CHAPTER

19

“This deserves celebrating,” Aviva said when she saw me on the train, and began rummaging in her purse again until she pulled out a flask. She sent Al-Cerraz to the dining car to fetch three teacups while I basked in her festive mood. When he returned, she poured a healthy dram of amber liquid into each and held hers aloft. “To Feliu’s first spontaneous act!”

I hesitated, stung by the caustic edge to her tone, which undermined the brief elation I’d felt at her evident pleasure upon seeing me. After a few minutes, Al-Cerraz said, “I’ll finish that if you don’t.” With effort, I drained the cup, feeling the burning in my throat turn to warmth.

“It’s not my first spontaneous act, by the way.” I patted my chest.

This only made Aviva laugh. She dribbled more liquid into our cups and toasted me: “To Feliu’s second spontaneous act!”

When Al-Cerraz set down his empty cup and looked my way, I drank again, quickly.

“I had a dog like that, when I was a kid,” he said. “A skinny mutt. Almost hairless. His ribs stuck out so far that if you rubbed a wooden spoon against his side, you got a washboard sound. He was a living instrument. We were terrible to him.”

Aviva was fumbling through her purse again, not listening.

Al-Cerraz looked directly at me, “He wouldn’t finish the food in his bowl, but if you went near it, if you shook the bowl”—here he grabbed my arm playfully—“then he’d nod his head as if he were waking up out of a daze. He’d start growling at us. Then he’d start eating. He seemed not to know he was hungry unless he thought you were hungry.”

Aviva pushed to her feet unsteadily. “That’s terrible, teasing a sweet dog.”

We watched her struggle with the compartment latch and then catch her low heel on the threshold of the doorway. She freed it, regained her balance, and stepped into the hallway, en route to the ladies’ room.

Al-Cerraz reached out a hand to pull the door shut again. He leaned toward me, holding my attention with a meaningful look. “The silly dog didn’t know he was hungry unless he thought you were.”

“Yes, you said that.”

“He was kind of a runt. I guess he was lucky we’d taken him in because he didn’t have much of a survivor’s instinct. We had to teach him to fight for what he wanted.”

I lifted Aviva’s flask off the seat where she’d left it, shook it, and confirmed, gratefully, that it was empty. “You seem to think this anecdote is an excellent metaphor for something. But I’m a little more interested in our friend’s welfare. For someone who was eager to start her new job in Berlin, she seems nervous.”

He clenched his eyes shut, exasperated, but he didn’t pursue his topic. “Well, a new job can make a person nervous.”

We stared out the train windows, waiting for Aviva to return. “There is someone waiting for her in Germany,” I said after a while. “Someone besides Weill and the school-opera people.”

“Yes?” I had his full attention now.

“There must be a good reason why she turned back from America, a reason she’s never told us completely.”

“Completely?”

“Something she doesn’t want to talk about.”

“I think you might be right,” he said slowly.

“We shouldn’t be waiting for some tabloid magazine to tell us all her secrets.”

“Right again.”

“So why haven’t you asked her? You’re not afraid to say anything.”

“Because she trusts you, Feliu.”

I was about to protest, but he interrupted. “She adores me. But my dearest, thick-skulled partner, she trusts you. Find out who she is and what she’s hiding, before we lose her again.”

 

I’d traveled to Berlin a number of times in the last decade. Even as the Great War receded into history, the city retained its ravaged appearance. Postwar development meant more smokestacks and blocky tenements, iron railings and chain-link fences, sober flat-topped buildings meant to inspire city dwellers toward modernity. When I called it ugly, Aviva disagreed. She said she found it refreshing to be somewhere so clearly on the way to becoming something else.

“But what is it becoming?” I asked, looking out the window at the gray city outskirts.

Aviva had been told to come to the apartment of a woman named Frau Zemmler, who was involved with the school-opera project. Al-Cerraz and I checked into a guesthouse on a residential street in the Bayerische Viertel, or Bavarian Quarter. We agreed to rendezvous the next day at the theater where Aviva would be meeting Weill, Brecht, and their young students.

When we showed up late the next morning, the rehearsal was already under way. A man with round wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a polka-dotted tie—that would be Weill—sat in the front row. He called out lines and directions toward the stage, where a dozen adolescent musicians stood or sat, most of them in shorts or knee-high skirts and identical white school blouses, instruments on their laps, thin legs swinging, restless hands scratching scalps or twisting braids around fingers.

Three seats down from Weill, Aviva studied the score in her hands, pointing out a line to Bertolt Brecht, instantly recognizable in his slouchy leather jacket.

Aviva was the first violinist and concertmaster, and I understood why Weill had chosen her for that position. She was as talented as any young touring soloist, but without a soloist’s pretensions. She would inspire the other musicians and set a high standard without becoming a prima donna. She was only a few years older than the youngest company musician, but could discuss everything from orchestration to adolescent discipline with Brecht, Weill, and Frau Zemmler, the brown-suited chaperone in charge of feeding and tending the troupe.

Aviva saw us enter the theater and lifted a hand to indicate Weill, who turned and nodded curtly. Brecht touched his hatless forehead, taking advantage of the gesture to scratch discreetly at the edge of his crew cut. Visitors to the theater made them nervous. The Brown Shirts had made a mess of their last collaboration, Mahoganny, at its premiere in Leipzig, and again the previous month, when Party members in the opening night audience of a new production at the Frankfurt Opera made so much noise that one could barely hear the singers onstage. The Nazis called all of Weill’s work “degenerate,” but they hadn’t yet made a move to disrupt Der Jasager.

I took a seat a few rows behind them. Al-Cerraz scuttled to the side of the stage and returned with a score and a program explaining the opera.

The program informed us that Der Jasager was based on the fourteenth-century Japanese Noh play, Taniko. In Brecht’s version, a group of students undertakes a perilous mountain trek in order to visit an esteemed scholar. A younger student begs to go with them, in order to obtain medicine for his sick mother. The teacher-guide acquiesces, but not before warning the boy of an ancient custom: Anyone who can’t keep up—who endangers the group by faltering—must be sacrificed.

Al-Cerraz snorted under his breath. “Am I reading this correctly?” He pointed to a line in the program.

I translated for him, from German into Spanish. “Yes—‘hurled into the valley.’ Now, please.”

He whispered, a touch too loudly: “Where are the costumes? I hope they have some marvelous Japanese costumes.”

“I don’t see any.”

“At least makeup. What do you call that white-faced look? Geishas—that would spice things up.”

“Tranquilo, por favor.”

“Sorry.”

To one side of the stage, some hastily written signs leaned against the wall. One of them read, simply: “Mountain.”

