by Mona Golabek
Sometimes, Gunter would sit on the piano bench to be closer to the beautiful music. His round, horn-rimmed glasses made him look a bit like a junior version of Professor Isseles. As Lisa had gotten to know Gunter, she had come to love his sweet and gentle manner. He had grown up in Cologne, where his father had owned a hardware shop, and he loved to play chess. Lisa liked his company on the bench and sometimes shared the images of the music that her mother had instilled in her.
“Hear that? That’s the sound of the deep blue of the fjords.”
Gunter smiled.
“Grieg was from Norway, so I picture this as a summer’s night when the sun never sets. Can you see it? Low in the sky.” She played the end of the elegant slow movement, then exhaled quickly and launched into a staccato dance.
“Ta ta ti da, ta ta ti da,” she hummed along. “Those are the peasants dancing.”
“Must be exhausting,” Gunter said, making her laugh. Promptly at seven Mrs. Glazer announced dinner, and the children rushed to the dining room. As Lisa tidied up her music, she noticed that Johnny “King Kong” still sat in the corner. She looked over at him, and he put his notebook down and clapped. She smiled back and hurried to join the others.
Gina’s and Lisa’s beds were next to each other, and the two girls whispered confidences after lights out. One night Gina suddenly asked, “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“Of course not!” Lisa blurted out honestly.
“I did,” Gina said in a conspiratorial voice.
“In Vienna?”
“Uh huh.”
“What was his name?” Lisa asked, riveted.
“Walter.”
“Did he get out, too?”
“He didn’t have to. He wasn’t Jewish.”
“You had a gentile boyfriend?” Lisa asked, scandalized. “Why shouldn’t I?”
Lisa didn’t say anything. Sometimes Gina was too confusing to her.
Gina continued her story. “He came to the train to say good-bye and brought me a flower.”
Suddenly Gina bounded out of bed and fumbled through a drawer in the dark, coming up with a sweet-smelling box. Lisa peered at it through the almost total darkness but made out the form of a dried flower.
“I can still see him standing there when I left. His pants were really wide and they were flapping in the wind—they made so much noise.”
“Do you miss him?” Lisa asked.
“Not really. I don’t really remember what he looks like anymore,” came the matter-of-fact answer. Gone was the scattered gossipy air about Gina that had bothered Lisa in the beginning. Now they were closer than ever—she had found “a best friend,” someone to help fill the hole of not having her sisters near her.
“Do you like Gunter?” Lisa ventured.
“I don’t know. He seems kind of soft.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. I bet you he’ll make a lot of money when he gets older.”
“You think so?”
As the girls whispered, they heard humming coming from outside the door and down the stairs—it was unmistakable.
“Dum, dum, da dum, dum.” The opening bars of the Grieg!
Shivering in delight, they scuttled out of bed, trying not to wake Edith as they slipped their coats over their nightgowns and jammed their bare feet into their shoes.
The humming came again, followed by a quick whistle. Tiptoeing down the stairs into the dark foyer, they saw the front door was open. Gunter and Aaron were standing on the porch, peering at the sky through binoculars.
“What are you doing?” Gina asked excitedly.
“We’re spotting German planes,” Gunter said with importance.
“Follow us! Quick!” Aaron said, sticking a matchbook in the door as it closed so it wouldn’t lock them out.
“It’s after curfew,” Lisa whispered.
“We’re official plane spotters, come on, hurry up.”
“Where did you get the binoculars?” Lisa asked, not convinced.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Ooh, don’t say that, it makes me nervous!”
“We got them from the air raid warden. We’ve been asking every night, and finally he let us be spotters,” said Gunter.
The girls were led to the unlocked front door of the convent next door and up two flights of stairs. A ladder lay waiting under an open hatch, and they clambered through it onto a large flat portion of the slate roof.
