Page 119 of Hell to Pay
I said, “Well, yes, I can play that, of course. I won’t need music for that.”
“Fine,” Joe said. He pulled the chair near me, then went back for the cello and placed it before him with care before picking up the bow, while I slid onto the piano bench and ran through a few chords. My fingers and hands were stronger than ever from all the kneading, but they felt stiff and much less than nimble. “Perhaps the music after all,” I said, “if you have it, Herr Volcker.”
His search gave me a few precious moments to practice my scales. My heart was beating rather hard, and my stomach was a flutter of nerves. How ridiculous, to feel the need to impress Joe! Had I just been showing off back there in the brewery, then? Was that why I’d showed the photo of my parents, with my mother in all her bejeweled splendor and my father with his decorations, and talked of nannies and governesses and cooks? Oh, I hoped not. What would I have become if that were so?
At that moment, Joe said, “You don’t have to be perfect, you know. I wanted to do this because—well, honestly, because my soul’s feeling pretty battered right now.”
“The deposition,” I said.
“I hated him,” he said. “I wanted to kill him.” He’d finished tightening and rosining his bow and was tuning the cello, plucking strings and turning pegs and not looking at me.
“I thought you looked so tired,” I ventured, “in the shop. Almost defeated. I wanted to—” I stopped.
“Yeah?” Joe still wasn’t looking at me, just going on with his tuning. “I’m sure I presented a compelling picture. Enter the hero.”
“How can you say such a thing?” I felt as impatient as I had when reading about the teddy bear Aloysius. “What, I can’t care for a man who has feelings? Who is angered and sickened by injustice? Am I a Nazi, then, in your eyes?”
“Oh,” Joe said. “Well, all right, then.” He looked at me and I looked at him, and suddenly, I laughed and said, “I’m going to decide that you’re right. That neither of us has to be perfect. We’ll justbe,shall we, and not think about it too much? Bach, you know, is excellent for such things.”
He smiled back, and the nervousness folded its wings inside me and went to sleep. And when Herr Volcker brought the music, we played.
The BachMinuet No. 2is a simple piece, a learning piece, one that I’d been playing since I was nine or ten. It isn’t even really by Bach. I won’t say that I performed it adroitly, but once we started, that didn’t matter, because I was listening to Joe.
He played beautifully. On an unfamiliar cello in a cold German shop, he performed the simple piece so crisply. The rich tones of the cello melded with the bell-like ones of the piano, and for those few minutes, I was in a different place and a different time. What did Nazis and bombs and rats andsoldiers have to do with this? This was sunny meadows and bright flowers and the gentle river.
All too soon, it was over—it’s a very short piece—and Joe said, “What do you think? Try another one?”
I found it hard to speak. “Yes,” I said. “Please.”
He said, “Something beautiful, that we can play slowly and enjoy. Herr Volcker, would you haveJesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring?”
“But of course I have it,” the little man said. “And it would give me great pleasure to hear you play it.”
When he brought the music, I looked it over and remembered my tutor telling me—was it only a year ago?—“You have the notes correctly—it is deceptively simple, no? This performance, though, is all in the feeling. You mustexpressthe music. It comes not just from your hands, but from your heart and your soul.” But no matter how I tried, he was never satisfied.
Today, though? Today, with my work-roughened hands, on a battered old upright, I played the notes and rejoiced in them. In their beauty, and in their simplicity. And when Joe joined in, playing with such intensity, such emotion? It was as if everything I’d seen and felt since that February night was here with me now. The pain and the pleasure, the courage and the fear. The ache of loss, and the slow dawning of hope. I could never have put it into words, for it was too deep for that, but my hands could express it, for they were following Joe’s lead. And the exultation of that moment … it brought tears to my eyes.
We played for an hour, one piece after another. The day darkened to gray, and then to black. The shortest day of the year was almost upon us, but after that, the days would lengthen again, and spring would come. We playedAve Maria—Schubert again—and I thought of the organ in theHofkircheat that last Christmas mass,and the boys’ choirwith the voices of angels—how many of those innocent boys were still alive now, or still innocent? But surely Schubert had known of such things, and Bach, too. That was the reason for music, wasn’t it, to give one’s weary soul a place to rest?
At last, I said with reluctance, “I must be getting back. And we’ve kept you, Herr Volcker.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed my concert very much.”
Joe set the cello back in the window with evident reluctance, then turned to Herr Volcker and said, “Do you suppose I can buy this cello and leave it here? I’m in the barracks, and—well, the other guys probably don’t want to hear a sonata. And quite honestly, I want to play with Fräulein Glücksburg again. What do you think?”
Herr Volcker spread his hands. “Of course. It’s a fine old instrument with a wonderfully rich timbre despite its looks—looks are not everything, you know—and you have indeed made it sing.”
“Give me a price, then,” Joe said, “and we’ll have a deal. I only have American dollars, I’m afraid.”
“American dollars,” Herr Volcker said with dignity, “will do very well.”
How different it was, walking home with Joe again! Barely ten minutes, and we didn’t speak for most of it. He held my hand, and it was as if the music was still threading its way around us and through us, as if it tied us together. I said, when we stopped outside my door at last, “That was the happiest I’ve felt since Dresden.” Wonderingly, for that was how I felt.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Yeah.” We were in the shelter of the doorway, out of the snow and wind, and he still had my hand. He didn’t seem to have any more to say than I did, but just looked at me, and I looked back with my heart beating so hard, I felt it in my throat.
He said, “I’d like to kiss you.”
“I haven’t kissed anyone before,” I said. “I don’t know how to do it right.”
