Chapter 1

1.
“Die Dreigroschenoper, Ouverture: Brecht/Weill”

At least it wasn’t Brecht. It was always Brecht, or so it seemed. This score, sure it was a mess, sure it was unfinished, sure it was a child of his right arm, the man himself, Herr Weill--still, at least it wasn’t bloody Brecht. Joshua sat at the piano looking at it. The pages were still cold from their journey over. They had been hand delivered from the Oper, tied loosely in a thin leather valise. They still did things like that for him, for their Maestro.

Love was all he had for the man. From Mahagonny to Madam Peachum, what was not to love? He loved Brecht as Germany loved Brecht, as the whole of the art world and their mothers, aunts, cousins loved Brecht. He loved Brecht as a brother, a friend, as a genius for the ages. He loved Brecht, as the socialists hated Brecht. And he missed him.

Josh had written him in Denmark but didn’t receive a reply. No doubt Bert was afraid a letter from the likes of him would be discovered, placing Joshua in harms way, so he wrote to Kurt. Kurt was in America working on an American project and shared none of his former writing partners paranoia. When Joshua asked that he send him something with which to while away the winter months, he complied.

As Joshua notated the score with inky hands, he was secretly pleased, the way a child might be, that the score was called Davy Crockett. He was grinning. Two ridiculous, intriguing, words that made little sense and looked funny on the page, notes in major skipping along through a wild frontier. They held no gravity, no stress. At no point did they make him anxious about having to assume social responsibility. Gone was the fear that these characters would assault the front row with aggressive opinions. He scanned the pages for early signs of an easel and found none. Davy Crockett was a respite, a breath between Wagner, Bruckner and Beethoven, the real German music that was requested of him nowadays. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for not being Brecht,” he told the score with a twitching grin. “For if you were Brecht, they’d probably shoot me in the back.”

No one had done Brecht in years. It wasn’t allowed anymore. As for this new work, he had slipped it in unnoticed; that made Joshua laugh. He could just imagine the look on the censors face when he looked at the title. Davy who? In his ignorance he would be forced to read the logline, Seien Sie immer sicher, dass Sie recht haben, dann vorangehen--Be always sure you are right, then go ahead.

Of course it had been approved, probably with a big red stamp. He imagined that the current Chancellor had those words painted on the ceiling above his bed. Nationalsozialismus! When he shared this joke with others they didn’t laugh, their eyes went wide, but he continued to tell it anyway; it was funny.
He spilled some ink--no matter, most of it caught his jacket--the notes on the page were clear enough. He played, he tripped, he frolicked, and after twenty minutes of Davy Crockett, he longed for something more, America had diluted Kurt, and not willing to admit that that something was a someone beginning with the letter “B,” he launched into Stravinsky hoping Hanna wouldn’t hear. For it had been decided that Stravinsky wasn’t good for the baby.

“The Russians in general,” Hanna had said during a late night binge on cold soup and stale pastry, “I don’t think we should expose the baby to them. They’re too wild. I have thought about it Josh, and I think we should stick to the classics. Mozart for example.” He remembered how passionate she looked sitting crossed legged on the bed, how full of conviction she was, crumbs taking rest on her rounded belly, her face so serious.

“You’re my little Buddha squirrel,” he had told her.

“Your what?”

“Buddha squirrel. You look like a Buddha and you nibble like a squirrel.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“No Russians. They are banished from this house for all time.”

“Not for all time, just until he’s old enough to handle them.”

“Not even Tchaikovsky?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Hanna had brushed the crumbs carefully into her hand and rolled off the bed towards the bathroom. Joshua felt that pang of dread that only the truly happy know.

“You’re coming back, right?”

“No, Josh. Tonight I sleep in the bathtub.”

“May I sleep in there with you?”

At dinner he would ask her if they could name the baby Davy Crockett, or maybe Wolfgang. For he noticed that his hands had somehow turned Four Etudes into The Magic Flute. He began to play it the way Stravinsky might and made him self laugh in the doing of it. He wondered if Hanna would find that at all acceptable?

