Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  “Fire!”

  Friedrich stumbled down the stairs. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ran into the burning workshop, turned off the gas pipe, and thereby prevented the flames from consuming his life’s work.

  * * *

  A WEEK later, on 26 November 1903, Sofie went into labor. Friedrich placed great hopes on the birth of his fourth child.

  Georg, the eldest son, was already fifteen and causing him concern. The child had been born with a club foot. At the beginning, Sofie had kept his disability a secret. Was it not a punishment for her frigid behavior toward her husband? Had she not threatened to throw herself out of the window shortly before the birth?

  Irma was born three years later, but there was no question of a girl taking over the running of the business. The third child, Paul, was nine years younger than Irma, and his father’s favorite, but his impetuous character and his tendency to daydream led Friedrich Herz to doubt that he would ever be capable of taking over the company. Friedrich hoped that the fourth child would be a boy.

  That afternoon, to the annoyance of the midwife, Friedrich Herz stuck his head through the double doors to Sofie’s bedroom again and again. It had been dark for some time, and Friedrich was pacing up and down uneasily in the flat. Finally the news of a successful birth was announced in the early evening.

  “A boy?” cried Friedrich Herz, in an entreating tone.

  He slumped when he heard the answer: “No, not a boy!”

  With disappointment he said: “A girl…”

  The midwife again said: “No.”

  Not a boy and not a girl? Before he could come to his senses the midwife’s voice hit him like a slap in the face: “Two girls!”

  * * *

  ALICE HERZ was born into Habsburg Austria a few minutes before her twin sister Marianne on 26 November 1903. As Marianne weighed only 1.9 kilos it was feared that she would not live long. Alice was 2.5 kilos, appreciably heavier. She looked altogether healthier and more robust, although later on she would grow much more slowly than her sister. Her mother was full of love for the weaker child and called her Mizzerl or Mizzi, and naturally gave her more attention and care. In spite of this, Mizzi remained all her life the anxious one; a pessimist who in her life always saw the dark side of things first. Alice, on the other hand, developed into a courageous person who was sure of herself. Very soon her mother would be heard to say “We don’t need to worry about Alice; she will go her own way.”

  Although the girls not only thought differently and looked different, Sofie dressed them both in the same clothes. Their bright red bonnets could be seen from far off: the Herz twins are coming! Beside her twin sister Alice was less striking. Alice said that Marianne was as pretty as a picture: she had tender white skin, expressive dark eyes, a sweet little mouth and fabulous pretty black hair. Her mother often picked up her favorite child and hugged and kissed her, while Alice, who was more capable of dealing with life, looked on with her winning smile.

  Alice heard few words of praise from her mother. Sofie reproached her children when they failed to do their schoolwork neatly or did something silly, but she found it hard to utter a phrase of encouragement. Alice became a remarkable creature of habit for one so young. Night after night with great pride and astonishing meticulousness she polished the family shoes: eight pairs in all—the parents, her brothers and sisters and even those of the Czech maid, Marie. And as if the five-year-old had not made enough of an effort, every morning she got up shortly after six and crept out to run a few doors down to the baker to pick up the family’s order for bread and rolls. This was actually the maid’s job, whose duties began at first light when she raked the oven and got the hot water ready for the family’s morning wash. Alice, however, refused to give up her role as bread-runner. Her father praised her, but her mother continued to lavish all her attention on Mizzi, despite the fact that she never lifted a finger in the house.

  Mizzi enchanted even the strangest of people. Or so it appeared to Alice—who was generally standing unnoticed next to her at the time. Aged six, the twins were out walking with their older sister Irma on Letna Hill in the Belvedere Garden, part of the nearby Crown Prince Rudolf Park, when an old friend of the family came up. Alice already had an idea what was going to happen. Enraptured with little Marianne the woman cried out: “My God, this child is lovely!” This time, however, Alice was ready to quip: “But I am cleverer!”

