Playing for Time (15 page)

I knew a lot of things about Alma and yet I made no progress in getting to know her; she remained inaccessible, possibly because I couldn’t feel those bursts of pity that might, in the circumstances, have brought her closer to me.

On this evening, she talked to me about herself in an almost methodical manner. I got the lot: childhood, adolescence, professional life. I had the impression that she was giving me a recital on herself, a solo there in her room, a monkish place which suited her to perfection, whose rigour and bareness she hadn’t tried to soften in the least. Nothing was pinned to the white walls; everything was arranged in a military fashion, clean, tidy, cold. It was the room of a mother superior; it wasn’t Auschwitz Alma was blocking out, but the world.

Seated on her chair while I gently massaged her head, neck, and temples, she gazed at her hands in a way I’d often observed—beautiful, vigorous hands which lay almost calmly on her knees. Then she began to talk, and her voice became gradually warmer, less harsh and metallic. “My mother always said that she listened to music or played night and day when she was pregnant with me, so that her child would be imbued with it. She wanted a boy and had everything ready, his room, his music, everything. Even his first little violin was there, lying in the red velvet cradle of its case. Everyone in the family assumed she would have a boy, and that he would be a musician. An uncle had prophesied his coming and nobody doubted it. But hopes diminished from year to year. I arrived very late, and I was a girl. My mother watched me grow and didn’t even think that I was pretty. I understood everything that was said around me. The bitterness and contempt I met with everywhere made me miserable. I felt responsible for the dirty trick I’d played on them: I wasn’t the genius they’d hoped for, only a very gifted and terribly shy little girl—but I’d sworn to become their pride and joy. I was gawky and clumsy, driven to desperation by my gangling legs and long hands.” She paused for a moment to consider them. “Later, I changed my mind: I think they’re my best feature. Very much alone and living such an unusual life for a child, I naturally had no friends. I played music all day long; for hours my mother would sit beside me, in front of the metronome, just listening to me. All my days were the same, all years identical. Except for one, when I entered the Conservatoire. I got my prize, and no one thought to congratulate me, it was so taken for granted. The contrary would have been a scandal which neither I nor my parents could have conceived of. From that day onward, I spent all my time on tours and concerts. One morning in my hotel room in Karlsruhe, combing my hair in front of the oval mirror, I realized that more than twenty years of my life had gone by—they were lying there beside me, shut up inside my violin, locked in that black case. I was a young girl and I had no lover; I felt so different from other young girls that I didn’t even dare look at boys. That morning I wept for all those things I didn’t know: tenderness, friendship, love. Then I saw that it was just a brief romantic urge; it was pointless to cry, because music gave me everything. If I was to devote myself solely to music, my life would have to be utterly uneventful. I gave more and more concerts on the Continent. I wanted to get to know Paris; it became an obsession. I learned French, which I found easy-musicians are gifted for languages—but the war put an end to all that!”

The life that Alma was recounting so blankly and yet so bitterly had certainly been monotonous. I too loved music, but with me it seethed, exploded, and blossomed. It was a flower, a firework, flaming within me, white-hot. It was love, passion! It carried off my life, inflamed it and transformed it, but it never demanded any sacrifice; the offerings I made it were the first fruits of my new passions and my dead loves, which it magnified! Alma’s pathetically loveless youth struck me as miserable and yet, strangely, it didn’t move me. Vague and distant noises reached us from behind the door of the room; we might have been in a hospital or a convent.

Alma gave a throaty little laugh, and suddenly I felt a sense of closeness.

“I did marry, though. One evening, when I was just back from a tour, I met a pupil of my father’s, a well-known violinist and a very good one. We talked music for several days and then, one afternoon when we were taking tea at Krauzer’s, he talked to me of love.”

She fell silent, her face expressionless.

“Were you surprised, were you pleased?”

“Surprised, yes. It was unexpected.”

“Was he right for you? What was he like?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, physically.”

“It seems to me now that I never looked at him, I began to hate him so soon. When he was playing he had a lot of presence, of style. He was dark, with rather long hair—I don’t like that sort of thing—and a very pronounced Adam’s apple.”