He stage-whispered again, “These Berliners are very literal.”

“I imagine they’ll add set design later.”

“I hope so. Take away the costumes and the sets from most operas, and all you have left is screaming.”

“No wonder you had so much trouble writing Don Quixote,” I whispered back. “You don’t even like opera.”

I jabbed at the program, and continued reading. The students proceed up the mountain. The younger boy becomes ill. The opera—only slightly more than half an hour long—ends with the boy consenting to the ancient custom and sacrificing himself for the societal good. He is Der Jasager, the Yea-sayer, and the school audiences would be prompted, as the theater curtain closed, to reflect and discuss: Should he have said yes?

Al-Cerraz followed my finger to the end of the description. He snorted again, loud enough that Brecht turned and glowered at us over his shoulder.

Three more children entered the stage, wearing signs around their necks. The signs read: “Boy.” “Mother.” “Teacher.” Al-Cerraz burst out laughing.

Aviva appeared suddenly next to us. She reached a hand toward Al-Cerraz, touched his neck, and gave him a sly, warning smile. “Quiet, please. We are rehearsing.”

The smile she directed at me was less warm and far less secure. “Please don’t make any judgments until you’ve heard and seen the whole thing. Tell me you won’t.”

“Of course I won’t.” I scowled at Al-Cerraz. He had been the one laughing, not me. Why did she always expect me to judge her harshly?

The musicians played well for a school ensemble, and the orchestration provided no cause for snickering. I knew little about Weill’s work, but this was spare and haunting, a Germanic interpretation of lyrical Orientalism. I detected nothing trite in it, nothing overblown or kitschy.

Al-Cerraz wasn’t equally impressed. From the corner of my eye, I could see his head shaking, subtly at first, and then with vigor, animated by barely suppressed critical urges. I watched him puzzling over the roundlike lyrics from the score, overlapping strains of a simple sentiment: “It is important to know when to be in agreement. Many say yes, and there is no agreement. There are many who are not asked, and many agree with what is wrong. Therefore: it is important to know when to be in agreement.”

He muttered into my neck. “Is this a speech, or is it a riddle? It isn’t a song, I’m sure of that.”

After they’d made it through the work, with much pausing for direction from Weill, he invited the students to take seats on the stage’s lip and accepted a cigar from Brecht. “Your reactions, please?”

Silence.

Weill smiled and tilted his head back, peering through the bottom half of his glasses. “Don’t be shy. Speak up.”

I felt Al-Cerraz move forward in his chair, balancing on its padded edge. I put a steadying hand on his leg and whispered, “Not you.”

Finally one of the students spoke. I recognized him as the alto sax player. “The story, sir. It’s horrible,” he said, querulous voice breaking.

Another thin young voice added, “Yes, murderous!”

Brecht, smiling, puffed on his stubby cigar and Weill nodded with satisfaction, tapping his pen against the notebook in his lap. They leaned their heads together for a minute.

A student clarinetist cleared his throat and called out from the stage, “I think the boy’s suicide was an honorable action, actually—I mean, if you’d like another opinion, sir.”

Weill looked up. Brecht exhaled and slitted his eyes against the cloud of smoke. There was an awkward silence, until Brecht spoke: “Good. Very good. Just because this is a didactic work doesn’t mean it’s propaganda, after all. There isn’t one correct reaction. A small number of audience members might misunderstand the theatrical intent, and find the Yea-sayer’s actions heroic. That’s fine. Thank you.”

The young baritone who had played the Teacher raised his hand. “Herr Brecht, please—if I may add a word. Personal sacrifice is sometimes necessary, particularly in these troubled times.”

“That’s your feeling, is it?” Brecht said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And by sacrifice, you mean the ultimate sacrifice? You think the boy was right to take his own life, simply because he couldn’t keep up with the others?”

“I think so, sir. That was the ancient custom, after all.”

Weill wrote in his notebook.

Al-Cerraz whispered to me, “I’ve heard that anything goes in Berlin—but I didn’t know it meant this. They’ve taken an ironic story and turned it into an idiotic one.”

Next the harmonium player added her public comment, along the same lines as the clarinetist, followed by two members of the chorus and the tall girl who had played the lute. The consensus swelled; even one of the violinists reneged on his label of “murderous” and joined the crowd in arguing that the opera’s main character had taken the moral high road and deserved our praise.

Brecht nervously worried the brushy edge of his hair with a flat palm. Weill sighed, “Perhaps we’ll have to make changes.”

Later, at a café, Aviva asked us, “It wasn’t an ideal first rehearsal, was it?” She unpinned her hat, crushing it in one hand and leaving the top of her uncovered head a mass of curls.

“They played remarkably well,” I started to say. I reached out to smooth her hair but stopped as soon as she turned, my hand hovering for a moment before I tucked it underneath the small round table. Around us lay the refuse of a half-finished meal—dishes of eel in herb sauce, green beans, gherkins, and hard rolls.

Al-Cerraz, his breath foul with the smell of pickled herring, leaned hard into both of our faces. “That’s the problem when you use musical theater to send messages. It’s like that children’s game of telephone: It always comes out wrong by the time it reaches the far end of the room.”

“I don’t think the original was quite so simplistic,” Aviva said. “The Japanese version ended with the boy’s spiritual resurrection. Brecht took that out.”

Al-Cerraz grumbled, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

“He’s a Marxist. He took out religion. He left in all the parts where the mother worries about the boy’s food and clothes. It’s all about labor and capital now, don’t you see?”

Aviva said apologetically, “He took out a lot.” I pushed a plate toward her, but she ignored it, draining her glass instead. “His assistant, Elisabeth Hauptmann, talked to me at the rehearsal. She made her own German translation. Hers included a line where the boy’s sick mother tells her son . . .” Aviva faltered.

“Go ahead,” I said. “What did it say?”

She laughed at herself. “Never mind.”

“No. Go ahead. Just the general idea . . .”

She sat up straighter on her stool, steeling herself. “It said, ‘You were never out of my thoughts and out of my sight longer than it takes a dewdrop to evaporate.’”

Her eyes darkened and seemed to grow larger, trembling under the glassy lens of emotion. I looked around for a clean napkin to hand her.

But Al-Cerraz snorted, “Longer than it takes a dewdrop to evaporate? Dios mío. Between that and Brecht, you have your work cut out for you, my dear.”

 

We continued to talk long into the night about Der Jasager. Aviva gave Weill and Brecht credit. They had said at the rehearsal that they would keep working on the opera, altering it according to students’ suggestions. They would attempt to remove traces of martyrdom and to introduce complications that made the “ancient custom,” while no longer called such, more sensible and legitimate. They would try, above all, to make the boy’s forced suicide seem less savage, even while they wanted audiences to react to it with some degree of horror. That was the point, after all. They claimed they wanted audiences to think, but they were bothered that the majority of students might think the wrong thing, might agree to mindless “yea-saying” that only reinforced the authoritarian tendencies the opera’s creators were hoping to challenge.

