Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  “And what exactly have you been doing, Amelia?”

  She looked around to make sure there were no eavesdroppers. “Finish your beer. There’s something at the house I think I want to show you.”

  “You think?”

  She exhaled as she spoke. “I need to know that you love me, Harmon. That you truly and without question love me.”

  I tried to size up her question. “Of course.”

  “More than Germany itself?”

  I paused. “Does that matter?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. She let that curious answer sit in the air. Now I was getting concerned.

  “I think you’d better tell me why you’re asking such a question,

  my dear.”

  “Okay, Harmon,” she finally conceded. “Come with me.”

  We rose from the table and strode casually through the town center arm in arm. She was taking me back to her house. What waited for me inside I could only guess. And I never would have guessed right if given all the time in the world.

  25

  We stood in the front parlor of Amelia’s tired house. The piano I used to play during happier times sat against one wall. A burgundy velvet sofa with its solid wood frame and carved claw feet faced the instrument, beckoning visitors to sit awhile and listen. The hearth was decorated with colorful hand-painted ceramic beer steins and playful figurines, small boys and girls in traditional country garb on their way to the well or market, that celebrated a simpler Bavarian life that seemed to belong to another universe.

  “Amelia?” called a defiant, if shaky, voice from behind a closed door to the side of the room. “Is someone here?”

  Amelia smiled mischievously at me.

  She called out: “Oh, just an old friend of ours, Mama. No one special. Come out and see.”

  “If she’s not so damned special then she can come and see me. I have no desire to get out of bed, Daughter.”

  Amelia put her fingers to her lips and ushered me into Hanna’s dark bedroom. Although it was a sunny day, the heavy curtains were drawn, lending a tomblike atmosphere to the chamber. Sitting up in a sleigh bed, her head and back propped up by thick pillows, Hanna waited to receive her visitor. She was knitting a scarf. I remained behind Amelia as we entered.

  “My dear,” Hanna said with irritation in her grating voice. “You know I loathe surprises.” Amelia stepped out of the way so her mother could make out my form. “Well, I can see that our she is a he. Come closer. Is he a soldier? Not that Keitel I hope.” When I stepped forward, there was enough light for her to see my face, and her eyes widened with delight. “Harmon Becker!” she gasped, clasping her hands together. “Can it really be you?”

  I smiled. “It’s good to see you, Hanna.”

  “I never thought I’d lay my eyes on you again, young man!” She placed her knitting on the end table and beckoned me with outstretched arms. “Let me look at you!”

  I took her hands in mine and I kissed her on the cheek. Her hands were icy and skeletal. She trembled from either fever or some other syndrome. And she emitted that musty, dank odor of the chronically ill.

  “You’re still a handsome one!” she exclaimed weakly. “And so splendid in uniform!”

  Amelia came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my chest. I let go of Hanna to acknowledge the hug. “Mother always asks about you,” she said, resting her chin on my shoulder.

  I smiled at the old woman while caressing Amelia’s hand. “You look well, Hanna.”

  She chuckled knowingly. “You’re a bigger liar than Goebbels. I know I’m in a staring contest with death.”

  “Oh Mama, stop such talk,” chided Amelia. “You’ll outlive us all.”

  “For your sakes I certainly hope not.”

  “Can I open the curtains for you?” I asked.

  “No,” she sighed. “I’m not too fond of the world outside my window these days.”

  Amelia ignored her mother and purposefully strutted over to the window and threw open the drapes. Sunlight poured into the room, revealing Hanna’s drawn and deeply creviced face. Her white hair was pulled back taut. Her pallor a mottled gray. I was, in fact, shocked by her sickly appearance. Everyone in that room knew that Hanna Engel’s days were numbered.

  She scorned Amelia: “You may bring the outside to me, daughter, if you must. But I’ll not go to it.”

  “The doctor said that it would do you good to get up and out.”

