The Savior (8 page)

“Are you with me or against me?”

“I…” Gottfried looked away, at his corner table, where the waiter had just deposited a plate of pancakes. “Excuse me, my food is ready.”

“What's the matter, are you a Jew-lover?” He laughed, screwing up his beady eyes, which were almost lost in the fleshy folds of his cheeks. His admirers laughed with him.

“Or are you a Jew?” one of them added.

He remembered Ernst's words:
If I have any self-esteem, then I must be a Jew-lover.
But he didn't say that; he just backed off as the pig swilled down half a mug of beer, wiped the foam from his mustache with the back of his hand and proclaimed, “No, he can't be a Jew. Doesn't have the nose.”

“But he walks like a Jew!” another one of them called out gleefully as Gottfried turned and started back toward his table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the fellow rise halfway from his chair and imitate an apelike walk, to the intense amusement of his friends.

Back at his table, Gottfried looked without appetite at the pancakes, feeling his face redden. He slowly pulled a couple of bills from his wallet and placed them on the table. Then he picked up his violin and hurried out.

The day didn't seem so fine to him anymore. He wasn't in the mood for strolling or sightseeing. The Altstadt had lost its charm.

The Goldener Adler used to be like a second home to him. He'd had countless meals there, had played cards and chess and read the papers. But it had changed ownership recently; he'd heard that somewhere and had forgotten it until this moment. Now the café harbored the likes of that bastard!

He had almost achieved the composure he needed for his meeting with Marietta and now it was shot to hell. He had read about party cadres like this in the papers but had never actually seen one in action. And his listeners! How could they buy that crap? With relief, Gottfried remembered the irritated faces of some of the other customers, and the rest who were ignoring him. “Still the majority,” he muttered to himself as he rushed toward the Hochschule. “At least in this part of the country. This isn't Bavaria.”

Now he couldn't wait to see Marietta. It didn't matter if he stammered, expressed himself awkwardly, played badly, made a fool of himself. It didn't even matter if she rejected him; he just needed to see a reasonable person—in fact, any students or teachers at the Hochschule would do right now, anyone who loved Bach and Mozart and Brahms. He turned the corner into the street where the Hochschule stood, and bounded up the stone steps that led to its massive entrance.

Above the portal were bas-reliefs of mythic figures with lyres and flutes. He'd never paid much attention to the serene faces of the Muses and other deities depicted there, but now he stopped in the middle of his flight up the stairs to look at them for a few moments. On a side panel Orpheus was shown playing to the beasts, which were tamed with wonder at his song. On the opposite panel he was descending to the underworld, soothing the tormented spirits of the dead with his lyre. At any other time these representations might have struck Gottfried as old-fashioned or pompous or sentimental, but now he didn't care. Their familiarity, combined with the rather naïve belief in the power of music that was projected by those scenes, was of some comfort to him.

Inside, he paused in front of the same bulletin board where Ernst's name had been crossed off the graduation program. He shuddered, didn't want to think anymore about their last conversation at the Goldener Adler. He headed toward the second floor, where most of the classrooms and practice studios were. On the way upstairs, everything that was familiar made him feel a bit safer: the broad, deep marble steps leading to the mezzanine, the dimly lit hallways where he had sometimes paced before jury examinations, the heavy double doors that insulated the studios.

As usual, strands of phrases—climactic moments from Beethoven or Schubert piano sonatas, Chopin preludes, Brahms intermezzos—filtered through to the corridor despite the thickness of walls and doors. At the far end of the second floor was the orchestra rehearsal hall. Yes—it was a Tuesday afternoon, they were rehearsing. He could make out the anxious strains of the opening of Mozart's Fortieth Symphony, mingled with the piano music coming from the studios nearby.

He slumped against a wall. His back slid slowly down the cool plaster, and he cradled the violin case against his chest. He crouched there for a moment, then with a soft thud his bottom hit the floor and he stretched out his legs.

Gottfried covered his eyes with one hand as they filled with tears. Fortunately, it was the middle of the hour: no one was in the corridor. He knew it would look strange to anyone who might walk by—a grown man sitting on the floor, like a child, with tears dripping down his cheeks.

 

“By now a dozen concerts have been lined up for the spring, and I'm being considered by Schmidt's management for next season.”

“That's wonderful.” Her face radiated goodwill toward him. Marietta seemed incapable of jealousy of someone else's success; she was too complete in herself. But he wanted to find something beyond friendliness in her face.

“I'd like you to play the recitals with me.”

She blushed with pleasure and looked down at her hands, which were resting on the keyboard. But her expression changed suddenly, and the color drained from her face.

“There's going to be a problem,” she said.

“Are you worried about the repertoire? I know there will be a lot, but you can take your time learning…”

“That's not it.” Her eyes locked onto his almost fiercely. Suddenly he felt as if he had done something wrong. “Didn't you know I was Jewish?”

He hadn't known. She was foreign, exotic, but he'd never asked about her religion. She could just as well have been a Gypsy, for all he cared. He told her it made no difference to him, but she was adamant: A public collaboration wouldn't be a good idea. It would be risky for them both, she said—for him in his future career in Germany, and for her if or when she needed to get out.

Considering the scene he'd just witnessed in the Goldener Adler, it was hard to argue with her. Gottfried was too ashamed to tell her about the rabble-rouser and his crew, even though they had shaken him up so much that he needed to talk to someone about it. He hadn't stood up to them, and he didn't want Marietta to know that.

