CHAPTER

23

By 1940 I was forty-eight years old, but I felt ancient, worn, frail—older then, in fact, than I do now as I tell this story, three and a half decades later. Who knows how much longer those dreams might have sustained my hibernation, if the knocking at my door had not suddenly grown insistent. Three times on one June day I ignored it and even pulled my window closed despite the sticky heat, to block out the shouts of an unfamiliar, self-important voice from the landing below my window. The shouting went away, but a fly stayed to torment me, beating and buzzing against the window. It so wore down my resistance that when the knocking started again, I rushed to the door and flung it open, only to find this time an altogether-different pest.

Al-Cerraz came in, swinging in each hand a glass gallon jug filled with cider-colored liquid. He didn’t offer me either of them, but only set them down, tested the mattress with one balled fist, and made himself comfortable on my bed.

“You’ve missed me?”

“I haven’t.” I was puzzled to realize that in all my dreams, he’d never appeared. I stifled a laugh. “My mind seems to dwell on everyone and everything, except you.”

He wiped his brow. “There’s only one explanation. You’re mooning over your undistinguished past. I’m in your future.” He went to the window, looked out, and sat again. Then he explained all the knockings and callings I’d heard. Handbills were being posted throughout the city, and at least a few colleagues had tried to notify me, knowing I’d become a shut-in.

“Not a shut-in,” I objected. “I go out to shop every few days, to take care of my own business . . .”

Al-Cerraz ignored me and pulled a paper from his back pocket, unfolding it so I could read the words: Citoyens! Aux Armes!

He translated: “Citizens! To arms!”

“Yes, I know,” I said, exasperated. They were taken from the lyrics of “La Marseillaise,” the French anthem. But after a moment I had to ask, “What does it mean, exactly?”

“It means the Germans are maybe a week away. Maybe only a few days, depending on their appetite for Paris luxuries. The French army has failed. Officially, it means Parisian citizens are preparing to fight—quartier by quartier, they say.”

He advised me to leave the city. When I said I wouldn’t, that I didn’t care, he said, “Come out for lunch, at least.”

“I have lunch here.”

“Do you?” He went toward the small cupboard behind the table that doubled as desk and dining table. He flung it open, nodded at the pitiful contents, then returned to the bed again, where he sat down heavily, testing the springs. I winced at the squeaking, the grinding of metal against metal, the knock of metal against wood . . .

“Stop—my bow!”

Al-Cerraz stood reluctantly and with one large hand gripped the white porcelain rail of the bed, lifted the whole thing as if it were nothing more than a suitcase, and moved it aside. Underneath was my bow tube, still sound, nestled like an egg atop a nest of thousands of papers and envelopes, stacked nearly as high as the bed frame itself.

“Dear, dear,” he murmured. “Do you have a match?”

 

I agreed then to leave the apartment with him before he talked himself into building a bonfire and burning down the entire building with it. Outside, we walked, pausing to look into windows and to watch people. At the café where we stopped for lunch, it was as hard as ever to get a table. Ladies were dressed in their floral best, men in suits despite the heat, raising their glasses to toast with that season’s most popular phrase: Chantons quand même! Let’s sing nevertheless!

Along one of the boulevards, we watched gardeners digging out withered flowers from an embankment and replacing them with fresh geraniums offloaded from the back of a truck.

“Clearly they don’t think the tanks are coming,” I noted.

“No, but they do.” Al-Cerraz pointed down the boulevard to a squat, stone-faced government building, along which more trucks were lined up. Men in crisp work shirts, sleeves rolled up, came out pushing one dolly after another, loading with fat, uneven stacks of paper barely secured with twine.

“See? They’re doing what you won’t—destroying the papers that the Germans shouldn’t see.”

“Or moving it.”

“Yes. Probably.” He laughed noncommittally. “Citizens to arms—guard our rears while we retreat.”

“If they think it’s too dangerous to stay, shouldn’t everyone leave?”

“The train stations are jammed. I went there this morning, just to see. Ten people for every one seat. Children separated from their parents. It looked like a refugee camp. Already, people have been trampled.”

“And yet . . .” I paused, glancing back at the gardeners.

“‘Chantons quand même!’” he said. “In our land it was ‘No pasarán’—but it happened all the same. Let them pass, and make music anyway.” He lifted his chin and said more loudly, “Make music. Make gardens. Make love. Admirable, in some ways. But I won’t hang around to see how it ends—not past Monday.”

We stood a while longer, watching the gardeners in one direction and the government office workers in another. Al-Cerraz added, “For anyone with initiative, it’s still relatively easy to leave now. In a few days, it won’t be.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him.

“Doing what?”

“Why are you trying to help me?”

He adopted an incredulous expression. “Come now. We’ve always had our differences. But we ‘ve made music together. And I trust you. You’ve seen the worst of me—and here we are, still talking.”

Looking back on that day now, I wish I could say he’d already seen the worst of me.

Later, he asked a favor: Would I keep his cider bottles for him until he left? His latest accommodation was in the home of a lover, a married woman whose husband was at the front. She let him sleep there, but she wouldn’t let him store his belongings, for fear her mother-in-law would spot them during one of her frequent unannounced visits. It seemed a small thing to ask.

“Tonight I’ll come by with a few more, if that’s all right. And then a few more again in the morning, if I’m lucky.”

“It’s a bit late to be starting a cellar.”

“No.” He ran a hand through his thick hair distractedly. “It’s not too late at all.”

 

By morning, we all knew the handbills had been a political mistake. Even as they were being printed, even as some citizens boasted the Germans would never succeed in taking Paris, the government had already decided. No one planned to fight after all—not soldiers or citizens. Paris was declared an open city. Two of the city’s five million residents had left or were preparing to leave; some quickly and some slowly; some bitter, some relieved, most fixated on this newest reality of getting out before Nazi flags were raised over every government office, every hotel, every historic landmark.

In Spain, I had seen great masses of mostly poor people fleeing cities. But here the poor and the rich fled together, and no one had it easy. Near my apartment, there was a veterinary office, and the next morning as I returned from a shopping trip I saw a long line of women and a few men outside the lobby, all holding their cats and Pomeranians and poodles, trying to keep them from leaping free and igniting their own Gallic wars. It might have been funny, except that after a couple of inquiries I discovered the reason these elegant people were queuing up in such numbers. They were putting their pets to sleep, knowing how difficult it would be to carry animals while fleeing the rapidly approaching German front.

That day, as planned, Al-Cerraz came with a fifth jug and a sixth. One last time, he tried to convince me to join him.

“They know your opinions about everything,” he said, looking around my apartment at the stacks of unsent letters. “They’ll arrest you.”

“It doesn’t worry me.”

“You were lucky in Spain.”

“Lucky?”

He threw his hands into the air. “I still need rope and a few small things. I’ll come back in an hour. Then I’m leaving Paris, with my jugs. I can’t force you to see reason.”

After he left, I sat near the window, my coat-covered cello visible out of the corner of one eye. The day’s heat was building. I opened the window to a day that seemed the more awful for its heartless sunshine. Outside, I heard a man calling, “Bicycle for sale!” I imagined the traffic that must be choking the city’s gateways, as every kind of car and tractor and pushcart and bicycle joined the exodus. I heard an explosive pop—too light for a gun—and I thought of champagne, and that infernal toast: Chantons quand même!

