Of course, as the dying Hamlet says, “The rest is silence.” How to convey such a stunning silence in music? A paradox, that. It is where my lone clarinet comes in, ending, not with a bang but with a diluendo, a slow fade into eternity.
I feel a chill, when I think of this, when I hear that variation’s slide into the infinite.
But enough of that. I must say a word about Alice’s David, who continues to be precocious in unexpected ways (though perhaps precociousness is inherently unexpected?). He is, first of all, very American. By that I mean he is remarkably self-assured for a child of seven (I should qualify that and say a boy of seven). He is, for example, fearless—unafraid of softballs shooting toward him, of leaping across wide creeks when we hike in the Jemez, of the horrific sonic booms made by the jets at the Air Force base. He does not seem at all nonplussed by the air raid drills schoolchildren are required to perform (they sit crosslegged, hands behind necks, in tidy rows against their lockers, so that I picture the aftermath—a still-tidy row of little charred bodies). He laughs when I hesitate to cross a streetcorner because a light is red. (“There’s no cars, Aunt Hana. Why should we wait?”) He questions his superiors with a marked nonchalance (“I write much better than Mrs. Brown,” he says of his teacher). He meets Alice’s parental reason with a clever logic that stops her midway through her words. (“Mom. We don’t have Nazis here.” Of course, he is wrong about this.)
I seek, and never find, signs of my own Pavel within this very different boy. David is already the age that Pavel was when he died, and though he knows Pavel’s story well, it is not his story, a distinction he is quick to point out. Physically, David is dark where Pavel had his father’s more pale coloring, and psychically, David has a stronger faith—in both himself and in others—than Pavel was ever able to develop.
But because I, at nearly forty, will have no other children, I seek to make my mark on this child in some way. I try to interest him in the piano, or, at the very least, in music, though our only connection there seems to be through country western ballads (he loves to listen to Patsy Cline).
The one place where I do seem to touch David is through my stories. How strange that I should choose a child as the repository for this horror, and yet I find that I have masked them in the genre of fairy tales, a genre that after all houses witches and ogres and wicked stepmothers. The difference is that in fairy tales the children live, and triumph over those who intend them evil; in my stories, the children die.
Here is Pavel’s story:
Once upon a time, in a land far away, a land called Czechoslovakia, a little boy named Pavel lived with his Mama and his Papa and his little sister Heidi. Pavel lived in a great stone house on a narrow cobblestoned street, and he was very happy there.
But then, one day, the Evil Men came and said that Pavel and his family could no longer live in the great stone house. No, the Evil Men said. Pavel and his family must leave everything that was theirs behind and go to live in another town far away, a town that had been built as a fortress, a town that had been named Terezin, but which the Evil Men now called Theresienstadt, which was in their own language, a language that unlike Czech was full of grunts and gutturals.
Why did the Evil Men say they must leave? Well, because Pavel and his family were Jews. How, you may ask, is a Jew different? Pavel and his family asked the same thing, because they had thought that they were no different.
This was their mistake. A Jew is different in unaccountable ways, in ways a Jew himself cannot see but which others claim to see with great ease. Others will say you can tell a Jew by his shifty little eyes (here David laughs and points out both his and my very large eyes), his huge hooked nose (another laugh, and acknowledgement of our small ones), by his money-grubbing ways, by his duplicitous nature. (“That means two-faced!” David crows, having heard this story before.) A Jew will laugh—yes, like you—and say, “Surely a man who bothers to look will see that those things are not so,” but—and here is the thing—these men did not look.
Who can say why they hated the Jews? Why does any man hate another? Often, it is because he thinks the other man has that which he desires. (“That’s a commandment,” David points out. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ass.” Then he giggles.) Or sometimes it is because he thinks that man covets what is his.
What did the Jew have that the Evil Men desired? Perhaps they wanted Pavel’s great stone house. It was a wonderful house, with three stories and many many rooms. Pavel’s room was filled with his toys—lead soldiers and elaborate fortresses and houses that Pavel had built from wooden blocks. There was an electric train set from America, which Pavel never tired of rearranging, and there were models of American cars and aeroplanes as well.
You can understand why the Evil Men might want these things.
But what had they that they might think Pavel would desire? This is a more difficult question. They too had great cities built of stone—but Pavel was quite happy with the one in which he lived. They had fat silly wives and fat silly daughters, but, well, Pavel was a little boy. He had a desire for neither.
Perhaps it was their great rivers they imagined worth coveting, but Pavel’s lovely city had many rivers of its own, rivers crossed by a variety of beautiful and unusual bridges—yes, they are still there for you to see, should you go.
No, this is not an easy question to answer, why the Evil Men hated the Jews. Perhaps the only answer is that Evil Men hate because they hate. They hate because they are Evil, and Evil does not require a reason.
Good, of course, does not require a reason either. But, unlike Evil, it is its own reward. Evil requires more tangible evidence of its success.
But so. Pavel and his family were sent away from their city to the place called Terezín. Here they no longer lived together, but instead boys with boys, girls with girls, men with men, women with women. Still, little boys adapt. Pavel played with his new friends; he went to the secret school where his grandfather taught. And he drew lovely, lovely pictures, which was a difficult thing, not just because he was a little boy, but because the Evil Men did not allow them to have paper, or crayons.
