Chapter 7

7.
“Si Tu Savais: Satie”


Max hadn’t slept a wink in three days. In spite of his grief, he put himself on close watch of Maestro, who had slipped, understandably, into a state of borderline catatonia. Max had become nurse maid, forcing him to eat, to drink, and to keep him from injuring himself, for that was the one and only thing he seemed interested in doing in those dark days following Hanna’s murder. It was only once they were on the train, once they crossed the border out of Germany, that Max allowed his eyes to close and sleep to take him. It had been a living hell, but they were finally in Italy, almost to the port of Genoa.

The first night was the worst. It took a little under three hours, but Max managed to get the two of them safely back to Ingrid’s house. The rioting had gotten so bad that they were forced into the shadows. When there was no way around it, they had to muscle through and pretend to be a part of it. Joshua didn’t say a word the whole way back. He followed Max at an arm’s length with his head lowered. Violence and rage hung over the city like a bad smell that night. It seemed to hydrate Joshua in much the way breaking all the windows in his house had. For him it felt like the apocalypse, and in a way that was comforting.

When they arrived back at Ingrid’s Joshua cloistered himself in the living room with a bottle of scotch. Max and Ingrid took turns sitting with him and keeping him away from the piano. All he wanted to do was drink and play, which had become progressively more dangerous as the night went on and the riots continued. Isaac, grief stricken as well, thought it best to hide, and spent the night in the closet. The rift between him and Joshua had widened beyond any hope of repair, compounded by the fact that if Max dozed off for more than a minute or two Joshua would be back at the piano. During one such episode, Isaac had crept from his closet and wrestled his brother-in-law to the floor.

“You killed her and now you want to kill us, too?” he spat before Max and Ingrid could pull him off. After this, Ingrid locked the piano and the next twenty-four hours were spent in a variation of silence punctuated by outbursts of emotion from each of them. Luckily it was not enough to alert the looters and the Hoppe house was passed over.

By Thursday night, it began to die down. It was now common knowledge that Joshua had not gone to the Argentine Embassy for their visas, and though Joshua wanted no part of the argument, Max set his sights on a way to get them both out of Germany. That night, the challenge was keeping Joshua in the house. He got it into his head to go home, to be with Hanna and the baby, but Ingrid and Max wouldn’t allow it. Isaac thought it best to let him go. Someone had to give her a proper burial and it may as well be him, the one who killed her. This argument was exhausted into the wee small hours and finally it was decided (mostly thanks to Ingrid’s Luger) that everyone sit down and shut up.

The next morning Max ventured outside. It was early and the pavement sparkled with shards of broken glass in the gloom of the rising dawn. The city had been ravaged beyond all recognition, beyond all reason. Survivors kept out of sight, alley jumping the way he had the night before. It was only when they got within running distance of the Embassies did they make a break for it, joining hundreds of their fellow Germans in hopes of getting a ticket out.

Max fell into the throng. Stealthy creeping followed by a mad dash, then rejection and on to another. Many of the Embassies had closed their doors already. Nicht Mehr Visa, read the signs. The Argentine Embassy wouldn’t see him, even after three hours of waiting for an audience with Isaac’s contact. He was told by the man’s secretary that though Herr Hendricks extends his most profound sympathies, there was simply no way he could help.

The streets of Berlin had become an extended game of telephone. People passing rumors along about which Embassy was still handing out Visas, which ones had stopped, and which had stopped and then started again. “The British are issuing another 200,” someone would say, and a small crowd would head in that direction followed by a larger group who didn’t know where they were going but figured that if people were heading off somewhere it must be for a good reason. The streets became overrun with these groups, like conflicting schools of fish, swimming through the ruins of a shipwreck. For hours Max went with the tide, too exhausted to do much else and hoping for a break.

It was mid-afternoon when he ran into Dieter. He too was attempting to find a way out of Berlin. The Gestapo who came for Joshua at the Oper let the burly doorman off with a warning, mostly because he would have taken up too much room in their truck. Dismissal from the Oper was the final straw for him. That afternoon, Dieter was on his way back from the American Embassy. When he saw the numbers he took himself out of the running. There were people who needed it far more then he. “People like Maestro,” Dieter said.

“I’ll be lucky if I can get Maestro out at all,” Max told him, and went on to relay the story of what had happened.

Dieter listened, and taking it all very personally, began to get emotional. His face tensed up and turned red as if he were being stuck with a hot poker but didn’t want anyone to know. He looked as if he might boil over, and he did. Without warning, he pulled Max off the street and into the nearest alcove. The glass door leading to a small shop had been shattered and Dieter urged Max in. “I have to tell you something, Max,” Dieter huffed like a deflating hot air balloon. The two men stood in what, forty-eight hours ago, had been a popular shop for watches and clocks. Now it was a disaster area, Max couldn’t locate a single item that hadn’t been smashed.

“You know why there are no Gestapo on the street today?”