  She looked at me. “I don’t know whose droning annoys me more. The doctors’ or those awful bombers’. Actually they both take a distant second to the Nazis.” She laughed. If her body was failing, her wits were still robust.

  Amelia picked up Hanna’s crumpled robe off a side chair and re-folded it before laying it back down. She moved a glass of water on the end table next to the knitting and, like a doting nurse, asked her if she needed anything.

  “Yes. I would like this damned war to end.”

  “I’m working on that,” I assured her.

  “I know you are. The soldier prays for peace most of all. You are the ones that must bear the scars of war for the rest of us.” Her face grew forlorn as she turned to the window. “At least that’s how it is supposed to be. The Americans bombed the kindergarten outside of Ebensfeld last week. Twenty children died. To what end? There’s nothing there.” I nodded my head in assent.

  “Such talk is senseless, mother,” said Amelia, fluffing up her mother’s pillows. “I have parcels coming to the house. I’ll boil some soup and you will eat. Is that clear?”

  Hanna coughed. Even this brief interaction seemed to have drained her reserve of energy. “What is clear, Daughter, is that I am not your child. You are, in fact, mine. I will decide when and what I eat.”

  Amelia shook her head. “Stubborn old Brauhaus maiden.”

  Hanna chortled as she settled in to nap. “In my day I was. Oh Harmon, you should have known me in my youth. But I am so tired now.”

  “Then you should rest,” Amelia said.

  “Can you do something for me?” Hanna looked up at me as she pulled a blanket to her chest. “Can you play a song that I might sleep? It’s been so long since we’ve had piano music in this house.”

  “Of course.” I’d forgotten how much she enjoyed my playing.

  “Now do as your daughter says and rest,” I told her.

  Hanna nodded and closed her eyes. She breathed deep. “It’s good to see you again. Please promise you’ll stay alive. For my little girl.”

  “I’m afraid that’s up to the Allies,” was the only assurance I could give her. We backed out of the room and closed the door behind us. While Hanna drifted off to sleep, I sat down at the dusty old spinet piano and began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. It was always Hanna’s favorite. So soothing and melancholy. Soon I grew too engrossed in the music to notice that Amelia had closed all the shades and darkness now cloaked the parlor as it had Hanna’s room before. Then she disappeared up the stairs.

  26

  I was just walking my fingers down the keys, retarding to the last haunting C-sharp minor chord of the Moonlight Sonata’s first movement, when I detected not one but two distinct footfalls creaking down the steps behind me. Deep in concentration, I barely noticed when the shadows of a pair of individuals fell over the piano. One of them sidled up to me and sat uneasily next to me on the long bench.

  My hands lay flat on the keys, preparing to enter into the sonata’s allegretto second movement. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and to my astonishment before I could begin I heard not Beethoven, but Chopin’s “Gota de Lluvia” prelude. The music was full of longing and made me think of staring through a rain-pelted window out at a stygian morning. It was the most moving piano music I’d ever heard. And in my heart, despite what my mind told me could not be so, I knew who was playing.

  I opened my eyes with trep
idation and turned to face the man who’d been the most important force in my young life, outside of my own family and Amelia. His appearance shocked me. He looked so much older than I remembered. In his emaciated face was abject despair. As if all he’d once believed in had been proven a grand farce. And in a sense, it all had been.

  “Leo?” I said softly. He continued on with his somber melody as if I was not there. It must have been so utterly satisfying for him to play again.

  I twisted in my seat to face Amelia. Her hands trembled as she tried to gauge my reaction. Harmon Becker, the man she loved, was also an officer in the Führer’s Luftwaffe. And now he sat side by side with a Jew in hiding, deep in the heart of Nazi Germany. It was too much for me at first, and the effect of that first realization was mind-blowing. I abruptly retreated from the bench as if my former Musikmeister were a leper. But the old man played on.

  Amelia’s eyes widened, and a look of disquiet flushed across her pale face. Standing in between them I darted glances back and forth from her to Krup and back again. Then I shook my head in utter disbelief. Amelia made a furtive move to take my arm, but I backed away from her, only increasing her unease.

