Vienna Prelude (55 page)

“Why am I doing this to myself?” he said aloud. Then he slammed the rolled-up program against the empty seat beside him and stood up to leave.

Just then the musicians began to filter out onto the stage. Shimon at the tympani. Leah, wrestling her cello, checking the score. Members of the first and second violins and violas. He stood rooted in front of his seat. And then Elisa came from the wings. Her long golden hair fell over her shoulders, and she brushed it back and tossed her head. Her skin was smooth ivory in contrast to the long black gown. Someone spoke to her and she leaned down to whisper a word in reply. She nodded and smiled at Leah as she passed and then, as she reached her chair, Murphy sat down in perfect unison with her.

He ran his hand over his face. He was perspiring.
Why is she still here?
He squinted, trying to catch some glimpse of a ring on her hand. He was too far away. If there was a wedding band, an engagement ring or something, he couldn’t see it.
Why didn’t I bring opera glasses?

The balcony had begun to fill with concertgoers. A fat man who looked like a bank clerk sat down in front of Murphy. The man had opera glasses, and Murphy tapped him on the shoulder.

“
Bitte
. . . may I borrow . . . ?”

“Mein Herr, there is nothing to see yet!” He laughed and passed the glasses to Murphy, who sighed with relief.

He focused the tiny glasses on Elisa and instantly felt his heart constrict. Her eyes were intense as she studied the music. Slender fingers held the violin. He thought of those fingers intertwined with his that day in the open-air market. And suddenly he rejoiced. There was no wedding band on her hand!

As quickly as his heart rose, it fell again. “So what?” he muttered as he handed the glasses back to the fat man. Then he stood to go again, saying,
“Bitte, bitte, bitte,”
as he inched past patrons and tried not to tramp on their toes. At the end of the aisle, he turned for one last look at her. She raised the violin and tucked it beneath her chin. He wished he could be her violin. She drew the bow across the string, and Murphy turned around to go back to his seat once again.
“Bitte, bitte schön! Bitte!”

He sat down with a sigh and tapped the fat man on the shoulder again. “Would you sell me your opera glasses?” he asked the startled man.

The man shook his head and stuck out his lower lip.
“Nein!
My wife bought them for me before she passed away last Christmas.”

“How much do you want for them?”

“I will not sell them, mein Herr!”

“What are they worth?”

“But they are not for sale!” The fat man was angry and indignant.

“Fifty dollars American.” Murphy opened up his wallet.

“Why did you not simply buy a ticket in the orchestra seats? Or rent a box?”

Murphy counted out the bills. “This is all I could get.”

“The only seat? On a Wednesday night?” The fat man eyed the bills.

“Yeah. Lucky for you.” He held out the bills.

“
Nein
. . .” The fat man hesitated. “But I might rent them to you.”

“How much?”

The fat man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Fifty?
Ja
?”

Murphy was about to agree when a soft, urgent tapping interrupted the transaction. He turned to face a smiling old woman who held out her opera glasses. “For fifty dollars, you may buy mine. And my umbrella as well.”

“Done!” Murphy gave her the bills, and she passed the opera glasses and the umbrella forward as the fat man grumbled unhappily and scowled at her.

Murphy focused on Elisa again and imagined himself opening the umbrella and jumping off the balcony to float down to her. At that moment, as though she sensed his gaze on her, she turned her eyes upward to the gallery.

Murphy wanted nothing more than to have her see him. He wanted to stand up and shout her name, to tell her that he was in love with her and to beg her from his lofty perch to marry him.

But he did none of that. He lowered the glasses when she looked away, then sat in silent misery as the concert began. When it was all over and the applause had died away, he blended into the rest of the crowd and wandered disconsolately back to his hotel room at the Sacher.

***

Elisa slowly climbed the stairs to her apartment. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the keys, then stopped and drew her breath in sharply.

In the darkness at the top of the stairs, the form of a man sat in the shadows.

“Who are you?” Elisa asked, feeling the same sense of the foreboding that had followed her through tonight’s concert.

The man stood. She clutched the banister and stared up at the familiar figure. “Thomas?”

“I have been waiting,” The words of Thomas were a frightened whisper. “Quickly, please.”

She wavered, then hurried past him, unlocking the door and throwing it open. Thomas slipped in, but neither of them reached for the light. The window shades were up. She set the violin on the table as Thomas locked the door behind them, and she drew every shade before switching on the lights.

They faced one another across the room. Her face contained a thousand questions, and he replied with a furrowed brow and a hard-set jaw.

“My father?” she said at last, holding tightly to the back of a chair.

He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Elisa.” As if the pain of her own heart had struck him too, he grimaced. “I saw Canaris. He knew already. They all knew. It is over—there is no more to be done . . .” He did not have to speak the lie. She interpreted his words as he wanted her to believe.

Elisa pressed her lips together tightly and tried to hold back tears of disbelief and disappointment. “Thomas?” she asked bleakly. She wanted his answer to be different, somehow miraculously changed.

He moved toward her, his arms stretched out to comfort. “I’m sorry.” Thomas began to weep with Elisa as her tears pushed past the barrier of control.

She fell into his arms and let him hold her as she cried for the death of all hope, for the haunting echo of the challenge:
“
What God has done is rightly done.
”
How could
this
be right? How could she accept this? How could she carry news of such tragedy back to her mother? “Oh, Papa!” she sobbed. “Papa!” Now they would have to grieve again. They had given up hope before, only to have it offered to them once again.
Cruel, cruel hope!
Pulled away, wrenched from their hearts in some cosmic cat-and-mouse game! How could she keep her promise to
believe
in the face of such heartache?

“Poor Elisa.” Thomas stroked her hair softly and kissed the cheeks that were wet with tears. “Poor, poor, darling . . .”