  Soon Alice found a new way to win her mother’s love. Every two weeks Sofie and her daughters were busy for four whole days doing the family laundry. The air in the large kitchen would be filled with steam and the smell of soapy water. Little Alice literally fell over herself to show her mother what an industrious washerwoman she was. She sorted out the bed linen and the articles of clothing; dark clothes had to be separated from light ones; silk from cotton. She helped to brush the clothes as they soaked and to rinse them. And she went up to the roof with Marie, where the clean clothes were hung out to dry. Alice could not be discouraged from pinning a few articles of clothing to the washing line. To do this she stood on her tiptoes on a wooden stool—risking life and limb in the process.

  As there was no tap in the kitchen, bucket upon bucket of water had to be brought in from the hall. One day Alice’s grandmother Fanny was coming down the stairs from her flat on the second floor when she ran into the little girl. Alice’s face was bright red from the exertion of dragging a bucket filled to the brim with water across the hall to the kitchen. Fanny was a quiet, reserved woman who preferred to avoid conflict. This time, however, she lost her temper and gave her daughter a talking to: “Have you not noticed that you are turning your child into Cinderella? Can you not see that every child needs the same amount of attention and love?”

  “You are a fine one to talk,” her daughter exploded, “you who arranged my marriage, you speak of love?!”

  Alice could not see what the bucket had to do with love, but uncertain as to whether she had been responsible for the fight between her mother and grandmother, she began quietly to sob. A word that she had never heard before seemed to play a role in the battle: mischpoche. In the war of words between the two women a few words of Yiddish had surfaced, possibly because they had become overexcited, perhaps to spare the children. The foreign-sounding words, the outraged tone and her feelings of guilt puzzled Alice.

  Finally Sofie turned to her weeping child and gave her an affectionate cuddle:

  “Alice, it is not your fault that we are having a row. I love you as much as I love Mizzi; only you are strong, I am proud of you. You will make your own way in life. Mizzi is weaker, and she is going to have a tougher job of it than you.” And she stroked Alice’s hair.

  Her grandmother’s final words kept going through her head: “You don’t have to love your mother,” she had told her daughter, “but you owe her derech-erez. Derech-erez.” Then her grandmother left and went off in the direction of the Belvedere Gardens and sat down on her favorite bench. She was usually to be found there, come rain or shine, when she was not at home.

  In an agitated frame of mind, Alice told her sister what had happened. “Do you know what derech-erez means?”

  Mizzi shook her head.

  “And what does mischpoche mean?”

  She shook her head again.

  So the two girls decided to ask their grandmother and ran off to find her. The park was only a few hundred meters from home but the twins were completely out of breath by the time they reached the bench.

  “Grandmother,” Alice panted, “tell us what mischpoche means?”

  Her grandmother smiled: “Mischpoche means family and that is all of us together who belong to the family. Our family is daddy, mummy, grandmother, grandfather and the children.”

  “And derech-erez?”

  “That means respect.”

  “Respect?” Their grandmother saw the question in Alice and Marianne’s eyes.

  “Respecting your parents means honoring them, acknowledging them.” After a pause
Fanny added, “Those are Yiddish words. Yiddish is my mother tongue and your mother’s mother tongue. Yiddish is the mother tongue of most Jews in our country.”

  “Jews?” asked Alice.

  Then, for the first time Fanny Schulz told her grandchildren of the Jewish people and the diaspora. The girls listened to her spellbound, as if it were a fairy tale.

  Although the family celebrated Passover every year, their mother had never so much as alluded to the Jews, let alone allowed a Yiddish word to pass her lips. When Alice later used the word meschugge which she had picked up from other children, her mother gave her a firm dressing down: “Don’t use it again.” Sofie tried stubbornly to prevent anything that recalled her Jewish origins from reaching the children. For her, Judaism was a belief she had rejected. She felt she had good reasons. One was the Ashkenazi tradition which had been her misfortune and which had caused her unhappy marriage. Another was her conviction that the worrying and frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the multiracial Habsburg Empire were chiefly directed against Orthodox Jews, taking their cue from perceived Jewish traditions. Even in the early twentieth century it was widely believed in Bohemia and Moravia that the Jews “needed Christian blood at Eastertide, and therefore slaughtered little children and virgins.”