Yes, these Evil Men were very wicked. But there is far worse wickedness to come.
The Evil Men decided it was not enough to move the Jews from their homes. They decided it was not enough to forbid them to live with their families, or to go to school, or even to have paper or crayons.
The Evil Men decided that the Jews should die.
Now at this time there were many, many Jews. And so the Evil Men had to think long and hard about the best way to kill so many people. First, they tried shooting them at the edges of deep pits which they had the Jews dig. When they were shot, the Jews would fall dead, and sometimes not dead, into these pits, and then the Evil Men would bury them.
This took a long time, and, of course, a lot of pits.
So the Evil Men decided to put the Jews into rooms and then fill the rooms with poisonous gas. This was supposed to be a quick and easy death, but sometimes it was not so quick and easy, and when the Evil Men unlocked the doors they would find the dead Jews piled against them, their fingers scraped raw from trying to escape.
It was possible in this way to kill many more Jews, but the problem still remained of what to do with their dead bodies. For this purpose the Evil Men built enormous crematoria, places in which they could stack the dead Jews and burn them, until all that was left was ash. This ash streamed out from tall smokestacks and covered everything for many miles around, houses and trees and fields and people.
It is not easy to erase the evidence of Evil.
Jews were transported to the rooms of gas in railroad cars. Ostentransportes, these were called: caravans east.
Pavel had always liked trains: remember his electric train set, in his room in the great stone house. So when he was told he would be traveling on one, he was very excited.
But it soon became apparent that this was not the train ride he had imagined. Instead of passenger
cars with seats, this train had boxcars, many boxcars, each crowded with far too many people. There were no seats, and there were no stops, except the final stop, at Auschwitz, where Pavel was herded with the others in his boxcar who were still living into one of those rooms, which the Evil Men then filled with poisonous gas.
This story does not have a happily ever after, unless you believe that a hereafter offers that opportunity. But true stories are not often like fairy tales, and for that, I am very sorry.
Georg Frederic Handel is said to have heard the last movements of The Messiah in a dream, and the Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini said that his “Devil’s Sonata” was first played in a dream by the devil himself. Dreams have similarly been credited as the impetus for paintings including Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” and Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory,” and for literature including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
A pre-World War II study explored the dreams of over three hundred Germans between 1933 and 1939. Early in this period, dreamers reported hearing radios blaring propaganda over and over, while, by 1939, a representative dream was that of a man whose recurrent nightmare was that he was being accused of recording his dreams.
But few, if any, people recollect all of their dreams, and even those that do remember some of them recall only small portions. Native peoples believe that dreams are messages from parallel worlds, an interpretation that is strikingly similar to the psychoanalytic belief that they are messages from one’s unconscious. Many dream researchers insist that we cannot consider dreaming and waking as two entirely different spheres.
Music, of all the arts, most easily connects these two spheres. By its very nature, it moves us to another state, a feeling of removal from ourselves: Listeners often report feeling “transported” or “moved to tears.” This morning I awoke with a lyric I could not place repeating itself in my head, and it was only later in the day, when I sat down at the piano and picked out the tune note by note, that I realized that it was “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” from My Fair Lady. Melodies haunt us for a reason, as do faces, as do dreams. I had grown accustomed to Hana Weissova, though the face I had assigned her was one I had created myself.
It was a dream that drew me back to the cartons in the attic, cartons I now knew had been packed by Carl Mayer shortly after my mother died. In the dream, I was standing on a ladder to an attic—though not my attic and not its ladder—in order to store more things there. My father stood at the base of the ladder, shaking it, and the more I insisted he stop, the harder he shook it.
Then, in the dream, I had a revelation: Rather than continue to store these things in the attic, I could bring them down and keep them somewhere else, somewhere more accessible. I awoke feeling relieved of some tremendous burden, and recollected the dream vividly, except for the fact that I had no idea what the “things” had been.
Still, by mid-morning (it was a Tuesday, a day we did not rehearse), I had resolved to bring the cartons down. I planned to take them to our guest room—hardly ever used as such but nonetheless sporting an always-ready bed and waiting empty dresser. In addition, there was an unused closet, and I thought whatever I didn’t keep out of the cartons could be easily stored there.
One by one, I carried the awkward but not-too-heavy cartons down the ladder and set them on the guest room floor. It was close to noon when I finished, and the day had grown unusually warm even for May so I opened the guest room window before making myself a sandwich and opening a Diet Pepsi, both of which I took back to the guest room with me. I sat on the floor next to the cartons while I ate, back against the bed, legs stretched straight out, a posture I’d often assumed as a child but not at all since, and studied the boxes as if their brown sameness alone might reveal something to me. They remained resolutely unforthcoming.
When I finished my sandwich, I began unpacking. I set each item out onto the floor, bed, and dresser without pausing to consider any, and when all was unpacked I stacked the boxes in the closet. I returned to the kitchen only long enough to grab another can of Diet Pepsi and then I sat down crosslegged amongst the cartons’ contents to begin my sorting.
