CHAPTER

24

“And then?” the journalist prompted after I’d refilled his glass. He’d asked for whiskey, but foreign brands were hard to procure in Cuba, at least for someone of my means. I’d given him rum instead.

I told him, “The train, the checkpoints, the heavily guarded station in Hendaye, our nerves, arriving to discover we’d brought inappropriate clothes, trying to find two tuxedos with the help of the Gestapo officer escorting us—terrifying a tailor in town when we all walked in, four of them and three of us, and the look on the face of the tailor’s wife, poor woman! And then giving up—I was quite small, Al-Cerraz was quite large—having the suits we’d brought ironed for us—the Germans were always better pressed than the French. . . . Well, I had no time to write during all that. No time to write or think at all.”

“You carried it with you, place to place.”

“In the side pocket of my cello case. I didn’t want Al-Cerraz to see it, to know I hadn’t left it with Fry.”

“If anyone looked—”

“It would look normal. We were musicians, on the highest state business. Carrying instruments and bows and sheet music. Now, if they’d wanted to read the backs of the pages . . . that was foolish. I’d written everything there, describing not only my feelings about Hitler, but our problems with the Gestapo so far, and even hinting at what Al-Cerraz and Aviva hoped to do as soon as the concert ended. I wasn’t thinking. I was a mess, but no one noticed that. Al-Cerraz was watching Aviva, worrying about her.”

“She was afraid to perform?”

“She was having second thoughts about escaping.”

“She was afraid of being caught.”

“No. It was true she had some concerns about the swim out to the rowboat anchored in the harbor, or being seen as she and Al-Cerraz rowed past the estuary to the open Bay of Biscay, where a larger fishing boat would be waiting for them. But sneaking, swimming, illegal, legal—that wasn’t the main problem. She felt terrible about leaving Europe; it was her second try, you’ll remember. She’d made it as far as New York in 1929—but that was when she still believed that her son was being cared for. This was worse. If there was any chance that he was still alive in Germany, then she was abandoning him. She’d talked with people who had seen the camps, who had escaped them. She already knew the things we all would find out later, from the photos taken by the liberation troops.

“She had considered letting herself be arrested and transported on purpose, so she could look for him there—Birkenau, Auschwitz. Friends reminded her that a typical prisoner lasted six weeks in those camps, children less, but she imagined he had eluded such a fate. Talented musicians were recruited into camp symphonies that performed not only death marches, but gay music for the guards and administrators—entire musical productions. A child prodigy might be kept around for years in a camp, like a songbird in a cage, just to amuse some high official. And who was to say that her baby had not become a prodigy?

“On the train to Hendaye, she leaned her head on my shoulder and described how her son had huddled, wide-eyed, under the piano. ‘He pushed aside his curly blond hair and pressed his cheek to the wood, to feel the vibrations as the doctor played over him.’ She spoke with such confidence that it was with effort that I pulled away and looked into her eyes, saying as gently as I could, ‘You never saw him do that. Aviva—you never saw him. Remember?’

“I was reminded of something she had once quoted Brecht as saying, about the suspicion with which Jewish refugees were treated—even by their relatives, even by their friends. She had the ambivalence of those who have left someone behind, and that made her unpredictable, a dangerous person with whom to link one’s fate.”

“Go on.”

I took a breath and shuffled the pages in my hand, smoothing the edges. I hadn’t read from them directly, but I had turned the pages as I’d spoken, following a line here or there with my finger. They had given me direction and support.

“Go on,” Wilhelm said again.

“I didn’t write any more—as I told you.”

He’d been patient for hours—for years, really, considering how long I’d avoided him, led him on, disappointed him. I had become aware of him in 1957, when he started working on the Al-Cerraz biography; I had pieced together his full significance only when the book was published in 1962, under the title Vanished Prodigy. The biographical information under the photo on the flap of the jacket was brief, but it told enough: Wilhelm Erlicht had moved to New York with his adoptive parents when he was seven. He had been a pianist until the age of thirty, when he turned to writing, a shift propelled by his interest in the past, in genealogy and history. And also, the text implied, by what he’d learned of his origins at that age.

Now Wilhelm stood behind his chair, gripping the blue cloth of his jacket hanging over the chair’s back, wrinkling the linen.

“Take your time,” he said. “Don’t worry about the order. Just remember, and tell me what happened at Hendaye.”

“Everything went wrong,” I said in the flattest voice possible. “Not like the petrol jugs or any of Al-Cerraz’s other schemes. Wrong.”

He waited.

“Wilhelm, I did a terrible thing.”

When I didn’t resume speaking immediately, he turned his chair to the side and sat again, hunched over, with his elbows on his knees, cuffs of his trousers raised to reveal worn loafers that clashed with his black silk socks. He had the look of a creative person who has had to adopt the dress code of a more conventional life. He listened without facing me.

“I don’t trust my memories,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t trust the words. Who can trust words when they can be so easily changed and misunderstood? My name,” I said. “Just one example. My mother had wanted to name me Feliz. In Spanish, it means happy—”

“I know it means happy!” the journalist shouted, startling me. “Then the notary, your brother, your aunt—it was changed to Feliu—your sister in the cellar, your mother coming down the stairs. I already know that story!”

