The Savior (5 page)

“His sense of music-making was more appropriate for a marching band than for a violinist,” Ernst added. “For some reason I held myself back from saying so, even at that moment.”

Gottfried's mouth was dry; he needed a refill of his beer, but the waiter was nowhere to be found. He turned all the way around in his chair, but Ernst went on, oblivious to the fact that his friend's back was turned to him.

“Why I should have acted with any consideration for his feelings, I'll never know. All I said was, ‘If I have any self-esteem, then I must be a Jew-lover.' I yanked the door open so hard that he jumped. Then he left, without another word.”

Gottfried gave up on the waiter and swiveled around to face Ernst again. “You handled it the right way.”

“I don't think so. Not exactly. I should've done something the first time.”

“But you were caught off guard. You needed time to think it over, to figure out how to respond.”

“I don't think there will always be time for people to think things over in the years ahead. Anyway, I have thought it over since the last time I saw him, and what disturbs me most of all in this little story is what it has shown me about myself. How passive I must be if I can't respond decisively to bigotry in a student, in a situation where I'm the authority and should be in control! I'm just like all the rest of the good, decent people who won't speak up or act while there's still time.”

“You're being too hard on yourself, Ernst.”

“The first lesson when that clown wore the armband, I didn't know whether or not to tell him I was Jewish. Even when I kicked him out, I couldn't say it directly. I was clinging to my Germanness and hiding the truth about myself. In front of an untalented pupil! My God, how would I act when it's the authorities I'm facing? Especially when they're trying to take away my right to be German?”

He had managed to keep his voice from rising, but with the last words he swatted the Nazi paper onto the floor and clenched his fist as if he was going to pound the table. Gottfried looked at the people drinking and chatting at a few tables alongside the opposite wall. They hadn't noticed anything yet.

Ernst seemed to be aware of his discomfort. He spread out his fingers and said quietly, “Don't worry. I won't make a scene. It might come back to haunt you or me later on.”

“Please, Ernst. I'm your friend—I hope one of your best friends. Don't become bitter toward all Germans.”

“I'm sorry. I won't. How can I, anyway, when I'm as much a German as any of you?”

Gottfried was about to protest, thinking Ernst had mistaken his meaning when he said the words
all Germans
—of course, he hadn't meant to exclude him—but Ernst held up his hand. “I know you meant no harm. You are a good friend. Please don't take it personally if I'm upset.”

But the expression on his face didn't match the conciliatory words. His mouth was set in a narrow, rigid mold, and his eyes seemed to focus on some imaginary point a few feet behind his friend. Gottfried began to feel like he wasn't really there for Ernst, like he was just being used as a sounding board.

“Listen, there's one more thing I have to tell you. You know my brother Gerhard, don't you? Half a year ago he started working for an engineering firm. Since last week there's a new company policy: the official greeting when answering the telephone is supposed to be ‘Heil Hitler!' My brother won't say this, and I don't think he'll last long there. He and I are getting out, anyway. Professor Kerner has given me letters of recommendation to all his contacts in England. I don't want to give myself any more chances to react passively. I'm not waiting for what might happen here.”

He downed what remained in his beer mug with a defiant gulp. To Gottfried's dismay he found himself disliking Ernst for the first time. There was a coldness in Ernst's anger that made him feel excluded because he happened to be an Aryan.

 

Over the next few days, Gottfried wondered if Ernst had been cold to him because he couldn't tune himself up to the proper pitch of indignation about the review in the
Völkischer Beobachter.
He thought he'd been contemptuous enough of the critic and the whole newspaper. Had he been too optimistic about the state of affairs in Germany? He didn't know exactly what Ernst had expected of him, or what he should have done differently, but it was clear that much had changed between them that afternoon.

The following week he was one of a small circle of friends who saw Ernst off at the Hauptbahnhof. Afterward he received two postcards and eventually some letters, in which Ernst dwelt on details of his new life, with no mention of the tense moments they had spent at the café. Things seemed to be going well for him in London, but every time Gottfried thought of him, he felt sad. They could avoid the subject in the letters they exchanged; on the surface they could back away from a total estrangement, but the fact was that their last afternoon together had chilled the feeling of friendship between them. With Ernst in England, they might never see each other again.

T
oward four o'clock, a guard appeared at the door of Keller's room and led him to the area where the prisoners were kept. This was separated from the Kommandant's office and the guards' quarters by an internal barbed-wire fence. They entered a one-story brick building that consisted of a single large room with several rows of low, backless benches. Nobody else was there yet. The windows were small and dirty, letting in only a fraction of the already meager late afternoon light. There was no heat, and he was already wondering how to get some blood circulating to his fingers. As he was unpacking his violin, the Kommandant came in and said that he would introduce him to the inmates.

They entered a few moments later, slowly, one by one. Eight or ten guards accompanied them, taking up positions alongside the walls.

Barely human, the way they move, the way they look. My God, what's happened to them?

And these were the ones who'd been fed “normally” for the past few weeks. He tried to picture them as they might have looked before, tried to
see
them in their various lives before they were wrenched from their homes and brought here. It was impossible.