“His eyes, mouth, hands?”

“He had grey eyes. I don’t remember his mouth. And his hands were good for the violin.”

It seemed impossible that she should have noticed nothing, felt nothing. I insisted:

“Did you like him?”

“Like him… I don’t know.”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, did he love you?”

Clearly, my questions annoyed and disconcerted her. Wasn’t that what she wanted of me? Then what did she want?

“How could I know? He was poor, he knew that I really had something to offer him. By marrying me, thanks to my father’s privileged position, he’d find any number of doors open to him. How could I say no? I let myself be pushed into it. In my family, girls have always obeyed, it’s an established custom which I respect. This marriage pleased my family. My mother thought I was lucky—I wasn’t pretty, I wasn’t young any longer—and I thought she was right.”

This passivity she was vaunting annoyed me and once again I felt as remote as ever. What could she have expected from this marriage of convenience?

After a pause she continued: “I think I felt grateful to my husband. I was surprised that he agreed to marry me and it made me humble.”

That block of pride: humble!

“With him, I felt physically and intellectually inferior, I knew so little. I hardly read at all. Politics didn’t interest me; that seemed men’s business. I felt I was just a dead weight for him to drag rather gloomily along. We didn’t talk much, only about everyday matters. I don’t think we had anything to say to one another. Nothing changed when we married: we lived with my parents. The only difference was that I no longer went on tour alone. It was then that our relationship started to deteriorate: as we were both soloists, my husband became simply a rival.”

Her nostrils flaring, Alma was trembling with indignation and retrospective anger. That was her real nature, which only music could reveal.

“Can you imagine, this musical upstart wanted to outstep me, Alma Rose. If the newspapers said more about me than him, he’d count the lines and say meanly: ”If you weren’t Rose’s daughter, you’d have nothing; it’s all because you’re Mahler’s niece. What a family! What a stumbling block for the young!“ If the applause for me was louder, he’d make terrible scenes. He’d say I’d paid people to applaud. What do you call that?”

“A claque.”

That set off a new train of thought.

“He slapped me too, once, and that I really couldn’t take. It’s fair enough in work, one can accept it, but not just out of the blue. I hadn’t deserved it. We had increasingly violent scenes.
Ach mein Gott, mein Gott!”

Alma twisted her hands and started pacing up and down the room again, her hair escaping the discipline she imposed upon it; she was almost beautiful in her desperate rage.

“Imagine him ranting, always ill-humoured, saying cruel things, that I had no talent, that I played like a machine, drily, with no soul, no—” She fell silent, looking for words, then went on regardless: “—without those things in the stomach. He dared to say that my playing wasn’t sensual!”

I could have told her that that wasn’t true, but I was silent. These memories were costing her dear, but she continued grimly: “He was so violent that I was afraid. Divorce wouldn’t have been possible in our family. One morning, in the train coming back to Berlin, there was a particularly stormy scene: he decided to forbid me to play in public. He lowered the window, took my violin, and hurled it out! I threw myself at the window—I was out of my mind—and I looked: Its case had opened and my violin had fallen on the embankment, shattered like a body in a bombardment… my poor violin!”

She had tears in her eyes; it was as though she were talking about a child. Her jaws tensed, contracted, she clenched her fists. “I said to him: ”That’s it.“ He shouted and threatened, but I left him, and that was that.”

She sat down, calmer, and reflected.

“It was a very cruel experience. Perhaps I might have thought that men were not for me had it not been that in Amsterdam, at the beginning of the war, I met a very nice man, older than I. Everything was different with him, he did me good. He liked to hear me play, he encouraged me. He’d listen to me for hours-how he’d listen! His love warmed me like a thick coat. I felt very safe in his arms. With him I realized that at thirty-six I was as ignorant as a savage. I don’t know if what I felt for him was love, perhaps it was more a very great tenderness. I think love could have come with time, if I could have divorced and married him. I cried when we were separated…”

Was Alma’s pride perhaps just a facade? If she had given herself over to love, would her heart have opened to others?

“But why did you separate?”