I leaned back in my chair and held the manuscript to my chest, shielding the back of the last page with my forearms. “I’m sorry, Wilhelm.”

“If you were sensitive about names,” he thundered, “you would stop calling me by the name I don’t use. My driver’s license says William. My friends call me Will.”

“I’m sorry. I apologize.”

“Your childhood, your early career—I’ve listened for hours. But this is more than a professional interest. If you blame yourself for what happened to her, then tell me exactly what happened. If you’re trying to tell me you killed Al-Cerraz, or that you informed on him, then just say it. You’ve made it clear that you thought he had ruined your life.”

“He did ruin my life. I helped him to do it.”

He crossed the room and refilled both our glasses, and then walked back quickly, ignoring the trail of drips he left behind on the wooden floor. He pressed my glass into my hands without making eye contact.

I said, “This is how you get your stories? By shouting at people?”

“Of course not.”

We sipped our drinks in silence for a moment before I spoke again.

“You’re believing your own book. I understand you felt the need to present every remote possibility. But you know I wasn’t involved in anything like that. . . .”

“I never named you. I simply said that he’d made enemies among musicians and artists.”

I ignored him. “He didn’t die in Europe that month. He went on to finish his one-act Don Quixote the next year—”

“Discovered after the war; published and produced posthumously, to bad reviews,” he corrected. “Proving that even a dead composer doesn’t always get a break.”

“Posthumous only if he was dead. I’m sure he wasn’t.”

“Maybe he had written it before October 1940,” William said. “It was in your custody, and you sent it—or Varian Fry mailed it earlier.”

“But can’t you see what it was about?”

“It was a defense of fascism. Don Quixote as Franco, the misunderstood hero.”

“Oh, William!” I let the disappointment creep into my voice. “Don Quixote as Franco? Al-Cerraz’s Don Quixote was a woman.”

“Franco dressed perversely as a woman. The image invented by Picasso.”

“No, no. If it were merely metaphorical, the best guess would be Don Quixote as the Republic of Spain. But this Don Quixote was based on a real woman. The only woman Al-Cerraz was thinking about that year.”

I leaned forward, trying to meet his gaze. “Aviva was the dreamer among us. She believed in the impossible: your survival.”

He looked away and cleared his throat, masking his feelings with professionalism. “So the critics were wrong in panning it as unfashionably fascist.”

“Absolutely wrong.”

“And the long-suffering British patron?”

“He was crushed.”

“I don’t recall you correcting the critics’ misinterpretations.”

“I did not.”

 

“Cigarette?” William said after a while.

“No, thanks.”

“Bother you?”

“A little.”

He lit up anyway.

“Let’s start again in Hendaye. Easy things first. Tell me how it looked, when you first saw it.”

Beautiful. Hopeful. Marseilles had been more industrial, more polluted. But Hendaye reminded me of Campo Seco: clean air, the smell of the sea.

Arriving by train, you see all the red roofs, the curved, overlapping ceramic shingles. Then the white walls of the connected houses. Narrow streets veering off at unexpected angles, but everything orderly. Wooden balconies and bright green wooden shutters. Potted red geraniums. Arches of gray stone embedded in the white walls above each tall, narrow window.

Farther out from town, there is a wide sandy beach, and hotels lined up along it, fronting the Bay of Biscay, with some sea stacks just offshore that look like squashed brown hats.

The center of town sits on the eastern bank of the Bidassoa River, just where it meets the Bay of Biscay. There is an old fort, some narrow rusted cannons cemented into an ancient Basque seawall made of gray stone, with tiny wild violets growing in the cracks. At its mouth, the little river widens, making a protected pocket of water—a natural harbor, blue and sparkling. That’s where all the little boats anchor—fishing boats and sailboats with their wooden dinghies rocking next to them.

The boundary between France and Spain runs directly down the middle of the river, through the boats; and another town, Hondarribia, is visible just across the harbor—nearly a mirror image of Hendaye. When the clock tower in Hondarribia chimes, it is audible in Hendaye, and when the Basque fishermen head out of Hendaye’s harbor to fish off the wide beach, they rub shoulders with Hondarribia’s Basque fishermen. At sunset the lighthouse on the French side winks at the lighthouse on the Spanish side. And the green hills rise up behind both towns, enfolding them.

Our duty that first afternoon, in addition to meeting the local Gestapo chief and attempting to dress ourselves more appropriately for the next day’s concert, was to notice all these details and to understand where one nation ended and the other began, and how each guarded its border.

But there is a detail I haven’t explained. I told you we had a Gestapo officer helping us to find better clothes in Hendaye—and not just that. He had been attached to us since our departure from Marseilles, an official escort. He was young—twenty-three or twenty-four. I will not tell you his name, because I know that, given your propensity to research things, you will look him up. I don’t know if he is living or not, if he had any descendants, but if so, it would not be right to bother him or them about this. He crossed our paths this one week only, and it was to his misfortune, as well as ours. I will call him Kreisler—it’s close enough.

The motorcycle-riding officer we had met briefly at the Villa Air-Bel had been the one to recommend Kreisler, who was an acquaintance of his daughter.