I couldn’t decide which scenario seemed worse: to be trampled by refugees or maddened by naïve collaborators, the kind who thought, “It’s better this way” or “It’s easier,” or who proclaimed “a return to traditional values,” meaning fascism of the kind I’d already experienced in Spain. There were plenty of Parisians who not only tolerated the Germans but welcomed them, admiring their goose-stepping efficiency, their espousal of fatherland and family, their good public manners. And in any crowd, loyal or disloyal, there would be men as foolish as Al-Cerraz, storing up his cider or Chablis or whatever it was, as if elegant refreshment mattered at a time like this.

But what could one do? The train stations were mayhem. Al-Cerraz seemed to have a different plan for traveling, but I hadn’t asked what it was, hadn’t even wanted to know. Wiping my face, I went to the sink and turned the tap. Nothing happened. It did not surprise me that someone had tampered with the pipes on this day of flight, and I acknowledged that perhaps Al-Cerraz hadn’t been entirely silly to stockpile beverages. Shrugging, I lifted one of his jugs, felt the saliva dampening my mouth, and twisted the cap. I had the jug close to my lips when the fumes flooded my nose. I recoiled, barely stifling a sneeze. Then I drew close and sniffed again. Petrol.

Had I said he was foolish? He was a genius.

When Al-Cerraz returned, he burst through the door ready to argue his final case. “Forget what I said before. The truth is the Germans adore you, and that adoration will be worse than torture. The Nazis love classical music—didn’t I once read that Hitler owns your recording of the Bach cello suites? They won’t leave you alone a single day unless you perform for them.”

“You’re right.”

“And you won’t get away with saying you don’t play anymore, that you’ve taken some kind of principled stand . . .” He paused, belatedly absorbing the fact that I had agreed with him.

“You’re right. I’m ready.” I gestured to the bed, where one small valise lay waiting, my bow tube across it. He hesitated. I said again, “I’m ready. Show me to your car.”

Then the spell was broken. He laughed. “My car? I don’t have a car.”

And I realized that nothing in wartime could be easy, but I had followed his lead for years and I felt willing, against my better judgment, to follow him again.

 

Al-Cerraz’s experience years earlier, crossing an arid land in a Stanley Steamer, had taught him that vehicles don’t matter if you can’t find fuel. We followed the long lines of traffic out of the city, hitchhiking easily at first when people recognized us by the cello Al-Cerraz had demanded I carry along, lashed to my back with rope, and walking when we couldn’t get a ride, Al-Cerraz struggling under the weight of the tethered jugs. The exodus was chaotic and slow, with vehicles of every kind backed up by roadblocks. Some citizens, more optimistic or at least militaristic than France’s own generals, had towed boulders and other obstructions into the center of roads, to slow down the advance of the German tanks. But in the east, where it mattered, the tanks had no trouble getting through; they’d simply gone around the roadblocks, across fields now greening with spring wheat. Within days, Paris was buzzing with German motorcades and Hitler was having his photo taken in front of the Eiffel Tower, and the boulders blocked only the exodus of refugees.

As drivers’ tanks began to run dry, as hearts hardened and faces grew frantic, we bargained for rides with Al-Cerraz’s petrol. It gained in value the farther we traveled from the capital. Occasionally we came across rural stations where we could refill a jug or two, but the stations were spaced widely, and demand far exceeded supply. Nearly every station was noisy with altercations, as station owners claimed their tanks had run dry and desperate drivers accused them of lying and price gouging.

Kilometer after kilometer, Al-Cerraz strategized. He refused to help drivers of cars broken down along the road, insisting that we couldn’t hitch our destinies to lost causes—a few more gallons of petrol wouldn’t get an empty car to Marseilles. Better, he explained, to wave down a moving car and contribute only as the needle dipped low, giving drivers the insurance they needed to make it to the next rural station. In this way we traveled south on fumes, on others’ hopes, on Al-Cerraz’s unwavering resolve.

 

We did not rest until we smelled the ocean again—not the untainted shore of my youth, but the briny, diesel-perfumed air of a major port: Marseilles. France’s southeastern corner had become a mecca for fleeing artists and intellectuals. It was the part of France that everyone hoped might stay free—and it did, in principle, as part of Vichy France, once the Germans drew their occupation line in a zigzag south of Dijon and Tours, dipping low to the west, south of Bordeaux.

But Al-Cerraz and I had barely found a flophouse before the Nazis arrived in Marseilles, too, assisting the collaborationist Vichy to route out critics of Hitler and other enemies of the state. According to the armistice, the French agreed to surrender on demand any German nationals within Vichy France, including citizens of the many countries Germany had overrun. Considering Hitler’s expanding reach across Europe, we knew that eventually no one would be beyond the Nazis’ reach. Exit visas were restricted, locking within France’s borders thousands of persons anxious to emigrate. Germans in dark green uniforms strolled the streets of Marseilles with an air of luxury and leisure, taking their time in arresting the wanted men and women they knew to be holed up in various houses and hotels, sweating out their last days of relative safety.

Two months had passed since our flight from Paris, and our cash reserves had dwindled to nearly nothing when we heard that an American was openly assisting refugees and clandestinely granting a chosen few help in leaving the country altogether. His name was Varian Fry—but we were told he winced at the feminine sound of his first name, and anyone who hoped to win his favor called him Mr. Fry. We heard about his arrival in Marseilles, with three thousand dollars taped to his leg. And we heard most of all about his list: the names of two hundred artists, musicians, and writers that he and his emergency-relief committee back in America believed were most in danger and most worth saving. My name was on that list. Al-Cerraz’s was not.

Fry received visitors at his room at the Hôtel Splendide, but Al-Cerraz did not want to be seen there, lined up with the other petitioners, under the direct scrutiny of local gendarmes and Nazi informers. At present, Vichy was tolerating Fry’s activities, under the guise of purely humanitarian efforts. Officially, he had permission to hear sob stories and offer minor financial support, not to forge documents or deal in foreign currencies, all of which he did. The game would end up lasting for thirteen months, until they sent him packing as an undesirable alien. I say thirteen months rather than rounding down to a year, because every month—every day—mattered. In that time, he helped some two thousand people flee to safety.

Some of the local artists were initially suspicious of the former journalist, astonished by his boldness and his youth and his apparent naïveté, to be operating so publicly when many of us, I suppose, thought aging politicos and spies should handle these things. My own first inclination was to steer clear, until Al-Cerraz asked me, “Then you’re ready to pawn your bow? The Marseilles Mafia might want that sapphire, when they learn it belonged to a queen.”

“You know I’d never sell it.”

“Then the least you could do is play,” he grumbled. Since our arrival, Al-Cerraz had performed privately here and there for well-heeled socialites, expecting the kind of instant patronage he’d found easily most of his life. But local largess was wearing thin. The night before, he’d left a party with a small white bag handed him by the hostess, a countess. He thought it held a discreet portion of cash. Instead it held scraps from dinner. The wealthy of Marseilles weren’t living as well as they once had.

We knew that Fry dined with the likes of Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall and other renowned Marseilles refugees; we knew he supported Jews and known homosexuals, so-called “degenerate” artists and other hard cases. Al-Cerraz persuaded me to wait until a September weekend when we knew Fry would be in the countryside, where he and his associates had rented a nineteenth-century villa and converted it into a hostel for select desperadoes.

