Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"What do you mean, he doesn't speak?" Aviva interrupted.
"That's not uncommon in a group home where children aren't often spoken to. Dear, I'm upsetting you. I didn't mean to. He's a clever child. And with pretty hair—light and curly, like a cherub. Doctor—the Jewish gentleman—spent an afternoon with him. They went for a walk; they played the piano..."
"Played the piano?" Aviva saw Madame glancing around the room for her.
"There is a piano in the orphanage. The boy liked to pick out notes, or sit under the piano with his head against the wood. I'm not saying he's a prodigy—nothing of the kind. But he has an affinity. He was hiding under the piano when the doctor and his wife first came to us. They might have overlooked him if the doctor hadn't sat down for a moment, to try his own hand at the keyboard."
Madame Borghese was at Aviva's arm, awaiting an introduction.
"Sister—tell me where; at least name the province."
Sister Luigia nodded her head in wordless acknowledgment of Madame. "I really cannot."
"You cannot, or you
will
not?"
The nun recognized her own words returning to her. "Truthfully, I cannot. It's unfamiliar to me."
Madame dropped any pretense of politeness. She put an arm on Aviva's shoulder and tried to turn her, forcibly.
"Unfamiliar? Is it that far away?"
"Gut
and far," she winked. "You need not concern yourself with it anymore."
Gut,
is that what she had really said? And far—not Austria, then, but Germany, perhaps one of the northern cities. A Jewish doctor who liked the piano. Upper class, musically inclined, living in a richly cultured, tolerant place where Jews were well assimilated. Better even than the region where she'd been raised. A homeland without limitations, the best that one could wish for her child. So she could be free now. She could live and travel as she pleased.
Why, then, with so many choices, did she end up six months later enrolled in the Magdeburg Music Conservatory, two hours west of Berlin? She spent long weekends exploring the surrounding towns, feeding birds in plazas, watching nursemaids pushing prams, observing schoolchildren lining up outside local bakeries. She spent money that was meant for musical scores and staff-ruled composition pads on train tickets and restaurant fare: a few sausages and many more beers. She found herself waking, in a daze, in roadside inns on Monday morning and thinking: music theory—missed again. That, in addition to the poor marks she received in the required
Volkslied
singing class, left her on probation at semester's end. She had no intention of rehabilitating herself. It was easier to leave.
The Friday before she intended to inform her adviser, she performed in a student quartet. A small man with an impressively round, balding pate and large lips listened from the back of the room, his fingertips pressed against his left temple. It was Kurt Weill.
The next afternoon, when they happened to meet at a café, he asked what she had been thinking about as he'd watched her play. "A child," she said, without elaborating. Her confession caught her by surprise; she hid her face behind a cup. But something about the answer pleased him. It reminded him of the work that was foremost in his mind that week, an opera for and about children.
Weill told her that he hadn't had a rigorous musical education, either. His father was a cantor, and Weill himself had started composing songs at the age of sixteen, without the benefit of formal conservatory training. He did not ask her what her ethnic background was, but he seemed to know, and he made a cautious remark about feeling as uncomfortable among Zionists and zealots as he did among pompous, assimilated German Jews. When she asked him what kind of Judaism he
did
believe in, he said, "The simple kind: innocent belief."
Weill got her hired on to play in the orchestra pit of a local production of his musical play,
Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera.
His career had exploded, and he had multiple projects boiling at all times—new compositions under way, others in rehearsal, or thriving in established runs. That year,
Die Dreigroschenoper
alone was performed in various cities over four thousand times. Weill was like a big puppy that hadn't yet grown into its oversized feet, suddenly endowed with celebrity and access to every musician and conductor in Europe, still incredulous at his own success and the consideration, both positive and negative, that his work was attracting.
When the Magdeburg run ended, he discussed future opportunities with Aviva. She did not know why he took the time to offer her advice and to recommend her for auditions, all the while admonishing her that many of the jobs were technically and creatively beneath her. Among these was a position as an adult lead in the school opera he'd mentioned—repetitive, low-profile labor for anyone who had a chance at a solo or ensemble career, he warned. And a lot of time on the road—he intended to take
Der Jasager
to schools throughout the country.