“Are you thinking of marrying her when this whole thing is over?” Al-Cerraz asked him.

The young guard’s ears flushed red. He said, “The SS does not encourage us to marry. Only to procreate. To spread the Aryan race.”

Al-Cerraz rolled his eyes. “You boys have all the fun.”

Kreisler had blond hair, stubbly on top, shaved close around the ears. The back of his head and soft, lined neck looked like an infant’s. I asked him if he’d played piano as a child. No, he told us, he had sung in a choir. He had been a regular police officer in Stuttgart, until his police branch was absorbed into the state police. He liked France. He had always wanted to visit Spain, and he ticked off the musicians he knew on his fingers: “Albéniz, Granados, Cassadó, Casals . . .”

Just after the train pulled out of Marseilles, he asked us for our autographs. Aviva thought it was a trick and refused. In Toulouse, he disembarked and bought flowers for her. That softened her up a little. At the next stop, he came back with sandwiches—ham for Al-Cerraz and me, beef for Aviva, though she hadn’t mentioned any dietary preferences. It was clear to all of us: He knew who she was, or rather what she was. And still he maintained his deferential attitude, and several times left us unguarded, for a quarter of an hour at a time.

When Al-Cerraz chided him on his leniency, Kreisler grew suddenly officious. “I have two primary directives,” he said. “First is to safeguard this man’s health.” He nodded toward me and opened a bulky leather valise to present another basket of cherries, of the type I had received at the Air-Bel a month earlier. “Second is to escort you for your own welfare, to beware of thieves and so on. My superior officer takes a great interest in musical objects, and in Maestro Delargo’s bow in particular.”

“Other than that, we’re free to get into trouble,” Al-Cerraz teased him.

“No, please. That would be a bad idea for all of us.”

After we settled into the hotel rooms that Hendaye officials had provided for us, we asked Kreisler for permission to see the town, and he granted it. Al-Cerraz, Aviva, and I walked from the town center to the ancient seawall and harbor, and back to the train station. Then we walked a little farther, to see where the train tracks led. The tracks followed a slim bridge very high over the river, where the Bidassoa narrows. Just upriver, a second high bridge echoed the first—this one had a road over it. At the foot of the road, there was a French guardhouse on the Hendaye side, and on the bridge itself we could make out a small convention of dull green and brown uniforms, the glint of medals and belt buckles and the flash of rifles well-oiled for the dictators’ impending meeting.

No one seemed to think it strange that the three of us were out walking, squinting toward the water and the bridges, although a shopkeeper called out to us, “You must be very famous to require all this protection.”

The townspeople hadn’t been told about the more famous men expected the next day. But they’d been told about the concert, and a select number had been invited, or ordered, to the train platform to hear us play. The members of a local civic orchestra had been told to report as well, with their instruments and every piece of sheet music they owned; they would perform some patriotic music to introduce us. But they didn’t seem to know why there would be music on this day, why the train platform instead of the church or the grassy park by the seawall. Or they pretended not to know.

The two dictators were to meet the next afternoon in Hitler’s private railcar. With one well-placed undercarriage bomb, French resistance could have deprived the world of two dictators, had anyone been aware of the plan. Meanwhile, afternoon gave way to evening, and the station’s parking lot filled with motorcycles and official cars. The café across the street was crowded with gendarmes sipping double espressos, in preparation for a long vigil. Normal train traffic on the route had been interrupted, for security reasons. Officially, the tracks both south and north were “under repair.”

Returning to the hotel, Al-Cerraz volunteered to Kreisler, “Maestro Delargo seems to be rubbing his hands. I hope the gout is not starting to bother him again.”

That alarmed our Gestapo guard. He immediately called the front desk and inquired after local sources of cherries.

“Maybe it was the prawns he ate for lunch,” Al-Cerraz volunteered between phone calls.

“He ate prawns?” Kreisler asked, looking queasy himself.

Al-Cerraz adopted a guilty expression. “We tried to stop him. He’s the one you should be keeping a closer eye on.”

The mischief I had known from our earliest train touring days had not been purged from Al-Cerraz’s soul. I glared at him, incredulous, hoping that this tomfoolery had some purpose. In the meantime, Kreisler came and went, bringing me every type of produce he could procure at the last minute, including that item his superior officer’s grandmama had vouched for. Over the course of an evening, I spooned the contents of three entire jars of preserved cherries into my mouth. Ever since, I haven’t been able to look at a cherry without feeling sick.

Each jar bought us a half hour or so of freedom from Kreisler. We three gathered in Aviva’s room; I looked out the window while Aviva and Al-Cerraz leaned their heads over a map sketched on a matchbook and took turns reading from a pocket-sized phrasebook:

“Kaixo,” Al-Cerraz said.

Aviva repeated: “Kaikso.”

“The x is like ‘shhh.’ Kaixo.” He pushed on. “Zer moduz?”

“Zer moduz.”

“Nola esaten da hori euskaraz?”

“Oh, Justo—I’m not going to remember that.”

“But that way you can point to things and find out how to say them in Basque. It will help you with everything else.”

“We’ll be with them for a few days at the most, until the next boat from Portugal. I don’t plan to talk,” Aviva said. “Only to listen.”

