In the meantime, an unknown noncommissioned German officer named Adolf Hitler broke with his Munich beer hall society, governments fell, prime ministers were assassinated, young poets died of tuberculosis, and the people, hungry and hopeless, looked for someone to blame for their hunger and hopelessness. And whenever people are looking for someone to blame, somebody thinks of the Jews. This time it happened very fast, faster than Joška Herzl could flick and catch matchsticks with his two fingers ten times in a row. In Germany the first concentration camps were opened, the shop windows of Jewish stores were smashed, and mountains of great German novels and volumes of poetry were burned. The rabbis’ beards were shaved off, and their temples transformed into public urinals and stables. Thousands of members of Moses’s faith were able to escape from the land of philosophy and song, sailing to Palestine and farther, to America, Canada, and Argentina, before Joška Herzl had managed for the first time to juggle with the four fingers of his right hand.
“To juggle matchsticks,” Joška Herzl explained to Rudi, “the hand must be stable. It cannot move the way a juggler moves his hands to catch any number of bowling pins, apples, or balls, for juggling matches is not acrobatic, it is a mental discipline, a philosophy and a philosophical attempt, the first in human history, the first in the biography of the human species, to have the fingers separate from the hand so that each moves independently, in a perfectly harmonious and coordinated symphony of motion, the fingertips always accepting a match and relaunching it so that it never collides with another match, launched into the air from a neighboring finger an instant before.
“The ideal in piano playing,” Joška explained, “is for each finger to touch a key independently of the state or status of any other finger, especially the adjoining one. The hardest is with the ring finger, for it is connected by tendons to the next two. It is impeded by both physical and metaphysical factors. Robert Schumann, a tragic composer –” “My favorite!” said Rudi enthusiastically – “longed for piano virtuosity. He had quick fingers, a perfect memory, and was thoroughly musical. He had an ear that recognized tones other people could not, and he heard voices others did not. His perfect pitch eventually drove him to madness.
“But there was something that tormented Schumann more than the voices no one else could hear. His ring finger. No matter how much he tried to think through the tip of his ring finger and impart his soul to it – though the soul for other people of the day was in their chests, for Robert Schumann it was in his two little fingers – the moment his ring finger started to move, so would those damned other two with it, one on each side. To change this and triumph over his fourth finger, Schumann created a mechanical device, which he attached to his right hand, but instead of exercising the finger to make it independent of the other two fingers, he broke the tendon in the hand, inflicting irreparable damage to it. And so, in breaking the will of his ring finger, Schumann broke his own soul.
“He made a mistake, a fatal one,” said Joška Herzl, waving his arms in the heat of his story. “He should have got to know it instead of breaking it, dealt with it on its own terms, won the finger over with his charm. If the finger was heavy, let everything around it be as light as a feather!
“This was why one fine day the great Romantic composer Robert Schumann lost his mind. By contrast to Joška Herzl, he had no legitimate reason for his struggle. His reason was that of an artist: he wanted to be a virtuoso, a piano juggler greater than all the others, but that was not sufficient for each finger to think for itself and for the hand to break into four minds with a fifth, great notion in the thumb. To achieve that,” Joška shouted, moving closer to Rudi’s face, “a man had to have reasons based in his destiny. Only great and true unhappiness could move fingers to each think for themselves.
“A happy man has no reason to be an artist!” Joška said, bounding about the train compartment while the police officers making their way down the corridor looked at him, perplexed. “A happy man will become an unhappy man, troubled and with a broken soul, should he attempt to become an artist for no good reason.
“And what, my dear sir, is art?” he shouted at Rudi, who had tucked himself into the corner, nearly flat against the window, regretting that he had ever entered into conversation with this man.