“I had been arrested as a Jew, certainly denounced, though I don’t know by whom. There’s a lot of jealousy in our profession. It was a shock to me that it should have happened that way.”

She crossed her long legs, too thin but still very beautiful, her hands round her knees, and leant backwards slightly.

“I hardly knew we were Jewish. For me, it was just a religion, not even a philosophy, different from that of other Germans. In my family, which had always been German, no one ever talked about it or thought about it. We thought like Germans. My father, who was first violinist in the Berlin Opera orchestra, had a privileged position, and the coming of the Führer didn’t harm us at all.” She gave a bitter little smile. “We were part of a minority that the Nazis kept for themselves. My father’s quartet was well-known throughout Europe. Stories of arrests and deportation seemed things in another world. They didn’t affect me or even interest me. Only music counted—I’d never had anything else. And my arrest cut me off from it completely. Losing music, I lost everything…”

Cooped up in that room, she reminded me of a trapped, quivering thoroughbred desperate at the knowledge that never again would he gallop drunkenly towards the winner’s post amid the crowds and the sweet smell of success.

Alma the Kapo

I had a letter from Leon, my beau from Drancy, a few words on a nasty little piece of crumpled torn paper. This morning, ever since she’d woken up, Pani Founia had been making a tremendous uproar; incomprehensibly, her mattress was wet. She spat out insults, soliloquized, called Tchaikowska and her slave, Marila, as witnesses.

The affair had begun in a farcical vein but threatened to become tragic any minute. Founia proclaimed that if the filthy swine who had done it didn’t own up in five minutes, it wouldn’t be Alma she’d complain to, but someone much higher up!

“Five by five!” shrieked the abominable pair; like a general, Founia passed in front of us, stopped and spluttered at us full in the face in a Polish that was incomprehensible even to those who spoke the language. I was worried for Florette, the intended victim, when Halina grabbed Founia by the arm and showed her the ceiling. Heavily displacing her gelatinous mass, Founia went towards her bed, lifted her head, and began swearing again, but it no longer concerned us. Her wrath was now directed at the roof, which had had the temerity to allow rain to seep through onto her bed.

We’d hardly finished our soup when a runner announced the imminent arrival of a workman. He turned out to be a tall fellow with glasses (which was unusual, because people with poor sight weren’t exactly cherished around these parts), impressively thin, which caused Jenny to say: “He can walk about on the roof with no danger of falling through; the only trouble is, he’ll be carried off by the first breath of wind.”

Dreamily, he examined the woodwork, nodded his head, and gazed around him with naive, shortsighted eyes.

“He seems to be looking for someone,” commented Big Irene.

“Well, with his eyesight, he’s unlikely to find her!”

Male deportees were forbidden to speak to us, and Founia was mounting inexorable guard. He climbed to the top of the
coja
and began to examine the woodwork.

Rehearsal time was approaching, and there was a certain amount of bustle. Suddenly Anny said: “That fellow’s got something for you—you’ll have to find a way to go up to him.”

It would take just five seconds; I crept up to him and he slipped me a bit of paper and a murmured name: “From Leon; it needs an answer.”

Leon had written: “Fania, I’m here in the camp and I’m making out all right, working in the factory, and I haven’t forgotten you. Don’t forget I’m here and that you still have your place in my heart. I found out that you’re in the music block. Your boyfriend from Drancy who loves you, Leon.”

Poor devil, what could he have done for me? I could just see his friendly Paris ragamuffin grin. He’d been thin as a rail, he must be virtually invisible now! We’d probably never have been really close—his mad gesture of slipping into the convoy at Drancy had been quite astounding. He must have hoped that we would travel together, that we’d make love, that we’d keep each other warm; a boy’s dream in a man’s head, an action from another era, the age of princesses, heroic vagabonds, magnificent adventurers. They knew how to do things in the poorer Paris suburbs. I felt a rush of sudden warmth and wrote back quickly, telling him that I was fine, that it was bearable, that I was delighted with his note, that I needed affection. I sent my love. How I would have liked to be able to bandy more words with him on that subject.