Two
In 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The Dachau concentration camp is established near Munich.
DECEMBER 21, 1933
When I was nearly six, my parents decided I was finally old enough to attend the opera. I wasn’t yet old enough to begin school, but for my parents, music was more essential than words or numbers. Ever since I had learned how to speak, ever since I had first understood what it was my parents did for a living, I had wanted to see them onstage. Opera stories—tragic though most of them are—had been my bedtime reading, alongside stories from Greek mythology and the Brothers Grimm.
Why she chose Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots I will never know. It’s not a very festive opera. Something light and funny—The Bartered Bride or The Abduction from the Seraglio, for example—might have better suited a child’s sensibilities. Perhaps it was simply to hear Rose Merker singing Valentine or Marie Gerhart singing Marguerite, though neither was her favorite. Perhaps that is just what happened to be on the day she decided to take me.
Or perhaps it was intended as an early warning: the god you choose to worship could get you killed.
* * *
• • •
MY OPERA DRESS, pale blue with white lace along the hem and at the edges of the sleeves, made me feel grown-up. My mother brushed my hair until its pale, coppery strands shone like a one-schilling coin and gathered it up on top of my head. Her hair was curlier and darker than mine, glossy like the horse chestnuts we found on the ground in early September. She twisted my hair like hers, and even dabbed a bit of her lilac perfume on my wrists. “There,” she said, stepping back to admire her work. “Pretty as a china doll.”
I twirled, watching my skirt catch the air. “As pretty as you?” My mother looked glamorous in her floor-length, cream-colored silk gown. Embroidered leaves and flowers in the same color spilled down the bodice and over the curve of her hips.
“Prettier!”
This was not possible. No one was as beautiful as my mother.
* * *
• • •
THE OPERA HOUSE was even grander than the Musikverein. I was so busy staring around me that I tripped going up the stairs and my mother had to catch my arm. Above us, tucked into the corners near the ceiling, were statues of children clutching instruments or theater masks, gazing down on us as we ascended. Dozens of chandeliers dangled from the ceilings like upside-down fountains.
“There’s Meyerbeer,” my mother said, pointing to one of the busts carved into the top of one of the walls. “Who wrote this opera. And there’s Mahler.” She nudged me toward a black marble head perched on a pedestal in front of a mirror.
“Shouldn’t he have combed his hair before he let someone carve him into a statue?” My question was sincere: Mahler’s hair looked lumpy and long.
My mother laughed. “We don’t love him for his hair,” she chided.
“Do we love him because he’s Jewish?”
“We love him for the same reason we love everyone in this building. We love him for his music.”
Just as in the Musikverein, everything in the opera house was gilded. Music for me was always associated with elegance, gold, and crystal.
My mother had gotten us seats on the left side of the second balcony so that we could look down at our fellow operagoers filing into their seats. I leaned over the railing staring at the ladies’ dresses and furs until my mother told me to look up. From the middle of the ceiling was suspended the largest chandelier I had ever seen. I wasn’t struck so much by its beauty—it looked like a gigantic shiny pastry—as by its mass.
“It weighs eleven tons,” my mother said. “Fifteen cows. Or twenty grand pianos.”
Gazing at it, I was glad we were not sitting underneath. “How come it doesn’t pull down the roof?”
“Well, the roof is even heavier.”
All of this was making my chest tight.
“Orly,” said my mother, sensing my discomfort, “this building has been standing for a very long time. And it will be standing for a long time more. I promise you, Schatz.
“Now, do you remember the story of Die Zauberflöte?” While we waited for the curtain to rise, my mother entertained me with opera stories and bits of gossip about the composer and singers. When she got to Lohengrin, I made her tell me the story three times. I loved to hear how the knight turned into a swan, how the lady married a man whose name she didn’t know. It all seemed very romantic and mysterious, except for the end. Insatiably curious, I found it maddening that the women of opera, of legend, of myth, were so often forbidden to ask questions of their men, and punished when they did. Psyche, not allowed to see the face of her beloved. Elsa, not allowed to know even the name of her husband, Lohengrin. How terrifying it must have been to marry someone you didn’t know. “I’m going to marry Anneliese,” I announced to my mother. “She lets me ask her questions. And I already know who she is.”
My mother laughed and squeezed my hand. “What a silly duckling you are.” The lights dimmed, and I pulled my spine up as straight as I could and firmly crossed my ankles, locking my feet together to keep them from mischief.
There was no chance of me squirming during Les Huguenots. Stunned by the heady mixture of music and violence, I sat like a stone. I didn’t cough, I didn’t swallow, I didn’t change the crossing of my ankles. (Later, when I undressed for bed, I would notice an indentation remained on the top of my right foot, so hard had I pressed it into the buckle of my left shoe.) I imprisoned my mother’s hand in mine.
I had thought, somehow, that music was meant to tell only beautiful stories, love stories. But here was a story in which every single character was murdered, in which a father murdered his own daughter. I felt sorry for both the Catholics and Protestants—even though it was mostly the Protestants who got killed—because they were not allowed to fall in love with each other.
During the interval, I shook out my stiff legs as we walked to the lobby bar. My mother ordered me an apfelspritz and herself a glass of champagne, which she explained was a grown-up version of the same drink. I looked longingly at the cakes, but my mother said we could go to a café afterward. As she was paying, a woman with long, glittering earrings and a spiraling tower of fair hair touched her elbow. “Julia? I thought it was you!”
My mother turned to greet the woman, introducing her as a singer she knew from work, but I failed to catch her name. I was distracted by another woman—was it a woman?—just behind her. Dressed in what looked like a man’s tuxedo, she had combed her short, dark hair straight back. Instead of tipping her weight into one hip or wobbling on heels, she stood with her legs a foot apart, comfortable like a man. When she saw me staring, she smiled.