Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
He kept staring at me, smiling, the skin tight around his cheekbones and chin.
"Maestro Delargo," Goebbels said, "you have chosen to come out of retirement for a very special occasion. We will find some way to celebrate your presence here. The photographers are looking forward to seeing you, and so is the Führer."
He broke eye contact to glance around the room. "You understand that we were not as interested in a duet. And this lady"—he nodded toward Aviva—"I'm aware your trio employed a woman—a violinist who lived in Berlin for some time, correct? But that was many years ago, before the war..."
None of us spoke.
"Some of my men do make mistakes, it's true. They hear an Italian accent and they assume, 'Catholic.' But let's not spoil the day with accusations. We will have more to talk about after the festivities are over. I will expect to spend some time with all three of you."
Outside the room, in the echoing train station, the orchestra struck up the Nazi anthem, "
Horst Wessel Lied.
" "There," Goebbels said. "They've begun. He tired of waiting. Someone has decided against
Bolero.
You will excuse me."
We waited, hostages in that small room. Kreisler returned twenty minutes later, while the orchestra was still playing. "Something is wrong," he said. "The Caudillo has not yet made his appearance, and we are told there might be a substantial delay."
"Late," Al-Cerraz muttered. "It figures."
"The Führer is on the platform—there are citizens, other officials." Kreisler was flushed, out of breath. "We are trying to maintain appearances. I was told to keep the music going until Generalísimo Franco is arrived and on the platform. You will be called to begin shortly."
He left again. Aviva began to pace. Her face was even-toned, normal; but red welts had shown up behind each of her ears, reaching down her neck. "This isn't working." Her voice had become high and strained. "They're not happy with us; they'll be watching more closely."
"Damn you, Feliu!" Al-Cerraz said suddenly. "Just come with us to the platform and play. Goebbels and all the rest will be so pleased they'll let us out of this box. They'll be so busy taking your picture and toasting you that they won't even notice when Aviva and I slip away."
"You'd leave now?" I asked him. "In daylight?"
"I don't think we'll have another chance," Aviva whispered.
They both looked to me. I had underestimated the potency of this moment, the knowledge of that man just beyond the door, standing stiffly in his dress uniform, a false smile below his brushy mustache as he awaited the Spaniard intent on deliberately insulting the efficiency-minded Germans. Fry had been right: Everything about this meeting had been engineered to allow each side to annoy the other.
I answered my partners. It was the same answer I'd given to Al-Cerraz in Marseilles, the first time he had asked. Aviva nodded swiftly as I made my position plain. Al-Cerraz stood and inhaled deeply and held his breath, chest inflated, glaring. But that didn't change anything. It was the only thing I had left to control, the only thing that hadn't yet been sacrificed, the only choice I could make, if "choice" can be used to describe a terrible mistake—the worst, or second-worst—of one's entire life.
Kreisler entered again. "Fourteen-forty. Your leader is very late now. Everything has changed."
"He isn't my leader," Al-Cerraz muttered.
"Everything has changed!" Kreisler shouted, and pounded his fist against the wall, just behind him. We all jumped.
Kreisler stood taller and tugged at the bottom of his uniform jacket. "To extend the festivities, Herr Doktor Goebbels makes this request. Maestro Al-Cerraz will come out first, and play the piano. Applause, pictures. Leave the platform slowly. Then Maestra Aviva with the violin. She bows, exits. Then finally Maestro Delargo, who will appear and shake hands—applause, pictures again. No hurrying. By this time, we are quite sure Generalísimo Franco will be present and the music can be finished and you will have your meeting with Herr Doktor Goebbels and everyone can go home."
"Home?" Aviva whispered, sounding dazed.
"To the hotel. Escorted. No one is to walk the streets for the duration."
***
The windowless room in which we were waiting was an administrative office: a desk, a typewriter, three chairs, and travel posters on the wall: vineyards of Bordeaux, the beach at San Sebastián, a Roman bridge in the Italian countryside, old white windmills of Castilla—La Mancha.
Aviva stared at the pictures. "I won't leave."
