While the Music Played

by Nathaniel Lande

  Without a moment’s hesitation, I returned the salute, “Heil Hitler!”

  The following day, Poppy and I visited Hans for tea, and we were barely through the door before Anna expressed her concerns about Reinhard Heydrich: “What are you doing heiling Hitler, Max?”

  “I was being polite and that felt like the right thing to do, the right way to behave, Anna. We do it every morning at school. It’s like saying good morning. Some of us compete to see how far we can stretch our arms in the air after taking the pledge in front of the Führer’s picture. Everybody except David.”

  “What pledge?” Hans asked.

  Poppy tried to ease everyone’s concerns. “Max goes to the German School. It’s the best in Prague, and I assure you it means nothing. Just a German thing. We’re musicians, not politicians.”

  “You shouldn’t be heiling anyone, Max,” Hans added.

  “I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

  The room was quiet for a few seconds. Poppy changed the subject and put a record of Dvořák’s Symphony no. 8 on the Victrola. Then he gave one of his amazing impromptu performances.

  “Listen to the music, Anna; it is our life,” he said, closing his eyes. “Do you hear every note and every instrument? Music is everywhere. Music is something that we can share and that can help us feel better … if times become difficult for us … for all of us.”

  There were instruments left over from a recent evening with the Uncles group.

  In a flash, he circled the room and, as he did so, he played the piano, violin, tuba, and trombone.

  “Pay no attention to trombones, they like to show off.” I knew he was trying to lighten the mood and break the tension between him and Hans and Anna.

  Even Hans couldn’t help himself in the face of his friend’s inspired theatrics. Poppy finished with a dramatic riff on the drum.

  Everyone applauded. “Bravo, bravo, the Great Viktor Mueller!”

  Viktor never failed to impress. And I saw Anna stare at my father with a look of undisguised admiration.

  THE HOUSE ON

  GOLDEN LANE

  Pierre Burger had dual citizenship, Czech and French, but he preferred French style, attitude, and dress. The pension was just off a part of Old Town known as the Golden Lane, a row of sixteenth-century houses near Prague Castle. Each had an appealing charm. One had been the home of an alchemist who had tried to transform base metal into gold, and now was the tasteful twenty-room Pension Burger, where Pierre enjoyed the privilege of accommodating many important Germans, especially Reich generals who brought their mistresses from Berlin for discreet, informal weekends away.

  All the window boxes had produced fresh flowers. The foyer was painted with pewter-gray panels, and overhead hung a brass chandelier. It was very smartly decorated with eighteenth-century armoires and gold-leaf mirrors showing off the taste of its owner, a landlord, hotelier, and secret agent. In a hidden room in the pension was the powerful shortwave equipment that Pierre used as a key center for the underground activities and news dispatches to London.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Pierre Burger announced when Anna arrived at his small hotel.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s taking some time,” she said with a sincerely apologetic tone. “This undercover work should take priority.”

  “I know,” Pierre replied.

  “How would you know?”

  “We’ve been watching you.”

  “Nothing too embarrassing, I hope.”

  “Nothing at all embarrassing. I’m glad you are here. London is very high on you, and we are so glad to have you as part of our group. It’s extremely important work, Anna.”

  Coming directly to the point, Anna told Pierre she had found someone for Pink Tulip to liaise with.

  “Viktor Mueller. Do you know him?”

  Viktor had made a deep impression, and she liked his sense of fun. He was unconventional and talented. What Anna liked most was his devotion to Max, and his boundless curiosity. But could she protect him if he joined the Resistance?

  “What do you think, Pierre?”

  “Everyone knows of Viktor Mueller. He’s German, well-regarded, well-traveled.”

  “I think he has an inside track to useful friendships. Especially Heydrich.”

  “Friendship and information. But we need operatives, Anna. Can he do what is required?”

  “I can’t be absolutely sure, but if I had to take a bet, I would trust him.”

  “You haven’t answered my question: Can he manage the hard stuff?”

  “Hard stuff?”

  “Yes, life and death stuff. Assassination, sabotage, explosives—the ability to risk everything every day, all with the confidence and intelligence of a good actor. I can’t overstate how dangerous this all is. You must know this. When you enlist anyone into this work, you must trust that they can do it and that they understand what they are laying on the line for the cause: everything they have and everyone they know.”

  “I’m new to this game, Pierre. I don’t have the answers. I think he’s a good man to have on our side; he can move around and socialize with the Nazis. And I want to see him alive. He must stay alive. He has a son.”

  “Maybe I can arrange something on Kindertransport.”

  “He’s pretty devoted to his father. I’m not at all sure the boy would go. It could compromise things …”

  “I understand. I’ve been working hard on the program, and I’m having some success in Germany and Austria. About fifty children. I’m not sure anyone else in Europe really feels the urgency … just yet.”

  “Let me know how I can help.”

  “Of course. Back to Mueller. We’ve investigated everyone you have contact with, Anna. I’m sorry to do that but you must realize the stakes in this game. This is not to intrude upon your privacy, but that’s the way we work. Intelligence-gathering. I think he could be an essential operative, and in time maybe he can help us. See what you can do to put him in play.”

