Hana had already been at Terezín a month. The orchestra, including Hana and the frequently tuned upright, was rehearsing a program of Schubert and Beethoven for an upcoming visit of Nazi higher-ups. When rehearsals ended at noon, all adjourned to the dining hall, men on one side, women on the other; the children ate in another building. Married couples vied for the benches where the men’s tables abutted the women’s, and this day, Hana and Anton managed to sit back-to-back. They appeared to be talking to their neighbors, who in turn appeared to be talking to them. But their neighbors, Dori and Vasil Stoll, were also husband and wife, and attempting to make similar arrangements.
“I do not know why I did not think of it sooner,” Anton said. “The library.”
“When I strip the beds in the girls’ dorm,” Dori said, “it is deserted.”
“But there is a guard at the library,” said Hana.
“That is in the morning,” Vasil said. “That is when I am working on the new building.”
“The guards are often outside while we work,” said Anton. “It is so stuffy in there. And I have made myself a sort of office, in a closet in the back. I am often alone there.”
“Surely you could sneak away,” said Dori.
“What time of day is this?” Hana asked.
“I could not sneak,” said Vasil. “But Herman might look the other way, if I give him enough cigarettes.”
“Both mornings and afternoons,” said Anton.
“I am there from nine until nine-thirty every morning,” Dori said. “Always alone, though there is a guard at the entrance.”
“I rehearse in the mornings,” said Hana. “And in the afternoons I am at the laundry.”
“Yes,” Dori said. She was at the laundry in the afternoon as well. The Germans insisted their sheets be washed daily, and had constructed an enormous facility for that purpose.
“Who is the guard?” Vasil asked.
“Perhaps you could miss a rehearsal,” said Anton.
“Oh, it is that Claus, that silly boy from Berlin who is always singing dance hall songs,” Dori said.
“The absence of the piano player is too obvious,” said Hana.
“Claus!” cried Vasil. “He will do anything for a little bribe.”
“Well, there are so many at the laundry. That might be easier,” said Anton.
A guard walked the path between them, but they kept talking: They were speaking Czech and this one knew only German; he thought they were talking to their neighbors, as it appeared. And now Dori did speak to Hana. “When we go outside to hang the sheets. That would be a good time. I could watch for you, or you for me. But you couldn’t be long. And we would need to find a good route. There is that large open space to be got around.”
Hana nodded, just as the shrill whistle blew, signaling the end of the meal, and all stood to go. Hana and Anton touched hands, furtively, and his touch sent a wave of electricity up her arm. She could not remember the last time he had filled her with such desire, or that he had felt that way about her. She would seek out a route this afternoon, and let him know this evening.
But that afternoon it was Dori who whispered to Hana, “I am going now to look.” Each held the end of a sheet, which they lifted to the line and pinned in one smooth practiced motion. Then they carried the heavy basket a little further, picked up another sheet and repeated the process. Dori slipped underneath, not even ruffling the edges.
“Be careful,” Hana told her. “And hurry.” She tried to keep the same rhythm and motion they had together, but her upper arms soon ached with the effort and she had to slow down. When she chanced a look toward the laundry building, she saw a guard looking back down the row at her. She risked a wave. The guard glanced over his shoulder, then quickly saluted his fingers at her and moved on. Claus. Thank God.
How long had Dori been gone? Only a few minutes, probably. Only five sheets. Hana was coming to the end of this line. Soon she’d have to turn back, down an empty line, more exposed. She slowed her pace still more. Hurry, Dori, she prayed. Hurry. Hurry.
At the end of the line, she decided to hang the sheets from the same side, rather than ducking under and facing in the opposite direction. She picked up her pace again, trying to erect a new wall of sheets as quickly as possible. At the far end of the line, she saw Claus walk by again, barely glancing her way. Hurry, Dori, she prayed.
