The Savior (7 page)

H
e first met her in a theory and solfège class at the Hochschule, in the fall of '34. He hadn't noticed her yet by the second session—she was sitting in the back of the room—but when the professor called on her to sight-sing a Bach chorale, she responded with a bell-like voice. Not the trained voice of a singing student. It didn't have that kind of fullness, or the self-consciousness of trying to produce a perfect sound, or the other kind of self-consciousness that most of the instrumentalists had because their voices sounded so bad. No, it was a naturally beautiful voice, light, transparent, perfectly in tune. But it wasn't only the sound that made it distinctive. The notes seemed more connected when she sang; there was an intuitive inner logic tying them together.

At the sound of her voice, Gottfried turned around—he was not the only one—and saw a face just as striking. Not conventionally beautiful, at least not in the sense he was used to. She was small and pale, with thick eyebrows, prominent cheekbones, and dark curly hair pulled back from her forehead, which was high and broad. Her eyes were black, the kind of black that made you look deep into them because it was hard to distinguish the iris from the pupil.

Someone told him that she was a pianist, which delighted him because he needed a sonata partner for a chamber music class. When she accepted his offer to work together, he was overjoyed, though he still had no idea how she played. In the conservatory everyone was sure to be pegged with a label very quickly, but she was a first-year student who, it seemed, had arrived only recently from somewhere in the East. No one knew her playing yet. In any case, her voice seemed to guarantee a natural musicality.

They started playing together a few days later; her piano tone had the same limpid clarity as her voice. She didn't have tremendous power, which was something of a problem, because they were working on a Brahms sonata. Her hands were too small and delicate for some of the stretches and awkward chord formations in Brahms' piano writing. She made plenty of mistakes, but they were both learning the piece for the first time. The mistakes were usually just wrong notes, yet they weren't clumsily played; it wasn't a question of faulty rhythm or a lack of responsiveness to the violin part. No, her rhythm was superb, he thought, and her sense of tempo much more instinctive than his. She never banged, even when she was groping for the notes, so her mistakes rarely sounded unmusical. Besides, he had enough to attend to in his own part of the sonata, and he wasn't a perfect player either.

It would have been hard for Gottfried to explain this, and perhaps he was never objective about Marietta, but the lightness of her tone never seemed superficial to him, not even in the Brahms D Minor Sonata. Maybe it wouldn't have projected to the last row of a large hall, but she would have drawn the audience into her orbit. There was a quiet, hidden power in this small woman; when she spoke to him in the school cafeteria, eliding the words in curious un-German patterns with her Romanian accent, people sitting nearby tended to stop their conversations and listen.

After working with her for a few weeks, he had to go on tour for a month as concertmaster of a chamber orchestra. This month seemed very long to him, but at least it was filled with work: in addition to the tour schedule, he had some important recitals to prepare for the coming spring. He decided to ask her to play them with him. But he didn't want to make the offer in a letter or on the telephone; he would wait till he got back to school and ask her in person. He could have been businesslike about the recitals in a telegram, but this collaboration meant more to him than a business arrangement, and he wanted it to mean more for her, too.

They were supposed to be just friends and colleagues, but he missed her so much that it scared him. During this month anything could happen. She might meet someone else; whatever feelings she had begun to have for him, if any, might evaporate.

He wasn't inexperienced with women. Every day on that tour he asked himself what had kept him from taking her hand in his, from telling her how he felt. But he knew the answer: sometimes women had accused him of rushing them, so this time he was afraid to push things too fast. The attraction between them should develop naturally, he had thought, and he hadn't found the right moment to talk to her about anything but music before he left.

The day he returned to Cologne, he had a few hours to kill before his rehearsal with Marietta. Too impatient and nervous to practice, he left the Hauptbahnhof and headed toward the Old City. He needed to take his mind off the possibility that she might not share his feelings.

With renewed awe he gazed up at the spires of the Cathedral as he walked in its massive shadow. He stopped for a minute and began to feel the calm emanating from the majestic structure, the quiet but overwhelming authority of things that stand for centuries and do not change.

Suddenly a side door opened and three SA officers emerged, smartly dressed in crisp brown shirts. Planting their considerable bulk in front of each portal, they stood as firm and stalwart as tree trunks in a jarring modern counterpoint to the carved saints and prophets staring down from the gables.

What were they doing in the Dom? he thought. Surely they hadn't come there to pray—they would look to the Party for spiritual guidance. Did they still attend services out of habit, because they'd been brought up as good Catholics? No, it seemed more likely that they had been monitoring the sermon for any kind of subversive content.

Latter-day shepherds, he thought, watchful of their flock.

A thin stream of worshippers trickled past them. It was chilly: the men and women leaving the shelter of the Dom braced themselves against a gust of wind. The men pulled up the collars of their raincoats, clapped their hats onto their heads and drew the brims down toward their eyes. The women hurriedly buttoned their woolen overcoats as they passed the Brownshirts without looking at them. Yes, already an accepted fixture of daily life. Or were all those women simply too shy to look directly at such robust standard-bearers of German manhood?

Their high heels made a dry, clacking sound against the pavement as they hurried off toward homes and shops. Gottfried closed his eyes for a moment before continuing on his way. All around him, the footsteps of male and female churchgoers combined in a percussive chorus that made him think of teeth chattering in the wind.

He was relieved when he got to the Altstadt, one of his favorite haunts. He didn't want to think about the Brownshirts, not when he was going to see Marietta in a couple of hours. Most of the streets in the area were too narrow for cars and trams, so it was very quiet. Few people were out walking; it had just struck noon. Tourists were relaxing in cafés and restaurants. Shopkeepers were enjoying sandwiches and beer with their families in the back rooms of the shops. It gave him a childlike pleasure to imagine that he had this storybook part of the town to himself.