  UNEXPECTED

  JOURNEYS

  I was overwhelmed by a term paper I was assigned to write on French history. Why couldn’t it have been about England? Anna knew everything.

  Poppy surprised everyone: “Billets de faveur,” he exclaimed, holding up four train tickets. “Let’s all go to Paris!” It was not Anna’s first visit to Paris. She had always appreciated everything about the city, and now it seemed to matter more, because it was a city that meant so much to Hans.

  After taking an overnight train, we were soon dining at Maxim’s, that proud and celebrated Parisian restaurant.

  “Named after you, Max!” Poppy proclaimed.

  Smart-looking waiters in black tails and white ties introduced a delicious lunch topped with crêpes suzettes. As the French have always known, conversation is the brightest and optimism most accessible when at a table with friends. For a moment, we seemed to have left the headlines behind us. Dinner ended with a toast, “To those we love, to those we cherish, to good times just near.”

  After lunch, Anna took me swimming in an indoor pool fashioned in teak on the top floor of our hotel, Le Bristol. The deck and even the windows of the pool were reminiscent of a ship, and I splashed through the water like a buccaneer. Then we got dressed and strolled to the Left Bank while Viktor and Hans prepared for their evening performance. Walking across the boulevard Saint-Germain and down to rue de Buci, Anna found an antiques shop with crystal paperweights.

  “Are you going to buy one for Hans?”

  “I think he will like this one. What do you think?” she said, holding up a particularly intricate piece. The shopkeeper said it was very rare, and made by a glasshouse called Saint-Louis, one of the three great manufacturers of fine crystal. Anna didn’t take her eyes off the piece as she spoke, barely above a whisper: “Don’t you think it’s beautiful, like silent music?”

 
I said something that day that Anna later told me she never forgot: “I’m learning a lot. About you, about myself, about my world. I hope you never leave us, Anna.”

  I learned a few things for my notebook as well, one of the most useful being that the best way to know people and a city is through its markets. I saw that Parisians were expressive people, and in the street, everyone was part performer and part spectator; the market was a theater and nowhere was the show better. While we were in Paris, I noticed Poppy and Anna talking a great deal. They were animated, and I wasn’t sure what about. But it was an exciting time, free and happy, and my next entry read:

  These might be called my sunlit salad days. Paris has a thousand amazing places.

  My view of the world was being formed in a series of new experiences. I ran over and played with leaves that were just browning at the beginning of fall. There were old men sitting in the autumn sunlight on green benches, leaning forward on canes, watching. The city was brimming with life and hope, and for those blissful few days at least, so were we.

  That evening I wrote a postcard.

  Dear Sophie,

  I saw the brightest star, trailed by dusty little ones over Paris, and I’m sure that bright star was you.

  Love,

  Max

  Poppy was off to Munich, and before leaving, he described the city as one of his very favorite places to conduct, to be. “Always good audiences in Munich!” I continued shuttling between our house and Hans’s. My father and Hans entertained me with music, but Anna was a talking guidebook, telling me about the world, about life, about the changing face of the continent, and about England, with places and historical tales that allowed me to imagine I was there. Sitting on my favorite sofa, I fell into her lap, not missing the opportunity to be close to her and always looking forward to hearing about distant places. She told me about the colorful changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and about the other joys available in London, its grand houses, its museums, its parks; then we traveled farther afield over patchwork landscapes in the country to the rugged coastlines of Cornwall, and across to the medieval forests of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We took long, rambling imaginary walks through centuries-old villages in the Lake District. I took the waters in a town called Bath. She told me about her school, individual colleges along the Cherwell, and about punting on flat-bottomed boats over a rippling waterway with weeping willow trees. She read to me and we stepped through a magical looking glass with Alice. At Stratford I met Shakespeare, had tea in Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

  When Anna described London, I fell deeper into pretending, visiting the morning markets in Covent Garden, where farmers brought their fresh fruit and vegetables. But the best of all was a glass house at Kew Gardens, where there was an orangery inside an Edwardian conservatory and beautifully lit over the winter holidays. She described the details with a reporter’s accuracy, making the place come vividly alive in my mind’s eye. Palladian windows, and hundreds of orange and lemon trees. This was a place where Poppy and I could pick fruit and make fresh lemonade.

  “Near the orangery,” she said, “is a pond with a squadron of ducks and a flotilla of little boats.

  The English poet Percy Shelley floated one when he was as old as you, Max, in a setting that years later was inspiration for his verse.”

  The war winds were indeed blowing toward Prague, and Anna was asked by her chief to return to London; two journalists had been arrested in Berlin.

  NOT SAFE FOR YOU KINGSLEY STOP

  BEST TO RETURN LONDON STOP

  MACPHERSON

  “I hate for you to leave, Anna,” Hans said, picking a few late-blooming cabbage roses that had lasted through the summer. “Even our flowers want you to stay.”

