by Karen White
On Thursday afternoon, after a morning of sewing at Gerta’s, she walked up the stairs from the subway to the Lexington Avenue exit side of Grand Central, and she could already hear him playing around the corner. She thought he was playing a violin concerto, maybe by Mendelssohn, but she couldn’t be sure. But one thing was certain: as soon as she heard the music, she could feel her body start responding to it. The notes were like little pulleys within her. She could feel her limbs wanting to stretch, and her feet wanting to point and flex. In her mind, she could imagine herself dancing as if she were on her own private stage and this man she didn’t know was her accompanist.
The line for Murray’s cart was not as long as it usually was, and as she walked past this nameless musician, she turned her head and smiled at him. She saw his eyes look up from his instrument, his own lips curling into a smile to match her own.
“Next!” Murray’s sharp voice called out from behind the counter of his cart.
“What do you want, doll? An apple strudel like always?”
“Yes,” she said, blushing. “But one of these days I’ll have to try your doughnuts.”
“You look more like a strudel girl,” he said, smiling, and handed her the wax paper bag. Already he was on to the next customer, and she turned to look at the wall clock just above the entrance that led down to Vanderbilt Hall.
She had less time than she thought. She now had only ten minutes to get to rehearsal at Rosenthal’s on time.
As she quickened her step to exit the terminal, she could hear the violinist begin to play a piece by the Polish-born composer Chopin. It struck her as an odd choice, as even she knew the piece sounded far better on a piano than on a violin.
It didn’t occur to her that he was playing it just to see if she might respond. To see if she was from Poland, like he was. That he was searching to find something that would remind her of her home, wherever that may be.
—
That afternoon, Liesel continued to think of the violinist who always seemed to play in the same part of the terminal, and whose musical selections began to bemuse her. She had not yet been able to see his face in its entirety, for his instrument had obstructed a clear view of his features. But Liesel had definitely seen his eyes. They had fastened onto her like a magnet. Even now, she could remember the weight of his gaze.
Rosenthal was barking orders at the girls to remember their steps.
“You’re going to descend the stairs, with your arms laced through your partners’ . . .” he commanded. “Remember to smile. Remember you need to keep your legs in sync with the others . . . I want everything seamless . . . Girls!” He raised his voice and glared at one of the girls who was chatting with another dancer. “Three days until this has to be perfect. So let’s concentrate and get going!”
Liesel kept quiet and made a mental note of the choreography. It was simplistic to her, nothing compared to the intricate work that Master Psota had created.
She looked up at the clock and saw it was almost four P.M. Before she headed to the Upper West Side to Madame Polyakov’s, she could dip into Grand Central and see if the violinist was still playing.
—
By three thirty, Gregori had already packed up and left to get to his night job at the theater’s orchestra pit. As he pushed through the doors to Lexington Avenue, he couldn’t stop thinking about the music he chose to play for the girl that day.
Although she hadn’t yet come over to him, at least today she had looked in his direction and smiled. This, he had to tell himself, was a good sign.
He knew selecting one of the Polonaises was a poor choice for him to play. It sounded terrible on the violin, given that Chopin wrote it (and virtually everything else he had composed) for the piano. But he thought that if she were Polish, she would have appreciated his feeble attempts to play something from her homeland. He racked his brain to think of what else he could play the next time he saw her.
He still had a few pieces left in his repertoire to evoke the different countries she might have come from. Anything to get her to stop for a few minutes.
He imagined that if he could do this, he would play the piece until the end, as if he were serenading her. And when he finally rested his bow, he could actually speak with her. Perhaps maybe even ask her to lunch at the Automat nearby.