“Art is juggling with matchsticks! It’s a miracle that serves no one and nothing, but is a reason to stay alive, all in the fruitless attempt to attain perfection. Six hours of practice, every day. Then ten, twelve, eighteen hours, merely in order to get the tips of the four fingers of your right hand to juggle the matches ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred times…At the beginning I was practicing six hours per day, then ten, twelve, and finally eighteen. I had stopped going to school; the temple had been burned down, and I wasn’t going any longer, I had stopped praying in the end, I was just sleeping and practicing. Were there people who admired me? You wanted to ask that, didn’t you? Well, go on then, ask, and I’ll answer: no, no one admired me. Who in Graz would have been amazed at the skills of some small and insignificant Jewish kid while Hitler’s troops were marching through the city? Doroteja? Big Doroteja? You think maybe she was amazed? No, the dear girl, my big sister, was devoid of that gift. To be amazed you have to recognize the wonder, but for my Doroteja there was no wonder. Everything I did was ordinary and normal to her.
On the day – it was a Monday – when the SS burst into the home of Rozalija Herzl and carried her off along with her mentally deficient daughter, Joška Herzl was sitting at his writing desk, juggling eight lit matches for the first time. His thumbs resting on the black veneer, his palms unnaturally inverted, he juggled the miniature torches as if each of his fingers had an ingenious mind of its own, the mind of a great pianist, circus performer, and Buddhist, who knew how to measure the force of each thrust in accord with the loss of the match’s weight, which was disappearing into smoke and tiny ash.
The SS men were dumbfounded. The sight so entranced them that they forgot to take Joška Herzl away.
While he was juggling, he didn’t notice what was happening around him. He lit the matches, one by one, flicked them in the air with the tip of his finger and waited for the unlit end, then lit another, tossed it, and watched as the match returned, spinning three hundred sixty degrees in its flight, and he did this eight times. He could neither see nor hear Aunt Ružica and big Doroteja as the Germans took them away.
Before all the eight matches had burned down to nothing, they were no longer there.
Joška Herzl never learned what had happened to them, whether they were taken to a camp or died somewhere along the way, but when he thought about their death and disappearance, he saw them both as two whirling matches flying through the air and vanishing. Several seconds had been enough for them to be gone without a trace, except in his memory, his shame, and the guilt that would survive in him.
He thought he might have saved them if he had not been juggling the matches. But was that worth more than their two small and unimportant human lives? If juggling matches was worth more than the two of them, then between him and the SS men who had taken them there was no difference.
After Hitler moved to annex Austria, Joška Herzl had stopped thinking and studying, going to school and synagogue; he had stopped taking walks around town and chatting with people. At the time the majority of the Graz inhabitants had discovered that they were Germans rather than Austrians and that their greatest enemy, as with all the Germans, was their Jewish neighbors. There were not many Jews in Graz – they had never been much liked in the city, so they had avoided settling there – but that did not mean that their disappearance was any less dramatic. In the end, within just a few weeks following Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Joška Herzl was the only Jew left in Graz. They left him alone, ignored him and his despair at the loss of his family, or else the truth was what some say today, that the Nazis left one Jew alive in every city as representative of the annihilated race, as a warning.
&nbs
p; Joška would sit in the park, his back turned to the fountain, his thumbs pressed against the back of a bench, as he flicked the matches with his fingertips, one after another, miniature torches that would burn out in the air, leaving no trace. They would turn to smoke and dust, just as the Jewish people, in a year, or two, or three, would. But no one would believe this, for who would think of doing away with six million peaceful and unarmed people – small shop owners, moneylenders, gullible bankers, industrialists, rabbis, shoemakers, lottery ticket salesmen, small-time crooks and con men, idealists, communists and Zionists, soft-spoken worshippers afraid of life but even more of what comes after, famous doctors, surgeons, pediatricians, psychoanalysts, disciples of Doctor Freud – whom the Nazis did not kill when they found him in his Vienna apartment, exiling him to London instead, for Doctor Freud too was a match juggler – professors of biology who created the most beautiful herbaria in the history of Europe, archivists, librarians, village teachers whose frightened wives concealed their Jewish heritage, great German poets and travel writers who had journeyed all the way to India and Nepal in order to leave their testimonials to the German culture, circus performers and owners, village carpenters, proprietors of pawnshops and rare books, chemists, manufacturers of poison, barbers, mystics, tricksters of great imagination, quacks who for tiny sums would make the rounds of apartments in the center of town, performing abortions on the underage daughters of the city’s solicitous gentlemen, philosophy professors, building custodians, owners of small kosher restaurants at the border of the ghetto where non-Jews were also welcome, maids, servant girls, midwives, authors of the first Aztec, Turkish, and Aramaic grammars, blind and deaf painters, idlers, dreamers, assiduous bookkeepers, industrialists with no heart for their workers or their workers’ rachitic children who would not live long, rag merchants, peddlers, roofers, ice cream vendors, loafers, porters, dish washers and dish dryers in communal kitchens, where the Jewish poor found food, philanthropists, sponsors, coin collectors and counterfeiters, false prophets, proselytes and neophytes, who changed faith too late for by then Nazism had come along? Who would have believed that someone would actually come forth and erase the lives and memories of all these people?