  Walking into the drawing room, Anna deposited the cut flowers in a slender vase, adding water. “They smell like English cold cream,” she said over her shoulder. Suddenly, her eyes widened, and she turned to face Hans. “Come home with me, Hans.”

  He had a smile, but then his face fell. “England isn’t my home, Anna. And even if it were, I can’t leave on a moment’s notice. Let me just … let me have time. We need time.”

  “Time? You’ll soon to be ordered to fly a German flag over your home. Just as in Germany, that flag is going to wave in every occupied country.”

  She could hardly say more. Anna reached out to Hans, their arms finding an embrace.

  “I’d like to take Max with me. I’m worried about him, worried about you all. We have great schools in London. Max can come with me tomorrow,” Anna urged.

  Hans held Anna close. “Max is a German citizen, Anna, he’ll be safe here.”

  “But you’re not safe, Hans.”

  “I’m safe, Anna.”

  “Hans, face facts. We can’t spend our lives in an idyllic spa. They’re shutting down schools for Jewish children, they’re passing new laws, property is being confiscated. Even your prime minister is in exile in Britain. Wake up, Hans!”

  He walked over to Anna and put his arms around her. “I’ll talk to Viktor when he gets back from Munich. I promise.”

  Then he retreated to his piano and began to play. Anna wondered aloud if this would be the last time she would hear him play. The next day, she was gone.

  THE BLACK

  OVERCOAT

  “Hello, Max.” Mr. Raggle was piling up newspapers in his kiosk. “I have a good feeling about you, Max. And I have a job for you, if you have time.”

  “A job? I have one already.”

  “But you could be very helpful to me, Max. You always read the papers. I like that. It’s good for my business, and it’s good for your education. I need someone to deliver a few newspapers for me, twice a week, twenty-five or so, all in the neighborhood. I’ll give you all the newspapers and magazines that you would like for free.”

  Endless free newspapers and magazines sounded perfect.

  “Aren’t you taking a chance on my abilities, Mr. Raggle? I’m just a kid hanging around.”

  “You’re a young man interested in the press. Yes, that is an intelligent interest.”

  “Thank you,” I answered, remembering to be polite. “And I have a bunch of questions from reading the papers.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you know anything about this man Heydrich?”

  “I do,” Mr. Raggle replied. “He’s in the news these days. I read recently that he’s planning a meeting near Berlin. I suspect he’s up to something. There’re not many details except dark rumors, something called a final solution.”

  That solution again? A solution to what?

  David would have the answer. I took some papers to him.

  “I see you’ve met Mr. Raggle at the house of information.”

  “I’m working for him. Now you can have current news.”

  “Who are you delivering papers to, besides me?”

  “I suppose he has his list of subscribers, people like you and me who want to be informed. Do you know anything more about this Heydrich plan? Mr. Raggle was talking about it just now.”

  “I aim to find out.”

  I sat down right there and read my first haul cover to cover. All I could find were articles about the Germans, the same story over and over, with names like Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels, and their dedication to “the cause” and their “devotion” to the Führer.

  “The German press is just a giant keyboard,” David said. “They play what they want us to hear. It’s called propaganda.”

  The second time I visited Mr. Raggle he gave me a few coins for each delivery.

  “Be careful,” he said, handing me a pile of papers.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Just a figure of speech,” he replied, but I noticed he was looking across the way. That man in the black overcoat had been there every day, and he w
as there today too. Even Mr. Raggle noticed him.

  I made my way around the city, delivering the papers. As I wove through the streets and alleys I knew so well, I would catch a closer look at the man in the overcoat. He was following me. I tested my theory and took a diversion. Turning left, I walked a little way down the street and turned left again. I looked over my shoulder. The man ducked into a doorway. He was after me, and that frightened me. Would I disappear like Sophie’s father? Be taken away and never heard from again?

  “Do you know what he’s up to, Mr. Raggle?” I asked, pointing toward the black overcoat when I returned, out of breath, to the kiosk. “He’s always around.”

  Mr. Raggle took his time. “I asked you to deliver because some customers don’t want to be seen buying papers.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “It’s really not so stupid, Max. These days it’s risky to be well-informed, and riskier to speak out against the occupation. That man and his cronies are particularly interested in anyone who reads the foreign press. I guess he has it in his mind that anyone who does might disengage from the party line, and there’s no room to ask questions and seek answers in his world. If he is what I think he is, then he has an agenda and anyone who disagrees with that agenda … is going to disappear. I’m convinced of that.”

  “Then he’s a threat. Are you telling me everything I need to know?”

  Mr. Raggle sighed. “Just be alert and wary. These are … how can I put it … precarious times.”

  I was sure that the overcoat man was interested in me. Or was he more interested in Mr. Raggle, at “the House of Information,” as David dubbed his kiosk? Something deep inside me wished he would vanish, but I was beginning to know better, I was learning more each day, the latest contribution to my education coming from an editorial I read, a clipping that David had filed in one of the scrapbooks he kept.

  THE OBSERVER