All My Sins Remembered (61 page)

Julius bowed his dark head. When he lifted his eyes again Grace thought he was scanning the rows of seats in search of her. His face was very white, as white as his starched collar and the butterfly wings of his tie. She found that she wanted to stand up, to signal to him I’m here with you, and she curled her fingers around the edge of her seat to anchor herself.

Then he turned aside, so sharply that the black tails of his coat flipped behind him. There were the formal bows exchanged between soloist and conductor, soloist and the orchestra.

The audience was silent now, fully expectant. Clio noticed only subliminally in the split second before Julius lifted his violin that there was none of the usual coughing and fidgeting before the music burst out.

Julius began to play. At first he seemed tense but after a few bars his face cleared, and then settled into the expression of remote concentration that it always wore when he became absorbed in his music.

Clio’s breath came more easily. She sank back by small degrees until her shoulder blades connected with the plush padding of her seat. Rafael eased his long legs into a more comfortable position in the cramped space. The music rose around them and up into the gilded vaults over their heads.

The whistling was the more shocking just because Julius’s playing had taken hold of all of them.

There was one long, sharp blast that cut across the sweetness of the music like an obscenity, and then three or four more that came and went and then united in a single harsh shriek.

A collective gasp seemed to stir like a wind in the concert hall and then the old seats creaked and groaned as people turned to gape at the source of the noise. The whistling went on, raucous and defiant. Isolde leapt to her feet and shook her fist at the back of the hall, but neither Clio nor Grace looked round. Their eyes were fixed on Julius. At his back the conductor let his baton fall and the orchestra struggled on and then raggedly faltered into silence, section by section.

Julius continued to play. The notes rose thinly, sliced into fragments by the whistles.

‘Julius,’ Grace whispered. She covered her mouth with her fingers.

Isolde was shouting something while Pilgrim jerked at her arm. There were more shouts, and a banging of seats, and then the stamping began.

Clio looked sideways at Rafael. He was hunched forward, with Grete’s hand on his. Slowly, moving her head as if her neck were painfully stiff, Clio turned to see what was happening behind her. All the time she could hear Julius’s unaccompanied playing and see the image of his death-pale face.

A group of young SA men had occupied the last row of seats. They were standing up, as stiff as if they had been called to attention, and they were holding shiny silver whistles to their lips. The blasts were synchronized now into sharp, short volleys of noise, and the stamping and handclapping from the body of the hall fell into the same vicious rhythm.

‘Stop it,’ Isolde was tearfully screaming. ‘Damn you, stop it.’

Grace bit into her own knuckles as the noise swelled up like the sea.

A man’s full-throated voice roared out, ‘
Jude! Jude!
’

Clio felt rather than heard Julius stop playing.

She turned again to face forward and saw him lower his violin until it rested at his side. The conductor had already left the stage and the players in the orchestra sat in a silent phalanx, looking nowhere.

Julius bowed again, with ironic grace, into the storm of his audience. Then he walked away, straight-backed, and disappeared into the wings.

Clio caught at Rafael’s arm. The chorus had been taken up in other sections of the hall.

‘Jew! Jew!’

‘What can we do?’ she whispered.

‘We must get him away from here.’

He was already pushing away from her, over the feet and knees of their neighbours, towards the end of the row and the aisle. Grete was ahead of him. Clio and Grace stumbled in their wake, clutching at their evening handbags and trailing wraps. ‘Excuse me,’ Clio heard Grace muttering as she trampled on the feet of Berlin matrons. Excuse me, as if they were making an unscheduled exit from a Shaftesbury Avenue matinée.

They ran the length of the concert hall, past the young men in their brown uniforms, and out through the double doors into the foyer. A group of ushers was peering into the hall around an opposite set of doors. They seemed merely curious, rather than surprised or shocked by the disturbance. Rafael leapt down the shallow steps that led from the main doors into the street with Pilgrim at his shoulder.

The performers’ entrance was in a side street overshadowed by the dark bulk of the hall. The door was open, and they saw Julius standing in a dingy entry. He was wearing his old black overcoat buttoned to his chin, and he held his violin in its case close against his chest, as if it were a child.

