In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  Rows and rows of chairs were set up, many of them already filled, and he didn’t know a single soul in the room, so he sat toward the back. As he looked around, all the men were wearing those flat little pancake hats that he had seen Jews wearing walking out of the temple in Gutenstat on Saturdays. The fact that he was out of place here felt even more obvious, as he did not have a hat. All the unfamiliar eyes rested on his head, then the guests seemed to frown, collectively.

  But then the door to the room opened, and all eyes turned toward the back. The room was completely silent as Julia walked in on Hanna’s and Frau Ginsberg’s arms. Everyone was watching the bride. But if someone had asked Max later what Julia had looked like at her wedding, he would not have been able to say. His eyes went to Hanna, only to Hanna. She smiled at him as she walked by his row, and he imagined how it might feel if she were walking down the aisle toward him, to marry him.

  After the ceremony, the guests moved to the winter-garden hall, crowded with tables and flowers, drinks and dinner and dancing. And Max found Hanna again. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him fully on the mouth, with all the passion she normally reserved for when they were alone. She was holding a half-empty glass of champagne, and she was no longer worried about her makeup or how scandalous they might appear. He was completely sober, but he couldn’t help himself; he kissed her back, a long, slow, deep kiss. The band stopped, and then they began a new, slower song.

  “Dance with me,” she said, impulsively, finishing off her champagne, putting the empty flute down on a table. She held out her hand, and Max took it. Maybe it was the alcohol; maybe it was the energy of the wedding, but Hanna didn’t seem to care what anyone else in the room thought, who saw the two of them together. So he wasn’t Jewish and she was. So what? They loved each other. They were going to be together.

  He allowed himself to be pulled onto the dance floor, and he took Hanna in his arms, leaned his chin on top of her curls, and they swayed together to the music, as the band played.

  “The trumpet is flat,” Hanna whispered to him, and she giggled a little, amused. He heard only a slow dance song that allowed him to hold her close, in public. She heard the actual music.

  Frau Ginsberg sat at a table at the edge of the dance floor, watching them dancing, frowning. But Max looked away, closed his eyes, and breathed in the lemon scent of Hanna’s hair.

  He could’ve danced with Hanna forever, held on to Hanna forever. But after two songs like that, the music abruptly stopped. He opened his eyes; Hanna took a step back. People murmured and looked around. A gentleman in a suit was standing by the five-piece band, talking to them, and then he turned and raised his arms, faced the wedding guests. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We will have to end early tonight.”

  “Early?” Friedrich’s father, whom Max had never met, but who had walked Friedrich up to the altar along with his mother earlier at the ceremony, pushed his way through the crowd. “But I have paid for the room until midnight.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said again. “Some guests have been complaining about the noise.”

  “The noise?” Hanna whispered, her hands on her hips now, incredulous. It was ridiculous. All weddings made the noise of music, chatter, and dancing. It wasn’t the noise. Every single person in the room knew it wasn’t the noise, and the room grew so quiet, it was almost laughable they were talking about noise. Just then Frau Ginsberg coughed, and the sound echoed so loudly it felt painful to hear.

  “But I have paid for the whole night,” Herr Weiner tried again.

  The man shrugged, turned back toward the crowd. “I’d appreciate you all leaving without disturbing the other guests. I don’t want to have to call the police.”

  The police? To a wedding? Max thought of the riots that had happened just two weeks earlier, how the police had injured and killed those speaking up, like it was nothing. But this was different. This wasn’t a riot. It was a wedding, for heaven’s sake.

  But at that, the man walked out of the room, ignoring Herr Weiner’s continued protests. The guests looked at one another for a moment, as if they weren’t quite sure what to do. Then one couple walked out, followed by another, and another, until the room was almost empty.

  Julia was standing just across the dance floor from them, and now she was crying, Friedrich holding on to her shoulders. “Scheisse,” Hanna cursed under her breath, let go of Max’s hand, and ran to her sister. Frau Ginsberg continued to cough, louder and harder, the spasms shaking her entire body.

