Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
"Never mind," Al-Cerraz said. He reached for her free hand, studied it, and spread the fingers across his broad knee. "No musician can feel human with dirty nails. Then we 'll tackle your hair."
She shook her head gravely. Her lips strained to form a half-smile. "Just promise me you won't touch my elbows."
"Feliu—do you know what she's talking about?" Al-Cerraz said facetiously.
"Not a clue."
From off to one side, I watched them edge their chairs together, until their knees touched. I had found Al-Cerraz's insistence on grooming petty, but once again I soon saw the wisdom in his priorities. As he clipped and cleaned and buffed and massaged, Aviva's arms loosened, her shoulders fell. He murmured banalities as he worked, as if we 'd all been in close contact, as if she hadn't been lost inside Germany for five years, as if there was nothing important to ask or to know. I heard her breathing deepen and saw her eyes close, the swollen one still leaking an occasional irritated tear.
"I shouldn't have asked Varian for anything," she said in a low voice.
"Fry," I corrected. "Mr. Fry."
"Oh, stop," she said. "I'm tired of men deciding my fate. I'll call them by their first names if I like—Benito, Adolf, Bertolt, Varian. Do you know he decides which artists are superior enough for his services? Do you know he asked me to play for him?"
"I'm glad to hear you have your violin," I said, guessing Fry had only been attempting to be polite. Aviva's politics were her problem, not her performance abilities.
She ignored me. "I'm tired of auditioning. And I'm tired of traveling. God—I've been on the road my whole life."
"It's the style these days," Al-Cerraz said. "Half of Paris is on the road, taking an extended holiday."
Aviva's shoulders had tensed again. He massaged her lower arms and gave her fingernails a final buffing, though they already shone.
Above the hum of voices and clinking glasses and occasional laughter, I could hear the night sounds of the country around us: the two-note songs of the frogs, the chirping of crickets, the thrum of beating wings. A man ran across the grounds with something in a jar, shouting that he 'd caught a praying mantis, and everyone must come to take a look. Even this didn't open Aviva's eyes.
"Is it true you don't play the cello anymore?" she said after a while, in a drowsy voice.
"That's true."
"It makes perfect sense," she said.
Al-Cerraz muttered skeptically under his breath.
"No, I mean it," she said. "I admire Feliu tremendously. Ask any Jewish musician in the Third Reich—ask my colleagues in the
Jüdischer Kulturbund.
We were wrong to play..." But she couldn't go on. After she'd steadied herself, she said to me, "I'm sure you have no regrets."
"I have one."
At last she looked my way. Al-Cerraz focused more intently on her hands.
"Your son?" I asked finally. "Did you find any sign of him?" She took a deep breath. "No sign, alive or dead."
Al-Cerraz said, "Well, that's better than knowing for sure that he's dead."
I glared at him. "Not necessarily."
Aviva pulled her arms free and opened her eyes. "I've missed you both." Then she walked away, to be alone in the orchard's unlit corners.
***
Later that night, after Aviva had gone up to the room she was sharing with André Breton's young daughter, Breton joined Al-Cerraz and me on the patio with the last of the liqueur he'd pried from the fingers of the cook's assistant. Breton wore his dark hair slicked straight back from his flat, lined forehead, like a movie gangster—if gangsters spent their evenings spouting poetry. He closed his heavy-lidded eyes, savoring the weight of the glass in his hand before relinquishing it to the tabletop and said, "Your friend—she reminds me of people I met in the last war."
"Writers?"
"Nutcases. I worked in a psychiatric ward. She has the same look. The worst part was the night shift, sitting up late and listening for any sign that they were trying to slit their own throats. But the resigned ones are really quiet about it."
He stood up. "Good night, gentlemen. Sleep well."
I went up next, leaving Al-Cerraz brooding, forearms on his thighs, an ear cocked toward the frog song of the estate's dark corners.
The next morning, Fry and several of his charges left for the train that would take them within walking distance of the Spanish border. I watched them go, apparently dressed for nothing more than a weekend holiday. Alma Werfel, Mahler's ex-wife and now the wife of novelist Franz Werfel, wore a fashionable summer suit, with a close-fitting skirt and high-heeled sandals. While the men struggled to load the suitcases into Fry's car, I drew alongside him, sharing some last-minute tips on Spanish phrases and ways to differentiate between various kinds of Spanish police and military uniforms.