But when the shot rang nearby, she knew. Next came shouting, from several different directions, and then Claus, from the end closer to her, grabbing her elbow and telling her to come along, to hurry, the very word she herself had just been repeating, over and over.
Dori was standing in the center of the square, a guard on either side of her. The sun blazed overhead in an almost white sky, and the other laundry workers were gathered together to one side. When Claus pushed Hana roughly toward the group and then went back for others, Hana let out her breath, so relieved she thought she might wet her pants; she’d been certain Claus had grabbed her to share Dori’s punishment.
But what about Dori? Guilt and fear replaced her relief. Now the men were being gathered in another part of the square. Hana searched for Anton, but instead found Vasil. Dori’s husband. She couldn’t see his eyes, but imagined his terror nonetheless.
The Commandant rode up on his horse. The residents had grown used to this horse, an elegant black animal which it was clear the Commandant adored. He leaned over without dismounting to speak to a soldier who in turn motioned to others; all ran off toward the children’s dormitories. Oh God, no. Not the children.
The Commandant, meanwhile, marched his horse close to the front rows of the men, forcing them into straighter lines. Dust flew up from the horse’s hoofs, and some of the men coughed, waved it away with their hands. Hana spotted Anton, sliding carefully away from the front row after the Commandant had passed.
Then the children were coming. The soldiers hurried them along, and their teachers helped as best they could as well. Mother Weissova was carrying a very small child with one arm and clutching the hand of one not-much-larger with her other. Father Weiss was being helped by a group of his boys, who hovered protectively around him as he took his painstakingly slow steps toward the square.
But at last all arrived, and the Commandant trotted his horse smartly up to Dori, the animal’s front hooves stomping so close to her feet she jumped back. The Commandant laughed, an eerie sound in the full but silent square. Then he danced his horse in circles, the sound of his voice rising and waning as he turned.
“This woman left her detail,” he said. “And so we must hang her.” A collective gasp rose from the crowd. “Carpenters,” he went on, addressing Dori’s husband’s group. “Build a scaffold. Quickly. We are all waiting.”
He will not really hang her, Hana thought. He is making a show, to fill us with terror, and he is succeeding. But at the last minute he will grant her dispensation, he will show us that he is really a compassionate man, and we will be grateful to have such a kindly Commandant.
But when the scaffold was built, the Commandant himself rode up and tied a rope just so. And it was the Commandant, still on his horse, who lifted Dori and fit her neck through the noose. Dori appeared to have fainted, a little blessing, Hana thought, if there could be blessings within such horror.
And then Dori was dead. Her body swung from the taut rope at her neck, and her arms hung limp at her sides. There had been no struggle, no pain, no resistance: She had been alive, and now she was not. And it could have been me, thought Hana. Such a selfish, terrible thought, but it was true. Hana searched for Anton across the square, but his group had already been dispersed. Then she heard the small children and turned in their direction. They too were leaving, but they were laughing, and talking amongst themselves. They had not understood! Oh God. They had not understood. Hana’s legs collapsed beneath her and she fell to her knees, in an attitude of prayer. A moment later two women came to either side of her and quickly helped her away.
My knees, too, felt we
ak. While Hana had outlined Dori’s death in her diary, it was my imagination that had taken me to this uncomfortable place.
I stood shakily and went to the piano, opening once again to the first movement of Hana’s symphony, but I did not play. The music was startlingly light and carefree, the unmistakable lilt of “Dodi Li” skipping through the entire movement.
I could hear the music in my head. I hadn’t yet played the symphony all the way through; I hadn’t been ready. But now my fingers moved on their own to the keys and played the first sequence of chords: One-two-three, One-two-three. A waltz. But a dissonant waltz. The piano repeated the first three notes of “Dodi Li,” over and over again.
I had never felt anything quite like it. And after a page, I stopped. It was quite possibly a masterpiece. But I still, I realized, wasn’t ready to play it through.
Someone once suggested that music sounds the way emotions feel, that music reveals the hidden patterns of our inner lives in the same way that mathematics reveals the outer, physical world.
