November 1938
Walter awakens to the smell of burning paper. With the bedroom shades drawn, the late afternoon street sounds are muffled. He untangles Sonia’s hair from his hand, steps to the door and peeks. His father kneels before the fireplace, feeding the flames with rolled-up sheet music. Josef rips the pages from their bindings and shapes them into logs, the edges cinched tight. Walter winces at the sight of his father’s fuel supply. Maybe the fire will release some kind of strange music, he thinks. A prompt, a sign, a directive. Leave this place; embrace your future. But a flute étude cackles like ordinary paper, heats the living room for a brief spell, and then flickers out.
Josef lights a cigar with the last embers and steps over to his typewriter. He taps a few keys slowly, then attacks the whole alphabet with ardor. Here he goes again, thinks Walter. Another afternoon of futility for the father; another afternoon of love for the son. He listens to the keys explode under Josef’s fingers and knows his father is writing yet another letter to his former colleagues at the university that no longer employs him, claiming that Josef Westhaus educated a generation of Berliners to understand Plato and Aristotle and this defrocked professor is not like other Jews. For a while Josef mailed these but now he doesn’t even address the envelopes.
Walter would give themselves another two weeks. Enough time to convince his father that he could teach philosophy and make music in Palestine, that he could survive the heat and possibly again know happiness. Two weeks would be enough time for Walter to arrange for their visas and pack up the whole traveling circus: Josef, Sonia, her parents in Leipzig, their embroidered tablecloths and Sabbath samovar, his father’s flute, the unburnt sheet music—and himself, an eighteen-year-old student who needs no luggage of his own, a man who memorizes all the poems he loves. Walter imagines a caravan of loaded camels meandering through the streets of Berlin, Sonia riding in the lead, wearing a white veil, her long blond hair brushing the camel’s skin.
“What’s the plan?” asks Sonia, her voice thin and hoarse.
Walter returns to the bed and spoons behind her.
“My father’s burning up his études,” he whispers.
Sonia presses her nose to his hand and inhales the faint smell of vodka they drank sometime that morning, in between the lines of poetry, the languid sex, the hours he spent sketching her toes, her incessant question: when, schatzi, when?
He pulls at her long curtain of hair and sniffs the ends.
“Cardamom?”
“Cheap perfume.”
“I could smell you forever.”
“Palestine will be our forever.”
Sonia winces, thinking of the flute études burning on the other side of the wall.
She once believed every piece of sheet music was holy, that the pages filled with Italian words—con brio, andante, agitato, subito piano—were her cues for how to shape time with her voice. Even if Sonia had memorized Brahms lieder she would hold the sheet music in her hand and fix her eyes on its elegant code. She misses the nights she sang in a café, and longs for the moments after the applause when a stranger would approach her with words of praise.
If Billie Holiday sang Brahms she would be you.
“I asked you about the plan, Walter.”
“What?”
“Stop dreaming, schatzi. The currency of real life. Certificates and visas. We can’t live in your childhood bedroom forever, waiting for your father to pack his bags. I can’t breathe in here. His cigars, the burning—”
“Think of us standing on the deck of the boat,” says Walter.
Sonia points to her wrist. “When?”
“Two weeks.”
“Promise?”
He holds up two fingers and presses them against her lips.
“Yes.”
“Thank God,” says Sonia. “The minute we arrive, let’s buy your father new music.”
Walter tries to imagine his father crossing an arid desert in Palestine with a folio of études under his arm, but he can’t picture him anywhere except this apartment, or laying flowers at his wife’s grave, or delivering lectures at the university, speaking the only language he knows. No new verb forms lie ahead for Josef Westhaus; no tender pangs of a life marked by change.
“And if he won’t come?” asks Walter. “I can’t leave him behind.”
Sonia springs up and sits on her heels. “We will convince him! There will be orchestras and cafés and Arabs selling rugs so we can buy him one that doesn’t stink of old smoke. He will be happy again; he will remarry! And he will find new students, even if he has to stand before them wearing short sleeves for the first time in his life.”
“And us? What will we do over there?”
“I’ll sing lieder in the cafés.”
Walter’s friends talk about this haven called Palestine but he can only imagine the words from the Bible he learned in poetry classes. Sonia’s café would be built from a pile of stones, a dish of gold, and a measure of barley.
“You won’t be singing lieder over there.”
“But everyone loves Brahms.”
Walter maps her gaze. He can tell when her thoughts careen into a private fog, and he waits until she finds her way back.
“What are you remembering?”
“Nothing important.” She shakes out her hair, piles it on top of her head and lets it down again.
“I’ll sing a new kind of lieder then. I’ll set the Song of Songs to music and we’ll play it at our wedding.”
“And me? What will I do?”
“You will sketch Mediterranean beauties and become a professor of world religions. It’s your destiny! How many men your age see their work translated into English and then published in a journal?”
“A silly joke. I only wrote that paper to impress you.”
“My seducer. ‘The words of the texts echo in the lives of the people who read them.’ If I had told you I was in love with the Book of Lamentations and not the Song of Songs would you have written a paper on that?”
“I’m glad you didn’t try me,” says Walter.
