Dissonance

by Lisa Lenard-Cook

  One way modern composers have chosen to address the increased fragmentation of life in the twentieth century is to create a more fragmented music. But while expressionist melodies often seem chaotic, they in reality are almost obsessively concerned with order. For this reason, the ultimate effect of such a piece is not disorientation. Because the order is so mathematically precise, in fact, the careful listener is ultimately impressed with the piece’s intensity rather than its seeming lack of structure. And so, although modern compositions such as this are often quite short, their effect is disproportionately large.

  It is possible that we have learned from our fragmented lives that big does not necessarily equal effective. It is possible that we have learned to cull our lessons, and perhaps our transcendences, from the small spaces in which they are allotted to us.

  I told Paul about the wedding cake. “Why would she do that?” he asked.

  “It’s what people did,” I said. “For luck.”

  “A lot of good it did her.”

  “I just keep thinking about her packing it and me opening it, fifty-five years later.”

  “Why?”

  “The connection. I touched what she touched.”

  Paul laughed. “Anna, you are talking about your mother. You touched what she touched all the time.”

  “But fifty-five years—”

  He laughed again. “I guess I don’t see what you’re getting at,” he said.

  I rose from my seat. “All finished?” I asked. “Coffee?”

  “Coffee’d be great,” Paul said, looking relieved.

  I have my mother’s Steinway. I have her Royal Doulton, and her Waterford and Lalique. The antique china cabinet where these smaller things are displayed was my mother’s, and her mother’s before her.

  Every day I see these things, and, particularly the piano, touch them as my mother did. Perhaps Paul was correct in saying I was attaching too much importance to two pieces of petrified wedding cake. But I knew the wedding cake possessed some fragment of my mother in a way that those other things, things she had possessed, did not.

  What is the possessed and who is the possessor? Could it not be argued that the more we acquire the more we become a prisoner to that which we own? This wedding cake, though, was not a possession and hence held far more of my mother’s essence than all those things that were. Just as, when she played, the music would possess her, her careful saving of these two pieces of cake was something much larger than the cake itself.

  But there was no use trying to explain this to Paul. I could barely explain it to myself.

  “Tell me how you met Daddy,” I’d demand. There were certain stories I knew my mother was willing to tell, if I didn’t ask too often, if I asked only for the ones she’d already told.

  “It was on a ship,” my mother would say, the distance in her eyes telling me she was already back on that deck. “The Queen Mary, a huge ocean liner. Everything was made of lovely, polished wood—the rails, the floors, even the walls and ceilings. And every evening after dinner a band played, and people danced and danced until it was nearly morning.”

  I knew better than to interrupt or even move, though I had so many questions I’d never asked. Where did she sleep? What did they eat? What did they do during the day, which she never mentioned? Where were they coming from? Where were they going?

  But my mother’s telling of this tale was her own dream and I could not intervene. Every story, it is said, requires teller, tale, and told, and I, of course, was the latter.

  “A tall handsome man approached the table where I sat with my mother, and asked me to dance,” my mother continued.

  “Daddy,” I said. I was permitted this interruption.

  “Daddy,” my mother agreed. “Tall and dark, though not in that Jewish way—”

  I had forgotten that part.

  “—and oh so handsome. White jacket—it was summer, but not everyone can wear a white jacket, summer or no. It set off his coloring, that white jacket.

  “It was the summer of 1939, the last summer Europe would be what it had been. I was nineteen, and he was ten years older, an officer in the Army. Out of uniform, but it was an ocean liner, after all.

  “And he asked me to dance. ‘May I dance with your daughter?’ he asked my mother, who smiled and dipped her chin, and then he asked me. It was a waltz, the ‘Viennese,’ funny to hear it played by a dance band, but they were really quite good. A pianist from Vienna, a Jew, it turned out, running away. It surprised me, when I found out. Your father looked more Jewish than he did.

