“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. Never mind, Erdnuss. Oh, I feel like a trapped animal!” He began circling the room, swinging his arms wildly.
Anneliese chose that moment to come crashing back through our front door, arms full of plush socialists, and I returned to the welcome distraction of our game.
Predictably, the socialist herbivores won the battle and dragged their captive soldiers off to Friedenglückhasenland. There, the soldiers drank too much wine with Nicholas, chased each other with knives, and fell in love with wood nymphs, who escaped their advances by turning into trees. The queen turned the men into women and outlawed soldiers.
When my mother came home from rehearsing a duet from Giuditta with a fellow singer who lived nearby, she looked pale and strained. The soldiers we’d been playing with lay strewn about the carpet, surrounded by knives I had taken from the kitchen when Stefi wasn’t looking. “What are you playing?” she asked in surprise.
“Opera,” I said, as if that should be obvious.
Willi paused in his pacing of the room. “I thought it was politics.”
My mother unwound the scarf from her neck and began tugging off her gloves, one finger at a time. “The difference between the two is increasingly negligible.”
Four
After the death of German president Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merges the roles of chancellor and president and declares himself Führer, immune to all laws.
Stefi, a blue-eyed nineteen-year-old girl from Lutzmannsburg, was in many ways a third parent to me. She was given the worst of the jobs: toilet training, mashing my early foods, and wiping jam and egg yolk from my face. By looking after our basic needs, she freed my parents to focus on teaching me to read music and books. My room was off the kitchen, next to Stefi’s, so that if I woke in the middle of the night I wouldn’t have to disturb my parents. Sleep, my mother told me, was essential for vocal quality and for steady hands. When my mother was singing out of town, Stefi took over parenting entirely. Several times during my earliest years my mother was away for months, singing roles at the Oper Köln, Hamburgische Staatsoper, and Berlin’s Städtische Oper. Once she sang in Paris. I always wanted to go with her, but she told me it wouldn’t be any fun for me because she would be working.
I never did get to see Paris.
When my mother went away, she always brought me back a memento. Sometimes it was an ordinary gift, like a fancy postage stamp or a book of opera stories, but sometimes it was something more unusual, like a piece of chipped crystal from a chandelier at the Paris Opéra that was being replaced, or a silk rose from the set of Arabella in Dresden. I liked these best, because no one else had them and they were secretly famous, having been seen by thousands of people. Even more, I loved them because they meant my mother had been thinking of me while she was working.
Stefi was off on September 3, 1934, the eve of my first day of school. My parents had sent me to bed early, and a new dress was laid out on the armchair by the door. I was looking forward to school, and to showing off that I already knew how to read. Perhaps I would have been more nervous had I not known that Anneliese was to be in the same class. With Anneliese, I was never afraid. Still, my heart was beating too fast for sleep, and my mother had left my door—which Stefi usually shut—wide open.
“What bothers me most,” I heard my father saying to my mother in the kitchen, where they sat at the table drinking their after-dinner coffees, “is that they don’t even seem to be trying to hide it.”
“But it’s illegal.”
“I know it is, Julia. That doesn’t stop them from joining.” I heard the strike of a match and the sizzle as the flame met the tobacco of my father’s pipe. “Don’t think there aren’t plenty of singers in the party as well.”
“But I don’t know any. I can’t imagine— Do they talk in front of you?”
“There are few secrets in the orchestra, Liebling. They’re in the air. We can hear them in between the notes.”
“Seriously, Jakob.” My mother’s spoon clattered into her saucer.
“I am serious. I can hear them in the trumpeting of Helmut Wobisch.”
There was silence for a long moment. I tried to imagine my mother’s face. “You’ve suspected him for a while.”
“And I’ve been right. I just wish it were only him.”
“How many do you think there are?”
Another silence. A long exhale. “Eleven? More? Hard to say exactly. Wilhelm Jerger’s been in the party for years.”
“Are you in danger?”
“It’s hardly a secret what I am. Wouldn’t they have done something about me already?”
More silence.
“If they do something about the Jews in this country, they’ll have no music left.” My mother’s voice had turned bitter. “Even Walter is a Jew! Can they seriously eradicate him?” Bruno Walter often conducted the Philharmonic. I had met him several times when my father took me to the Musikverein.
“I don’t think anyone’s saying anything about eradication.”
“They are across the border. Have you even looked at a paper?”
I heard the legs of my father’s heavy chair scrape across the kitchen floor as he pushed it back to stand. “I don’t have time to read the papers.”
It was my mother’s turn to sigh. “You know, Jakob, if you had been on the Titanic, I think you would have been the last one to set down his bow.” But there was a smile in her voice.
My father laughed. “I wouldn’t have set it down at all. The Rahab would have had to take me playing.” The Rahab, I knew from my father’s bedtime stories, was a demon of the sea. It was this demon the God of the Torah had to crush in order to separate land from water.
“The Rahab might take you yet, if you don’t take seriously what’s happening around you. Around all of us.”
“You can’t think that that horrid little man is a real danger to Austria.”
“I don’t know what to think, Jakob. The things I heard when I was in Germany . . .”
“It’s true that you probably won’t be getting any work in Germany anymore. Not with—”
“I know that. That’s what I’m trying to say—”
“So what do you want us to do? Just pack up and leave? Julia, Schatz, you’re rehearsing a solo show of Lieder at last, and you want to leave? What about our parents, would we take them? Thekla? Klothilde? We need time to think. Besides, they can’t get rid of all of us. They can’t. Imagine what that would do to our sound.”