He remembered cheerful, plump Frau Nierenberg, his next-door neighbor while he was studying in Cologne. She occasionally invited him in for coffee and cakes, said she liked the sound of his practicing. Her teenage daughter, Rachel, a thinner, paler version of her mother, used to refill his cup and plate but always seemed slightly shy in his presence.

Where were they now? They had nothing to do with these people.

Pressure was building behind his eyes. He had to look away.

He had imagined the inmates living in squalor, but was unprepared for the stench that enveloped him as soon as they were assembled—something like cheese that had been left standing around too long, he thought, or rancid butter, tinged with that bittersweet scent from the smokestacks.

That's the only drawback. It gets in your hair, your clothes, flavors the food you eat.

Within a few days he would probably smell like that.

The price one has to pay for progress.

He swallowed hard a few times, trying to clear his mouth of the bitter saliva that was filling it. He stared at the door and wondered if they'd ever let him out. Then he looked at the Kommandant, who was studying him, impervious to the sight of those phantoms.

“You may sit down,” he said in a dry, neutral voice, barely glancing at the prisoners.

Most of them dropped onto the benches with obvious relief, but two remained standing quite close to Keller, looking straight ahead. They seemed not to have heard the Kommandant's words—or maybe the invitation to sit hadn't sounded enough like an order. Those two didn't seem to notice Keller, but the blackened hollows beneath their eyes were staring at him.

One of the guards came over and led them to a bench a few steps away. They turned their heads slightly but did not quite look at him as he ushered them along, barely touching their sleeves with the tips of his gloved fingers, as if he dreaded contamination through direct contact with those subhuman creatures.

“Today, and for the next three days,” began the Kommandant in a slightly warmer tone, “I have a special program for you.” He began to walk slowly around the room, between the guards and the prisoners, his hands clasped behind his back. “You have not experienced anything like it since your arrival here. This young man will play the violin for you.” He indicated Keller with one hand, but most of them didn't look at him; some were staring at the floor, others at the walls.

They didn't seem to mind the closeness in there, the lack of air.

It would have been easier to face a row of corpses in a morgue, thought Keller. He would have only had to look—not play, not try to move them. Then he could have left, and gulped some air.

Looking away, he tried to loosen his grip on the violin. He was clutching it so tightly that he'd never be able to play well once the Kommandant was finished with his introduction. And he was holding the bow like a club. He managed to transfer the violin to his right hand, then opened and closed his left fist behind his back a few times in an attempt to stretch the stiffness and cold out of his fingers.

“He is very good,” continued the Kommandant, “and already has achieved some distinction in his career. Recently he has been playing for our wounded soldiers near the battlefront. That is his contribution to the war effort.”

As the Kommandant spoke, Keller's eyes returned to the mass of gray in front of him—gray, shroudlike garments, gray complexions, gray scalps from which the hair had been shorn. Some of them looked back at him now. He could have been a wall, or another guard; it didn't matter. When their eyes met, he averted his. What struck him most was that they all looked so much alike, at least at first glance. The entire group seemed to be around the same age, but that could have been anywhere from twenty to fifty. And in that half-light it was difficult to tell the difference between men and women. If he was looking at women, he couldn't see the contours of their bodies.

“He is here now to help you renew your sense of beauty, which you have lost. For his presence you may thank the Third Reich.”

The Kommandant smiled broadly at him. His eyes held Keller's for several seconds as the smile faded from his face. Then his glasses caught a momentary shaft of sunlight—he was standing next to a window—and the glare of the reflection made the violinist look away.

Keller had chosen to begin with some Paganini caprices, the most purely virtuosic music in his repertoire. Grab their attention, banish their listlessness with dazzling effects. Earlier that day, as he was hurriedly putting together some pieces for the first concert, this seemed to be a better approach than starting with a deeper, more introspective work—a mistake he had often made with the soldiers. Bach's music would require his listeners to be already attuned to fine shades of meaning, to enter a world of subtleties without transition from their brutal, deadening existence.

But avoiding one mistake was no guarantee against making another: he wasn't used to starting his programs with virtuoso pieces. Keller knew that it would be easier to tackle the pyrotechnics once he'd gotten past his nervousness and given his muscles a chance to loosen up. Having played these caprices dozens of times in hospitals, though, he felt he could take the risk of starting with them.

First he played Caprice Number Nine in E Major, a sparkling piece in which double-stopped thirds, fifths and sixths imitate the sound of hunting horns. He'd had great success with this caprice in his graduation recital at the Hochschule. Other students had told him afterward how much they admired the clearly chiseled scales and double-stops, but the memory of that triumph was clouded by more recent performances for the wounded soldiers, who barely reacted to his attempts at virtuosity.

In fairness to the soldiers, though, his playing was no longer the same as it had been ten years earlier. These days it was hard for him to work up any enthusiasm when he took his violin out of its case every morning to begin practicing. There was no freshness in his work anymore, no belief that it would lead anywhere, least of all to progress. The best he could do nowadays was to try to recapture what he had lost.