We were alone. Kreisler had given the three of us a final moment together. Then, at the sound of his name blared over a megaphone that rattled the walls, Al-Cerraz had gone to the platform. Even through the closed door, we could hear him playing: first, a romantic piece by Augustín Barrios Mangoré, transcribed from the guitar, full of broken, flowing chords alternating with single lightning-fast notes that recalled a repeatedly picked guitar string.
"I hope they appreciate what they're hearing," I said, ear cocked. "It's the best he's played in ages."
Aviva repeated in a whisper, "I can't."
The second piece was equally melodious and virtuosic. Distinctly southern, but for the first time in decades I couldn't identify the composer. Something in it made me recall a certain night on a balcony, and Spanish women with flowers in their flowing hair—the "perfumed hours" of our younger years.
I said, "He's giving them their money's worth."
"Oh, God." Suddenly Aviva clutched her stomach. "He forgot. It's back at the hotel room."
"What?"
"The money, for the boat captain. He's planning to go directly to the rowboat, but he doesn't have the money. The hotel is too far—all the guards."
Instinctively, I pushed my hands into my coat pockets, reaching for my billfold.
"No," she said. "He brought a lot. Eight hundred dollars, U.S."
"Where did he get that?"
"Fry. He sold him his compositions. Fry said it could be a loan, but Justo insisted it be a sale. He made Fry promise to have them published in America. He didn't care about the rights or the future royalties—he just wanted them published, no matter what happened."
I couldn't tell her what I'd done.
I told her then not to worry about payment—that I would give her something to take to the rowboat, more valuable than eight hundred dollars, and small enough to hide in the palm of one's hand. I no longer needed proof of Queen Ena's former favor. I would outlive this day. I would be favored again. Al-Cerraz had played for Hitler, but I had not, would not. Photographs might show me on a railroad platform next to him, but not with a cello, not with a baton—as a hostage, merely. I could still walk away from this, my reputation intact.
I pushed my thumbnail into the bow frog, hard, and the jewel popped out—blue, sparkling, so much smaller than I thought it would be. How could it have weighed anything?
"If they stop me, they'll search me," she said.
"They won't." I returned the bow to its tube.
"Should I swallow it?"
"It has hard edges. It might hurt you. Just put it somewhere. I'll turn around. Take it."
"I can't," she said.
"Tighter—you're going to drop it."
Her shoulders were heaving. "Feliu, I can't leave him behind!"
That's when I told her about her son. I had to be quick, I had to be blunt; I did not have Al-Cerraz's skill at fabrication.
"But how could you know?" She was crying, but there was a thin, hard edge behind the ragged breaths. "Was it Fry? He knew?"
We heard the megaphone announcing her name, and then Kreisler's knock at the door. I told him I'd like to follow her out, to watch her play. He said that was fine—Al-Cerraz had made the same request, to watch from the back of the room, behind the orchestra. He followed the two of us out, carrying my cello and bow tube.
On the platform, I saw no sign of Al-Cerraz. There was an open door behind the last row of folding chairs. The blue harbor was visible through it, and the masts of sailboats swinging gently side to side atop the waves, with metronome precision. There were no guards near it. They had moved closer to the music area, to form a cordon around the Führer, who was standing, watching, from the back of his railcar. Another line of guards was facing entirely away, down the tracks, willing Franco's train to appear.
Aviva walked to the cleared area between the track and the makeshift stage. She looked forlornly at the unattended piano. Then she made a quarter turn, planting her feet widely, her profile to the Führer. Her violin hung from her left hand, looking impossibly heavy. I could still remember how it had felt to play that instrument as a child, when I'd found it hard to hold it to my chin.
Every second that she did not lift the violin to play, my stomach clenched more tightly. Goebbels leaned toward a uniformed man and whispered in his ear. The sound of my own beating heart pounded in my ears, and my ears themselves became more acute, so that every sound outside the station—the bell-like tolling of boat cleats and clips and posts ringing against each other, the light slap of waves against the seawall—was amplified.
And then another noise—not my heart, though just as regular. It was a train coming from the southwest.