  When the final notes drifted away, the old man remained seated on the bench, hunched over the keys, and I could see that he was fighting back tears. It had been too long for him. Too much of his life had spiraled down into a nightmare for him to contain himself. His gnarled hands leapt off the keys to cover his face as he broke down and wept in front of the two German gentiles he needed most. One to give him succor, and the other to forget his duty and the Führer to whom he’d sworn absolute fealty.

  Amelia stepped forward and put her hands on my broken teacher’s shoulders, which bounced up and down as his uncontrolled sobbing went unabated. She gazed at me again, her doubts about me growing with each passing moment that I said nothing.

  Amelia had to know that for me to ignore what I’d just seen would send me down a path fraught with the unseen twists and turns of high crimes against the Reich as an accomplice to hiding Jews. It meant, in all probability, a death sentence for me and my family if I didn’t report this. And with a man like Johann Keitel about, I knew it would only be a matter of time before this mad charade was discovered. Had I known how little time we really had, I might have chosen the safe course. I do not pretend to be a hero after all. And if I told you I don’t struggle with my decision, especially given how many paid the price, I would be a liar. For only one who was in the Wehrmacht in that time could understand how ingrained in us was the notion of devotion to the state, and to Hitler above all else. Above friends, family, above decency. As we had been told in Russia: “Officers will be required to sacrifice their personal scruples.”

  As I stood paralyzed with shock, the memory of the last time I’d seen Leopold Krupinski raced through my mind in a torrent of acidic reflections.

  On the day before I was to leave my home and report for duty at Number 22 Flying Training Regiment in Shonwalde, just outside of Berlin, I went to see Krup at his home on the outskirts of town.

  A thick morning mist hung over the still sleeping town as I made my way through the deserted Himmelplatz and into the outlying country houses sprinkled amidst the rolling forest several miles to the west.

  The Krupinskis lived in a whitewashed stucco cottage with dark brown trim and emerald shutters that sat alone, set back from a dirt lane under a shady canopy of blue coniferous trees that shimmered in the humid breeze of late summer. As I approached their house I could see that the family was already awake, tidying up and going about their morning chores as if all was right with the world. But it wasn’t, of course. Not for them.

  Frau Constanze Krupinski, a delicate woman ten years her husband’s junior, was beating out a rug with a straw broom while their little curly-haired toddler, Elsa, played with her dolls at the threshold of the open door. Jakob, their dark firebrand boy of twelve, had half his small body buried under the hood of a 1922 Ford. He was gifted with machinery and would have had a bright career with Heinkel, BMW, or Daimler-Benz but for being a Jew.

  As if to add an appropriate backdrop to this peaceful homestead, the tranquil notes of Chopin’s Waltz no. 2 in C Minor floated through the open windows of the master’s study. I paused at the edge of the lane, my morning shadow stretched out in front of me, just listening and wondering how this could be a civilization on the brink of war.

  Frau Krupinski saw me coming and waved excitedly before disappearing into the house. To my disappointment the music abruptly stopped, and both Frau and Herr Krupinski emerged from the doorway, stepping over Elsa, who was too busy dressing her dolls to notice their visitor.

  Jakob poked his head up from the Ford’s engine as I followed the dusty walkway to the house, his face streaked with motor oil. With accusatory and embittered eyes he watched me pass but said nothing. Jakob was an angry boy. Years of being spat on, ostracized, then banned from school because of his Judaism had turned him resentful of Germany and suspicious of the world.

  “Is that my young Beethoven?” called out Krup as I approached. He coughed and wheezed and then extended his hand in greeting. We shook, I bowed to Constanze, patted Elsa on her head, and turned in time to see Jakob sneer and disappear under his hood once more. “Come in, my boy. I haven’t seen you since the winter. You’ve grown.”

  “Would you care for some tea?” offered Constanze, who seemed thrilled to have a visitor who came without taunts or insults.