  In the last years of the nineteenth century, a considerable number of Prague Jews, above all from the working class, had begun to align themselves with the Czech majority and plumped for the Czech language before the German in their choice of schools and universities. According to figures published in 1900, 14,576 Jews described themselves as Czech-speaking, as opposed to 11,599 German-speakers.1

  Sofie, however, identified with liberal-thinking Germany—like most educated Prague Jews. To be assimilated into the German-speaking cultural circle of the city was for her—much more than for her husband—not just a measure of security, it satisfied a deep, inner need. Her access to higher education had been blocked, but she saw herself as part of a world steeped in culture. She instilled in her children a respect for German high culture, a culture that was open to the world. They were to become artistically minded, cosmopolitan Germans, without bearing the stigma of Judaism. It was therefore from their grandmother that Alice and Mizzi first learned that there were not just Germans and Czechs in Prague, but that there was a third group of people: Jews. Only a few months later they would become painfully aware of what it meant to be a Jew.

  * * *

  IN THE part of the city where Friedrich Herz had settled generally nobody would have asked about origin or religion. The former villages of Bubna—where the Herz factory was to be found—and Holešovice were only incorporated into the former walled city as its seventh district. Bubna on the left bank of the Moldau was rapidly industrialized, but even twenty years later it still felt like a small village.

  Alice and Marianne played with many Czech, German or Jewish children in the Belvedere Gardens or in the streets and courtyards closest to their home. They played with their skipping ropes or catch, hide-and-seek and hopscotch. The other children's backgrounds made not a jot of difference to them.

  The twin girls grew up bilingual. In the family they naturally spoke German but with many of their friends and with their father’s workers they spoke Czech. The nationality problem, however, had become increasingly acute in the Bohemian city. The majority of people were Czech. The German minority accounted for just ten percent of the population, and was mostly made up of civil servants and the garrison, as well as a part of the old Bohemian nobility, scientists and intellectuals and some German Bohemians from the Sudetenland. From a political point of view, the Jews reinforced the Germans and were considered anathema to the Czechs for that reason. More and more German-speakers from Prague were tending toward nationalism and anti-Semitism and spurned the Jews. The children had yet to see evidence of this. Not yet, but adolescent Germans and Czechs were already trading cobbles and vile insults.

  One day the twins were playing with two friends when suddenly a group of young Czechs from the area appeared in the park and as quick as a flash surrounded the girls. The lads had evidently learned that the industrialist Friedrich Herz was a Jew and began to sing a mocking song “Smaradlawe židy—smaradlawe židy,” they kept chanting: “you stink like Jews,” while at the same time they pushed “their prisoners” around until they fell over and began to cry. The Czechs retired in triumph and the humiliated children ran home with grazed knees. When they got in Alice and Marianne ran to their mother: “Mother, why did they hurt us? Are we different?”

  The otherwise so brave and quick-witted Sofie was lost for words.

  * * *

  THE GIRLS’ home was at 23 Bělsky Street. The main street in the Seventh District was named after the Mayor of Prague Václav Bělsky. For the children the building was filled with secrets and surprises. It took years for them to discover every nook and cranny. Friedrich Herz had acquired the estate at the bottom of hilly Belvedere Gardens shortly before his marriage and had it constructed like an urban version of a courtyard farm. It consisted of four large buildings. Toward the street there was a two-story dwelling, a roomy, but from the outside by no means majestic building with an unprepossessing, plain facade which failed to conform to the historical or neoclassical schools of architecture current in central Prague at the time. Next to the porter’s flat on the ground floor there were the director’s and secretary’s offices. Up a few steps on the mezzanine, you reached the family’s eight-room flat, together with a smaller one which was rented out. Three of the four units on the floor above were rented out. In the fourth lived Grandmother Fanny and her maid. With the rent from the flats Friedrich paid off the mortgage on the house.