‘Come with us,’ Rafael ordered.

Julius hesitated. ‘If they decide to restart the concert …’

‘Come
now
.’

Clio had a vision of the brownshirts in the hall realizing that they had been deprived of their sport and spilling out into the street in search of their Jewish violinist. Heinrich’s story of Herr Keller the lawyer came back to her.

‘Please, Julius. There isn’t going to be any more music tonight. Do what Rafael says.’

Still he did not move. He drew his violin case to him and looked back over his shoulder into the light, as if he could not believe they would not call for him again, that there had not been some administrative mistake that could all be explained away. He had played other concerts in Berlin; sometimes the posters bearing his name were defaced or there were the gaping spaces of empty seats in the prominent front rows, even catcalls when he took his bow, but he had never dreamt of being driven from the stage. Clio and the others saw that he was numb with shock.

It was Grace who broke through to him. She seized the violin case in both hands and wrenched it away from him, and then she took hold of the lapels of his black coat and shook him until he looked down into her face. His expression changed at once. Grace wrapped her arms around him and leant her cheek against his shoulder.

‘Come home,’ she whispered. ‘We can’t stay here, all of us.’

‘I’m coming,’ Julius said.

Pilgrim picked up the violin and they closed around him, with Clio and Grace on either side. The side street was empty, and the wider street beyond. There had been no exodus yet from the Philharmonic Hall.

‘Perhaps they have found another soloist,’ Julius said softly. ‘Perhaps one of those boys can stand up and play the violin as well as the tin whistle.’

‘Where can we go?’ Clio asked Rafael. Her head was filled with images of dark alleyways and bundles of rags left lying in the gutter.

‘He cannot go back to his own place,’ Rafael said. ‘Not for a day or so until they have forgotten him and fixed on someone else.’

‘My studio is nearest,’ Pilgrim offered. ‘Two stops only on the U-Bahn.’

Even Isolde was silent on the short journey. To Clio the divided city seemed to have become universally hostile. Every young man out with his girl looked like SA or SS, ready to pounce on Julius and drag him away out of reach to the terror of some shuttered brown house.

Pilgrim’s studio occupied part of an old warehouse. It was reached by an internal spiral staircase of flaking ironwork rising through a hole in the floorboards into a shadowy space beneath the iron girders that supported the warehouse roof. They climbed the tight spiral and stood in an awkward group at the opening of the stairwell while Pilgrim swore and fumbled at the lights.

When the lights did come on the sudden antiseptic glare threw into prominence all the clutter of canvasses and empty bottles and paint jars jammed with brushes. There was a screen for models to change behind, and a divan heaped with discarded clothes. The roof was pierced with glass skylights, black shiny strips now in the darkness. Even the smell was the same. It was like stepping back into Charlotte Street.

‘Welcome, Janus,’ Pilgrim said slyly.

Grace and Clio did not look at each other.

‘It’s not exactly the Adlon Hotel, Julius, or the Reichskanzler-Palais, but perhaps you won’t mind that for a day or so. May I offer anyone a drink? There’s some schnapps, Isolde, isn’t there? Maybe even a drop or two of Scotch.’

‘I’ll get it,’ Isolde said wearily. She kicked aside a heap of grubby clothes and went to the stone sink in the corner of the studio. The glasses that she distributed were sticky and filmed with dust, but Julius took his and drank the whisky in a grateful gulp. He sat on the divan with his hands hanging loosely between his knees, staring at the floor in front of him.

A silence swelled in the thick air.

At length Rafael put his glass aside. There were grey lines at the corners of his mouth. ‘I am sorry, Julius,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed of Germany and the German people.’

‘No, Rafael, it is not a matter of
shame
for you …’

Grete moved closer to his side but Julius held up his hand before she could say any more. He seemed dazed, still, but his eyes were fixed on Grace.

‘I was warned. But I was sure that music transcended everything. I thought my playing determined what they thought of me, and that everything else was incidental. A political matter, not my concern.’ Rafael shifted impatiently and Julius glanced at him before his gaze returned to Grace. ‘I misunderstood, that is all. I failed to see what should have been obvious to me. It was my own mistake.

