And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  “Thank you.”

  Edith never hovered, which Scott appreciated. Possibly she was watching on security cameras, so she didn’t need to hover.

  Among the many boxes of letters written by Felix or Fanny, he chose one at random, from the 1840s. He took it to a nearby table, which was equipped with a computer terminal, excellent lighting, and a series of recharging outlets. He sat down and opened the box. Taking out the first file, he began reading. Felix’s handwriting was graceful, clear, and consistent, as if he’d taken very seriously his boyhood instruction in penmanship. In fact, Felix’s writing was rather beautiful, for example in the way he crossed the p and z in Leipzig to create a decorative flourish.

  Fanny’s writing was less studied, faster, tossed off. At times it approached a scratchy scrawl. Nonetheless he was able to follow it.

  The letters were addressed to friends and family members. The letters between the siblings were the ones he liked best. Fanny’s letters to Felix revealed both a special warmth and a rather sardonic humor:

  Da man noch immer das Volk ist, das im Dunkeln wandelt . . . If one is a member of the people walking in darkness who don’t know when they will see you, the Great Light, in person, then one probably had best proceed with the help of quill, ink, and paper. . .

  Mein lieber Felix, sey einmal recht barmherzig . . . My dear Felix, be kind and merciful toward me sometime, and after you will have delighted Europe and neighboring countries, delight and gladden your own family once again. Either come here for a few days incognito . . .

  The siblings shared such a deep affection. Such mutual sympathy. They used pet names for each other. They exchanged musical sketches, and highlights of the places they visited and the people they met. He could imagine them at their desks, writing down the details that each knew would make the other smile.

  He wished he felt such empathy with his own siblings. And yet . . . was there an undercurrent of anger in Fanny’s tone? Of fighting to maintain a pretense of good relations with her brother? She had every right to be seething with resentment toward him, for his control over her life—if one listened to the feminist critiques, that is.

  No one could ever know her mind for certain, however, and he wasn’t about to start psychoanalyzing her.

  Lieber Felix! Wozu sind die dummen Streiche in der Welt . . . Dear Felix! Why do blunders exist in this world if not to be committed? I’ve made a truly stupid one, for I rejected the arrangement concerning the piano that you offered me . . .

  As he studied the letters, he realized that Fanny’s handwriting looked familiar. He felt as if he were reading messages from an old friend.

  And then he knew.

  He turned to the computer terminal on the table and opened one of his password-protected files, to double-check.

  It was Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel who had written upon Susanna Kessler’s cantata manuscript, Im Privat-Kabinett halten. Keep in the private cabinet.

  Chapter 37

  Dan was in Berlin, staring at love. He sat at a worktable at the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden, boxes of music manuscripts once owned by the Berlin Sing-Akademie arrayed around him. Sara Levy had left much of her music collection to the Sing-Akademie.

  Sara Itzig Levy and Samuel Salomon Levy. He studied their library stamp, symbol of their unity, typically placed on the music in their collection . . . the graceful sweep of the S of Sara and the S of Samuel, intermingled with the flourishes of the L of Levy.

  This stamp was not, however, on a cantata that they’d safeguarded but most likely didn’t want.

  What were their lives like? Before arriving in Berlin, Dan had learned a good deal about them. A long-lost world had come alive before him, of salon afternoons and private concerts. He imagined Sara’s loneliness after her husband died, and the forty-eight years she lived without him. Dan sympathized with the pain she must have experienced, being without children during an era when having children was the primary purpose of a woman’s life. He had read her will, a copy of which was kept here at the Staatsbibliothek: she’d left a large part of her fortune to Berlin’s Jewish orphanage. So far, he hadn’t found any more evidence to show her possible interactions with the orphanage, but the link made sense: a woman without children, and children without mothers, brought together.

