In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  Though Frau Ginsberg went back to bed and didn’t reappear for the rest of the night, Max thought about her words all through dinner. He heard them in Julia’s polite but distant conversation with him—her offerings for second and third helpings, Friedrich’s questions about business in the bookshop these days. In the prayer he didn’t understand, and in the rich challah bread they broke. And he saw it on Hanna’s pinched expressions as she glanced between him and her sister the whole night. He tried to grab her hand under the table, just before dessert, but she quickly pulled away as she stood and helped her sister clear the table.

  After dessert, Hanna walked him out to the porch and shut the front door behind them, so it was only the two of them out there, in the darkness. Max wrapped his arms around her, kissed the top of her head, inhaled the scent of lemons in her hair and the molasses scent of rosin on her skin. He’d never smelled rosin before he met Hanna and now the scent was her. “Come with me,” he whispered into her hair. “Come sleep at my place tonight.”

  “You know I can’t,” she said, pulling back a little. “It’s the Sabbath.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “Promise,” he said.

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him quickly on the mouth. He pulled her toward him, not wanting to let her go, but she broke away. “I have to get back inside,” she said brusquely. He wanted to call after her, ask her to wait, to kiss him one more time, or to reassure him that nothing would change between them now that he’d met her family. But he had this horrible sinking feeling that it was too late, that it already had.

  The next evening he stared anxiously at the shop door, still thinking about Frau Ginsberg’s words. What had she said to Hanna after he’d left? He felt awful that her mamele had clearly disliked him, all because of his religion. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. This was how his country was becoming. Things were black and white; you were a Jew or you weren’t. Why was he beginning to feel like he was the only one who didn’t care about those divisions?

  And when sundown came and went that evening and Hanna didn’t appear at his shop, he began to worry that she never would come again. That her mother had convinced her that he wasn’t right, good enough for her. Just as he was about to go crazy worrying, the shop door opened and the bell chimed, and Hanna was there before him, a little breathless. He ran to her and hugged her.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I couldn’t get away.” She felt so good to hold, and he sighed with relief. He’d been silly to worry. He felt it in their hug, the intensity that was always there between them. He kissed her, then reached for the top button of her dress. But she pulled back. “I can’t stay tonight.”

  “What? Why not?” He couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  “Mamele and Julia weren’t believing I was staying at Gerta’s now that they’ve met you . . . I mean it was pretty obvious that I was coming here.”

  “So? Tell them the truth,” Max said.

  “I can’t do that. Mamele is old-fashioned. She doesn’t even think it proper for a man and a woman to be in a room alone together if they’re not married. Much less, well . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she blushed a little, as if thinking of all the things they had done together upstairs in his bed.

  “Let’s get married then,” he said quickly.

  “What?” Her eyes widened; the idea had never occurred to her, but he ignored her surprise and kept on talking.

  “Yes. Marry me, and then we can be together every night.” His words tumbled out in a rush, and as he said them, his enthusiasm grew. He realized they weren’t empty words, but what he wanted. Hanna to be his wife, to be with him, every night, all the time.

  But she frowned. “You know I can’t.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “You can practice as many hours as you like. I never get tired of hearing you play. And when you get into the symphony and you’re touring, I’ll go with you.”

  She didn’t answer and she looked at her shoes, shuffling her feet from side to side across the wooden floor. “It’s not because of my violin,” she said.

  “Because I’m not Jewish.” Frau Ginsberg’s words and her rattling cough haunted him. “But Hanna,” he said. “I’m not even religious. I don’t care what religion you are.”

  “But I am,” she insisted. “I do.”

  She did or her mother did? What had everything been between them if she’d never had any intention of it lasting? “So what does that mean?” he asked her, unable to keep the sting of hurt and anger from his voice.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe we should take a little break. I have to practice anyway, and I don’t have time for . . .” Her voice broke and she didn’t finish her sentence.

  “A break?” Now that Max had Hanna in his life, he couldn’t imagine his world without her. “This doesn’t make any sense,” Max said. “I love you.”

  She took a step back so there was distance between them now. “It’s getting late. I have to get the train back.”

  “Please don’t go,” he said, his anger softening. He couldn’t lose her. If she walked out right now, he was going to lose her. “Not like this.”

  “I have to,” she said. “Good-bye, Max.” And she turned and ran out.

  Every part of Max’s body felt numb after Hanna ran out, and he sat behind the counter, stunned. He pulled out the scotch his father had kept on a high shelf for emergencies and took a sip, straight from the bottle. It burned his throat and somehow made him feel more, not less. His eyes went to the closet, in the back of the bookshop, and he stared at it, then took another swig of scotch.

  If Hanna didn’t want him, if Hanna wouldn’t love him, then there was nothing for him here. He had nothing left.