  “He was such a good dancer, your father. I suppose he still is; we never dance anymore. Where would we dance?” Here she laughed, a tight, odd sound I seldom heard.

  “And we fell in love and the following June we were married.”

  “And lived happily ever after,” I added.

  My mother would suddenly bring me into focus when I said that, then slowly smile. “Yes, Anna,” she said. “If you wish to believe in fairy tales, that is what you must say.”

  “I do believe in fairy tales,” I said.

  “Good,” said my mother. “There is so little else.”

  Here is my father’s version:

  “How did we meet? Well, I think it was on a ship. I’d been in Germany, studying their technology, surreptitiously, of course. She was a lovely girl, your mother—that nearly black hair against that pale skin. Frail even then, though at that age it was still disguised by her youth.

  “She was with her mother, whom she resembled amazingly. It was like seeing what she would look like twenty-five years later, and I liked that, documented evidence of lasting beauty.

  “Her mother died, of course, shortly after we were married. I wish I’d known her father. ‘My father would have liked you,’ she always said, and I like to think that’s so. We were cut from the same cloth, from what I’ve heard of him.

  “She was very clever, and wickedly funny. I’d catch her mimicking me, and then she would laugh so hard I’d have to join in. Everything made her laugh. I’d never met such a perpetually happy person.

  “Of course now I understand that only those who can sink to the depths of despair are capable of such a level of happiness. But she truly was happy. And I was happy, too.”

  If I had been a child when he told me this, I would have asked what made her not happy anymore. But I was an adult, and I knew what had ruined her happiness.

  I had.

  So many were gone, and yet Hana remained. All through the long winter of 1944-1945, transports left for the East. But transports arrived as well, bringing strange Jews from Slovakia and Hungary, and, in April, emaciated evacuees from other camps, people more dead than alive, carrying diseases which spread to those already in the camp.

  Hana did not fall ill.

  Rumors of the Red Army’s approach began in April as well, though no one believed them until the SS turned the camp over to a Red Cross representative in early May. Of the 140,000 Jews who had passed through Terezín, only 11,000 were there to greet the Soviet Army when it arrived. Hana Weissova was among them.

  When the quarantine was lifted, in August, she returned to Prague, to her large, empty stone house. She went to the Relief Agency and registered, listed the names of all her relatives and the last time she had seen them, and then went home again. She found a piano and arranged to have it delivered to her home, and she found a tuner, a Czech who refused to allow her to pay him.

  She began her diary, but drew a line through page after page when she found her words did not say what she wished them to. And then, when the Agency began to have information, she started again.

  Anton, she wrote, 1915-1944; Pavel, 1937-?; Heidi, 1939-1944. Then she closed the book and did not open it again until 1946.

  Irena and her parents. Mother and Father Weiss. Her friends, her neighbors. The musicians and composers she’d known at Terezín. Why were all dead and Hana alive?

  The Relief Agency employed psychiatrists to help with “s
urvivors’ guilt,” but Hana could not talk to them. First there was a man, a German Jew, who urged her to return to her childhood. “The roots of all guilt are in our childhoods,” he said in clipped German. Hana hated him. The next was a woman, the age of Hana’s mother, a Czech from the provinces, a Jungian. “What are your dreams?” she asked.

  “I don’t dream,” Hana said.

  The woman looked aghast. “We all dream. You are choosing, perhaps, to not recollect yours.”

  “That is my choice,” Hana said.

  “You will make yourself ill,” said the woman.

  “Then I will be ill,” Hana said, and did not return.

  Viktor Ullman. Juliette Aranyi. Gideon Klein. Carlo Taube.

  Anton Weiss. Pavel Weiss. Heidi Weissova.

  Zikmund Schul. Egon Ledec. Rafael Schachter. Dori Stoll.

  Petr Weiss. Eva Weissova. Anton. Pavel. Heidi. Irena. Mama. Papa. Raja?

  Hana would not dream.