We arrived at the gate of the Villa Air-Bel in September, were allowed in and guided past the fruit trees and unkempt garden and sprawling patio where one man sat with an easel and several others reclined in folding beach chairs, reading the newspapers. Later, we learned that when Fry was a boy, he had enjoyed regular visits to an orphanage run by his grandfather in Bath Beach, part of then-rural Brooklyn. This aging eighteen-bedroom chateau overlooking the Mediterranean was much like that seaside orphanage, full of just as much rambunctious mischief and bickering, though in this case there were no real orphans in residence, just creative artists who occasionally acted like children.

We nodded at the men on the patio and passed into the house. Fry’s secretary showed us into a wood-paneled office and offered cigarettes and slices of pear. We accepted all of it, nervously puffing with sticky fingers as we waited to be seen. Finally Fry entered, shook our hands, and took his place behind a fussy, narrow desk. He looked like an accountant or perhaps a bookish schoolmaster, with his thick, round tortoiseshell glasses and close-buttoned pinstriped suit. We’d heard he was fluent in several languages, and a quick study when it came to maps and money and evaluating risk. He tended to look away as he spoke, and opened and closed shallow desk drawers as he listened to us, fingers searching restlessly for the stamp or envelope or franc notes that might solve a given problem. At first, I mistook these mannerisms for social nervousness. I might have even thought he was awed by me or by my partner or both. But Fry’s jumpiness had nothing to do with us. It was simply excess energy made visible; sparks escaping from a mind occupied with lists of names, locations of hotels, exchange rates, appointments.

After we’d told him about our most pressing needs, he trapped his fingers in a thoughtful steeple and angled his head toward me. “I wish I could tell you I traffic in microfilm and secret capsules, but mostly I deal with old-fashioned paper. Visas. Because of your reputation in Spain, your prominence, and your letter-writing activities, you were identified early as someone best served by emigration. We have an emergency entrance visa for you. The exit visa from France is more difficult, but we can forge one; or perhaps better, since you dare not cross into Franco’s Spain, simply smuggle you onto a boat from Marseilles.”

“To . . . ?” I asked.

“America, of course.”

He paused and studied a piece of paper on the desk in front of him. “As for you”—he stumbled over the pronunciation of Al-Cerraz’s name—“you are not on the list. Furthermore . . .” he stopped again. A young woman in an hourglass-shaped tweed suit entered without knocking and whispered in Fry’s ear.

“We have no ice?” he responded. “Send someone to get some. For now, anything cool. I don’t suppose we can waste a piece of steak . . .”

Al-Cerraz’s eyes grew round at the mention of steak, and he winked at me and smiled, until the lady retorted, “That’s funny, Mr. Fry. And the shipment of fresh butter, cream, and coffee is waiting around back.”

After she left, Fry explained, “One of our residents punched one of our lady visitors in the eye. She was just leaving, but I can’t see sending her back to Marseilles with a black eye. Her ill health has attracted enough attention already.” He tapped his fingers on the desk and turned back to Al-Cerraz. “The problem is not your lack of artistic reputation, but the facts of your reputation.”

We waited, and he continued with evident reluctance. “Our first priorities are prominent critics of fascism. Not collaborators.”

“But I’m against Franco now,” Al-Cerraz sputtered. “I fled Spain years ago—in ’37. Even the Spanish Republican embassy in Paris offered me some assistance. Who are you to say—”

“Come on, Justo.” I reached for his arm.

“I’m not leaving. I have nowhere to go.”

We stayed in our seats, Al-Cerraz huffing, Fry fingering the edge of his desk. It was a stalemate.

Finally Fry said, “What about you, Mr. Delargo?”

“I came here hoping for shelter or a temporary loan. I’m not leaving France—I never intended to. List or no list, I don’t think I’m in serious danger. Frankly, I’m tired of running from place to place.”

Fry exhaled. “Of course you are. Half the artists you’ll meet in Marseilles say the same thing, until they’re arrested or threatened. The lucky ones get a second chance. But I’m not in the business of convincing anyone.”

The lady assistant cracked the door again and stage-whispered, “I’m sending Yehoshua to town for the ice. André requests that we pick up more wine for tonight; Jacqueline says he has had more than enough. Do we need anything else?”

Fry rose and straightened his jacket, looking harassed. “I hope he wasn’t the one who punched our Italian violinist.”

He wasn’t.

Fry smiled in our direction. “We already have one artist missing an eye—that’s Victor Brauner, the Rumanian surrealist, do you know him? You are welcome to stay for dinner and meet him and all the others.”

While Fry and the assistant discussed the market list, Al-Cerraz and I exchanged glances.

“Mr. Fry,” I interrupted, “please tell us the name of this lady violinist. We know many European musicians.”

“Let’s see.” He scratched his head. “I’m usually good with details, but I can’t recall her last name. Of course she told me, but there were six syllables at least. It seems to me that she doesn’t use it publicly.”

“Is she Jewish?” Al-Cerraz asked.

“Yes. And she is disliked for the company she has kept over the last few years, which brings out the worst in some of our other guests. You see the problem I have here? If they’re not arguing about the quality of the morning pastries, they’re arguing about politics.”

“If she can stay until her eye heals, then I should be able to stay, too,” said Al-Cerraz.

Fry exhaled again. “I can’t help you leave the country, but I won’t deprive you of a bed or camaraderie, at least until you’ve planned your next move. Some of the surrealists are planning an art showing tonight. Stay and enjoy, please—both of you.”

 

“Don’t say anything,” I said to Al-Cerraz on the way out. “I just want to see her.” He nodded curtly. I could feel that he was as excited and nervous as I was, both of us stifling the urge to run through the orchard, tear open doors, put our hands around the neck of the cretin who had struck her.

We found her in the kitchen, slouching on the kitchen counter while a young girl, the cook’s helper, patted at her cheek with a damp towel. When Aviva spotted us, she drew back, startling the girl, who stepped away. Al-Cerraz moved forward first, and Aviva made a choking sound and threw her arms around his neck, then made room for me, looping one arm around my head so that we huddled awkwardly together. Pressed that way between us, she weighed almost nothing—a mere vibration of the past, with limp hair clinging to her damp face, and a bruise forming as we stared.

That night, the Villa Air-Bel was loud with games and frivolity. On the patio, torches glowed with fragrant light, dispersing the autumn chill. A dozen residents and Marseilles guests had gathered, and several of the painters had hung their latest works from the trees, creating a gallery in the open air.

Aviva and I kept to ourselves, withdrawn to a half-lit corner. Al-Cerraz, unable to accept exclusion, made an attempt to penetrate the society of this downtrodden estate, and he succeeded in part. Wineglass in hand, he circulated, gathered intelligence, and managed to beg or borrow personal items from the wives of several of the artists and writers gathered. He brought these and the latest news back to us, along with a dusty bottle he’d taken from the cellar. “France will starve, but she won’t go without drink,” he said.

“They’re gay beyond belief,” I grunted back, watching a man dangle upside down from one of the trees.

“It’s an act,” Al-Cerraz said. “Three or four of them are making a run for the border tomorrow, with Fry. They’ll take a train and then try to cross the mountains into Spain on foot.” He pointed out an overweight man and his well-dressed wife, her profile hidden behind a peaked green hat festooned with dark lace. “She’s had a lot to drink, but her hands are still shaking. And look at him—he has a heart condition.” He cleared his throat and tried to sound buoyant. “More important, she is jettisoning some of her personal effects. She gave me this.” He opened a flat leather case to reveal a set of shining silver manicure tools and a small pair of pearl-handled scissors.

