In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  “Herr Doctor says I’ve forgotten ten years,” I told Sister as she pulled off the road by the cathedral. “Memory loss due to trauma.” Sister Louisa nodded but seemed oddly unsurprised. “Where are all the Jews?” I asked her quietly.

  She turned her eyes away from me, looked straight ahead to the road, though the car was parked; she was no longer driving. “The lucky ones got out before the war,” she said.

  “Not the Great War?” I said.

  She shook her head. “The Second War.”

  An entire war I couldn’t remember? It was unfathomable really. My memory had always been meticulous, spectacular. I could play a short piece only once and step away from the music and play it again by heart. “What about the ones who weren’t lucky?” I asked Sister Louisa.

  She sighed, then cocked her head, trying to decide whether or not she should tell me. “They were all sent to forced labor camps,” she said. Then she lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “And many were killed.”

  Her words were so hard to understand, and yet, I didn’t disbelieve them. The current was there, the hatred for Jews, the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, the Nazis’ non-Aryan decrees. I knew of labor camps, for political prisoners. And in 1936 Jews were already banned from many things: health insurance, cultural unions, the military. The symphony. Even, love. But forced labor camps for all Jews? They were killed? Why hadn’t anyone stopped them? How had all the good kind people I’d known in Gutenstat and Berlin allowed this to happen? Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought about all the Jews I’d known my entire life, and not just Doctor Wein and Herr Fruchtenwalder but my classmates at the Lyceum, my friend Gerta, who’d played violin with me in primary school, and her boyfriend, Hans, and her father, Herr Brichtman, the baker. Fritzie, the pianist, who accompanied me at my symphony audition. Were they all really gone?

  My sister, Julia, had moved to London with her husband, Friedrich, just after Mamele died. She’d wanted me to come with her then. She was worried things wouldn’t be safe for Jews much longer in Germany. But I had refused to leave my chance at the symphony and Max. I could still vividly remember the words we’d exchanged outside on the porch of our apartment on Maulbeerstrasse. You will risk your life, your career, for what . . . music? This unreliable man? That was how Julia saw Max, as unreliable. Not as I knew him: generous, handsome, brilliant. Julia and I had fought that afternoon and had lost touch for months. She was right, I thought now. Not about Max, but about the danger. But at least she hadn’t been in Germany when it had happened.

  But . . . Max? Max wasn’t Jewish. But he also wasn’t here, with me now. And I felt this cold hard icy truth in my chest. Trauma to the psyche. The last time I was truly happy. Had something horrible happened to Max, and my mind did not want me to remember it?

  “You said the bookshop in Gutenstat was gone?” I asked Sister. “When? What happened to it?”

  “It burned to the ground,” Sister Louisa said, matter-of-factly. “The whole Hauptstrasse did in ’38.”

  Burned to the ground? There was a large book bonfire in the streets of Berlin in ’33, the smell of smoke I’d tried to ignore as I’d played with my quartet blocks away. We’d had barely anyone in the audience for our concert. And yet, thousands and thousands had come out to listen to Goebbels decree that Jewish intellectualism was dead as they burned books by Freud and others. Max feared that they would come for him, his books, his store. This was when Julia and Friedrich first started to talk about moving to London. Friedrich was a doctoral student in biology and he’d been writing his own book at the time of the burning.

  But Max wasn’t Jewish, and he’d made sure to display only German Aryan books in the shop after the bonfire. He kept the others, the forbidden ones, in the back, in a closet, and only went in to find them should a trusted customer ask. Had the soldiers found them? Had they ignored the achtung! sign on the closet door and barged in, found the contraband, then killed Max for his crimes and burned the bookshop, the entire street, down? I shivered at the thought, and deep down I couldn’t believe it was true. If that had happened, I would remember it. I knew I would.

  “Come on, let’s go back inside, shall we?” It was chilly in the car, and Sister Louisa blew on her hands, then moved to open her car door and get out. And I did the same. Because I didn’t know what else to do. What else was I supposed to do? If Julia was still in London, I could contact her. Maybe she had an idea of what had happened to me? And if she didn’t, she must be worried sick. I had to let her know I was okay.

  “Will you play your violin for us?” Sister Louisa asked as we walked toward the front of the cathedral.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have a bow.” And besides, what was the point? The Lyceum was gone and Herr Fruchtenwalder could be dead. And Max. What had happened to Max? I tried so hard to come up with a memory after that night in the bookshop, when I was practicing Mahler. Max and I, running away, escaping together. Max and I being arrested. Something. Max wasn’t tethered to one place the way I’d always been. Had we left Gutenstat before everything had gotten dangerous? Had I gotten my visa for Holland like I’d been hoping? Had we run to Julia? But then why was I here, now?

  “Ah, the bow.” Sister Louisa was still talking about the violin as we entered the church. “I asked Father Broving to go in search of one while we were out. Some sort of case for you, too, so you don’t have to just carry that around like that.” Sister Louisa stopped walking and put her hand on my shoulder. “Perhaps if you remember your music, you will remember other things?” she suggested. I was suddenly so touched by her kindness, I felt like I might cry.