  Hanna, 1947

  I began working with Henry Childs once a week, and at first, all we did was talk about my former life, everything I actually did remember from Gutenstat: all my days practicing and performing at the Lyceum, growing up with Mamele and Julia, meeting Max and falling in love with him. Then, Henry (he told me to call him Henry, not the more formal Doctor Childs as they did in Britain, so that I might feel more comfortable) reviewed historical events with me, hoping they might ignite my memory. He read a passage about Kristallnacht in 1938 from an old newspaper clipping, his account of Berlin so precise that I felt a physical sensation of homesickness, a shooting pain in my stomach. The descriptions of loss and destruction—the fire, the broken glass. I imagined all that happening in my beautiful Gutenstat, too, and it brought me to tears. But I had absolutely no memory, no personal recollection of the terrifying events he read about. “Anything?” he asked gently, as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. He kindly handed me his handkerchief. And I shook my head.

  “Reichstag Fire, 1933.” He read another passage, and this time, I nodded, and clutched his handkerchief tightly, twisting it between my fingers. Just after Julia and Friedrich’s wedding, I told him. The Parliament burned. The government blamed Communists, and then there was the Reichstag Fire Decree, which took away all our freedoms, which the government said would protect us from harm, and which my mother, even in her very sick state, had decried was the end of Germany. She was wrong, though. It was still far from the end.

  “That must have been quite scary,” Henry said.

  “At the time, it wasn’t,” I told him. “I guess it sounds crazy now, but we mostly went on with our normal lives. I had school and my violin and Max, and my mother was sick, and it all felt strangely far away. Like something that wouldn’t actually touch me.” Only Max believed it would. Max was so worried for my safety. He had wanted us to leave, but it seemed such a ridiculous notion to me at the time. How could you just pick up and leave your entire life?

  “Ahh,” Henry said. “That’s what the war was like here for a while. Until the air raid sirens started going off at night and bombs would just . . . rain from the sky.”

  It was the first time I thought about wha
t it must’ve been like here, during the war, or how scary it would’ve been for Julia and the boys to have bombs falling all around them. Every day when I walked outside, I saw the aftermath, the rubble, the destruction, but that had become commonplace in my mind. What had it felt like to actually live through it, and to remember it all now? “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “That must have been terrifying.”

  “To tell you the truth, it was,” he said. “There were a few nights I really believed we were all going to die.”

  I thought about the high numbers Friedrich had rattled off at breakfast a few months ago, all the people killed and injured in London during the war, and the many buildings gone. “I know a lot of people died, or lost everything,” I said. “You probably think it’s selfish of me to be so wrapped up in myself . . . in what I can’t remember.”

  Henry shook his head. “Not at all, Hanna. You’ve lost something very precious, too. You should not feel bad for wanting to recover it, all right?” He stared at me, waiting for an answer. His eyes were a bright green and filled with kindness.

  “All right,” I finally said.

  “Good.” He glanced at his pocket watch, then back at me and smiled. “Shall we continue next week at the same time?”

  Henry and I met once a week for the next few months. We continued to talk about everything I did remember and everything I didn’t. Anything from before 1936 was still so vivid to me. I could tell Henry exactly where I was, what I was doing, even what piece I’d been practicing when. But everything after 1936 was a blank, no matter how many news articles or details Henry read to me.

  I also told Henry about my dreams, the one I’d now had several times about Hitler himself commanding me to play my violin, and there was always a faceless Nazi insisting I do it, at gunpoint. And how I would wake up terrified, most nights, so it had become hard to sleep at all.

  Henry always listened carefully when I spoke. That was what I liked most about him. He didn’t ever look at me like I was insane or insist that I shouldn’t dwell on the past the way Julia sometimes did. He listened, jotted it all down in his notebook. When I got frustrated, he reassured me that we would keep talking, keep pushing, and that eventually we would get there. I would remember. People usually do, he promised me. But after months with no progress at all, I wasn’t hopeful.

  “What about your violin?” he asked me one morning, as I recounted my first and second symphony auditions for him in great detail. “Are you still playing now, Hanna?”

  I shrugged, unwilling to admit both that I was still fingering through pieces in secret at night and also that I’d given up on playing for real. “A little,” I said. “Not really.”

  “You should immerse yourself in it again,” Henry suggested. “Anything familiar to your old life could bring the memories back. The violin would be a very good place to start.”

  A few days later, I saw in the newspaper that the Royal Symphony would be holding their first postwar concert the following Saturday afternoon. Immerse yourself, Henry had said. And I knew I had to go. Though I was bitter and angry still at not being chosen in the audition, I also wanted to see whom Maestro Philip had picked over me. And besides, every violinist knew that one audition did not define you, that you would fail sometimes. But you picked yourself up, kept on going. How had I let that one audition define me in London?

  As kids Julia and I had always kept the Sabbath with our mother, but in London Julia’s family didn’t, and so I had stopped too. I’d felt guilty about it at first, but on this particular Saturday I was just happy that it wouldn’t keep me from the symphony. I was bursting with excitement at the very thought of going to the concert, hearing a live orchestra again. And perhaps that was the best thing to come out of working with Henry, his reminder that I needed to still be the person that I always was. That my violin and the music I played were still important.

