Chapter 2

2.
“Hungarian Rhapsody, Number 2: Liszt”

Hungarian Rhapsody, Number 2, by Franz Liszt, is made up of two distinct parts: the first half, which is known as the Lassan, in C sharp minor, and the second and more famous half, known as the Friska, in C sharp major. It was by far Max’s favorite piece of music--complex and hysterical--he vowed to conquer it one day. Joshua could play it, though he didn’t very often. It’s one of those pieces, he reasoned, that sounds better played when least expected.

The Strengs had hosted a cast party back in ’28 when Joshua was first made Maestro. His debut was an opera, something by Brecht, “Die Dreigroschenoper” as a matter of fact, and Joshua insisted the whole company be there including the stagehands and the children’s chorus. Everyone had their turn at the piano, even people who didn’t know how to play; it was a party. Lotte Lenya played chopsticks, Georg Kaiser wisecracked his way sloppily through Chopin, and Frau Streng recited one of her own works, “The Tragic Death of Enrique Granados,” accompanied by a handsome Spaniard.

Later, and at the urging of some older cast members who knew of the boy’s entertaining parlor trick, a seven-year-old Max took the bench, propped up on a slippery pile of librettos, he played a rousing version of Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen. Everyone sang along and it was joked that he should quit the children’s chorus and become Joshua’s apprentice.

It was a summer evening and it was late, candles burned down, bottles everywhere. Max remembered waking up from a nap on in a pile of jackets and perfumed shawls. Spotted around the room were bodies in various states of consciousness, shifting, grunting, and snoring like so many maimed carcasses, and walking among them, like a general surveying the dead after a battle he’d led them into, was Maestro Streng. He had a bottle in one hand and a peculiar grin on his face. He made his way to the piano and leaned against it to steady himself. Max watched him with awe. How bizarre looking he was, tall and thin with piercing green eyes. That shock of black hair and his wild beard that hid all subtle expression. Max wanted to be just like him, and not someday, right then, with a snap of the fingers.

Feeling the boy’s eyes, Joshua turned and saw his apprentice-to-be peeking up at him from the outerwear. “Maxala, come over here,” he whispered.

Max climbed out of his nest and took a place beside him on the bench. Without another word it began, the Lassan. Max was enthralled, hanging on Maestro’s every note. Joshua even let the boy help, winking at him whenever a high F was necessary, letting the boy plunk on that one key with deliberate abandon. Around the room eyes began to open, shrouded with the dreamy, far away gazes born exclusively from the rounded clefts of rhapsodies in minor keys.

Then the Friska.

Max’s uncle called him der kleine affe, the little monkey, for his ability to will the coins from people’s pockets. Nightly, this uncle would bring the boy to clubs and bars, sit him at the piano, and make him play the hits of the day while men nodded in stern approval and women squealed with delight. During the day, this uncle would drop the boy off at the Oper while he played from his own worn list of standards in a dank, smoky, hotel lobby.

From a corner of the Streng sitting room, Klaus, Max’s uncle and teacher, watched as his kleine affe was reborn on the piano bench. If the boy had a tail it would have been wagging. And if Streng hadn’t given him the job of fingering the high F, he would have floated up to the ceiling. To be affected at such a young age was rare. He knew that, and gave the boy up willingly to his destiny.

Klaus, along with most of the dozing partygoers, had gotten to his feet by then. Half drunk and zombie-like, they stood around the room facing the piano with smiles wide like the creeping dawn. When the Friska breaks for the first time into the frenetic melody it’s known for, they let out a cheer that was heard for blocks. It was the first time he had played all night.

Below on the street, people on their way to work froze and watched that second floor window explode. It was as if a roaring party had suddenly manifested out of thin air. Joshua’s dead soldiers had risen! They were dancing, cheering, breaking bottles, while he, the captain, navigated the treacherous dips and swells from the bough of the majestic HR2.

Max bounced in place, dizzy from following the movements of Maestro’s hands. He felt as if his heart might pop. He was laughing so hard tears streamed down his face. Never before and never since had he felt that much joy. And when it was over someone said, “Joshua is that your way of telling us to get the hell out of your house?” Then everyone laughed and the night dissolved into morning.

When a nervous Isaac burst into the music room and told him to play something else, Max wasn’t surprised. He knew Hanna’s aversion to Russian music and launched into the Lassan.

“Is this better, Isaac?” He said with a flirtatious grin, but Isaac was already halfway down the hall. He knew why the gnome was edgy, and he had every right to be. Unlike Maestro, who spent his days either consumed at the Oper or consumed by Hanna at home, Max--like Isaac--was worldly. He knew what was going on in the streets with the Gestapo, and while he himself didn’t feel like a target, his friends were having trouble and he knew it was only a matter of time before they came knocking at Maestro’s door.

Joshua wouldn’t have any of it. To him matters of the world were base and insignificant; they paled in the shadow of concepts like love and passion. Ironically, he saw the soldiers that marched the streets as insects. To make his point he suspended a slice of bread from the kitchen ceiling by way of a fishing wire and sat at the table gesturing at it repeating, “See what I mean? The roaches can’t get it,” over and over again. Max didn’t see what he meant and had to ask Hanna about it. She didn’t know either but speculated it had something to do with being above all it all. “My religion is music,” was his way of dismissing any further discussion. Or in his more histrionic moments, “What are they going to do, kill me? It would be like burning down the Reichstag,” to which Isaac would reply, “They did burn down the Reichstag! They did, Joshua, five years ago, and we’re still here.” Then Joshua would get to mumbling about Communists and Isaac would retire to the garden for air.

