At last I heard the tumble of the locks on the front door. I swung my legs to the side of the bed and sat up, listening.
“Jakob?” My mother’s footsteps, almost running to the door. “Jakob!” I would have felt relief then had it not been for my mother’s muffled sob. I ran to the door to look out.
“They’re everywhere,” my father said as he removed his hat and set it on his hook by the front door. “Already they are everywhere. They’re taking people, Julia. I’m sorry I was so long getting home. I wanted to stay out of their way.”
“What do you mean ‘they’re taking people’? What does that even mean?” My mother’s voice rose an octave.
“The men—they’re arresting Jewish men.”
“We need to go. Jakob, we can’t—”
“We don’t have visas. We need to organize ourselves.” His voice was a deflated balloon. “Have they been here? To this building?”
My mother must have shaken her head. “I would have heard. They would have been here. Everyone knows who we are.”
Instead of going to sit in the kitchen as they usually did, they retreated to their bedroom, meaning I had to actually sneak out of my room in order to hear them, my feet going numb away from the warmth of my bed.
“And Arnold is leaving.”
“Arnold?” My mother’s voice was bewildered. “When? Where will he go?”
I could not hear my father’s answer, just the creak of the bed as one of them sat down.
The door flew open before I could move or formulate an excuse for being up. “Orly!” my mother began, cross. Then she sighed. “Go back to bed, my love. Your father is home.” She took my hand and walked me back to my room, waiting until I was under the covers before turning to go. “No more listening at doors. This is not for you to solve.”
I lay awake for a very long time. Arnold must mean Arnold Rosé, the first violinist who had been concertmaster of the Philharmonic forever, longer than I had been alive. He was Catholic, but my father said he was born Jewish. He often played me a recording of a duet Arnold played with his daughter, Alma, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. “It was recorded the year you were born,” my father told me. “I always thought of it as your welcoming song.”
* * *
• • •
IT WOULD BE DECADES before I discovered how we were saved that night. Only after the war was over and I had become another person did I learn that Anneliese had been sitting on the front step when the Nazis arrived. Like me, she had been eavesdropping on her parents, whose conversations had an entirely different tenor from the ones I overheard. She had also crept out of bed, knowing she had to see the Nazis before her parents did. “I’m so pleased you’ve come,” she said, standing to shake their hands. “My parents own this building and they think that the Jews are a scourge.”
This, of course, was the opposite of the truth. My family had owned the building for generations. “We have only two tenants, an old lady and my cousins. But please come in.”
“Step aside.” She was a just child, though tall for her age. She may have passed for thirteen or fourteen.
“Of course. Though I heard you were looking for Jews?” She turned the lock on the door and swung it open.
The two men glanced at each other. They had many other buildings to get to. “You have no Jewish men here? None at all?”
“I wish we did, so we could help you round them up. But my parents, they’re very strict.” She beamed up at them. “They would never allow a Jew to live in our building.”
* * *
• • •
WE WOKE THE NEXT DAY to rejoicing in the streets. Cheering, chanting, music. We could hear it from our apartment, from our beds. They were happy noises, celebratory noises. It didn’t seem possible that our neighbors, our friends, could be celebrating the end of our country. That they could be welcoming the planes roaring overheard. There could not be so many Austrians who wanted to become German. I had to see it for myself.
Without waking my parents, I ran upstairs for Anneliese. It was unlike me to leave without telling anyone where I was going, but I needed Anneliese. Ever since Fasching she had been trying to make it up to me, though she still couldn’t let me in her apartment. On school days she met me around the corner so we could walk to classes together and sometimes she came over after school if her parents were out.
I had already tapped our secret knock on the door when I remembered I was no longer welcome. Quickly, I started back down the stairs. But just as I hit the first landing, I heard her door swing open. “They’re not here,” she hissed. “Come.”
Anneliese’s parents had gone out early, she told me when I got inside. They had wanted her to go with them but she had pretended to be sick. “I was just going to come see you. Those traitors!” She shoved a stockinged leg into a leather boot. “Including my parents.” Her face looked tight, her eyes as anxious as mine. I noted she wore a white sweater with a red skirt, the colors of the Austrian flag. “I’ll get my coat.” She didn’t say out loud that she thought I was in more danger than she was. She didn’t have to.
We wouldn’t go far, I told myself as we clattered down the stairs. Just far enough to see what was going on. It couldn’t be risky to look out our front door. This was still our city. This was still our own neighborhood. We pushed open the heavy door against a surge of jubilant noise coursing down our street. The crowds were all moving the same direction, away from Alsergrund, surging in the direction of the Ringstrasse.
“They’re having a parade?” Anneliese gripped my hand.
I stood silent for a moment, unwilling to understand. “What are they celebrating, Ana? How can they?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t want to be German.”
Our feet began moving, swept along in the current of people. “Where is everyone going?”
“My parents said Hitler’s giving a speech in the Heldenplatz.” She glanced at me. “Don’t worry, we won’t go there. I don’t want to see that man.”
Women in their hats, girls, men, everyone lined the streets, the surge of their bodies restrained by human chains of police officers. Jolly music played, a marching tune conveying the opposite of everything that was to come.
Foreboding paralyzed me. I recognized the flags our neighbors were waving as the Nazis proceeded down the street with their machinery, legal at last. Rolling, walking, and riding sleek, fat horses. A muddy river of brown flooding our city, spiders on their arms. I clutched Anneliese’s hand as the crowd jostled and shoved us along, foolishly longing for the quieter carrotmobiles we had invented years ago, the tiny carts that dominated the streets of Friedenglückhasenland, powered by wind generated by the swish of Japanese fans.