  And then she moved to America. To New Mexico. In August of 1947, she opened the diary again and wrote, in careful English:

  Alice has secured me a position with a University in the western United States. I have left Alice’s address with the Agency for Raja. The University is in a place called New Mexico, which Alice says is a desert but also mountains, very hot but also very cold. “You will like it,” Alice writes, as if she could know such things.

  Alice likes it. She has met a man, and is planning to marry again. “And perhaps—” she writes, “—children.” Children. Pavel. Heidi. “Don’t tell,” he said. All I have is a drawing—and it is myself.

  Still, if I touch the crayoned likeness, I touch the end of the crayon that Pavel touched. I touch it again and again—the likeness begins to fade.

  And what have I of Anton? Of Heidi? Memories which also begin to fade, which begin to play tricks and change or waver. Heidi is blonde curls. Anton is a touch. I am the only thing which keeps them alive, and day by day they slip from me.

  “We all dream,” that fool of a woman said. How I wish I could dream. I would step into my dreams and not return. I would touch Anton’s face, Heidi’s curls, Pavel’s shoulder, feel their touch upon my arm. I would hear Anton’s voice, the children’s laughter, smell their fresh-washed faces, taste their salty cheeks.

  Sometimes at night—but I am awake; I am not dreaming—I will hear Anton say my name, quite plainly, his usual voice, as if he is in this same room with me. I am afraid to answer, afraid I will not hear him again, but I know I must, and I say “Anton” in that same way, the way I always did.

  But I do not hear him again after I speak. All I hear is the silence after the unexpected sound of my own voice, and the word that I spoke. Anton.

  I knew how voices of the dead can haunt the living, especially in the night. The voices I heard were always singular, always saying the things they had always said: my name, or another’s; common things like “Have you eaten?” or “Where are my shoes?”

  My father would say, “You’re wasting your time. You’ve got better things to do,” an endless series of quasi-commands I had learned to pretend to obey. My mother, though, if I heard her at all, would say only my name, a word I seldom heard her speak, in life.

  Lately, there was another voice, lightly accented, melodic. “Anna,” this voice said. “Remember.” Remember what? I’d ask the silence. But the silence did not respond.

  Music is unique in its ability to exist in two very different states: potential and realized. Potential music, which lies in the unperformed score, is silent, the product of its creator, while realized music is heard, the product of its performer. No other art can be separated in this manner, and so no other art is perceived in the same way.

  The best composers understand that a good performance can only enhance their creation by adding that mysterious element “heart.” Such a performance entrances its listeners, moving them to a rapture that the composer could only imagine. It follows that a composer who insists on faithful reproduction of what he has written may doom his creation to mediocrity.

  Perhaps analogous to this is the paradox that the large fails to move us. The number 6,000,000, for example, is merely a number to us, incomprehensible in its enormity. “Shoah,” on the other hand, the Hebrew name for the ritual remembering of the Holocaust which introduces us to individual Jews, personalizes the Holocaust, and so touches the heart of its horror. “Heart” is a small thing, made large in its particularity. In the mathematics of persuasion, whether musical or personal, the product is inverse to the mass.

  My mother’s playing had “heart.” The music that poured out of her piano when she played had an essence of its own, a soul, a presence that lingered long after the music ceased. My own playing, as I have said, is resolutely pedestrian, and I am at a loss to engineer the transition from rote reproduction to something grander.

  The performer does not hear the music in the same way as an outside listener. The true performer, in fact, feels the music rather than hears it, and this sensual distinction varies from performer to performer. I suspect that the feeling begins when the listening stops, just as a seemingly difficult question can suddenly be answered when one stops thinking about it. But I do not know how to stop listening.

  There has always been music in my life. Even as a child I could differentiate Beethoven from Bach, Mozart from Mendelssohn, Dvorak from Debussy. By the time I was ten I knew I preferred Liszt to Schubert, classical to modern, consonance to dissonance.

  These were my mother’s preferences as well.