She didn't feel she deserved the attention, and in a lucid moment, she admitted that her decision to come to Germany from Italy had been rash. America would be a better place for her, she argued convincingly one night over too much schnapps. He seemed to agree. The next day, he sent a strongly worded telegram on her behalf to the New York Philharmonic. Within another week, she was headed across the Atlantic, but her resolve weakened during the voyage. On the day Al-Cerraz and I met her, she had decided to turn back. Always, she was counting in the back of her mind how old her son would be, in the event she ever did meet him: four that year, in 1929. Five years old now, in 1930. Not a baby anymore. Old enough for school.
No matter how Aviva spent her evenings, she always made it to rehearsals and performances the following day. But I witnessed the growing strain on her, which seemed to intensify in the fall, as
Der Jasager
finished its Berlin run. I was glad to leave the city—Babylon on the River Spree, as they called it then. Weill and Brecht had already detached themselves from the project. Soon Aviva and Frau Zemmler would head to a series of smaller cities and towns, to help rehearse the youth orchestras at each school, spending three or four days in each place before moving on.
One September weekend before Aviva left Berlin, I talked her into a final outing. We took the express train to Wannsee, a large inland lake southwest of the city. From the sandy beach, we watched small boats sail past each other. Hardy bathers frolicked and splashed in the cold lake, dancing between spirals and ribbons sketched by the wind. But not Aviva—I never even saw the suit she wore beneath a large black robe.
We rented a large wicker bathing chair and curled inside, out of the wind. I watched her tremble, the thinness of her forearms and wrists emphasized by the robe's wide sleeves. The acrid scent of wet wicker will forever remind me of the specific and peculiar discomfort of trying to be merry in the wrong place, at the wrong season.
I had meant to leave Berlin in the fall, when Aviva did. Instead, I tagged along from Brandenburg to Leipzig, from Nürnburg to Stuttgart and on across Germany, a shadow figure carrying Aviva's violin and my own cello, which I played in hotel rooms—never in public. I lurked behind coatracks, resisted introductions, ducked away from the impressed whispers of local music teachers who recognized my name. I helped set up music stands. I distributed programs. I turned away from cameras. I refused to sign autographs. No doubt people thought Aviva and I were lovers. And why wouldn't we be? An attractive and talented young woman, a revered older man with a formidable reputation. Perhaps they saw the shadows under Aviva eyes and thought we had stayed up all night, reveling in decadence and depravity. That we had never kissed or embraced passionately was harder to explain.
After each school-opera performance, Aviva went from classroom to classroom, giving short instrumental demonstrations, allowing the youngest students to watch a violin string vibrate up close or handle a felt-covered hammer that had been removed from the inside of a piano. She watched the face of every child, studying this one's response to the mention of a piano, that one's reaction to the violin, especially when she played Vivaldi. She appraised noses and eyes, reached out a finger to pat a curl, quizzed children on their favorite animals and foods and—when a teacher was distracted—on their birthdays, each and every one.
She watched them while I watched her. I told myself I should return to Spain, but her intensity fueled my own. I pretended that her search was metaphorical: She felt guilty for abandoning a child and so had dedicated herself to educating all children. But watching her in the classroom day after day forced me, finally, to abandon my own delusion. She fully expected to find her son. Long after she tired of
Der Jasager
and students' puzzled reactions to it—"Why did the boy kill himself?" "Couldn't someone else have gone for the mother's medicine?" "Why do we have to watch a Japanese play in the first place?"—she clung to the job because it allowed her to continue her search.
"I'll find him," she told me one night, nearly asleep, her head in my lap.
"There are tens of thousands of children."
"I meet hundreds of them each week."
"My brother once told me that my mother used to sing to us, when I was just a baby. But I don't remember it." Though even as I said it, an image formed in my mind: Mamá's dark head, bowed over mine, singing just under her breath as I nodded off to sleep.