Aviva glanced at the kit with little interest.

“Someday,” Al-Cerraz said, trying to engage her, “you will tell your children that your hands were once manicured with implements belonging to the ex-wife of Gustav Mahler.”

But the mention of children had been a gaffe. Aviva turned away, toward the shadows beyond the patio’s glowing center.

After a while, I said, “Please, tell us the rest.”

Aviva grasped the neck of her dress, pulling the lapels closer together, fighting a chill the rest of us couldn’t feel. “Tell you what? Tell you why I’m not already dead—like that ignorant jackass wanted to know this morning before he slugged me? I suppose the fact that I am alive at all proves I’m guilty of something.”

“Never mind,” Al-Cerraz said. He reached for her free hand, studied it, and spread the fingers across his broad knee. “No musician can feel human with dirty nails. Then we’ll tackle your hair.”

She shook her head gravely. Her lips strained to form a half-smile. “Just promise me you won’t touch my elbows.”

“Feliu—do you know what she’s talking about?” Al-Cerraz said facetiously.

“Not a clue.”

From off to one side, I watched them edge their chairs together, until their knees touched. I had found Al-Cerraz’s insistence on grooming petty, but once again I soon saw the wisdom in his priorities. As he clipped and cleaned and buffed and massaged, Aviva’s arms loosened, her shoulders fell. He murmured banalities as he worked, as if we’d all been in close contact, as if she hadn’t been lost inside Germany for five years, as if there was nothing important to ask or to know. I heard her breathing deepen and saw her eyes close, the swollen one still leaking an occasional irritated tear.

“I shouldn’t have asked Varian for anything,” she said in a low voice.

“Fry,” I corrected. “Mr. Fry.”

“Oh, stop,” she said. “I’m tired of men deciding my fate. I’ll call them by their first names if I like—Benito, Adolf, Bertolt, Varian. Do you know he decides which artists are superior enough for his services? Do you know he asked me to play for him?”

“I’m glad to hear you have your violin,” I said, guessing Fry had only been attempting to be polite. Aviva’s politics were her problem, not her performance abilities.

She ignored me. “I’m tired of auditioning. And I’m tired of traveling. God—I’ve been on the road my whole life.”

“It’s the style these days,” Al-Cerraz said. “Half of Paris is on the road, taking an extended holiday.”

Aviva’s shoulders had tensed again. He massaged her lower arms and gave her fingernails a final buffing, though they already shone.

Above the hum of voices and clinking glasses and occasional laughter, I could hear the night sounds of the country around us: the two-note songs of the frogs, the chirping of crickets, the thrum of beating wings. A man ran across the grounds with something in a jar, shouting that he’d caught a praying mantis, and everyone must come to take a look. Even this didn’t open Aviva’s eyes.

“Is it true you don’t play the cello anymore?” she said after a while, in a drowsy voice.

“That’s true.”

“It makes perfect sense,” she said.

Al-Cerraz muttered skeptically under his breath.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “I admire Feliu tremendously. Ask any Jewish musician in the Third Reich—ask my colleagues in the Jüdischer Kulturbund. We were wrong to play . . .” But she couldn’t go on. After she’d steadied herself, she said to me, “I’m sure you have no regrets.”

“I have one.”

At last she looked my way. Al-Cerraz focused more intently on her hands.

“Your son?” I asked finally. “Did you find any sign of him?” She took a deep breath. “No sign, alive or dead.”

Al-Cerraz said, “Well, that’s better than knowing for sure that he’s dead.”

I glared at him. “Not necessarily.”

Aviva pulled her arms free and opened her eyes. “I’ve missed you both.” Then she walked away, to be alone in the orchard’s unlit corners.

 

Later that night, after Aviva had gone up to the room she was sharing with André Breton’s young daughter, Breton joined Al-Cerraz and me on the patio with the last of the liqueur he’d pried from the fingers of the cook’s assistant. Breton wore his dark hair slicked straight back from his flat, lined forehead, like a movie gangster—if gangsters spent their evenings spouting poetry. He closed his heavy-lidded eyes, savoring the weight of the glass in his hand before relinquishing it to the tabletop and said, “Your friend—she reminds me of people I met in the last war.”

“Writers?”

“Nutcases. I worked in a psychiatric ward. She has the same look. The worst part was the night shift, sitting up late and listening for any sign that they were trying to slit their own throats. But the resigned ones are really quiet about it.”

He stood up. “Good night, gentlemen. Sleep well.”

I went up next, leaving Al-Cerraz brooding, forearms on his thighs, an ear cocked toward the frog song of the estate’s dark corners.

 

The next morning, Fry and several of his charges left for the train that would take them within walking distance of the Spanish border. I watched them go, apparently dressed for nothing more than a weekend holiday. Alma Werfel, Mahler’s ex-wife and now the wife of novelist Franz Werfel, wore a fashionable summer suit, with a close-fitting skirt and high-heeled sandals. While the men struggled to load the suitcases into Fry’s car, I drew alongside him, sharing some last-minute tips on Spanish phrases and ways to differentiate between various kinds of Spanish police and military uniforms.

I gestured toward the car and said in a low voice, “I hope I’m not out of line, but those are terrible clothes for hiking the Pyrenees. Her shoes in particular. And if she’s going to wear a fancy hat, at least it might have a brim, to protect her from sunstroke.”

Fry locked his hands behind his back and rolled on his heels, like a parson watching fondly as his congregants left the sanctuary of church for the hazards and temptations of the outside world. “I’ve been here only a month or so,” he said in a gentle voice. “But what I’ve learned so far is you have to work with the materials you’ve got. I can’t make an elegant woman dress down. She would look suspicious in jodhpurs and flat shoes. But that’s just part of it.” He paused, pressing his lips together. “The other part is, you can’t take away people’s idea of themselves. Not at the last minute, when they’re facing a dangerous situation. It makes them less stable, less predictable. Everyone clings to some silly thing or other. Everyone seems to have that one thing they can’t live without.”

We both looked toward the car, where Mrs. Werfel was haranguing her husband for having failed to find room for all the bags she had insisted on taking.

I said, “Just one thing?”

Fry laughed, loudly and openly, the first and last time I’d have the pleasure of seeing his face free from worry.

After the car had pulled away, I went looking for breakfast. I asked Imogene, the cook’s assistant who had treated Aviva’s eye, to inform me when Aviva or Al-Cerraz came in for breakfast.

“They’ve already eaten,” she said. “They finished early and went for a walk. Just down the road, I think.”

I spent the morning waiting for them to return and thinking about Aviva, about whether an inland location might be better for her given that Marseilles was guarded so heavily. The port was a place the authorities expected desperate refugees to gather; every backcountry road in view of the Mediterranean was patrolled by both French Vichy and German officials. I wondered how we might convince Fry to help her with French identification papers for internal transit, at least, so that she could take the train west with fewer chances of being arrested.

Little did I know how close and imminent the threat truly was.

 

Later, Al-Cerraz would explain to me that the walk had been his idea, to begin to put a blush back in Aviva’s sallow cheeks. A motorcycle with a sidecar had approached them, sputtering. It died on the road, within view of where they were strolling, and the motorcyclist called out in French for assistance. He was young and thin, wearing a peaked cap and goggles, a dark uniform and black knee-high boots. At closer range they saw the armband with its familiar symbol.