  The flats were flanked by two forty-meter-long workshops. In the right-hand building the precision scales were made: letter-scales, pharmaceutical scales, scales for use in grocer’s shops; in the left-hand building they put together scales for heavy industry.

  The stable at the far end of the courtyard, opposite the flats, completed the quadrangle. It exercised a great pull on the children. They were particularly keen to watch Franta when he was looking after the horses. One day the servant pressed a carrot into the hands of both girls. The sturdy dray horses whinnied loudly and stretched their necks out anxiously toward the children. Mizzi was too frightened to feed the horses and hid behind a pillar. Alice on the other hand, pushed her carrot toward the mare Bianka. It was love at first sight. From that moment onward she visited her favorite horse daily, and Bianka always thanked her with a joyful neigh.

  Franta was particularly fond of Alice’s brother Paul and let him mount the horses and ride around the courtyard. No matter how broad in the beam and powerful the horses looked, they were placid and good-hearted.

  One evening Franta told the girls: “The moment has come: today you can both have a ride!”

  “Hurrah,” came Alice’s spontaneous reaction, “Can I ride Bianka?”

  For her part Mizzi wasn’t having anything to do with the horses and when Franta tried to talk her round she fled to the furthest recesses of the stables and disappeared behind some bales of straw.

  Alice allowed Franta to lift her on to the horse. She looked tiny on its broad back and while she held on tightly to Bianka’s mane, she was happy and laughed her infectious Alice-laugh.

  Sofie did not get any closer to her husband over the years. She found it hard to respect him despite the fact he was a reliable, devoted and uncommonly hard-working man whose neighbors admired his friendly character and whose employees were unstintingly loyal and long-serving. He was not as well-educated as Sofie was, he never picked up a book and only rarely could he be talked into attending the performance of an opera. Sofie did not like putting up with his antiquated thinking and his deep-rooted thrift. Although he was ready to invest money in the education of his two sons, he showed little understanding of the fact that his three daughters needed to be helped too.

  Sofie was also particularly unwilling to receive Friedrich’s f
amily. One of his sisters visited regularly and every time Sofie’s hackles rose over the comments that came bubbling out of her mouth. When she inquired whether her brother was getting enough to eat, Sofie showed her the door.

  When Friedrich Herz left the factory after his long working day, he was thinking of having a good supper, of a little chat with his family, of rounding off the day peacefully and going to bed around eight. While the midday meal was a rush, he could take his time over his dinner. He would therefore often go to the delicatessen across the road after work for some air-dried sausage or some Swiss Emmental or other, more mundane, provisions. Shortly before six every evening the children had to take their seats at the dining table with clean hands and combed hair and wait for their father. Precisely at that point, however, when her husband was hoping to relax, Sofie, as Friedrich realized, was hatching a reason to prevent this.

  One day, in the summer of 1910 or thereabouts, Friedrich was supposed to bring home two jars of spicy gherkins for the evening meal. Since the advent of the deafeningly noisy tram had made the crossing of the road perilous, he took his life into his hands each time he went to the shop. On this occasion, he did not run into a tram, but a three-wheeled vehicle bearing the word “taxi.” Although Friedrich Herz had already read a newspaper article announcing the arrival of motorized vehicles in Prague, it was the first time in his life that he had seen a rattling, stinking automobile roaring toward him. He was lost for words: thirty kilometers an hour seemed madly fast to him.

  The taxi had disappeared from view leaving Friedrich standing aghast in front of the delicatessen. How much faster the smaller deliveries could be brought to the station with one of those wonderful machines! Enraptured by his brush with the taxi, and quite contrary to his usual frugal habits, he bought a bottle of expensive cognac for himself and a juicy ham for the family. He was almost leaving the shop when he noticed the jars of gherkins, which were the principal reason why he had gone there in the first place. He turned on his heels and returned to the counter.