“I wouldn’t have. I’m not one for sorrow.”
“Then you were born into the wrong time.”
Sonia sits up and straddles her legs around his. “A few more weeks and life with you will be beautiful.”
Walter runs his hands through her hair.
“I could swear it’s cardamom.” He inhales. “One day I will rub spices on your belly.”
“And?”
“We will pluck dates from our own trees—”
“And—”
“Stand in a wadi—”
“And—”
“With our children—”
Sonia wraps her palm around Walter’s wrist, shaping her hand into a bracelet. “We will make the beautiful possible.” She closes her eyes and shudders.
“Are you okay?”
“Not really,” she says. “Toss me a line, please.”
“Tagore or Heine?”
“Oh, Tagore. And say it slowly.”
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
“Now Whitman.”
“The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.”
“You and your faithless American poet! How can you believe that?”
“Poetry is my god, Sonia. My one and only.”
“When I read your paper on the Song of Songs, I honestly thought you were religious in some way.”
“The Song is a poem. Nothing more. Are you disappointed?”
“You never disappoint.”
“Two weeks. All of us. I promise,” he says.
“One more line and maybe I can trust you.”
“Tagore? Whitman?”
She smiles. “Ours. The Song.”
“His belly is an ivory tablet on a sapphire stone.”
“Sounds like you. Only they didn’t have spritzkuchen back then. You, schatzi, have an excuse for your untableted belly.”
She rubs her cheek along Walter’s chest, draws circles around his torso.
“Promise we’ll go to Palestine?”
“Promise,” he says.
The fire has gone out. The cackling from the living room has stopped, along with the thrum of the typewriter keys. Walter pulls the blanket over their shoulders, and Sonia closes her eyes, listening to Josef warm up with a minor scale, then an arpeggio, then the first movement of the Bach Flute Sonata, unaccompanied.
“Your father sounds good today. Softer. I feel as if I’m underwater.”
Walter slithers to the edge of the bed. “Need anything from the kitchen?”
“We finished the crackers last night,” she says. “Every crumb.”
“I’ll look.”
“No, Walter. Let me. I’ll go crazy if I spend another minute inside this love cave.”
“Check for vodka too. There may be a drop left.”
She reaches for a slip and laughs. “Will your father faint from the sight of me?”
“Possibly.” Walter passes Sonia his sweater. She wraps it around her shoulders, twirls, and winks.
Her face will never age, he thinks. One day we will both be old and I will brush her long white hair and remember her standing before me like this, half-dressed, fully ripe, smelling like cardamom.
“Better, yes?”
“When you come back, stay just as you are so I can sketch you.”
She winks again.
The bedroom door closes behind her and Walter reaches for his pad and charcoal. He gazes at a blank piece of paper and imagines Sonia in the center of it, his sweater wrapped around her breasts, a glass in her hand. This time he will sketch with focus, committing this moment with her to a kind of permanence. Everything is backwards, he thinks. His world is ending and he and Sonia stand on the edge of a new story to be lived in a new land. Sonia’s love will keep him safe and when she gets lost in the tangle of her thoughts he will recite lines of poetry, surround her with words of comfort.
“Scheiss!” yells Josef.
Parading herself in a slip was a mistake, thinks Walter. Forget the crackers! Come back! Glass breaks, shatters, the front door pops, the music stops, Josef screams. From the bed, Walter smells gunmetal and grime, stench from another world. An icy shrill passes from Sonia’s throat, then a shot rings out, then another, another. The flute crashes to the floor, two bodies fall. Walter reaches for a shirt—save them!—but then freezes and slips under the bed, lies facedown, his arms wrapped tightly around his head. Save them, you coward! Save them—
The bedroom door cracks open, that stench!
The profile of a man’s boot is close enough for him to touch, gleaming, black. A bloody footprint. Another pair of boots casts a shadow at the door. Walter flinches.
“Lass uns gehen!”
Hands press on the bed above him; a man sniffs the sheets like a crazed dog.
“Kardamom. Das fraülein—”
The boot pivots.
“Gehen!”
A sharp inhale; a groan.
“Gehen!”
The men gallop down the back stairs, a door flails on its hinge, a woman shouts in the street. Breaking glass, a gunshot, more glass.
The living room is silent; his father’s cigar is ash. The radiator hisses, stops, and hisses once more. Walter lies under his bed, facedown in his own vomit, shit oozing between his legs. He slithers on his belly, reaches for the bed frame, and stops himself. Sonia. His father. One more body left to fall. Too soon to get out of here alone; too late to save them. It should have been me, he thinks. It was meant for me. Walter pulls his arm close to his torso, his body a rolled-up rug.
He hears nothing, just the rasp of his breathing and the rodent sound of his teeth chewing off his thumbnail. Come back to me, Sonia. Forget the crackers. Forget the vodka. His tongue finds his lips and just before Walter fades out he tastes the last remains of cardamom, and there he finds her, climbing a mountain where spices grow, and she takes his hand and pulls him onto a slab of rock. The words echo in our lives now, just like you wrote in your paper, she says. And then Sonia lets go of his hand and runs onto the hills where hyssop grows alongside mint and she runs and runs and then she is gone.