  I didn’t tell Julia or the boys where I was going, though I might have liked to have taken Lev and Moritz with me, especially Moritz. I imagined his little green eyes would light up at the music. But I didn’t want Julia to try to stop me or talk me out of going, or even upset me with some vague negative comment she would most likely make. Julia believed I’d settled into my life as a part-time typist. Recently she’d mentioned a few men she might like to set me up on dates with, and I’d flatly refused, and she had so far let it go, happy enough that I was earning my keep with a practical job.

  And so I snuck out after lunch, set out for the symphony alone. The sun was even shining today! As I walked there I felt more excited than I had in weeks, or maybe months. Or possibly years. If only I could remember them.

  I slipped into the small auditorium and sat in the back row, not wanting to be noticed by Maestro Philip, and I prepared myself to be annoyed, critical of the violins. But as the music played, instead it left me wanting, longing. The orchestra wasn’t spectacular. Certainly not as good as the symphony in Berlin had been once, when I’d auditioned. The cellists were a bit out of tune. The first viola missed his entrance on the second piece, one I knew well from having played it with a chamber group at the Lyceum. But the first chair violinist, Stuart Beckham, the program told me, was actually quite good. I watched him throughout with fascination, then with reverence. Was it possible Maestro Philip had chosen him because he was better than I was, not just because he was a man?

  Afterward I hung around at the back exit to the auditorium, where the musicians came out. It had started misting again. (The sun was so short-lived in London.) I could feel my curls wild around my face and I tried to smooth them down with my fingers as I waited. Finally, I saw Stuart Beckham, walking out of the back door to the stage, and I called out to him. He turned, surprised to hear his name.

  “Hello.” I held out my hand. He shifted his violin case into his left hand and took my hand. “You don’t know me. I’m Hanna Ginsberg. I auditioned for your seat but obviously wasn’t chosen.”

  “Have you come here to kill me for it?” His voice was deep and he had a thick British accent.

  “What? No!”

  He laughed a little. He was joking, but he held up his hand, and I realized I still hadn’t let go of our handshake. I blushed and pulled away quickly. “I was just wondering if you gave lessons.” I made only a little money at the hospital, and I’d been saving it up to get my own place. But I could live with Julia awhile longer and use my salary to pay for lessons instead. Immerse yourself, Henry had said. If I played again, I knew I would feel alive, whether I remembered anything from my past or not.

  “Lessons?” Stuart raised his eyebrows. The prospect surprised him.

  “I can pay you. Not that much,” I added. “What would you charge?”

  “You’re not from here,” Stuart said, ignoring my question. “Your accent . . .”

  Stuart was the first person I’d talked to in months who didn’t know my story. Or, my nonstory. Everyone at the hospital knew via Friedrich, and all of them, but Henry, looked at me like I was crazy or broken or both. Stuart looked at me only with curiosity. “I grew up near Berlin,” I said. “I studied violin there when I was younger. I moved here to be with my sister after the war, and I miss playing.” All of that was true, and I didn’t elaborate on the rest. Stuart nodded, satisfied with my answer.

  “God knows I could use the money,” Stuart finally said. “What if we said two pounds? And would Wednesday evening work for you? We don’t rehearse that night.”

  “Yes,” I said, though two pounds was almost all I earned in a week at the hospital. I didn’t even care. “Wednesday evening would be perfect.”

  “Do you have a pen and paper?” he asked. I searched my pocketbook and came up with only a felt pen, no paper. I handed it to him, and he took my hand, gently flattened it over. “Do you mind?” he asked, holding the tip of the pen to my palm. I shook my head. He wrote lightly, the pen tickling my skin, and my hand warmed as he wrote. “Now you have my address,” he said. “Just don’t wash your hand before you write it dow
n. Shall we say seven p.m.?”

  I glanced at the address, committed it to memory. I wouldn’t forget it now. Or at least, the old Hanna wouldn’t have in 1936. I would certainly write it down as soon as I got back to Julia’s. “I’ll see you Wednesday,” I said and walked away feeling lighter and giddier than I had in months.

  Max, 1932

  The truth was, Max had known about the closet in the bookshop in a vague sort of way for many years. He’d overheard his parents talking about it once, when he was a boy. Arguing about it, in fact.

  It was a few weeks after his mother had gotten sick, and his father had been away for a while. His father used to travel all the time before his mother’s illness overcame them. He was off, buying books, finding new things for the shop. Sometimes his parents would travel together and Max would be sent to stay with Johann and his mother for a few days. But then Max’s mother got sick, and everything changed.

  She was bedridden, quite suddenly. Or at least it had felt that way to Max, at nine years old. One day she’d been dancing around the kitchen, as her phonograph had played, laughing with his father as she cooked soup on the stove. And then the next, she couldn’t get out of bed. Herr Doctor came from Berlin, and he told them there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. “Make her comfortable,” Herr Doctor had said to Max’s father. And to Max, suddenly, death and comfort were one and the same.

  The next morning he heard his parents arguing. “You cannot go anymore,” his mother had said. “It is too risky. Who will take care of Max if you don’t make it back?”

  “But what if we could all go?” his father had argued. “Maybe there is a cure for you in another time.”