“All right. Then here’s one you should learn to recognize: Kontuz!”

“What does that mean?”

“Caution.”

 

At one point when Kreisler returned to the room for the third or fourth time, cherry compote in hand, Al-Cerraz told him that he and Aviva were getting married. It astonished me how far he dared go.

“After the concert?” Kreisler asked.

“Just after.”

“So this is an early honeymoon for you, so to speak.”

Aviva’s face lit up.

“Does that mean you’ll let us go have a night on the town, just me and my girl?” Al-Cerraz asked.

Kreisler looked pained. “It’s late. It’s dark. Everything is closed. Better tomorrow, after the concert.” He smiled. “After the concert, you have a nice dinner, you two alone. I will pay for the champagne.”

That fit their—our—plans perfectly. Al-Cerraz’s wizardry seemed to be working its spell again.

When Kreisler left again, Al-Cerraz went over the plan—what time we were expected at the station in the morning, to inspect the delivered piano and rehearse under Gestapo supervision, the point at which I would explain to Kreisler that my arthritis had flared up and I could not play, how they would execute a modified program. Then they would return to the hotel, leave again for their dinner—and wait by the seawall for that precise moment when the sky’s peach blush faded to pink, then light purple, then blue, and the twin lighthouses winked on, alerting the fishing boat hiding beyond the sea stacks that they would be arriving. Then around the curve of the seawall and down the ancient steps to the quiet harbor, and to any of several anchored rowboats, floating there, waiting.

And I—I was not going with them. They had invited and urged me several times, but I hadn’t the will. Instead, I accepted my land-based role in the charade. When Kreisler noted Al-Cerraz’s and Aviva’s absence, I would share his alarm that my friends had sneaked off for a romantic beach swim and not reappeared. Some gendarme would no doubt find the twisted, damp pile of discarded clothing—pants and shirt and lady’s dress—on the seaweed-covered tidal rocks at the beach’s farthest east margin, where the rocky hills sloped toward the shore. Two drownings. By that afternoon, Hitler would be well on his way east, and Franco south, and every local gendarme would be wiping his brow in relief at having survived the incursion of police and intelligence agents from two other nations. By comparison, the drownings of two visitors would stir little excitement. I would stay another day, frequenting cafés and restaurants and socializing with minor officials if it was required, and then return on the train on October 24, as my ticket stated.

And if Kreisler alerted other Gestapo officials insistent on questioning a convenient disappearance? Let them. My spirits had sunk beyond caring.

 

Al-Cerraz and I shared a room. Kreisler’s was one door down; Aviva’s a door beyond that. Sometime during the night, I heard a bed creak, the clink of glasses, the door opening and closing. Some hours later, it opened and closed again. Al-Cerraz’s hand tugged at mine.

“She’s having second thoughts,” he whispered.

I told myself this was the last time he’d ever wake me in the night. I sat up, turned on the bedside lamp—

“No! Turn it off!”

“If it’s about marrying you, I’m not surprised.”

He sat at the corner of the bed, weighing it down.

“I said that so she’d leave, so that she could picture having a life.”

“You don’t want to marry her?”

“Of course I do. Someone should.”

“Someone should?”

“Feliu, you could have done it long ago. She would have accepted. Your refusal to have a joyful, normal life can’t be a death sentence for her.”

I stared into the dark, too full of anger to speak. I did not feel that I was losing Aviva; I considered her already lost. How dare he dangle this shred of hope in front of me?

“She’s in her room, wide awake, not being rational,” Al-Cerraz continued. “She’s going to fall apart and destroy everything, in front of everyone.”

“She’s stronger than you think.”

“We’ll all be taken away. I need you to help me with this.”

“You said this journey was the last favor you’d ever ask. I’m here at greater risk than either of you.”

“Aviva . . . the Gestapo . . .”

I raised my voice. “What about Franco? I’m sure he’d be all too pleased to add me to his trophy case.”

In a low voice, he said, “So even you have nerves.” He continued, “She knows I’m a bit of a storyteller—”

“A liar.”

“A wishful thinker,” he corrected me. “Everyone trusts you. The moral purist. She’ll have to hear it from you to believe it.”

“To believe what?”

“To believe the thing that will allow her to let go, to start a new life. Help her close a door that should have been closed long ago. Some fantasies are destructive. And anyway, what you’ll tell her is probably true.”

The next morning, I was up before dawn, before Kreisler had come to get us. I stood outside his hotel door and heard his voice high and clear over the sound of running water. Sweet innocence, in unexpected places. He was singing while he shaved. In that moment, I decided to tell him.

“I’m not playing today.”

He pulled me into his room and closed the door. “Your hands?”

“No,” I said. His whole face relaxed. He excused himself to dress, pulling his black uniform over his underclothes, pulling a belt through the pants, strapping on a long knife in its black leather sheath.

“It’s not the gout,” I continued. “I’ve decided not to play on principle.”

His face turned ashen.

I said, “Let me make this simple for you: Franco. Since he came to power, and I went into exile, I have refused to play the cello. This entire concert was a mistake. I can’t perform for him. I won’t.”