"I played for him every day," Aviva said. "He heard Vivaldi before he tasted milk."
There was no reasoning with her, so I simply watched and waited, as summer turned to fall, and fall to damp, cold winter. My hip throbbed. I knew the warm, dry climate of southern Spain would lessen the pain, but I could not leave her. Once, after a particularly bad night, I tried the morphine tonic Dr. Gindl had given me, back in Switzerland. It helped that day, and it allowed me to sleep that night, but I couldn't take it again. It felt like giving in. Perhaps I was already slipping back to my former ways of thinking—observing Aviva on her futile quest, I no longer believed that pain was avoidable. I began to feel skeptical about the hopefulness I had allowed myself, began even to resent her for allowing me to think I could have a different kind of life, where music served a good purpose or none at all, beyond pleasure, and where friendship could grow into passion, in good time.
Al-Cerraz wrote to me from Spain:
Is she doing all right? Has she tired of Weill's silly opera?
I ignored the question and wrote nothing about what I saw daily in the schools, feeling that the only advantage I had over him was information and proximity. I was determined to help and protect her and did not appreciate being second-guessed.
He wrote again.
Is she drinking heavily?
I wrote back, rattled by my own inadequacies and resentful at his insinuation:
Not really. Not anymore.
And that was true, as far as I knew, though she looked worse than ever—thin and sallow—and though she did slip away from me occasionally at night, to attend nightclubs with other young musicians from the troupe. I hated those nights most of all, waiting for her to get back, listening to her cough herself to sleep after too many hours in a smoke-filled cabaret.
I know Al-Cerraz wrote to her directly as well, but those letters disappeared into a violin case or a coat pocket as soon as they arrived, and they were not shared with me later.
Before some of the performances, Aviva would set her bobbed hair in curlers, but by winter she was doing it haphazardly, missing large pieces in the back, which hung down limply. She stopped taking care of her fingernails, which was a particular embarrassment—even the schoolchildren stared at them when she played. But I did not have Al-Cerraz's eye for style or vanity, or his forthrightness, and I was thankful he was not there to rebuke us both. And Aviva, who had always seemed beautiful to me, remained so.
By midwinter I had memorized every line and note and cue of
Der Jasager.
But I did not risk missing a performance or school visit. I stayed close to Aviva at every moment, until that day when I went to fetch an extra E-string from her violin case, and came upon a letter she was evidently in the midst of writing to Al-Cerraz:
He's become terribly strange. He follows me everywhere. He is awake when I fall asleep and again when I wake, usually staring at me. He has no humor at all. Except for playing the cello in his hotel room, he doesn't have much to do. I'm not sure when he plans to return to Spain or why he hasn't left already.
The letter took my breath away. It was like a mirror thrust suddenly in front of my face—a mirror in a house of mirrors. Aviva was making me sound like the obsessed one, the addled insomniac. She could not pretend I drank, because I did not; she could not pretend I was the one losing weight. But what had she said just the other night? Her voice had been thick and slurred, her voice sadistic and bitter, dirty fingernails pressing into my leg as she tried to stand: "I think you like me being a little sick. If I weren't, I'd be in America."
She had let it slip, also, that she had been using the morphine tonic, which I had stowed in my cello case.
"How many doses have you taken?" I asked her. I went to retrieve the bottle. It was empty.
"There's worse things."
"Maybe so, but you took something that didn't belong to you. And you're abusing your health, and abusing the trust of your mentors."
"It isn't like smoking opium," she snarled.
"How would you know?"
"You're blind. But that's not the saddest part of it," she lashed out. "You're jealous. At least I know what I'm doing here. You don't believe in what I'm doing, but at least I'm doing something."
I kept arguing in one direction, she in another, on nonconverging courses. I don't remember what I said or how I ended things, only her parting shot as she left the room that day. "Who is to be pitied here: the crazy person, or the person who is following the crazy person in circles?"