sat, with a riding staff pointing each person in one direction or another: men to the far left; women to the far right; children and the elderly to two other groups towards the center.
“Oh God, oh God,” a woman next to Hana said over and over, as if the words were themselves a prayer. Men who were not in uniforms appeared with sticks to hurry them along, not Czechs, surely. Heidi began to cry.
Hana leaned toward one of the stick-men. “My husband,” she said. “How will I find him?”
The man pushed her back into line with his stick. “Move along. Move along,” he said.
“Anton Weiss?” Hana persisted. “Perhaps you know him?”
“No talking!” the man cried, glimpsing quickly over his shoulder to see if any soldiers were watching.
“Mama,” Heidi whimpered. “I’m hungry.”
“Oh God, oh God,” the woman repeated.
“Quiet,” Hana hissed at her. “Enough. You are upsetting my children.”
The woman turned and gave Hana a look filled with contempt. “Do you not see what they are doing? Culling, gleaning, sorting, deciding.” And she turned back around and resumed her chant.
When it was Hana’s turn to file past the man, his pale blue eyes moved up and down her body in an almost lazy way. “Name?” he asked.
“Hana Weissova.”
“And what do you do, Hana Weissova? We have found the Jews so talented. Tell me, what is your talent?”
“I am a pianist,” Hana said.
The man laughed. “How delightful! Fritz!” he called to a young man standing rigidly near the table. “Here is another pianist. Take her to Herr Friedman, and see if she can meet his rigorous standards.” Fritz stepped forward and grasped her elbow firmly.
“My children—” Hana said.
“Yes, yes,” the blue-eyed man said, already looking at the next woman in line. “They will be in the children’s barracks.”
“Quickly!” Fritz said. “Come! Come!”
“Mama!” Heidi cried from the edge of the group of children. Pavel hovered protectively over her.
“Stay with your brother!” Hana called. “I will see you soon.” She tried to watch the children over her shoulder, but Fritz hurried her away.
Surely Werner Friedman recognized her, but he gave no indication that he did. Fritz still held her elbow firmly, and now wore a somewhat frightening smirk.
“What is your background?” Friedman asked, and Hana told him. She’d played with him, with the Prague Symphony, on more than one occasion, but she did not mention it. As she spoke, she began to recognize faces in the orchestra: Marya Novakova behind a cello; Otto Brozan with a clarinet.
“Bring us the piano!” Friedman ordered Fritz, and, to Hana’s surprise, the young soldier hurried off. “Hana my dear,” Friedman said. “Are you well?” His eyes darted all over while he spoke, always watching, always wary.
“Have you seen my husband?” she asked. “Anton. Is he here?”
“Yes, yes. Anton is here. He is helping to organize the library. A fine library, Hana. Terezín is a place of culture, and of learning.” His voice seemed remarkably free of irony.
Across the wide expanse of the square, Hana saw Fritz hurrying two men along. They were pushing a makeshift upright piano set on a dolly, its wheels catching in the grass and clods of dirt. “Fritzel, Fritzel,” Friedman said quietly. “You are a fool.”
Fritz rushed ahead of the men, came up and saluted smartly, clicking his heels. “Your piano, Herr Friedman,” he said with an expansive gesture. Then the piano arrived, the two men who had pushed it breathing heavily.
Friedman turned to Hana. “Perhaps you will play for us, Mrs. Weissova?”
Hana stood before the keyboard, then was given a chair by a violinist. “What would you like to hear?” she asked.
“Our German hosts are very partial to Herr Beethoven,” he said. “A sonata, perhaps? The ‘Moonlight’?”
Hana nodded and began. The piano was horribly out of tune, and its damper pedal stuck. Still, she played. When she finished the “Moonlight,” no one said anything, and so she went on and played the “Pathetique.” Fritz stood by woodenly. He had no idea it wasn’t all the same piece.
When she stopped, Friedman cleared his throat. “This one will do quite nicely, Fritzel,” he said. “But we must do something about the damned piano.”
“What is wrong with the piano?” Fritz asked, looking alarmed. He was really quite young, perhaps not even eighteen.
&nbs
p; “Fritzel, Fritzel. It needs a piano tuner. Perhaps you could check your lists and find out if there is one here.”
