At home she practiced what Viktor Rosen had taught her on an 1859 Bösendorfer upright. A piano made in Vienna—a piano forever associated with Vienna. This particular specimen was well-travelled. Her greatgrandfather had had it shipped new to Budapest, her grandfather had brought it back with him when he settled in Vienna some thirty years later, and her father had had it lugged around the city from apartment to apartment as his fortunes improved.
“One more move and we might have room for a grand,” he would say every so often, although not lately.
Méret reminded him early on that Bösendorfer made the largest grand piano in the world, with ninety-seven keys.
“Oh, we’ll knock down a wall or something. We’ll do without a bathroom and piddle in the street with the urchins.”
“Papa!”
He wouldn’t dare say anything so rude except when her mother was out.
She was out now. Méret was at the piano, running through scales. Her father was wandering around, slitting open his mail from the third post of the day with a paper knife, often as not discarding the letter and keeping the envelope.
Her mother came in. Groceries in a small wicker basket, followed by the maid—more groceries in a large wicker basket.
Her father was halfway through a sentence—“My dear, did you remember . . .”—when he noticed the red, white, and black swastika brassard on her arm and on the maid’s.
“Have you taken leave of your senses!?!”
Her mother’s hand wrapped around the swastika, much the same gesture Knobloch had used, but she was trying to conceal it, protect it.
“Have you gone mad, woman?”
“Imre, you don’t understand. We cannot go down the street—”
He tore it off in a swift movement, lunged for the maid but she fled to the kitchen, screaming, and slammed the door.
Then her mother squared off to her father and slapped his face. And he slapped her back, so hard she stood rigid for a moment scarcely believing he had done this. Then the tears welled in her eyes, the red imprint of his hand spread out across her cheek, and a trickle of blood crept down from one nostril.
Imre went to the theatre for the night’s performance and did not come back. He had a large couch in his office. By one in the morning, having listened for the sound of his return, Méret concluded he was using the couch to sleep on.