J SS Bach E-Book

Martin Goodman

• Herausgeber: Wrecking Ball Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 425

Beschreibung

J SS Bach is the story of three generations of women from either side of Germany's 20th Century horror story - one side, a Jewish family from Vienna, the other linked to a ranking Nazi official at Dachau concentration camp - who suffer the consequences of what men do. Fast forward to 1990s California, and two survivors from the families meet.Rosa is a young Australian musicologist; Otto is a world-famous composer and cellist. Music and history link them. A novel of music, the Holocaust, love, and a dog.The author's writing is a wonderland, captivating and drawing the reader in to the presented world. Time becomes no object as a literary universe unfolds and carries the reader through eighty years, where emotions are real and raw and beautifully given.

Leseprobe

J SS BACH

MARTIN GOODMAN

Martin Goodman’s debut novel On Bended Knees, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, heralded a major theme of his writing: the aftermath of wars. His nonfiction picked up the theme when his biography of the scientist who worked to counter WW1 gas attacks, Suffer & Survive, won 1st Prize, Basis of Medicine in the BMA Book Awards. In Client Earth, which won the Jury’s Choice Business Book of the Year Award 2018, he told the story of ecolawyers who battle to rescue the planet from human destruction. J SS Bach combines this theme with another that shapes his life - the intersection of music, words, memory and creativity. 20 years in the writing, it draws on deep musical exploration and a journey through the geography of twentieth century history. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull, where he is Director of the Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing.

www.martingoodman.com

@MartinGoodman2

Also by Martin Goodman:

Fiction

Forever Konrad

Ectopia

Look Who’s Watching

Slippery When Wet

I Was Carlos Castaneda

On Bended Knees

Nonfiction

Client Earth (with James Thornton)

Suffer & Survive; The Extreme Life of Dr J.S.Haldane

On Sacred Mountains

In Search of the Divine Mother

J SS Bach

Martin Goodman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-903110-47-8

First published in this edition 2018 by Wrecking Ball Press.

Copyright: Martin Goodman

Cover design by humandesign.co.uk

All rights reserved.

For

The adults who made music in the ghetto,

and Honza Treichlinger and the child cast of Brundibár,

Terezín 1943-1944

We create hell and paradise here,

Where love and hate blossom together,

Animating life.

- Luis Cernuda, (The Lover Digresses – trs. Rick Lipinski)

Time is the element of narration... It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious.

- Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, trs. John E. Woods)

Music is mankind’s greatest miracle.

- Alice Herz Sommer

1

SYDNEY, 1962

Place a shark in an aquarium and ask it to describe the life of the little fishes it encounters there, and the shark won’t account for its own impact. Similarly, Katja could not know how her shadow drove the world. When her fellow Australian citizens sensed Katja’s approach, they tended to cross the street. That is one reason her portraits of the country contain no people.

‘What was your maiden name?’

Katja had to think a moment. What was her name before she became Birchendorf? It was so far back.

‘Klein,’ she remembered.

Her daughter wrote it onto the form she had taken from a resettlement officer. She spelt it her own way and made the name her own. Uwe Cline. She would not be a Birchendorf any more. When Katja spoke to her in German, the girl mouthed English back.

In 1951, when Uwe turned thirteen, Katja accepted that she now shared her home with an Australian teenager. When she dyed her hair black Katja took it to be a fashion statement. Uwe buttoned her white blouse tight around her neck and tugged her sleeves below her wrists. She wore black tights under a woollen black skirt even in summer. In a teenage world of flesh and brightness, Uwe stood out. Perhaps that’s what she wanted.

Uwe went to secretarial school. She passed shorthand and typing classes with distinction. She found a job and left home. Katja did not hear from her. She waited.

In December 1962, Katja stepped out of a taxi and commanded the driver to keep the meter running. The day was mild and sunny. Katja hated the lack of a northern winter. Out on the streets she felt like a penguin in a zoo, dressed in her dark clothes and there to be laughed at. Inside the entrance hall of the apartment block she found her daughter’s name on a mailbox. Uwe had written it like a child, the nib pressed hard on the paper while she concentrated. Uwe Cline.

Katja climbed the cement stairwell to the third floor where she pressed the bell on the black door. No one came. She hammered on the wood and shouted Uwe’s name. A woman stuck her head out of the apartment next door.

‘She’s my daughter,’ Katja snapped. ‘I’m her mother.’

She banged on the door again and the neighbour retreated.

Eventually the door opened a crack. Uwe stepped back and her mother pushed her way in.

Uwe’s hair was lank and unwashed and showed its brown roots. She had been sweating into a pillow. Her cheeks were drawn and her shoulders were thin yet her belly bulged out against her nightgown. She moved to her narrow bed and sat on its edge.

‘Have you got money?’ Katja said. ‘We’ll need your money. I didn’t bring any and I have a taxi waiting. I am taking you home.’

Katja spotted Uwe’s purse on the windowsill and walked across to fetch it. It held a few banknotes and some coins. It was enough.

What a nasty little room. An electric ring, a gas boiler, a cracked enamel sink; is this what her daughter’s independent life amounted to? There was a small wardrobe but it wasn’t worth waiting to pack a case. Uwe wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while and the taxi’s meter was ticking.