“Oh! No, no, no. Mozart doing Stravinsky,” he told no one specific, “That’s very good.” Not thinking to stop, Joshua yelled over his own playing, a clipped and level version of Igor’s cacophony. “Max, get in here!” He pondered the name Igor, Stravinsky’s first name. “She’d never go for it.”

“Yes, Maestro?”

Max had been up to no good. Recently. Joshua could tell this without looking at him. He doubled his speed on the keys.

“I’m going to name the baby Igor-Amadeus Streng.”

“Hanna won’t like that.”

Had his young apprentice been drinking? That was it. Probably with the urchin chorus boys he liked so much. “Where have you been all day, Maxala?”

Max pursed his lips and leaned a hip on the piano. “Practicing.”

He gave the boy a reprimanding look. “Tell me, what am I playing?”

“It’s Stravinsky’s Etudes, isn’t it? But you’re playing it strange. You’re playing it the way one plays Mozart.”

Joshua lifted his hands from the keys so suddenly that the shock of silence nearly knocked them back physically. The room hummed with vibrations.

“Yes. That is what I was doing. Now I want you to do it for a while. You may have been practicing something today but it wasn’t the piano.” Joshua slid off the bench taking up his baton in the process. Somewhere he had a pile of its fallen brethren all murdered by him across the backside of his talented yet, insufferable apprentice. On this night he would only use it to intimidate the boy.

“I want to hear it all through dinner. You only stop when I return, understand?”

“Yes, Maestro.” Max began slowly as Joshua conducted him, and when he was sure that the boy was lost in his project, he backed slowly out of the room, pleased, and tucked the baton under his belt.

In the shadowed hallway, between the music and the smell of dinner beginning to waft his way, Joshua’s heart swelled as if someone had poured hot coffee into it. It was that feeling again, the one of impossible happiness, impossible only in its inability to sustain itself. For years now he had lived with these pangs, swelling pride followed by numbing fear. When the warmth drained from his heart, Joshua would have flashes of the end. That night, it was an image of tripping and impaling himself on his baton. A poetic way to die. Or perhaps the baton wouldn’t kill him right away, but pierce an intestine causing him to turn septic. He would find himself dodging imaginary bullets constantly. He could almost hear them whizzing past his ears. Joshua smiled and watched his footing. If he knew he could go at any moment then he was less likely to misstep. This perpetual state of neurotic mortal awareness, he reasoned, was the price he paid for being so blessed. He put his arm against the wall to steady himself which cued a gust of cold air. It smelled like snow, it smelled like Berlin.

“Do you know what they’re doing out there?” Hanna’s baby brother, Isaac stomped in. He looked like ruddy-cheeked gnome dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

“Making snow angels?” Joshua righted himself and let the fear retreat.

“It’s bad, Joshua. Getting worse.” Isaac had mastered the art of being cryptic. He closed the door and opened his coat producing an envelope that he offered to his brother-in-law.

“Take off your coat, Isaac.” Joshua turned from him and led the way into the sitting room.

“Open it,” the younger man demanded of him, shaking the envelope, trailing snow onto the rug.

Joshua sat in his second favorite chair, the one he reserved for sarcasm. “I’m doing well, Hanna saw the doctor today, she’s fine, and I think we’ve decided to name the baby Igor, but only if it’s a girl.” Down the hall, Max could be heard struggling over a difficult stanza. It repeated again and again like a broken record. Isaac’s eyes bore into Joshua’s.

“Please…”

Joshua opened the envelope with a slow seductive tear. It contained three passports. His, Isaac’s and Hanna’s.

“Newly issued. Do you see the markings?”

“Maybe the J stands for jovial.” Max had conquered his notes and moved on. “Isaac, you’re dripping snow all over my rug.”

“We have to leave Berlin, Joshua. Now.”

“I haven’t had my dinner yet.”