I gestured toward the car and said in a low voice, "I hope I'm not out of line, but those are terrible clothes for hiking the Pyrenees. Her shoes in particular. And if she's going to wear a fancy hat, at least it might have a brim, to protect her from sunstroke."
Fry locked his hands behind his back and rolled on his heels, like a parson watching fondly as his congregants left the sanctuary of church for the hazards and temptations of the outside world. "I've been here only a month or so," he said in a gentle voice. "But what I've learned so far is you have to work with the materials you've got. I can't make an elegant woman dress down. She would look suspicious in jodhpurs and flat shoes. But that's just part of it." He paused, pressing his lips together. "The other part is, you can't take away people's idea of themselves. Not at the last minute, when they're facing a dangerous situation. It makes them less stable, less predictable. Everyone clings to some silly thing or other. Everyone seems to have that one thing they can't live without."
We both looked toward the car, where Mrs. Werfel was haranguing her husband for having failed to find room for all the bags she had insisted on taking.
I said, "Just
one
thing?"
Fry laughed, loudly and openly, the first and last time I'd have the pleasure of seeing his face free from worry.
After the car had pulled away, I went looking for breakfast. I asked Imogene, the cook's assistant who had treated Aviva's eye, to inform me when Aviva or Al-Cerraz came in for breakfast.
"They've already eaten," she said. "They finished early and went for a walk. Just down the road, I think."
I spent the morning waiting for them to return and thinking about Aviva, about whether an inland location might be better for her given that Marseilles was guarded so heavily. The port was a place the authorities expected desperate refugees to gather; every backcountry road in view of the Mediterranean was patrolled by both French Vichy and
German officials. I wondered how we might convince Fry to help her with French identification papers for internal transit, at least, so that she could take the train west with fewer chances of being arrested.
Little did I know how close and imminent the threat truly was.
Later, Al-Cerraz would explain to me that the walk had been his idea, to begin to put a blush back in Aviva's sallow cheeks. A motorcycle with a sidecar had approached them, sputtering. It died on the road, within view of where they were strolling, and the motorcyclist called out in French for assistance. He was young and thin, wearing a peaked cap and goggles, a dark uniform and black knee-high boots. At closer range they saw the armband with its familiar symbol.
Al-Cerraz spent half an hour with the man, bent low to the road, touching wires and poking at the hot exhaust, his sincere love of mechanics helping to mask his apprehension. Aviva sat off to the side on the embankment, her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to hide her face behind her hand with exaggerated yawns.
"You speak excellent French," the guard said after they'd fixed the bike. "But you're not French. Spanish?"
"Good ear." Al-Cerraz said.
"You look familiar to me, like someone I very much admire."
"A movie star?" Al-Cerraz joked.
"No, a pianist."
Al-Cerraz bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.
"I didn't believe it at first," the German continued. "But then I watched your hands while we were working. I once had a photograph of your hands over my desk, if you can believe that. My daughter used to visit my office and lay her hands over the picture, trying to match her fingers to yours. I told her if she ate her vegetables and practiced her scales, her fingers might grow just as big someday."
Al-Cerraz couldn't help smiling. "Did they?"
"Nearly as long, but not as wide," he laughed. "She didn't succeed as a concert pianist. I didn't either—but that was a long time ago."
A hot breeze rustled the long blades of grass lining the ditches on either side of the road.
"All my mementos are back in Germany. Would you mind?" And the young guard went to the pannier hanging over his motorcycle's rear wheel and pulled out a small camera. He took Al-Cerraz's photo; first his face, then the fingers of both hands, splayed against the black leather seat of the motorcycle.
"I'm almost out of film. Would your girl like to be in the next one?"
"I'm sure she would," Al-Cerraz said, still smiling. "Come on honey, over here. She's a little shy; and with her fair skin"—he emphasized
fair
—"she can't stand this sun. That's why we take our walks early."
"Please come," the guard said.