A scuffed pair of shoes lay under the bed. Katja knelt and pressed Uwe’s feet into them. It was a hard job because the feet were swollen, but she managed.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Now stand up.’

The girl did as told. A light grey raincoat hung on the back of the door. When Katja held it out, Uwe fed her arms inside its sleeves.

‘Come on then,’ she said.

A bunch of keys hung from a nail near the door. Katja pocketed them, and steered her daughter out into the corridor.

The bathwater turned grey as Katja sponged her daughter down. She rubbed strands of hair between her hands and then checked her palms, wanting to find them black with dye.

Uwe did not have the will to feed herself, but her mouth worked when Katja fed morsels into it. She chewed and swallowed. That would do her some good.

Katja kept up a stream of speaking, in what she hoped was a soft voice. Just snippets from her life mostly. She didn’t bother with any of that ‘you’re eating for two’ nonsense. The baby was clearly sucking Uwe’s life into itself. It needed no help from her.

‘Your company wrote me this,’ she said, and read out the letter. The company’s maternity cover was considerate but it was discretionary. Employees needed to stay in touch. The secretarial pool was short staffed. Please be in touch at once.

Katja folded the letter back into its envelope.

‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened to you?

Uwe closed her eyes. All Katja could do was wait. Watch and wait for her daughter’s mouth to move.

The most figurative painting Katja had ever achieved depicted a clouded sky filled with crows. It was a portrait of her mind at rest.

She watched her daughter and inside her head a crow flashed its wings. Each crow is a memory. None lingers. Memories are the opposite of survival. Let one take roost and you die.

They had shared too much, this girl and her. They spent winters on the road. Her daughter was never raped. When Katja looked back coldly, she saw that as the main achievement of her life. Her daughter starved but she did not die of hunger. Katja saw to that. And Uwe was never raped. She saw more than a girl should ever see and who knows what she heard, but she was never raped.

If it was rape that did this to her daughter Katja did not want to know it, but if that is what she had to know then so be it.

Katja had known women who lay down. Some did so in the open and some in hollows among the rubble of war. They had hauled their bodies far enough, but they could not let go. They had a story still to tell. Their heads turned aside to look for the details. Katja became expert at lipreading from mouths that were in profile. The act of absorbing these women’s stories set them free.

Katja knew what young women on the edge of death looked like. They looked like Uwe looked now.

Uwe had a story to tell and it was Katja’s job to bear witness to it. She watched her daughter’s lips. That’s where the story would come from.

‘You remember that boy on the boat?’

The shapes of her daughter’s mouth were a jolt. She was speaking German. Katja nodded and reached her fingers to lay them lightly on Uwe’s throat. She felt the vibrations of speech as Uwe spoke on.

‘His name was Stefan. We played and we were friends. Then he learned I was Daddy’s daughter and he spat in my face.

Well ...’ And she lay a hand on her belly. ‘This is his.’

Her daughter’s voice felt soft, like when she was six years old.

‘I found him. I didn’t go looking for him, well not really, but I found him. I spotted him in a kosher diner. The way he sat with his friends, the way he told stories and moved his hands, it drew me to him. I could see the boy in him. His skin had the same deep tone it had then, his face had that same angular shape, and of course there were those eyelashes. So long and dark. I waited for the friends to use his name. Stefan, one said. That’s how I knew for sure. I followed them back to their workplace. It was easy to get a job there. And it was fairly simple after that to join in with the group of Stefan’s friends.’

What were you doing in a kosher restaurant? Katja wanted to ask, but didn’t. It was too late for challenges. Her job was to listen.

‘Stefan says I planned it all. He says I’m sick. He said my black hair is the biggest lie he’s ever seen. He wanted to shave my hair and push me out in the street. He says my pretending to be Jewish is like a paedophile putting on shorts and a school cap to get into a playground. That’s not true is it, Mutti? I wasn’t pretending. We talked about it. We killed so many Jews. Father killed so many Jews. I couldn’t bring back any Jews but I could become one. That’s the best I could do. Becoming a Jew was the proper Christian thing to do.’

Your father didn’t kill Jews, Katja wanted to say. He wasn’t a killer. And you, you were just a crazy girl with a stupid idea. You should have grown out of it. But she did not say these things.

‘We went to a Torah study group together. Well, I joined the one Stefan attended. He saw how hard I was trying. I never lied. I said how my father was not Jewish but they kept him in a camp because of his association with Jews. That’s what they did do after the war, isn’t it? I said that he died in Dachau. I told how I went from place to place till I was put in Rosenheim. I worked hard at studying the Torah because I had no Jewish family left to teach me the traditional ways.’

What turned you into all this? Katja wondered. Was it the spit of that boy in your eye? Was it all that went before? Was it us?

‘Stefan was preparing to go to Israel. He said he needed a new start and that was the place to go. The old ways were good but there was a new way and we could both find it. We were modern, he said. Modern and ancient both. He believed in free love. It was exciting. In Israel children would grow into the family of the kibbutz. Our children could do that.’