Fritz saluted once again, clicked, turned, and was gone. Friedman shook his head after the boy, then turned to Hana. “You must be hungry,” he said. “And tired. One of the women will help you find out where you will be.” He scanned the violins and a young woman stood up. “Ah, Rita. Good.” He turned back to Hana. “We rehearse every morning from 9 o’clock until noon. It makes the mornings pass.”
“Will I see my children?”
“This is not a prison, my dear. Yes, you will see your children.” Once again his voice was free of irony.
“Come, Hana,” said the young woman called Rita. “We will find out where you live.”
“Dodi Li,” I discovered, could be played in counterpoint to the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, though I cannot say what led me to my experiment. When Paul got home from work, I was playing the two pieces in a D minor rondo, and the effect was electrifying. Or so I thought.
“What on earth is that?” Paul asked, apparently less satisfied with the result than I was. “That sounds like—is it ‘Dodi Li’?—but what’s the other part?”
“Do you know ‘Dodi Li’?” I asked him.
“All Jews know ‘Dodi Li,’” he said. “It’s piped into our blood.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember much Hebrew. No, wait. I think it means ‘dearly beloved.’ I think it’s a wedding song. I’m not sure. Why don’t you call my mother?”
I already have, I thought but did not say. Paul was in the kitchen. “You want a drink?” he called, as he did every night.
“Sure,” I answered, closing the piano and rising to join him. A wedding song. What a curious theme for Hana Weissova to choose.
While some 20th century composers were experimenting with the twelve-tone system, others were returning to their roots for new methods of musical expression. One style in particular was pioneered by Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer born in 1881, who fused folk elements, classical forms, and 20th century sounds into his work.
Using old Hungarian and Rumanian folk tunes as a base, Bartok added dissonant accompaniments, creating a music which is unusually expressive. Fast movements may convey a primitive brutality while slow movements may feel bleak or pessimistic. Bartok reintroduced traditional forms such as the rondo, fugue, and sonata, but even while employing dissonance, polychords, and tone clusters, his works were nonetheless organized around a tonal center.
The ultimate effect of a Bartok composition is one of emotional intensity. The listener moves from quiet reflection, to unharnessed frenzy, to exciting fanfares, to disturbing dissonance. A man who himself left Europe in 1940, Bartok was all too familiar with the unmitigated horror of 20th century life, a horror which his music all the same manages to transgress.
Bartok’s Mikrokosmos is a set of 153 piano pieces for children, ranging from the simple to the technically challenging. While for most of my students I do not use Bartok at all, but rather the usual progression from Haydn to Bach to the simpler Beethoven sonatas, there is the occasional student who seems she might actually continue playing past the age when her parents are making such decisions, and for these, I dust off the Bartok, as much to assess a reaction as to measure talent.
I had begun to hope that Karen Maisel might be such a student, though her playing continued to be unremarkable. A teacher must sometimes look beyond the immediate evidence to evaluate a student’s potential: a future Georgia O’Keeffe limited to pastoral watercolors, or a young Katherine Anne Porter restricted to 1-3-1 essays, might never reveal her real talent within such confines. The alert teacher may notice, though, another quality quite apart from rote reproduction: a gift of observation; a way of seeing, or of listening.
Karen, I believed, missed very little. Even as she played her dutifully memorized exercises with a small part of her being, her eyes darted around the room, lighting on the pattern of the dracaena’s leaves, or the weave of the Two Grey Hills rug. In the kitchen, while her mother and I talked, Karen would stare off, seemingly into space, but when I followed her gaze, it would be resting on a band of light across the tiles, or the chipped handle of my mother’s white teapot, which I still use. At the sound of a bird outside, or at the sudden hum of the refrigerator, Karen would be quickly attentive, her head atilt. I noted all these things and began, I suppose, to hope.
Joyce had brought me a Xeroxed copy of “Dodi Li.” The lyrics were written in phoneticized Hebrew below the notes, but also appeared at the bottom of the page in right-to-left Hebrew letters. There was something ancient and mysterious about those letters, as if they contained far more than mere words, and I touched them with the tip of my forefinger, curious.
“Can you read this?” I asked Joyce, pointing.
