Playing for Time (14 page)

How right Little Irene was when she said: “You see, they’re pleased. At last they’ve been given credit: they did something for the prisoners and the prisoners appreciated it!”

Alma Rose

“They’ve finished their damned railway!”

The girls went towards the windows and door. They moved slowly, as if unwillingly, but they went all the same, and so did I.

In the distance new rails gleamed in their bed, which rose above the mud. It was March; patches of snow melted slowly during the day and froze again at night.

“Well! We’ll have a grandstand view of arrivals,” remarked Jenny. “We won’t be short of entertainment.”

“They make me sick,” shouted Florette. “Sick, sick! I refuse to see all this.”

“We mustn’t look,” Ewa advised her.

Florette rounded on her like a wildcat. “You’re above all that then, miss high and mighty, you have no memories, you arrived here in a carriage, were borne here by lackeys, eh? And of course you couldn’t care less about us Jews, you won’t be gassed… But it so happens that being a Yid myself, I do care.”

Her hand searched desperately for something to grab and she came upon my arm. “Look, you see that smoke that smells of cooked corpses, do you know what that is for me?”

The girls had drawn away from us, out of weariness, perhaps, or indifference.

“I arrived here with my mother, my father, my boyfriend, my whole family: twenty-one people in all. We’d been rounded up. I didn’t know where they were going. When I saw them get into the trucks, I didn’t understand. So when I arrived at the quarantine block, I actually dared to ask about my parents. Then the blockowa grabbed my arm, pulled me towards the door, and said in her foul German jargon, pointing towards the chimneys with her filthy finger: ”You see that smoke?—that’s your father coming out of the right chimney and your mother out of the left.“ I screamed like a mad thing, I was hysterical…”

She calmed down, her startling green eyes filled with tears. She lowered her head, suddenly humble. “Because of that, I think I’ll rail against everything all my life. You don’t get over a thing like that…”

Seated at one end of the copyists’ table, Little Irene was drawing; head bent, she was concentrating, like a child absorbed. Her chestnut hair hadn’t been shaved for three months; theoretically we were supposed to be shaved regularly, to facilitate Pani Founia’s delousing sessions. She would march her heavy fingers over our skulls, her permanently black nails searching greedily for lice. As our gentlemen-taskmasters were extremely delicate flowers, these parasites struck terror among them. The women who were in contact with them—the girls in Canada, the interpreters, the women in the medical section and we, the orchestra —were not to cause them to run that shameful risk, the risk of catching lice.

I was moved by the sight of the nape of Little Irene’s hollow neck, like that of an undernourished child. I leant towards her; she was drawing the cover of the Sunday programme. She was an even worse violinist than Florette, and to keep her place among us she had had the idea, which charmed Alma, of giving a programme to the SS “ladies and gentlemen.” She drew quite well and they liked it:
Ach! gut! ach! schon!
We’d have done more than that to please our masters, our murderers, to live one more month, one more day…

On her paper were garlands of flowers, branches bursting into Leaf, nests, birds—everything that was conspicuously absent here. Lovingly she touched up a sprig of lilac: “You see, Fania, the spring inspires me.”

“How do you know it’s spring? There’s not a blade of grass, not a bud!”

“The days are longer, we’re coming up to March 21, lilac will be flowering somewhere.”

At these words, Jenny’s imagination took hold: “I can’t help thinking about the Porte des Lilas, it must have been lovely when it was all in flower.”

Florette cut her down to size: “There can’t be much left of it!”

“What do you know about it—it’s not your part of town. My grandfather’s got a little garden on the old fortifications and you ought to see the lettuce he grows, nothing but heart. He has two lilac trees, one of those fabulous purple ones and a double white. He always gives me the first spray. My husband’s just like me, it affects him too; and emotions give him strength.”

“We’re fed up with these dreary records,” Big Irene snorted.

In excellent humour, Jenny remarked firmly: “It certainly wouldn’t be a sight for brats of your age.”

“
Rube! Ruhe
!” ordered Alma.

It was a pity, because when they were laughing, they could forget their hunger. That night, Big Irene woke up suddenly. I wasn’t asleep, and I heard her murmur miserably: “Mama, mama, I’m so hungry.” Then she started crying. It was all the more irritating in that we could have suffered rather less. On various occasions Mandel had told Alma, in front of us, to ask for anything she needed. Well, we needed to eat! It was less inspiring than making music, but perhaps more vital.