Aviva explained, “Brecht’s already talked of writing a counter-play, a sort of parallel production—Der Neinsager—to make his original intentions more clear.”

Al-Cerraz sneered. “The Naysayer. The Yea-sayer.”

I asked, “What does Weill say?”

“He says the music should stand on its own. There is no need for any supplemental texts.”

Al-Cerraz raised his glass. “Hear, hear.”

“Besides, the music itself is antiauthoritarian,” Aviva said, raising her finger to the bartender as she spoke, evidently quoting from Weill again, if the false confidence in her tone was any indication. “A grim chorus; triumphant solo melodies. The audience should know to root for the individual.”

Al-Cerraz raised his eyebrows. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I wouldn’t count on the audience knowing whom to cheer for, based on what I saw today.”

I reached a hand toward Aviva’s wrist. “Are you sure you want another?”

She squirmed away from me, smiling across the room at the waiter approaching us, a towel over his forearm, a stoppered bottle in his hands.

“Mineralwasser, bitte,” I suggested with a nod in all directions, but the suggestion made little impact; Aviva ordered her own glass of likor instead.

Al-Cerraz said, “Can you imagine Beethoven saying, ‘Listen to this measure. This dotted rhythm here tells the workers they should meet at quarter-past nine to smash all the machines’? Nonsense. Der Jasager, Der Neinsager—it will not stand the test of time.”

Aviva downed her freshened glass and set it down. “Anyway, I’m here. That’s all that matters, really.”

 

When the hotel bar closed, we hired a cab and escorted Aviva back to Frau Zemmler’s house, then walked back to the guesthouse by ourselves. I asked Al-Cerraz, “Didn’t you see, at the bar?”

“What?”

“She got teary about that line from the opera.”

“Not our stoic girl.” But then he reconsidered. “Something about dewdrops.”

“Eso es. That’s what the mother tells her son. She thinks about him every minute. That’s how Aviva feels. She can’t forget him.”

“Who, Weill?”

“No.”

“Brecht?”

“No!”

“Frau Zemmler? I’ve heard some strange things about these German women, I’ll admit. They don’t follow the rules our Spanish women follow. At some of these cabarets—”

I slapped him hard on the back, torn between aggravation and gratitude for his clowning.

“No. I am saying that Aviva misses her baby.”

“Her baby,” he repeated, stopping dead in his tracks, all playfulness extinguished. Without turning, I could feel the slump of his shoulders, his eyelids growing heavy with disappointment.

That night, I finally told him what I knew, what Aviva had told me at the harbor café, about her music teacher and Paganini’s grave, and being left at the convent, pregnant. He was astounded by the story, but even more astounded that I hadn’t revealed it to him earlier.

“The baby was born? It lived?”

“I assume so.”

“Where is it, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does she?”

“The way she put it . . .”

“And then? And then?” he kept saying, incredulous that I hadn’t pressed to know what happened later. “It couldn’t be any more personal than what she’d already told you. Good Lord, Feliu—you’re an ass.”

“I was worried about her feelings,” I said.

“You were worried about your feelings. You don’t want any complications. You like playing the priestly role—Father Confessor—someone whispering into your prim, sexless ear, as long as what they say doesn’t require you to take action.”

“I’m hardly a religious man—”

“I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about authority—the kind that likes to keep everything how it is and everyone in their place.”

“That just isn’t true.”

“It’s the last thing I’d expect from someone with your—leanings.” He stopped and ran his hands through his hair. “Do you remember that ‘Mysterious Woman’ article? There will be more like that one. We’d better know more about Aviva than what some malicious journalist has to say.”

 

The next morning, I knocked on Al-Cerraz’s door and got no answer. I went to the rehearsal hall, but Aviva hadn’t shown up for work. I sat in the back row of the hall, sweating in my overcoat as I listened to the young choristers’ falsetto, more annoying with every refrain: It is important to know when to be in agreement. Many say yes, and there is no agreement.

After an hour, Aviva hurried in, hair disheveled, a run up the back of one stocking. She winced as she passed quickly by me, face half-hidden in her coat collar, but I caught the mascara smears under her eyes. Weill’s assistant approached, took Aviva’s coat and led her backstage. When she emerged, her face was clean but redder, fiercely scrubbed.

For another hour I waited, my throat tight. When the rehearsal ended, Aviva took her time in apologizing to Weill, then made her way slowly to where I sat, in the shadowy rear.

“Justo spent the night,” she said, refusing to look directly at me. My worst fears were confirmed. In one night of swift and decisive passion, Al-Cerraz had surmounted my months of hesitation. Seeing my expression, Aviva said, “It isn’t what you think, Feliu. We argued.” She began to sob, the tears dripping from her red nose into the fur of her coat collar. “Don’t be angry with me, too.”

I cleared my throat, struggling for composure. “Why was he angry?” To my own throbbing ears, my voice sounded aged and strained, as if I hadn’t spoken for days, as if I’d lived alone for years.

“Because I wouldn’t tell him,” she said, and leaned into me, her wet cheek against my own, the tips of her collar soft against my eyes. The embrace provided the perfect blind for my sudden burst of relief.

“He already knows about your teacher, and the pregnancy. I told him.”

“That became clear,” she said sharply, then softened again. “But there is more, and it’s not his business.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“He’ll want to advise me, and I can’t bear advice. I can’t bear anyone’s questions. I have one idea, but it’s mine, and it’s all I have. If he laughed it away, I think I’d fall apart.”

“Of course.”

She pushed away, rubbing her face with the back of one hand. “Justo thinks that one yes means a yes to everything.”

I felt the tightness take hold again, the hollow ache of fading relief.

“He’s used to getting everything he wants—you know that.”

“Please,” I said, taking her hands in mine and squeezing. I saw her eyes grow wide as she struggled against the pressure of my hands. “Don’t tell me any more about what you and Justo did.”

“Well, at first—”

“I don’t want to hear this.” I swallowed hard as a pain gripped my chest.

“You’re overreacting. We didn’t do anything. We talked—he talked. Into his own glass, by the end. Are you listening to me?” she said, noticing the fist clenched over my heart.

I closed my eyes.

“You’re different, Feliu. You have principles. And you don’t push.”

“Promise me you and Justo aren’t lovers.”

She wrested her hands away from mine. “That’s all you care about?”

“At this moment, yes.”