  “I will play, if Father finds a bow,” I promised her. “Do you mind if I ask you for one more favor?”

  “Anything, my child,” she said.

  “Can you take me to send a telegram to my sister in London?”

  “Telegram?” Sister laughed a little. “Well, I can do better than that. We’ve just installed a telephone in the rectory.”

  The thought of my sister’s voice, so close, just like that! It made me want to cry. No matter what disagreements we might have had in the past, Julia would know what to do; she would have answers for me.

  Max, 1931

  Max waited to go back to the Lyceum until the following week, when he had Detweiler’s lecture. As he got off the train and walked by the apartments on Maulbeerstrasse, all he could think of was Hanna. He’d found himself thinking about her at odd moments all week, daydreaming about her nimble fingers and her beautiful smile. Maybe he would catch her practicing in the auditorium as he had the week before? Or if not, he’d try at her apartment again on the way back toward the train. He’d brought her a book, a biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, which was the most musical choice he had found in his shop.

  He walked to the auditorium first, and he listened outside the door. He heard a violin and felt certain it was her. She was practicing something different today. No less haunting or filled with passion, but last week’s song had been slow, while this one was fast. He waited for a pause in the music, before he opened the door and walked into the auditorium.

  Hanna was on the stage, wiping her violin with a cloth, and then she bent down to put it in her case. Max watched her from the back of the room; she hadn’t noticed him yet, and for a second he hesitated. She’d been very clear that she hadn’t wanted to be friends with him. But he’d taken his father’s old advice to Johann; he’d brought her a book, and he wasn’t going to be a chicken now.

  “Hanna,” he called out, as he approached the stage. She latched her case, picked it up, and stood. She looked at him and frowned. “I have a lecture just across the green,” he said before she could yell at him for pestering her. “And I thought you might be here. I brought you a book.” He held up the biography. She was still frowning so he kept talking. “When my mother was very ill, I used to read to her. It used to comfort her to listen to a story, to hear the sound of my voice.” He had only been nine years old, but he’d been a g
ood reader, and the memory was so tangible; it was still one of the clearest memories he had of his mother.

  Her face softened a little, and she jumped down from the stage. She took the book from him. For a second their fingers touched, and Max felt a thrilling surge of energy up through his arm. “This was very kind of you,” Hanna said. “Thank you.” She looked at him for another moment, as if she wanted to say more. But then she began walking toward the door of the auditorium and Max jogged to keep up with her.

  “Do you want to get a coffee?” Max asked her.

  She stopped walking and turned to him. “I thought you had a lecture?”

  “I could skip it,” he said. It had been foolish to pay for the course if he wasn’t going to attend, but at that moment he cared more about getting to know Hanna than about anything he’d learn in class.

  “Well, I have a lesson now, anyway,” she said. “And then I have to get back to my mother. My sister, Julia, is with her now and she has things to do.” Hanna rolled her eyes. She held up the book. “But thank you for this. I’ll return it to your store when I’m done.”

  “No need,” Max told her. “You can keep it.” She shrugged a little and started to walk out of the auditorium and then he wanted to kick himself. If she returned it to the shop, he would have the opportunity to see her again.

  “Let me know if you like it,” he called after her. “I have many others. Come into the shop anytime.”

  That afternoon in the bookshop, Max got two real paying customers—a near miracle these days. And he was feeling good as he readied the shop to close for the evening. Just as he was about to turn off the lights and walk upstairs to his apartment, he heard a knock on the glass storefront door, and when he turned to look, Hanna was there, standing on the other side. He couldn’t believe she’d actually accepted his invitation and come by so soon.

  “Sorry to come so late,” Hanna said when he opened the door. “I didn’t realize you’d be closed. I just couldn’t get away till now.”

  He smiled. “No, I’m glad you’re here. Come in.” She walked inside the shop, and she seemed more at ease than she had earlier in the Lyceum, less on guard. Maybe it was that she didn’t have her violin in her hand, and instead the book he’d brought her this morning. “You couldn’t have finished it!” He was a fast reader but not that fast.

  “No.” She laughed. “To tell you the truth, I’d read it already.” She smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t want to tell you this morning because it was so thoughtful of you. It really was. It’s been a long time since anyone has . . . well.” She held the book out to him. “I felt bad keeping a book I already have when maybe you could sell it to someone else. Business must be hard these days.”

  Instead of taking the book from her, he put his hand on her arm, lightly. “You came all the way here for that?” he asked. She shrugged but didn’t answer. Had she been eager to see him again, like he’d wanted to see her? “I know it’s late,” Max said. “But Feinstein’s bakeshop next door is still open. We could get that coffee now?”

  “I . . . I should get back,” Hanna said. She put the book down on the display in front of him and began to back away toward the door.

  “At least let me get you another book,” he said. “One you haven’t read.” She stopped walking. “What do you like, something else about music? Or fiction? Poetry . . . ?”

  “Maybe something hopeful, that I could read to Mamele, like you suggested. I think she might like that.”