  Max went to Frau Ginsberg, and she somehow managed to glare at him, even through coughs. But he sat down next to her, anyway, handed her a glass of water from the table. She took it, sipped it slowly, and her coughs began to subside.

  “I know you don’t like me,” he said to her. “But we both want the same thing, you and I, for your daughter to be happy and safe.”

  Frau Ginsberg didn’t say anything for a moment, took another sip of water. Then she said, “Will you walk us home? I don’t like the streets after dark without a man. I tell Hannalie that all the time, and yet she insists on taking the trains to see friends and play in orchestras late at night.”

  Max knew exactly what she was saying, that if he wanted Hanna to be safe, he wouldn’t want her to come see him, to come be with him at night. But he didn’t want to argue with her. He held out his arm to help her up. “Of course I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  On the way out, Max saw the sign that he’d noticed at first walking in: ginsberg/weiner wedding. Only someone had, during the ceremony or during the shortest wedding party ever, defaced it. The slash between the names had been turned into a Nazi Hakenkreuz in bright blue ink.

  The three of them walked out onto the street, and the night somehow was still bustling. The entire breath of the city moved on, oblivious and uncaring to what it had taken.

  Two days later their parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire by an arsonist, Communists trying to overthrow the government. And by Tuesday, Chancellor Hitler passed new laws suspending freedom of expression, freedom of press, the right to public assembly, the secrecy of post and telephone. The papers called the fire a great act of terrorism against Germans and claimed that Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree, giving the government more powers to arrest and incarcerate and suppress, would keep them all safe.

  And then Hanna rode the train to his shop after her lesson at the Lyceum. She walked inside, holding her violin, just as she always had.

  He hadn’t seen her since he’d walked her home from the wedding, and somehow their entire world had changed since then. Germany had changed. The Parliament had burned and Hitler had taken away so many of their freedoms, to keep them all safe. The injustice of it all made his stomach roil.

  He opened his mouth to speak to Hanna about it, but she put her finger to her lips, took her violin out of her case, and began to play, to practice as she always had. The sound of her violin floated through the air of his shop, passionate, fierce, angry: her music expressing everything she felt.

  There was still music, he thought. And they still had each other.

  Hanna, 1948

  Stuart’s finger did not improve, not even after seeing three different doctors at the hospital whom Henry connected us with. None of them agreed on a diagnosis or whether his ailment would be permanent or temporary. The third doctor suggested more tests—perhaps it was a rare form of arthritis?—but Stuart told me he didn’t want any more tests.

  “What’s the point?” he said, sounding completely defeated. “Who cares why it’s happening? It’s happening, and I can’t play.”

  “But if they figured out why,” I said, “maybe they could fix it?” My voice faltered a little because I didn’t really believe the words, even as I said them. Neither Henry Childs nor Herr Doctor in Berlin had been able to fix me, after all. My memory of those ten years was still completely blank; my faith in doctors was not very strong these days. Of course, Stuart didn’t know about any of that, and when I considered it, I
felt worse for Stuart than myself. At least I could still play; at least I still had my violin. Music was breath, and life, and joy. My future. Without it who would I be?

  In one stroke of luck, Stuart’s ailment coincided with the orchestra’s summer break, so he was not expected back at rehearsal until September. But as the summer went on, he became increasingly frustrated and more certain that he would have to tell Maestro Philip that he would need to fill his seat.

  Of course, it did occur to me, if Stuart couldn’t play, that maybe Maestro would offer the seat to me. It’s not at all how I wanted to join the orchestra. I genuinely wanted Stuart to heal; he was my closest friend, after all. And I did everything I could to cheer him up, still showing up at his apartment every Wednesday night, though after a few weeks I stopped bringing my violin. Instead I brought cakes that I’d bake with the boys in the afternoons after they got home from summer camp, and I’d sit with him and we’d listen to records. Stuart had a nice collection of European orchestra recordings, all prewar, as even now, many of the orchestras had just gotten back together, just started recording again. I was both relieved and disappointed that he had nothing in his collection from Berlin. But maybe it was for the best. I was already still in prewar Berlin in my mind; I wasn’t sure I could bear to listen to the music from there, too. Or face all the emotions, the longings for a different life, that I knew that music might conjure in me.