She reached a hand up to smooth her hair. “Fine. I promise.”

My head sank to my chest. I felt as if I’d just played a double concert, the worst of my life.

 

I stayed in Berlin through the summer. Within days, a letter arrived from Al-Cerraz, postmarked from Málaga. He asked me to assure Aviva that he wasn’t angry, only worried. He looked forward to our tour the following summer. I replied immediately, reassuring him that nothing had changed with the trio, that we’d all be together again as planned. As long as he stayed away, I reasoned, whatever had passed between them could be forgotten.

In the meanwhile, I told him, I was enjoying an impromptu vacation. I planned to visit several museums, analyze some historical scores, improve my German—all things I did intend to do, as I wrote them. What I ultimately desired I wouldn’t have been able to explain, to him or to myself.

What another man might have accomplished with overt action, I tried to accomplish with the same dogged determination that had allowed me to master the cello. I relied on long hours and repetitive motions. I refrained from making physical advances upon Aviva, even when opportunities presented themselves, reasoning that I had earned her trust so far by leaving her alone. I waited and followed. I listened. And over the next month, Aviva told me her story. After rehearsals, we met at bars, and later, in my hotel room, where she would relax, sometimes in a chair in the corner, hands wrapped around a glass, head nodding as I played the Bach suites for her.

I stopped once, just as her glass was tipping into her lap. I reached forward to catch it, set it aside, and said, “Justo always hated when I practiced these on the train.”

She shook her head and wiped her chin, pretending to be wide awake. “He was envious.”

“Of what?”

“Of your single-minded devotion.”

 

Al-Cerraz’s letters continued to arrive frequently. How is Aviva?

She is fine, I wrote back.

How are you both?

She and I are fine, I wrote, and in later letters, more forcefully, We are fine. I did not mention her drinking, which seemed if anything to increase, here in the land that reminded her daily of her unfinished task. I was haunted by the thought that Al-Cerraz would have handled all this better—would have handled her better. I thought of my mother pressuring me to choose among my father’s gifts. “I don’t want to get it wrong,” I’d told her. “You will be wrong, sometimes,” she had said—and she was right. I had been wrong many times, always when it mattered most.

And yet I could not seem to change course. If anything, I became a caricature of myself, even to myself: cautious, stern, dogmatic, ascetic.

When Aviva drank, refilling her glass even before it was empty, I switched to water. When she came out of my bathroom wrapped in a towel, wet hair streaming down her pale back, I turned away and busied myself in a corner, sorting through letters. When she decided to talk, I listened, hands in my lap, face impassive. She did not want sympathy, I told myself. She did not want physical love.

I did not touch her even when she fell asleep on my bed, head on my lap, whispering in German to herself as she nodded off: “Es macht nichts.” It does not matter.

In the mornings when we left together, the guesthouse matron would turn a blind eye. We’d go to a café on the corner where I’d order her Katerfrühstück, a “hangover breakfast” of sausage and herring. But she rarely touched it, and I gained a few kilos before I learned to order only enough for one.

I heard most of Aviva’s stories not during the evenings, when she turned silently inward, but during these headache-plagued mornings-after, when she became more verbose and acidic, angry at herself and therefore willing to invite discovery. Repeatedly, she asked me not to judge her. But why did she tell her stories to me instead of Justo, except that she did want to be judged?

 

Judaism, Aviva told me, was not what set her apart at the convent near the Austrian border where her violin teacher had dumped her unceremoniously. Where she was raised, Jews and Catholics intermarried occasionally. In the convent, the sisters treated her with compassion and did not try to convert her.

As she soon discovered, pregnancy did not make her different, either. First she was shown to her shared room in the attic, where she set down her valise and the battered violin case that held her first instrument (vastly inferior to the borrowed Magione). Next she was taken to the main hall, where the other girls sat at long benches that paralleled even longer tables, doing piecework sewing. Sister Luigia clapped for the girls’ attention. In a disorderly wave, the girls pushed themselves up, some supporting themselves with hands on the table or hands on their lower backs, and Aviva saw that every last one of them was carrying a shameful burden, just like her. Only a few bothered to smile.

Sister Luigia was a music lover. After dinner, she asked Aviva to perform something on the violin for the other girls. Nausea had plagued Aviva for her first trimester and was only barely beginning to recede now. Smells still bothered her, and the convent was infused with them: mold, though the nuns and girls spent part of each day scrubbing the floors; garlic, which she had once loved, and sour, overcooked squash, which she did not; iodine and peroxide wafting in from the overcrowded infirmary. Aviva told the nun she felt too ill to play.

Many of the girls had come from well-off families in the south, but class meant less here than practical knowledge. The girls at the top of the pecking order were invariably among those farthest along in their pregnancies. They regaled and taunted the others after bedtime, as they lay in darkened attic rows, with the knowledge gained by their greater experience: how it felt to be so far along that the baby kicked your liver and forced the air from your lungs; how one could distinguish false contractions from real. A select few served as helpers in the infirmary. They alone knew what happened during labor and in the first few days following childbirth. Aviva didn’t want to hear about it or think about it.

Sister Luigia again asked her to play the violin, a week later. And again a week after that. “I see,” the nun said, in a quiet moment alone. “Humility is a virtue.”

“I’m not humble, Sister,” Aviva said.

“Then play for us.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean, you won’t.”

“No, Sister. That’s not what I mean.”

A month had passed since she’d last played—the longest she’d gone without playing since she’d first picked up the instrument. By now everything about her felt different. Her hair was thicker, dryer and less curly, her fingers too fat to wear the simple ring her mother had left her. Veins sprang up on the back of her calves. The hair on her forearms darkened, but not nearly so much as the alarming stripe of dark skin that extended from her navel toward her pelvis, like an arrow from God, pointing to the place where all the trouble had begun. While some of the girls whispered clandestinely about their changing bodies, Aviva was sure that none of them had a stripe like hers; perhaps it was Paganini’s mark on her. Each night, she faced the wall while undressing, to conceal it. It was easy to believe she would never be herself again. Nothing felt right, nothing mattered.

She wasn’t depressed to the point of complete inaction. She ate a fair amount: pasta and soup and root vegetables, as mindless as a grazing cow. At the nuns’ request, she sewed and washed floors; cleaned, dried, and ground herbs; scrubbed potatoes. She rarely talked, because there was nothing to talk about. One night, the girl who slept in the bed next to her asked in a whisper after lights out what Aviva would name her baby, but Aviva could hardly think what to say. The nuns would decide the babies’ names, just as they would arrange the adoptions. She pretended to be asleep.

