The Savior (13 page)

He thought of all the Eastern European violinists he had met, their Russian and Polish accents lending an air of worldly experience to everything they said about music. He remembered their easy, elegant way of spinning a phrase with that sumptuous “Russian tone.” The violin seemed like a natural extension of their bodies; they had the ability not only to sing but also to speak through their instruments. He remembered the Jewish players from Hungary and Romania, the Gypsy influence, their “parlando-rubato” style. Even the native-born German Jews seemed to have imbibed some of that spontaneous approach with their mothers' milk.

They had centuries of suffering, displacement and adaptation in their blood. It was a potent brew. The German people's much-vaunted purity paled by comparison.

Ernst's story of the untalented pupil with the armband came back to him as he lay there with Marietta snuggled against him. He could almost see the boy's jaw jutting stolidly over the chinrest, the stiff motions of his arms, the back-and-forth straightening and bending of his right elbow failing to achieve any legato between the bow strokes. Gottfried could hear the squareness of his phrasing, the musicality “more appropriate for a marching band” than for a violinist.

Why was he thinking about that boy, he asked himself, why was he seeing and hearing him so vividly?

The wooden phrasing, the dry tone—was that what Ernst heard in his playing, too, even though he sometimes said that Gottfried was gifted?

Do they think we all sound like that?

He shifted abruptly in bed; Marietta stirred, stretched and began to whisper about their future together in Palestine. He found himself wishing she would just speak in a normal voice. No one was there to overhear them.

 

Finally he turned back, drenched, shivering, and made his way toward the hotel. It was getting dark. His audition was at nine o'clock the next morning and he still had some practicing to do. He couldn't shake off the feeling that something bad was going to happen, but he wasn't sure what it would be. His Beethoven Concerto had been getting worse in the past week, not better.

Probably he would just get nervous at the audition and make a fool of himself, and that would be the end of it. Not the worst thing in the world, he told himself. It would be embarrassing, but it didn't really warrant the kind of dread he was feeling. It wasn't as if everything in his future depended on this one audition. Even without a job he could still emigrate to Palestine, find Marietta and marry her. As for his playing, somehow he'd carve out opportunities; they could start playing together again, maybe in public this time, and if he was lucky, music might feel the way it had before.

On the way back to his hotel he wandered into a church, seeking a momentary respite from the wind and pouring rain. It was quiet, dimly lit, if anything even colder than outside. Fortunately there was no service in progress; he wasn't sure why he had strayed in there, but he needed to be alone with his doubts.

The soles of his shoes made a wet, splattering sound on the stone floor. Moving slowly down the aisle, he heard the organist practicing. A Bach chorale filtered softly through the stillness, punctuated now and then by gusts of rain hitting the stained-glass windows: “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” wafting across two centuries, beckoning to him from his childhood, oblivious to the Nazi rally that had taken place that afternoon just a few steps away.

“Music is my religion,” he had told his parents when he stopped coming to church with them at the age of eighteen. They didn't understand; to them music was entertainment, and whatever spiritual dimensions it was capable of could only be revealed only in the service of faith. “What I experience alone when I play the Chaconne by Bach means more to me than sermons and ritual.” They had shaken their heads in disapproval.

As he approached the altar, he realized that if music was his faith, he no longer believed in himself as a musician. For years he had thought that love and music would replace religion in his life. But if that were true, why was he going through all this indecision, all this doubt about the path he'd chosen with Marietta? Now he wondered if he had been overconfident in his proclamation to his parents. When he stopped coming to church, didn't that leave a void that he simply hadn't acknowledged until now?

Then he saw the life-size wooden figure on the Cross staring down at him. He took a step back. The sculpted Jesus, eyes half-closed in pain and resignation, filled him with a fear he couldn't understand.

Most people come here for solace, he thought, glancing at a hymnal lying open on a pew. He remembered playing the
St. Matthew Passion
a few months earlier with tears in his eyes, finally giving himself up to the story of the Crucifixion, with all its imagery and symbolism, permitting himself the luxury of faith only in the temple of great art. How uplifted he had felt!

He looked up again at the suffering face, which seemed to look back with reproach, but gently enough to hold out the possibility of forgiveness. It occurred to him that he might try to pray. He could see himself kneeling, asking for guidance at this turning point in his life, pleading for a strength he knew he didn't have on his own. But the problem was that he could see himself doing this as if he were watching another person. It would be like acting a scene from a play.

The music had stopped; the wind had abated somewhat. The rain had quieted down to a faint drizzle against the walls and windows of the church. In the silence he felt alone, more alone than he had ever felt, and suddenly it was too much to bear. He shuddered and walked quickly down the aisle toward the exit. Before leaving he turned around and looked at the crucifix once more, relieved that those eyes hadn't followed him.

Maybe I should think about coming to church again, he said to himself, and wondered what it would be like to attend church in Palestine, married to a Jewish woman.

 

The next morning he woke up early after a night of fitful sleep and a recurring dream in which he couldn't get to a concert on time. He found himself on the wrong train, got off and rushed across the platform to the right one, a number 3 in the dream, only to discover after a few stops that it was going in the wrong direction. After retracing his route, he finally got off at the right stop and hurried out of the station. As he was getting close to the hall where he had to play, he began to relax, his shoulders loosened up and he even felt a certain buoyancy, a carefree lightness in his limbs. Then he looked down at his hands and saw they were empty. He had left his violin on the train!

