* * *
• • •
WHEN I WOKE the following morning, the house was silent. Alarmed, I ran down the hall to my parents’ room. Sun danced across the dirty glass of the windows and no birds sang. It was late. My father was a lump under the covers. I tried to think if I had ever seen my father lying still under the covers after dawn. Next to him my mother sat with a book on her lap, staring at the wall in front of her.
“Liebchen,” she said, turning when she heard me. I bounded into bed beside her.
“Is daddy sick?” I lifted the scratchy wool blanket gingerly, trying to find his face.
She shook her head. The lump next to her did not stir. His face was closed, curled into his chest.
“Sweetheart, your father lost his job last night.”
“What? Why? Did he forget his notes? Did they think he was bad?”
Again she shook her head. “I’m not sure your father could ever be bad.”
“Then what?”
“It wasn’t just your father. They got rid of all of the Jews. Some of them they sent away.” All of the Jews. All of them.
“Who? Where?”
My mother swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her white nightgown twisted around her body. “I’m not sure. Viktor Robitsek, certainly. Max Starkmann. Arnold Rosé. Armin Tyroler. And he even received the Ring of Honor from the city of Vienna! This is the kind of person they want to disappear?”
“They want us to disappear? Why don’t they want the Jews in the orchestra? Aren’t Jews good at music?” Even as I asked this I knew it was a stupid question. Jews created at least half the music I knew.
My mother seemed to immediately regret her outburst. But really, what could she say? My mother wasn’t a liar. “We’re good at everything we want to be good at. Sometimes I think that’s why they hate us.”
“Really?”
She sighed. “No. I don’t know. But some people think we make too much money, we write too many books, we sing too much. Maybe they think we don’t leave enough room for them.”
“I don’t understand.” I looked at my father, wanting him now to stay asleep.
“I’m glad,” she said, and pulled me close to her side. “I’d be worried if you did.”
* * *
• • •
I WOULD MAKE PANCAKES, I decided. My father loved pancakes. My mother and I often made pancakes on Sundays she was home. Today wasn’t Sunday, but no one was going to work.
It was easy to find the right page in the cookbook; it was rumpled and stained, speckled with dried batter. In the silent kitchen, I cracked an egg against the bowl, stirred in flour and water, brushed a pan with oil. Carefully, I poured the batter into the pan and turned to look for the coffee.
When I returned to the stove, flames danced from the cookbook. I had propped it too close to the burner. Dropping the coffee on the floor, I reached for the measuring cup of water and dumped it on the pages. Too late; the book had turned to ash.
“I know that recipe by heart, my love,” my mother murmured into my hair as I curled next to her in bed, disappointed tears rolling down into my ears. “I don’t need the book. There will be no shortage of pancakes in our future.”
I opened my eyes and tipped my head back to look at her, scanning her face for censure, but it was soft. Between us on the bed, long strands of my pale apricot hair mixed with her darker auburn curls. Combing them together with my fingertips, I admired the range of hues, the contrasting textures. “It looks like a fire. The colors of flames, our hair all together.” I thought of the cookbook, the heat that devoured it.
My mother tilted her head slightly to see them. “No, my love, look again. Our hair together is a sunset.”
* * *
• • •
A NIGHT LONG AGO, when my mother had been cross with my father for staying out too late or working too long, she had said, half in jest, “Don’t ever fall in love with a musician, Orly. You can’t compete with his instrument.”
“But you are a musician!” I protested. “And I am in love with you.”
She hugged me when I said that, as tight as tight. “I’m in love with you, too, Liebling.”
“As much as you are in love with Daddy?”
“The same amount. I love you and Willi and Daddy all the same.”
“Do you love me more than singing?”
“I love you more than anyone has ever loved anything. More than Lebkuchen and Liszt.”
“But more than singing?”
My mother sighed. “It’s different. But if I were forced to choose whether to lose my voice or my child, I would never choose to lose you.”
I never asked my father this question; I was afraid his answer would not be the same.
My father reached for his viola before he got out of bed in the mornings, even before he reached for his wife. Each morning, I drifted up from sleep to the tremors of his strings and would sit up to listen. They were gentle, his morning songs, rough and slightly out of tune. They called me forward and up, into my day, my life. They also signaled permission for me to come to their bed, to pull up the sheet and slide in next to my mother’s warm skin. Only once he had set the viola back in its case and headed for the kitchen did we need to stir. Before the Anschluss, all of our cues were musical.
* * *
• • •
FOR NINETEEN YEARS my father had played with the Philharmonic. For nineteen years he had crossed the city swinging his viola case at his side. For nineteen years he believed that music was a common language.
Close to half of his colleagues eventually became Nazis. Whether this was a result of conviction or a desire to stay employed made little difference to us. There is no record of any musician in the orchestra ever protesting the expulsion of his Jewish colleagues. These men who had played alongside Jews for decades, who had tuned their instruments to those of Jews, who had created harmonies with Jews, these were the men now calling for their exile. For their deaths.
After my father finally awoke the morning after his last evening at the Philharmonic, he locked his viola into its case and placed it alongside the small cases we were already filling with our few valuables. He would not open it again in Vienna.
My mother’s work had been declining since 1934, although she had still managed to be cast in a few operas each year. The range of allowable composers and works had dwindled to nothing. No more Meyerbeer. No more Schönberg. By 1938, no one even wanted to be in a room with a Jew.