Despite the orders she bellowed out so imperiously, Alma seemed accessible to me today. Indeed, she was in a good mood: some new pieces had been sent to her from Berlin. “Here’s some work for you: ”The Charge of the Light Brigade‘ and two Suppe overtures. The SS are fond of him.“

I didn’t share their taste, and by the time I’d finished I’d had enough Suppe for a lifetime.

“I thought we ought to put the
Butterfly
duet on the programme; you can sing it with Lotte. I must say I’m very fond of it; I think it’s rather reminiscent of Ravel.”

An unexpected comparison. Poor Ravel! Me singing beside Lotte would be a sight worthy of Dubout, my favourite caricaturist! My head hardly came up to her chest. The Germans might have no sense of the ridiculous, but I did. Despite my desire to laugh, I commended Alma for her marvellous idea, which earned me a smile. The girls welcomed these developments, which might presage a relatively peaceful rehearsal. I took a calculated risk and said boldly: “Alma, couldn’t you ask Frau Mandel for a little extra, a parcel for the girls or something? They’re so hungry.”

Her face inscrutable, her lips pursed, she answered hissingly: “No! I refuse to ask for anything for them. They spoilt my concert last Sunday; I’d be ashamed.”

And she turned her back on me. I didn’t give a damn about her scores and her music. Internally, I apostrophized her: “You’d be ashamed? What of, you vain idiot? Helping women to survive? You’ve got a marvellous position in this monstrous place and yet you won’t take advantage of it. What kind of person are you, you little German Jew? You’re not a primitive animal. You’re educated, intelligent, and you behave as if you saw nothing, as if you didn’t know where you were. Doesn’t the smoke from those charred bodies worry you? Don’t you miss the ordinary little things of life? Aren’t you a bit surprised by your audience of corpses, uniformed executioners, fat shrews? Where do you think you are, in the Albert Hall in London? In fact, do you as much as perceive these women? Are you aware of the dramas that go on in our seething block? Or are you thinking of your Uncle Gustav Mahler, of your father, of the men you’ve loved, if indeed there are any? Wrong notes seem to be your only recurrent nightmare.”

I didn’t feel like writing music; it was going to be a long, unbearable day and I dismissed it before it had even happened.

How loathsome Alma was, lording it on her platform, masterful and self-confident. Or was she? Wasn’t her “I’d be ashamed” an admission of pride and powerlessness? These three words haunted me; somehow I imagined that they were one of the keys to her character, that through them I would be able to understand her, to establish a relationship with the other Alma, the one who was taking her violin out of its case. Imperious but gentle, she proffered her chin to the side of her instrument. The careful way she placed her cheek and lifted her shoulder to support the violin bespoke a sensual pleasure compounded of tenderness and trust. Her agile fingers glided along the finger board in a possessive caress, her wrist supplely bent like an acrobat’s unstraining limb. Alma was transfigured when she played; she was incomparably beautiful. She gave off an extraordinary sensuality; her relaxed mouth softened, half-opened; her eyes misted over; her body trembled. Alma was in the throes of love. We were silent, we listened and forgot. When she stopped and put down her bow, the desire to applaud was irresistible. But it was very, very short, the length of a piece of music. Then, instantly, Alma became inhuman once again.

Her voice pulled me from my reverie: “Fania, we’ll rehearse
Ein Paar Tranen.
I hope you’ve learnt to pronounce
Lacheln?”

I was afraid I hadn’t. Florette had made me repeat the German word for “smile” twenty times and lectured me: “You must manage it, you’re gifted for languages, you’ve already begun to learn German, so it’s not that that’s the problem, you’re just not trying.” Stubbornly I insisted that I couldn’t pronounce the German
ch.

Alma raised her baton. I launched into song and again came to grief on
Lacheln.
Alma lost her patience and so did I: “Listen, give me whatever word you like:
laugh, giggle, split one’s sides,
anything, but not
smile—I
can’t do it.”

“You can. You must. All it needs is an effort of will.”

“Well, I don’t want to!”

This was effrontery; she was towering above me, her dark eyes dangerously bright with anger, her baton trembling in her hand.

“Do you know what you’re saying?”

Silence.

