Music for Wartime (15 page)

I lied before. The sex isn’t that good. I had low expectations, so I was thrilled he knew
anything
. But actually he’s pretty stiff, noncreative. I’ve tried things a couple of times, normal things for our society, and he’s pulled away from me, started talking fast in German, turned bright pink.

The last time he did it, I put my clothes back on and decided to ignore him for the rest of the day. I went to the window and opened the curtains. I wasn’t thinking about it, but maybe on some level I did it to scare him. He stood staring down at the cars, saw all the buildings, saw for the first time how high we were. He didn’t cry, but he looked like he wanted to. He stayed there a long time, shaking and mumbling. Then he closed the curtains and ran to the couch, ran bent over at the waist as if he were scared of falling. I’m surprised he never opened the curtains himself while I was at work. You’d think a genius would be more curious than that.

To calm him down, I got my big music encyclopedia off the shelf and showed him all the pictures in the Bach section. The house where he was born, the church in Leipzig, a portrait of his oldest son. He pointed at each and said things I couldn’t understand, but they seemed to make him happy. He flipped back a page to the Vivaldi section and made some kind of joke. He giggled and giggled, so I just laughed along with him.

“Yep, that Vivaldi,” I said. “One funny guy.”

After I put the encyclopedia back on the shelf, I got out the little Chagall book I’d bought at MOMA.

“Here,” I said, and I opened it to
The Fiddler
.
“This is what I think of when you play Chopin. See how he’s making music, floating there above the town? That’s what you sound like, like there’s nothing under your feet but you don’t even notice.”

Bach squinted at the picture, pointed at the fiddler’s face. “Grün,” he said.

“Yes, it’s green. I wouldn’t make fun. You looked strange enough yourself when you were twelve inches tall.”

I flipped to the one called
Birthday
,
the one where a man floats above the red carpet, floats above a woman to kiss her. A city window and a little purse. The man has no arms. The next page was
Couple of Lovers on a Red Background
, where they’re lying in the red, and they’re red themselves, drowning in it, only they’re not drowning, because up above is a huge blue pool where the real water is, where the blue man throws flowers and the fish-bird jumps down.

“These are pictures of love,” I said. “
Love.
” He put his hand on his heart. I’d taught him that one the week before. “Everyone in these pictures can float, because they’re in love, or they’re the fiddler on the roof, or just happy.” I pointed out the window. “That’s why we can stay up here so high. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is. Twenty-seven stories up!” I flashed my fingers in two tens and a seven. “Because we’re playing music and we’re happy.”

He crawled back to the window, his nails digging into the carpet, then reached up and lifted just the corner of the curtain. Together we watched the bus shed passengers twenty-seven stories down. Then he looked at me and pointed at the wristwatch I’d given him, the one Larry left behind because it wasn’t digital.

“You want to know how long the building can hold up against gravity?” Although maybe it was something else. How long must he stay here, how many lifetimes have passed since his own, what time is it in Germany?

“Tock, tock, tock,” he said.

I chose to answer the gravity question, because it was the only one I could. “A long time.
Long time.
It won’t fall down while you’re here, at least.”

Since that afternoon, when he sings the blues, it sounds like the
blues
.

“I’m so forlorn,”
he sings,

“life’s just a sorn

my heart is torn

vhy vas I born

Vhat did I dooooo

to be so bleck . . . and blue?”

He won’t look out the window anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He knows. Every siren he hears now, he looks at that curtain. I’ve never been in the blissful ignorance camp, but in this case maybe it was too much for one man to handle. Sometime last October, Larry made us stop watching TV so we wouldn’t see bad news. I couldn’t understand how it worked for him, because for me it was worse. If we don’t watch the news, I said, how do we know the city’s not on fire? How do we know we’re not the last ones alive? Since Johann’s been here I’ve kept the TV off, but I’ll turn on my radio when he’s in the bathroom—if only to hear some stupid ad, because then at least I know we’re all okay. Those shrill furniture store jingles are the sound of safety. There’s still money to be made, they say. There’s still something left to buy.

He’s been turning pale, and if I’m not mistaken he’s getting smaller. You can see it around the eyes, the way they’re sinking back into his face. The skin feels loose on his arms. He hardly leaves the couch anymore, and when he does—when he finally gets his courage and dashes to the bathroom—it’s with shaking legs and outstretched arms, like he’s worried the floor will give way any moment. He’s scratched the arms of the sofa to shreds.

Yesterday I played the piano to see if he would follow suit. I brought out my big blue Gershwin book and got through “A Foggy Day” with only three or four mistakes. I’m good, if a little rusty. At the end of high school I was even applying to conservatories, making tapes and getting ready to go on auditions, when I realized that although I could play almost anything you put before me, and skillfully—I’d won competitions, even—I’d never gotten through a major piece without one error. I could play the whole
Pathétique
flawlessly, then a measure from the end I’d breathe a sigh of relief and wreck the last chord. And so I majored in finance.

“Maybe that’s what you are,” I told Johann after I’d flubbed the last two measures. “Maybe you’re my repressed ambition.” Not likely, the way he sits with his mouth caving in, his glare darting between me and the window.

He sighed. “I’m vhite . . . in-side,” he sang.

“You’re white all over, Johann,” I said. Though truth be told, lately he’s a little gray.

I get the feeling his tock, tock, tock is running out. But if my test sticks are accurate I started ovulating yesterday, so I only need him to hold out a little longer. We made love twice this morning. I’ll buy him a fattening dinner tonight.

I had to leave him on the couch at noon, lock the door, ride down in my loud, slow elevator to show the Lindquists their fifteenth (and God, let’s hope, final) apartment. Johann didn’t look good at all when I left him there, so small and pale, curled in the cushions. I wonder if I’d be as terrified by his eighteenth-century Leipzig, or if there’s something intrinsically horrifying about our modern world, about this new century, something we can handle only because we’ve been so slowly inured to it. At other moments today I’ve wondered, too, if Johann shriveling in on himself is in fact a sign that part of me is coming back to life. Or that another life is ready to start inside me.

“I have to make money,” I told him as I left. “Deutschmarks, right? You’d understand. I’m sure you wouldn’t have slaved your Sundays away on half the organs in Germany if you didn’t have twenty mouths to feed. I’ll need to buy things. Piano lessons. For the baby.”

And so I left him, and even if he’s still there when I get back, I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t last the night, if he evaporates by morning. But I never planned on his being in the picture long-term. I don’t actually want him to
raise
the baby. It’ll be easy enough to explain why he’s not around. “Well, the baby’s father is quite a famous man,” I’ll say, “and this would simply ruin his reputation. Believe me.
Very. Famous.
”

Waiting for the elevator, though, I did something I didn’t know I was going to do. I took out my phone and called Larry. When he answered, I said, “Don’t talk.” I said, “It’s good that not everyone is like me, born expecting the world to come unpasted.” I said, “I see it now. You were up there playing a fiddle with no roof to stand on, and one day you just looked down and lost your grip on the air and fell. And I’m sorry.”

Larry was quiet, and then he said, “Okay.” And then he said, “I’ll call you after work.”

It occurred to me—of course it did—that if I got back with Larry next week, or the week after that, he’d never know the baby wasn’t his. And who’s to say it wouldn’t be? Am I the expert on reality these days?

On the long ride to the ground floor I slid on my stilettos, growing three inches even as I sank three hundred feet. I put on lipstick and prepared to sell the Lindquists a place to live, a nice plot of air so high above the city the Indians didn’t even think to charge beads for it. I practiced saying: Look how convenient. And how stable. It’ll last a thousand years, if nothing knocks it down. I know you’re going to love it.

(SECOND LEGEND)

I
n the bedroom of her Budapest apartment, using the stage makeup left from her acting career, my grandmother painted young women’s faces old. Greasepaint doesn’t go stale, and when properly applied—when a skilled hand traces lines that are not yet lines but the faintest shadows on taut faces—it can achieve the most astonishing prophecies of the body’s eventual self-betrayal. My father, still very young, stood far from the blackout curtains with a candle, and in thanks for this illumination my grandmother called him her little acolyte. She handed out canes and shawls, taught the girls to walk with the weight of eighty years—and thus superannuated they shuffled through the streets at night, without fear of predatory soldiers. And if they chose to carry things other than yarn in their knitting baskets, so be it. Who would suspect?

Another impossibility, yet by most accounts true: More than once she voluntarily strapped a yellow Star of David on her arm before walking into the ghettos to visit old theater friends, her papers in her pocket to prove, later, her right to leave. How this could ever have worked is unclear, but then the ghettos were slippery, temporary things, their borders well guarded but shifting, the soldiers bribable and perhaps susceptible to charm and beauty. There are stranger things true. There are simpler things not.

Impossible as well: When my mother was engaged to my father in 1964, she traveled alone into Communist Hungary, which her fiancé was not allowed to reenter and her future mother-in-law was not allowed to leave. She spent three days there, and at the end of that time my grandmother asked her to smuggle out of the country the particularly incriminating anti-Communist novel she’d completed a decade prior. My mother rode the train to Austria with three hundred onion-skin pages tucked in her girdle.
A vádlott
was published in 1999, twenty years after my grandmother’s death. It’s the only book I’ve read, in rough translation, of her forty. But her longest novel, I’ve just learned (reeling with the glee and fear of things I don’t even believe in), involves a man from the Romanian region of Moldavia shot to death by the fearsome Iron Guard. Ten years ago, I wrote a short story about an American boy learning of someone shot to death by the Iron Guard in Moldavia, in the city of Iaşi. I’d chosen the region at random, then was drawn in—drowned—by its history.

I’d love to take this confluence as an indicator of inherited memory, as evidence of further connections, further legacies—of empathy, artistry, guts. But to claim one ancestor would be to claim them all, even those on the wrong sides of humanity’s decisive moral battles. The slave owners, the anti-Semites, the Huns, the cowards. And furthermore: Wasn’t the presumption of a genetic morality the error at the very core of Nazi ideology?

I’ve written the story of the painted faces twenty times, from every perspective, at every degree of remove from reality, but my descriptions of candles and shadows have never come close to resurrecting the commingled scents of greasepaint and melting wax and fear. Certain images I’ve copied over so many times they’ve come to feel like truth. (My grandmother drawing the bristles of the brush through her lips to flatten them, naming the creases of the face as she etches each girl’s future there—the lines called think-too-much, the lines called worry-too-much, and smoke-too-much, and know-too-much. The way she flips her tarot cards on the small table after the transformations are complete, telling one girl to beware tall men, another she’s surrounded by protectors.)

When I tell it from my father’s point of view, it is always a story of innocence. In the girls’ narration, it becomes gossipy: This writer, this former actress, painting their faces in the closet, was surviving the war by pawning the family silver one spoon at a time. She had enough spoons to last five more years. She was psychic, even beyond her tarot skill. Strangest of all: Despite her liberal views, her Bohemian friends, she’d been married to the member of Parliament who had written the Second Jewish Law in 1939. (The new quotas put tens of thousands out of work, restricted Jews from the press, took their land, defined Jewishness as a race rather than a religion. Even the theater was affected. If no more than 6 percent of any cast could be Jewish, then in a play with fifteen characters, one actor was too many. No Jew could direct a play or own a theater. Of course, the girls don’t really whisper this litany. But I need to. I need to remind myself of these details in draft after draft, as if the writing might wear the words thin, until their meanings won’t stick.) The same year the law passed, Rózsa Ignácz divorced János Makkai. They were first cousins, the women whisper. And this boy with the candle, he is their son. As my grandmother seals their wrinkles with powder, they wonder about cause and effect. Did the political differences destroy the marriage? Or were theaters included in the law as revenge against the woman who was already leaving him? Perhaps she’d had an affair with a Jewish director. Their questions are my own.

One of these times, if I get the words in the correct order, if I retrace more precisely the lines of history, I am convinced I will learn something I need to know. If not about my grandparents’ strange marriage or its dissolution, if not about bloodlines, then at least about courage in its quietest manifestations.

In any event, the faces were finished, the walking sticks distributed. The girls laughed at themselves in the mirror and headed into the night. What acts of sabotage or simple self-preservation they accomplished on the streets are not a matter of record.