Each day, the nuns granted the girls free time to read magazines, stroll the vegetable garden, pray, or nap. Aviva didn’t care what she did, as long as she could do it alone. All the other girls who were at her stage—five or more months along—had been talking about the first quickening they’d felt. One girl likened it to bubbles popping just under the skin’s surface. Another said it felt longer and more continuous, like a slithering snake. Aviva hadn’t felt anything. The other girls knew, she was certain; it gave her an aura of contagious bad luck. Even though no girl would be allowed to keep her baby, none of them wanted to lose it to death—not at this advanced stage, anyway.

Two more weeks passed. A nun examined her without comment. Now she was entering her third trimester, still growing, but without any sign of movement inside. Perhaps her baby was dead. The nausea had long since passed, but a sourness remained, the metallic taste of sorrow. Two new girls, each in their first trimester, came to the home, and Aviva joined them in scrambling up the convent wall to view the hills beyond—a tricky task, with bellies pressing against the stone wall. They returned with scratched legs and arms, blackened elbows and knees, and Sister Luigia punished them each with a day’s solitary confinement. What had they been thinking? Did they realize what might have happened if they had fallen?

As new girls entered, others graduated. A bossy redhead from Firenze had spent her last month reveling in her superior girth and know-it-all status, until the evening her contractions started. They began at lunch, continued through free time and afternoon chores and vespers. Even from the chapel, all the girls could hear her moaning in the infirmary next door. The nuns attempted to keep straight faces, but all the girls’ eyes were wide, listening to the moans escalate into screams—even profane curses—to which some responded by crossing themselves and others by covering their mouths, to stifle panicky giggles.

Aviva didn’t feel so well herself. Listening to the screaming, her pulse beat faster, and a deep pain rippled across her abdomen. During free time she began to think it was her time, too, even if the nuns had said it wouldn’t happen for two months more. She rocked back and forth with the pain until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Then she walked toward the screams and moans to the infirmary. Rounding the corner, she saw red and purple, two nuns holding down the girl’s arms, her open legs, silver bowls glinting everywhere like some awful blood sacrifice.

Despite the pain, she managed to climb the stairs to the attic bedroom faster than she’d ever climbed them before. In the room, she took out her violin without thinking, an automatic motion practiced thousands of times. In the infirmary, her ears had flooded with white static, and she fingered several measures without hearing the sour din she was producing. Suddenly the white curtain of noise parted and she realized she hadn’t tuned the neglected thing; it sounded wretched. She twisted a tuning peg, heard the wood of the neck groan in protest, and then the pop of the A string. She fumbled through the case and realized she’d brought no extra strings. Useless. Then she would play without the A string. The second string went the way of the first. She laughed out loud for the first time in recent memory, and mouthed a message to Paganini himself: I know this is the trick you loved best. But I can’t play an entire piece on one string. Leave me two at least. The last two held: E and G.

Her violin teacher had encouraged her to stand with heels touching and toes apart, like a ballerina in first position, but she ignored that now and spread her swollen feet shoulder-wide, planted at an ungainly right angle. She rocked side to side as she played, feeling the weight of the baby nestling deep down into her pelvic bones. Her violin wasn’t louder than the screams still issuing from the infirmary below, but it was a welcome distraction, a point of focus. At some point, the girl downstairs stopped, but Aviva kept playing—even an hour later, when the nun’s handbell rang, calling all the girls together to share with them the bad news. The girl from Firenze was well enough, but her baby had died, and though no one had wanted it, every girl felt death’s hand brushing too close for comfort.

Aviva felt no guilt in not rushing to join them then, or at the ensuing chapel service; there would always be bad news, there was no hurry. For now, she felt stuck to the floor—not glued but pierced—as if an iron shaft had descended through her pelvic bone, numbing the pain there and anchoring her to the floor, easing her need to rock. During a Vivaldi sonata, when she had played for perhaps two continuous hours, she felt the first stirrings of the baby inside her. Not deep in her pelvic bones, but higher up, just under her right ribs. Looking down, she saw the fabric of her jumper move, an elbow or knee pushing against the surface, followed by a deeper, indefinable gaseous shift, smooth and yet unexpected, like an ice cube rolling in a glass. “Vivaldi woke you up, not Paganini,” she whispered. “I’m glad.”

From that moment forth, she played every day. One girl complained that Aviva’s use of the attic during free time infringed on others’ rights to nap, but several other girls stepped forward to say they liked the music, and Sister Luigia allowed it to continue, even climbing the stairs to listen on occasion. Another nun brought her new strings after a trip to town. The strings were appreciated, but the praise meant nothing to Aviva; she would have preferred to play alone. Or not really alone, because she knew now for whom she was playing. Her baby never failed to move when she played—a percussive pummel, a sudden stretch that took her breath away, a slippery shift that gave it back.

One night two weeks before Aviva was due, the girl in the next bed whispered to her again. “I’m going to name mine,” she said. “I will insist on it.”

“Against the rules,” Aviva yawned.

“I have a boy’s name chosen and a girl’s name, though I’m sure it’s a girl. I won’t push unless they say they’ll agree to use it on the forms. The sisters will agree.”

“Won’t push?” Aviva laughed into her pillow. “You’ll be dying to push. It’s like going to the bathroom; that’s what Elena said.”

“That’s disgusting,” said the girl, and rolled away.

But she did not sleep, and neither did Aviva. A shutter was drawn over the attic’s only window, but she could see the bright glow of a moon beyond the slats, until the moon had moved and the slats gradually darkened. Aviva whispered across the room, “Why do you want to name it? You’ll never see it again.”

“Maybe in a few years, maybe later, when I’m married and have a family, and I’ll be shopping for a hat somewhere, and a beautiful young girl will enter the shop with her nanny . . .”

Unlikely, Aviva thought, but she had asked.

“. . . and I’ll recognize the shape of her eyes, or her nose,” the girl continued. “I’ll pretend not to know her but I’ll ask her to tell me her name. They’ll place her only among good people—that’s what the sisters have promised. And if I get along with her mother, I might ask her to tea.”

From across the darkened aisle, a voice shushed them both.

“But what if the new mother decides to change her name? Parents can do that.”

The girl pulled her sheets to her chin and answered with exasperation, “I’ll choose a good name. It will fit her, and they won’t change it.”

“But how do you know it will fit your baby if you’ve never seen her?”

More shushing, aggrieved now.

The girl’s insistence dismayed Aviva; it made her feel as if she’d spent no time considering the future. Certainly, she’d felt she had no future just a few months ago; but now that she was nearing pregnancy’s end, the baby felt disturbingly real. When it nestled its hard round head against her abdomen, she could place a hand there, and it was almost the same as rubbing a fully developed baby’s head; she could almost feel the fine hair, the soft skin, almost smell it. She longed to watch her baby’s eyes open. She longed to see the small clenched fists that had been playing dotted rhythms against her lungs.