She leaned against his chest and let him hold her. Then he picked her up and carried her to the sofa where he cradled her in his arms as if she were a small girl with a broken toy.

She wept for a long time until finally she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. She was glad he was there, glad she was not alone on such a dark and terrible night.

***

A soft rain had begun to fall by the time Murphy reached the hotel. He opened the umbrella he had purchased at the concert and stood dumbly in the middle of the sidewalk as people hurried by him seeking shelter in the building.

“Why was she still there tonight?” Murphy muttered to himself, turning back toward the opera house. “And no wedding ring. Maybe she just told me all that . . . about some other guy . . . because she—” He could not finish the thought. There was, after all, no reason for Elisa to lie about something like that unless . . . unless she just wanted to get rid of Murphy. But if that was the case, then why did she kiss him like that? And why take him to the little cellar joint with the guitar-playing Spaniard?

He turned back toward the entrance of the Sacher Hotel. But he could not make himself move toward its warmth and comfort. He had to see her, had to talk to her. By now she would be home.

Automatically Murphy raised his arm and hailed a passing taxi. Within ten minutes he stood outside the building where she lived and stared up at the drawn shades. A sliver of light escaped from them. Elisa was still awake!

He smiled and let the raindrops hit his face as he watched a shadow move across the shade . . .
her shadow
! And then another shadow moved toward her! Their arms reached out. Murphy felt suddenly foolish as the two shadows melted into one long embrace.

Murphy had the urge to hurl the folded umbrella at the window like a javelin. But he did not. He wanted to slam his fist against the hard cold stone of her building and call her a thousand foul names, but he did not. He knew a man who had broken his hand just that way, and then the boyfriend had come outside and beaten him senseless for such language. No, Murphy was beaten badly enough already. At this moment, Joe Louis himself could not have punched him harder or knocked him down any more completely than the image of the shadow boxing going on upstairs.

He wiped the rain off his face as the large shadow scooped up Elisa and carried her away. “Oh, God,” Murphy breathed at last as emptiness consumed him.

There were no taxis. He was drenched. Numb and cold, he walked through the puddle sidewalks and never thought to open the umbrella. He was sick before he reached his room at the Sacher Hotel; he flung himself onto the delicate petit point chair without changing his wet clothes. He just didn’t care.

In one final gesture of despair, he took out the little wooden angel from his pocket, threw it on the floor, and slammed his heel down hard on it. It splintered into a thousand pieces.

“So much for love,” he muttered, wishing he had a drink. “So much for you, John Murphy.”

***

Soon Professor Julius Stern’s rags hung on the old man’s skeletal frame just like the stripes on all the other prisoners. He seemed tiny and fragile without his bulk. Theo had watched the old man’s flesh melt away as they scrambled in the rocks each day. But the old man’s mind grew sharper as the grief of his fate somehow dulled. The guard’s command for Theo to watch over the old man had developed into an inseparable friendship that flourished and grew and kept the two men known as Stern alive. Each night they sat awake and whispered to one another snatches from books that they both loved. They would discuss a passage until exhaustion pulled them into a numb and dreamless sleep. For Theo, the arrival of Julius Stern had meant the saving of his sanity. It became more obvious, however, that for the old man, his time in Dachau would mean death unless something happened very soon.

The lights had been extinguished for an hour. An almost total silence had fallen over the packed barracks. Prisoners clung to their precious few hours of sleep. In these moments they could forget the horror that daylight would bring. Only Theo and the old man still lay awake.

“You took Goethe’s
Faust
with you, Jacob?” the professor asked. “Why Goethe?”

“It is the finest . . . the best written of all the stories about Faust.” Theo replied, hoping that his comment would stir up an argument between them. Such discussions kept their blood flowing and their minds awake. Tomorrow on the rocks they would think of what they said tonight, and such thoughts would dim their awareness of the cruelty around them.

“Yes. Perhaps in the German language, Goethe’s
Faust
is the best,” the old man conceded, and Theo was disappointed at the ease with which he had won the argument. “
But
,” the professor added, “have you never read the Faust tragedy written by Marlowe?”

Theo could have cheered. The old man had not failed to find some comparison, some controversy.
Keep the mind sharp! Remember that we are men, not animals in a cage!
“It can hardly come up to Goethe’s
Faust
!” Theo scoffed. “The comedy, the wit, the moral lesson—”

The professor was silent for a time, and Theo was afraid that he had drifted off to sleep. Then he spoke. “Perhaps before Hitler, I would have agreed with you. As Goethe writes the play, Faust is saved in the end and the demons are given a phantom to carry off to hell—a pretty picture that men may do as they like, that they may sell their souls to Satan, and still God will snatch them from the pit of hell.” His words were more thoughtful and serious than they had been before with any of a hundred different topics.

“That is what our guards think, surely,” Theo said. “That is why Goethe’s
Faust
would be the best version for Germany now.”

“They would be better off, these Nazis to read what Marlowe had written, and tremble.”

“Marlowe is English.”

“The English have a better idea of right and wrong. They still believe in hell, I think, and perhaps that keeps them from brutality. Germany has ceased to believe in hell. And so they create hell for innocent men and have no fear that they themselves will ever face condemnation. I tell you, Jacob,” the professor whispered to Theo, “Germany has sold its soul, and the fire it brings to the world will come back to itself. Hitler is Satan.
Mein Kampf
is his book of black magic. Germany is Faust. And the hour will come when . . .” His voice trailed off.

“When what, Professor?” Theo asked, hoping the old man was not falling to sleep.

“Like the Faust of Marlowe, Germany will watch the clock run out. And there will be no salvation.” Nearly blind eyes stared up into the darkness of the barrack’s rafters. And then the voice of the old man began to read from the pages of a book he couldn’t see, from a script seared upon his brain: