Dissonance

by Lisa Lenard-Cook

  This was not a way my husband talked, and my desire to know the place increased. And I would meet Raja. Karma, Emily would call it. I sometimes caught myself smiling.

  We played the Terezín program Fourth of July weekend, and were written up in papers as far away as El Paso and Denver. At the reception following our opening performance, a man about my own age smiled at me across the room. Flirting? I wondered, frightened and flattered. But no—there was a woman with him. And, they were making their way toward me. I tried to match his face to a memory, but was still without a connection when they arrived.

  “You don’t know me,” he began, then stopped when he saw sheer relief flood my face. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Shit.” His drink tipped, and the woman—his wife, I was certain now—took it from him with a smile, then extended her free hand to me.

  “I’m Julie Stone,” she said, “and this stage-struck fool is my husband, David.”

  David Stone recovered himself, saw that I was trying to place the name. “Hana Weissova was my godmother,” he said.

  “David Stone! She wrote about you in her diaries. But you were a little boy—”

  “And you were a little girl.”

  I stood still. “We’ve met.”

  “It was a long time ago. I’ve been waiting for you to play a concert, so we could meet again. Your mother meant so much to Hana.”

  I had a moment’s urge to turn and run, and then the urge was gone, as if it had never existed. “And Hana meant so much to my mother,” I told him.

  “Thank you,” he said, and then I was certain it was true.

  That night, I dreamed my mother called me on the phone. The phone rang and rang, and when I finally answered, she said, “We cannot blame people when they reach out for love.”

  “Love is where you find it,” I told her. “And if you lose it, it will seek you out, until it finds you once again.”

  When I awoke, I thought I saw her there, and I reached out my hand toward hers, stretching, stretching. But then my father was there as well, standing between us, and I was confused, because he was dead. Perhaps I haven’t awakened after all, I thought, and at once I did awaken, truly, this time, shaking and alone. Paul had already left for work.

  “Forgiveness,” I said aloud. The word was soft and loud in the brightness of the midsummer morning, pianoforte, which is also the original name of the instrument that I had chosen to be my voice.

  But while I had forgiven my mother, forgiving my father was not so easy. How could he? I would answer myself every time I sought to begin. How could he whistle while he worked? How could he keep my mother’s friends from me, myself from me, my life from me? As I’d think these things, my anger would grow and grow, and I began to understand something of the nature of the secret things my husband worked on: the small made large, the mushrooming. Containment, I told myself, as if the word were a prayer. But I found that it had lost its power to hold me, and was merely a word after all.

  On the long El Al flight from JFK to Lod, neither Paul nor I could sleep. Paul, uncharacteristically talkative, told me stories about his mother’s village in Poland, and then, at dawn, moved on to Auschwitz. It must have been our destination that determined this odd choice; he’d never talked of these things before.

  “She doesn’t understand why she survived,” he said. “She says it made no sense then and that it makes no sense now. She saw people come and just as quickly go, day after day. She was the nanny for the Commandant’s children, and that’s why she was spared. But she doesn’t know why it was her. For fifty years, she’s tried to understand why it was her, but she doesn’t.”

  “She shouldn’t feel guilty,” I said. How easy to say that of another, I thought.

  Paul turned to me with surprise on his face. “But she doesn’t feel guilty, Anna. Many survivors do feel guilty, I know. Others feel fortunate, and she’s probably felt that, though her memories can’t be called fortunate. No. I’m saying it exactly as she does: She just simply does not understand. There is no explanation.”

  “No,” I agreed. “There’s not.” I wanted to tell him about Hana Weissova then. I wanted to tell him about Hana and my mother, about my father’s decision, about my own guilt about his decision, so foolish in the face of a guilt like this.

  So foolish, I thought. These women lived through the most horrific time in history, and yet they have managed to go on. What have I done?

  I turned to Paul. I’d find a way to begin. But now his mouth was slightly open, and his eyes were closed. I let him sleep.

  Raja BenTov’s sprawling concrete-and-glass house sat high on a hill overlooking Haifa and its bay. Sparsely but elegantly furnished, it was a place that seemed a part of its surroundings, a place that belonged. And Raja BenTov too belonged, as much a part of the place as it was a part of her.

  She was small—the same size as my mother-in-law Rose—but like Rose was possessed of an inner energy that belied her 73 years. She wore her bright white hair pulled up into a tidy knot, and her blue eyes sparkled behind bifocals. Her dogs were black Cocker Spaniels, Moshe and Miriam, and Moshe had only one eye.

  “He was born that way,” Raja explained as she led me to a screened-in porch at the back of the house, “so his name was a foregone conclusion.” She laughed, the laugh of a much younger woman.

  A tall black woman—she’d been introduced as a recently arrived Ethiopian Jew—brought a pitcher of iced tea and some little cakes and then soundlessly departed. Below us, Haifa shimmered in the afternoon’s heat, not quite real. I had never flown overseas before; this new reality had certain qualities not unlike a dream.

  “I am so sorry I could not meet your husband,” Raja said.

  “Work,” I said, with a flip of my hand, a gesture I seemed to have picked up during my five days in this odd country.

  I suppose I should have felt out of place: It was full of Jews. I remembered how Eva Marie Saint had looked in the film Exodus: taller, blonder, unsure in a way the Jews weren’t. But I didn’t feel that way at all.

  I’d taken a walking tour of Jerusalem after sleeping off our flight, and with each step was reminded of how many had trod these stones before me. I loved the sound of the guide’s accent, the words exiting below his huge moustache with a basso whose resonance an American voice could not possibly possess.

  Every place had a story, and Yitzhak was a storyteller. My fellow tourists, older American Jewish couples from the suburbs of New York and Johannesburg, often interrupted him, but Yitzhak was patient with them, and could pick up his stories again exactly where he’d stopped.

  “Anna?”

  I looked up from the shimmering city to find Raja staring at me.

  “You were elsewhere,” she said, smiling. “It is selfish of me to interrupt, but we have so little time.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Raja stared at me, another Israeli habit to which I’d grown accustomed. “You look so much like your mother,” she said.

  “I do?” I looked nothing like my mother, possessed none of her elegance, none of her inherent grace.

  But Raja had risen and now brought a photo album to me, opened it and withdrew an enlarged snapshot of my mother and Hana Weissova. “Come here,” Raja said, taking my hand to lead me to a wicker-framed mirror, where she held the photo beside my face. “You see?” she said.

  I stared. I did see. While I could know my own image only in a mirror, I had never seen my mother’s so. Reversed, she became me. Or I became her. Had this always been so?

  I remembered an early evening just before I left for college, when I had sat playing the piano in the fading light. I was playing a Beethoven sonata, the pure notes of the Steinway masking my lack of virtuosity.

  I had become aware of my father—standing there, watching me—slowly, and then had not stopped playing until the end of the piece. When I did stop, he did not move for a moment. Then he shook his head, first a quick shake and then a slow left to right that said, emphatically, “no.”


  I looked at him then, but instead of meeting my eyes, he turned and left the room. I had thought it was my playing, and had covered the keyboard. Now, as I looked in the mirror, I saw that that had not been it at all.

  Raja, behind me, reached her hand up onto my shoulder. “You want to see the diaries, too,” she said. I nodded at my mother in the mirror. “Come,” said Raja. “I will take you to them.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, my mother still looking back at me while my father retreated to another room.

  “Sha,” Raja said. “Cum.”

  January 1960

  Her name is Katherine Holtz and she is the most beautiful woman I have ever met. She is also the saddest, sad in a way I have never been, in spite of everything, sad in a way that has nothing to do with her life but seems rather a part of her in the same way as her shining dark hair, her pale smooth skin, her long and lovely ringless hands.

  I love this sadness. How do I explain? Should one not wish to make someone one loves happy? Should one not seek to move them from their melancholy to joy?

  But here my answer is no. If we truly love, we love that person as she is, and do not seek to change her. I needed Katherine to teach me this, to show me that this was the way I loved Anton, with all his methodical and practical ways. Anton was not as I am, and I did not wish to make him so: I loved the otherness of him. And I love the otherness of Katherine as well.

  How did this happen, that I should love a woman in this way, a woman who has a husband, who has a child, a sad and quiet girl so much like her mother it pains my heart? I did not seek it; I sought no love; I had decided to live my life alone. And surely Katherine did not seek it; she would never leave her husband, for she loves him as well.

  Carl Mayer likes to twirl an imaginary moustache and take all the blame: He introduced us, he says, but then I say, That is all you did. You could not know. Though Carl, of course, would like to think otherwise.

  The few nights Katherine can stay with me, I cannot sleep. I have learned how precious time is, and I choose to watch her sleep instead. In sleep, I see, she is at peace; in sleep her lips will sometimes smile. “Sleep, sweet Katherine,” I want to whisper. “Sleep, and do not cry.”

  I closed the volume and reached for another, opened it randomly.

  September 1964.

  I am certain that Katherine is ill, though she has been better during the summer, the dry heat a help, though she does not wish to be helped, or cured.

  “Katherine,” I will say to her. “You should see a doctor,” and she will say, “A man cannot change what the fates have begun.”

  This is such foolishness I want to put my hands upon her shoulders and shake it from her. I do not, of course, because, no matter how foolish I may think it, I also understand it, understand it in a way that makes me know that this is why I have managed to go on.

  A God? No. Some force at work that determines our lives? No. I do not believe that either. Yet there are things over which we have no control, things we cannot change. They are what create our lives, these things, and what we can do is make the best of it, and live those lives, or rail against them, and suffer.

  I have seen enough suffering. Like Doris Day, I sing, Que sera sera. What will be will be.

  Is this horrible of me? I do not think so.

  November 1964.

  She sits on the floor by the fire, but still, she shivers. I go to her and wrap her in my arms, tuck the afghan more tightly around her.

  “I am not cold,” she says, resting her head on my shoulder. She stares into the flames.

  “But Katherine,” I say. “You shiver so.”

  “I am not cold,” she says again.

  “No,” I tell her. “You are not cold.” I have known cold people, and Katherine is not one of them.

  December 1964.

  I have added a last theme to the symphony, a minor melody which nonetheless has resolution. It is yet another variation of “Dodi Li,” an odd choice, perhaps, since Katherine is not Jewish. This theme is introduced in the final movement, and is played by the right hand only, within the middle octave of the piano. It repeats itself over and over, then disappears, and is picked up again by that lone clarinet, where it becomes stronger, purer, and carries on until the end.

  I couldn’t read on, not yet. I drew the diary’s ribbon to the page where I’d stopped and gently closed it. Then I went and rejoined Raja on the porch.

  “Thank you,” I said. I reached across the table to hold her hand.

  “You are all right?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I’m all right. It’s all all right. Thank you.”

  And Raja smiled at me, a familiar smile, one that I recognized as Hana Weissova’s, and that I remembered from many, many years before.

  Of all musical compositions, the symphony is the most ambitious. Lasting as long as forty-five minutes, it is characterized by four ritualized movements: the dramatic first; the lyrical second; the dancelike third; and the rousing Finale. While early symphonies were written for small orchestras, it was Beethoven who expanded its scope, and his most famous Fifth Symphony illustrates both his mastery of the form and its elevation to a dramatic scale.

  Theorists say that the short-short-short-long motif that opens the first movement symbolizes fate knocking at the door. The second movement calms, but then the third resumes the struggle, leading via a bridge to the Symphony’s Finale, in which, some claim, man triumphs over his struggles. This thematic structure became a dominant trend for the composers who followed Beethoven.

  Still, by the twentieth century, composers rebelled against the constraints of such strictures. Symphonies were no longer confined to one predominant key, or even to harmonic constructions. Many returned to the smaller orchestra of the symphony’s early years; others experimented with new musical forms such as the twelve-tone system and electronic enhancement. The number of movements could be two, or six, or as with Hana’s, five.

