My mother looked up from the newspaper she had gone to fetch from the selection spread out on the table by the door, her brow creased. “Is what true?”
“That God wants blood.”
My mother pushed the paper aside, almost as if she were angry with it. “Meine liebste kleine. What kind of god would that be? If there is a god, Orly, he would want nothing but peace. We have had enough of war. Now, no more religion talk. It’s bad for the soul.”
* * *
• • •
ANNELIESE WAS AT OUR DOOR the next morning, wrapped up in her red woolen coat and hat, before I had finished getting dressed. “Did you really go? Did you see the whole thing? Were the singers very good? Were they as good as your mother?” Anneliese had never seen my mother perform—even I hadn’t yet seen her—but she loved when my mother sang us “My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo” as we walked to the park or when we finished our homework. My mother sang all the time, even when she wasn’t singing opera.
“Close the door, you’re letting the cold hallway air in!” I was still on the floor, lacing my boots. Ana stepped into the apartment, pulling the door shut behind her. “It was magical and scary and I got to go to Café Sperl after, in the middle of the night. I wish you could have come!” Anneliese’s parents didn’t let her stay out late at night.
“Me too.” Ana sat down next to me, pulling her knees into her chest.
“When my Mutti sings, then you can come to see her, can’t you?”
“Maybe.”
I finished lacing my boots and stood up.
“Don’t forget your bunny!” Stefi emerged from the kitchen to pass me Lebkuchen soft and cinnamon-brown like the cookies he was named after. She was taking us to the Riesenrad. “And your hat.”
“I don’t need a hat! I’m never cold!”
“Me, too, I never get cold!” Anneliese echoed, leaping up and twirling in the hall. “Even when we’re sledding or skating and having snowball fights and—”
“I don’t care if neither of you ever gets cold, you’re wearing hats or we don’t go. Come on, get moving, both of you.” Stefi handed me my scratchy wool hat and pulled on her coat.
I grabbed Ana’s arm and dragged her out the door. Not until we got down to the street and had raced ahead of Stefi did I tell her the most interesting thing I had discovered.
“Ana, I met a woman last night who was dressed as a man.”
“You mean in trousers? Lots of women wear trousers now.” She skipped ahead of me.
“No, not just trousers, she was all dressed up, in a tuxedo. And she had short hair.” I jogged to keep up. Stefi was a whole block behind us, calling our names.
“Really? Did she really look like a man?”
I considered this. “You could tell she was a woman. She was pretty, but in a different way.” I didn’t know how to express the way Odiane had carried herself, the way she walked and talked as if she had every right to be like she was. “She lives with a singer who works with my mother.”
“Was the singer dressed in a tuxedo too?”
“No. She had long blond hair up on her head and a green dress. My mother said they were roommates.”
“Maybe they didn’t have a man to go with so they were pretending to be married.”
“Maybe. But they live together.”
“Maybe they are married!”
“Can girls marry girls?”
“I don’t know.” Anneliese took my mittened hand in hers and we stopped to allow Stefi to catch up. “But if they can, I’m marrying you.”
I laughed, my boots slipping over the snow. “That’s what I told my mother. Will you wear the tuxedo or shall I?”
Three
In February 1934, members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party rebel against Austria’s Fascist regime. Four days of violent clashes end with the deaths of several hundred and the dissolution of all political parties other than the Patriotic Front.
During the four days of conflict and general strikes of February 1934, we had no school and my parents made us stay inside. Police were attacking the workers, they told us. It wasn’t safe on the streets. Willi sprawled on the sofa with a book, sulking, as my parents had also forbidden him to join the socialist paramilitary Schutzbund to fight against the right-wing Heimwehr.
While my parents were theoretically socialists, they had little time for political activism. I think they thought that music somehow protected them from politics, that as artists they were beyond earthly concerns. But Willi was fourteen, full of unspent passion and idealism. He and my Viennese grandmother were the fiercest socialists in our family, though all of my relatives were staunchly anti-Fascist. Willi closely followed Hitler’s rise in Germany and was perhaps the only one of us with foresight enough to worry.
Anneliese and I sat on the carpet with our rabbits, Marmalade and Lebkuchen, quarreling about which one of them was going to be the socialist and which the police officer.
“They should both be socialists.” We looked up in surprise. Willi didn’t often join in our games. “They should join forces to fight against the foxes.” He returned to his book.
Anneliese and I glanced at each other, unsure whether to tolerate this intrusion.
“We don’t have foxes. There is no one for them to fight against,” I pointed out.
Willi heaved himself off the sofa and disappeared into his room. A moment later he dumped a cardboard box in front of us, spilling leaden soldiers onto the floor. “Here you go. Heimwehr for you.”
Anneliese looked at them all, her dark eyebrows raised. “We need more socialists.” She ran up to her apartment to gather all the rest of her stuffed animals. I raced to my room to collect the rag doll I had been given at birth, a china-headed doll with a cloth body, and one stiff porcelain doll too pretty to be any fun.
Willi settled back onto the sofa with his book, but after a few minutes he threw it aside. “I mean no insult to Mahler, but if I have to hear that Adagietto one more time I am going to lose my will to live.” He stood and walked to the window.
“He’s practicing.” It would never have occurred to me to criticize my father for playing. While the strikes had kept them from going to work, neither of my parents neglected their practice. I thought the Adagietto was pretty. It made me think faraway thoughts, as if it were stretching what I knew about the world toward the horizon.
“I know he’s practicing, Peanut. I just wonder if there’s something more important he could be working on.”