It is oddly comforting to our late twentieth century sensibilities that even music, and its effects, may have a scientific explanation. Both music and mathematics build what have been called ever grander and more coherent unities out of abstract details, and aim at formal beauty. But there is a danger in deconstructing a thing of beauty: the sum, after all, is greater than its parts. We are tempted to take the clock apart, to see how it ticks (or glows), but can we then reassemble the pieces back into the clock they once were?
In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras asserted that music was “number made audible,” while T. S. Eliot, much more our contemporary, wrote, “The detail of the pattern is movement,” and, “Desire itself is movement.” A movement, in the language of music, however, is but one section of a much larger work, sections that are in fact much longer than entire compositions in the twentieth century.
Pattern is not a musical term. Its primary definition is “a person or thing considered worthy of imitation.” But pattern has more than ten other definitions as well, one of which is “an arrangement of form; [a] disposition of parts or elements.” If these are the hidden patterns that music brings to light, the implication of “arrangement” is that there is an “arranger,” someone, or something, who “hid” these patterns in the first place.
Music implies a God. Or, at the very least, music implies a communion which transcends our physical bounds. Unlike mathematics, music is a very frightening thing to deconstruct.
Physicists are also mathematicians. Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=MC2, is stated in the form of a mathematical equation, and without mathematics an understanding of physics would not be possible.
At the same time, the language of mathematics is not a language many understand, and this barrier makes the theories of physics appear incomprehensible. Some suggest that if we were to get rid of the math, physics would become pure enchantment, that physics would be more easily understood outside its native tongue.
It is curious that both my husband and I are involved in professions capable of enchantment and yet which seem to have no common language. I have tried to discuss this with Paul, in fact, but that very lack of a common language makes such an effort meaningless. My husband, for example, does not seem to understand what I mean by “enchantment,” while I am not certain why the term “space-time continuum” brings him such joy.
But another difference makes itself apparent here: While I recognize that these two phrases may be saying the same thing in our very different languages, my husband laughs when I mention the idea.
But in fact the theories of physics are not so very far from the theories of music. Physics, for example, suggests that we are not so separate as we sometimes feel, while music attempts to forge a connection that proves this so. On the other hand, physics is the science responsible for creating the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even at its most dissonant, music is incapable of such destruction.
Paul insists that his current project at the Lab does not involve implements of mass destruction, but the name of project, which is all I know about it, does not sound like it has a peaceable goal in mind.
“I’m not working on weapons,” Paul says. We’re eating breakfast, and he’s reading the Journal, but I’m asking him questions anyway.
“What are you working on then?” I ask him.
Paul puts the paper down and sighs heavily. “Anna,” he says. “You of all people should know I can’t discuss it.”
“Broadly,” I say. “You can tell me broadly.”
“A space station,” says Paul. “All right?”
“What kind of space station?”
“Anna—”
“Okay, okay.” I get up and busy myself making a fresh pot of coffee. But I’m picturing this gigantic metal ball. It’s manned by robots, and it’s full of weapons we can’t even imagine. And my husband, the man with whom I sleep every night, controls all this from his office here in Los Alamos.
Physics, I decide, is nothing like music.
Could this be what killed my mother?
Oh yes, I know it was tuberculosis. And I heard, for years, her wet ratching cough as she tried desperately to bring up the horrid thing inside her. When she gave up, she no longer tried to get rid of it, and I could hear it bubbling and growing within her while she slept.
It was the habit of Einstein to illustrate his difficult theories with what he called thought-experiments. Thought-experiments are hypothetical situations which serve to explain concepts such as relativity, and the space-time continuum. The tale of physicists measuring a suicide’s velocity from the gorge bridge, in fact, may be just such an illustration, though its truth would not surprise me.
Freud asserted that psychologically induced illnesses manifest every bit as realistically as physically induced ones. A pain in the neck may be caused by someone who’s, well, a pain in the neck. Stomach trouble may mean that something, quite literally, is making one sick to one’s stomach.
