The Savior (19 page)

“So who were you crying for? Yourself? Your lost innocence?”

“The music was so beautiful. I…I'd never heard anything like it, not from a single violin. The recording I told you about was nothing compared to it. I had the feeling you'd never played like that before, that you were stretching beyond yourself, way beyond what anyone could do in a normal concert. I didn't want it to end. I could have stayed in that corner forever.”

All his life, Gottfried had hoped and waited for praise like this, and now it meant nothing to him. He couldn't even muster the energy to respond graciously. Rudi's rhapsodizing was an irritant, not a comfort.

His throat felt parched; he would have given anything for a glass of water. He gathered some snow in his hands and brought them to his mouth, trying to suck in some moisture.

“You know, my gun was lying on the floor beside me. It never looked so strange to me as when I listened to you play. So…alien. I never wanted to touch that gun again. I wanted time to stop. But when you came to the part that sounds like a bell tolling—you know, when you keep playing the same note, with other notes moving against it, and the whole thing gets louder and louder—I knew it would be over soon.”

“You mean you knew what was going to happen.”

“Yes,” he admitted in a low voice.

“You could have told me. This morning, or yesterday.”

“What good would that have done? It wouldn't have changed anything.”

“Yes. It might have. I don't think I could have played like that if I'd known for sure there was no hope. I might have gone through the motions, but he wouldn't have got what he wanted.”

“They'd still be dead. And then we wouldn't have shared such…such beauty.”

“‘We'? No, Rudi, don't include yourself. You didn't share a musical experience with the Jews. They disgusted you, remember? And what the hell good did the music do them?”

“Listen, they had to die. There was no hope for them, you just didn't know that. Well…if you have to die, it must be better to have Bach ringing in your ears.”

“That's a bit too lofty for me right now. Maybe it's worse.”

“You haven't been there, watching them for months. You don't know the level they were reduced to—what animals they had become. No, hear me out. Day after day I've watched them die. And I've watched them live, too—if you can call that living.”

“You haven't only watched.”

“Yes, that's true. Sometimes I've been forced to kill them. But you can't feel sorry for each and every one.” He flicked some snow off his coat. “They're better off dead, anyway.”

“You have no right to say that.”

“What's right got to do with it?” He snorted. “You haven't been there. What a luxury: you can still consider yourself a human being, with normal human responses. But I have no compassion left. That's a luxury I can't afford, not if I want to survive. The only thing I can cling to is music. It's the only thing that makes me feel remotely human in the midst of all that.” He lifted one hand from the wheel in an oblique gesture back toward the camp, then let it fall onto the seat beside him. “That's what you gave us today. For a few moments you made us human again.”

“They
were always human.”

They drove on in silence. Gottfried could sense the motion of the car, but there were no landmarks against which to measure any forward progress: it seemed as if they were riding on a giant treadmill, covering the same ground in the same torrent of snow from one moment to the next. He didn't understand how Rudi could see enough to keep the car on the road; the headlights illuminated only a kaleidoscope of swirling snowflakes. Gottfried closed his eyes to avoid getting dizzy from the chaotic, ever-shifting lines of white etched against the darkness.

When Rudi spoke again, he had to raise his voice to be heard against the wind. “You want to know why I was crying? I know you think it's sentimental, disgusting—a killer who cries. You think my tears defiled the music. But I wasn't feeling sorry for myself. I wasn't mourning my lost innocence, or my childhood, or my days at the university in Leipzig before everything fell apart. No. I was mourning the music itself,
our
music, the music that can never be the same again. Not after the ovens. Not after the burial pit. Not after we've distorted music by blasting it through our loudspeakers while we count them and herd them like cattle. I used to think it didn't matter what they did to waltzes and tangos, that our great music would survive all this, that it would remain pure. How stupid I was! They've ruined everything, they've pulled it down to their level, dragged the summits of our culture through a cesspool.”

“And I've helped them.”

Once again Rudi was silent. He hunched his shoulders, shook his head as he steered through the blizzard. Somehow Gottfried sensed that Rudi wanted to back away from the edge of the abyss he had just described. As for him, his arms and legs and neck had begun to ache. He had nothing more to say to Rudi; all he wanted was to lie back and be quiet. And get home to his bed.

“If I ever get out of this nightmare alive, I hope to be able to go to a concert again someday. Years from now, if you're playing somewhere, I'd like to come backstage and…” His voice trailed off. He must have known he was dreaming—there would be no such concert.

“I will never play again,” Gottfried murmured. He wasn't sure Rudi had heard him: he barely had the strength to speak. His clothes were hanging on him like a wet sack, and he had the chills.

“Maybe it will have to be different music from now on. I can understand…some memories take a long time to shake off.” Competing with the wind, Rudi's voice had risen to a hopeless whine.

“I will never play the violin again!” Gottfried shouted.

The car went into a skid. Rudi stepped on the brakes. Instinctively Gottfried's left hand shot out toward the violin as he braced himself with the right. They spun around in a wide, bumpy arc before lurching to a stop. Rudi leaned over the steering wheel and spread his fingers out on the dashboard, the knuckles arched. His shoulders were heaving.