“Mein Gott im Himmel!” Lisa exclaimed, looking up at the extraordinary sight. The blackout of London had produced a wondrous celestial show rivaling the greatest planetarium. The moon had not yet risen, and the white band of the Milky Way seemed close enough to touch; the brightest stars twinkled like fairy dust.
Aaron got proudly to work. There were several blankets on the roof already, and he stretched one out and lay down, putting the field glasses to his eyes.
“We’re looking for two kinds of bombers, the Dornier Do 17 and the Heinkel He 111,” he said, scouring the heavens.
“Well, aren’t you Mr. Know-it-all?” said Gina.
“The Dornier looks like a pencil, the Heinkel is rounder.”
Gunter spread out another blanket and all four of them lay side by side, looking straight up into the sky.
Nothing moved. They looked and looked.
“What happens if you see something?” Gina asked. “You blow this whistle and the block air raid warden will hear you.”
Gina and Lisa shared an impressed look.
“Let me try,” Lisa said.
Aaron handed her the binoculars and showed her how to focus. She put them to her eyes and waved them around unprofessionally.
“You look like you’re chasing mosquitoes.”
Lisa slowed her motion and her vision came to rest on a close-up of a human face. She screamed, dropping the glasses. Everyone stared in the direction of her gaze. A neighbor, perched on the roof three houses over, waved at them. All of London was pitching in.
From then on, the “committee” met on the roof every Tuesday and Thursday. Sometimes Paul joined them, but often not; he had become more withdrawn since the failure to get his brother out of Germany. Lisa worried about him.
“Go back and get Paul,” she pressed Aaron as they trekked across the lawn.
“Oh, let him sleep,” Aaron said.
“No! I want you to get him.”
“I’ll go,” offered Gunter, ever the gentleman.
One night it was colder than usual, and all five huddled close under blankets.
The evening’s chatter was usually organized by Gina, who either told gossip from the factory, made observations about the royal family, or introduced a challenge, as she did tonight.
“Let’s each tell something embarrassing.”
Gunter groaned. “You go first.”
“All right, I will.” Gina launched into a rambling account of the time when she’d been a servant and had made some arcane faux pas that the others didn’t understand. Her stories always ended by making the point that her family was very wealthy and she knew more about silver service in particular or culture in general than the English upper class.
“That’s not embarrassing,” complained Lisa.
“Then you tell us something,” Gina countered. “Remember I told you about the castle? I was caught once throwing out the nappies, because they were so disgusting I was going to vomit.”
“You already told me about that, it doesn’t count!” Gina said.
“I’ll tell you something,” Aaron said, his voice taking on a seriousness it usually didn’t have. “I’ll tell you something, if you want.”
“Of course we do,” said Gina.
Aaron rolled onto his back, staring into the sky. “When I first came to England, I was sent to a little town near the Scottish border—to work in the stables. It turned out the lady who sponsored me had a little dairy farm. It was freezing all the time. I had to sleep in the barn on a cot, but I piled straw all around it, so I guess it wasn’t so ba
d. When everyone was called up, her husband joined the army—the day after he left she had me move inside.”
Aaron paused, as if he wondered whether to continue. “And?” asked Paul.
“She didn’t want me to move the cot inside though, she wanted me to sleep in her bed.”
The words fell heavily on Lisa; she didn’t know why but she didn’t want to hear what came next. Aaron sensed the mood of the group and went silent.
“Did you sleep with her?” Paul insisted.
Aaron didn’t answer for a long time, as if he wished he could take it all back. “What do you think?” he tried to say ambiguously, but the friends looked at this handsome, arrogant boy and knew the answer.
Lisa didn’t know whether she liked this Aaron anymore. Why had he shared this? It made her uneasy.
Gunter had been listening quietly; there were tears in his eyes.
“Gunter! What’s the matter?” Gina asked gently.
“I was thinking about the birds and bees—when my father tried to tell me about the facts of life,” he answered, his voice trailing off.
“And?” Gina asked.
Gunter was silent.
“Oh, please tell us,” she coaxed.