Katja could not grapple with the concept of a kibbutz. Jews went there to work to make themselves free. They built a camp and put up their own walls and installed their own guards. To her, a kibbutz seemed a throwback to the war.

‘He took me to his home. For a Sabbath dinner. We practised beforehand. I knew when to break bread, the words to pray, and the answers to give. But not all the answers. His mother stared hard at me across the table. We finished the meal and she wiped her mouth on an edge of her napkin. “When did you first dye your hair?” she asked me. “When did you change your name? Where is your mother now? Does she pretend to be Jewish too?” I know it’s important not to lie. She would not let me keep silent. Her questions pulled my story out of me. I tried to say why. Why I became a Jew. That it was the best I could do. She would not listen. She left me empty.’

Not so empty, Katja wanted to say.

‘When was this?’ she asked.

‘In the spring.’

‘Does Stefan know about the baby?’

‘I never saw him after that night. He stayed at home when they asked me to leave the house. He did not come to work the next day. At the office, weeks went by and then they closed his file. They said he was leaving for Israel.’

‘And you still love him,’ Katja said.

Uwe did not speak. She had told enough of her tale. But for the baby inside of her, she was now empty.

At least it was not rape, Katja reflected. It was likely not that.

Katja knocked on her neighbour’s door and asked her to phone for a doctor. The doctor examined Uwe and then borrowed the neighbour’s phone to call an ambulance.

This wasn’t an emergency, the doctor said. They just needed to keep the young woman under medical observation. They rolled her onto a stretcher, covered her with a blanket, and carried her away. Katja locked her front door, dropped her apartment’s keys into her bag, and followed.

‘I’m sorry love,’ the paramedic said. He dared to touch her arm but he didn’t grab hold. ‘You can’t travel in the ambulance. It’s not allowed.’

Then let them try and throw her out. She climbed in. The space on the bench at the back near the driver was wide enough for her. She would be no bother. Nobody just carried her daughter away on a stretcher. Nobody.

At the hospital, she followed as they transferred Uwe into a bed with clean sheets and fitted a plastic band to her wrist. Uwe’s pulse was weak, her blood pressure low. Statistics were inked onto her chart. Katja fetched a plastic chair so she could sit nearby and wait.

There seemed to be two teams led by different doctors. One checked on Uwe’s health, while the other bent over stethoscopes and listened for the health of her baby. The two teams walked away to meet out of earshot.

Katja had come to her own conclusions. Her daughter should give birth naturally. That’s why, when they came back with their recommendation of a caesarean, she refused. They should wait, she insisted.

Uwe squealed at the first pain of labour. It wasn’t loud. Katja could tell by the way a nurse turned her head only slowly at the sound, more like a gust of breath perhaps. Pain passed like a wave over her daughter’s face, sudden and then gone.

Nurses pulled around the curtains. Katja sat outside. They insisted. They would have manhandled her out of the way if needs be, she realised. She watched the shadows of their movements upon the nylon drapes.

Uwe’s body was not responding. They would have to operate.

Katja did not resist. They let her through the curtains while they went to make arrangements.

Katja took a corner of the sheet and wiped the sweat from her daughter’s face. Of all the words she could have said, only four were worth saying.

‘Uwe, ich liebe dich.’ And again, because her daughter had tried so hard to become a part of this new world, she said the same four words in English. ‘Uwe, I love you.’

‘We’re very sorry, Mrs Cline,’ the young doctor began.

‘Birchendorf,’ she corrected him.

He blinked. ‘Mrs Birchendorf,’ he began again. ‘We did all we could. Your daughter was very weak.’

She could have slapped him for that, if the words on his slack mouth hadn’t punched the strength from her body. Uwe was not weak. She was stronger than some privileged young male like him could ever guess at.

‘It was heart failure. We tried to resuscitate, but the heart could not take it. Your daughter has died.’

‘And the baby?

The doctor dared to smile, as though she would let him off so easily.

‘It’s a baby girl,’ he said. ‘She is very healthy.’ He paused, and then, ‘Would you like to see her?’ he asked.

Yes. She nodded. Katja wanted to see her. She wanted to see her daughter.

The young doctor walked away and Katja followed. He held out a hand to stop her walking through a pair of swing doors. She waited outside and he returned. A nurse came with him. Katja peered through the doors as they opened and shut.

The nurse held out a baby toward her.

‘What’s that?’ Katja said.

‘The baby,’ the nurse said. ‘Your daughter’s baby. You granddaughter.’

‘Where is Uwe?’ Katja said. ‘You told me I could see Uwe. Where is my daughter? I want to see Uwe. Take me to see Uwe.’

Health visitors and social workers came to visit her in her apartment. They were checking on her suitability to parent her granddaughter.

‘How will you know when the baby is crying?’ one dared to ask.

‘I will watch her,’ Katja said. ‘Like I watched my daughter.’

She filled in forms. She was as honest as she could let herself be. A blank space would do for the name of the father. For the name of the baby, she chose Rosa. Uwe once had a favourite doll she called Rosa. Perhaps that was why. And for the girl’s surname, she had them write Cline. She was bringing up the baby for her daughter, not stealing her away. Eventually they let her take the child home.

