Méret perceived the politics of her time and place in the only way a child can. In pieces. A jigsaw she would never be able to arrange into a whole. Her father made efforts to explain to her what had happened, but her mother stopped him with, “The girl is only ten, Imre.” Just as she had said at all the punctuation points of Méret’s life—“only seven,” “only eight,” “only nine.” She wondered if one day her mother might mention her age without the prefacing “only.” When she was twenty-one would she be “only twenty-one”?
What she knew was what she saw—sandbags set out at street corners to shield machine-gun emplacements—slogans painted onto brick walls—young men in uniform, some in black trousers, some in brown shirts, some, oddly, in white socks—emblematic of she knew not what. What she knew was what she heard: cries in the street, whispers in the cafés, the occasional explosion, the less occasional sound of gunfire, the rumble of an armoured car across the cobblestones; arguments between her parents that were hushed the moment they could see that she was listening.
It was an unassembled pattern of fragments, and as such she perceived her native land aright. Austria was an unassembled pattern of fragments.
Two weeks later, at her sixth visit to Rosen’s apartment, she arrived to find the floor littered with packing cases and books, and Rosen sitting in the middle, not, as was his habit, in a neat two-piece black suit, but in braces and shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled back, blowing the dust off a book.
“We will begin a little late today,” he said. “I have to clear a way through or you’ll never find a spot to put down your cello. Indeed, I cannot get to the piano. The complete works of Count Tolstoy have become an obstacle course.”
She had never seen so many books. When she was very small it had seemed to her that her father possessed all the books in the world. They lined all four sides of his study—under the window, over the window—and reached right up to the ceiling. Then, one afternoon, he had taken her to call on Professor Freud and she realized that her father possessed most of the books in the world but that Professor Freud possessed more. Herr Rosen had almost as many as Freud and she wasn’t counting the volumes of sheet music.
Stacking up the Russians on the shelves she noticed the title of one very fat book, in faded gold along its spine: Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Prince Peter Kropotkin.
“May I ask,” she said, “what is a revolutionist?”
“One who makes a revolution. Or are you no wiser with that definition?”
“It is something that revolves. Like a wheel?”
“In a sense. It is a change in the order of society. In that sense it revolves and another group finds itself at the top. As though a wheel of people had been spun. In France a hundred and fifty years ago, the poor took over, killed the rich, and made all the changes they could . . . from fixing the price of bread to changing the names of the months in the calendar.”
“How odd. Why would they do that?”
“I’ve never really understood it myself. But it has a romantic feel to it. And, of course, a descriptive quality. November means nothing. It isn’t even the ninth month. Brumaire . . . now that really says something about the autumn, doesn’t it?”
“Foggy?”
“Yes, foggy.”
“And where would we be now on the poor people’s calendar?”
Rosen had to think about this.
“I can’t be certain. It’s a long time since I studied history . . . but tell me, what was the day like as you walked here?”
“It was windy.”
“Then I think we would be in Ventôse. The windy month.”
She had finished sorting the Kropotkins as they spoke and was well into the Tolstoys.
“My father will not tell me what happened.”
Rosen looked baffled.
“What happened when?”
“In the middle of the month. In the days after I first came here. Was that a revolution?”
“Well, my dear, I am not your father, and with all respect to your father . . . if I had children I would answer their questions.”
“It is Mama,” she said. “It always is. If she gets her way I’ll never know what happens. I’ll never know where babies come from and I’ll end up believing the nonsense the other girls tell me at school.”
Rosen grinned. She thought he might even have swallowed laughter.
“I won’t answer the latter. That really is a matter for your mother. But I am happy to talk politics to you. No, it was not a revolution. If anything it was a counterrevolution. The powers that be trying to nip the activities and the workers in the bud with a surprise attack. The result? The workers struck, they refused to go to work, no trains, no trams . . . and the powers that be attacked them again. This time not with rifle butts but with Howitzers.”
“Cannons?”
“Yes, cannons. You must have heard them. The police and the army fired upon the workers’ flats.”
“Were the poor people killed?”
“Yes. I think many were killed. But I have heard figures bandied about from dozens to hundreds. Only one thing is certain.”
“What is that?”
“That many more have been locked up. The camp at Wöllersdorf must be bulging at the seams. But then there are so many factions one could lock up . . . the fascists, the socialists, the social democrats, the communists, the patriots—who in reality are Nazis. In a country of six million there may well be six million factions.”
He could see now that he had lost her.
She wiped the spine of a Tolstoy and read out, “The Kreutzer Sonata. It is a book of music?”
“No, my dear. It is a book about music, a novel about the power of music to affect us. Have you not heard of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata?”
She shook her head. Now that Tolstoy was shelved, the way through to the piano and his cello was clear. He crossed the floor, set the Goffriler between his legs, tilted the neck slightly to the left, and with the bow in his right hand struck up the intense, dramatic opening of the adagio sostenuto, the first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata.
He stopped at the moment the piano should cut in.
“You like?” he said simply.
Like? She felt blasted, as though the notes had pierced her flesh and entered her blood.
She just nodded.
“I have only two hands,” he said. “Unpack your cello. I will find the score and we shall learn the piece. No exercises today, no scales, we shall play the music of the gods.”