  Hopeful. Nothing he had read of late was hopeful. Since the market had crashed in America none of the English writers were in a very good mood. Not that the German writers were either, as their economy had similarly withered. His eyes scanned the shelves looking for something, and he landed on Virginia Woolf. He pulled out A Room of One’s Own. “Have you read this one?” She took it from him, examined it, turned it over, and shook her head. “I don’t know if you’d call it hopeful, exactly. But I have a feeling you’ll like it.” Hanna and her violin reminded him of Woolf’s argument about women writers, needing a space of their own to create their art.

  She held the book up to her chest and smiled at him, and this was what he liked best about the bookshop, this was what he did best. Pairing books and people together. It was what his father had taught him, what he missed now that business was so much slower.

  “I’m going to read this, and then I’ll bring it back. I promise.”

  “No rush,” he said, though he hoped she would, so he could see her again soon.

  She stood up on her tiptoes, reached out, and wrapped her arms around him in a hug. The gesture surprised him so, that he stumbled backward a step, and he put his arms around her, too, and steadied himself. Up close she smelled like spring, like lemons and wildflowers, and something else he’d never smelled before . . . almost like molasses. He closed his eyes and inhaled. Her body was warm, and feeling her that close to him, he felt that same thrilling energy as when their fingers had touched.

  He put his hand on her cheek. Her skin felt so soft, and she tilted her chin up to look at him. She smiled a little. And then as fast as she’d hugged him, she pulled away and walked out of the shop.

  He stood there and watched her go, his mouth agape. He wanted to call after her, to tell her to stay here longer with him. He had almost kissed her. If she had stayed another second.

  He put his hand to his mouth, his lips warm from the anticipation. And that was the moment he realized that he was going to fall in love with Hanna Ginsberg.

  Hanna, 1946

  It took Julia two weeks to come to Berlin after I telephoned her from the rectory. She had believed for nearly ten years that I was dead, and when she first heard my voice through the telephone, she screamed, and then she swore I was a ghost.

  “I’m no ghost,” I promised her. But everything about myself felt strange, detached. My fingers could play the violin as they always had—Father Broving had procured a bow and I’d spent hours playing in the church, much to the delight of the sisters. But my fingers felt like they didn’t belong to my body anymore; they had a memory, a life, all their own.

  “I don’t understand,” Julia repeated several times. “Where were you during the war? Where have you been all this time? How did you survive?”

  “I wish I knew, but I don’t remember anything,” I said, and I could hear the disbelief in my sister’s silence.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Julia finally asked, her tone softening.

  “Yes,” I assured her, though the truth was I didn’t know whether I was okay or not.

  “Well, I’m coming to get you,” she said. “And don’t argue with me about it.” I didn’t argue. What else was there for me to do?

  She hesitated for a moment, and I thought she might ask me about Max, but then she said, “Oh, Hanni, I’ll be so glad to see you again.” She cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “I’ll telephone you back when I know which train I can get on.”

  Sister Louisa told me that the station in Berlin had only been repaired enough in the last month to begin accepting some train service again. “Life is getting back to normal,” she said, but she shook her head sadly, so that I wondered if for her, remembering every horrible thing that had happened around her over these last years, life would ever feel normal again. Was it better not to remember? No. That made it worse. I wasn’t a ghost as Julia claimed, and yet I felt like a shadow of the woman I used to be. Nothing felt normal to me, either.

  In my two weeks living at the rectory, I spent my days playing violin for the sisters, and I also walked around what remained of the Gutenstat I used to know, looking for any small piece that might trigger my memory. But nothing did. The Lyceum had closed down, and the building where the conservatory was housed had been damaged, most likely bombed. The roof was missing, the windows to the auditorium where I’d often practiced blown away. The door was boarded up so that I couldn’t even walk inside.

  I asked Sister Louisa to drive me to Hauptstrasse where
the bookshop had been. She insisted that there was nothing much there to see but she drove down the road a few kilometers for me to see it with my own eyes.

  And she was right. All the buildings on Hauptstrasse were burned to the ground. The space the bookshop used to occupy was unrecognizable from the café next door or the Fischmarkt that had once been across the street.

  “It feels like I was just here,” I said, staring out the car’s window in shock. I felt paralyzed, breathless staring at the destruction. Even if I wanted to, I could not move, get out of the car, or walk around, examine the ashy mess of what had once been a street that felt like home to me. More than my apartment on Maulbeerstrasse ever had. Though, of course, that was gone too.

  Back at the rectory I asked Sister if she minded if I used the telephone again to call the operator and ask for Max. I promised I would pay her back for any charges once Julia got here, though knowing Julia, she wouldn’t be pleased, but I didn’t care. “Of course, child,” Sister said, and she left to give me privacy.

  My voice shook as I spoke into the phone asking the operator for Max Beissinger, and though I was not surprised when she said she didn’t have a listing for one, tears filled my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t stop them. Max had disappeared on me before, but this was different. I understood somehow, fractured memory and all, that it was. Then I asked the operator if she had a listing for Johann Wilhelm, Max’s best friend.

  “I’ll connect you,” she said.

  And then again came a flood of hope. If anyone would know where Max was or what had happened to us, it would be Johann.