The baby slept in her arms while Uwe’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Katja felt the heat of Rosa’s body press through the black cotton of her dress and work its way toward her heart.

2

SYDNEY, 1971

Rosa wanted to take a friend. That’s what girls do. She was only nine.

Absolutely not, her grandmother told her. You go alone. That is the experience.

And so they stationed themselves. A dark blue broad brimmed hat shaded the grandmother’s face and matched her dress. A white headband pinned the girl’s light brown curls to her scalp, and her dress was also white. They stood on a lawn of the Botanical Gardens and faced the Harbour. The sky was cloudless.

The woman, Katja Birchendorf, set up her easel. This landscape was too stark, all green and blue and white. It was impossible for painting. She needed nuance.

Still, this was not about her.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Your ticket. Don’t lose it. Put it in your purse.’

Rosa moved her lips as she made out the words. Diaspora Variations. She looked up.

Katja broke the word up into plainchant. ‘Di-as-po-ra.’ A family on the footpath turned and looked at her as they passed. She had such volume. ‘It means a dispersal of people from their homeland.’

‘Dispersal?’

‘You have something you do not want, you give it away, and there is so much it goes everywhere. Diaspora is when you do that to people.’

‘Like with you and my mother.’

‘Ah yes.’ Katja looked away from the girl’s lips and toward the sky. She only learned to speak English after she turned deaf, and chose intonation and pronunciation that suited her native German. ‘We were dispersed. It was a great and sad dispersal. People forget this.’

Rosa touched her grandmother’s sleeve. She had another question. Katja looked down at her lips.

‘Variations. I know that’s a musical term. But diaspora variations?’

‘There was a big diaspora and a little diaspora. Your mother and I, we were the little. We were Aryans. We had ideas that were too big for one country.’

‘And the big diaspora?’

‘Jews.’

The woman boomed the word. That happened randomly whenever she spoke, words jumped out and shouted at you, but the word ‘Jews’ was different. Whenever it came, it jumped out with especial force, and ended conversation.

Rosa’s purse was pink and hung from a string around her neck. She sealed the ticket inside it, alongside a coin for ice cream.

‘So go,’ Katja said, and pointed to the white shells of the Sydney Opera House roof. ‘Come and find me when it’s done.’

She watched the girl in white grow distant, and then become a speck that rose up the high range of concrete steps. And then she folded her easel, turned her back on the Opera House, and walked off into the gardens. It was useless to stand there and think about the girl. She had her own life to lead.

Rosa was used to strange sounds that fell from the sky. When she looked up to trace them, she mostly found cockatoos. She stopped on the steps and looked up now.

A man sat high above her. He straddled the white tiles at the front peak of the concert house shell. His shirt was dark green and his face so black it lost features against the white background. The long tube of a didgeridoo pointed from his mouth and straight at her. The first note he blew boomed out on the longest of breaths. It started low and roared into a wail.

The wail ended yet its absence was as strong as sound so she was still listening for it when she noticed a new note had started. This one grew too till it roared and almost screamed. Then the music became breaths, quick explosive breaths that shook Rosa back to herself.

She finished walking up the steps. Inside the glass doors of the entrance a boy tore her ticket and stuck a big green sticker to her dress.

Rosa stood still. ‘I don’t know where to go,’ she said.

‘That’s the plan,’ the boy replied. ‘Apparently.’

He stuck a sticker on the next visitor and Rosa walked through.

People clustered into small groups. Heads turned around, and then clicked into one direction and off they went. Rosa followed and found herself in a courtyard.

Up above her a woman sat in an empty window space and dangled her legs. She was playing an accordion. It pumped breaths of loud air like the didgeridoo was doing on the roof. Then Rosa heard a single low note, which sustained and grew loud as a chord was added. It roared towards a silence and started again.

The afternoon became a hunt. Rosa found a lady in a skintight silver dress whose neckline dipped between her breasts, and watched the hairs in her armpits as she bowed a violin. Alone on the stage of the Concert Hall a man in a purple shirt sang in a voice that was higher than a girl’s. His song had no words, just vowels, and then a rush of explosions when he spat breaths into a microphone.

To the side of the building she entered the Playhouse and found a young woman who beat padded sticks onto a kettle drum. Back in the Opera House bar a fat man sat on a barstool and streamed sounds from a clarinet.

Inside the Opera House’s auditorium the walls were black and dim floorlights guided people to the rows of seats. Rosa placed herself in a pink one on at the front. A spotlight dropped a small circle of light on a man on stage. He wore a white shirt, open-necked with the sleeves rolled up, and sat quite erect. On his cello he played four notes in different patterns, up and down the octaves, all with gentle strokes of the bow. His eyes stayed closed; not squeezed shut, but soft like eyes in sleep.

Suddenly she was held inside one continuous bending note, with no beats at all any more. The cellist opened his eyes and looked up high, toward the ceiling and over to the right. Rosa turned and stared with him but found nothing to see. Music collapsed into sound. Other sounds joined in. The violinist, the accordionist, the singer, the clarinettist, the man from the roof with the didgeridoo, the drummer with a drum strung round her neck, entered through different doors and walked onto the stage as they played.