He strolled through the familiar winding streets down to the Rhine embankment and back up again, and even found a few charming cul-de-sacs and alleyways he'd never seen before. He loved the feel of the cobblestones under his feet. The wind had died down, but it was still a cool, crisp autumn day. The sun highlighted the pinks and light blues and greens of the old houses. Outside each shop hung a wooden sign proclaiming the trade practiced within.

After half an hour of pleasantly aimless wandering, he realized with a start that Marietta had been absent from his thoughts since he had reached the Altstadt. He had grown so accustomed to daydreaming about her whenever he had any time to himself—practicing, eating, strolling through the streets and parks of cities he'd visited on tour—that it seemed strange to become completely absorbed in something else. A sense of self-preservation made him feel good about this momentary distraction, this proof that his emotions and enthusiasms could occasionally wander.

He began to worry again about exactly how to propose the concert tour. The problem was, he couldn't picture her now without imagining his arms around her, his lips pressed against her neck, and he had decided that today he must let her know how he felt. He didn't know which to do first—offer to concertize together or tell her she meant more to him than just a recital partner.

He passed a newspaper stand where the
Völkischer Beobachter
—that upstart Nazi rag, as he had once called it—was displayed more prominently than the respectable
Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
Then, turning a corner, he found himself in front of the Goldener Adler. He hadn't been there since the unpleasant conversation with Ernst more than a year earlier.

He hesitated at the entrance to the café, but the familiar smells of roasted meats and potato pancakes drew him in. He'd had nothing to eat yet that day; during his train trip he had had no appetite. Suddenly he was quite hungry. As soon as he stepped in, he felt the warmth emanating from the kitchen and from plates steeped with hot food as waiters hurried past. The café was crowded; almost every table was taken, but he was lucky enough to find a small one in a corner, being cleared by a waiter. As he made his way toward it, zigzagging around tables and chairs, he picked up bits and pieces of several animated conversations.

He ordered chicken broth and potato pancakes with applesauce. He'd gotten slightly chilled outside and was shivering. After a few spoonfuls of soup, he began to feel warm inside and was grateful when he felt the warmth spread to his hands and feet. His fingers, which had been clenched around the handle of his violin case, began to loosen up. He wanted to play well at the rehearsal with Marietta; he was afraid that his nervousness about talking to her would spill over to his playing. It was one thing if his voice would shake; nobody expected him to be a polished speaker. But he couldn't afford to sound shaky on his instrument, not today.

He looked over at the table where he had sat with Ernst the last time, and began to notice the other diners. There was the usual assortment of university students, laborers, shopkeepers and old men dining alone at small tables. Only the old men and a few students were wearing ties; the students had loosened theirs. Despite the ambient noise, which would have sapped his concentration, some of those young men were leaning over books that lay open next to their plates; they seemed to be absorbed in study while they ate. At a few of the larger tables, the plates had been cleared away and card games were in progress. Clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke hovered in the air.

At the biggest table in the middle of the room, a dozen men were leaning forward, resting their chins or cheeks on their fists or between two outstretched fingers. They were listening attentively to one man at the far end of the table. Gottfried couldn't see him well from his seat, so while he was waiting for his potato pancakes, he walked over to get an idea of what the man was talking about. The crush of tables, chairs, waiters and customers was such that he had to get within a few feet of the speaker to be able to see him. And then he froze.

The object of everyone's attention was a thickset Bavarian in lederhosen and a green feather hat, which he hadn't bothered to take off for his lunch. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing enormous hairy forearms and pudgy hands, which jabbed the air in front of his bulbous nose whenever he made a point. But what jumped out at Gottfried was the swastika armband on each sleeve, just below the shoulder. His chair was pushed back from the table and he was standing, but he was so short and round that Gottfried hadn't noticed the man was on his feet until he was practically next to him. He even caught a drop or two of spittle as the fellow jacked up the pitch of his oratory.

It was the usual stuff: International conspiracies against Germany. The unfairness of Versailles. The inflation and food shortages of the twenties as well as the more recent Depression were all engineered by a cartel of banks in the hands of the Jews. He ranted about the Communists. And the need to rearm. To hell with the League of Nations and the treaties that tied our hands.

Only half-listening to the tirade, Gottfried stared at the swastika, that ancient symbol that the Nazis had appropriated and plastered all over the country. He thought of Ernst's pupil—a mere boy who probably didn't know the full implications of his party affiliation. But this middle-aged café demagogue seemed to know all the formulas and catchwords by rote, as if he'd mouthed them at street corners and in barrooms for years. A tried-and-true member of the New Order, and probably a veteran of a few street battles, too. Gottfried imagined those fat fingers curled around a club as the bully and his friends charged into a demonstration of socialists.

Gottfried turned away from him and scanned the group of listeners. Sailors, railway workers proud of their new Reichsbahn uniforms, housepainters with smears of white, gray and pink on their hands and faces and stray chips of plaster in their hair, all nodding their heads with enthusiasm whenever the speaker emphasized a point by pounding his fist on the table. Gottfried looked around at the other tables and found to his relief that this oaf hadn't yet reached a wider audience. The better-dressed, more educated clientele seemed to be ignoring him, but some nearby customers intent on enjoying a tranquil meal glanced over the tops of their newspapers at the speaker and shook their heads with irritation. Apparently he was aware of this; once in a while he aimed his oratory and his spittle in their direction. And then he noticed Gottfried.

“What are you staring at?”

“Nothing. I…I'm just waiting for them to bring my food.”