Joška Herzl sat on the bench in the park – though Jews were forbidden to enter the park under penalty of death – with his back turned to the world, his thumbs against the bench, juggling lit matches with his fingers. He did not want to think about Aunt Ružica and his sister Doroteja who up to the moment of her death had never had an evil thought, and he wished to be killed right there, while juggling the little torches that burned and disappeared one after another. But no one dared satisfy his wish.
And here the sad life confession of Joška Herzl could end, and it would be the right moment for the juggler of matchsticks to demonstrate for Rudolf Stubler his art, if we were prepared to forget and mislay from the history of the twentieth century that part of the story that touches upon the great Croatian pianist Maksimilijan Stinčić, after whom today, in 2012, a beautiful Zagreb street is named, which until the nineties bore the name of Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, and upon his life’s partner, the famous music pedagogue Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić. Perhaps we could even forget it, were the two of them not linchpins of Croatian culture and were the story of them not at the same time the story of Zagreb at a certain moment in history, the moment when Rudi, following his unsuccessful studies in Vienna and Graz, spent the last days and months of his youth in the city.
After the fateful Christmas they spent with their son, Aunt Ružica, and her simple-minded daughter, when Maks Stinčić insulted the boy and provoked him into becoming a match juggler, they visited him in Graz whenever their consciences weighed on them. And with the elections of 1933, as Germany began to get back on its feet and once more become a power, their consciences weighed on them less often. In part, this was a result of the difficult conditions in the country, the misery in which the Croatian nation found itself after a Serbian war volunteer shot three representatives of the Croatian Peasant Party at the Belgrade Assembly, fatally wounding the popular leader Stjepan Radić. Neither Maksimilijan Stinčić nor Bosiljka Stinčić had been known for their patriotism until then, but this attack so disgusted and infuriated them that they attended less and less to family matters. They gathered with socially and politically like-minded people, glowered angrily, and by October of 1934 were quietly celebrating the murder in Marseille of King Alexander as a tyrant and oppressor.
They started thinking about their son again in 1936, when reports first appeared in the news about Hitler’s possible seizure and annexation of Austria. Probably one of them, perhaps Bosiljka, had thought it would be only natural, and in line with familial relations, warmth, and solidarity among people, to save Auntie Ružica and her simple-minded daughter along with Joška, and bring them all to Zagreb to live in their house in Zelengaj. There was a comfortable little apartment in their basement in which the three of them could live. It would not be too crowded – Doroteja could be instructed to be quiet, especially in the afternoons when Mr. Stinčić was resting, and not to hang around in the garden, where she might trample the roses that Bosiljka had been growing for years – but then again, how would they explain to people, what would they tell their acquaintances at the conservatory, who those three people suddenly living in their basement were? Ought they to say that they were Jews, or would it perhaps be wiser to keep quiet about it? And anyway, was it really the right time to be announcing to the world that Bosiljka’s aunt was a Jew and that Madam Elene Levy Kamauf, her respected mother, had actually been half-Jewish? To Mr. Stinčić this would not have been a problem, he was a man of the world and for years had performed with Jewish musicians, and the deceased Mr. Stein-Baruch, Maksim’s manager from the best days of his career, was a Jew who kicked up his heels on the Sabbath, which was why Maksim did not perform on Friday evenings, but was this really the time to be explaining all this to people? Might they take it as a provocation, a political taking of sides, just at the moment when a new order was being born in Europe, one in which the Croats needed to find their place, if Bosiljka proclaimed to the entire musical world that her mother had been a Jew and that, for this reason, she had decided to open the doors of her villa to some Austrian Jews?
