She looked at me, a pleading question in her eyes.
"The police would not have changed their minds," I said. "To them, this would look like a genuine suicide note, especially as you say the writing is identical to your husband's."
"How can that be if he was murdered? The writing, I mean?"
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "Writing can be forged. It can take an expert eye to tell the difference between what's authentic and what's not."
She nodded, but with a slight hesitation, as if a flicker of doubt had crept into her mind. Or perhaps I was imagining it, because I feared it. I had found an unlikely ally and I did not want her to lose confidence in me.
"How did your husband know Yosef Kaplon?" I asked.
"From Europe. I don't know the exact details. Meir didn't speak much about what happened to him there. His family, all of them are gone. But I take it he and Yosef Kaplon knew each other quite well during the war. Then they lost contact and only recently found that both were here."
"Your husband was in the camps?"
"Yes. The one called Auschwitz."
I felt a prickling across the back of my neck.
"In the letter I showed you, the one I found in Yosef Kaplon's mailbox, your husband wrote about his passion. He wrote how much he wished to make a living from it. What was he referring to? What was his passion?"
Magda Abramo shrugged. "He played the flute."
I sat back, doubly stunned. Once for what Magda had just told me, and once for not thinking of the connection myself. "In Auschwitz? He was a flutist in Auschwitz?"
Her eyebrows rose. "How could he have been? There was music there? I understand it was Hell on Earth."
I told her about the music orchestras at the camp. And part of what they were used for. I explained that the music was a tool used by the guards, partly to prod the prisoners to greater exertion in their work, partly to create a false sense of culture in a place of utter savagery, and partly for their own amusement. I did not mention the music that was played during executions.
"I never knew," she said in a voice soft with wonderment. "He never spoke about his time there. Apart from knowing he was a prisoner—the number on his arm made that clear—and that his parents and brother were murdered in the gas chambers, I knew nothing. I tried asking him about it a few times, but in his gentle way he always changed the subject. It was, I think, something he wanted desperately to leave behind. It may even have felt dangerous to him, to mix that horrific part of his old life with the new one we were building. Like placing poison next to food." Her chin trembled as she recalled that this new life was now over.
Then she said, "But that does explain something I never understood—Meir told me that he had gotten his flute in his childhood, before the war." She bit her lower lip, looking down and to the left. "I wanted to ask him how he could have held on to it during his imprisonment, but I never did."
"Yosef Kaplon played violin in an orchestra in Auschwitz," I said. "Perhaps your husband played in the same one. It might be what connected the two of them. It might help to find out who killed them."
She shrugged helplessly. "I just don't know. I should have asked him more about his time there. And now I never will."
"Don't blame yourself," I said. "Many survivors prefer to keep silent. Talking about it can invite nearly unbearable memories. And trying to talk about it to someone who wasn't there adds another risk—that from that day onward you will be looked at with a mixture of pity and fear, that you will arouse discomfort and a reluctant but definite repulsion. Even among your loved ones."
"You were there," she said rather than asked.
I nodded. I was gratified to see no pity in her eyes, just sadness.
"And you were also in a camp orchestra?"
"No. I was just a regular prisoner. But I heard the music every day when we were marched off to work." I told Magda about first meeting Yosef Kaplon in Auschwitz in 1944 and explained that we had run into each other a few days earlier in Tel Aviv. I also told her that musicians were often allowed to keep their instruments. "It is probably how your husband was able to hold on to his flute."
She sipped her tea, lost in thought or memory, and I gave her time to find her way back to the present.
"Did your husband keep any of the letters Yosef Kaplon sent him?" I asked.
"I think so. I'll go check." She got up again, taking my now empty glass with her and depositing it in the kitchen sink, before disappearing down the hall.
She returned with three pieces of paper and handed them to me. "This seems to be all of them."
I hesitated with the letters in my hand. "Have you read these?"
"No," she said.
"And you're all right with me reading them?"
She nodded. "Since I hope with all my heart that you're right and that my husband did not kill himself, I might as well let you have what you need to find out who murdered him." She paused for a moment, then let out a humorless laugh. "Am I insane, hoping that my husband was murdered?"
"Not at all," I said. "Now you are angry with yourself. When I catch your husband's murderer, you will be angry with him. It's not much, and it won't take the pain away, but it's still an improvement."
She smiled a sad half smile and accepted my explanation with a nod of her head. "I'll put some more water on for tea and go check on David while you read. You will have lunch with me."
Her invitation was posed as a statement of fact, so I merely thanked her.
I spread the letters on the table and perused them. All three were in Hebrew. I focused on the alephs and lameds. They looked the same as the ones in Kaplon's suicide note and the grocery list I had found in his pants. The earliest letter was dated June 11, 1950. The second, July 1; the third, July 23. A letter every three weeks, but nothing in August. Was there a letter missing, or had Kaplon simply not mailed anything during August? If so, then Abramo's final letter made no mention of it.
I read the earliest letter. After a short customary greeting, Kaplon wrote, "How happy I am to have run into you in Tel Aviv last week, Meir. I know of a few other members of our orchestra who have gone to America, and one who has traveled all the way to Australia. But I thought I was the only one here. Perhaps we shall one day soon play together once more."
I lowered the letter, rubbing the back of my neck. Magda came back to the room.
"The letter confirms it," I said. "They played together in the same orchestra in Auschwitz."
I handed her the letter. She read it, pursing her lips. "You said it might be important."
"It might be," I said. "I think it is."
She handed the letter back. "I'll go start lunch."
She went into the kitchen and I heard her running water into a pot. I went on with the two other letters.
In the second letter, Kaplon wrote about playing music at Café Budapest. "It is the highlight of my life, these one or two performances each week. Without them, and the generosity of the patrons, it would have been hard to meet my expenses, meager as they are. Even so, I am barely scraping by. But I must count my blessings. I have my music and a small and appreciative audience. And I am free to walk where I wish and do as I please. As you well know, these are not minor things."
In the third and final letter, Kaplon apparently responded to something in Abramo's previous letter. "I understand perfectly how you feel, though I, unlike yourself, am without a wife. Talking about those terrible days is something I do only rarely and always with someone who was there. I cannot, in good conscience, offer any advice to you. You wish to reveal all to your wife. That is noble. It is the right thing to do in a loving marriage. But is it also the wise thing?"