The pause that followed was one of the longest in my life. I faced this young man, neck red from hurried shaving, stray white soap flecks in front of his large ears. He was at least a head taller than me, so I had to crane my neck to meet his conflicted stare. On the chair next to us: his peaked cap, with its death’s-head emblem. Shadows danced at his jawline, at his temple, as he ground his teeth together.

Finally he said, “It is essential to trust a leader with all one’s heart. Al-Cerraz—he is an opportunist. But I know you are a thoughtful person. For you to dislike the Caudillo that much . . .” He shook his head gravely. Then suddenly, he lifted his chin and opened his mouth. To my astonishment, he started to sing: “Oh believe!”

Flushing, he dropped his jaw and spoke—slowly and clearly, reciting the words that I recognized instantly:

 

Thou wert not born in vain!
Hast not lived in vain.
Suffered in vain.
What has come into being must perish.
What has perished must rise again.

 

The final movement from Mahler’s Second Symphony—lines penned by a Jewish composer, banned in German occupied territory. I joined him, reciting more quietly:

 

Cease from trembling.
Prepare thyself to live.

 

We stopped there, not speaking, not moving: the most complete silence, round and rich, with the sky just beginning to lighten behind filmy window shades.

 

Then suddenly: an immense roar, as if we were being bombed. The floors of the hotel trembled and the framed pictures danced on the walls.

It was a convoy arriving: armored cars, military trucks, more motorcycles, spilling down from the road to the northeast. This was the advance guard, arriving by coastal road from the east. Kreisler said under his breath, “Lockdown.”

He didn’t say anything more to acknowledge what I had told him. We joined Al-Cerraz and Aviva for a morose petit déjeuner, and waited. At precisely ten o’clock, we were allowed to leave the hotel and ride in a black Mercedes to the train station, where Al-Cerraz confirmed that the piano, transported the day before from a chateau east of town, was in tune. Everything we’d seen so far—a few guards here and there, gendarmes at the café—was nothing compared to this. The entire town was under siege. Most people—unless they had been “invited” to the concert—stayed inside, doors and shutters latched.

Back to the hotel again, where we waited in the lobby, under a painting of Louis XIV. Outside, a banner with a Nazi swastika had been raised; not speaking, we watched it flutter in the wind.

Franco was to arrive by rail from the south at two o’clock. At ten past one, we were shuttled to the train station. The platform was decorated with more banners, flags of Germany and Spain. A hundred folding chairs awaited the audience. An official-looking railcar was parked on the far tracks, but we saw no sign of any occupant. Kreisler escorted us to a small private waiting room in the station, and left us there. “There will be a guard posted outside,” he said. “For your security.”

When we three were alone in the room, Al-Cerraz whispered, “Did you tell him?”

“I told him.”

“I didn’t expect so many police,” Aviva whispered, voice breaking. “They’ll have people with guns posted along on the seawall.”

“They’ll be watching the border and the station,” Al-Cerraz said, more firmly. “The train will stay parked, for the meeting. Every person will be trying to get a glimpse of him. They’ll be entranced.”

“But how will we get away, to dinner? They’re moving us place to place. They wouldn’t even let us back to our rooms.”

“Kreisler said you could go to dinner,” I reminded her.

“But that was before all this—perhaps he didn’t know how heavily they’d close down the town.”

 

A knock at the door. Another black-uniformed guard—older, with gray streaks in his brown hair. Kreisler stood behind him, not speaking. The older officer faced me. “You’re having a medical problem?”

Al-Cerraz grabbed at the guard’s arm. “It’s his hands—arthritis. He can’t play the cello.”

“Fine,” the older guard said. “I will get you a baton. When the Führer and the Generalísimo are ready, and standing on the platform, you will conduct the civic orchestra.”

I struggled for words. “I don’t know what they play. I don’t know what you’ll allow us to play. Dvořák? Mendelssohn?”

“That is not allowed.”

“What is allowed? You wouldn’t allow a Spaniard to conduct Wagner, would you?”

“No.”

“You wanted us to play Spanish music. But this orchestra may not know Granados or Turina.”

The guard furrowed his brow and clamped his jaws together. “Ravel! The Bolero. It is French, but it sounds Spanish.”

“Dear God, not an amateur production of Ravel,” Al-Cerraz whispered under his breath.

“That’s not an easy work to perform, unrehearsed.”

“It will fill the time. Mostly percussion, isn’t it?” the guard asked.

And left.

Kreisler stayed behind. After the door had closed, he said quietly, “He will go and talk to the orchestra. They will tell him they don’t have the instrumentation or sheet music for Bolero.”

The door opened again. A different man entered, smaller, with black hair and deep brown eyes, the hairline high and square. He was limping slightly. I didn’t need the introduction—I had seen his picture in the newspapers: Goebbels.

Kreisler saluted and stood at attention, his back flat against the wall. Goebbels lowered himself into a chair that appeared from behind and addressed me. “We are disappointed that you have reason not to perform. If Goering were here, we might peek into his bag and try an injection of some kind, to relax the hands. But I’m not sure that would work.”

He kept staring at me, smiling, the skin tight around his cheekbones and chin.

