Beach Music (84 page)

“Ruth is a descendant of such people. They were peasants who were peddlers and woodcutters who spoke Yiddish by day and searched their body hair for lice at night. In America, they would be like the black ones, the
Schwarzen
. I make no judgment. But this is
who Ruth is and who I am. These are the origins. The history of Europe and my family conspired to make me a musician. I composed my first sonata when I was seven. At fourteen, I wrote a symphony in honor of my mother’s fortieth birthday. There is not a family in South Carolina as cultivated as the one into which I was born. I say this for definition’s sake. There is no arrogance in my claim, just fact. Europe marked my family in its depths. It enfolded us in a culture that was a thousand years in the making. America has no culture. She is still in diapers.

“I had four sisters, all older than me. Their names were Beatrice, Tosca, Tonya, and Cordelia, not Jewish names you will note, but names chosen with discrimination from the worlds of literature and opera. Laughter followed them wherever they went. All married well, brilliantly. They seemed like young lionesses to me, strong, willful, and they refused to let my mother say a single harsh word to me. Whenever my poor mother would try to scold me, these sisters would surround me in a protective circle, their silk dresses brushing up against me, their tiny waists eye level, their hands caressing me and stroking my hair, their four voices arguing with my poor outnumbered mama. My father would read the paper, amused, as though he were watching the latest comedy from Paris.

“We were not good Jews; we were good Europeans. My father’s library was breathtaking to behold with its leather sets of Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, and Zola. He was well schooled and brilliantly polished. As a factory owner, he was beloved. He avoided crassness, authoritarianism, and from his vast reading he knew that the happiness of workers would come back to him a thousand times in the riches that contentment always brings.

“My family attended synagogue on the High Holidays only. They were humanists, rationalists. My father was something of a freethinker, a man with his head in the clouds when he was not adding columns of numbers or ordering supplies for his factory.

“In our house in Warsaw, my mother was the center of the universe, and she wanted her children to have everything in the world. I was her only son and she worshiped me as few children have ever been worshiped. Her smile was like the sun to me. She was my first piano teacher. From the beginning, she told me I would
be a master. She had no enemies. Except, of course, the entire Christian world, but I did not know this as a boy.

“At eighteen, I won an important competition for young pianists in Paris. My main competition was from a Dutchman by the name of Shoemaker. He was a true artist, but did not love the spotlight. Another pianist was Jeffrey Stoppard of London. Very strong. He had beautiful touch, but no sense of drama. The critics said I moved like the Prince of Darkness when I approached the piano. They nicknamed me
Le Loup Noir
, ‘the Black Wolf.’

“There was a German pianist I remember best. His name was Heinrich Baumann and he was of the second tier in ability. He was passionate about music, but lacked the true gift, which he knew, even then. For years we wrote each other letters, discussing music, careers, everything. The night after the competition, we walked through Paris all night, and we were sitting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur when the sun rose over the city and turned the old buildings rose-colored and breathtaking. A city looks more beautiful after you have won a competition. Heinrich had finished third, his best finish ever. His letters stopped in 1938. Then it had become dangerous to write to a Jew. Even the Black Wolf.

“Single-mindedness is something I was born with. It is a necessary ingredient of all the great musicians. The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life. In the morning, I would work on my scales. I am a great believer in the scales. Master the grammar of scales and the secrets of the best composers will reveal themselves to you in slow increments. My gift made harsh requirements of me. It made me aloof to all courtesies. I was neither kind nor cordial and dreamed only of black notes pouring off a scale like water over rocks. When I turned to new symphonies, I felt as happy as those astronauts who first stepped on the moon.

“But why do I waste my time telling you this story, Jack? You could not play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano with the great Horowitz holding your hand. One of Shyla’s most unforgivable betrayals was marrying a man who was an ignoramus when it came to music.

“I had a first wife, Jack. I also had three sons. You did not know I had a wife before Ruth?”

“No.”

“You did not know I had children before Shyla and Martha?”

“No.”

“It makes no difference. There is nothing in it to talk about the dead. Do you agree?”

“No.”

“You do not know what it is like to lose a wife.”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Sonia and I were destined to meet. She was beautiful, as beautiful as the music I played to praise her. She, too, played the piano uncommonly well, especially for a woman of that time and place. I played in Warsaw soon after my triumph in Paris. The concert was sold out weeks in advance. My name was on the lips of every aficionado in Poland. That night was my coming out in my own birthplace. I tell you I was utterly brilliant that night. Flawless. I closed the performance with the Third Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt because it is showy and crowd-pleasing. Sonia sat in the second row and I saw her when I walked onto the stage to begin my performance. She was like a pure flame burning out of control in that theater. Now, at this moment, I can close my eyes and see her as though time could not manage to extricate itself from that distinguished moment. She was the kind of woman accustomed to being noticed and she saw me see her, saw the exact moment of my surrender and her conquest, when I let myself be stolen away by her. I lost myself forever in that first glance. Though I played before an audience of over five hundred that night, I actually played only for her. When I rose to acknowledge the standing ovation, I noticed that she alone had refused to stand. Later, when I met her, I asked her why she had remained seated. She told me, ‘Because I wanted to make sure you would seek me out to ask that very question.’

“Our marriage was one of the largest and most jubilant ever among the Jews of Warsaw. Both of our families were rich and cultured and hers was even famous for producing a line of distinguished rabbis on her mother’s side that could be traced back to the eighteenth century. We took our wedding trip to Paris where we stayed at the Hôtel George V and we wandered hand in hand through all the streets of Paris. In France we spoke to each other only in French. We made love whispering French to each other and
I lost my shyness with her when I whispered French into her ear at night. Later, she would claim I made her pregnant on our first night together. Our bodies burned when we were together. I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. I could not satisfy myself with her or get enough of the endless feast her body provided. You get to love like that but once.

“Sonia knew music almost as well as I knew it. She would sit in the room as I practiced and I played for her approval. Never have I had an audience as spontaneous and knowledgeable as Sonia was. Her pregnancy was a source of great joy to us both and I poured out my soul at the keyboard so my sleeping, developing child could hear the most beautiful music in the world as it grew bones and lived in the womb of its mother. At that time, I had moments when I was sentimental as the next man, but you have not known this side of me. Long ago I buried that part of me. I never looked back upon it or sang kaddish or offered it a word of praise.

“Sonia loved it more than I did. My twin boys, Joseph and Aram, were born on your July 4. I played a song I wrote for that occasion all during Sonia’s labor, because that was the wish of my Sonia.

“So, Jack.

“Not so many years pass, but it was a time that now seems like perfect happiness. Beneath the approving gaze of pretty Sonia and the sound of my growing boys in the nursery, I began to outreach even the talent I was born with. I reached that point where I could make the piano mourn or cry out or exult by laying my fingers just so.

“But the Nazi beast was growing. As a Jew, one felt hunted in the great cities as the voice of Hitler poisoned the airways. As a musician, I thought I was immune to the fury of armies and the faith of my fathers made little difference when I sat down before the music sheets and interpreted those passionate notes that Brahms, Chopin, Schumann—that all the great ones had left the world. Hitler meant nothing to me because of music and Sonia and my beautiful twin boys. When the newspapers disturbed me, I simply
stopped reading the newspaper. When rumors flew wildly in the streets, I stayed indoors and commanded that Sonia do the same. When the radio made Sonia weep with fear, I turned off the radio and forbade its use. I refused to listen to the baying of the Nazi hound. Politics sickened and bored me.

“Then I heard scratching at my door, unprepared and in innocence, and saw the Nazi beast. So I played my music to calm the blood lust of the Nazi beast. This beast loved my music, came to my concerts, called for encores, threw roses on the stages, and bellowed out my name. It loved music so much, Jack, that I almost did not see the moment that it wiped the blood of my family from its fangs and claws. Jew-hating Poland was attacked by Jew-hating Germany. It was not until later that I learned that World War II had begun and I and my family were in the middle of it all.

“I learned in the first days of the war that I was not a man of action. How is a musician supposed to respond to dive-bombers? I found myself paralyzed with fright and I remained at the piano during the first bombing raid because I discovered I could not move. The piano seemed safer to me, friendlier than the basement where my wife and neighbors had fled. I heard the approach of the planes and the air raid sirens go off and I knew what I should do, but I could not make myself run. Instead, I found myself playing from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111. The very last movement of his last sonata of the complete set of thirty-two.

“You have never been in a country invaded. You cannot understand the chaos, the despair, the panic in the streets. I think it is why modern music and modern art are so ugly. My wife, Sonia, found me, after the bombers had returned to their bases, sitting on the piano bench, still playing, as though possessed. I had urinated in my pants. Such was my fear during that first raid. I think I thought my music would save me, form a protective barrier that would hover over me like some impregnable umbrella. Sonia was very kind and gentle with me. ‘It is all right, my husband. Here, let me help you. Let me assist you. Please lean against me.’ I do not remember having a single thought about Sonia or my sons during the bombing. Not
one. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I was a coward of the most despicable kind. Now, even Sonia knew it.

“Sonia’s father, Saul Youngerman, was a man of action. He could think clearly under pressure. Already, he had read Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
and had watched his rise in Germany with a distrustful eye. He was a rich manufacturer who possessed fortunes in four countries and he told us he knew what Hitler had in mind. He commanded that we run east as fast as we could, keeping well ahead of the German Army. His two sons, Marek and Stefan, refused to leave Warsaw because their wives were city girls, born and bred to expect the comforts of Warsaw life. They had school-age children and even if the Germans won, they could not prevent their children from going to school. It is easy to mock their stupidity now, but remember, this was a time when the words Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen had no meaning to the world. Not a single member of Sonia’s family who stayed in Warsaw survived the war. Not one.

“With all the madness in the streets, with Warsaw itself wounded and bleeding, Saul Youngerman arranged for us to leave by boat, down the Vistula by barge, and then by oxen and wagons, which drove us twenty kilometers to a farm where two touring cars were waiting with uniformed chauffeurs. It was not the fact that Sonia’s father was rich that made the difference. Many were the rich men who perished from starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was that he had formed a plan in his head if something happened and he was not bashful in putting it into effect. By daytime we slept, and by night we moved. When we came to a border after the fourth night of very hard travel we crossed into a territory controlled by the Red Army. Saul figured that his family would be safe there since Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. His wife’s brother runs a factory there and knows we are coming. On 5 September, we are taken in by the family Spiegel. We are put up in a beautiful house with a very fine piano that had recently been tuned in preparation for my arrival. The city that offers us deliverance is in the Ukraine. It is called Kironittska.

“The wheel of fate comes round to touch you unawares. This is
the place from which your Great Jew, Max Rusoff, and his wife, Esther, are from. But fate reveals itself only slowly and in its own good time. So, we are there and every day I play the piano and crowds of people gather outside on the street to listen to my music. Everything is good for us in Kironittska from the beginning. Many people there are Jews, some twenty thousand, so we are well taken care of. News from Warsaw is worse each day, but we know this only from the radio. On 17 September, the Soviet Union attacks Poland from the east.

“I take on music students and some of them are very good, but it is not the life I would choose. My father-in-law takes several trips fraught with terrible danger back to Warsaw. He takes food and medicine to our family, then sneaks back after terrifying adventures to Kironittska. I have never known a braver man. The stories he brought back from Warsaw were each worse than the time before. By November, the main Jewish areas are enclosed in barbed wire. Jews are ordered to wear the Star of David. Saul Youngerman cannot be persuaded from still another trip back to Poland. He considers himself a Polish patriot, more than a Jew.