Tuberculosis is an infection which causes a swelling of the lungs. The lungs in turn secrete a mucous which fills the cavities that should be filled with air. A tubercular person is breathing, instead of air, a viscous liquid.
Why might a person choose to breathe liquid rather than air? It is our original embryonic state: that might be one explanation. But another is that the person finds the air somehow poisonous, no longer capable of sustaining life.
My mother was there the day the birds fell from the sky. It is a testament to her hidden strength that she managed to go on breathing that poisoned air for another twenty years.
There are birds in Terezín, and in the morning, they sing. Meadowlarks can carry a tune, and their melodies are conversations, a question and an answer. Robins sing, too, the same song over and over again, and sparrows peep and doves coo, and, before she gets up from her narrow stiff cot, Hana allows herself a moment to believe that such music insists on hope.
The camp is getting crowded. All summer transports have been arriving from Germany, Austria, and Poland, as well as from throughout Czechoslovakia. Many of the newcomers are elderly; many are children. Few are young and healthy, and the character of the camp undergoes a slow change.
Men and women no longer eat together. The carpenters have completed the facility that now serves as the women’s dining hall, but the portions are getting smaller, as if the same amount of food is being stretched to feed twice as many people.
Since Dori’s death, Hana and Anton no longer search for a place to meet, though they still furtively touch hands, if their separate tasks bring them near each other. Hana hears that the library project is going well, that the Germans are very pleased with Anton’s work, but she does not hear this from Anton. They no longer risk speaking, either.
It is rumored that Hitler will be one of the Germans coming for the concert in early August, a rumor that sends a current of excitement through the camp, as if when the Fuhrer hears the orchestra he will see that Je
ws are not so terrible as he has thought. This is absurd, of course, but hope, Hana has begun to realize, knows nothing of reality. Reality, on the other hand, seems to depend on hope.
The children, when she catches glimpses of them, look painfully frail. Mother Weissova insists that Heidi, who’s now four, is, despite her circumstances, a happy, healthy, inquisitive child. And Pavel, Hana has heard, has shown a remarkable artistic talent; there is actually an obtuse hope among some that a future arrival may be an art teacher.
The day of the concert, one of the small chamber groups sets up at the entrance to play as the visiting dignitaries arrive. Members of the large orchestra are wearing their best black suits or dresses, and are setting up their chairs behind a newly hung pair of curtains at one end of the women’s dining hall. Other workers have been assigned to slide tables against walls and set chairs into concert hall-like rows. Orchestra members peek periodically through the curtains to see who is there and report back. It is Marya Novakova who hisses excitedly to Hana: “It’s Anton! He’s right here, not ten feet away!”
Hana checks quickly for guards and then hurries to the gap. Anton’s back is to her, and she watches this back for a moment: it is much more muscular than the one she remembers. Anton’s hair has been very recently cut, and his skull shows dark beneath the blonde bristle. Hana runs her hand involuntarily through her own hair; while at Terezín the cutting of hair is not required, one does not style it, and Hana knows without a mirror that hers falls limply around her face.
Anton turns and sees her, stops, and their eyes lock. Anton’s eyes seem set more deeply in his face, dark, and Hana knows hers are probably the same. They could speak in whispers and no one but they would hear, but they do not speak. They stare and stare at each other in a moment that is at once an eternity and far too brief, and then Hana hears Fritz’s officious voice behind her: “Piano player! Achtüng! Here is your piano!” Hana allows her eyes to hold Anton’s a second longer, and then she turns and lets the curtain drop.
Hitler, of course, is not there. Eichmann is, and a man it is whispered is Himmler. They all look alike, these Germans, starched into their uniforms, small-eyed, thin-lipped. But we probably look all alike to them, Hana thinks, dark-eyed, thin-limbed, too afraid to be angry.
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