The audience followed and squeezed in between the rows but no one sat. They just stood and waited inside the sound.

Rosa noticed no signal but the musicians turned still all at once. The silence shocked her. It was like being dropped and falling to the ground.

The adults stood stunned, and then they shouted and clapped their hands. The switch from that one vast pure sound to a rage of applause was more than Rosa could take. She stood and pushed at a closed door and stepped out into the light.

She needed to leave the building, that’s all she knew.

Once outside she paused. Her heart beat so fast it hurt but she was OK.

A cry shrilled across the sky. There above her cockatoos flashed white against the blue. The birds flew across the Botanical Gardens. That’s where her grandmother was. She would ask questions.

Rosa was not ready for that. It was too big a reduction, to fit music into words. She needed more time.

The main stairs swept down the front of the building. She found an alternative set that led down to the lower level. To the right of an entrance door a man sat on the floor. He was young enough to have spots on his face, and dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans and big boots. He had a black straggly beard, long hair, and blue eyes that stared at her when she came near. On the floor to his left lay a hat with coins inside, and to his right a Jack Russell terrier was curled up in sleep.

The man was playing a penny whistle. She recognised the tune. It was a four-note theme, repeated through different combinations. Then he reached an endnote. He closed his eyes to keep the pressure inside them and the sound grew louder the less breath he had. The dog sat upright and tilted its head. And then the note stopped.

The man kept his eyes shut, and then opened them. Rosa was staring at him. He grinned and she grinned back.

Rosa opened her purse, took out her ice cream coin, and dropped it into the man’s hat. Then she turned and ran away.

Rosa shouted once. ‘Oma!’

Her grandmother was deaf, but sometimes you have to scream and shout not so someone can hear, just for the release of it.

Rosa ran across lawns and around banks of shrubs. At last she spotted her grandmother. The woman stood beside a pond and faced a palm tree. Not that you would be able to identify the scene, from the colours slashed across the canvas on her easel.

‘So soon,’ Katja said and waited for Rosa to regain her breath. ‘So tell me, what was he like?’

‘Who?’

‘The cellist, of course. Otto Schalmik. The supposedly world famous composer.’

Rosa thought. ‘He was a man. A thin man with big hands.’

‘Does he have much hair?’

‘Quite a bit. It’s long. And grey. And swept back.’

‘And how does he seem?’

Musical? That’s what Rosa wanted to say, but it seemed silly. ‘He seemed well.’

‘What do you mean, well? Did he look proud? Did he look pleased with himself?’

This was a yes or no question. Her grandmother liked clear responses. One answer would be right, the other would be wrong.

‘Yes,’ she tried.

‘I thought so.’ Katja whirled her paintbrushes inside a jar of water. The water turned dark brown with paint.

‘Wipe those dry on the grass,’ she told Rosa, and handed her the wooden handles of the brushes like they were a bunch of flowers. She tilted the jar to pour the paint and water into the pond. ‘I believe we have both earned a glass of ice cream. Let’s go to the pavilion.’

Katja read lips, which meant they could not walk and share conversation. It suited them both. The girl followed the woman across the grass, and on the path they linked hands.

3

VIENNA, 1938

We need what the words miss out.

From his cello Otto Schalmik drew notes that went up through the ceiling and into the apartment above, and down through the floorboards to the apartment below. Otto was nineteen and stuck in his bedroom at home. He might have been quieter, but was not in the mood. His play was an attack.

His head was bowed and his large ears were close to the belly of the cello, yet what he heard most acutely was not the notes he played but the tread of soft leather shoes on parquet flooring. Though stout, Frau Schalmik walked in one crisp rhythm. That rhythm had nothing to do with the rhythm Otto was playing. Why not? It was deliberate, he decided.

He speeded up a little and played still louder. Her footsteps stopped. She opened his door and watched him.

‘What?’ he said.

He sliced the bow free of the strings and sighed.

‘It’s a gigue,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘A gigue is a dance. Try making it dance.’

‘I am making it dance.’

‘You’re making it stomp about. Do you think Bach was angry when he wrote it?’

He looked at her, one of those glares that said go away. She wore an apron, its pattern of flowers washed and faded to whiteness. Beneath it was a skirt and blouse of dark crimson. Her hair was pulled back beneath an ebony headband. She was dressed for cooking and yet ready for a party.

‘Come, set the table,’ she said. ‘Your sister will be here soon.’

The cloth was spread over the table. His mother had starched it so its white was brighter than ever. A grandmother he never knew stitched clusters of tiny daisies around its hem petals, white on white. Two candles were lit and in glass holders.

‘Oh no,’ Otto said. ‘Hugo’s coming.’

‘Would Erna come without Hugo?’

Frau Schalmik bundled cutlery onto the table for Otto to set in place. Otto’s father brought the wine glasses from the cabinet, one at a time, and polished each with a soft cloth. His mother headed to the kitchen. Otto set down the last knife and followed her.