“Can't you forgive me?” There was a catch in his voice.

“How can I forgive you when I can't forgive myself?” Gottfried's voice was shaking, too, but for a different reason. His teeth had begun to chatter. Rudi turned around, his face wet with snow and tears. He put his hand on Gottfried's forehead.

“My God,” he gasped. “You're burning up.”

“I'm freezing,” Gottfried muttered.

“Here, take this.” Rudi pulled off his coat and handed it to him. “Cover yourself with it.” Gottfried was too weak to resist the offer.

Rudi turned back to the wheel and started driving again, more carefully now but as fast as he safely could. Gottfried no longer tried to speak, and Rudi seemed to know better than to tax him with more pleas for understanding or forgiveness. Gottfried lay down and dozed off. When he opened his eyes, they were winding through the dimly lit, familiar streets of his town. Within a few minutes they pulled up in front of his building. It seemed like much longer than half a week since he had last seen it. Rudi helped him up the four flights to his garret, and he collapsed into bed without even taking off his clothes.

“You should change into something dry.”

“I will in a few minutes, once you leave.”

“Let me get you some aspirin.”

“It's in the cupboard, over the sink.”

Rudi poured some water into a glass and brought it over to the bed, helping Gottfried prop himself up just enough to swallow the aspirin.

“I have to get you a doctor.”

“The only doctor in this town died of a heart attack last month. Please, just let me rest.”

“I'll let the Wehrmacht know you're sick. They must have a doctor somewhere in the area.”

“They're all near the front. I just need to rest. Please, leave me in peace.”

“Yes, I suppose I should go. It's time for me to get back to the camp now—the Kommandant will be wondering.” He moved toward the door. “But we'll have the Wehrmacht send someone to look in on you in the morning. We borrowed you, and we ought to return you in decent shape.”

“Rudi,” called Gottfried in a voice so weak it sounded like a whisper.

His hand on the knob, Rudi turned and looked at him one last time.

“You saved my life out there. I just wanted to say thank you.”

“There's no need,” he said, squinting slightly and running one hand through his hair. “No…human being would have let you freeze to death.”

He pulled open the door. “I hope,” he added softly, looking out toward the stairwell, “that after this is all over…” He hesitated, clearing his throat.

“I don't know what to hope anymore.” Incapable of offering comfort, Gottfried looked at the forlorn figure in the doorway and said, “Goodbye, Rudi,” then gathered the down quilt between his knees, shifted onto his side and closed his eyes. A few moments later he heard the door shut, and the first few halting steps down the stairs.

Threadsuns

The events in this novel that take place between 1933 and '35 are based on the life of my father, the violinist Ernst Drucker, who graduated from the Hochschule in Cologne in 1933 and eventually became concertmaster of the Jewish Kulturbund Orchestra in Frankfurt and later in Berlin. He emigrated to the United States with the rest of his family in September 1938.

A year after my father's death in 1993, I read the autobiography of Albert Speer, and was surprised to learn that Siegfried Borries, one of my father's acquaintances from his days at the Hochschule, had flown to Finland with Speer late in the war. After Speer and other top officials from the war ministry had inspected the fortifications on the front line between the German troops, their Finnish allies and the Russian enemy, they built a campfire and listened to Borries perform Bach's Chaconne under the stars. I regret having missed the opportunity to ask my father what he knew about Borries's prejudices and political affiliations in the early 1930s.

One day in the spring of 1933, my father found his name stricken from the program of the upcoming graduation concert at the Hochschule. It was his teacher Bram Eldering—also the teacher of the world-famous Adolf Busch, in whose quartet my father later played—who threatened to resign if his pupil was not allowed to play at least the first movement of the Brahms Concerto. It was my father who wrote a letter to the editor of the
Völkischer Beobachter,
in response to a perfunctory and racist review, pointing out that Brahms had dedicated his “immortal German violin concerto” to Joseph Joachim, a Jew.

Some of the bizarre moments in Keller's performances for the wounded soldiers are loosely based on my own experiences performing in hospitals, an alcoholics' ward, a drug rehabilitation center and a psychiatric ward while preparing for the Queen Elisabeth International Violin Competition in Brussels in 1976.

For their encouragement and guidance during the long, intermittent gestation of this book, I am grateful to Thomas Gavin, Denise Levertov, Eileen Lottman, Richard Pollak, Jef Geeraerts, J. B. Keller, John Felstiner, Carlotta Maurice, Stephen Donadio and Martha Cooley. Special thanks are due Elizabeth Benedict, who patiently read three successive versions of the story and offered many valuable insights.

A nearly final version eventually found its way to Simon & Schuster through the generosity and interest of Kate Atkinson, Peter Straus and my wonderful agent, Melanie Jackson. I am indebted to David Rosenthal and all his colleagues at Simon & Schuster who have been involved with this novel, particularly to my editor, Sarah Hochman, who from the beginning of our work together demonstrated a clear and deep grasp of what I was trying to achieve.