Isabella’s eyes were lowered, the violin case on her lap. I couldn’t tell whether she was embarrassed by Hanni’s description, tired from the long night, or simply didn’t understand.
“When I woke up,” Hanni continued, “the Russian and the baby were gone. I was lying in my bed, covered by a clean blanket. Frau Wetzler was stroking my hair. She had arrived in time to deliver the afterbirth, but there had been no sign of either the baby or the soldier. I jumped out of bed, frantic, and ran down to the street. But you can imagine what it was like, the day the Russians liberated Berlin. I followed rumors, sightings, filed official reports in a British DP camp.
“My favorite half-belief was that my son had been traded by the Russian to a British soldier for a carton of Woodbines, and then adopted by a spinster professor of philosophy at Cambridge. Two years later, I slipped into England as a domestic in Leo’s house. On my first half-Wednesday, I rode the Underground to Liverpool Street and the train to Cambridge. I walked the mile and a half from the station to the philosophy faculty. I walked from college to college.
“I found the spinster professor’s rooms up a narrow staircase in Corpus Christi. Empty. No curtains, no cradle. It could have been Berlin. The porters told me she’d taken a post in the United States. No forwarding address.
“Leo found me, rescued me from the grim confusion of Addenbrookes Hospital, thanked the porters for their attention. Eventually Leo loved me. Eventually he proposed. His love gave me strength enough to doubt the rumor. Eventually I doubted the birth itself. Because, in our twenty-five years of marriage, longer even than yours, Holland, I was unable to conceive.
“Papa was dead—a knock on the door, a small sound, no time for surprise. There had been a body, a certificate, even a funeral of sorts. I visited his grave once with Frau Wetzler, the day before we were separated. He may have been the only travel agent to be buried among high-ranking Gestapo. He can’t have been the only Jew.
“I never went back. That last night, in the shadows of the stairwell on Iranische Strasse, he had given me a message. He had entrusted me with Zoltan and the Esau Letter. With one, I would continue our race, with the other I would continue our history. I had lost both. I had failed him as an agent, I had failed him as a daughter.”
“May second?” I asked Hanni.
“May second, yes, nineteen forty-five. If my son were alive, somewhere, he’d be forty-six years old.” My age to the day, although I know I was born in Surrey to enormous celebration. “And August second,” Hanni added.
“August second?”
“The day I lost Zoltan.” A private Granadan thought. The date of my private loss, an emptiness, as strong as any contraction, enough to make me shiver in the Spanish darkness of the early morning. Not enough to make me talk, to tell that story.
“Do you ever wonder,” I asked, “very early in the morning, alone and half-awake, whether there are choices we make, have made, that will come around again, and then again? Not whether time will repeat itself, but whether people, things, we have lost or turned against will present themselves to us again? Whether we will have that second chance, that third chance, be stronger, wiser, more capable?”
“There isn’t any way of looking at that film, is there?” Hanni pointed at my wheels. I had lost her.
“Which film?” I was stuck in that endless close-up, the face of the Russian soldier on Iranische Strasse. I had forgotten about my wheels, Sandor, Flamenco Halevy, The Lost Tribes.
“Did Sandor ever mention the war?”
“He avoided it, the question.” I would have liked Hanni to answer me. Someone. “Before he moved down to Mariposa, he was kept as a semi-indentured servant/semi-houseguest in a bougainvillea-draped cliffhouse on the Costa Brava. His semi-semi-mistress was something to Franco. It embarrassed him in many ways. He was reduced to playing Sarasate party pieces in an ornate gazebo just north of S’Agaró. The more calorific the rondo, the more cholesterol in the glissandi, the higher the tip. His great escape was to the south. I never pushed for further info. I wanted him to play for me. Assumed he’d been in Spain during the Civil War, avoided the question.” I’d been embarrassingly derelict on the Sandor shoot. I knew little more about the man than when I had started. I was after a single, live performance, a tape, for purely personal and, I suppose one might unkindly say, reiteratively pornographic reasons.
“So Sandor could be Zoltan!” Hanni’s eyes flashed. She screwed the top on her jar of kipferln and stood.
The thought had occurred to me. The ages matched, the virtuosity. Both Zoltan and Sandor were as tall as necessary. I had a momentary something of a something at the black-and-white still of Zoltan/Sandor making love to this eighteen/sixty-five-year-old woman in a boxcar in the south of Vichy/France.