“It was the day I was to leave Cologne. The transport left at midnight, so there was a lot of time after dinner, and my mother asked him, just like that. She said, “Take your son and tell him what fathers tell sons.’ So we left the house and started walking around the block. My father hadn’t spoken much since we’d decided about the Kinder-transport . . . he had been awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War, fighting for Germany, and now they’d smashed his shop and were sending me away.”
Gunter started to cry.
“What did he say?” Gina asked.
“He never said anything because he couldn’t stop crying.”
Gina took his hand and squeezed it tight.
As weeks passed and there was no sign of Germans, the chill of winter made the rooftop adventure less attractive, so the Willesden boys gave the binoculars back to the warden. Months went by without the sighting of a single German bomber, and many Britons became convinced it had all been a false alarm. Half of the 800,000 parents with young children who had left for the countryside returned home and England played a waiting game. Even the 150,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, who had been sent across the Channel, were waiting, hunkered down in muddy barns in Belgium and France.
One day, Mrs. Cohen asked the Kinder to move their bedding back to the hostel from the convent bomb shelter, and the normal life of the hostel resumed—if anyone dared call it that.
Lisa’s waiting also continued. When Hanukkah came, a promised visit from Sonia was postponed. In spite of the lull, people said London was still too dangerous.
12
RATIONING WAS announced New Year’s Day. It was 1940. Mrs. Cohen sorted through the coupons on the kitchen counter and muttered to Mrs. Glazer, “Four ounces of meat per week per person? Good grief, these are growing boys and girls.”
She took the coupons to the shops on Walm Lane twice a week to pick up the meager supplies. Luckily, the kosher butcher kept a jar on the counter with a hand-lettered sign—“For Our Needy Refugees”—and used the coins to help the hostel buy additional provisions; occasionally, the greengrocer slipped in something extra. All in all, they got by.
The bulk of the items were parsnips, potatoes, and flour. The children were assigned turns lugging the heavy bags back home, moaning about the disappearance of candy and chocolate from their lives. The rations were mere subsistence; Lisa often felt hunger gnawing at her stomach.
One Saturday, when it was Lisa’s and Gina’s turn, a freak snowstorm transformed the neighborhood from its customary gray to a brilliant white. After synagogue, the two girls broke off from the rest of the group and went to collect the groceries, fastening the bags onto rickety-wheeled trolleys. The sun was shining for a change, and Lisa saw things in the neighborhood she had never noticed before.
There were colorful, reflective strips in the shape of wrenches and hammers pasted on the blackout curtains of the hardware store, and the bric-a-brac shop had a hand-painted mural of a room of antiques. The light stanchions had newly painted zebra stripes to ward off the rash of car accidents that had begun the night the streetlights were turned off. It all put her into a merry mood, and the two girls skidded home on the icy sidewalks, laughing their way down Willesden Lane into the gigantic crossfire of a serious snowball fight.
The hostel had divided up into teams by rooms, and the boys and girls were pelting each other mercilessly. Lisa and Gina became instant fodder for the cannonballs of snow, so they were forced to fight back with everything they had—turnips and potatoes (the vegetables flew better and took less time to produce than snowballs)—and soon several of the little boys were sobbing from direct hits.
“I’m sorry, Leo! I didn’t mean it,” Lisa said with contrition, but ten-year-old Leo responded by stuffing a huge wad of snow down her back.
“Truce!” someone yelled, and Johnny came forward and comforted the crying children by rolling an enormous snowball and beginning a snowman. Everyone pitched in and the snowball became life-size. Gina hit upon the idea of decorating the face with a green turnip top. She stuck it on to make a mustache, and everybody gasped.
“Der Führer has arrived,” she said in an eerie voice. “Let’s kill him!” someone shouted.
The younger boys leapt on the snowman, and in seconds the effigy was pummeled into slush.
The front door opened and Mrs. Cohen came out on the porch and surveyed the soggy groceries with displeasure. Turnips and potatoes littered the front yard, and her expression alone was enough to send everyone scurrying to pick them up.