But surely the fact that most people in the café had been oblivious to the Nazi, and some even annoyed by him, was a good sign. He and the kind of people who listened to such talk were still the minority; Gottfried was convinced of that, even if they were gaining strength. In any case, lowlifes like the ones he'd just seen at the Goldener Adler had little to do with the concert world. People who loved great music couldn't be taken in by the gross oversimplifications that appealed to the uneducated.

“Look, there are still many Jewish artists performing in Germany. I admit, they're usually playing with each other, they play less and less with Aryans, but there's no law against it. At least not yet. Let me speak to a friend of mine who just started working at Schmidt's. Let's see what's still possible.”

“Let it go,” she said miserably. “It wasn't meant to be.”

He said, only half-believing it, that this situation with the anti-Semitism in Germany couldn't last; there were enough people who didn't feel that way, and many who were completely against the Nazis.

“You mean you think the Nazis will be voted out?” she asked with a bitter smile.

He shrugged, as if to say there was no other way, feeling foolish because he knew there would be no more elections. Then he thought of something else. “Maybe if there's enough pressure on them from other countries, they'll ease up a little.”

“You're more naïve than I thought,” she said, her voice lower than he had ever heard it. Her smile turned into a grimace.

Everything between them until that moment had felt innocent; even his sexual attraction to her had felt as if it was elevated to an idealistic plane as pure and airy as her voice, and now she was speaking to him with tired contempt. What had he done? He'd wanted to offer her an opportunity that would advance her career, offer them both a way of working together continually, of sharing their love for music.

He looked away from her, and when he turned back he saw that the grimace had frozen as she struggled to fight back tears. He reached out to touch her shoulder. She shook her head vehemently, as if the tiniest disturbance would upset the tenuous balance that kept her from dissolving.

“Marietta…” His voice sounded different to him, thick with emotion even in those four quick syllables. He repeated her name and once again heard a voice that was no longer dry, commonplace, matter-of-fact. She looked at him, her lips slightly parted, her deep black eyes half closed.

“We can keep working together,” he said, “at least in the class. I don't know if you felt the same way I did every time we played the slow movement of the Brahms sonata last month. Music never meant as much to me, I was never able to forget my own problems like that. I'm not quite sure how to tell you…but I'm so glad you came into my life.”

A smile was struggling to break through the rigid cast of her face. Her eyes began to blink rapidly. As the tears came, he pulled her toward him.

 

The next month was the happiest of his life, but by January 1935 she had to leave the Hochschule. The Nazi director who had been installed in the spring of '33 finally had his way over the objections of a number of professors and saw to it that no Jews remained in the school. Soon afterward Marietta told him she was moving to Frankfurt with her family. Her father worked for a Jewish organization there, which promoted all sorts of cultural events and helped Jews emigrate to other countries.

“We'll find a way to stay together,” she said.

“How? You'll be leaving the country.” The pleading, the despair he heard in his own voice frightened him. They had spent so much time with each other during that month, playing through a large part of the sonata repertoire, but also going to movies, plays and concerts. He could hardly imagine coming to the Hochschule every day without seeing her, without hearing that voice.

“One of the projects my father is organizing concerns Jewish musicians. Huberman and Toscanini want to form an orchestra in Palestine next year or the year after. As far as I know, the auditions are only for players with Jewish blood, but maybe…” She looked at him shyly. “Maybe they could make an exception where mixed marriages are concerned.”

 

After she left, he couldn't concentrate on his work. His violin teacher, Professor Kerner, noticed the change in his playing and asked what was wrong. Gottfried had never confided in him before, but as he looked into the old man's watery gray eyes, he needed to unburden himself. As far as anti-Semitism was concerned, he knew he could trust him. Kerner was one of the teachers who had opposed the expulsion of Jewish students from the Hochschule, and he was the one who had fought for Ernst's right to play the Brahms Concerto.

His eyes widened as Gottfried told him of his love for Marietta. But when Gottfried spoke about her father and the plans for a Jewish orchestra in Palestine, Kerner rose from his chair and walked over to the window. “I've already heard something about this proposed orchestra,” he said, gazing out at the street. “There will be so many displaced Jewish musicians that I doubt the orchestra will have room for non-Jews.”

He turned back toward Gottfried, who could see the anxiety in his face.

“And frankly, if you decide to stay in Germany after all—for whatever reason—you could find yourself in an awkward position. Not so much because of your involvement with Marietta. That sort of thing is not uncommon, especially in the music world. But a connection to a Jewish organization like her father's could eventually be dangerous.”

Gottfried told himself that the professor's fears were exaggerated. After all, didn't the government want the Jews out of Germany? One of the items on the agenda of her father's committee was emigration.

The next month he heard from Marietta that auditions for the new orchestra would soon be held in Frankfurt, and that with her father's help she had landed a job as staff accompanist for those auditions. This would enable her, she hoped, to ask for a favor, a double favor really—that Gottfried, a promising young soloist and a Gentile, could try out for one of the concertmaster positions rather than simply for the violin section. Competition for those seats was bound to be intense, because the Jews already had several of their own Kulturbund orchestras in Germany, and their concertmasters would need to emigrate sooner or later, probably to Palestine.

Another major obstacle remained: she would have to tell her parents about him and their hopes to marry. She had already told Gottfried that her father didn't take kindly to the idea of intermarriage, especially in such times as these. He was furious that Hitler had been elected chancellor, and constantly reproached himself for having made the mistake of moving to Germany with his family several years earlier. In Romania he had been a theater and opera director; in 1931 he was asked to direct
Salome
and
Elektra
in Cologne, then decided to settle there with his family, believing he would find more opportunities and greater artistic freedom than in his own country.