He pictured a map of Europe in his head and thought about where to try next for her potential homeland. Russia was easy. Tchaikovsky. Gregori loved showing off his skills with the violin concerto, but the love theme from Romeo and Juliet would awaken the warm feelings of any girl, particularly a Russian far from home. If she were from a place like Bulgaria or Romania, then he was in trouble, though. No great composers from either of those countries. Maybe he could ask one of his uncle’s diners for a suggestion for a folk song from there. And Hungary, like Poland, would also prove difficult. There was Liszt, of course. But he was another pianist, whose best works didn’t translate well to violin. But if he tried that route again, after the Chopin debacle, wouldn’t she now see that he wasn’t playing for the money, but, instead, just trying to send a message that was only for her?
He hoped he’d see her again tomorrow and get another chance. He had already noticed her respond with her feet once to his music, and the last time he was sure he had gotten a smile. He also wondered where she might be rushing off to every afternoon. His mind created several scenarios, but none where she was locked away in an office with nothing but a typewriter and a phone.
—
As Gregori headed home to change his clothes for his orchestra job that evening, Liesel decided to dip one more time into the terminal and see if she might catch another performance by the violinist. But when she walked through the doors of the Lexington Avenue entrance, she didn’t see him. Across from Murray’s pastry cart, there was an empty spot, like a vacant stage that now was only squares of gleaming, pale marble. Liesel was surprised at her own sense of disappointment in not seeing him there.
She saw the shoeshine man busy with a customer, his back hunched over and a rag brushing off what looked like a middle-aged banker’s now sparkling wingtips.
A woman was tugging her two children in the direction of the tracks, her son with his cap crumpled in his hand.
She looked at the empty space and her mind began to wander. There was the sewing at Gerta’s that needed to be done, the performance on Friday night, and the final rehearsal for that tomorrow afternoon at two. Liesel saw Murray look up from his pastry cart. The trays were nearly empty.
“No more strudel,” he said with a smile. “But I have a few more doughnuts.”
She was hungry and knew it would be better if she had a sandwich or something healthier. But she had yet to try one of his doughnuts.
“Two sweets in one day?” She laughed and walked closer to the counter. “My waistline might not be able to take it.”
“You must be joking,” he said as he reached to take one and put it in the paper bag. Liesel removed a dime from her coin purse.
“It’s on me, honey . . . A little taste of America to sweeten your day.”
—
The following afternoon, she left Gerta’s at lunchtime and went to Times Square to catch the shuttle for Grand Central. Mr. Stein had another check for her, and then she would go on to Rosenthal’s for the last rehearsal.
In her hand was the contract for that evening.
Dates of performance: September 21–24, 1945
Start time: Be at theater no later than 5 P.M.
Performance at 7 P.M.
Payment: $10 for each performance
She folded the paper and slipped it into her purse. In her bag, she had packed her black ankle strap shoes, a waist nipper, and two pairs of hosiery, just in case one got a tear.
“Off dancing again?” Gerta had asked her as she got ready to leave.
“Yes. I’ve left a
ll the costumes on the racks with the names of the girls attached. Everything’s up to date.”
“It always is with you, meine liebe,” she said in German, “my dear.”
“See you Monday,” Liesel said as she opened the door to leave.
“Unless I get around to seeing you perform.” Gerta smiled and lifted her head from her sewing table. “One of these days, I will!”
Outside, the taxis were honking their horns and a couple on the sidewalk was locked in an embrace. As Liesel walked toward the subway station to catch the shuttle to Grand Central, she felt her hours at Gerta’s falling away from her. Her neck lengthened, her spine straightened, and her feet sprang to life: it was as if the seamstress had instantaneously transformed into the dancer.
—
Gregori had been tired from last night’s theater performance. But after a strong cup of coffee and a hard roll from the deli beneath his apartment, he had gotten to Grand Central and began to tune his violin.
The day was hot and overcast. He was too warm to wear his suit jacket, so he folded it carefully and placed it against the wall behind him.
By eleven A.M., Gregori had begun with Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major. Though originally intended for the lute, it had been transposed for the violin. Everyone loved the romantic largo. It stirred something within them and the tips were generous. Gregori wondered if that might have been a better piece with which to have serenaded the girl in the tulip green dress, though he doubted that she was Italian.