  After that one time, Stuart did not try to kiss me again. We sat there listening to music together in his flat, only as friends, never touching. When I would think about it sometimes later, when I was back in my bed at Julia’s, in the dark, I would feel both relieved and disappointed about that, too.

  In the beginning of August, Lev, Moritz, and I had tickets to watch the Olympic sprinters, and, boy, were we cheering for Fanny Blankers-Koen, the “Flying Housewife” from Holland, who could run so fast that people almost forgot she was a thirty-year-old mother of two. I stood up and screamed with my nephews, and for just the smallest moment, I had a glimpse of Max, sitting with me on Johann and Elsa’s couch in Gutenstat, praying that by the next Olympics, everything would be different. And oh, how it was.

  But I pushed the thought away, not wanting to be lost in old memories, wanting to enjoy my time making new memories with Lev and Moritz. And I did. By the time we left, I was hoarse from cheering so loud.

  “She’s quite fast for a girl,” Lev said contemplatively as we made our way home on the tube after watching Fanny win a gold medal.

  “She’s quite fast, period,” I told him. “I’d like to see you run that fast.” Moritz laughed, picturing his older brother racing a woman and losing, no doubt. “Girls can do everything boys can, and sometimes better,” I told them. And as I said it, I felt heat rising on the back of my neck. Was I really talking about the Flying Housewife now, or was I talking about myself, playing the violin?

  “We already know that,” Lev said, matter-of-factly.

  “Of course you do.” I ruffled his hair a little, and he pulled away, embarrassed. “You are going to make a great husband someday,” I told him, and he began to blush.

  “Tante, stop,” he begged me.

  Moritz broke into a hysterical fit of giggles, imagining his older brother as someone’s husband.

  As we got off the tube and walked back to Julia’s I thought about how lucky they were, to have been born in England, to be living now, after the war, where you didn’t have to be afraid to be Jewish, and everything was being rebuilt, not destroyed. How they would have the opportunity to be anything they wanted to be. Maybe I was lucky too. If Fanny could win a gold medal in the Olympics, while being thirty and having children, then why couldn’t I get a job with an orchestra somewhere? There was still time for me yet.

  I arrived at Stuart’s the next evening with a plate full of lopsided cookies Moritz and Lev and I had baked, excited to tell him about Fanny, and all the energy and noise of the crowd cheering for her. Our baking was not the best, neither in appearance nor taste, which I blamed on the rations still. In Germany, I’d baked with so much more sugar and eggs, and here it was hard to know what I was doing with the ingredients we could get. But Stuart hadn’t noticed, or at least hadn’t complained.

  I forgot about the cookies I brought when Stuart opened the door for me. All his furniture was gone. The room was completely empty. And I gasped. “Have you been robbed?”

  “Robbed?” Stuart shook his head sadly, took my plate of cookies with his good hand, and placed them on the counter. “No, Hanna, I’m moving back to Wales for a while. I need a break from the city, from . . . life. I should’ve told you last week, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud yet.”

  “You’re not giving up,” I insisted, trying not to stare at his awkwardly bent finger. I knew how badly Stuart wanted to play, how badly he wanted to make his fingers move as they always had. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t. “Maybe you just need to give it more time?”

  “I will,” he said, sadly. “But not here.” He looked at me; our eyes locked and he opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. “I mean it would be different if you and I were . . . but you’re . . .” I nodded, understanding what he was trying to say. Stuart and I were just friends, connected by the violin, and now that he couldn’t play, what did we have? Even if our friendship transcended playing violin together, I was not a reason for him to stay. Still, I didn’t want him to leave. “I let Maestro know yesterday,” he said. “I suggested you as my replacement.”

