In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  I’d resigned myself to this life in London, where my violin was just a hobby, but at least things were finally improving after the war. Clothes were no longer being rationed! And there was hope that food soon might not be too. Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Wales, had given birth to a baby boy, Charles, a few months ago, and I, like everyone else, had been excited to see the photos in the paper, a fact that had made Julia smile, as if she finally believed that I might be recovering too.

  But then, one night at the end of March, just before supper, I found a letter from Stuart in a pile Julia had left on the kitchen counter.

  “When did this come?” I asked Julia, as I picked it up. She shrugged. She hadn’t noticed it, or she couldn’t remember. Friedrich was working late yet again, and I’d heard Julia complaining to him over the telephone earlier. You should be able to eat dinner with your sons, she’d said. And I wasn’t sure what he’d said back, but now she seemed to be in a mood, so I didn’t question her any further. I ran off with the letter to the privacy of my bedroom, not wanting Julia to stare over my shoulder as I read Stuart’s words.

  Dearest Hanna,

  I’m so sorry it has taken me this long to write you back. I was waiting for my hand to improve, hoping that it would get better, and that I would write you then with the good news. But it is still very much the same as it was last summer, and the truth is, I might never play violin again. Then my mum took a turn for the worse, and I’m afraid that we lost her last month, so things have been hard for me on all fronts lately.

  I stopped reading for a moment, feeling like I was going to cry. The letter continued much farther down the page, and I took a breath and read on:

  But I cannot stay away from music or the orchestra, and I’ve recently been offered the position as the maestro of a new small orchestra starting up in Paris. I’m going to try my hands, my good one and my bad one (See, I’m making a joke now, aren’t I?), at conducting. And that’s also why I’m writing you. I will need a first chair violinist, preferably someone with passion. Unfortunately, it won’t pay very much, just 500 FF a week, and you may have many other better prospects by now. Even so, I had to write you to ask if you had any interest in moving to Paris and playing in my orchestra? (My orchestra, what a strange feeling it is to write this . . .)

  The letter went on, but I put it down, my hands shaking. Stuart was going to conduct an orchestra in Paris, and he wanted me to be his first chair violin? It was hardly any money, and in a city where I didn’t know a soul. But I was so excited, I could barely breathe.

  “Hanni.” Julia rapped on my door, then opened it without waiting for me to answer. She walked in and sat at the end of my bed, and I held the letter up to my chest, defensively, not wanting Julia to read it, until I had a moment to absorb it myself.

  Her eyes went to the letter across my chest. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Stuart got a job,” I exhaled the words. “Conducting a new orchestra in Paris and he wants to hire me to play in it.”

  “Paris?” Julia puckered her lips as if she’d eaten something sour. “But you don’t even speak French.” As if that would stop me.

  I laughed a little. “Violin is the same in every language,” I said. “And Stuart speaks English.”

  “So . . . what?” Julia asked. “You are in love with him? You want to marry him and move to France?”

  I frowned at her. How had she gotten any of that from what I’d just said? It was as if love and marriage were to her the only viable options for women like myself. “Jule, no. It’s nothing like that. He’s offering me a job, playing violin in his orchestra. A real, bona fide job as a violinist.” My voice rose with excitement, as if by saying it out loud to Julia, it had suddenly become more real. There will be other orchestras, Max had said once. You will play in one someday, I know you will. I promise you. You can’t give up the fire!

  “But where will you live? And what about your job at the hospital?” Julia was saying now, her face reddening. She was flustered or annoyed. Or both.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I said. “And Paris isn’t really that far from London. There must be a train. I’ll be back to visit. And the boys can come visit me, too, explore the City of Lights with me.”

  Julia bit her lip and looked down at the floor. “You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” she said softly.