At noon, after a small lunch break, just as he was trying to think of what to play next, he saw her come up from the stairs, just out of the corner of his eye. There was hardly a soul around her, so he could focus on her completely. In her silver grey dress, she looked like a fluttering dove, one who had long limbs rather than wings. He was sure she paused for a moment to look at him.
As he gazed at her, she looked as though she was suddenly standing at the threshold of two worlds. He took his violin and placed it under his chin, his eyes stealing one more glance at the beautiful girl in the soft-colored dress.
It was then that the perfect music came immediately to him. The melody that seemed to befit her fully: the second movement of the Dvorák New World Symphony.
His eyes shut and he lifted his bow. He would play the piece as though it had been created out of his own longing and the deepest recesses of his heart.
The music swelled within his violin like a starburst of emotion. His body swayed, and his head moved from side to side. The music was pouring from every aspect of his soul. He realized he was playing it both for himself and for the girl, two strangers in New York who were neither Americans nor completely refugees. But a pair of souls finding themselves caught between each of those two worlds.
Liesel’s feet had momentarily locked underneath her as soon as he started playing Dvorák’s haunting melody. Her mind rushed with memories of that same piece being played back in Brno.
It was as if this nameless violinist had peered into her soul and found the one piece of music that encapsulated her journey to America. He played with such depth that one didn’t even miss the sounds of the English horn from Dvorák’s original score. His playing brought her back to her parents and her teacher, and to the warmth of the living room she had left so many years before. She felt not just nostalgia and longing, but now a sense of possibility as well. Something in his playing made Liesel believe he had chosen this piece just to reach her.
For years she had studied how to interpret music so her limbs could move in synchronicity with the score. Now Liesel felt herself being pulled in his direction, a choreography that was between them alone. “How did you know?” she whispered, as her eyes locked onto his. In his gaze, she saw not only warmth, but also the recognition that this music had special meaning for him, too.
As Liesel moved closer, he set down his bow and smiled as if the stars from the Great Hall had suddenly aligned. With tears in her eyes, Liesel took her last steps toward Gregori, her feet fixed at the edge of his private stage. And when she finally stood right there in front of him, she knew she would never leave.
The Lucky One
JENNA BLUM
For my dad
I.
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK
Thursday, September 20, 1945
1
It was late September when Peter saw the woman who looked just like his mother, sitting in the Oyster Bar near one of the grand architectural columns that reminded him of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. She was eating something Peter’s mother would never have put in her mouth because it was treyf—a shrimp salad. Peter quite liked it, as he liked most things forbidden by his mother’s childhood teachings. He cleared the woman’s dining companion’s soup bowl—the remains of the restaurant’s nominal dish, oyster stew, pooling tepidly in the bottom—then stopped, the bus tub held at his waist level, and just stared. Despite her consumption of shellfish, this woman had to be Jewish. She was, to use the English idiom for it, a dead ringer for Peter’s mother. Salt-and-pepper hair braided around her head. A rose-colored dress. Pearls. A fur stole, although the day outside was quite warm and the air in the Oyster Bar soupy. The woman’s nose was the delicate blade of a fish-boning knife, her exquisitely ruched skin the texture of a peach the day before the fruit rots and its mortal sheath slides off. The term in German was Doppelgänger; it meant “double goer,” one’s exact counterpart, and in literature, Peter remembered from his university days, a confrontation with one’s Doppelgänger signified imminent death. But what did this mean, spying not his own ghost but his mother’s?
The woman, sensing Peter’s stare or his lingering presence next to the table, looked up and over, and Peter saw with deepening shock and fear that the woman even had his mother’s eyes, his own eyes, deep set and blue green. Peter fully expected her to say, “Ach, Petel, your beautiful hair! It’s far too long,” and then to reach over, brush the locks off his forehead, and say to her friend, a corpulent man with black-rimmed glasses, “Did you ever see such golden curls on a boy? A gift from my mother, so wasted on him. Isn’t he the lucky one,” and then she would sigh dramatically and smile at Peter with the greatest tenderness. This Doppelgänger, however, did nothing of the kind. Her face, at first inquiring, tightened into an irritated expression. She looked him up and down and seemed on the verge of saying something sharp when her traveling gaze fixed on Peter’s left forearm. Peter himself glanced down, although of course he knew what was there. The bus tub had pushed up the sleeve of his white shirt, unbuttoned in the heat of the kitchen, to expose the small, crooked greenish line of death camp numbers.