  Dan had been working at the Staatsbibliothek for three days. The massive library, which dated from the early twentieth century, had been heavily damaged during World War II, both from aerial bombardment and from street fighting. It was only partially rebuilt. During the war, the librarians had taken their treasures, including those he was examining today, to monasteries, salt mines, and caves, to keep them safe. At the end of the war, the Russians took whatever they stumbled upon in the chaos of Germany’s defeat. More than twenty years after the fall of communism, German musical archives were still coming to light in the libraries of the former Soviet Union.

  Turning to the next Sing-Akademie box, he began to review its contents page by page, skipping nothing. He found before him W. F. Bach’s Flute Concerto in D Major.

  Dan examined the flute concerto with care. He was struck with near certainty that the title page included the handwriting of Samuel Salomon Levy. For confirmation, he compared it to the Stammbuch entry that he’d photographed with his phone. The similarities here, as well as with the notation on Susanna’s cantata wrapper, were unmistakable. He’d order a reproduction of the flute concerto’s title page so that eventually he could include it as an illustration in the article or book that he and Scott would write about Susanna’s manuscript.

  Dan noticed that the Levy collection included a lot of flute music. Was Samuel Levy a flutist? Was the W. F. Bach concerto a piece that Samuel and Sara had performed together?

  Sunlight filled the long windows of the music division’s reading room. The room had been renovated recently and was filled with such modern amenities as good lighting, well-placed electrical outlets, and moderately comfortable chairs. The paint was no longer peeling. Dan found himself wishing for the old, albeit shabby, stateliness that he’d experienced during his first visit here years before.

  Dan looked at his watch. In ten minutes, he’d see Susanna. She was meeting him downstairs, at the library entrance. He checked his phone for texts and voice mail. While Dan was in Germany, Becky was staying with Dan’s sister and her family, and they were in touch frequently.

  Susanna had arrived in Berlin from New York this morning. She’d done something that seemed to Dan, with his parsimonious upbringing, to be almost shockingly radical: she’d booked her hotel room from the night before, so that she’d have a place to go in the early hours after her plane landed. On more than a few occasions, Dan had wandered around German cities in a daze before conferences while waiting for his hotel room to become available in the afternoon.

  With his fingertip, he followed the intertwined initials of Sara and Samuel’s library stamp. What record would he leave, of the love he’d experienced?

  He checked his watch again. Nine minutes.

  He touched his chin. Still smooth. This morning he’d shaved carefully. He’d donned a relatively new oxford shirt, as if this would make a difference. He had enough distance from himself to be amused by his focus on these small gestures that no one else would notice, by his hopes half-hidden from himself, and by his hesitations as he contemplated the risks he might be about to undertake. Despite his graphic imaginings, he didn’t know what risks he was actually prepared to take in reality—if in fact she gave him the opportunity to take any risks at all.

  He focused on the music manuscripts.

  He checked his watch. Six minutes.

  More manuscripts.

  Two minutes.

  He didn’t want to be waiting downstairs when she arrived, creating the impression that she was late. Nor did he want her to wait and possibly worry. With both those considerations in mind, he needed to organize himself and get downstairs now. He gathered up the materials and returned them to the librarian at the de
sk. He filled out a form to order a reproduction of the title page of the flute concerto.

  “Vielen Dank für Ihre Hilfe,” he said to the librarian. Thank you for your help.

  “Schon gut.” Very good.

  He walked down the passage to the central hall. The formal entry doors to the original, domed reading room were before him. These doors were kept always locked. He’d seen photographs of what lay beyond them: a huge, round ruin. A deformed steel skeleton. During the Allied bombing, the reading room’s massive glass-and-steel dome had collapsed upon itself. The library’s stones were still black from firestorms and riddled with holes from the shelling.

  He approached the grand staircase.

  He began to walk down.

  She entered the vestibule. She wore a sleeveless dress and sandals. Her arms, bare. Her legs, bare. She reached the bottom of the stairs. Looking up, she spotted him. She smiled with excitement and happiness. Happiness, he dared to believe, to see him.

  She began walking up, until they embraced.

  “How are you? You look wonderful,” he said, and she seemed to be saying the same to him, their words blending together, as she kept her hand against his back, while his hand was around her shoulder. Arm in arm, they walked down the stairs and left the library.