The nuns didn’t allow the girls to nurse their babies. Following birth, mother and child were separated. Some preselected babies were delivered directly to wet nurses hired by prospective parents, upper-class couples who concealed all signs that the babies had not been born to them. Other babies were moved to a second home, where they were raised through early infancy and adopted out in less-predictable fashion. All the girls had agreed, upon entering the convent, not to attempt any contact with their children.

But how not to forget, how to forge a bond, leaving open the possibility of later breaking that agreement—that was the question. A name was nothing, the first thing another person could take away. She would have to give her baby something more lasting.

Aviva’s family had changed its surname once, attempting to assimilate into the region where her parents had settled. She had been told her great-grandmother’s maiden name, but couldn’t recall it. She had never asked her great-grandfather’s trade. The nuns’ rules aside, her sense of family was foggy, eroded by her parents’ early deaths, dislocation, simple forgetting.

And yet consider how lovingly her music teacher, scoundrel that he was, had tended Paganini’s grave. Consider what she herself knew of Vivaldi, eight generations removed from her own life. Aviva’s memory of her own mother was a still portrait—the shape of a woman standing, hands on hips, in an open doorway. But Vivaldi was a living presence to her, a life that continued past that door, with whom she could spend a day, a season, a year. Playing the violin part of Le Quattro Stagioni, Aviva could sit on a rain-drenched hillside next to him, or walk in the paths of goatherds and laugh upon finding them asleep beneath a massive tree, their light snores accompanied by the buzz of sun-drunk flies. Those who loved his music need never be alone. And so she played the same measures again and again for her unborn child in those final two weeks, standing for hours until she thought her pelvic bones would split under the deepening weight.

 

The baby was taken away, but not adopted out immediately. Three months later, when Aviva moved away from the convent, she knew only that it had been a boy, and that the nuns had listed his religion on the form. She hadn’t thought they’d do that; surely it lowered his chances of being placed into a good home.

She tried to put the idea of him behind her. She moved south to Bologna and spent two years studying violin and piano with a Madame Borghese, who also arranged a place for Aviva with a local family, in exchange for occasional help with their four children.

As her eighteenth birthday approached, her career prospects improved. Several people seemed to think she’d make an ideal musical nanny—thus, the short interview with Mussolini. But Aviva was not interested in tending others’ children as a lifelong pursuit, and Madame Borghese had higher hopes for her as well. Aviva spent a season performing solo recitals and began to garner favorable publicity, publicity that might increase, Madame Borghese implored, if only Aviva would dress better, cultivate more eye contact with the audience, narrow her stance slightly, and so on, listing the recommendations that Al-Cerraz would echo in a year or so.

At an intermission during one of these recitals, in Padova, Aviva spotted Sister Luigia in the audience. To her surprise, she was happy to see the music-loving nun.

“When we last knew one another, you would not accept requests,” Sister Luigia said. “Play one for me now.”

“The program is already established,” Aviva said, confused.

“As an encore, then. I will wait.”

Aviva leaned closer and said, “The encore is established, too. Madame leaves nothing to chance.”

“You can’t allow yourself to be spontaneously inspired?”

“Madame doesn’t believe in spontaneity.” Aviva tried to smile. “Which is for the best. I am not consistently inspired.”

Sister Luigia frowned. “No requests for an old friend? Well, what can I do? Punch is no substitute, but I’d accept some at this moment.”

Aviva hesitated. Madame didn’t allow Aviva near the refreshments table, for fear of something—a ruined dress, or the temptation of marzipan, which might lead to sticky fingers or the temptation to imbibe, which might lead in turn to a full bladder at the wrong moment. But Madame, immersed in a discussion with a small circle of well-dressed women, had her back to the two of them.

When she returned with Sister Luigia’s punch, the nun did not immediately take it. Aviva stepped closer, and held the cup forward again. Only when they were toe to toe did Sister Luigia reach forward, wrap her hands around Aviva’s and say, “You play too well for this local audience. Madame must know it, too. Is there a reason you haven’t gone to Rome, or to Paris?”

Aviva nodded.

“You’re feeling bound to your past, aren’t you? You’re staying around in case you catch word that he finds no home.” Her grip tightened around Aviva’s. “He did find parents. Two and a half is old for that—no one wants a child who is old enough to remember, who can speak. Your child didn’t speak, actually—that was the problem, the appearance of a delay of some kind. But a very special Jewish gentleman came and took an instant liking to him.”

“Tell me more,” Aviva whispered, just as she saw over the nun’s shoulder Madame’s group breaking up, the accompanist entering the room.

“I said you played well—and you did, certamente, but I sensed hesitation. It was technically impressive, of course, but I remember how you played at the convent once you were willing to play—through the roof, like a bird! I thought I should say something. My intention was to help you to stop worrying, to free yourself—”

“What do you mean, he doesn’t speak?” Aviva interrupted.

“That’s not uncommon in a group home where children aren’t often spoken to. Dear, I’m upsetting you. I didn’t mean to. He’s a clever child. And with pretty hair—light and curly, like a cherub. Doctor—the Jewish gentleman—spent an afternoon with him. They went for a walk; they played the piano . . .”

“Played the piano?” Aviva saw Madame glancing around the room for her.

“There is a piano in the orphanage. The boy liked to pick out notes, or sit under the piano with his head against the wood. I’m not saying he’s a prodigy—nothing of the kind. But he has an affinity. He was hiding under the piano when the doctor and his wife first came to us. They might have overlooked him if the doctor hadn’t sat down for a moment, to try his own hand at the keyboard.”

Madame Borghese was at Aviva’s arm, awaiting an introduction.

“Sister—tell me where; at least name the province.”

Sister Luigia nodded her head in wordless acknowledgment of Madame. “I really cannot.”

“You cannot, or you will not?”

The nun recognized her own words returning to her. “Truthfully, I cannot. It’s unfamiliar to me.”

Madame dropped any pretense of politeness. She put an arm on Aviva’s shoulder and tried to turn her, forcibly.

“Unfamiliar? Is it that far away?”

“Gut and far,” she winked. “You need not concern yourself with it anymore.”

Gut, is that what she had really said? And far—not Austria, then, but Germany, perhaps one of the northern cities. A Jewish doctor who liked the piano. Upper class, musically inclined, living in a richly cultured, tolerant place where Jews were well assimilated. Better even than the region where she’d been raised. A homeland without limitations, the best that one could wish for her child. So she could be free now. She could live and travel as she pleased.