‘I shall not make the mistake now of pretending that it is not going to grow worse every day. Jewish violinists will not be allowed to play Mozart any longer, any more than Jewish doctors will be allowed to look after the sick or Jewish lawyers to practise the law.’

The bewilderment in him was so evident that Clio felt a rush of anger clotted with tears burning at the base of her throat. She jumped up and sent a bottle of linseed oil skidding across the floorboards.

‘You have to go
home
. You have to leave this place, while you are still able to go.’ Her voice sounded sharp and hollow. There was a slight echo in the high-roofed studio. ‘Can you
hear
, Julius?’

Julius did not take his eyes off Grace’s profile. ‘Go home? Are you going to go home, Clio, because of what has happened tonight?’

Rafael did not move. He sat with his big hands cupped, as if they still held the whisky glass.

‘No,’ Clio answered. The certainty came to her as she spoke. Her voice was clearer now, more like her own. ‘I don’t want to leave Berlin. But it isn’t the same for me, is it? I’m not Julius Hirsh, the violinist. Nobody knows who I am.’

‘They will do,’ Rafael shouted. ‘They will know us all, by the end. We shall have to creep, and dissemble, and lie about who we are and where we come from, or else we will have to run away.’

There was no contradiction. No one tried to say anything to soften or deflect the words.

After the echo of Rafael’s prediction the silence deepened around them. The rattle of raindrops on the skylight over their heads sounded unnaturally loud. Clio was reminded of the afternoons in Charlotte Street when Pilgrim had invited her to sit alone, and she had listened greedily to the disquisitions on art and spouts of Fitzrovian gossip while he dabbed at
The Janus Face
.

And of course there had been the other afternoons, opposite but not equal, when he would have made love to Grace on the sleazy divan. Then there had been Cressida, and Anthony for convenience.

Clio’s anger burned up like a clear, bright flame. She could see Grace, dancing in her débutante dress, a little figure at the very heart of the flame. She turned deliberately, to see where Grace sat beside Julius. Grace held her back very straight, with her knees and ankles together, the folds of her silk skirt falling elegantly to the dirty floor. She seemed to claim Julius for her own just by sitting at his side. She absorbed all his devotion, as a bolt of perfect black velvet absorbed the light, and reflected nothing back for him.

Clio whispered, ‘Do you see what they have done, your Nazis? Do you see what they are going to do, to Julius and Rafael and Grete and all of us, with their uniforms and their whistles and their violence and hatred?’

Grace never flinched. Her manner was at its most coldly patrician. ‘They are not
my
Nazis. It would be presumptuous to claim them for myself. I expressed my admiration of the Führer, and sympathy with their economic and cultural ideals.’

‘With anti-Semitism, with murder and the pogrom as cultural ideals?’

‘I am not anti-Semitic, Clio. How could I be?’ Grace’s fingers, still wearing Anthony’s rings, made a small, disdainful movement. ‘This evening’s display was ugly and disturbing. If the Führer were to hear of it, I am sure there would be an investigation and proper punishment. But it is the sad truth that at the tail end of any great political movement there are always thugs. Left or right. Communist or National Socialist. Is that not true, Rafael?’

Julius made a sudden movement. He leant over to Grace and put his arm around her shoulders. Then he kissed the side of her head, where the dark hair waved over her temple.

‘Don’t, Grace. Don’t talk about this any more. I said that it was my own mistake, and I would rather it was forgotten.’

Grace closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again they looked very deep and brilliant. She smiled at Julius.

‘Of course, if that is what you want. But I think you will see that I am right, just the same.’

Clio waited for him to contradict her, but Julius said nothing. She would have shouted herself, refining the flame of her anger towards Grace like a gas jet turning from smoky yellow to blue, But Rafael warningly touched the back of her hand.

Pilgrim was slouched against his screen, watching them all in sour amusement.

‘There’s no more whisky,’ Isolde announced. ‘You can have the schnapps, if you want.’

‘Is Julius safe here?’ Grace demanded of Rafael.

‘Yes, safe enough. If he’s willing to stay for a few days, until the Nazis find themselves another target.’