“Maestro Delargo,” Goebbels said, “you have chosen to come out of retirement for a very special occasion. We will find some way to celebrate your presence here. The photographers are looking forward to seeing you, and so is the Führer.”

He broke eye contact to glance around the room. “You understand that we were not as interested in a duet. And this lady”—he nodded toward Aviva—“I’m aware your trio employed a woman—a violinist who lived in Berlin for some time, correct? But that was many years ago, before the war . . .”

None of us spoke.

“Some of my men do make mistakes, it’s true. They hear an Italian accent and they assume, ‘Catholic.’ But let’s not spoil the day with accusations. We will have more to talk about after the festivities are over. I will expect to spend some time with all three of you.”

Outside the room, in the echoing train station, the orchestra struck up the Nazi anthem, “Horst Wessel Lied.” “There,” Goebbels said. “They’ve begun. He tired of waiting. Someone has decided against Bolero. You will excuse me.”

We waited, hostages in that small room. Kreisler returned twenty minutes later, while the orchestra was still playing. “Something is wrong,” he said. “The Caudillo has not yet made his appearance, and we are told there might be a substantial delay.”

“Late,” Al-Cerraz muttered. “It figures.”

“The Führer is on the platform—there are citizens, other officials.” Kreisler was flushed, out of breath. “We are trying to maintain appearances. I was told to keep the music going until Generalísimo Franco is arrived and on the platform. You will be called to begin shortly.”

He left again. Aviva began to pace. Her face was even-toned, normal; but red welts had shown up behind each of her ears, reaching down her neck. “This isn’t working.” Her voice had become high and strained. “They’re not happy with us; they’ll be watching more closely.”

“Damn you, Feliu!” Al-Cerraz said suddenly. “Just come with us to the platform and play. Goebbels and all the rest will be so pleased they’ll let us out of this box. They’ll be so busy taking your picture and toasting you that they won’t even notice when Aviva and I slip away.”

“You’d leave now?” I asked him. “In daylight?”

“I don’t think we’ll have another chance,” Aviva whispered.

They both looked to me. I had underestimated the potency of this moment, the knowledge of that man just beyond the door, standing stiffly in his dress uniform, a false smile below his brushy mustache as he awaited the Spaniard intent on deliberately insulting the efficiency-minded Germans. Fry had been right: Everything about this meeting had been engineered to allow each side to annoy the other.

I answered my partners. It was the same answer I’d given to Al-Cerraz in Marseilles, the first time he had asked. Aviva nodded swiftly as I made my position plain. Al-Cerraz stood and inhaled deeply and held his breath, chest inflated, glaring. But that didn’t change anything. It was the only thing I had left to control, the only thing that hadn’t yet been sacrificed, the only choice I could make, if “choice” can be used to describe a terrible mistake—the worst, or second-worst—of one’s entire life.

 

Kreisler entered again. “Fourteen-forty. Your leader is very late now. Everything has changed.”

“He isn’t my leader,” Al-Cerraz muttered.

“Everything has changed!” Kreisler shouted, and pounded his fist against the wall, just behind him. We all jumped.

Kreisler stood taller and tugged at the bottom of his uniform jacket. “To extend the festivities, Herr Doktor Goebbels makes this request. Maestro Al-Cerraz will come out first, and play the piano. Applause, pictures. Leave the platform slowly. Then Maestra Aviva with the violin. She bows, exits. Then finally Maestro Delargo, who will appear and shake hands—applause, pictures again. No hurrying. By this time, we are quite sure Generalísimo Franco will be present and the music can be finished and you will have your meeting with Herr Doktor Goebbels and everyone can go home.”

“Home?” Aviva whispered, sounding dazed.

“To the hotel. Escorted. No one is to walk the streets for the duration.”

 

The windowless room in which we were waiting was an administrative office: a desk, a typewriter, three chairs, and travel posters on the wall: vineyards of Bordeaux, the beach at San Sebastián, a Roman bridge in the Italian countryside, old white windmills of Castilla—La Mancha.

Aviva stared at the pictures. “I won’t leave.”

We were alone. Kreisler had given the three of us a final moment together. Then, at the sound of his name blared over a megaphone that rattled the walls, Al-Cerraz had gone to the platform. Even through the closed door, we could hear him playing: first, a romantic piece by Augustín Barrios Mangoré, transcribed from the guitar, full of broken, flowing chords alternating with single lightning-fast notes that recalled a repeatedly picked guitar string.

“I hope they appreciate what they’re hearing,” I said, ear cocked. “It’s the best he’s played in ages.”

Aviva repeated in a whisper, “I can’t.”

The second piece was equally melodious and virtuosic. Distinctly southern, but for the first time in decades I couldn’t identify the composer. Something in it made me recall a certain night on a balcony, and Spanish women with flowers in their flowing hair—the “perfumed hours” of our younger years.

I said, “He’s giving them their money’s worth.”

“Oh, God.” Suddenly Aviva clutched her stomach. “He forgot. It’s back at the hotel room.”

“What?”

“The money, for the boat captain. He’s planning to go directly to the rowboat, but he doesn’t have the money. The hotel is too far—all the guards.”

Instinctively, I pushed my hands into my coat pockets, reaching for my billfold.