Al-Cerraz spent half an hour with the man, bent low to the road, touching wires and poking at the hot exhaust, his sincere love of mechanics helping to mask his apprehension. Aviva sat off to the side on the embankment, her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to hide her face behind her hand with exaggerated yawns.

“You speak excellent French,” the guard said after they’d fixed the bike. “But you’re not French. Spanish?”

“Good ear.” Al-Cerraz said.

“You look familiar to me, like someone I very much admire.”

“A movie star?” Al-Cerraz joked.

“No, a pianist.”

Al-Cerraz bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” the German continued. “But then I watched your hands while we were working. I once had a photograph of your hands over my desk, if you can believe that. My daughter used to visit my office and lay her hands over the picture, trying to match her fingers to yours. I told her if she ate her vegetables and practiced her scales, her fingers might grow just as big someday.”

Al-Cerraz couldn’t help smiling. “Did they?”

“Nearly as long, but not as wide,” he laughed. “She didn’t succeed as a concert pianist. I didn’t either—but that was a long time ago.”

A hot breeze rustled the long blades of grass lining the ditches on either side of the road.

“All my mementos are back in Germany. Would you mind?” And the young guard went to the pannier hanging over his motorcycle’s rear wheel and pulled out a small camera. He took Al-Cerraz’s photo; first his face, then the fingers of both hands, splayed against the black leather seat of the motorcycle.

“I’m almost out of film. Would your girl like to be in the next one?”

“I’m sure she would,” Al-Cerraz said, still smiling. “Come on honey, over here. She’s a little shy; and with her fair skin”—he emphasized fair—“she can’t stand this sun. That’s why we take our walks early.”

“Please come,” the guard said.

And then more directly: “Come.” Aviva’s reticence had worn the solicitous edge from his voice. When she continued to bury her face in her hand, feigning exhaustion, he made five long, slow strides toward her, the sun glinting off his boots.

“Papers, please.”

“I don’t have them with me.”

He lifted her chin with a finger, noted the bruise on her cheekbone. “Someone hit you?”

She didn’t answer. Al-Cerraz spoke up, “A lovers’ quarrel—you understand how it is.”

“I don’t believe it,” the German said.

No one spoke for a moment, until he tilted his face back toward Al-Cerraz, eyes shielded beneath his cap. “I’ve read enough about you to know you’d never hit anything. You are obsessed when it comes to protecting your hands—isn’t that true?”

Al-Cerraz forced a laugh. “Never try to outwit a fan. You’re right about my hands. But you’ve misunderstood me.”

“Oh?”

“I said it was a lover’s quarrel. I didn’t say I was the guilty lover.”

“Oh. Oh,” the German said, the note of surprise extending into a pleased, gravelly chuckle that trailed off only slowly. Then he stepped close enough to touch her. He eyed the narrowness of her legs and arms. He set a hand flat against the side of her torso, feeling the ribs beneath the thin fabric.

“Not ticklish?” he said. If only she’d had the energy—or the temperament—to shy away girlishly, or to bridle, rather than letting her head and shoulders fall as she did. He took her hand in his and slowly rotated the slim wrist, looking up and down her arm for the sign of a tattoo. There was none.

“You’re staying nearby?”

“Visiting friends for the weekend,” Al-Cerraz interjected.

“Your papers are there?”

Al-Cerraz started to speak again, but Aviva interrupted. “In Marseilles. I left them at our hotel.”

“I’m going to Marseilles now,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

He walked her toward the sidecar, holding her wrist, and over his shoulder said to Al-Cerraz, “There’s only room for one. My apologies. But I hope to see you in town—especially if you are performing. What I would give for that!”

Al-Cerraz tried to delay him. “What would you like to hear?”

The German dropped Aviva’s arm. “That’s a difficult question.” He took his time considering, while Aviva stood by, hands hanging long at her sides, hair fallen in front of her face. “Should one choose something he has heard before, or something he has never heard? Everyone says you play Chopin better than anyone in Europe, but I’ve heard more than my share of Chopin. What I know and love best is your recording of the Dvořák trio.”

“Number four, I am guessing. The Dumky,” Al-Cerraz said.

The guard clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “Of course.” He started to turn away.

“I can’t take much credit for that recording,” Al-Cerraz gushed. “It’s all in the cello, isn’t it? I will tell Señor Delargo how much you loved it.”

“You are in contact with Maestro Delargo?”

“In contact? I’d call sharing a double bed too much contact.”

The German advanced toward Al-Cerraz, forgetting Aviva altogether and gripping the camera tightly in his right hand. His eyes grew wide as he whispered, “Where?”

 

And so, my partner of all these years—my colleague, my shadow, my friend, my rival—lured the wolf directly to our door. They would have heard of me soon enough—I took few pains to conceal my presence. But there were other people in that villa: André and Jacqueline Breton, their daughter Aube, the Trotskyite writer Victor Serge, and several other artists and writers still lazing in their beds, sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s excesses. Even the cook, Yehoshua, had been arrested once already in Marseilles for using forged ration cards to purchase more than his—our—share of limited foods. It could have been a disaster for any of them if the guard had wanted to make trouble, or impress his superiors. Fortunately, the Werfels and Heinrich Mann had already left. Unfortunately, Fry, the quickest-thinking among us, and the best at sweet-talking officials, had not yet returned. We were left to cope on our own.

“I don’t play anymore,” I explained to the Gestapo officer after he’d pumped my hand and begged me to play something for him.

We were on the patio, next to one of the ironwork tables, from which Imogene was hurrying to clear half-finished plates full of torn rolls and smears of jam, the late breakfasters having absented themselves at the first sound of boots on the herringboned paving.

“You don’t play anymore?” the German repeated, working his fingers around the edge of his cap.

“Temporarily,” Al-Cerraz explained quickly. “He has gout. A type of arthritis, isn’t it? Inflamed joints.”

“Of course! My grandmama has the same problem.” He studied my face. “Do you eat much seafood?”

“When I . . . can,” I said slowly.

“Red meat?”

“When it’s available.”

“That’s the problem. Meat and seafood are terrible for gout. How long do these spells last?”

I looked to Al-Cerraz. He said, “A week, ten days. Comes and goes. In between, we can practice with him a little, but not very much.”

“You still play together?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“Good,” the officer said under his breath. “I’m glad to hear it isn’t permanent. My grandmama swore by various fruits and vegetables, but especially cherries. Fresh cherries.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said.

The German looked around. Al-Cerraz and I both followed the sweep of his eyes, out toward the grounds. Aviva had crept away during our introductions, and he seemed to have forgotten about her entirely. Relaxing, I let my eyes wander to the tops of the trees overhead—and spotted one of the surrealists’ paintings, still hanging in the arboreal gallery of the night before. It showed a naked woman, pressed close to a man-creature with enormous, doelike eyes, crab claws, and a distinctly brushy mustache.

“Oh, God,” I exhaled.

Al-Cerraz looked up, looked down just as quickly, and stepped toward me, taking my hands in his. “Is the pain that bad? I think our friend is right—it must be your diet. Have a look.”

And with unnerving boldness, he held my hands to the German officers face, caressing my knuckles, drawing attention to the lines and folds and bumps that were my normal hands, nothing more or less.