  She said it like it was a real decision, like something I might have to labor over, weighing out the positives and negatives in my mind. But here Stuart was handing me what I’d always wanted: a start at a life playing in an orchestra, a life as a violinist. There was no choice, no other option but for me to go. I loved my nephews. Julia had shown me enormous kindness over the past few years. But London, and Julia’s house, was not my home. The violin was my home, and I would follow it wherever it would take me.

  I didn’t want to hurt her, though, and I knew I would, that she would take me leaving as a personal offense. I leaned over and hugged her. “This is what I’ve been working for, what I’ve wanted for my entire life,” I said. “You’ve always known that about me.” She stroked back my hair and then pulled back from our hug. She wiped at her eyes with her fingers. Was she crying? “Don’t be sad,” I said. “Be happy for me. We’ll still see each other.”

  “I’m worried for you,” she said. “A woman all alone in Paris?”

  “I won’t be alone,” I told her. I was going to say I’d have Stuart, but I wouldn’t, not in the way she’d want me to. So instead I said, “I’ll be with an entire orchestra. I’ll make so many friends.”

  Julia frowned. “Oh, Hanni,” she said. “It’s just . . .” She tilted her head and stared at me like she was going to say something important and trying to find the right words. But then she finally said, “The boys are really going to miss you.”

  Max, 1933

  It was remarkable how the sun rose each morning, set each evening, the earth still spinning on its axis, as it always had. How everything could change and nothing could change. In July, the Nazi Party was decreed the only political party in Germany, any opposition punishable by law. Most people in Gutenstat were not Nazis: not Johann and Elsa, not Herr Feinstein next door, nor most of the patrons who still came to his shop looking for books to read (some, even the banned ones). But now no one spoke of it in public; it was illegal and somewhat terrifying to consider what would happen if they did. Instead they exchanged grim expressions or shrugs or saluted with the Hitlergruss if they thought anyone was watching them.

  Herr Fruchtenwalder had told Hanna that the principal violinist in the symphony was rumored to be retiring soon, and that he would be able to secure her an audition. It felt like they were holding their breaths for that to happen so she could make it in already. There would be a certain safety for her in the symphony that she did not have as just a music student. Max believed she would be excused for being a Jew due to her talent, her service to her country. Even Hitler enjoyed Beethoven, or so he’d read.

  Then the fall came, and the leaves on the mulberry trees changed color, as they always had, turning the streets into shades of orange and red and gold. Germany left the League of Nations in October, and in November, Nazis won 93 percent of the vote in the Reichstag election. Of course, no other parties were allowed to nominate candidates, and so it came as no surprise. It seemed to barely even register with the people Max spoke with each day. Max wrote it all down in his notebook.

  For months Max also thought about Johann’s words, Johann’s legal advice from last spring, that the best way he could keep Hanna safe would be to marry her. And every time he kissed her, every time she put her violin away for the night and collapsed into his arms in bed, he would stroke back her hair and be consumed by how much he wanted her to be with him always, wanted her to be his wife. Not because it would keep her safe (though that was important too) but because he loved her so much he felt a physical ache in his stomach when she left his shop in the morning.

  He knew her mother still would not app
rove, and she had her ups and downs, good days and bad with her health. But by the end of November, when he hadn’t seen Hanna in three days and he felt his heart might burst, he truly could not wait any longer. He had to ask her to marry him now. He would have to find a way to win her mother over.

  He did what he had been putting off for months: he went into the closet in his bedroom and pulled the locked box down from the top shelf that he’d been avoiding since his father’s death. The box contained his father’s most personal things, and though he’d inherited the key to it, he had left it alone until now. He didn’t want to invade his father’s privacy, even in death. In fact, he felt sure his father wouldn’t want him to open the box, the same way he would not have wanted him to walk inside the closet in the shop. But he had searched everywhere else he could think of for his mother’s diamond ring to give to Hanna, and he felt certain that his father must have locked it in there.