Totally unrefreshed, he pulled himself out of bed and managed a few unsteady steps across the room. There was a mirror just above the washstand. Usually he thought of himself as a rather handsome man, but he was shocked at the way he looked this morning. His eyes were smaller than usual, sunken, squinting, and there were dark circles beneath them. The wings of his nose looked bulbous and fleshy. His whole face seemed bloated, out of focus, as if he had a hangover. He turned away from the mirror in disgust.

He had no appetite, but forced himself to go to the breakfast room for some sustenance, to get some strength. His right hand shook as he poured himself a cup of coffee. If it was shaky now, he wondered, how would it be in two hours at the audition?

Why was he reacting this way? He sometimes got nervous, but never like this. Once again he tried to reason the fear away. He reminded himself that the audition shouldn't be a test of how well he played in general, but simply a step toward building a future with the woman he loved. Even if he didn't play his best—that was already a foregone conclusion—it could still go well enough for him to get a job in the violin section.

But such reasoning couldn't calm him down.

It was much too early to practice in the hotel. He had time to kill, so he decided to walk to the Jewish Academy, where the auditions were being held. Normally he would have taken a tram or a taxi. It was a long way and it was probably freezing outside, but at least that freezing rain had stopped, and he thought a vigorous walk might do him some good. He would still get to the academy early enough to warm up for half an hour.

Again he walked along the river, only in the opposite direction from the previous day. He had to navigate around huge puddles with patches of ice, and got aggravated when some mud spattered his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers. After getting splashed a couple of times he suddenly stopped caring, and instead of looking at the ground he looked straight ahead, westward along the river and at the buildings he was approaching.

I just want some peace, some freedom, he said to himself. He began to think of Palestine as he had pictured it in the Bible—which he hadn't read in years—and strained against his chilly surroundings to imagine palm trees and fragrant breezes. He thought of Jesus' betrayal and capture in the garden, and Pilate's equivocations and the Crucifixion. The words “Agnus Dei” ran through his mind along with some intricate, tortuous melodies from the alto aria in Bach's B Minor Mass, which he had recently played. He remembered several passages in the Old Testament about sacrificial lambs.

He thought about scapegoats, and the Jews of today, and then Marietta. It came as a shock to him that he'd hardly thought of her all morning. He was supposed to see her at his audition in less than an hour, the audition that would unite their lives. This was the woman he had slept with for the first time a few days earlier, and had dreamt of sleeping with for months, but somehow he couldn't picture her body now. He could remember it only through words: he told himself that she was slight of build, had firm skin as well as a womanly softness, and her body seemed to store up great energy, whether she was standing still, playing the piano or lying in his bed. But when he tried to
see
her body—after all, it had been early afternoon, and the sunlight was filtering through the curtains of his bedroom window—he drew a blank, and when he persisted in his effort, he began to see Ilse's statuesque body instead. He wanted to banish Ilse from his mind but couldn't, and when he tried at least to see Marietta's face, that too was a great effort. He could remember the dark hair, the thick eyebrows, the full red lips, or rather could remember that she possessed those features, but couldn't put them together into a recognizable face.

Frightened, he walked faster and was glad to see the building that housed the Jewish Academy not far away. But then—later, he wouldn't have been able to describe what happened, couldn't remember the exact sequence of his thoughts—he began again to imagine a sacrificial lamb with a knife at its throat and a basin to catch the blood. And a scapegoat cast out into the wilderness to ward off the wrath of God. An innocent creature on whose head a priest would pile the transgressions of an entire people: the Jews may have devised that method to cleanse themselves of sin, but it had been turned against them. They had become an outcast nation, scattered across the globe, blamed for everything real and imagined that had gone wrong in the last two thousand years, from “ritual murder” and the most recent economic depression all the way back to the death of Christ.

He tried to picture Judas, tried to imagine what was going through his head when he made that deal with the High Priests, and how he felt later, when he brought them to the garden with their soldiers and kissed Jesus so they would know whom to arrest. What drove him to do it? Was it jealousy—of the other disciples, or of Jesus Himself? An inability to accept Jesus' teachings, or a self-contempt so deep that he couldn't allow himself to belong to the community of the blessed and partake of salvation? Or was it simply that he had no choice in the matter, that he had been preordained for this hideous but necessary role in the history of the human spirit?

What would he have done in Judas' place? Gottfried asked himself. Would he have been able to resist such a powerful impulse to betray someone who loved him?

He thought again of the crucifix in the church the night before. He pictured it outside, up on a hill—as he'd seen the Crucifix in countless paintings—surrounded by a cluster of robed figures and Roman soldiers in breastplates and helmets. Only it wasn't Jesus hanging on the Cross, it was…a woman? He felt a twinge in his stomach when he realized it was Marietta he was imagining up there. Yes, he could finally see her naked body, but God, that wasn't how he'd wanted to see it when he was trying so hard to bring her into his mind's eye. He wrestled with that horrible crucifix, fought to push it away as he rushed along. Finally he succeeded: the figure nailed to the cross was no longer the woman he had claimed to love. There was no voluptuousness in that body—it was emaciated, bloody, faceless.

As he struggled with those images, he passed the academy without realizing it and walked on as if in a trance. The next time he looked at his watch it was nine o'clock, but he was outside the city limits. A church bell was ringing. He turned around and could barely make out the academy in the distance.

At first he thought of running back—maybe there was still time to rush in and try to explain. This had never happened to him before; he'd never been late to a rehearsal or an audition. Whenever he had dreamt of missing a concert or being unprepared, it had made him terribly anxious. But as the wind buffeted him on that river path, he felt oddly detached from any sense of urgency, and, for the first time in weeks, almost at peace with himself.