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by Astrid Julian
Note: If you are interested in a less anecdotal history of the events described in this story, I highly recommend Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1979. This book, written by American historian and Secretary of the UN Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, Alfred M. de Zayas, also has an extensive bibliography.
Vancouver is one of My best creations, if I say so Myself, especially in the summer. It is evening. The red disc of sun slips down onto the black edge of ocean, igniting a slash of fire across English Bay's gently lapping waters. I stand next to the Twin Sisters, across the Narrows from Burnaby Mountain. The locals call Me Mount Seymour.
I need to be across the inlet from the concert hall parking lot where Conductor Janowitz is helping her 69 year-old grandmother out of her father's old MG and locking the door.
Irene Janowitz is terrified about her upcoming concert, in Vancouver, the city where she was born. She's not afraid of discovery. In fact, she refuses to believe any of the myths surrounding her work. I doubt she even believes in My angels. How then can she be afraid that the angels will discover she has been plundering little souls from their collections? No, Janowitz is afraid her mother, Mari Janowitz, will once again find an excuse not to attend a performance of her daughter's own works.
Irene Janowitz has conducted her compositions in Tokyo, Berlin, London, Sao Paulo and Washington, but never in Vancouver. Tonight she has finally brought the concert home just so her mother can attend.
Janowitz is wearing an elegant black dress made of velvet so thick I want to send out a pseudopod to feel it. Her shoulders are bare, a frivolous gesture for a conductor, but it's in keeping with her freckles. Her hair is red as dragon flame. Janowitz has always hated the color, but she's too proud to dye it.
Janowitz's grandmother, Anna Weber, grips the conductor's forearm as she walks. Their progress across the pavement is slow but steady. There was a time when she was as ashamed of her grandmother as of her red hair. Janowitz is embarrassed to remember how she felt.
As a child, Irene hadn't been able to see the ferocity that drove Anna Weber to enjoy life. A ferocity had driven Anna into embarrassing her architect daughter, her UBC English lit professor son-in-law and her very spoiled granddaughter, by continuing her with her cleaning job. She insisted the people she cleaned for were her friends and taking care of them was a pleasure as well as a duty. Even the simple things Anna did, planting petunias, or peeking through her greenhouse windows at Irene playing the violin on the pool patio, they all had an air of desperate deliberateness.
Anna pauses to listen to the water splashing into the fountain at the back entrance of the concert hall. Irene knows better than to hurry her. A life well-lived includes taking the time to admire a fountain. Anna pats her granddaughter's arm.
"Don't worry, Irene," the old woman says, understanding the conductor's silence without saying a word. "Your mother Mari is very proud of you. You just frighten her sometimes. But she'll come tonight. She promised."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Janowitz says. "She promised that time in Vienna, too."
An old couple approaches Janowitz, startling Me. At first I think My angels have followed Me and are making an unauthorized visitation, but no, they are My Earthly children.
The old woman carries a bouquet of white roses with green edged petals. "For you, Maestra Janowitz. I hope you will be making some very nice music tonight."
Janowitz smiles and smells the flowers. "Barbi's Summer Fields," she says, naming the variety. "Would you like to meet my grandmother, Mrs. Weber? She hybridized the rose. It's named for my aunt who died in the war."
"Yes, I know." The woman smiles shyly and offers Anna Weber her hand. Then she nudges her husband. The old man stammers and flushes.
Janowitz thinks she will make it easy for them and asks, "You wish me to add a passage to my symphony in memory of your child?"
"Our daughter." The woman nudges her husband again. "Show her the picture, Rudi." She takes it from him and hands it to Janowitz. "Her name is Pauline, Pauline Seefeld. She was a good girl. Never any trouble. My husband was with the Wehrmacht, fighting to save Königsberg from the Russians. Pauline and I made it as far as Breslau before the Allied firestorm caught us. I left her in a park with an old man I met on the flight from our village and went to find food. The park was filled with carts, thousands of women arranging haversacks and bedrolls, and even more children crying for food. I heard the bombers and ran back as fast as I could, but by the time I reached the park . . ." The old woman's eyes rim with tears. "It was black, all black. And so quiet." She puts the picture away. "Now we are alone, Rudi and I. It's not easy being old and alone."
"That's not why . . . " the old man speaks. "Pauline was so smart. And always laughing. We could have helped her study. At the university even. She deserves to live. Poor little one. She never had a chance."
Janowitz shakes her head. Why are people so superstitious? "Of course I'll add a small phrase or two for Pauline," she tells the woman. "But you mustn't believe those stories. How can a piece of music bring the dead back to life?"
Janowitz was always willing to add passages memorialing additional war victims to the Requiem. While musicians the world over might grumble about having to relearn the Requiem each time it is performed, the audiences never complain. People who can hardly read a note of music struggle through dog-eared scores to find the passage annotated for their relative.
"That's exactly what I told my wife," Mr. Seefeld says. "But . . ."
"You see, Maestra," Mrs. Seefeld interrupts, "Our neighbors are from Cologne, and they have a son and three grandchildren, but sometimes I can remember them with no grandchildren and a son who died of typhus just after the war. The memories are old, from the time before I heard of your music, but I swear to you, they are real."
The man looks down onto the concrete.
