The musicians were spared Appell. Through the window of the blockhouse Méret could see row upon row of ragged women in prison stripes. It was dawn and they had already been standing for hours. It was torture—torture by cold, torture by endurance, and torture by boredom. She had been familiar with the latter all her life. It was the first demonstration of power in the life a child. The ability of those with power to waste your time, to insult your intelligence with boredom and futility.
Magda appeared next to her.
“I have to play now. We all have to play now. We play them out to work and we play them back again.”
“And me?”
“Not today. Another privilege. Just wait here.”
A few minutes later a dissonant Arbeitsmarsch was struck up somewhere outside.
At the end of the blockhouse a wooden partition carved two rooms out of the barracks. One for the blockowa, one for the orchestra conductor. A door opened. A woman in her mid-thirties emerged. Tall, lots of dark-brown hair swept back. It was a familiar figure from her youth, one of the best-known musicians in Vienna—Alma Rosé, daughter of Arnold Rosé, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, and a niece of Gustav Mahler. She had led the Wiener Walzermädeln, a small orchestra renowned for the saccharine musical clichés for which Vienna was famous. In the mid-thirties it had pleased her father to take her to see the Wiener Walzermädeln two or three times. They put on a “show.” They wore billowing ball gowns that trailed along the floor. They played the kind of music that set his foot tapping, waltzed away his worries, and whisked him back to the turn of the century as surely as a bottle and a half of red wine. It was the kind of music Viktor Rosen abhorred. Too much of a good thing.
“You are our new cellist.”
It wasn’t a question. Méret said nothing. Alma swept an errant lock of hair back over her right ear—a gesture that took Méret back to a thé dansant that had bored her silly seven or eight years ago. She could see Alma Rosé in her ball gown, she could feel her father’s hand enfolding hers.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. I knew you at once. I heard the name Alma last night many times. I did not think it could be you because no one told me it was and because I heard a rumour in Vienna that you had escaped to London.”
“I had. My mistake was I came back. Come, follow me.”
Inside the kapo’s room, Alma had set a cello on a stand. It was cheaply made. In so far as any musical instrument can be mass-produced, it was mass-produced. A bullet had entered at the front, just high of the left ƒ-hole, and exited not in a hole but in a two-foot-long split at the back.
“Do you think you can cope with it?”
Méret sat, quickly tuned up, and played a minute or so of Debussy’s cello sonata.
“It’s awful. There is a bad vibration along the split—if I were to demand volume of the instrument it would sound more like an orange box than a cello, but the neck is fine. It is not twisted. It seems to stay in tune.”
“Good. It’s all we have. When I saw you make your debut with Viktor Rosen in 1936, you played a beautiful instrument. What was it?”
“A Mattio Goffriler. 1707.”
“When I went into hiding in Holland I left behind a Guadagnini violin dating from 1757.”
It seemed they had exchanged sympathies, a common experience in the loss of an instrument that did nothing to take the crispness out of their meeting. It wasn’t an audition—that much was clear—it merely felt like an audition. They were cast in their respective roles. The individuals in them had not touched. They, too, were lost.
“You can copy parts, I take it?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I need something large, something loud, something German. We are orchestrating Beethoven’s Fifth. They seem to want it. Imagine, not enough violins, not enough percussion, no violas at all, one trombone, two flutes, three guitars, five mandolins, a piano, two accordions, and they ask for Beethoven. Thank God they didn’t ask for the Ninth or half a dozen of us would be masquerading as a choir. Could you copy out the parts?”
“Of course. Do we have music paper?”