 

Why, then, with so many choices, did she end up six months later enrolled in the Magdeburg Music Conservatory, two hours west of Berlin? She spent long weekends exploring the surrounding towns, feeding birds in plazas, watching nursemaids pushing prams, observing schoolchildren lining up outside local bakeries. She spent money that was meant for musical scores and staff-ruled composition pads on train tickets and restaurant fare: a few sausages and many more beers. She found herself waking, in a daze, in roadside inns on Monday morning and thinking: music theory—missed again. That, in addition to the poor marks she received in the required Volkslied singing class, left her on probation at semester’s end. She had no intention of rehabilitating herself. It was easier to leave.

The Friday before she intended to inform her adviser, she performed in a student quartet. A small man with an impressively round, balding pate and large lips listened from the back of the room, his fingertips pressed against his left temple. It was Kurt Weill.

The next afternoon, when they happened to meet at a café, he asked what she had been thinking about as he’d watched her play. “A child,” she said, without elaborating. Her confession caught her by surprise; she hid her face behind a cup. But something about the answer pleased him. It reminded him of the work that was foremost in his mind that week, an opera for and about children.

Weill told her that he hadn’t had a rigorous musical education, either. His father was a cantor, and Weill himself had started composing songs at the age of sixteen, without the benefit of formal conservatory training. He did not ask her what her ethnic background was, but he seemed to know, and he made a cautious remark about feeling as uncomfortable among Zionists and zealots as he did among pompous, assimilated German Jews. When she asked him what kind of Judaism he did believe in, he said, “The simple kind: innocent belief.”

Weill got her hired on to play in the orchestra pit of a local production of his musical play, Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera. His career had exploded, and he had multiple projects boiling at all times—new compositions under way, others in rehearsal, or thriving in established runs. That year, Die Dreigroschenoper alone was performed in various cities over four thousand times. Weill was like a big puppy that hadn’t yet grown into its oversized feet, suddenly endowed with celebrity and access to every musician and conductor in Europe, still incredulous at his own success and the consideration, both positive and negative, that his work was attracting.

When the Magdeburg run ended, he discussed future opportunities with Aviva. She did not know why he took the time to offer her advice and to recommend her for auditions, all the while admonishing her that many of the jobs were technically and creatively beneath her. Among these was a position as an adult lead in the school opera he’d mentioned—repetitive, low-profile labor for anyone who had a chance at a solo or ensemble career, he warned. And a lot of time on the road—he intended to take Der Jasager to schools throughout the country.

She didn’t feel she deserved the attention, and in a lucid moment, she admitted that her decision to come to Germany from Italy had been rash. America would be a better place for her, she argued convincingly one night over too much schnapps. He seemed to agree. The next day, he sent a strongly worded telegram on her behalf to the New York Philharmonic. Within another week, she was headed across the Atlantic, but her resolve weakened during the voyage. On the day Al-Cerraz and I met her, she had decided to turn back. Always, she was counting in the back of her mind how old her son would be, in the event she ever did meet him: four that year, in 1929. Five years old now, in 1930. Not a baby anymore. Old enough for school.

 

No matter how Aviva spent her evenings, she always made it to rehearsals and performances the following day. But I witnessed the growing strain on her, which seemed to intensify in the fall, as Der Jasager finished its Berlin run. I was glad to leave the city—Babylon on the River Spree, as they called it then. Weill and Brecht had already detached themselves from the project. Soon Aviva and Frau Zemmler would head to a series of smaller cities and towns, to help rehearse the youth orchestras at each school, spending three or four days in each place before moving on.

One September weekend before Aviva left Berlin, I talked her into a final outing. We took the express train to Wannsee, a large inland lake southwest of the city. From the sandy beach, we watched small boats sail past each other. Hardy bathers frolicked and splashed in the cold lake, dancing between spirals and ribbons sketched by the wind. But not Aviva—I never even saw the suit she wore beneath a large black robe.

We rented a large wicker bathing chair and curled inside, out of the wind. I watched her tremble, the thinness of her forearms and wrists emphasized by the robe’s wide sleeves. The acrid scent of wet wicker will forever remind me of the specific and peculiar discomfort of trying to be merry in the wrong place, at the wrong season.

 

I had meant to leave Berlin in the fall, when Aviva did. Instead, I tagged along from Brandenburg to Leipzig, from Nürnburg to Stuttgart and on across Germany, a shadow figure carrying Aviva’s violin and my own cello, which I played in hotel rooms—never in public. I lurked behind coatracks, resisted introductions, ducked away from the impressed whispers of local music teachers who recognized my name. I helped set up music stands. I distributed programs. I turned away from cameras. I refused to sign autographs. No doubt people thought Aviva and I were lovers. And why wouldn’t we be? An attractive and talented young woman, a revered older man with a formidable reputation. Perhaps they saw the shadows under Aviva eyes and thought we had stayed up all night, reveling in decadence and depravity. That we had never kissed or embraced passionately was harder to explain.

After each school-opera performance, Aviva went from classroom to classroom, giving short instrumental demonstrations, allowing the youngest students to watch a violin string vibrate up close or handle a felt-covered hammer that had been removed from the inside of a piano. She watched the face of every child, studying this one’s response to the mention of a piano, that one’s reaction to the violin, especially when she played Vivaldi. She appraised noses and eyes, reached out a finger to pat a curl, quizzed children on their favorite animals and foods and—when a teacher was distracted—on their birthdays, each and every one.

She watched them while I watched her. I told myself I should return to Spain, but her intensity fueled my own. I pretended that her search was metaphorical: She felt guilty for abandoning a child and so had dedicated herself to educating all children. But watching her in the classroom day after day forced me, finally, to abandon my own delusion. She fully expected to find her son. Long after she tired of Der Jasager and students’ puzzled reactions to it—“Why did the boy kill himself?” “Couldn’t someone else have gone for the mother’s medicine?” “Why do we have to watch a Japanese play in the first place?”—she clung to the job because it allowed her to continue her search.

“I’ll find him,” she told me one night, nearly asleep, her head in my lap.

“There are tens of thousands of children.”

“I meet hundreds of them each week.”

“My brother once told me that my mother used to sing to us, when I was just a baby. But I don’t remember it.” Though even as I said it, an image formed in my mind: Mamá’s dark head, bowed over mine, singing just under her breath as I nodded off to sleep.

“I played for him every day,” Aviva said. “He heard Vivaldi before he tasted milk.”