And then more directly: "Come." Aviva's reticence had worn the solicitous edge from his voice. When she continued to bury her face in her hand, feigning exhaustion, he made five long, slow strides toward her, the sun glinting off his boots.
"Papers, please."
"I don't have them with me."
He lifted her chin with a finger, noted the bruise on her cheekbone. "Someone hit you?"
She didn't answer. Al-Cerraz spoke up, "A lovers' quarrel—you understand how it is."
"I don't believe it," the German said.
No one spoke for a moment, until he tilted his face back toward Al-Cerraz, eyes shielded beneath his cap. "I've read enough about you to know you'd never hit anything. You are obsessed when it comes to protecting your hands—isn't that true?"
Al-Cerraz forced a laugh. "Never try to outwit a fan. You're right about my hands. But you've misunderstood me."
"Oh?"
"I said it was a lover's quarrel. I didn't say
I
was the guilty lover."
"Oh.
Oh,
" the German said, the note of surprise extending into a pleased, gravelly chuckle that trailed off only slowly. Then he stepped close enough to touch her. He eyed the narrowness of her legs and arms. He set a hand flat against the side of her torso, feeling the ribs beneath the thin fabric.
"Not ticklish?" he said. If only she'd had the energy—or the temperament—to shy away girlishly, or to bridle, rather than letting her head and shoulders fall as she did. He took her hand in his and slowly rotated the slim wrist, looking up and down her arm for the sign of a tattoo. There was none.
"You're staying nearby?"
"Visiting friends for the weekend," Al-Cerraz interjected.
"Your papers are there?"
Al-Cerraz started to speak again, but Aviva interrupted. "In Marseilles. I left them at our hotel."
"I'm going to Marseilles now," he said. "I'll take you."
He walked her toward the sidecar, holding her wrist, and over his shoulder said to Al-Cerraz, "There's only room for one. My apologies. But I hope to see you in town—especially if you are performing. What I would give for that!"
Al-Cerraz tried to delay him. "What would you like to hear?"
The German dropped Aviva's arm. "That's a difficult question." He took his time considering, while Aviva stood by, hands hanging long at her sides, hair fallen in front of her face. "Should one choose something he has heard before, or something he has never heard? Everyone says you play Chopin better than anyone in Europe, but I've heard more than my share of Chopin. What I know and love best is your recording of the Dvořák trio."
"Number four, I am guessing. The Dumky," Al-Cerraz said.
The guard clicked his heels and bowed slightly. "Of course." He started to turn away.
"I can't take much credit for that recording," Al-Cerraz gushed. "It's all in the cello, isn't it? I will tell Señor Delargo how much you loved it."
"You are in contact with Maestro Delargo?"
"In contact? I'd call sharing a double bed too
much
contact."
The German advanced toward Al-Cerraz, forgetting Aviva altogether and gripping the camera tightly in his right hand. His eyes grew wide as he whispered, "Where?"
And so, my partner of all these years—my colleague, my shadow, my friend, my rival—lured the wolf directly to our door. They would have heard of me soon enough—I took few pains to conceal my presence. But there were other people in that villa: André and Jacqueline Breton, their daughter Aube, the Trotskyite writer Victor Serge, and several other artists and writers still lazing in their beds, sleeping off the effects of the previous night's excesses. Even the cook, Yehoshua, had been arrested once already in Marseilles for using forged ration cards to purchase more than his—our—share of limited foods. It could have been a disaster for any of them if the guard had wanted to make trouble, or impress his superiors. Fortunately, the Werfels and Heinrich Mann had already left. Unfortunately, Fry, the quickest-thinking among us, and the best at sweet-talking officials, had not yet returned. We were left to cope on our own.
"I don't play anymore," I explained to the Gestapo officer after he'd pumped my hand and begged me to play something for him.
We were on the patio, next to one of the ironwork tables, from which Imogene was hurrying to clear half-finished plates full of torn rolls and smears of jam, the late breakfasters having absented themselves at the first sound of boots on the herringboned paving.
"You don't play anymore?" the German repeated, working his fingers around the edge of his cap.
"Temporarily," Al-Cerraz explained quickly. "He has gout. A type of arthritis, isn't it? Inflamed joints."