“Yes: I don’t want to say
smile
in front of the SS and I won’t. I’d consider it the ultimate indecency.”

Anything could happen now, endless
Scheiss Kopf,
a slap, her baton thrown at my head. Unpredictably, she was silent, turned away, shrugged her shoulders, and explained coolly to her musicians that they would have to play extra loudly at that point to cover my voice and render inaudible that offending “smile.”

Lotte smirked; at least no one could reproach her with such failings:
“Ach,
those French! No sense of duty!” Clara pursed her china doll’s mouth. I knew what she was thinking, I’d already heard it: “She’s taking my place, she’s not satisfied with what she’s got. And many would be, because she’s really in charge here, after Alma. She knows that all I can do is sing, but she doesn’t care, she only thinks of herself.”

That was how things were now. Clara had changed quickly, very quickly. A month after our arrival in the music block, one evening at six o’clock, she’d said to me: “I’ve organized a box. I’ve taken my things out of yours. I won’t share with anyone anymore.” The next day, at dinnertime, I opened her box by mistake and saw a pot of jam. Clara rushed at me. “Leave that; I told you to keep your hands off it.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. All our boxes look alike. I certainly wouldn’t touch that nobly earned jam of yours!”

There were tears of rage in her eyes, perhaps a last glimmer of a former morality, a remnant of dignity. The donor was probably a
kapo
from the men’s camp. Only the
kapos,
the blockowas, all Poles, Slovaks, or Germans, could come to our block.

Had she been a virgin? It was possible, it wouldn’t have been a decisive factor. Besides, the risk of pregnancy for internees was virtually nonexistent.

I felt sorry for Clara when I saw her twitching her large behind, almost as provocative as Lotte, but so different. Lotte was married; she always needed a man and became virtually hysterical without one. But for Clara, everything had been different. She had been an innocent young girl who loved her boyfriend and who still nourished childlike dreams. Living in a sheltered milieu she was innocent of life, like the adorable and naive Big Irene, who remained so, while Clara changed so quickly and so totally. She had become frighteningly selfish; she would do anything to get food. In the middle of all these painfully thin girls, her obesity was a wonder, a most effective lure for men, who paid court to her in butter and sugar. The successful candidate would pay Tchaikowska or another blockowa twenty cigarettes, a high rate, for the hire of her room for a quarter of an hour.

The environment, fear, and hunger had all done their destructive work. In Birkenau I had the impression that we were well on the way to suffering a sort of leprosy: bits of oneself rotted and fell off without one’s even knowing they’d gone. Clara had lost her woman’s dignity. What would I lose?

Pa-pa-pa-f
am. It
wasn’t London, but our orchestra rehearsing the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, which I’d rewritten from memory. The key phrase had given me a lot of pleasure. Normally it was the bassoons, clarinets, and strings which played it. For our orchestra I’d done my best with the mandolins, whose vibrato enabled them to produce a sustained sound. The guitars had the task of giving body to the arrangement, of reinforcing the mandolins, while the violins came in to swell the fourth note.

Alma had wanted some Beethoven; I’d claimed that all I could remember was the first movement of the Fifth Symphony and I suggested she put it on the programme. A rare pleasure for me. She didn’t see any malice in it, nor did the SS. They saw no connection with the signature tune of the Free French broadcasts on the BBC. For them it was Beethoven, a god, a monument to German music, and they listened to it in respectful rapture. Their lack of a sense of humour was almost touching. There was intense jubilation when our orchestra played the piece. It was one of my most perfect moments.

Today the girls must have been in a state of grace because, despite our unlikely orchestra of mandolins and guitars, the clumsy double bass, the pipes and Frau Kroner’s flute, Alma and her violins, the symphony soared, compelling and marvellous. All our table raised their heads and Founia and Tchaikowska stood transfixed in the doorway. The girls were transfigured: they understood what they were playing and I, eyes closed, was listening to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

Alma often asked me to massage her temples and the nape of her neck, claiming it soothed her neuralgia. I was quite prepared to believe it, but I felt above all she liked to emerge from her enforced solitude to find relief in talking endlessly about herself, like a queen confiding in her lady-in-waiting. There could be no intimacy between us. My only quality, in her eyes, was that I was a musician, a real one, guaranteed by my diploma from the Paris Conservatoire.