  “Oh, Stuart,” I said.

  “I don’t know if he’ll listen to me. He should. But Maestro Philip doesn’t appreciate passion as much as he appreciates technique,” Stuart said.

  The truth was, and we both knew it, Maestro still probably would not want a woman in his orchestra, and certainly not in a permanent position, and as first chair violin. Not that I wasn’t going to go speak to him first thing tomorrow—I was. But you could not draw blood from a turnip as Julia was fond of saying.

  I leaned against the wall and put my head in my hands. Stuart was leaving and with him my best chance at playing violin on any regular basis in London. But, of course, that wasn’t the only thing that upset me. I was going to miss seeing him every week; there were few people who understood me like Stuart. “You’ll come back, though?” I finally said. “When your hand is better.”

  Stuart pressed his lips tightly together and didn’t respond at first. “I’ll write,” he said. “You’ll write me back?” He held out his good hand to shake mine, but instead I impulsively grabbed him in a hug. He didn’t move for a moment, but then he hugged me back, just briefly, before he pulled away. “Don’t give up, okay?” he said. “You have a true gift.”

  I felt so heavy as I walked out of Stuart’s flat for the last time. I had lost so many things, and those losses had become a part of me. Who I was. Playing the violin was who I would still become, who I would always be. Or at least, I hoped. My weekly playing time with Stuart had kept that hope burning inside of me, had kept me alive.

  Outside it was dark and the air was sticky, wet. There were raindrops hitting my cheeks, as I walked toward the tube, or maybe they were tears.

  Max, 1933

  The wildflowers bloomed in the long fields that stretched between Gutenstat and Berlin, a blur of yellow and orange and pink outside the train window, like every spring before it. But Germany was changing fast; it was hard to keep up with the news, hard to understand how springtime looked exactly as it always had when everything else was different.

  Max became obsessed with reading the papers each morning in his shop, trying to digest everything that occurred. And each day he kept a record of what was happening, reading the newspapers in the morning, listening to the radio broadcasts at night, then writing it all down in a notebook, as if it might be evidence he would present to Hanna at a later date, to convince her how dangerous Germany was truly getting.

  The Nazi Party was winning a majority now, taking almost three hundred se
ats in Parliament in the March election, and Hitler had pushed through a new amendment to the Weimar Constitution, the Enabling Act, that decreed him dictator for the next four years. A special court was set up to deal with political dissidents, and people who opposed Hitler’s Reichstag could be sent to a prison camp, just opened in Dachau. Max wrote this all down in his notebook, his list growing longer and longer by the day.

  Everyone else around him took a different tact, though—they ignored it. Elsa and Johann had Emilia to worry about. And Johann began working longer hours at the law firm after some of the Jewish lawyers had been let go. And Hanna said she didn’t have time to worry about the things she couldn’t change, that politics would be politics. Her mother was growing sicker; she had her biggest audition coming up in just a few months. And besides, she would say, what did it matter for them if they just kept quiet and continued about their normal lives? It seemed to Max that Hanna, and everyone around him, was in a strange sort of denial. As if they believed Hitler and the growing anti-Semitism would simply fade away if they all kept quiet, ignored it, and went about their daily lives.

  And that is what everyone did. Each morning the shops on Hauptstrasse opened and closed as they always had. Sometimes, people came into his shop in search of books, and the only difference was, now if they saluted him with the Hitlergruss when they walked in, Max was sure to salute back, as he had heard rumors of the SA beating up some shopkeepers who refused. Feinstein still had a line for bread, albeit a little shorter than it once had been. Even as the jeweler down the block hung a sign in the window that Jews were no longer welcome there, most people in Gutenstat still wanted Feinstein’s bread. Their country was being dismantled, day by day, piece by piece, and yet life still mostly moved like it always had.