  The questions, though, remain: Does the music reflect the times or do the times create the music? Does dissonance signal chaos or does it cry for resolution? The composers themselves insist that they create what they must, that they find their disparate themes as the music emerges, and that, if there is a Greater Being, it is in music that It will be found.

  We all create our requiems the best ways we know how. Most mourn quietly, and privately, while others must commit their sorrow to paper, a medium which in the end is both absorbent and resilient.

  On August 6th, Raja, Paul, and I drove to Netanya, on the Mediterranean coast, to the small hillside graveyard where Hana Weissova was buried. It was a Sunday, a work day in Israel, but I’d asked Paul to come, telling him I wanted to visit the grave of a dear friend of my mother’s and that I wanted him to come along. The papers that morning were filled with Hiroshima remembrances—it was the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bomb—but Israel, a country sadly inured to the realities of war, did not question the decision to drop the bomb the way America had begun to.

  We placed our stones on Hana’s grave according to Jewish tradition and Raja and Paul said the Kaddish. Then, leaving Paul to read gravestones, Raja and I wandered among the graves, mostly recent in this still-young country.

  “My father picked Hiroshima,” I told her. “I cannot begin to forgive him.”

  “But Anna,” Raja said, stopping to turn and look at me. “There is nothing to forgive.”

  “All those lives,” I said. “And such horrible, horrible deaths.”

  Raja smiled and shook her head. “Come,” she said, gesturing to a bench. “Sit.” We sat, angled to face each other. “Do not think me condescending,” she began, and I shook my head, “but Americans know nothing of horrible deaths. For you, it is all in the imagination, and the imagination makes it far more horrible than it was, for all that it was horrible. Does this make sense to you?” I nodded.

  “I saw many terrible things,” Raja went on. “My sister Hana, she should rest in peace,
saw her own family sent away, one by one, to die. My own husband, Josef, died in my arms, and I left him there, in a Bavarian wood. Your mother-in-law, you have told me, lived under the soot of smokestacks where her fellow Jews’ ashes rose from their mass funeral pyres. So your father said, ‘Enough.’ The Japanese committed atrocities of their own, and your father said, ‘Enough.’ And I say to you, Anna, ‘Enough.’ Let him rest in peace. He did what he thought was right.”

  “You didn’t know my father.”

  “No, I did not. But I knew men like him, men who made the difficult decisions they had to make to try to stop the horror. And the horror still goes on, in that bus bombed last week in Tel Aviv, in Bosnia and in Africa, and in places we have never heard of, and still men try to say, ‘Enough.’ They are only men, Anna. They can only do what they can do.”

  Paul approached us, then stopped a few feet away. “Whoa,” he said. “So serious. Are you all right?”

  Raja looked at me, and I smiled at her. “Yes, Paul,” she said. “We are all right. And Anna is beginning to understand.”

  That night, our last in Haifa, Raja handed me a sealed envelope with my name written on it in a fine European script. “It is from Hana,” she said. “For if you ever found me, which you have. Go on, open it. I will leave you to read it.”

  I slit the envelope carefully with a fingernail and unfolded the two thin sheets that lay within.

  Dear Anna, it began.

  Because your mother was quite adamant that I must never contact you, I must assume that if you hold this letter in your hand you have sought me out yourself, but that I am no longer alive to talk to you. I regret that, but it was Katherine’s wish and I would not dream to betray her trust.

  There are things that Katherine did not know how to tell you, and so told me instead. Did she wish me to tell you these things? I think, yes and no, but yes and no is also a fitting characterization of your mother, while I was the one who always said yes. And now I am the one who is left, so I will tell.

  Your mother loved you very much. You must already know this, and yet, were I certain, I would not feel so strongly that this is where I must begin. She wanted so much for you—love, and good fortune, and happiness—but she did not know how to reach you. She did not know how to reach you because you were so alike, you and Katherine, both so strongly armored behind your carefully built walls.