“Oh God!” she said, leaning over toward where I pushed the paper between us. “We’re talking slow. Let’s see. ‘Doe deh,’ no, ‘Doe dee lee,’ well, of course! I could have faked that, huh? Does Paul know Hebrew?”
I drew the paper back. “No,” I said, though of course I had just discovered he did know a bit. There was so much I didn’t know about my husband. But then, there was much he didn’t know about me.
“Too bad,” Joyce said. She looked over at Karen, who was slowly tracing the bevel of the table with her finger. “Kare? You about ready?”
“I gave Karen a new type of music to try,” I said. “Bartok. It’s very modern—you may find it disturbing.”
Joyce laughed. “Tin ear,” she said, pointing. “None of it disturbs me. Come on, kiddo.”
At the door, I touched the music Karen clutched to her chest. “I don’t just want you to learn it,” I said. “I want to know how you feel about it.”
“Okay,” Karen mumbled, ducking under her mother’s arm to get out the door.
It is possible that those who experience the deaths of people close to them when they are young feel themselves apart from those who have not. It is not an elitism so much as a protective device, though whether it is self-protective or shielding those others is more difficult to say. You cannot know, is what we think of those who murmur well-meaning platitudes. How lucky you are.
My mother, and perhaps Barbara as well, was lost to me long before she actually died. My father, though, who died in his sleep when I was thirty, was such a presence that he has continued to occupy my life in much the way he did when he was alive. “Get out,” he tells me. “Do things. Make friends. Make a difference.”
My response, when I was a girl, was to tell him that I would, when I finished this sonata, which, if it did not satisfy him, at least mollified him. When I was older, and Paul and I were back in Los Alamos and I’d begun to take in piano students, I would say, “I am,” and give him examples, both real and invented.
One night, shortly before he died, he came for dinner, and after we’d eaten, he and Paul relaxed in the den, discussing Lab politics. I sat down at the piano, selected a Debussy nocturne, and began to play.
I don’t know how long my father had been standing behind me when I became aware of his presence, but when I did, I fumbled, and then stopped. He reached across my shoulder to touch the glossy rosewood above the keys. “Your mother,” he said. “And you.” He did not elaborate, and it chilled me.
“I wish I had her talent,” I said.
“No you don’t,” he answered at once. Then he stroked the wood again. “It’s enough that you have her piano.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant, while at the same time I was stung, as if his words had been: You have no talent. My father and I spoke easily to each other, but our words had no substance behind them, and never seemed to say what we meant.
On the other hand, while my mother and I had seldom spoken, our mutual silence said much more. Words, in the end, are the most futile form of communication. It is silence that speaks, silence, and music, which has a language all its own.
The thre
e floors of the old building had been converted to dormitories, rows and rows of bunk beds lined against walls. Hana was assigned a lower bunk on the second floor, near a darkened window that still managed a view over the narrow cobbled street below and across to a men’s barracks.
The children lived in two new structures, a boys’ facility and a girls’. Classes had been organized—they were not permitted but the Commandant pretended to look the other way. Father Weiss, weak and pale and sitting on a straight-backed chair, taught the young boys arithmetic, writing simple problems in charcoal on windowshades that the boys daily washed off again. Mother Weissova led the youngest children, Heidi included, in songs and games, and revealed as well a talent for storytelling.
And Anton worked on the library. It seemed that all the private Jewish collections in Prague had been relocated to Terezín, tens of thousands of books, and the cartons were stacked haphazardly against the walls of one of the old buildings. Anton and his work crew of five young men were currently cataloguing what they had before they began the more daunting task of organizing the books into sections.
The work seemed to have given Anton back some life, and his depression had been replaced by his more familiar precision and care. Anton lived on the floor above the library, and like Hana had a lower bunk by a window. If their windows had been clean, and operable, they could have seen each other across the street.
They hadn’t made love since before the occupation, but the very fact that it was forbidden seemed to make it suddenly desirable. Other married couples had discovered remote corners and the best times to meet there, and Hana and Anton, when they managed to talk, shared their newest information with each other. But there were not many such places, and their ownership and privacy were carefully respected. Hana and Anton soon began searching, individually, for their own place and time.
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