“No,” she said. “He brought a lot. Eight hundred dollars, U.S.”

“Where did he get that?”

“Fry. He sold him his compositions. Fry said it could be a loan, but Justo insisted it be a sale. He made Fry promise to have them published in America. He didn’t care about the rights or the future royalties—he just wanted them published, no matter what happened.”

I couldn’t tell her what I’d done.

I told her then not to worry about payment—that I would give her something to take to the rowboat, more valuable than eight hundred dollars, and small enough to hide in the palm of one’s hand. I no longer needed proof of Queen Ena’s former favor. I would outlive this day. I would be favored again. Al-Cerraz had played for Hitler, but I had not, would not. Photographs might show me on a railroad platform next to him, but not with a cello, not with a baton—as a hostage, merely. I could still walk away from this, my reputation intact.

I pushed my thumbnail into the bow frog, hard, and the jewel popped out—blue, sparkling, so much smaller than I thought it would be. How could it have weighed anything?

“If they stop me, they’ll search me,” she said.

“They won’t.” I returned the bow to its tube.

“Should I swallow it?”

“It has hard edges. It might hurt you. Just put it somewhere. I’ll turn around. Take it.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Tighter—you’re going to drop it.”

Her shoulders were heaving. “Feliu, I can’t leave him behind!”

That’s when I told her about her son. I had to be quick, I had to be blunt; I did not have Al-Cerraz’s skill at fabrication.

“But how could you know?” She was crying, but there was a thin, hard edge behind the ragged breaths. “Was it Fry? He knew?”

We heard the megaphone announcing her name, and then Kreisler’s knock at the door. I told him I’d like to follow her out, to watch her play. He said that was fine—Al-Cerraz had made the same request, to watch from the back of the room, behind the orchestra. He followed the two of us out, carrying my cello and bow tube.

 

On the platform, I saw no sign of Al-Cerraz. There was an open door behind the last row of folding chairs. The blue harbor was visible through it, and the masts of sailboats swinging gently side to side atop the waves, with metronome precision. There were no guards near it. They had moved closer to the music area, to form a cordon around the Führer, who was standing, watching, from the back of his railcar. Another line of guards was facing entirely away, down the tracks, willing Franco’s train to appear.

Aviva walked to the cleared area between the track and the makeshift stage. She looked forlornly at the unattended piano. Then she made a quarter turn, planting her feet widely, her profile to the Führer. Her violin hung from her left hand, looking impossibly heavy. I could still remember how it had felt to play that instrument as a child, when I’d found it hard to hold it to my chin.

Every second that she did not lift the violin to play, my stomach clenched more tightly. Goebbels leaned toward a uniformed man and whispered in his ear. The sound of my own beating heart pounded in my ears, and my ears themselves became more acute, so that every sound outside the station—the bell-like tolling of boat cleats and clips and posts ringing against each other, the light slap of waves against the seawall—was amplified.

And then another noise—not my heart, though just as regular. It was a train coming from the southwest.

The guards posted at the south entrance of the station squinted into the sun and down the tracks. But not Hitler. And not Goebbels, next to and slightly behind him. Their eyes remained fixed on Aviva. A few guards and officials, noting their line of sight, emulated them, fixing their own stares, though they could not control the twitches and throat clearings that made it plain how badly everyone wanted to look the other way, toward Spain.

For a moment, I thought she was saved. Her panic, her failure to perform, would be forgotten as the train rushed into the station, washing us all in a dust-laden breeze, obscuring our view with steam. If she walked away quickly to the back of the room, and kept moving as the excitement of Franco’s entrance swept the platform, she could get to the seawall, and down the stairs to the water’s edge. What a strange and unexpected white knight Franco had become, at that moment.

But the train did not arrive in a rush. We heard the tee-kah, tee-kah of its motion down the tracks, the squeal of brakes. It was slowing well before the station, out of view.

A German voice rang out: “Begin!” All faces turned toward the sound. Hitler’s dark eyes burned beneath his peaked cap. The prolonged wait had enraged him.

That shout, that command, melted the last of Aviva’s resolve. I looked at her just in time to see her knees buckle, toppling her forward, shins smacking against the hard black platform. The violin flew from her wrist, spun once, and stopped, two meters away. A circle of uniformed men appeared around her. Between their legs and the butts of their guns I could make out her hair, one slim arm trying to push herself up—but not her face.

I do not pretend that my choice to stand up then—to approach her and part the circle of guards and lead her away to a chair at the back—was in any way heroic.

Hadn’t Enrique always said I was like Paquito, my fellow matchstick-legged stray, eager to prove his worth, his stature, his meaning in this world? He had insisted on making his own delayed entrance, and so had I. He had insisted on controlling the flow of the day’s events, as if to pretend he was not a pawn, not subservient to a stronger foe, and so had I. And to what end? Only to the end of raising the stakes yet further, worsening the consequences. Hitler’s and Franco’s negotiations that day would not go well. Nothing that day would go well.

My last words to her, as I leaned over to reach my cello strap, were: “When I begin, and no one is looking—go.”