“Aaron, Paul? Please come here for a moment.”
Mrs. Cohen was carrying a bucket of black tar and handed it to them. “Mrs. Knight at 156 would like our help, her roof is leaking. I want you two boys to find a brush and help her.”
Paul took the pail from her, but Aaron hung back, saying to no one in particular, “Isn’t it convenient to have all these refugees to work all the time.”
Mrs. Cohen overheard and turned to him. “Aaron, I’m tired of your thinking that you are somehow above these things. And I’m also tired of your thinking you don’t have to obey the same rules as everyone else. If you are late for a meal one more time without a good excuse, we will not serve you, understood?”
Aaron pretended he wasn’t affected by her words and turned and left with Paul. Lisa watched him and worried. What worried her most was that she liked him too much. He was trouble; and she knew she should stay away.
Lisa and Gina hurried to finish kitchen duty, carrying the soggy bags of produce to Mrs. Glazer in the kitchen.
“Downstairs, please, but leave some potatoes here,” the cook said to Gina, directing her to the tiny cellar below. “Here, Lisa,” she said, handing her a large knife. “Peel me fifteen potatoes, would you, please?”
Lisa was beginning her task as Mrs. Cohen came into the kitchen. She stared at Lisa’s snow-reddened hands holding the poised knife.
“She is not to use knives, Mrs. Glazer,” the matron said matter-of-factly, handing the sharp utensil back to the cook. “Please come here, Lisa, I want to introduce you to someone.”
Mrs. Cohen escorted Lisa to the living room, past several girls who were vacuuming and dusting, over to a boy in his early teens who sat calmly on the couch. He had neatly combed hair and was wearing dark glasses.
“This is my son, Hans. He was hoping you could play something for him.”
“Hello,” Lisa said shyly.
“He will be staying at the hostel with us,” Mrs. Cohen added with her usual formality, then turned and left them alone.
“Thank you for the use of your music; I hope you didn’t mind,” Lisa said.
“Not a problem. I won’t be needing it,” he said with an odd sarcasm. “Would you play something by Debussy?”
; “ ‘Clair de Lune’?” she offered.
“How about ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’?” he replied.
“I don’t know it.”
“There is a copy of the music there.”
“I’m terrible at sight-reading.”
“Please?” he asked.
Trapped, Lisa leafed through the stack of music and found the piece. She hated to sight-read because she was so bad at it, but fortunately the piece was simple, and she muddled through the first page. When she saw the complicated second page she stopped, too much of a perfectionist to allow herself any more mistakes. “I’ll play you the ‘Clair de Lune.’ ” Without waiting for a response, she launched into her favorite piece.
“Mother was right, you play beautifully—it almost makes me feel there might be something nice left in the world,” Hans said when it was over. He had a sad, resigned air about him.
“Won’t you play me something now?” she asked. There was a long silence before he spoke. “Yes, I will, if you’ll help me to the piano.”
It was only then that she realized Hans was blind. She got up, took him by the arm, and led him to the piano.
“Please show me middle C.”
She put his thumb on the proper key, then hesitantly, he began “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” playing with warmth and determination. “I’m sorry, but it’s the only piece I remember by heart.”
Listening to him play, a profound feeling overtook her. How lucky I am, she thought. She had spent so much time thinking about how terrible things were and how worried she felt about her parents and Rosie that she hadn’t had time to be grateful—grateful for Sonia’s escape, grateful for her own freedom. She knew God had given her a gift, and she vowed to use this gift to its fullest. She would practice and practice; she would fulfill the promise she had made to her mother.
13
HANS SPENT his days in the living room, reading books in braille and listening to the wireless, memorizing the voices of every reporter and politician on the BBC. His only respite was Lisa’s practice session. Each evening when she returned from work, he happily joined her at the piano bench, tapping his cane to the rhythm of her Czerny exercises and offering praise and suggestions with each new piece she’d tackle.