“I mean it this time. I spent all day trying to secure our visas. Should we try to get one for Max?” Isaac sat on the edge of the couch in his wet coat causing Joshua to wince. “You and Hanna are all he has. I think you should give it some more thought.”

“The couch, Isaac. Now the couch is wet.”

“There are more important things than the couch, Joshua.”

He looked so desperate. But that was Isaac’s way. His eyebrows were perpetually screwed up into a knot of discontent and Joshua felt, as his senior, that it was his job to unknot them. Hanna had similar tendencies. They were good people, his wife and brother-in-law. They worried about lofty things, the world, politics, truth and morality. Unlike Joshua, who spent most of his time fighting off the sweats upon the discovery of things as detrimental to his existence as an ingrown hair that wasn’t there yesterday. That, and music.

Hanna loved him for his talent. It was the only thing he had on her. In all other ways she was a human being far superior to him in every shape and form and he had no doubt that it was for that reason only he was granted access to her universe. If he couldn’t play the way he did she would never have spoken to him. Of this he was sure. He had a theory that he shared with her on occasion: if all people were made up of equal parts black and white, then Hanna would be a perfect shade of gray, balanced and even. Joshua saw his canvas as black with a white splotch in the corner. Lucky for him, she was attracted to the splotch’s purity. Unlike the rest of him, the splotch was perfect.

Seeing his brother-in-law perched on the arm of his couch, leaning into him with his brow in knots, did concern Joshua. But not for the right reasons, he suspected. He was concerned that Isaac thought too much, that his head was a hotbed of panic. It translated into stress for all involved and an unnecessary amount of wear and tear on the furniture.

Joshua rose and physically removed Isaac’s coat and hat. He would have hung them up in the hall but he didn’t want to leave the young man alone with the upholstery. He threw them over a wooden bench near the window. Outside some brown shirts passed. The two men took their seats and Joshua launched into his default remedy for nearly everything. He changed the subject.

“Isaac. Who is the greatest pianist that ever lived?” Isaac took the passports from the table and began shuffling them as if they were playing cards.

“Is there a point to that question?”

“There is a point to every question.”

“Liszt?”

“Yes. Liszt. What do we know of Liszt?”

“Joshua. We need to leave Berlin. You need to take Hanna and--”

“Liszt was the greatest pianist who ever lived yet no recordings of him exist,” Joshua insisted.

Isaac, beaten, sighed and slumped into the couch. “So how can you know that he was the best?”

“I don’t. But that’s what they say.” Joshua did believe the myth of Liszt and he would have gone on to prove it too, had not been for the cloud that crossed his brother-in-law’s face. It was a new darkness, one he hadn’t seen before in the young man. His garden gnome demeanor had cracked. Even the knots in his brow seemed to melt away into disparity. Joshua poured them both a scotch.

“Has something happened?”

“Yes,” Isaac drank the scotch in one shot. “No, just more of the same, only it’s picking up momentum. The arrests--everyone is leaving.”

“We’re not everyone. I have an orchestra to run.”

“Joshua you have been saying that for years. Eventually--”

“Eventually? We all go eventually. What if I get run down in the street tomorrow? What if I slip and fall on my baton?” The music from the other room stopped momentarily and began again. Joshua waited for it before continuing, “What if the house burns down or Max goes mad and kills us all? Isaac, let’s have a nice dinner.”

“Will you at least consider it? We could go to Buenos Aires. You loved it there, remember?”

He did. It was where he and Hanna had taken their honeymoon all those years ago. Her grandfather was from Argentina. He ran an import/export business. His son married Hanna and Isaac’s mother in Germany. They fell in love while he was abroad on business and didn’t return for fourteen years, when he did it was with a family of his own.