It was a good question, and he was right, Max hadn’t seen a single one. Maybe they were tired from two long nights of looting. But he was too anxious to be sarcastic.

“They’re giving people one last chance to get out. One last chance, Max. If you can’t get Maestro out now, he will be arrested just like all the others. And you too if they find out about you.”

Dieter had always been good at keeping secrets. “I’ve tried everywhere,” Max noticed a small ladies watch in a broken case that was still in one piece. He picked it up and put it to his ear, it was ticking.

“I don’t think you have.” And Dieter was gone.

Max didn’t expect him to move that fast. He set down the watch and followed him out the door. Dieter moved with the grace of a polar bear and the speed of a, well, a very old and wounded polar bear. Max skipped alongside him like a thirsty puppy. It was the first time in days that a ray of hope had entered his mind and he intended to keep as close to it as possible. There were no words between them as they traveled down the street, Dieter the sun and Max his spinning planet, moving faster only within the confines of his own desperate orbit. When he did take it upon himself to ask where they were going, Dieter showed Max a side of himself that was a revelation; the polar bear hissed at him and picked up his pace, lumbering, panting and sweating, with a clear determination. People stayed out of his way.

“There,” Dieter heaved. He lifted a massive arm and pointed toward a building overrun with people. It was the Chinese Embassy and Max had already tried it. “Not with me you haven’t.”

Dieter’s ground assault of the crowd was impressive to say the least. Max hung on to his collar and was more than once lifted off his feet as the great boulder of a man parted the fray. He kept repeating their names loudly, “Maestro Joshua Streng and Max Schmied, Maestro Joshua Streng and Max Schmied!” as if it were this mantra that kept him going, that removed the guilt he must have felt pushing aside people who were just as desperate as they. By the time they got to the front, Max was sitting on Dieter’s shoulders. He thrust his and Joshua’s passports into the hand of an exhausted looking clerk. The man wrote both their names in a ledger and stamped the books. Then he handed them back, waving them impatiently, without looking up. When Max and Dieter rolled out of the crowd, the space they occupied filled like water.

Thus their escape was underway. But escape to where, the other side of the world? Max had no context in which to place China. When he thought of the word, the easternmost part of his brain lit up with colorful images of swirling dragons, swords, and ships with pointed sails. How could one survive there? What would a place like that do to Maestro?

Dieter escorted Max back to Ingrid’s and like the angel that he was, offered to buy their passage for them on credit. Maestro was moved by this and took a private audience with Dieter in the living room. From behind the door Max and Ingrid heard Joshua break into a sob for the first time since Hanna’s death. When Dieter emerged ten minutes later he held the Lion. Apparently Maestro wanted him to have it, but Dieter couldn’t accept. “This is a family treasure and I have no right to it.” He gave the case containing the violin back to Max. “Watch him, Max,” Dieter added before going, “he means to kill himself.”

But Ingrid saw Joshua’s sobs as a positive development. “He’s grieving, and that’s what he needs to do.”

And grieve he did. Once the sobbing began it didn’t stop for a full day and a half. It was only once they were en route to the train station, their bags packed, their wounds licked, did Joshua trail off. His face became placid and unresponsive. “I think that China will be an ideal place to die,” he muttered in his muttering way, as he stepped foot onto train. Max helped him, it was like he’d aged twenty years in three days, and they went straight for their cabin. It would be safer, Isaac decided, if they saw themselves off.

By afternoon they were clear of the Rhineland, and not without any trepidation. Master and apprentice gliding over the Italian countryside, all of it so alien, yet still so familiar in comparison to thoughts of their final destination. Max had never been out of Germany. This field of green might have looked familiar still, but soon it would stop and a field of blue would begin, giving way to a jungle of red and black, of fireworks and bamboo, of opium and mystery. Max wished they could stay in Italy. Italy didn’t terrify him.

Joshua on the other hand was content to go. The only way it could get any better would be if the boat passed China by and sailed off the edge of the earth. All he could think of was following Hanna. If he weren’t such a weakling he would have done it already, but a man like him was not built for suicide. Even after what had transpired, the prospect of killing himself was still far too unpleasant to bear. If he could snap his fingers and just be done with it, well then he would probably develop a fear of accidentally snapping his fingers. He wanted death to take him by force, and since it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon (his self-preservation instincts being what they were) he was soothed by the thought of China. It was a faraway land with no memories. Unlike Max’s, Joshua’s vision of the place was one of fog and mist, a place where if you cleared your mind of everything, you just might be able to fade away into it.

As the countryside rolled by him, Joshua could picture Dieter performing his final task of loyalty. It was the reason he offered him the violin. He imagined the doorman’s hulking frame ascending the stairs of his house, and moving down the hall to the bedroom where he had left his wife’s body.

“In the back garden there is a tree. In the summer it is full of white flowers, they’ll be happy there. And they’ll have Helga to watch over them.”
It would take him all night, but Dieter swore on his last breath that it would be done.

“And Dieter,” It was here that Joshua began to sob, “close the curtains before you leave.”