I tore my eyes away from the house and smiled at him. “I’ll see you later, Pauli.”
“Try not to lose track of time,” he commanded. “Your parents ache for you.” He gave me another hug and patted me on the arm. “Don’t be nervous, Harmon. She’ll be happy to see you.” Then he disappeared down the lane with my bag in hand.
My heart was hammering. I felt off-balance as I slowly stepped towards the house, as if walking on a soft mattress. I paused in front of the window and tried to peer inside. A shadowy figure moved in the far room, which I knew to be the kitchen. I could draw her silhouette from memory. Every line, every curve of her frame. Her motions were unique to her. Always of a purpose, arms akimbo, hands resting on the band of her wool apron. Through the wavy glass pane I heard her muffled humming. It was what she did when performing a mind-numbing task. She must be preparing her supper, I thought.
And there I stood gazing at her like a child does a favorite toy in a shop window. The love of my life had no idea I was standing outside her house. I slid over to the threshold, took a deep breath, removed my cap, and gently rapped on the wooden door.
The singing stopped. Silence. A few dainty steps to the doorway, and I suddenly realized that she was on the other side. I could barely stand.
The door creaked open. A thin band of light fell across her face. Her eyes, light gray with a ring of blue, opened wide at the sight of me. We could say nothing for what seemed like an age. Finally, in a weak voice, I broke the spell.
“Hello, Amelia.”
She stood frozen, her gray eyes wide as searchlights, trying to process what she was seeing. Then she threw her arms around me, buried her head in my chest, and began to sob. “Please tell me this isn’t a cruel dream!” she said.
“No,” I said whispering in her ear. “I’m home.”
I held her tight, pressing her so hard to me that I thought she might suffocate. I never wanted to let go.
14
I have warm memories of my youth. I was blessed with good parents, loving yet austere. My father, Karl Becker, was the police captain of the town. During the First World War, he was a sergeant in the infantry. He was an imposing man, built block by block, and a fine soldier. He was captured at Saint-Mihiel in September 1918 and spent a long year as a prisoner of war in the island camp on Elle Ile in the Bay of Biscay. A decorated hero, he returned in 1919 to a country in disarray, reeling under the draconian impositions of the Treaty of Versailles. With support from the Burgermeister, who as sheer luck would have it had served in the same unit as my father, he was appointed the chief of the Stadtpolizei Stauffenberg after the sitting chief suffered a coronary. With his position secure, he sought out his childhood sweetheart, Greta Vogel, and won her heart. A baker’s daughter, she was as warm and filled with humor as her husband was stoic. Karl and Greta were married in 1921. It was a good match. I can still see my parents caught in each other’s gaze across the table, their eyes suggesting intimate secrets. And I’ll always hold dear the memories of my mother’s face, round, unlined, and fair, even as age crept up on her.
My brother, Paul, was younger by four years. He always pestered me, but I loved him just the same. I recall winter nights as our happy family sat facing the comforting yellow glow of a blazing fire. The thick aroma of my mother’s roast practically dripped off the walls. Somehow much of the terrible economic catastrophe that befell Germany in the 1920s passed Stauffenberg by. My father was a practical man and, like many in our little town, he distrusted paper money; thus did he convert most of his marks to gold before hyper-inflation rampaged like a wildfire through the country. I was too young to pay attention to such things, though. Perhaps that’s why I was caught off-guard by the speed and force with which the Nazis rose to power.
In my mind’s eye I see torchlight rallies and pledges to fealty and absolute devotion to National Socialism. The mysterious disappearances of beloved schoolmasters. They were replaced by Nazi propagandists who no longer taught that ten minus two equals eight, but rather if you have ten Berliners and eight are of pure Aryan blood, and two are Jews, how many true Germans do you have? In 1932 there were but one hundred thousand members of the Hitler Youth. By 1936 there were 3.5 million. I see my friends in brown shirts and caps marching along the Wilkestrasse. Egon and Werner Meissner. Alfons Kraft. Paul Genth. “Little Edu” Joppien. I see them tramp-tramping on cobbles in the neat files with red banners held high, and I hear Hitler’s voice declaring with sinister resolve: “When my opponents say, ‘I won’t join you,’ I just say your children are mine already. What are you? In time you’ll die. But your sons and daughters will stand forever in my new camp. And in a short time they’ll know nothing else but this new community.” For any child desperate for a sense of belonging, this was a powerful seduction. But it was a temptress that, thanks to my music and solitary nature, I resisted…for a while at least.
One spring day when I was thirteen, I was riding my bike through the streets of Stauffenberg when I braked in front of a store window along the edge of the Himmelplatz. I heard piano music wafting from an open window in Krupinski’s Music Shop. Mozart’s Sonata no. 15 in C Major. I stood transfixed as something inside of me burst open. Oh, I’d heard music all my life. My mother sang in the church choir every Sunday and even was the cantor on Christmas and Easter. Our radio was always tuned to classical music. But peering through the window and seeing the person actually playing with his own hands somehow made it accessible to me. This was what I wanted to do. It was one of the missing components of my otherwise happy life. Only later would I discover the other was flying. So I pushed open the door and strutted inside.
The cramped shop featured shelves lined with sheet music on one side. An assortment of instruments, from violins and cellos to accordions and horns, adorned the other. And in the center, beyond the counter in the very back of the space sat a weathered baby grand piano. A man in his late forties, thin as a fence post, sporting wire-rimmed spectacles and a graying beard and mustache, swayed behind the keys, his eyes closed, completely absorbed in this wonderful moment. When he finished, he noticed that I was practically standing on top of him. We looked at each other for an awkward moment. His breathing was heavy, as if he’d suffered from consumption in the past. He looked much older than his years.
“Well?” he finally said, coughing. “Are you just going to stand there or perhaps tell me what it is you want, young man?”
I shook myself out of the funk and clasped my hands together. “That was beautiful.”
His face warmed, and he slapped his trousers in appreciation. “Yes, well that was Herr Mozart’s brainchild. Not mine I’m afraid. No matter. What is it that you want?”
“I want that,” I uttered in a hushed voice.
“The sheet music?” he said. “Oh, I’m afraid this is my personal copy. I’ll have to order it for you.” He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and hoisted himself off the piano bench. He began shuffling over to his counter. “Now if you want a leather-bound copy, that will take three weeks. However, I happen to know a fellow in Salzburg, if he is still there, who can get the standard booklet in—”
“Can you teach me to play?” I interrupted.
He pivoted to face me. “I haven’t had pupils in over a year.” Then his eyes grew distant. “What with the new decrees about to be put in place, I am afraid Meisters of my…ilk…are not approved.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a folded pamphlet announcing the new anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws. He offered it to me. “You see?” he said wanly. “Soon I will not even be German anymore.” I skimmed the paper, which said that Jews could no longer be German citizens, marry Aryans, or even fly German flags. I handed it back to him. I didn’t care about politics—as that’s all it was to me then. “Can you teach me?” I asked again.
He pursed his lips, pinching them with his thick fingers. He put his hand on my shoulder and studied my eyes for a long ti
me as if trying to look inside and see what was really going on in my adolescent brain. Then he wheezed and broke out into a grin I found instantly endearing. “You’re a brave lad. I just hope we both do not come to regret this. Come here next week at this time, master…what is your name anyway?”
As I walked towards the door, I said: “Harmon Becker. And yours, Herr Musikmeister?”
“I am Leopold Krupinski. And I intend to make you a great musician.”
I took to the piano eagerly. Throughout the rest of my teens, I became too engrossed in my music to get entwined in the activities of the Hitlerites outside my very window. Although membership in the Hitler Youth was supposed to be mandatory, I was never pressed into the organization. After the Nazis gained control of the government, Father found police authority slipping out of local hands and into those of the state-controlled Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, headed by Hermann Göring. Father knew which way the winds blew, and so made it a point to feign cooperation with this menacing secret police force that was able to operate outside the law with impunity. He kept his job enforcing local ordinances. The Gestapo men understood that a beloved police chief meant a stable town and one less nest of traitors to deal with. I suspect his cooperation was at the heart of that exemption from the Hitler Youth. Maybe he just bribed them.
As the economy rebounded, the war clouds grew more ominous. While my schoolmates were learning to love the Führer and hate the Jews, I was learning Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven. By the time I was sixteen, Krup, as I affectionately called him, had taken to calling me Harmon van Beethoven, so devoted was I to my music. I’d even managed to make some marks playing for parties and halls, and now had an upright piano of my own jammed into an empty space of our already cramped living room. Towards the end, Krup started to come to my house at night to tutor me.
15
The lessons at home would come later. From age thirteen on, I spent much of my time in Krup’s store. First as his pupil and eventually as an intern of sorts. I hoped one day to run a music store of my own, and he accepted my work as payment for his tutelage. When the lesson of the day was done, we would share a loaf of brown bread and a wedge of cheese and sit across from each other on rickety stools by the front window. As we took in the bustle of the little village, Leo enjoyed chatting about his life as a boy in this town. He also told me about the days when he lived in Leipzig and studied under Max Reger. I listened politely. The large storefront window with the words “Krupinski’s Fine Instruments & Music Accessories” stenciled on its smooth surface was like a picture frame for a living mosaic of Stauffenberg. Among the kinetic figures roaming past us on the cobbles was a girl I’d often spied carrying a basket to market. Every time I saw her, the same thought raced through my mind: she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever set my eyes upon.
“Who is she?” I finally asked Krup after a month or so of cataloguing her daily movements.
Krup replied: “Walter Engel’s daughter, Amelia. She’s a wonderful girl, if a bit headstrong.” I didn’t mind a little spirit…even though it would one day put me in unimaginable danger.
Like so many in the Oberfranken, she had golden hair, broad shoulders, and a full chest that I could only imagine heaved as she slept. I came to learn that Fraülein Amelia was older than me by two years. An only child of sickly parents, sometimes she would catch me in the act of ogling and grin back at me playfully over her bare shoulder, her dimples imprinted on her cheek, setting my insides whirring.
Krup was acutely aware of my growing feelings for Amelia. Two people can learn a lot about each other when sharing a piano bench for years on end. My Musikmeister was a keen judge of the human condition, mine most of all. Although when it came to taking the measure of nations, this trait would tragically desert him.
Through the looking glass of Krup’s store window, I contemplated the people of Stauffenberg. They seemed different to me now. Less citizens than cogs in a great machine of state run by the powers of faraway Berlin. I wondered how I fit into this New Order. Krup would often sidle up beside me and put a caring hand on my shoulder. We watched Amelia making her way through the streets, lazily swinging her toned arms as if in cadence with a gavotte running through her head.
“She really is beautiful isn’t she, Leo?”
“I have only thoughts for my Constanze,” he said. “But I notice she comes to Koppel’s almost every other day at this time.” He motioned to the storefront directly across the street.
I chuckled. “Voyeur.”
Krup gave a dismissive gesture. “I have eyes and a window. She shops for her mother. Poor woman isn’t much better off than Walter Engel, her father. God rest his soul.”
“How well do you know her?” I asked.
“She’s come in here searching for sheet music. Her father played piano, like you…though not as well. And when she was a little girl she used to come in and listen to me play. The same way you did when you first entered my life. I kept the door unlocked then.” He ran his hand unconsciously over his Star of David patch. “These days not so much. In fact, I don’t think it’s wise for you to come here anymore.”
I shook my head. “It hasn’t come to that yet.” If I was trying to reassure him, my words fell flat.
“Yet,” he repeated ominously, as if running that word over and over in his mind. Amelia exited the store with an armful of wrapped parcels. “There, you see?” he said, happy to change the subject.
“She always comes alone?” I asked.
“She was supposedly engaged to Johann Keitel.” Johann was a spoiled schoolmate of mine whose wealthy family owned the Keitelgesellshaft armaments factory. He was also a devout Nazi and Hitler Youth leader. Leo understandably despised him. He observed: “I haven’t seen her with that brownshirt spider since Walter passed. It’s for the best anyway. I cannot see her with a boy like him. Now, you on the other hand…”
I turned away from the window and approached the piano. “Ach. You’re just a crazy old man.”
“That’s not fair, my boy,” he said, smiling. “I’m not that old.”
“Then come on, you crazy kid.” I laughed. “Teach me something.”
“You need no more lessons from me,” he observed.
I shook my head. “I think I still have much to learn from you, Leo.” He nodded at that. His eyes showed a distant look that reached out through the shop window, well past the Wilkestrasse, beyond the Main and the Oberfranken, out into the wide, hostile world. Then he began to play.
On a chilly late afternoon in early November 1938, Amelia walked into the music store just before closing time. Krup stayed home that day, as he was ill, which would soon prove to be fortunate, so I was alone behind the register. Daylight was rapidly fading as the sun slipped behind the foothills to the west. The overhanging bells jangled when Amelia entered. Even though I was closing in on seventeen and should have been more confident, I fought off the urge to duck under the counter as she nonchalantly studied the sheet music displayed on the wall shelves, running her long fingers across the booklets as if scanning for a particular piece. Then she approached me wearing that wickedly mischievous smile.
She leaned on the counter. Even though it was cold, her low-cut sweater under her jacket revealed all I needed to see. My eyes flitted down to her cleavage, and she caught me in the act. “Up here,” she instructed, and I raised my eyes to meet hers. The lightness of their gray intimidated me. One felt like they were not being looked at so much as probed by them.
I cleared my throat, trying to be casual. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t see any Mendelssohn,” she observed. “Are you sold out? I’d like to display something by him on our piano.” Her eyes stayed on mine. “In honor of my father.”
“I was sorry to hear,” I said.
She nodded. “He so loved Mendelssohn’s music.”
“So do I!” I blurted out, not sure
where that came from.
She put her palm to her mouth and giggled. “I bet you do, Harmon Becker.”
“You know my name?” I said with genuine surprise.
“As you must know mine by now,” she said. “I like to know the names of boys who undress me with their eyes. I swear you’ll make me catch a cold.”
My face grew fire-truck red. “I don’t understand,” I said.
She gave me a dismissive wave. “You’re a poor liar. I see you looking from that window.” She pointed to her own eyes. “These work quite well you know.”
So there was no avoiding it. “It doesn’t mean anything…I mean, well, it does mean something. What I’m trying to say is…” I looked over to a bust of Beethoven on the shelf by the register. “Help me, Ludwig.”
She laughed. “Please don’t tell me that man’s your social muse. He was far more offensive than you, Harmon.”
“Offensive?” I said with a squeak in my voice. “Oh, please don’t take—”
“It’s quite alright.” She cut me off with an assuring pat on my skinny forearm. “I’d be just as poor a liar if I said I’m not flattered.” She placed her elbows on the countertop and cupped her jaw in her hands. “Lecherous boy.”
I stared down at my feet. “I don’t mean to seem predatory, Fraülein Amelia. It’s just hard to look away when you look like, well…” I glanced back up to catch her gaze and gestured to her form with open palms. There was a thick pause as we just stared at each other. Now it was her turn to blush.
Of Another Time and Place Page 6