Frau Schalmik backed away from the oven and even Otto felt the blast of heat as she reached inside and pulled out a blackened tray. She handled it so the spits of fat fell back on the chicken and not into her face, and set the tray down on the hob. She turned the potatoes and spooned fat on the chicken’s flesh that already showed signs of gold. Asparagus spears were aligned in an earthenware dish on the counter.

‘Erna comes, and we find food suddenly?’

His mother heaved the bird back into the oven and slammed shut the door and then took a moment to set her fists against her hips and face him.

‘A boy who won’t stop growing resents that we feed his sister.’

‘I grow on potato soup.’

‘You grow on air. You grow on anything. You just grow. But today you can grow on chicken and be thankful like the rest of us. Go put on your kippah.’

‘Let Hugo wear what he wants. I’ll wear what I want.’

‘You’ll wear what I say. You’ll put on a clean shirt too.’

She out-stared him. He turned and left the kitchen.

Herr Schalmik stood by the dining table, folding his own kippah down across his skull. He lifted one eyebrow at his son, and then smiled. ‘Your playing was good,’ he said.

‘It was terrible.’

‘The boy knows best. Me, I am not so musical. I have ears for music like a mole has eyes for the world. Still, when my boy plays my heart sings.’

Otto almost smiled, and went to fetch his headgear.

A clean starched shirt hung in his wardrobe, its buttons done up so he could slip it over his head. His head was emerging from the cotton when he heard the knock on their front door. Erna had her own key, but the door was bolted when they were all at home nowadays. This was Erna’s knock, a light and rhythmic frapping with her knuckles. It announced her presence without yelling it out.

The bolts, both top and bottom, were pulled back, the door opened, and the bolts shot back into place. The four adults let themselves murmur as they moved along the corridor. Once inside the dining room their laughter and greetings swelled out.

Otto heard all this, and then went to join them.

‘See,’ his mother said. ‘Look at the smile on the boy. See how happy Otto is to see you. We thought that smile was packed away somewhere, but he gives it to his sister without asking.’

Otto tried to turn the smile off, but he couldn’t. His sister held out her arms and he grinned and hurried into a hug.

‘Look at me,’ Erna said over to his shoulder to the others. ‘I used to be the tall one and now I have to go up on my toes to hug him.’

She stepped back, her hands on his shoulders to link them.

‘You look good, Otto. When you don’t find time to come and see me, I imagine you living some wild kind of life. But you look well.’

‘He looks pale,’ his mother said. ‘And thin. He does little but practise. We have to invite you here, Erna, to entice him from his room.’

‘Well hooray for the cellist’s long arms, I say. You give great hugs, Otto,’ and his sister closed him into her arms again.

‘All my children round one table!’ Herr Schalmik opened his arms wide and grinned. He was pleased yet he was also hungry. He had done without lunch, and the smell of bread and chicken was a trial.

The mother laughed and pulled out her chair. The family gathered into their places. Hugo slid his kippah from his pocket and set it on his head while the father poured red wine into his glass.

‘You’ll do us the honour of reciting Kiddush?’ the father suggested.

Hugo nodded, his face solemn. See such a face and you don’t expect much. It was pinched and sour. Otto still could not believe his sister loved such a face, and so he closed his eyes. Hugo raised his glass and gave voice. This alone was an excuse for love. The voice came from a musical soul.

The prayer of thanks for the Sabbath settled into Hugo’s soft high tones. Then it dipped and rose between major and minor keys, like a magpie at flight in a storm.

The prayer was sung. Otto opened his eyes. He raised his glass with the others and sipped. The wine was safer that way. It fired up the tongue and then bit at your throat as you swallowed, but second tastes were kinder. In one movement, the family’s glasses went down and their freed hands reached for bread. They chewed, and their heads turned slowly as they looked each other in the eyes.

Otto was the first to swallow the food.

‘Shalom!’ he said, so loud he surprised himself.

The others jumped a little, and then laughed.

‘Shalom,’ they joined in, and raised their glasses. They didn’t chink them, the glasses were too delicate for that, so thin with a dainty pattern of vines etched around their rims. Each person reached their glass across the table in a silent pressing of air.

And then Erna touched her glass to her lips in a token gesture as the others gulped the wine down.

The chicken was small, but even so it was a chicken.

Otto checked around. Most of the precious objects were in the china cabinet, but he could see no gaps on the shelves. What had his mother bartered for the bird? Jewellery maybe. She seldom wore it so that was something he would not miss if it were gone.

Herr Schalmik carved, though really all it took was steering the blade as it slid through the meat. Frau Schalmik served: a leg each for her husband and Hugo, a token wing and two slices for her two children, and a slither for herself. The best piece of a chicken was its carcase, she always said. That’s where the goodness lies. She could do so much with a carcase.

The potatoes were lush with chicken juice. The family pulled the asparagus between their teeth. Their mouths were too busy for talk.

‘You have work still?’ Herr Schalmik asked Hugo when his plate was clean.

Hugo was trained as an engineer. A friend had lent him the rear of an old carriage house where he now worked repairing bicycles.

‘You know, some days bad and some days good.’

‘Some days good!’ Herr Schalmik nodded, and licked his lips like he could taste the good news.