My resolve to be efficient—a corner for personal mementos, another for sheet music; a place on the dresser for jewelry, another for photographs—was soon lost to the various reveries each thing induced. An early 40s score of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (apparently early 40s as it bore its English name) brought back a memory of my mother playing the piece in a loden green sweater set and pearls. A book of matches inscribed George and Harriet, May 13, 1957, called up a child’s eye view of pantlegs and skirt hems, and the sound of mingled adult voices, laughter, and the clinking of glasses.
I decided to save the photographs for last and put them into a separate pile without more than cursory glances, as if I knew it was there that whatever I was seeking lay. When I had finally finished sorting, I repacked the newly organized things, labeled the boxes and set them once again in the closet. I left the photographs out, but it was now too close to suppertime to begin going through them.
I did not return to the room until Paul had gone to bed. I often stayed up much later than he, so there was nothing unusual about my doing so this night. I had not, for some reason, mentioned my day’s activities to him, and, because the guest room was at the far end of the hall and held nothing of his, it was not likely he would discover my project.
I wondered again about the things I did not tell my husband. Did I think he would ridicule me? That was not very likely. Perhaps it was that he would attach no importance to the effort at all, a judgment that would in turn somehow diminish me. My father, after all, had been a master of dismissal: “Why waste your time?” was his phrase of choice, an expression which at once belittled both the effort and the person making it. We learn quite young what we must keep to ourselves, and lessons learned young are seldom unlearned. Thus I concluded that there was no reason to tell Paul. He wouldn’t care anyway, I told myself. I may have even believed me. The chasm I’d imagined lay between us, as if it were truly there.
I turned on the small bedside lamp and spread the photographs across the bed, then propped up the pillows at the headboard and sat down crosslegged against them. The first photos were familiar: my parents’ wedding picture; formal portraits of each of my four grandparents, all looking at the camera sternly straight-on; my own formal baby pictures, and a series of snapshots documenting my movement from infant to toddler to little girl.
And then there was a snapshot taken with a different camera, a different eye. Standing before the wide doors of a stucco building were my eleven-year-old self, my mother in her black cashmere winter coat, a young and smiling Carl Mayer with a cigarette dangling casually from one side of his mouth, and a dark-haired woman my mother’s age.
My breath caught, and I brought the picture closer and examined the woman’s features: shoulder-length dark hair worn loose under a stylish hat; large, dark, wide-set eyes; high cheekbones; full dark lips. I studied the hand that clutched a pocketbook, its long tapered fingers, its lack of rings. I noted her clothes: a simple hip-length cloth jacket over a dark straight skirt, low-heeled pumps, the hat that matched the jacket. Was there something foreign about the woman, some lingering pain behind her eyes? I turned the picture over.
And there it was, in my mother’s handwriting: Opening night at Popejoy—Anna, Carl, me, and the pianist Hana Weissova. September, 1959.
I called Carl Mayer. I didn’t care about the time. “I found a picture,” I said when he answered. He was apparently still awake.
“Of course you did, darling. I knew there were pictures.” Then, “Oh my God—are your repressed memories returning? How exciting!”
“Why didn’t you tell me that there were pictures?”
“Why so angry? Is it horrid? Is it graphic, or grisly, or gross?”
I ignored his attempt at humor. “No,” I answered. “It’s a picture of you, me, my mother, and
Hana Weissova in front of Popejoy. ‘September 1959,’ it says.”
“And so now you remember everything,” Carl said.
“Everything? No. I still remember nothing. What do you mean by ‘everything’? What is it you haven’t told me?”
Carl’s voice took on a different tone. “Perhaps you should drive down, Anna. Will Mr. Anna mind?”
“He’s sleeping. I could leave him a note. But why?”
“Have you read all of Hana’s journals?” Carl asked.
“Obsessively,” I said, “as you know.”
“And even with the journals, you don’t remember?”
“Well, there seem to be several volumes missing, from around 1959 to 1965.”
“Ah,” Carl said, a mystery apparently solved. “Come down. Tell Mr. Anna I’ve died or something. Come now.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”
Did I know before Carl told me? Had I known and forgotten? I hadn’t wondered at the missing diaries; I hadn’t wondered why I couldn’t remember a woman who’d known me well enough to remember me in her will. I hadn’t wondered, until I remembered Carl Mayer, if my mother had known her, though they were contemporaries, and women of similar talents. I hadn’t wondered about anything; I’d simply slipped into Hana’s life for reasons I’d never really examined.
Carl was waiting at the door when I arrived, and he quickly settled me on his couch and placed a brandy snifter in my hand. “What do you remember?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I told him. “There is nothing there at all.”
Carl leaned toward me and put his hand on my shoulder. This is it, I thought. Now I will know what I once knew before. “They were lovers,” Carl said.
It wasn’t what I had expected. “Oh my God,” I said.
Carl kept his hand on my shoulder, and his eyes on my own. “Do you remember?” he asked again.
“No. My God.” The snifter shook in my hand and I leaned to set it on the table. Carl sat back.
“Anna,” he said quietly.
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