  As he put the key in the lock, he promised himself he would only look for the ring, take the ring if it was inside, nothing else. His father would want him to have that, want him to give it to Hanna. If his father had met Hanna, he would’ve loved everything about her and welcomed her with open arms. He wouldn’t have cared about her religion, the way Hanna’s mother cared about Max’s. His father would’ve only cared that Hanna was wonderful, and that she made him happy. And a fresh wave of grief washed over him, making him miss his father in a way he hadn’t remembered to in months.

  He opened the box, and on top there were a few letters, his father’s passport, a notebook, and then underneath it all, what he’d been looking for: the ring. It was gold and had a small round diamond in the center: a Beissinger family heirloom. It had once belonged to the grandmother he’d never met, then his mother. He held it in his palm, ran his finger across the smooth top of the diamond, and smiled.

  He put the letters and the passport back in the box. He reached for the notebook but his arm bumped the edge of the nightstand and the notebook fell to the floor, opening a bit. As he picked it up, he couldn’t help but see that the pages were filled with his father’s handwriting. His eyes caught on the words: Space-time continuum . . . One-dimensional tube (later, wormhole? Einstein, 1935). 1935?

  He quickly shut the notebook, put it back inside the box. If his father had wanted him to read his journal, wanted him to know what he’d written, he would not have locked it up like this.

  Though he had locked his father’s journal away, putting the box back up on the high shelf in the bedroom closet, Max couldn’t sleep that night, still thinking about it. Hanna had come to see him late tonight, after supper, and he had the ring in his pocket. But he already decided he’d give it to her in a few weeks’ time for Hanukkah. She loved the violin pin he’d given her last year; she wore it on the lapel of her coat. And he hoped with all his heart that she would soon wear his mother’s ring and agree to be his wife.

  But now she was downstairs in the shop, practicing. Usually her playing soothed him, put him in a musical dreamscape. When she finished, she’d come upstairs, and wake him with a kiss, her fingers tracing a line down his chest, toward his waist, and he would kiss her, half dreaming, half present, aroused. But tonight his mind went over the words he’d seen earlier in his father’s handwriting.

  He’d written those words about the closet in the shop. Max was certain, just from the few his eyes had caught on. One-dimensional tube. Wormhole, and perhaps most telling, 1935, four whole years after his father would die. What if the journal explained everything? What if the closet wasn’t what he believed it was, and the terrible future he’d seen wasn’t real? Or what if this confirmed it was?

  He got out of bed and paced back and forth, his body pulling him back toward the locked box, his mind telling him his father would want to keep it private. He wasn’t at all sure he was ready to face the memories reading the journal would surely awaken, the feelings of great loss, and what if he learned something about his father he didn’t want to know, that would change the way he remembered him? But he also knew that understanding what he’d seen when he’d walked into the closet might be the only way he could keep Hanna safe. More than marrying her.

  And so he walked toward the bedroom closet, reached up on the high shelf for the box, and found himself unlocking it again with the key. He pulled the journal out and held it to his chest, as if his father’s words could warm him, comfort him, save him. Could they?

  He took the journal back to his bed, lit the gas lamp, and opened the book to the first page.

  April 2, 1915

  Rebecca and I found the end of the war! November 11, 1918. Drank coffee in Feinstein’s café. Gone approx. 96 hours. Rebecca and I both had head and body aches for two days following. Cannot remember all of what happened? But Gutenstat will survive the war.

  Max would’ve been four years old in 1915 and had very few memories of that time, no suspicion at all that his parents had been involved in such a trip. Judging from the thickness of the journal, there would be many more trips, many more entries between 1915 and 1921 when his mother would die. He turned the page to read more:

  November 10, 1915

  Rebecca and I walked more quickly and went even further. 1925! Took the train to the city and people are happy again. There is so much new music and they play it so loud. Rebecca and I danced all night! Gone approx. 10 days. Suffered with head and body aches upon return.

  August 11, 1916

  We ran and found 1932! Everything is blurry when we come back. Rebecca can’t remember anything, and I can only recall a feeling of sadness. Rebecca cannot get out of bed for nearly a week. I have head and body aches, but not quite as bad as her. Next time we should not run so fast? Detrimental effects?