A silence hung for a moment. Otto wanted to fill it but he could not find the words. Herr Schalmik had returned early from work that day. He carried a small cardboard box that contained the contents of his desk. The civil service had dismissed its Jews. Otto had watched his father’s shoulders shake as he sat in his armchair and tears ran down the man’s cheeks. Frau Schalmik stood behind her husband and stroked his hair. All was so quiet. Otto had returned to his bedroom and played a Bach Suite, gently at first.

Herr Schalmik had asked Hugo about his work. Now Hugo should ask a question back.

‘Erna,’ Frau Schalmik said, to draw her daughter’s attention.

Good. His mother had moved the conversation sideways.

Erna looked up. Her face flushed red. Otto noticed, but did not know why. His sister had a calm way of viewing the world. She never blushed. What had he missed?

‘You have some news for us?’ Frau Schalmik asked.

Erna blushed a still deeper shade of pink. She looked at her mother, then at Hugo, then down at the table, and then up at her mother again.

‘A baby,’ she said. ‘We are going to have a baby.’

‘Anaiah.’ Frau Schalmik raised her arms out in front of her, like the news was a dove she had released from her heart. Her chair slid back as she stood up and she hurried round the table to her daughter. The women wrapped arms around each other and held close, as though frozen in dance. And then the men and the women all took turns to hug each other.

‘May I touch?’ Otto asked.

‘There’s nothing to feel,’ Erna said, but let her brother lay the palm of his hand on her stomach in any case. Otto felt the slight curve of her belly, and its heat.

He drew his hand away slowly.

‘It’s a girl,’ he said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You don’t know that.’

‘The world needs more girls,’ he answered. ‘God is good.’

The family laughed together. Even Hugo joined in. God was always a joke for Otto, and this was a good joke.

And so they were all standing and laughing when the butt of a pistol rapped against their front door.

They went silent. This noise meant instant calculations. Who was there? It didn’t matter. The noise was hostile. Whoever was outside was hostile.

You don’t arrive at a door and bang on it straight away, you stand a moment and listen. Whoever was outside, what had they heard?

A family laughing, that was for sure. They had all let themselves loose for a moment. They could not pretend that nobody was home.

Who had laughed loudest? It was hard to say. It was a mix, for sure, soprano to baritone, men and women both. What did they want, these men at their door? They wanted men. Most likely. They were rounding up male Jews, so rumour said.

The pistol smashed into the door once again.

‘Polizei!’

At the shout, Frau Schalmik jumped from thought to action. She piled her son’s cutlery on top of his plate and thrust them at him, his wineglass too.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Take these away. Hide. Go to your room. Get in the wardrobe.’ Her hands reached toward Hugo’s plate, just a fraction, and pulled back. Hugo would be the provider for her grandson. He should be saved. But the police outside had heard men laughing. They needed to find two men. Hugo must stay or they would look for Otto. They didn’t know Hugo was here. They wouldn’t be looking for him. They did not want Hugo. He would be safe.

Herr Schalmik moved toward the corridor.

‘Stall them,’ Frau Schalmik said.

She reached out and plucked the kippah from her husband’s head. It would only goad them. It disappeared into a pocket in her skirt. She made her own clothes. Her family made fun of her for all the deep pockets sewn into their folds, but hands can’t be holding things all the time.

Erna watched her mother and made calculations of her own. She tipped the chewed bone from Hugo’s plate on top of the carcase and pushed his plate, cutlery and glass into his hand. He had to hide all evidence of his presence at the table.

‘To my room,’ she said. ‘Under the bed.’

‘Coming,’ Herr Schalmik called out as the pistol thundered against the door once again.

What was wrong with knocking? Otto wondered. A heavy brass doorknocker was fixed to the door, in the shape of a hand emerging from a laced sleeve. His mother kept it polished to brightness.

Then he guessed. It was gone. He bet it was gone. Bartered for a chicken.

‘You say you’re the police,’ Herr Schalmik called through the door. ‘How do I know? You could be anybody. Show me your papers.’

A man on the far side cursed him, but papers slid under the door. Otto saw them appear and hurried away down the corridor, Hugo right behind him. The front door had two bolts and a lock. Herr Schalmik rattled the top one, as though finding it difficult.

The man on the far side cursed him again. The father looked back to watch his son disappear, and jerked the bolt free.

Otto closed himself into his wardrobe but still he could hear. The second bolt slid back, and the lock on the door turned clear. There was a scuffle, the bang of the door against the wall, the gruff voices of loud men. How many, two? No, three.

He heard his father complain. They were pushing him in front of them.

‘You’re Jakob Schalmik,’ one man declared. It was an identification, not a question. ‘Where is Otto? Where is your son?’

‘He’s not here,’ Frau Schalmik answered.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s nineteen. It’s a Friday night. There are things a mother does not want to know. He is where he is.’

‘He is here.’ The voice of the third man from the corridor. Herr Els, the superintendent of the building. ‘I heard him. He’s been playing that cello all day. He’s here. He must be hiding.’

Two voices responded at once.

‘That was the gramophone,’ said Frau Schalmik.

‘That was me,’ said Erna.