  He took her to the outdoor café in the park between the Staatsoper, the State Opera House, and the Opernpalais. The café was about a block from the library, past the square that had been a book-burning site for the Nazis. Dan refrained from pointing out how convenient it was, to burn books near a library. Susanna could make that dismal connection herself.

  The café was crowded, but they found a shaded table at the end of a row, giving them a measure of privacy.

  “How lovely,” she said, slipping into the chair opposite him.

  In the gentle breeze, seeds from the sycamore trees fell upon her hair. He brushed them off.

  “I thought you’d enjoy it.”

  Here in the shade beneath the trees, away from the noise and exhaust of the street traffic, a scent of the countryside seemed to fill the air.

  Menus were already on the table. Susanna opened hers.

  “This is a little daunting,” she said.

  And it was, with dozens of varieties of cake . . . cheesecake with Quark and without, raspberry Linzer torte, apricot Linzer torte, Black Forest cake, on and on the listing went. Starlings dive-bombed the leftovers at other tables.

  “How about the Sacher torte?” she said. “Would you like to split it?”

  “Sounds good.” When the server arrived, Dan ordered for them in German. Then: “How was your trip?”

  “Long but smooth.”

  “And your hotel?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  Although people were all around them—young couples leaning close, distracted parents attempting to rein in rambunctious children, old men reading newspapers, chic older women drinking tea—he felt alone with Susanna. They inhabited a kind of heightened reality where two conversations were taking place simultaneously: the one on the surface concerned the merits of various types of cake as well as the details of her journey and his stay in Berlin, while the other, within them, was about what would happen next, and where they would go when they left here.

  Their cake arrived, the chocolate flavorful, the accompanying coffee acidic, exactly the way he liked it. Say what you will about Germans, they were masters of coffee and cake. Dan noticed a few of the men and women at other tables glancing at Susanna, and he was pleased and proud.

  “How has your work been going?” she asked.

  “Our work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Thank you for putting it that way.”

  “It’s going well. I want to tell you a story.” The story began long ago, with an adolescent girl who was the sole Berlin student of the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Susanna looked into the distance as she listened, and he knew by her concentration that she was imagining the lives and the history that he was laying out before her.

  “We have a few things left to figure out,” he said. “Like where the cantata manuscript was in the years between the death of Fanny Hensel and World War Two. Also, who originally gave the cantata to Sara Levy or to her husband.”

  “It’s a remarkable story.”

  “Yes.”

  Soon the check arrived, and with it, the moment of decision on where to go next. As he looked at her across the table, she was again staring away from him, toward the architectural confection of the opera house.

  She turned to him. “Oddly enough, my hotel has a historical exhibition in the lobby about a German civilian uprising against the Nazis during the war. The uprising took place on or near that site. It was among the very few instances of civil disobedience during the Nazi years.”

  A starling accosted the table next to them and flew off with the stem of a strawberry.

  “Maybe you’d like to see the exhibit.”

  She seemed to relax in acknowledgment of this variant of would you like to come up to my place for a drink?, a phrase he knew only from old movies.

  “The exhibit sounds interesting. I’d like to see it. Really,” he added, residual anxiety compelling him to pretend this was the primary reason he wanted to go to her hotel.

  She let him pay the check, and he was pleased to treat her. They walked across the bridge onto Museum Island. They passed the Dom, Berlin’s cathedral, its walls black from the fires of war. In the near distance, the museums of Berlin were packed together.

  They crossed the next bridge, and they turned to walk along the Spree. He tried to see the city as if for the first time, through her eyes . . . The monumental and war-damaged older buildings. The stark apartment blocks from the Communist era. The new towers with their gleaming glass. The massive construction sites as the former East Berlin continued to be modernized and integrated with West Berlin. The swaths of emptiness still remaining from the bombing raids. So much history, so many centuries, alive together. He sensed in her a disquiet that he couldn’t penetrate.