I hooked up the Spinoza to the twenty-five-inch Mitsubishi in Sandor’s bedroom. Hanni sat at the foot of the four-poster. I opened a window as the tape began. Over the courtyard, over the far side of the villa, the grey, two-hour announcement of the onset of a new day was just clearing its throat at the horizon. The shadow of the beach was empty, a mile down and away.
An eternity of black silence on the screen, waiting for the image of Sandor. I fast-forwarded the tape. Nothing. I switched tapes. Flamenco Halevy, Conchita, the military man, me and the owner of the Teatro La Rábida, dancing, my God, dancing. Switch. Ivy’s guitar, Roger’s voice, Isabella’s face looking down at the tabletop of the Santa Maria. Switch. Three tapes. No Sandor. Had I failed to push Record, inadvertently erased the tape, been unwittingly zapped at Colón by a roving Beta-ray machine? I knew the answers were No, but what other explanation for a lost fortune?
“Slow down,” Hanni soothed from the foot of the bed. “Think. Where have you been? Where could you have left the tape? Dropped it? Has it been in your possession without interruption?”
“Stop being such a travel agent!” I snapped at her common sense.
Then I heard it. Heard, not saw—the screen still dark with the exposed, unenlightened, unforthcome tape. But the sound track—there were the first thick D minors of the Chaconne, regal, dignified, Sandor in caftan. We couldn’t see him, but the sound—
“That’s it,” Hanni said, and when I turned, the music had lifted her off the mattress to a point somewhere just below the ceiling. “Zoltan, Sandor, Zoltan!” I felt her hand feeling into mine, a soft chamois palm. We stood there, staring at the blackness of the screen, each of us seeing something different but undoubtedly the same musician, as chords turned into a line of semiquavers, each one a miracle of precision, yet the entire line an argument, a persuasion with the force of a full novel, fictional notes far more vivid than any dry dissertation. The crystal arpeggios, the crackle of the demisemis, the reprise, the cusp of the modulation into the major—I was holding the hand of a strange woman staring at a failed TV screen, but I was hot, damp, hotter and damper than in the Plaza de Toros two, than in Hampstead fourteen years before. I had soaked through my knickers—the sound even more penetrating and destructive than the night before, when Sandor had been only six warm and human feet in front of me. I was squeezing Hanni’s hand, shaking, I couldn’t help it, my calves buckling, slipping off my shoes, two hundred measures on the way to a Mach 3 orgasm, when the light through the window caught the tip of a silver bow down below, and my eyes rose from the blank screen, out to the courtyard.
She stood as she had behind the bulletproof glass at Colón, only this time I was above and the glass was air and proof against nothing. Isabella. Isabella, not Sandor, not Zoltan. Although, to be more truthful, it was Isabella and Sandor, the pupil having mimicked the teacher so well, not just the style, but the tone, the timbre, the attack, the vibrato, the aura of the musician. A thirteen-year-old girl with a gift of music and ventriloquism so perfect that we had stood fifteen minutes in front of an empty TV screen in the belief that ghosts could play Bach. Hanni, at her lower height, couldn’t see. I didn’t want to make a move that might interrupt the music, that might distract her, that might break Isabella’s magic.
All the same, I was distracted. There are certain taboos that even I tremble at breaking. And I trembled on the brink of trembling. How to turn the heat from my groin to my chest, since, Isabella, I loved you already?
As the Chaconne drew to its final reprise, D minor again, full and strong, Hanni’s grip on my hand loosened. She followed my eye and took the step to the window. What power, what strength that girl had, a fortissimo so strong, the last chord as fierce and as loud as the explosion—it could have been the same chord, the same sequence of notes—that destroyed the Santa María.
Isabella looked up. Her bow arm relaxed, then the fiddle, with the smoothness of a sweep-second hand. Her head tossed once, a shiver, the hair back over the shoulder. She smiled. I felt such an emptiness that it was only Hanni’s arm pointing, her eyes, unbelieving, threatening to ignite the courtyard, that pulled me up from drowning. I followed the direction of her arm down to Isabella’s violin case. There, held tight by the pressure of two auxiliary bows, was a packet of papers, tied in a hair ribbon, faded, frayed, but, even from our height, unmistakably purple.
“Esau.”
Tell me a story.