“They do look swollen,” the officer clucked gently, clinically. “A shame. Well,” he said, straightening, “it’s been an interesting day. If there’s just one favor I could ask . . .”

At Al-Cerraz’s urging, Imogene jumped to attention, and ran to retrieve my bow tube from the bedroom I’d used. The German went to his motorcycle to retrieve his camera. I stood for a minute alone with Al-Cerraz, wanting to kill him—yes, kill him, a sentiment that everyone in the house would profess by that evening.

Then we were all together again, and the Gestapo officer was posing me with cello and bow.

“Can you hold it the other way—I know it’s less natural, but I want the sapphire in the picture. That’s what makes it recognizably yours, after all, isn’t it?” He looked through the viewfinder, then pulled the camera away from his face again without snapping. “I consider myself a devotee but there are some greater fans.” He shielded his face with the camera again. “This one will be for Herr Doktor Goebbels himself.”

Then the final disappointment of the German’s day: “But I’m out of film! Well, it’s destiny again. Maestro, we will have to meet another time. As soon as possible. I don’t get out this way very often, but I’m sure you come into town. . . .”

And with more hand-clasping and tender words all around, he left, saving his final words for Al-Cerraz: “Take care of this man’s health. I’ll hold you personally responsible if he doesn’t get better!”

The fading putter and bang of the officer’s departing motorcycle was still audible from the patio when Al-Cerraz elected to make his exit. He walked quickly to his room, to pack his bags and tell Aviva to pack her own. It wasn’t the German’s immediate return he feared half as much as our wrath, simmering at the very moment in the far corners of the house. A distant door opened and slammed shut. A baritone voice rumbled through an open window over our heads. Imogene sat down on the ground to cry.

Al-Cerraz recounted to me then everything that had gone before, ending with a plea: “You must trust me about this. It was the best thing I could do.”

“It’s all right.”

“Perhaps it was an opportunity. There are many more like him—did you hear how he referred to Goebbels?”

“Justo, haven’t you learned anything?”

Yehoshua came around the corner. “Miss Aviva is waiting in the car, if you still want a ride to Marseilles.”

I shook myself, flexed my fingers and started to follow Al-Cerraz around the corner of the house, toward the idling car, but he stopped me.

“You told her the other night you had one regret.”

I acknowledged him with a curt nod.

“If you care about her, you’ll make sure she gets out of this country soon.”

“She may not want to go . . .”

“Of course she won’t. She’d rather be in Germany now, still looking for that ghost boy of hers. Never mind the concentration camps; he might have died from dysentery or typhus or a thousand natural causes years ago. No wonder she can’t find him.” He exhaled sharply through his nose. “You should go. I want to go. But she must go.”

I took another step toward the car.

“Don’t say good-bye to her. She’ll get the wrong impression. We’ll be in touch soon.”

 

The baskets of stemmed cherries arrived two days later, perfect and brilliant and red, though local cherry season was long past. We took it as a sign that our visitor had connections, to distant lands and to air delivery, to power.

“Turkey?” André mused, spitting out the pits.

“Who knows?” I said, feeling glum.

Then Fry arrived, tired but pleased with his success. All of his charges had safely made it into the Spanish mountains, at least as far as he’d been able to see them go. Next they would travel to Lisbon, where they would board a boat—legally—for New York. At the last minute, Alma Werfel had confessed that in one of her many bags she was carrying the original score of Bruckner’s Third Symphony as well as a draft of one of her husband’s novels.

“I tell you this,” Fry said, over a celebratory dinner, “not to encourage you to attempt the same, but to discourage you. If you must try to smuggle out a manuscript of any kind, please let me know. I have couriers who can attempt to move some items. It is always safer to separate the banned material from the banned person. Please let me do my job.”

No one wanted to upset Fry’s tentatively happy mood by telling him what had occurred in his absence. But it couldn’t be avoided, and the half dozen refugees still in residence spent a good hour airing their collective scorn and fear.

“It must be that Spanish temperament,” a painter named Gustav said.

“What does that mean?” someone asked.

“What Al-Cerraz did. It was brash, stupid—hot-blooded.”

Fry interrupted. “We have another Spaniard present who has none of those traits. Let’s leave the ethnic stereotypes to our enemies, can’t we?”

Someone tapped a glass with a fork. “Hear, hear.”

A woman ventured, “No one has a cooler head—and a better heart—than Maestro Delargo. He’s certainly made enough sacrifices.”

More clinking.

But Fry stopped the toasts with his next question: “What was the German’s name?”

No answer.

“Gestapo—are you sure? Not another branch of the SS?”

“They are not synonymous?” Jacqueline asked.

“Brown uniform or black? Insignia on his uniform—badges, special medals . . . Did anyone look? A personal card with the cherries? Did someone notice?”

Faces disappeared behind napkins. One person coughed.

“He did mention the propaganda man, Goebbels,” I said. “Perhaps he knows him personally.”

“Why does all this matter?” Jacqueline asked indignantly. “We are artists and philosophers at this table, not spies. You can’t expect us to pay attention to these imbeciles.”

Fry sighed. “They pay attention to all of you.”

“We’re flattered,” Gustav muttered.

After a moment, as if regretting his terseness, Fry elaborated. “Some are friendlier than others; some are smarter or better connected.”

“Just stay away from them all—that’s my advice,” André said.

“It’s not possible,” Fry said. “I’m having lunch with the inspector of police tomorrow, and he’s likely to bring some Gestapo associates. How do you think I know who they’re looking for in any given week?” He pushed up from his chair and wished us all the best for the week ahead; tomorrow, he was due back at the Hôtel Splendide.

Later that night, Fry knocked softly at my door. “I can’t do much for your friends, you know,” he told me. “I’ll keep an eye on them in town, if they hang around. But as far as helping them get out . . .”

“I understand.”

“In the meanwhile, I have a project for you.”

Knowing I had no plans to leave France immediately, Fry suggested I begin to write an account of my life under Franco, the problems that I and other Spanish Civil War refugees faced now under the German occupation of France, the further threats that future months would bring if the Caudillo and the Führer joined forces. Hitler had bombed Guernica and assisted the Spanish fascists, but Franco hadn’t returned the favor by joining the Axis powers. With France’s fascist and collaborationist head of state Marshal Pétain under his wing, Hitler was close to controlling the continent. If he won Franco’s assistance, he might take control of Gibraltar, and in so doing secure the advantage necessary to conquer Great Britain.

Spaniards—especially those with communist affiliations—were already among the European nationals suffering in the concentration camps. But the Nazis hadn’t taken much interest in routing out all of Franco’s enemies for him. That could change if Franco entered the war in earnest; if the two dictators declared warmer sympathies for each other. Lucky for us Spaniards—for everyone—Franco was bristly, stubborn, and proud, an isolationist at heart. As of September 1940, Hitler and Franco still hadn’t met in person, although it was clear such a meeting had to be imminent.

“Tell us all that,” Fry said, when I puzzled aloud over what Americans would most need to understand. “But remember that we are trying to move hearts as well as minds. Stories equal more dollars, more visas. I hate to be crass, but it’s that simple. Be accurate, but make it personal.”

“How personal?”

“That’s up to you,” he said, and then smiling, added, “But don’t forget, I have only so much paper.”