‘Two answers,’ the officer said. ‘How many lies?’

‘It was me,’ Erna said, ‘and the gramophone. We have new recordings, Pablo Casals playing the Bach Suites. I’m learning. I listen to a disc and then I play it myself.’

‘She’s lying.’ The superintendent again. ‘She plays the violin. Frau Schalmik the piano. It’s the son who plays the cello. They play together sometimes. It’s endless. And so loud.’

‘I fear Herr Els is not very musical,’ the officer said and laughed. The second officer followed the laughter with his own. No one else joined in. ‘Me, I like Bach. Let me judge if it was you who was playing. Fetch your cello. Play for me.’

Otto heard Erna walk down the corridor. His wardrobe door was not firmly closed. She pushed it to. Still he could hear. She picked up the cello, the bow, the music and music stand, and carried them from the room.

‘Herr Els is right,’ she explained to the officer. ‘I’m only a beginner. This is Otto’s cello. I only get to play when he is out of the house. My parents have the patience of saints, to put up with the noise I make. Herr Els too.’

She had played the Bach before. It was like a dare when Otto was beginning to fathom the music, before he bought Casals’ recordings. She picked up her violin and instantly transcribed the cello music to suit it. The result was so alive, so sweet, that Otto’s eyes burned with tears as he listened.

But she had never, so far as he knew, played the cello. It didn’t interest her. As the first-born child she had her pick of instruments and chose the violin. You can’t practise too much, she told him. For her, every note not played on the violin was a note wasted.

Now her first ever note on the cello would be in concert.

It wasn’t bad. Not so bad. She played with confidence if too lightly. The note was recognisable, and the ones that followed fitted into a tune. It was hard to adapt a violinist’s technique to the cello. For a first attempt, this was brilliant.

Hands clapped loudly, three times. It wasn’t applause. It was an order for her to be silent. Erna stopped playing.

‘Is this what you heard, Herr Els?’ the officer asked.

‘I heard Otto. He’s a student at the Academy. He practises all the time. He’s good. I know what I hear. It wasn’t a gramophone. Like she said, that is Otto’s cello. Otto must be hiding somewhere.’

‘I think you’re right, Herr Els. Under this table, maybe? Haussmann, perhaps you can look for us?’

The other policeman in the room made his move. The china and the plates smashed on the floor first, and then the table crashed down. Otto heard his mother’s cry, and her gasp as she tried to hold the cry in check.

‘So he’s not here. You have a clever son, Frau Schalmik. Hiding under the table is too obvious for him. Perhaps the china cabinet has a hollow back? Haussmann, is this Otto hiding behind the china cabinet? Check for us, please?’

The joinery on the cabinet was delicate. The wood splintered as it landed, the glass in its doors shattered, the contents smashed.

‘Not there? I’m running out of ideas. This boy could be anywhere. Over to you, Haussmann. Search the whole apartment.’

Otto thought it through. Would they find him in the wardrobe? Surely they would. Might they find Hugo first? Most likely they would. Hugo was under Erna’s bed. They would look there first. Erna’s bedroom was closer to them than his own.

Would they mistake Hugo for Otto? Possibly. Hugo might even allow them to.

And then Herr Els would correct their mistake.

Otto pushed at the wardrobe door and climbed out. He could not save himself. If he was quick, he might save Hugo.

The front door was open. Otto considered running. It looked like freedom, but it wasn’t. The officer called Haussmann stepped into the corridor and pointed a revolver in his direction.

‘Otto Schalmik,’ he said.

It was all quick. Herr Schalmik was pushed into the corridor ahead of Otto. Frau Schalmik followed, asking questions, firing demands. Where were they taking them? Should she pack? She must pack. Her men needed changes of clothes, food for the journey. It would take her only a minute. They must wait.

They would not wait.

‘This is for their own good,’ the officer explained. ‘The streets of Vienna are not safe for Jews. We are taking them into protective custody.’

Otto turned toward his mother and sister as he passed the door in which they were standing. Haussmann pushed at the boy’s cheek with his revolver, to keep Otto looking forward. He was at the bottom of the stairs when he heard the loud wail of his mother’s cry.

4

VIENNA TO DACHAU, 1938

The guards were young and they were practising. At one end of a row, they yelled abuse. It had to be vile and loud so when it reached the far end it still hurt. Officials stamped in to judge and inspect and flash swastika-banded salutes. They were new masters of invective. This school gymnasium was a laboratory in which they taught the terrors of the human voice.

Six hundred men snatched from all across Vienna stood with a powerful absence of noise.

On the second evening the guards moved the men. The process was ordered and alphabetical. Both Schalmiks, father and son, were locked in the same barred wagon. They were told they were heading for the police headquarters in Elizabeth Promenade but through the bars they could make out a different route. Westbahnhof, where passengers board trains, went by on their right. The wagon drove them around to the Gueterbahnhof, the freight-loading area.

‘Schnell schnell!’ Otto watched an old man whose legs moved fast but his steps were small. Quick quick, he was being as quick as he could, no one wanted to obey as much as he. An SS guard raised his rifle, lined up the barrel, and shot. The old man fell. Killed while trying to escape.