The lighthearted opening theme of the Ninth Caprice alternates with more dramatic sections in minor keys. There are fistfuls of chords, rapid scales in the high register and a passage of ricochet, a special technique in which the bow is thrown onto the string to produce a series of rebounding notes. In order to run this gamut of difficulties successfully, one's hands must be absolutely limber. Before he started to play, Keller hoped against all reason that this one time he would be exempt, that it might still sound good enough for him to walk through that door at the end of the “concert” with a modicum of self-respect.

Missed notes, garbled ricochet, scratchy chords. He told himself it was still decent, even though it was far from his best playing. But was it good enough? If these people had really been concertgoers when they were free, they would know what great playing was like. He tried to stay rational, optimistic, to give himself a chance to adjust to the situation—if not today, then by tomorrow. But deep down he was disturbed by the very first sounds he produced, and this feeling refused to go away.

His fingers ached; as he made his way through the Ninth Caprice and began the next one, each upcoming challenge loomed as an insurmountable hurdle. After ruining one of the more treacherous passages, he had to keep himself from stopping in the middle of the piece. He'd spent too many hours of his life practicing those scales and double-stops to be able to bear such a performance. He could almost hear himself say,
The hell with it!
—could imagine the silence that would follow those words as he packed up his violin and got out of there. That would be humiliating, but he had already lost face through his playing. It seemed impossible to disgrace himself any further, and besides, who cared what these people thought of him? They'd probably be dead in a week.

What they needed was food, not music, and it made a mockery of his music to pretend otherwise, to make believe that this pigsty was a concert hall where people could concentrate on anything besides the growling in their bellies.

They all sat motionless; they might as well have been dead already. Something about their shoulders—he thought he could see the bones sticking out through their clothes—made him want to grab them and shake them. But then he remembered that no audience could see him from inside, the way he saw himself. These people most likely saw and heard nothing. Why should he admit defeat in front of the Kommandant, who for all his air of culture and sophistication might be tone-deaf?

And in his struggles with the Paganini, he'd almost forgotten: There was more at stake than his self-respect as a violinist. He had been brought here to play, and he couldn't refuse to do the Kommandant's bidding.

So he finished the second of his caprices. There was one more to go: Number Five in A Minor, which under normal circumstances could be dazzling. It opens with a series of arpeggios from the low to the high registers, each one followed by a scale hurtling down. Then comes a moto perpetuo, to be played as fast as possible, with precise articulation on every note.

This had been a warhorse of his in the early years after his graduation from the Hochschule. Suddenly he could remember the exhilaration of performing this caprice with flair, could feel once again the joy of watching his fingers work as efficiently as pistons, knowing that he had pushed the tempo to the limit. If for one moment he let up his concentration, or became self-conscious, the whole thing could spin out of control. But that had never happened. After all these years he could still hear the gasp of amazement from the audience when he came to the end. That gasp had meant even more to him than the rush of applause that followed.

He shut his eyes in order to block out the misery in front of him, and played this one better than the other caprices. By now there was some blood flowing in his fingers. He took more chances, and even made a bravura gesture on the final chord: he held his bow up high for a moment, the scroll of his violin pointing toward the ceiling.

Silence. Absolute silence.

Slowly he brought down the bow and opened his eyes. Only then did the Kommandant begin to applaud. His hands made a dry, solitary sound in the dead acoustics of the room. He cleared his throat and said, “Clap.” His voice sounded distant, as if he was preoccupied with other matters.

Perhaps they hadn't heard him.

“Clap,” he repeated, a bit louder. “The man has performed for you, and you must show your appreciation.”

Two or three started to bring their hands together in a slow, noiseless imitation of the Kommandant.

“Clap!” he yelled.

The guards began to move toward the prisoners. Only then did they all make the required noise—each one sporadically, the total sound unsynchronized and thin. The guards returned to their places along the wall without having touched the inmates; the Kommandant, seemingly satisfied with the paltry courtesy he had extracted from the audience, left the building without looking at him.

Keller bowed. The applause continued mechanically; it proved as difficult to turn off as it had been to turn on. He tuned for the next piece while they were still clapping—the ovation wasn't loud enough to prevent him from hearing himself. He got ready to play, but their hands still came together with grim regularity as they stared straight ahead. He brought down his violin and looked around, not knowing what to do. Finally a guard stamped his foot, just once, and there was silence.

The second piece he had planned was a sonata by the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Ysaÿe's works demand virtuosity, but always in the service of musical ideas and atmosphere. The Fifth Sonata is in two movements, “L'Aurore” and “Danse Rustique.” In “L'Aurore,” the delicate tints of spring emerge from the obscurity of night. The rising sun, represented by a theme woven into a tapestry of arpeggios, grows in intensity until it reaches a radiant climax.

He had once performed this piece at an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings in Cologne. It was during his second or third year at the Hochschule, when he was still carefree enough to immerse himself in some of those seductive canvases before the concert, fascinated by the brushwork and the warm, rich colors that seemed to dominate every other element—the lines, the perspective, the composition.