 

Until then, Al-Cerraz had always been our showman, our master of ceremony and surprise. But on this day, I surprised them all: Goebbels, whose large brown eyes grew even larger and wider, while his mouth remained a thin pencil-line of strategy and manipulation. The three photographers—one French, one German, and Hitler’s personal portraitist, Heinrich Hoffmann. I surprised even Hitler, who gripped the black edge of the railway car’s balcony, and then, to the sharp snap of extended arms, stepped down to the platform. He gestured to a chair, and it was drawn up for him. There was no chair for me. I looked for Kreisler’s face and found it briefly, at the edge of the room, clouded with confusion and dismay. Then it was gone.

In place of a proper chair, I proceeded to the piano bench, pulled it just away from the piano, extracted my cello, and reached out to tune quickly.

The sound of the distant train started up again, pulling forward, but no one looked down the tracks this time. Not when Hitler was sitting in a chair, alone, in the center of everything, looking soberly entranced. I pulled out my bow, testing its new weight in my hand. Then I pulled it across the strings and began to play the first Bach cello suite.

I was playing to save a woman’s life—perhaps too late. I can make that claim for the first measures, at least. And then I was playing only for myself: all six movements. It had been so long; not just the two and a half years since Guernica, but the nineteen years since Anual, the twenty-six years since Madrid, the thirty-one years since Barcelona. I did not see the man for whom I was playing, or even the train that finally pulled in behind us both, releasing three guards followed by Franco himself, who surely must have been astonished to arrive without fanfare, the Fuhrer’s back to him, as I continued to play. I was not there. I was living the words written by a Jew and spoken by a Nazi—Cease from trembling, prepare thyself to live! I was being resurrected on that railway platform—destroyed, too, but in that destruction, reborn.

For years, people would try to understand why I was willing to play for dictators on October 23, 1940, considering all the statements I had made, the careers I had ruined, my life history. I would have my accusers and my detractors; when I sought entrance to the United States, it would be denied. Cuba would offer me a home—no small irony, considering that a future dictator would reign there as well; but by that time, I had learned to stay out of the limelight completely. I did perform once more, a decade later, but I never recorded again. Far more people made excuses for me than I ever made for myself. The full truth could not be known.

But in that moment, it did not matter. I was that boy—the boy Al-Cerraz had seen once, in a dusty town, lost to playing; the boy Al-Cerraz had attempted to convince himself was not even real, whose unachievable purity had brought him to despair. He had brought me to this moment—the moment of my destruction and my rebirth. But hadn’t he been present at every important moment in my life?

The applause echoed through that cavernous space. I set down the cello awkwardly; it rolled forward, cracking the bridge. The bow, without its sapphire, still hung from my right hand. I reached down and grabbed the case with its music manuscript inside, but not the cello. There were voices everywhere, buzzing in my ears. I dared to look—there was Franco, full lips set grimly, downturned eyes watery with self-pity, as Hitler extended a hand toward him belatedly and the camera strobes flashed.

I walked, and kept walking. Out the front station door, down the stairs. No one stopped me. At the street I looked left, and saw a talluniformed German approaching with a long, purposeful stride. I looked right and saw a cluster of men clustered like bees around a hive, two of them walking backward. They were lifting something, half-dragging it. The officer to my left walked faster—it was Kreisler, his face stern, coming from the direction of the harbor.

The men on the right called out to Kreisler in German. He shouted an order back at them, came quickly to my side, and grabbed my left elbow. I felt a moment of relief until I looked into his eyes. “I thought you had integrity,” he muttered in French. “I would have done anything to save you and your music. But you have shown me—music is just politics and opportunity. It is worthless.” He gripped my arm painfully.

“There,” he said. The cluster of men on my right dropped what they were carrying and parted slightly. Two of the men were wet and capless, their uniforms dripping. My mind refused to see, to admit. They had been walking from the wrong direction—not from the seawall, not from the harbor, but from the other way—from the bridge.

Her hair was wet and stringy; her skirt clung to her thighs. Seaweed had wrapped itself around her calves and one shoe; the other foot was bare.

“She jumped from the bridge,” he explained. “They saw it and dragged her out.”

One of the wet officers explained something in German to Kreisler. I moved toward Aviva, got down on my knees, searching for signs of life in her gray face.

“Stand back,” Kreisler said. I moved quickly, thankfully; the vision of the flowers he’d bought at Toulouse filled my mind; the vision of Aviva smiling as she received them. Despite what he’d said to me, I expected him to save her.

One of the wet men leaned forward to put his mouth against hers.

“No!” Kreisler shouted. “Don’t contaminate yourself. She is a filthy Jew.”

He unbuckled a flap at the side of his leg. “They say she swallowed something just before she jumped. Jews are always doing this—stealing before they escape.” He unsheathed his knife. “Gold teeth, diamonds. We find all sorts of things.”

And like an angler crouching on a riverbank over his catch, he hummed softly to himself and opened her. A straight line from the esophagus down; pressure, the sound of a cracking sternum. I looked away.

I begged him to keep what he found, but he pressed the sticky sapphire into the palm of my trembling hand. “It would not be allowed,” he said coldly. “On principle.”

To the other guards he said, in French for my benefit, “Let him walk. He can’t do anything now. He is a ghost.”