She called on her father at the theatre on her way home from school the following day. She had not the words to say what she wished to say. She simply knew that she wanted to say something rather than go home to a continuation of last night’s mood. Even if she said nothing her father would fill the silence—he always did—and she would listen. Perhaps they would even go home together.
She found him in the lobby, sitting alone at a table, the customary scattering of envelopes and papers, scribbles and doodles spread out in front of him, watching sadly as two workmen perched on trestles behind the bar whitewashed the goddess Artemis—golden breasts and red hair still very visible beneath the first thin coat.
She came up next to him quietly. Put a hand on his shoulder. He knew her touch and did not look up.
“Would they paint over a Titian?” he said. “The blue behind her head is surely the same colour as the sky in Diana and Callisto? Doesn’t the Diana of the Death of Actaeon sit on a cloak of the same red on which our Artemis sprawls? Thank God I never had the money to buy a Picasso or we’d be watching that go under the whitewash, too.”
The workmen shuffled their buttocks along to the end of their plank to begin a second coat of whitewash. Titian, Picasso. It was all the same to a five-inch brush and a roller. Imre stood up and put on his jacket.
“That’s one of many things not to like about Nazis. We live in a world of infinite colours and they see everything in black and white.”
“No, Papa. Brown and white.”
Méret so rarely made jokes. It took her father a few seconds to realize she had actually said something funny. And then he laughed so loudly, the men on their plank turned to see what he was laughing at.
With his left hand he wiped his eyes and with his right handed her a letter from the office of the Reich commissar, Doktor Sauerwald.
“Here’s another laugh for you. The buggers have sent me a list of plays I may not permit to be performed.”
Méret glanced down the page.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Oh, quite,” said her father. “Definitely subversive. A cast of unruly working men and mischievous fairies. Trade unionists and anarchists.”
“A Doll’s House?”
“A woman’s place is in the home? Kinder, kirche, küche? Don’t look for logic. There isn’t any. You mark my words it’ll be music next. You’ll find yourself stuck with an approved list of suitably Germanic composers.”
Later that week, when Professor Kaiserman read out the approved list she was relieved to find that Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were on it. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Mahler were not.
The decadents and the Jews.