  He already knew the name and location of her hotel. She’d e-mailed it to him last week, and he’d looked it up. He’d plotted their route from the café to the hotel in advance, just in case. “I want to show you something.”

  They passed the Museum of the DDR, as the former East Germany was called. Tourist boats were moored along the river bank. Outdoor cafés crowded the quay. He led her to the corner of Burgstrasse.

  “The story I was telling you . . . as far as I can work out, this is where Daniel Itzig’s mansion was. Where Sara Levy grew up.”

  All around them were modern structures, some from the Communist era, some newly constructed.

  “In those days, this area was outside the traditional Jewish quarter. The wealthy built their palaces here.”

  In his mind he saw the old city. He heard the carriages rattling on the cobblestones. Behind the tall windows of the palace of Daniel Itzig, the King’s Jew, a girl practiced the harpsichord.

  “And over there,” he said, as they continued along the river, “on what’s now called Museum Island, that’s where the home of Sara Itzig Levy was, the mansion where she lived after her marriage. Her home was surrounded by gardens and was famous for its trees. When she was very old, she even stood up to the king, when he wanted to destroy her garden as well as a wing of her home to build the Neues Museum. She wouldn’t budge. So the museum’s design had to be adjusted.”

  The centuries existed simultaneously around them, the era of Sara Levy as close as the Nazis, the Communists, the present.

  A child, about three years old, with white-blond hair, ran before them.

  “Halt!” a man shouted behind them.

  Susanna gripped Dan’s arm and turned. The man, the boy’s father by the look of him, ran to catch up with the child. He passed Dan and Susanna. The unheeding child was now approaching the steps leading down to the river.

  “Halt!” At last the father caught up with his son and scolded him.

&
nbsp; Running off—a common predicament with kids that age, Dan knew from raising Becky. But Susanna clutched his arm with both her hands, and Dan knew that she hadn’t heard it that way. She’d heard something else. She’d heard a memory of war, of films, books, and historical accounts. Halt meant that you were as good as dead. After the war, the writers who called themselves Group 47 tried to purge the German language of its Nazi overtones, but how could you purge the word for “stop”?

  In silence they turned away from the riverbank and walked along Burgstrasse. She continued to hold his arm, now more for pleasure than protection. He felt a tranquillity envelop him, both because he was far from the constraints of home and because she seemed to feel that he could give her what she needed.

  They reached Rosenstrasse, the location of the hotel. The small street was abruptly quiet after the bustle of the main thoroughfare. Entering the hotel, they were greeted by a museum display, with large-format photos and explanatory placards. Dan stopped to examine the exhibit. He learned that the hotel was near the site of a factory where in 1943, German Jewish men married to German Christian women had been imprisoned. A rumor spread that the husbands were about to be deported. Their wives protested on the street each day until the men were freed. Dan hadn’t known anything about it. He translated the German documents for Susanna.

  When he was halfway through, Susanna said, “You can look at the rest of the exhibit later.” She glided her hand down Dan’s arm and took his hand. She led him to the elevator.

  Her decision was fine with him.

  Now they were upstairs in her room, sleek, modern, sunlit, windows open. The gauzy curtains billowed on the breeze.

  Susanna turned to Dan and reassured herself, everything will be okay, and she reached up to embrace him, her hands pressing into his shoulders, his neck, his hair, caressing his cheeks, outlining his eyes with her fingertips, bringing her face to his.

  Even as Dan felt himself present in this moment, Susanna unbuttoning his shirt, stroking his chest, his back, he sensed Julie doing the same in a flash within his mind. Julie at nineteen, lithe and strong, the first time they were together. Julie later, her body misshapen by disease yet still the person he’d loved so long. He wanted to stay in the present, but he couldn’t bear to push Julie away and he wouldn’t. Julie, Susanna. He unzipped Susanna’s dress. And then something inside himself eased and he understood he could have both, this and the other, the memories and the present. The two didn’t cancel each other out. Susanna stepped out of her dress. She pulled off his shirt. He drew her close, feeling her skin upon his, letting her envelop him.