  “I’m sorry but I can’t stay for long,” I said.

  “No,” said Krup with a sigh. “I suppose that would be dangerous for you now.” He bade me come in. I remember little now but the menorah resting on the open hearth, which stuck out in my mind. Family photos hung on the walls or adorned cabinets and end tables draped in alabaster knits. He motioned for me to enter the study, in which the dominant piece of furniture was his weathered grand piano. Streamers of light streaked through the room, shining rays of dust across his tired face.

  “Leopold,” I said. “I’ve come to say goodbye. I’m leaving Stauffenberg. I was accepted into the Luftwaffe.”

  “I see,” he said with disappointment while lowering himself uneasily onto the piano bench.

  I paused. Then I gave him a gentle squeeze on his weak shoulder. I could see his lip quivering under his bushy white mustache. “Try to understand. I’m not a Jew. I’m a German.”

  He looked up at me. “Et tu, Harmon? Am I no longer German to you?”

  “All I meant was my life is not your life. You’ve taught me to play wonderfully, and for that I’m most grateful.”

  “No,” he protested, waving his hands. “That was you, my boy. I just held a mirror up for you to discover the gift you always had.”

  “However you wish to view it, I’ll not forget you, Leo. I want you to know that.”

  He turned to face the piano keys. “And I want you to know that I meant it when I said you have the makings of a great pianist. Another Paderewski perhaps.”

  I sat down next to him. “Move over,” I said softly.

  He eased himself off the bench and moved over to settle into a leather chair whose cracked skin complemented the piano. As he reclined with a humph, legs crossed to reveal veined calves, he pressed his fingertips to his forehead with eyes closed. I played for him more Chopin, who was his personal favorite composer. The ballad Air. At first as I played, he quizzed me on my life and the world outside his study, his redoubt of sanity, as he called it. “Are you finished with school?”

  “It took me two days of work but I passed my senior matriculation.”

  “And what will you fly?”

  “I’m hoping for fighters. Our Messerschmitt 109s are the best in the world.”

  “War,” he said. “So senseless. Like the vandalizing of my store. For what purpose? To what end?”

  “No reason at all, other than who you are, I suppose.”
r />   It seemed as if my life was headed along two divergent paths. Here I was playing piano for a Jew who, despite years of Nazi indoctrination, I tried to consider a friend. And yet I was about to join the Luftwaffe as a flight cadet. I was to fly under the banner of the very regime that I knew wanted to see Krup and his kind gone from Germany.

  As I played I noticed that Krup suddenly closed his eyes and slipped deep into thought. I raised my hands off the keys, abruptly filling his study with an oppressive silence.

  “You stopped playing,” he said. He raised his head and fixed his eyes on me. They were pink and swollen with tears.

  “Leo, why are crying?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sad about the world, and my place in it.”

  I pivoted and sat on the edge of the bench, facing him directly, my palms cupping my knees. “Why have you stayed in Germany?” I asked bluntly. “Wouldn’t you prefer to live someplace where you’re wanted?”

  “No one wants us,” he replied with a hushed voice. “Besides, Stauffenberg is my home. My life was built here. My wife had family here. My children have friends.”

  “I dare say those friends no longer speak to them,” I reminded him.

  “That may change.” His tone was unconvincing.

  “No it won’t,” I said.

  “Harmon,” he said more sternly now. “I tell you this. You will rue the day you ever donned the uniform. You are not meant to kill. And certainly not in the name of Adolf Hitler.”

  “In the name of Germany’s honor, I am,” I retorted by reflex.

  “They are now one and the same,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” I conceded. “But my place is with my countrymen. Not here playing ballads for Jews.” That seemed to come from another’s mouth. Even with a wary sort like me, the indoctrination through osmosis could be insidiously effective.

  Krup went silent. A sullen look flashed across his tired face, accented by veined hands running down his cheeks to tug at his bushy mustache. “Why so much hatred in this land that has managed to turn even you into a warrior?”