The guards posted at the south entrance of the station squinted into the sun and down the tracks. But not Hitler. And not Goebbels, next to and slightly behind him. Their eyes remained fixed on Aviva. A few guards and officials, noting their line of sight, emulated them, fixing their own stares, though they could not control the twitches and throat clearings that made it plain how badly everyone wanted to look the other way, toward Spain.
For a moment, I thought she was saved. Her panic, her failure to perform, would be forgotten as the train rushed into the station, washing us all in a dust-laden breeze, obscuring our view with steam. If she walked away quickly to the back of the room, and kept moving as the excitement of Franco's entrance swept the platform, she could get to the seawall, and down the stairs to the water's edge. What a strange and unexpected white knight Franco had become, at that moment.
But the train did not arrive in a rush. We heard the tee-
kah,
tee-
kah
of its motion down the tracks, the squeal of brakes. It was slowing well before the station, out of view.
A German voice rang out: "Begin!" All faces turned toward the sound. Hitler's dark eyes burned beneath his peaked cap. The prolonged wait had enraged him.
That shout, that command, melted the last of Aviva's resolve. I looked at her just in time to see her knees buckle, toppling her forward, shins smacking against the hard black platform. The violin flew from her wrist, spun once, and stopped, two meters away. A circle of uniformed men appeared around her. Between their legs and the butts of their guns I could make out her hair, one slim arm trying to push herself up—but not her face.
I do not pretend that my choice to stand up then—to approach her and part the circle of guards and lead her away to a chair at the back—was in any way heroic.
Hadn't Enrique always said I was like Paquito, my fellow matchstick-legged stray, eager to prove his worth, his stature, his meaning in this world? He had insisted on making his own delayed entrance, and so had I. He had insisted on controlling the flow of the day's events, as if to pretend he was not a pawn, not subservient to a stronger foe, and so had I. And to what end? Only to the end of raising the stakes yet further, worsening the consequences. Hitler's and Franco's negotiations that day would not go well. Nothing that day would go well.
My last words to her, as I leaned over to reach my cello strap, were: "When I begin, and no one is looking—go."
Until then, Al-Cerraz had always been our showman, our master of ceremony and surprise. But on this day, I surprised them all: Goebbels, whose large brown eyes grew even larger and wider, while his mouth remained a thin pencil-line of strategy and manipulation. The three photographers—one French, one German, and Hitler's personal portraitist, Heinrich Hoffmann. I surprised even Hitler, who gripped the black edge of the railway car's balcony, and then, to the sharp snap of extended arms, stepped down to the platform. He gestured to a chair, and it was drawn up for him. There was no chair for me. I looked for Kreisler's face and found it briefly, at the edge of the room, clouded with confusion and dismay. Then it was gone.
In place of a proper chair, I proceeded to the piano bench, pulled it just away from the piano, extracted my cello, and reached out to tune quickly.
The sound of the distant train started up again, pulling forward, but no one looked down the tracks this time. Not when Hitler was sitting in a chair, alone, in the center of everything, looking soberly entranced. I pulled out my bow, testing its new weight in my hand. Then I pulled it across the strings and began to play the first Bach cello suite.
I was playing to save a woman's life—perhaps too late. I can make that claim for the first measures, at least. And then I was playing only for myself: all six movements. It had been so long; not just the two and a half years since Guernica, but the nineteen years since Anual, the twenty-six years since Madrid, the thirty-one years since Barcelona. I did not see the man for whom I was playing, or even the train that finally pulled in behind us both, releasing three guards followed by Franco himself, who surely must have been astonished to arrive without fanfare, the Fuhrer's back to him, as I continued to play. I was not there. I was living the words written by a Jew and spoken by a Nazi—
Cease from trembling, prepare thyself to live!
I was being resurrected on that railway platform—destroyed, too, but in that destruction, reborn.
For years, people would try to understand why I was willing to play for dictators on October 23, 1940, considering all the statements I had made, the careers I had ruined, my life history. I would have my accusers and my detractors; when I sought entrance to the United States, it would be denied. Cuba would offer me a home—no small irony, considering that a future dictator would reign there as well; but by that time, I had learned to stay out of the limelight completely. I did perform once more, a decade later, but I never recorded again. Far more people made excuses for me than I ever made for myself. The full truth could not be known.