The energy that I had dissipated over recent years by writing letters I now redirected into writing my memoirs. I had not meant to go all the way back to the beginning, but it was easier. The recent past made no sense to me; my early adulthood involved more people, more places, more questions. My childhood was the clearest, the least corrupted. I told myself I was writing for myself alone, as a warm-up, in the way that I had played daily scales all those years, starting with the simplest keys. I told myself I would select later the elements fit for public consumption. Despite what I told myself, I quickly lost control, and memory itself took over.

While I was writing, Al-Cerraz was in Marseilles, telling his own tales. I don’t know if he planned the whole scheme from the beginning and planted it in some official’s head, or if someone approached him with the idea and he merely accepted and perhaps accelerated it. He knew that time was limited. That week the gendarmes had begun to register all the Jews in Marseilles, calling them to their offices in alphabetical order, then allowing them to travel home again—“Just paperwork,” they assured teachers, pharmacists, accountants. Aviva did not fit easily into the pigeonholes. She was not French, not an enemy of the Italian regime, not a German national; but she was a notable Jew, and she had eluded Nazi roundups—they would realize that soon enough. They would scold themselves for having let her slip out of Berlin, unless her present liberty suited their purposes, which remained to be seen.

In October Al-Cerraz sent a note asking me to meet him at the Café le Croix in Marseilles “to discuss some ensemble work—our most creative collaboration to date.”

Aviva came, too, looking better than she had at the Villa Air-Bel: rested, well-fed, wearing a bright red belted dress with yellow daisies as big as saucers. It had padded shoulders and it flared at the hips, hiding her gauntness.

“I see you’ve decided against blending in,” I said warmly, reaching for her hand above the café table.

“Justo says we can do better by sticking out.”

“Is that so?”

“The key is not to be invisible. It is to be indispensable.” He patted the yellow carnation in his buttonhole. “We have nothing to fear. We are celebrities here—all of us.” And he took my free hand, and Aviva’s, so that we were sitting in a cozy triangle of clasped fingers.

“I realized the mistake I made on that day in the country. I let a stranger think Aviva was just some girl, when I should have explained that she is one of Europe’s most famous violinists.”

I leaned forward and whispered. “Even in France, they’re banning Jewish music now. What does that tell you?”

Al-Cerraz lifted his voice and addressed the crowd around us. “But we heard Offenbach played just the other night. Isn’t that so?”

I shook my head, confused.

“The cancan,” he explained, laughing. “No one’s thought to ban that. We heard it at the Moulin Gavotte—I think they played it a dozen times in one night. And there were German officers dancing to it, on their chairs.”

“Are you crazy?” I whispered back. “That German from the Air-Bel could have been there.”

“He was. He apologized to Aviva. He introduced us to his superiors. He bought us champagne.”

I groaned under my breath. “Champagne . . .”

“Well you have to have champagne when you’re closing a deal.”

I let go of the hands I was clasping—first his, then, with greater reluctance, hers. Suddenly every sound around us seemed amplified: the scrape of a chair leg against sidewalk, the high, brittle click of a glass making contact with a tile-topped table.

“What deal?”

Al-Cerraz lowered his voice to match mine. “The deal that allows all three of us to travel legally all the way across France, to a nearly unguarded port on the open Atlantic, where there are many small boats. It happens also to be on a rail line where some important men will be meeting. I have tickets and safe-conduct visas in my pocket. We depart in three days.”

I pushed out the words between clenched teeth: “To what end?”

“To the only end that ever mattered.” He was speaking loudly again. “To the end of making music, of course.”

“Even if it was a benefit for the Virgin Mary herself, I don’t perform anymore.”

“Oh, Mary won’t be there.” He studied his fingernails, then raised them to his teeth, and spoke into the anonymity of his cupped hands, whispering, “Only Hitler and Franco and a lot of newspapermen from both sides.”

I didn’t say anything. Aviva reached for my hand but I ignored her. She pushed a water glass across the table. When I ignored that, she dipped a napkin in the water and held it toward my brow.

“You can’t say yes on my behalf,” I said finally.

Al-Cerraz looked to Aviva, who looked away. Then he turned to me, wincing slightly. “I already did.”

 

Al-Cerraz refused to take no for an answer. By the time I got back to the Villa Air-Bel, a messenger had already left a note for me. It said, “I’ll never ask another favor. After this, you’ll never see me again.” I should be so lucky, I thought—but I did not believe him.

He must have met with Fry at the Hôtel Splendide, too, because Fry came to me later, and to my astonishment suggested that the plan was a good one. Bold, inventive, and sound, he said, except for one fact: “It certainly will destroy your reputation.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“If that’s true, then why aren’t you willing?”

The question deprived me of sleep all the next night.

Fry came to me again the following day, to share what he’d learned from one of his best sources, a man who had worked for the British embassy.

Al-Cerraz had not been inventing stories or exaggerating the rank of our proposed audience. The concert would be the centerpiece of the welcoming festivities at the railroad station in Hendaye, France, just across the westernmost border of Spain, where Franco and Hitler planned to meet for the first time in both dictators’ lives. Still, it didn’t make sense to me. Given that Al-Cerraz and I were not Franco’s favorites, why would Nazi authorities consider us the best musical accompaniment for a Spanish-German summit?

“Hitler and Franco will both be taking pains to annoy each other,” Fry guessed. “Franco never managed to force you to perform for him or his government—I doubt he could have succeeded. But if the Nazis can, then it’s Hitler’s way of showing how much control of Spain he has already. It’s all tied up with public image—cultural showmanship, philosophical innuendo. As a propaganda plan, it has Goebbels’s fingerprints all over it.”

“Wouldn’t my appearance just make Franco angrier?”

“It might. But Hitler has tried friendship with Franco for years already. I think he’s ready to settle for intimidation.”

 

The day before our officially ticketed departure, I had one last visitor. Aviva arrived at the villa on a black bicycle she had borrowed from the madame of a brothel. We sat outside, next to the pear trees. A few of the unharvested pears had fallen from the trees and been left to bake and decay into pulpy splotches between clumps of unmowed grass. I hadn’t noticed them before, but on this unseasonably warm autumn day, the wasps buzzed insistently between us and the sticky ground. We sat as still as possible, trying not to aggravate them.

“There are two things I need to tell you,” Aviva said. “First, I understand why you won’t play the concert.” She swallowed hard. “Even when I wasn’t well in Germany—wasn’t in my right mind—I understood you. And I think, despite your concerns, that you understood me. I admire your principles, Feliu. I always have.”

Little could she know that she was praising me for a firmness I did not feel. She continued, “If you tell them you won’t be playing, it makes the whole thing suspect. So we want you to come with us on the train. They already believe that you have arthritis. Ride all the way to Hendaye and at the last minute say you can’t perform—a medical excuse. Then Al-Cerraz and I play, and we leave the concert, and then . . .”

I sat quietly, considering both what to say and what to do: not just later in Hendaye, but there, at that very moment, in the villa’s garden, while she sat just across from me—her hand within reach, her cheek only a bit farther, if I stood now and leaned across the table.

“That way,” she added, “there is no harm to your reputation.”

There was that word again. But in that moment, I did not care about my reputation. I did not want to be revered, I wanted to be loved.

“Wait,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically, smiling. I’d been watching a wasp circling her head lazily for the last several minutes.

“There—in your hair.”

She shook her head impatiently. “The second thing is harder to say. I don’t know how you’ll take it.”