There was no reasoning with her, so I simply watched and waited, as summer turned to fall, and fall to damp, cold winter. My hip throbbed. I knew the warm, dry climate of southern Spain would lessen the pain, but I could not leave her. Once, after a particularly bad night, I tried the morphine tonic Dr. Gindl had given me, back in Switzerland. It helped that day, and it allowed me to sleep that night, but I couldn’t take it again. It felt like giving in. Perhaps I was already slipping back to my former ways of thinking—observing Aviva on her futile quest, I no longer believed that pain was avoidable. I began to feel skeptical about the hopefulness I had allowed myself, began even to resent her for allowing me to think I could have a different kind of life, where music served a good purpose or none at all, beyond pleasure, and where friendship could grow into passion, in good time.

Al-Cerraz wrote to me from Spain: Is she doing all right? Has she tired of Weill’s silly opera?

I ignored the question and wrote nothing about what I saw daily in the schools, feeling that the only advantage I had over him was information and proximity. I was determined to help and protect her and did not appreciate being second-guessed.

He wrote again. Is she drinking heavily?

I wrote back, rattled by my own inadequacies and resentful at his insinuation: Not really. Not anymore. And that was true, as far as I knew, though she looked worse than ever—thin and sallow—and though she did slip away from me occasionally at night, to attend nightclubs with other young musicians from the troupe. I hated those nights most of all, waiting for her to get back, listening to her cough herself to sleep after too many hours in a smoke-filled cabaret.

I know Al-Cerraz wrote to her directly as well, but those letters disappeared into a violin case or a coat pocket as soon as they arrived, and they were not shared with me later.

Before some of the performances, Aviva would set her bobbed hair in curlers, but by winter she was doing it haphazardly, missing large pieces in the back, which hung down limply. She stopped taking care of her fingernails, which was a particular embarrassment—even the schoolchildren stared at them when she played. But I did not have Al-Cerraz’s eye for style or vanity, or his forthrightness, and I was thankful he was not there to rebuke us both. And Aviva, who had always seemed beautiful to me, remained so.

By midwinter I had memorized every line and note and cue of Der Jasager. But I did not risk missing a performance or school visit. I stayed close to Aviva at every moment, until that day when I went to fetch an extra E-string from her violin case, and came upon a letter she was evidently in the midst of writing to Al-Cerraz:

 

He’s become terribly strange. He follows me everywhere. He is awake when I fall asleep and again when I wake, usually staring at me. He has no humor at all. Except for playing the cello in his hotel room, he doesn’t have much to do. I’m not sure when he plans to return to Spain or why he hasn’t left already.

 

The letter took my breath away. It was like a mirror thrust suddenly in front of my face—a mirror in a house of mirrors. Aviva was making me sound like the obsessed one, the addled insomniac. She could not pretend I drank, because I did not; she could not pretend I was the one losing weight. But what had she said just the other night? Her voice had been thick and slurred, her voice sadistic and bitter, dirty fingernails pressing into my leg as she tried to stand: “I think you like me being a little sick. If I weren’t, I’d be in America.”

She had let it slip, also, that she had been using the morphine tonic, which I had stowed in my cello case.

“How many doses have you taken?” I asked her. I went to retrieve the bottle. It was empty.

“There’s worse things.”

“Maybe so, but you took something that didn’t belong to you. And you’re abusing your health, and abusing the trust of your mentors.”

“It isn’t like smoking opium,” she snarled.

“How would you know?”

“You’re blind. But that’s not the saddest part of it,” she lashed out. “You’re jealous. At least I know what I’m doing here. You don’t believe in what I’m doing, but at least I’m doing something.”

I kept arguing in one direction, she in another, on nonconverging courses. I don’t remember what I said or how I ended things, only her parting shot as she left the room that day. “Who is to be pitied here: the crazy person, or the person who is following the crazy person in circles?”

 

We came to a truce the next weekend, one I questioned as soon as we made it. I refilled my morphine prescription and gave it to her; in exchange, she promised she wouldn’t smoke opium—something she had done, she admitted, in Berlin and elsewhere, with her other “music friends.”

But then one night, she did not come back to the hotel until dawn. I stayed up waiting for her, vowing to say something about the letter she’d written to Al-Cerraz, and about many other things besides.

The next afternoon, after yet another dreary performance at a small brick schoolhouse in Ingolstadt, I followed Aviva to a classroom full of young children, where a curly-haired blond boy of perhaps six or seven years old had been asked to play the piano for her. Afterward, the teacher asked me to help her wheel the piano back to a storage room. I was pushing the scarred instrument down the hallway when I heard a high, cheerful voice behind me, and turned to look. It was the cherubic boy, walking with Aviva down the hallway, in the opposite direction. She carried nothing with her—no violin, no coat. But just as they vanished around the corner she took his hand, and I knew immediately what she was planning to do.

I abandoned the piano and the teacher and ran. When I rounded the corner there was no sign of them. I ducked my head into each room that I passed. At the end of the hallway, a door had been propped open. It led to a schoolyard, and beyond that, to an empty street. Panting, I began to call her name, first outside, then back in the hallway, until faces came to all the doorways: the faces of a few students at first, and several teachers, and finally a white-haired man who questioned me sternly and walked me around a corner and into a larger room with a frosted window—his office.

When the headmaster shut his office door, I saw the long wooden bench along one side. Aviva was sitting there, with the boy next to her. She looked at me once, then hid her flushed face behind one hand. Around her neck she wore a small bronze medal I’d never seen before, on a thin blue ribbon. It was a thank-you gift from the school. The boy had walked her to the principal’s office to receive it because Aviva did not know the way.

 

“I’m going to tell Weill,” I told her after we argued that night in our hotel room.

“What will you tell him—that you are obsessed? That you are imagining things?”

“I will tell him,” I said again. Four quick raps on the wall beside the bed made me jump—it was Frau Zemmler in the next room, letting us know our voices carried.

“Maybe I was wrong about that boy—”

“Of course you were wrong. He wasn’t even the correct age! And what do you think I would do if I found the right boy—just walk away with him? Kidnap him?”

I didn’t answer.

“There’s only one more month—then we take a break for the summer. I’ll be ready to leave Germany.”

I whispered again, “I will tell him: first, that you are obsessed with these children. Second, that you have been taking morphine and opium, that you aren’t to be trusted.”

“But this year’s tour is almost done. I’m almost finished—”

“You will be finished after I talk to Weill. You may not respect me, but he does.”

I lifted my head, and with an energy coursing through me that I hadn’t felt in months, I saw that finally Aviva looked afraid. She sat down on the bed. After a minute she went to the bathroom, and sometime later, she came out wrapped in a towel and sat on the bed again. She said, “What do you want from me?”

The rapping sound came again from the next room.

Aviva glared at the wall. Then she turned toward me, all light extinguished from her eyes. In a harsh whisper, she said, “I’ll do anything you want.”