  “Max, you’re awake?” Hanna’s voice startled him, and he dropped the book. “What are you reading?” She reached for it, and he quickly picked it up.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Bookkeeping for the store.” He quickly settled on the lie, knowing Hanna’s disinterest in mathematics and accounting.

  “Oh.” She yawned, lay down on the bed next to him, put her hand gently on his arm. “That can wait until morning, can’t it?”

  He shut the book and put it down on the nightstand. Rebecca cannot get out of bed for nearly a week . . . Detrimental effects?

  “Max?” Hanna kissed him softly on the lips. “Where are you tonight?”

  “I’m right here.” He stroked her hair, traced her collarbone with his finger. It made a v, for violin, he’d once told her, and she’d laughed. But she was right, he was far away. He couldn’t stop thinking about his father’s words.

  As soon as Hanna fell asleep, he picked up the journal again and read through the whole thing, devouring every little piece of it. His father’s experiences—his mother, oh, his mother, experiencing it all with him. His father believed the closet in the shop to be a wormhole, what Einstein would use his theory of relativity to explain as a bridge through space-time, in two years from now, 1935. Max did not understand much about physics, but he understood that walking through the closet allowed you to go into the future. The faster they walked, the further they went. The further they went, the worse they felt upon return. But his parents had gone to the future, again and again and again. His father theorized at the end of his journal that their frequent jumping in time might have killed his mother. Max wondered now, if it eventually killed his father, too.

  Still, he took it all in with a new understanding, a relief. He didn’t need to convince Hanna to leave Germany, to move away from her symphony or from her mother. If things got really bad, when things got really bad, he had an escape for all of them, right here in the shop.

  He tucked the book out of sight from Hanna in his drawer and closed his eyes. He climbed back into bed, and Hanna nestled into him. He slept better and more soundly than he had in months.

  Hanna, 1949

  I had imagined Paris as a city of lights and magic, a fairy-tale city I’d read about in one of the books Max had g
iven me once, Fiesta maybe, by Hemingway. I’d envisioned the Paris of the wild ’20s, of Jake and Lady Brett, and laughter in beautiful cafés. But when I arrived, Paris was also still recovering from the war, and in the middle of a housing shortage. Too many people were moving in, and there were not enough apartments for them all. In spite of what I’d told Julia, that my violin was my home, the reality was I still needed housing, and that was nearly an impossible thing to find. Even more so for a single woman with a meager salary.

  As maestro, Stuart had been given a two-bedroom apartment on the rue des Fleurs by the orchestra’s patron, Monsieur Le Bec. The apartment had been in Le Bec’s family for generations, survived the war, and as Le Bec had his own much more sizable apartment in the Fourth Arrondissement, he had no use for it. Stuart said it was also because Le Bec was barely paying him anything, and that otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to take the job, much less afford to live in the city. Le Bec’s son had played the cello and had been killed in the war, and ever since Le Bec had been wanting to do something to honor him. Hence the new orchestra would be named the Pierre Le Bec Symphony, in honor of his son. Stuart told me he’d known Pierre, who’d been a few years behind him at boarding school, which is why Monsieur Le Bec had come to him with the idea first. And my surprise at the thought of Stuart attending a boarding school reminded me just how little I actually knew about him. Not that he knew any more about me.

  Still, our months having played violin together in London made us both feel a kinship toward each other. And Stuart offered to let me stay in his apartment’s second bedroom until I found a place of my own. At first I resisted, thinking about how it might look to the other members of the orchestra, but after ten expensive nights at the Hotel Paris-Dinard that I couldn’t really afford, I relented and moved into Stuart’s second bedroom. I’d brought only my violin and one suitcase with me, filled mostly with old clothes of Julia’s she’d given me in London. I could hold every possession I owned in both hands.