Justine raised her hand, ready to slap him smartly across the face. She held back. She did not wish to touch his flabby grey flesh. She did not wish to touch filth. Tucking her hands into her armpits, she walked away.
Justine’s mother had stayed in Lithuania, a widow made harsh by a life with a rough first husband. Her second husband, already old at the time of his marriage, obligingly died not long after from disregard. He had given her another daughter, Elenyte. Audrone made no secret of her preference for her second child. Drawing Povilas and Elenyte close, she tried making a family of three.
Povilas had enough love for all three women in his life. Tossing little Elenyte in the air, he would make her shriek with joy. He would tease Audrone out of her bad moods. He protected Justine from a mother who treated her with daily harshness. Dancing around the three women with good humour, he made life together possible.
“Justine’s an artist,” he said, watching her head tilt as if she were listening to internal music. “We must send her to Vilnius to study music.”
“Go ahead,” Audrone said. “I’ve got everyone I need.”
In Vilnius, Justine lived with an aunt and studied at the conservatory. Spending long sunlit hours in a golden studio filled with music, she flourished. There was an exchange of letters with a famous piano teacher. If you should find yourself in Paris, Madame Boulanger had written, come play for me. And carrying the note in her purse, one handwritten line on a piece of ruled yellow paper, Justine dreamt of a performance career.
One day, Uncle Povilas came to fetch her, saying they must leave. Head filled with the brilliance of music, she had paid scant attention to the boom of Russians guns in the distance. Her uncle insisted. She refused. Finally snatching up her music in frustration, she had let herself be dragged home.
“Audrone we must leave,” Povilas said. “All of us. We must go.”
“No,” she said, eyes flashing as she snatched up little Elenyte. “And you’d better not go either. You’d better stay with me and the child.”
Povilas loved all three women equally but loved life and freedom more.
“Then Justine and I will go alone.”
They packed one suitcase between them, not wishing to be encumbered. Tucking in her socks next to her uncle’s, she thought of the wider world beyond Vilnius, the concert stages of Paris, London and Rome. Rapturous audiences would applaud. Bouquets would land at her feet. And smiling up into up into crowds crying Bravo!, she would take her bows.
I carry inside me everything that I need, Justine thought. Liszt had said: Think ten times play once. And closing her eyes, she followed music like thought.
They said farewell in front of the house. Audrone clutched Elenyte to her chest. She glared at them, eyes filled with fury. Then she turned and went into the house.
My mother won’t miss me, Justine thought. And little Elenyte will soon forget.
She touched her uncle’s arm. He picked up the suitcase. They shared a faint sad smile. Then they turned to face forward. Neither one of them looked back.
They joined the river of refugees moving along the main road. Plodding amid carts piled high with pots and pans, mattresses strapped on top, they were strafed by aircraft. They leapt sideways into a ditch. They lifted their heads to see neighbours lying dead, their limbs askew. And leaving the main road to travel cross-country, they met the soldiers in the woods.
When the war was over, Justine and Povilas stood on the pier at Bremerhaven amid crowds of DPs boarding a ship for Canada. They clustered together like children, large cardboard tags hanging from the buttons of their coats. The men were assigned to mining or forestry work, the women to hospital or domestic service. After ten months, they would be free to do what they liked. Bereft, hungry and lost, they were eager for safety and work and plenty to eat.
Justine became a domestic in the home of the Morgensterns, a rich family of German Jewish extraction. Completing her contract, she was offered a permanent position. She agreed to stay. She was happy to have a job. And in a city crammed with DPs telling stories of harsh treatment, she had fair employers.
When Father Geras asked her to play the organ at Sunday mass, she shook her head. Bach and Handel had sat in similar seats, sending their music resounding into the church. Father Geras offered her the use of the organ anyway. He suggested a little concert. Waving him away in panic, she said she couldn’t.
She could not explain the feelings jostling inside her. Pressing their faces forward, they insisted upon being seen. Loneliness for her life in Vilnius. Anger and bitterness at her loss. Discontent at the company of farmers rather than musicians. Guilt and happiness at being safe. Hearing only silence where music had once lived, she dreaded that this might be her life forever, silent, empty and flat.
Povilas finished his contract at the lumber camp in the north woods, joining her in Toronto. Finding a job at Neilsen’s Chocolate Factory, standing all day long by a large copper cauldron, he stirred melted chocolate. Did you go to the church to practice? he would ask coming home from his shift. Did you play? And she would turn her head away, silent and bitter.
It’s dead and gone, she thought. And I can’t bring it back.
Chapter 2
Harry Morgenstern was a lawyer, a tall elegant man, sophisticated and well-dressed. Comfortable in his clothes, he never felt the need to adjust his shirt cuffs or to cross and uncross his long legs. He was at ease with himself and his place in the world. He loved his wife Greta. And still loving her after thirty years, he felt no desire for dalliance.
At the end of the war, he had gone with The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to help sort out the mess in Europe. Returning after six months amid blackened cities and rubble, he told Greta that he wished to take on a refugee maid. Greta had put up with his long absences. She had borne them without complaint. While he was overseeing the fates of strangers, she and the children had fended for themselves.
“Haven’t you done enough, Harry? Is it also necessary to bring one of them into our home?”
“But surely that is just what is needed.”
Harry had come upon Greta driving a cab in early 1930s Berlin. Tidying up legal affairs for his far-sighted father who had moved the family from unfriendly Germany to New York, he had fallen in love with this sparky young girl who took no guff from strangers. His family protested the marriage. They referred to her forever after as “that wretched girl that Harry had plucked from the gutter.” Neither forgiving nor forgetting, Greta attended to her husband’s every happiness.
“With such good fortune as ours,” Mr. Morgenstern said, “we would be remiss not to help.”
Mrs. Morgenstern found herself outmanoeuvred and silenced in one lawyerly stroke.
The Morgensterns lived in a grand house with a large black-and-white foyer, its tall oak doors opening onto spacious rooms filled with French antiques, Persian carpets and Italian chandeliers. On business trips Harry would stay in the New York apartment he had inherited from his father. In May and September Mrs. Morgenstern would visit Sak’s Fifth Avenue. At Christmas they would go to see the glittering lights of the Rockefeller Center. On weekends, they might visit Carnegie Hall and the Guggenheim Museum.
“The apartment’s small, really just big enough for family,” Mrs. Morgenstern would tell friends never invited along.
Mr. Morgenstern confined himself to legal matters, leaving domestic affairs to his wife. Venturing an opinion now and then on schools or cooks, he would encounter a swift response. You may know business Harry, she would say, but I know people. He stayed out of her sphere. To this and the steady influx of money he attributed the success of his thirty year marriage.