Hanna seemed so at ease in Buenos Aires. Her Spanish was flawless. Everyone loved her. Her skin turned a deep amber, and she wore dresses that revealed her entire back. Joshua remembered following her down a maze of colorful streets watching the way her hair brushed her neck unable to believe that this goddess was his bride. He felt like an albino rodent compared to her so he bought a violin. He would play constantly just to prove himself, just to fill her every waking moment with music. Like he was playing to sustain a magic spell. Hanna would remember the trip as the one in which “he preferred that cheap violin over me.” When she said this to him in frustration one night, he threw it off the balcony and they made love for days, Joshua humming through the silences till her kisses stopped his mouth.

“I’ll discuss it with Hanna. Maybe after the baby’s born.”

“Joshua,” Isaac spoke slowly as it seemed that his brother-in-law had faded off again, “I’m leaving at the end of the week. I managed to acquire a visa through a friend of father’s at the embassy. He said if you and Hanna want out you have to go see him yourselves. Tomorrow.” Isaac reached for his coat pocket before realizing he was no longer wearing his coat. “I wrote it down for you. His name is Hendricks.”

“Josh?” Hanna’s voice appeared like a lone flute high above stormy bass notes.
She always called for him before entering a room, an idiosyncrasy that she probably wasn’t aware of but that he appreciated vastly. It gave him a few precious seconds to straighten up for her, to remove his finger from his ear, to wipe the crumbs from his beard, or to awaken from this or that paranoid reverie. The only time Hanna appeared unannounced was when he was in his studio playing. He would lift his head to find her lingering in the doorway like a child, gazing longingly into his white splotch. Though unspoken, it was common knowledge between the two of them that Igor was conceived on the piano bench.

When she finally did appear, it was in a housedress and cardigan. Here eyes were puffy as if she had just awoken from a long sleep. She seemed languid, her bobbed hair tousled, beautiful.

“I think Max is playing Stravinsky,” she yawned, “but I can’t be sure.”

“He must not know our rule. I’ll tell him.”

Hanna sleepwalked into the living room and picked up a block of rosin from the mantle piece. She let it fall from one hand to the other. “Are you hungry, Isaac? Helga and I made dinner.”

“Yes. Thank you. We have much to talk about.”

Hanna turned and looked at her brother. She could sense the doom in his voice with a keen sisterly perception. “Has something happened?”

But Joshua rose hoping the denseness of his body in the space between them would block the impending sociopolitical panic fest. “Let’s have dinner. We can discuss everything over dinner. You look tired, my darling,” he told Hanna.

“It’s the parasite. It’s sucking all my energy.” She had taken to calling the baby “the parasite” over the last few weeks. To Hanna it was a perfectly acceptable nickname, “The parasite will need a pair of shoes,” she told the ladies in the shop. “The parasite was trying to kick me to death this morning,” she told her doctor. To them it seemed callous. To Joshua it was hysterical. He even drew pictures of his version of a monstrous parasitic baby and would leave them around for her to find. One rendering he had done earlier that week disturbed her so much it made her scream. The drawings stopped, but the nickname survived.

“So eat something and go to bed,” Joshua put his hands on either side of her bulge. “What do you think of the name Igor?”

Her eyebrows lifted as she pondered the concept of what he said. “I like it. It’s the perfect revenge for what he’s putting me through.” She didn’t smile but put her hands on top of his. “I think I’ll skip dinner, let you boys talk. Tell Max to play something else.” With her nails she gently scratched the top of Joshua’s hands and turned to leave. Isaac was about to chime in, but a look from Joshua stopped him. Normally she would have jumped at the chance to fret over Nazis with Isaac, she might even have been able to convince her husband to open his stubborn ears and follow the advice of her brother, but it was not in the cards.

“Night, night, don’t let the parasite bite,” Joshua sung as she turned the corner, the tips of her fingers the last part of her to go. To punctuate her exit she rolled her fingertips from pinky to pointer. Joshua would look back on this moment as the first in a series of moments leading up to the culmination of all his fears. It was as if her fingers played the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th. If life is made up of equal parts black and white, his lightest gray was twenty-four hours away from entering the blackest splotch of all.