  I do not think I am an unhappy person, though I also know I am not a particularly happy one. I do not, like so many these days, assign the blame for any present difficulties to the acts of others in a distant past. My parents, I think, did the best they could, considering who they were, and where they were both in space and time. I was by nature a solitary child, and so the continued solitude of my adulthood cannot be blamed on them.

  And yet, as I read Hana Weissova’s diaries, I discovered in myself an anger I had not known existed, a roiling, undirected fury, an emotion with which I had no experience in dealing. I never knew what would set it off: a news report from Sarajevo; a driver cutting his car in front of mine without warning; a morning sky devoid of blue.

  Where depression is turned inward, anger, I discovered, is turned outward. Depression self-examines, and finds that self wanting; anger screams at the fates and finds them to be at fault. I did not immediately make the connection between Hana Weissova’s diaries and my newfound anger, but when I did, I of course began to wonder what it was in them that had tapped it. Hana herself did not express anger. Nor did she point fingers or assign blame.

  And perhaps that was just it, that her passivity had shoved mine aside. I was angry over the fate of Hana’s loved ones, and I was angrier still that she was not angry: I did not want her to react as I would have; I wanted her to be better than I, stronger. I wanted Hana’s life to be all mine never would be, and I wanted it vicariously, without any risk on my part.

  But Hana had already lived her life, and would not bend to my wishes. She was human, the same as I, and I was human, the same as she. Perhaps it was time for me to stop seeking vicarious experiences and get on with my own life.

  By February, the highways were dry and the sun had returned, as it often does in that month. I drove down to Santa Fe one Monday morning, and went immediately to my favorite music store on Cerrillos with the hope of discovering recordings of some of the Terezín compositions.

  The longhaired young men at the store knew me, of course. One wanted to know if a tuner he’d recommended the previous fall had worked out; another was anxious to show me the new CD listening stations they’d installed over the winter. It was he I asked about Terezín recordings, drawing a blank look in response.

  “You have heard of the concentration camps?” I asked him, not at all certain he had.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, “but music?”

  I explained what Terezín had
been like, its preponderance of composers. I told him it was possible recordings had been made of their work. “Well, let’s check on-line,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but I agreed.

  It turned out to mean a computer listing, and my young man (Manuel, with the black ponytail and one gold hoop earring) showed me what he found on the screen. Apparently the computer could pick up cross-references, so that merely typing “Terezín” revealed a CD containing work by Viktor Ullman, Fritz Krasa, Ervin Schulhoff, and Gideon Klein. “This is by a chamber group out of Denver,” Manuel pointed out. “Do you know them?”

  Denver. It was so close.

  “No,” I told Manuel. “But I’m thinking of starting a similar group here.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was so.

  “Oh, be sure to check the board,” he said. “You want me to order this CD for you?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, and, “The board?”

  Manuel pointed me to a corkboard I’d never noticed on a back wall, tacked full of cards, notices, and various slips of paper. I read the abbreviations on some with no inkling of their meaning (“Base player for NWUF band.” “HM jammer looking for gig. No drips.” “Progressive salsa bluegrass band needs female LV. No drugs.”) Jammer? Salsa bluegrass?

  “New Wave Urban Funk,” Manuel deciphered when I asked. “Heavy metal. Lead vocalist.”

  “There’s not much classical,” I said.

  Manuel lifted various papers to read what was beneath them. “You gotta poke around some,” he said. “But here—‘String ensemble looking for pianist for quintet offerings. Classical training preferred.’ Gee, it’s pretty old. I better take it down.”

  “Here,” I said. “I’ll take it.” I tried to conceal my excitement.

  “You want to put one up?” Manuel asked.

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll try this one first.”

  “Up to you,” he said with a shrug. I gave him my phone number so he could call when my CD came in, and then I drove down to the Plaza and treated myself to lunch at La Fonda. While I waited for my salad, a memory I had not known I had returned.