But this was not all. How could Maksimilijan and Bosiljka have faith in Joška’s discretion? The old Jewess would, it was certain, keep the family secret for her own sake. Aunt Ružica well knew what would happen to her and her child if they stayed in Graz, if the Stinčićs did not save them, but could they be certain that simple-minded Doroteja might not tell someone the truth about Joška Herzl’s background? All they had to do was open up the tomb under the arcade and confirm that the small white casket was empty, filled with dirt, and that the Josip Stinčić “for whom his father Maksimilijan and mother Bosiljka mourned eternally, praying to the dear Lord God and the Virgin Mary for their only son among the angels” was not in his grave. And if he wasn’t there, then perhaps what the simple-minded girl had said was true.
The people of Zagreb would slowly recognize the faces of the two famous musicians in the monstrous physiognomy of the Jewish boy with the tic. And that would be the end of Maksimilijan Stinčić and Bosiljka Kamauf Stinčić, it would be their social and artistic suicide.
After German troops erupted into Austrian territory on March 12, 1938, and the borders were declared nonexistent between the countries in which the same German language was spoken, Maksimilijan Stinčić and his wife fell into a kind of religious rapture. At first, it seemed perhaps this might be merely a momentary spiritual state evoked by the early onset of spring, a temporary neurosis – as was noted by the popular medical commentators in the pages of the newspapers Jutarnji list, Obzor, and Svijet – and that the trembling would pass as soon as April, May, and June came around, months that are especially pleasant in Zagreb, when, in the mortally ill Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the cultural and civilizational distinctiveness of that Central Europea
n metropolis, by contrast to the colors and scents of central Serbia and the southern heart of the Balkans, was most evident.
But the rapture did not pass that spring, or that summer, and in the fall and winter of the final European peacetime year the Stinčićs continued to hold memorial masses in the city’s churches, spending their afternoons and evenings at the Mirogoj Cemetery, kneeling at the grave of their only son, incapable of holding back the wave of grief that had suddenly surged forth and about which, in deep sympathy, the Zagreb gentlefolk commented during intermissions of theatrical matinees, where the most significant town discussions often took place. Parents will live in shock for years after the death of a child, incapable of grasping what has happened, the loss they have experienced exceeds any other loss in life, exceeds what a person is able to understand, imagine, and endure, and what cannot be imagined cannot be endured.
Zagreb’s well-to-do commented in this manner, shocked by the image of the parents kneeling and praying every evening at Mirogoj, their knees on the cold Brač stone. If until the spring of 1938 there was still hope in the recovery of the great pianist Maksimilijan Stinčić, whose career had been suddenly cut short for reasons largely unknown to the public, after the season of despair and grief, it was clear that his piano playing was over.
After the Anschluss and the disappearance of Aunt Ružica and big Doroteja, Joška Herzl’s parents stopped visiting. The letters from Zagreb, which had once arrived with monthly regularity, no longer came, nor did any messengers deliver parcels or money at the Emanuel Café, leaving them with the landlord Hansijo, a Zagreb native from Kustošija. On one occasion Joška managed to go into the post office, though Jews were forbidden to go into the post office, and begged a postal worker to call the Zagreb number 47-39, though Jews were forbidden to use the telephone, but to everything he said his mother Bosiljka answered: “Hello, hello, you’ve reached Zagreb, I can’t hear anything, you’ve got the wrong number…”
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