“Then what does matter?”
“That we were fighting a final battle, Isabel. The last battle of the ancient German dream of heroism.”
“Bewegung!”
The command rang up and down the corridors and staircases of the old building the Jews were using as a hospital. There was to be a concert. A concert hall had to be made ready. The attic here was enormous. Boots on the stone floor. Shots fired merely for the noise. Beds overturned. Cries of surprise, fear. Those who were strong enough walked to the street themselves, some leaned on others. Most, too weak to stand, were simply dragged outside, where friends and relatives were beginning to gather, no one understanding what was happening, why the hospital was being emptied. The patients stretched their arms out and relatives ran to help their kin, acquaintances to help those they recognized or thought they recognized. The Commandant had mobilized all available transport: the three tractors and their twelve towed wagons, the two trucks, the sixteen farm carts, the forty-eight horse-drawn Jewish hearses, and a number of wheelchairs. But these were not enough and many of the patients simply lay down on the stones or wandered around dazed or were led away by relatives who themselves did not know what to do. Meanwhile the guards went up into the huge attic and brought down the heaped-up coffins and threw them into the truck that carried corpses to the crematorium. New corpses no one knew about were discovered, and Franz, looking on, smelled the stink of death among the living stinks of men and women who no longer could smell themselves. He walked toward a child and an old man dead two days or five days or a week. But not Ulrich. Ulrich refused. And one night Ulrich disappeared. In about two hours the attic was cleared and Franz remained there alone beneath the immense roof supported by perpendicular beams. He walked through the empty rooms where there had never been anything that could burn, neither mattress nor blanket nor pillow.
“The order has been executed. You can transform it into a theater now.”
He will tell you that the Scriptures speak of the time of love and the time of death but forget the time of waiting. And one night, returning, he reached the dirt road that led to the prison — he embraced you, Isabel, and told you twice that Ulrich did not want to wait — one night returning from the railroad he was overtaken by a convoy of seven trucks that moved heavily in the muddy, deeply rutted road and again and again stalled and guards and prisoners alike shouted and ran to help the soldiers who got out and pushed, sinking in the mud up to the tops of their boots. He jumped on the running board of the first truck to guide it, for he knew the road. A young corporal wearing glasses was the driver and beside him sat a sergeant with a machine gun on his knees. The corporal was still in his teens and his blue eyes were made huge by the thickness of his glasses. Franz told him here to the right, here swing off the road altogether and cut across the field, now back to the road but hold to the left, here right again. The corporal never looked at him. He drove with concentration and seriousness. He was doing his duty and doing it well. Maybe at other times he cracked jokes with his companion, but not now. It was certain that only a few months ago he had gone to the Volkschule and studied calculus or world literature. Maybe he had liked music. Schoolboys were sometimes taken to hear concerts or operas. Or at least that was how it had once been.
I promised her that I would come back. But the time of returning was not our time yet. Our time was only the time of waiting. Don’t yell, Franz. I hear you.
He knew that an order had been issued: the musicians and singers at the camp and in the ghetto city were to remain. They were not to be shipped off to the death camps, they would remain and be saved. Maestro Professor Schachter would be allowed to continue his musical efforts, and although the children would have to depart, others would arrive to replace them in the child’s opera. The musicians and singers would remain. Though they could, of course, if they wished, climb into the cattle cars with their relatives and accompany them. The children, the orphans, and the widows were being sent away simply for humanitarian reasons: there would be fewer people now and all would live better.
Now, possibly, the theater in his home town had been bombed out. What city was he from? Franz did not know, for the corporal had not spoken. And beside him sat the sergeant, silent, cradling the machine gun. Franz said nothing to him. To the left. Careful now. More to the left, there’s a deep hole, a well of a hole. And after the war they would all be able to go back to their cities and towns and live normal lives again. The Wallenstein Gardens were awaiting his return. The musicians would be in their accustomed places beneath the baroque portal. She would be waiting for him too, sitting in the same row as always. The great German Requiem of Brahms would begin. Franz and the corporal laughed. The sergeant looked at him sourly.
“Why don’t you keep this road in better shape?”
“The railroad is more important.”
“Don’t you have workers enough for both?”
“No. This is a very small camp.”
“Bah. And you, what the hell do you do here?”
“I’m the architect assigned to the camp.”
“Bah.”
The sergeant laughed and the face of the young corporal was motionless as the floodlights at the corners of the fortress glinted on his glasses and blinded him. He raised a hand to his eyes and braked.
“What are you stopping for?” the sergeant yelled.
The bumper of the truck behind hit them. Someone swore. The corporal said nothing. A shower of sparks showed that the current of the electric fence had been turned off so that the men in black could open the gate. Isabel, why are you moving away from me? Here, come back.
“This is where you get off,” said the sergeant to Franz. Then to the corporal, “Chin up now, man. Remember you’re a soldier.”
The corporal adjusted his glasses, stiffened his head, and smiled. Franz swung down and the trucks moved past him. Slowly he walked into the fortress. Voices of command, repeated shouts. And a hidden sound of singing, buried but penetrating. He asked a passing officer what the singing was and the officer said he didn’t know. Another officer, walking swiftly by, said that it was the Jews practicing in the stockrooms and cellars. The Commandant had given them orders to sing, to rehearse an opera or something. The Jews that had been recruited by Raphael Schachter: Germans, Austrians, Dutchmen, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, the whole caboodle. As Franz walked to the side and listened, their voices rose:
Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus
The loudspeaker:
“Achtung!”
The echo, “Achtuuung!”
“Take your places!”
In groups of five the guards ran to the rear of the trucks, which were still moving slowly with motors roaring and exhausts open. The trucks’ headlights went out. Dogs were barking furiously. The small band, standing on a mound beyond the trucks, a band made up of six women prisoners, began to play again. The director moved her arms, her gray baton, and the Merry Widow Waltz began, two violins, a flute, a double bass, cymbals. The loudspeaker:
“Stand by. Open the doors.”
And she would have told him if they had ever spoken with each other again that in the beginning Maestro Raphael Schachter had only two pianos, one provided by the president of the Jewish community, the other the one used in the fortress to accompany movies with music. He needed four soloists, a choir of a hundred and fifty voices, and as many instruments and musicians as was possible. The instruments appeared: the cello that had been hidden in the barn in the farm cart beneath straw, the cache of orchestral instruments that had been concealed behind the bricked-up wall, the violins and violas of the two old men, the double basses that had been tossed aside in a storeroom among top hats and dress forms and glass paperweights. Schachter gathered his soloists, his instrumentalists, and his choir, feeling safe and protected by the Commandant’s orders that the musicians and performers were to remain, were not to be interfered with. But when the children and old folks were packed off east in cattle cars, three of his soloists elected to go with them. Every convoy that departed took performers away, every convoy that arrived brought replacements who had to be trained and rehearsed. At one time he was missing twenty-four voices from his choir and twelve musicians from his orchestra. Again and again he had to start over from the beginning.