The woman looked quickly away from the tattoo, then back, then at Peter’s face. She forced a smile that sat ill on her features and angled forward to say something to her dining companion, the dead fox face of her fur stole dangling perilously close to a little silver tureen of Thousand Island dressing. Peter sneaked his hand onto the table to retrieve this just in time and shifted the bus tub to better conceal his number. The woman and her dining companion were both examining him now, trying to look as if they weren’t looking while their glances ticked from Peter’s arm to torso to face to legs, checking for visible infirmities from the camp: missing teeth, perhaps, or broken, ill-set bones; a lopped-off ear; the blue nails and protruding ribs of malnutrition.
Peter rehearsed in his mind what he would say next so it would emerge in perfect English, with only the slightest taint of German—You mean to tell me this kid’s a Jew who talks like a Kraut? one of Cousin Sol’s friends had said recently at the country club. Now that just beats all!
Peter reached for the woman’s bread plate, smattered with crumbs and butter.
“May I clear this for you, madam?” he asked.
II.
LARCHMONT, NEW YORK
Thursday, September 20, 1945
2
After his shift was over, Peter took
the New Haven line back to Larchmont, to the house in which he was living now—Cousin Sol’s. Sol’s Tudor mansion in Westchester was similar enough to Peter’s childhood home in the affluent Charlottenburg suburb of Berlin to make Peter feel as though he were in a dream in which everything was familiar, yet deeply, deeply wrong. Both houses were large and half-timbered, with stone foundations. Both were surrounded by extensive, well-manicured grounds. But there the likenesses stopped. The view here was not the River Spree and the Schloβ Charlottenburg but the Long Island Sound. The very rock upon which Sol’s house sat was different, huge boulders flecked with sparkling stuff, which Sol’s gardener had told Peter was called mica. The plantings were exotic imports, bonsai and Japanese maple trees, tropical bushes with lush pink blooms, not the groomed topiary and raked gravel paths of Peter’s youth. There was even a man-made waterfall chattering artfully down a dark, mossy rock channel to splash, finally, into a kidney-shaped swimming pool, painted aquamarine at the bottom, whereas the showpiece of Peter’s parents’ grounds had been a tennis court. Peter’s wife, Masha, would have much preferred this pool, Peter thought, with its Hollywood intimations; she would have sunned herself alongside it in her polka-dotted suit and cat’s-eye sunglasses, while the girls . . . He wiped his forehead on his sleeve as he mounted the stone steps to the terrace, the day humid and sultry with whirring insects, and used the key Sol’s wife, Esther, had given him to let himself into the Larchmont house kitchen.
Inside, the house should have been cool, its temperature lowered by the rumbling window boxes Peter had been told were called air conditioners, but when he stepped into the kitchen he found it steamy with the bland smell of boiling vegetables. The maid, Ines, stood at the sink struggling to debone a large bluefish Cousin Sol had caught the past weekend in Long Island Sound, while Esther shucked ears of corn into a waste bin she had set in the center of the floor, on the Spanish tiles. More bounty from Esther’s garden was piled on the counter, awaiting its turn to be cleaned and stripped: cucumbers, eggplants, and zucchini the size and circumference of Peter’s arms. Peter had never seen such huge vegetables before coming to America and found them somewhat alarming. Didn’t their size detract from their flavor? he had asked Esther when he first encountered her coming up the garden path in her straw sun hat, with a basket of tomatoes the size of infants’ heads. Esther had laughed, showing her lovely, healthy white teeth. Not at all, she had said. That’s how we like it in this country—the bigger the better in America.