The wasp had landed on a dark brown curl behind her ear, trapping itself there as she shook her head from side to side. She looked more annoyed than fearful; it was taking all of her energy to find her words, and she didn’t want to be interrupted.

“Justo and I—” she clapped her hand hard against her neck.

I reached toward her. “You’ll just get it—”

“—are getting married.”

“—angry . . .”

Our words had crossed, and I was only beginning to absorb what she had said.

She stiffened, closing her eyes. “Too late.”

 

For a full minute I sat, silent and stunned, until she rose to her feet. Ignoring the reddening spot at her throat, she said, “I have to go. The madame warned me that she imposes strict overtime penalties on all her customers.”

I watched her struggle to bunch her skirt between her knees and extend one leg over the crossbar. “Just remember,” she said. “No one can make you do something you don’t want to do. You’ve always been your own man.”

Had I? She seemed as sure of it as Al-Cerraz had seemed sure I’d follow his lead. But why should this matter when I’d just lost Aviva? Why should I care what she or anyone thought of me—what the entire world thought of me?

Precisely because now it was the only thing I had left.

 

I had written perhaps half of my life story so far, if the thin pile of hand-scrawled sheets I’d filled could be called a life story, and now this trip to Hendaye imposed a deadline. Fry had promised to smuggle my manuscript to a clandestine courier at the end of the week, while I was away.

Pushing Aviva as far as I could from my grieving mind, I continued to wonder about the choices I had made in my life, or failed to make; the lines I had drawn, not only for myself but for others as well. I had been fortunate in many regards, endowed with opportunities and gifts. But I needed think only of the gemstone in my bow to recall how many of those gifts had weighed upon me, upsetting my balance in more than one sense. With the same kind of fervor I’d once displayed in Alberto’s apartment, bowing until my tailbone ached, I kept writing, remembering, and searching.

That afternoon, Fry came to the Villa Air-Bel, and I told him I had used up all the paper he had given me. “Both sides?” His question embarrassed me. I hadn’t meant to be wasteful. I thanked him and returned to writing, filling the backs of all the completed pages, writing faster than ever—a scherzo of pen strokes.

One by one the house lights went out, the pure dark country night pressed down upon the house, and I continued to write in an insomniac trance. One might assume it was the events at Hendaye that were costing me sleep, but the truth is I didn’t spend more than a minute imagining them. I worried about only one thing: Had I explained myself? Whether or not I performed, I knew the Hendaye concert would change the way the world thought about me. There was a chance that something might happen to me. The manuscript I was writing provided answers, a defense, an explanation for everything I had ever done, or failed to do. But rereading the parts I’d already written, I knew I hadn’t explained anything well. Was it true I had lost contact with Alberto, distancing myself from him even after my own experiences at the palace had showed me that any musician can be ensnared by a situation beyond his control? After I—and everyone else—turned against the monarchy, why had I been unable and unwilling to return the Queen’s gift? Had I really ruined the chances of that young cellist, Rocamura—and how many other musicians besides? What had I ever done for my family? What had I ever done for art? For love?

I did not want to be remembered for the life I had so far lived. In the dark of the night, as I sat shivering and hungry with a cramped writing hand, I felt consumed by incompleteness. In the emotionalism that sweeps over a person rubbed raw by exhaustion, I suddenly became teary, thinking of the chorus from Mahler’s Second Symphony, which I had conducted once in Salamanca: Prepare thyself to live!

I did not feel prepared to live, or to die.

I wiped my eyes and turned over a piece of paper, to use the other side—it was filled. All the pages were filled. But I had more to remember, more to say and explain. I paced the room and wandered the house and found myself suddenly outside Fry’s door, and before I knew it I was banging on it, waking the poor overworked man.

“Paper,” I said.

He rubbed his eyes. “Tomorrow.”

“I leave tomorrow, very early. It’s my last chance to finish what I’m writing.”

“Go back to bed.”

“I wasn’t in bed. I need more paper.”

“There is no more paper.”

I shrieked inconsolably, “I need more paper!”

He turned slowly and disappeared into the darkness of his bedroom. I heard rustling, for two minutes, three. He shuffled back to the lighted doorway with a sheaf of manuscript pages in his hand. He thrust them toward me, eyes still squeezed into half-slits. “It’s all I have. Keep them in order; you can write on the backs and someone can recopy them later. They’re going with the same courier. Leave them with Imogene in the morning, before you leave.”

He started to close the door, then reopened it a crack. “He called them ‘everything I know.’ Be careful with them.”

Back in my room, I held the first page under the light of my gooseneck desk lamp. It was a music manuscript: short works for piano, by Justo Al-Cerraz. Some of the pages had dates ranging across many years. Unable to help Al-Cerraz leave France, Fry had apparently agreed to smuggle out page after page of his work.

I wiped at my burning eyes with a calloused fingertip and tried to focus on the first page. One brittle corner was marked with a wineglass stain so perfect and round and red it looked like a passport stamp. And a date: 1921. I held the blemished page to my nose, wondering if the smell of cheap Rioja would still be there, and with it perhaps other scents—rosemary from the Alhambra’s red-soiled slopes, the iodine of Mediterranean shores—but the only thing I could smell was dampness. A purple constellation of mold stippled many of the papers’ edges.

I read the first bars of the first page silently. The solo piano piece started with a percussive sequence: a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth. Again. Again. Again. His heartbeat, I thought. I’m hearing his heartbeat . . .

“Olvídalo!” I cried, and jumped at the sound of my voice echoing in that dark, empty wood-floored room. Forget it. And all my curiosity, all my concern, vanished in a fiery halo of indignation.

I caught my breath, tried to read more, to translate the inky markings into mental music. But my anger would not allow it.

Every measure bore his trace. The music refused to stand alone. It was always about him, and he was inescapable. How many times had I lain awake in a sleeper train climbing into the Pyrenees, listening to his snores and his flatulence? In Italy, ten minutes before the conductor raised his baton—and years before we met Aviva—I had been forced to witness him seducing a young violist, grunting into her neck like a pig unearthing truffles. Every day for months at a time, over three decades, I could have told you what he ate, whether he’d changed his shirt, how his intestines and feet were faring, if he’d suffered nightmares or enjoyed erotic dreams. His bodily rhythms demanded more than their fair share of attention.

And yes, perhaps age had mellowed him, or at least made him more fit for mixed company. But look at the company he sought! He was a political opportunist of the worst kind. And finally—finally—when he had seen the error of his ways and shed his political opportunism, he had grasped an opportunity of a different kind. He and Aviva were leaving together, to be married; to disappear together. Where would they go after New York—Los Angeles? Mexico? Brazil? His disappearance might be an improvement. But hers—unacceptable; an unjust prerequisite for her survival.

He had called this suite of piano pieces “everything I know.” He was everything he knew. Of course the rhythm of the very first page was his heartbeat.

I turned the page over, told myself it was just paper, and tried to return to my own task. I continued to fill pages with scenes, memories, justifications. As dawn broke, I heard Yehoshua outside, warming up the car to take me to the train station, as we had arranged. I piled the papers together, and I knew I could not leave them behind. My story wasn’t over, I hadn’t told anything correctly or well, and I did not know whether I would manage to return after Hendaye. I had no choice but to take the entire manuscript with me, with the work of two men—the interpretation of two lives—in my shaking hands.