Joshua was looked on as a bit of a national treasure. A child prodigy, the pride of Germany, he played for the Chancellor as a boy and was many times decorated by the city for his talent. Also, he had an uncanny knack for staying out of the way of things. It was as if he materialized at the Oper in the morning, stepping coolly out of the shadows, and reappeared at home in the evening. Max never saw him anywhere else. All his friends came to him. Max imagined Joshua dangling from a fishing wire being lifted around the city by an invisible hand and found himself, against his better judgment, hoping for the best. Besides, it wasn’t his place to question Maestro. He had been taking refuge under the Streng blanket since he was six and they had been good to him. People in the street were being harassed, beaten, arrested, but their home hadn’t been touched. Perhaps it would be completely looked over, maybe there were people in Berlin, Jewish people, who were somehow exempt from the developing trends, or maybe it was a spell cast by Joshua rendering them invisible.
“They can’t see us,” he had said sitting at the kitchen table. He was a deranged magician, watching that condemned slice of bread swing in the cross draft like a hypnotist’s coin, “and if they can’t see us we don’t exist.”

This attitude of superiority troubled Isaac on many levels; his lack of compassion for his countrymen for one, and even more so, his lack of concern for the safety of his sister and unborn child. This led to fierce arguments between the two that usually had Isaac pacing as Joshua spouted musical history in the guise of a well presented analogy that never came to fruition.

“Paganini was paranoid. Out of his mind. He refused to play his own violin solos in front of his orchestra in rehearsals. Refused. And where did that get him, Isaac? Where?”

That night, Max could hear them go at it between the many rests in the Lassan, but it wasn’t until he heard a crash that he stopped playing and ventured down the hall into the dining room.

Maestro was kneeling on the floor picking up the broken remnants of a gilded plate that had been smashed to bits, a piece of his and Hanna’s wedding china. Isaac was gone. Max watched him silently for a while, how his long fingers carefully gathered every single shard of porcelain. “Three octaves across four strings,” he was muttering to himself. Then louder, “Max, why did you stop playing?” He didn’t look up.

“I heard a crash.” Max advanced into the dining room.

“Stay where you are, please.” Joshua looked him in the eye and the boy froze. “If you step on even one of these smaller shards, it could get embedded in the carpet. I can’t risk Hanna cutting herself. She likes to walk barefoot, as you know.” He turned back to his work and Max watched from the doorway.

“How did it break?” He ventured after a moment.

“Isaac threw it at me.”

“Why?”

Maestro didn’t answer, he kept picking at the carpet. Max could psychically feel his desire for tweezers. And just as he was about to run and get him some, the strangest thing happened. “Max, if you were a Jew, would you leave Berlin?”

Max didn’t have to think. “Of course.”

Maestro stopped what he was doing and considered his apprentice. “And if you were me? What would you do if you were me?”

“If I were you, I’d probably stay.”

“Why?”

“Because I know that’s what you would do.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re ‘the pride of Berlin,’” he said, quoting Maestro.

“Okay, and if you were me. If you were the pride of Berlin, what would you do?”

Max felt trapped by all this, there was no right answer, so he did as his master would have done. “I’d consider the bread.”

Joshua rose carefully to his feet and backed off the carpet. “The bread. Yes.”

Twelve seconds later the two men, one younger, one older, both virtuosos, stood in the kitchen staring intently at the slice of bread Joshua had hung from the rafters, hoping for some sort of divine intervention. When none came, the bread was inspected and deemed insect free. Joshua paced, his hand lost in the forest that was his beard. Max studied the bread closely.

“Maestro! I see something,” he shouted.

“What?” Joshua stood at the kitchen window looking out of it, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Mold!”

“Mold?” Joshua turned, indignant, as if he had been insulted.

“Yes, these little white dots, they’re mold, aren’t they?” Max stepped back, hiding under his flop of golden hair, hoping the slice would take the brunt of Joshua’s impending rage.

Maestro crossed the kitchen with the swagger of a prince and studied the slice as if it were nothing more than a moldy piece of bread. “It can’t be.” The bread had indeed been over run with common everyday mold spores. Before it froze into an early snow, there had been rain. That must have accounted for the moisture necessary to incubate mold. The rain, and the warmth of the oven; Joshua felt the fool. “Max, a knife please.”

The boy chose a paring knife with a dull blade, (just incase) and handed it to him handle first. Joshua cut the offending bread down and tossed it in the trash.
“I’m going to bed. Practice what you’d like for another hour then you may, too.” Joshua turned the light off as he left the kitchen leaving Max in darkness. “And take care of the mess in the dining room.”

That evening in bed, Joshua couldn’t stop thinking about the symbolism of the mold. Was it a reflection on him? Had he grown moldy by staying in Berlin so long after most of his Jewish friends had fled? Was his attitude really as callous as Isaac had accused? Or was the mold them, Nationalsozialismus, the disgrace of his Germany, and had he underestimated their cunning. He saw them as roaches, unintelligent and shifty, yet ultimately doomed to extermination by reason and progress. But what if they were really more like mold? Mold was smart. Mold worried him. Mold could invade the lungs. Mold could kill you silently, when you least expect it.

That night he spoke to Hanna. “I think I’ll get those visas tomorrow. Just in case.” But she was asleep, lost in a dream. He wondered as he looked at her, her almond shaped face illuminated by the light of a setting moon sneaking its way in through a crack in the curtain, if she was dreaming her own dreams or if they were infiltrated by the baby growing inside her. Did the hills of her childhood feature a small, crawling, interloper, exploring the blades of grass and making friends with bugs? He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. He wanted to envelop them, to open himself and tuck them inside where they would be safe, because he envied their closeness. His heart swelled, and fighting the dizziness of all encompassing joy mixed with despair, he buried his face in her hair and squeezed his eyes shut. If Buenos Aires were their anti-mold agent, then Buenos Aires it would be.