"Please don't expect the impossible," Janowitz smiles and shakes their hands. "Thanks for the flowers," she yells after the old couple as they walk back to their car. Then she opens the stage door for her grandmother.
"You shouldn't talk to crazy people like that, Irene," the grandmother says, after the door has fallen shut.
"Oh, Omi. You're starting to sound like Mom. They're lonely and they miss their daughter. Grief does strange things to people, even after fifty years."
"You should listen to your Mama. About some things she knows."
Janowitz shrugs and walks down the hallway to her dressing room. She wants to review the music before the performance. She doesn't let on to the old woman how much the couple has upset her. There are sections on earlier recordings of the War Requiem that she can't remember having written. She supposes that's probably understandable in work that is constantly being added to. More disturbing is that she can remember three pages of a French horn solo that seem to be missing even though she could swear to having conducted the solo a dozen times. She could even sit down and write out a list of the soloists. Could she have dreamt it all? In such detail? Once, before her agent could stop her, she even called a recording studio executive and complained about the missing sections. I should be more careful, she warns herself. Almost, she lets herself wonder if the missing sections having anything to do with the rumors of children being brought back to life.
The old grandmother kisses Janowitz before walking back up the stairs leading to the box where she greets Janowitz's father. The chair for Janowitz's mother, Mari, is still empty. Curious to hear the music, I seat a transparent pseudopod of Myself in the empty chair.
The pseudopod is blind, unfortunately, or I wouldn't have this myopia problem, but it can hear and smell and feel what is going on around it. I am forced to remain on Mt. Seymour and to peer through the walls of the concert hall. It's slightly foggy as I watch the clarinet players assemble their instruments.
"She's not coming, is she?" Anna Weber asks Helmut Janowitz, Irene's father.
"She said she had to meet with a shopping center developer from Cheyenne."
"You know like I do, Mari is sitting on a rock in that dark dshungle she is calling a Japanese garden, and starink out into the ocean."
From My vantage as Mount Seymour I can see the Janowitz house and a light-haired, fiftyish woman staring out at black water striped red by the setting sun. She is so frightened I can taste it.
"Warte mol. I tell her somethink when we get home," the old woman says, back in the concert hall. "That poor Irene, always she is trying to please her mother, but never is it working."
Helmut Janowitz tries to placate the old woman. "Mari is afraid someone will hurt Irene and that she will have to watch it. It's this German business. Being German is not something you declare to the world. According to Mari, you keep it to yourself, like religion. Or insanity. You know when we first dated, she told me she was Yugoslavian?"
"Why? No one beats her anymore."
"Attitudes last a lot longer than beatings. And to hear Mari tell, most of the world still applauds those beatings." Helmut opens his program.
Anna almost tells him the real reason why Mari, the conductor's mother, doesn't come. Mari believes the stories. She believes the conductor can bring the dead back to life. And since the War Requiem was first written as a memorial to the old woman's other daughter, Barbara, Mari is terrified the Requiem will bring Barbara back.
Anna has told Mari it is silly to be so superstitious, but she has to agree with her son-in-law, the first ten years of Mari's life have done their damage. She can't tell Helmut the real reason Mari is afraid without telling him about all the lies she and Mari share.
Anna is touched that her granddaughter was inspired to write the Requiem for Barbara, but in Anna's mind Barbara has not died. She is missing, nothing more. So Anna has asked Irene for all passages specifically written in memory of Barbara to be removed. She has framed the sheets of music and hung them above her potting table in the greenhouse on Marine Drive. Sometimes the old lady imagines the black notes outlining a little girl's face on the paper.
Back stage, Janowitz is less charitable about her mother. Mari's sister, Barbara, had always been Anna Weber's favorite daughter. Janowitz herself has heard the stories of what a good baby little Barbara was a hundred times. She almost doesn't blame her mother for her jealousy. But she wishes just once Mari would come to hear the music, instead of being frightened away.
Conductor Janowitz steps on the hem of her dress, and the score almost slips out of its leather folder as she walks down the hallway to the stage door. Her nerves are always shot before a performance of the Requiem. The tuning of the instruments doesn't help. She sits on the stairs leading from the green room to the stage and straightens the sheets of music.
She'll be fine, she tells herself. Once the music catches hold of her, she's always fine.
All is quiet when Janowitz finally steps on the stage. She nods to the concert master, bows deeply to the applauding audience, then nods to the box where her grandmother, her father and I are sitting. She notes the empty chair with a glance that is a trifle overlong.
As she brings down her baton, the tympani, basses and tubas fight out the last battles of World War Two. A flute slowly introduces a lullaby, a sprightly, French-sounding tune that Janowitz calls 'Nanji's theme'. Violins and violas soon add a Teutonic seriousness.
The old woman beside Me shuts her eyes as she hears the lullaby. Inside, Anna Weber still calls herself Nanji, and the lullaby is the same one she sang to her Barbara. The music reminds her of the last time she sang without feeling sad.
She is a laughing nineteen-year-old in her memories. Laughing, hugging her friend Danitza and kissing her goodnight. Nanji hadn't realized how lonely she was until Danitza, the daughter of the Serbian doctor that Nanji cleaned house for, arrived on her doorstep with her accordion.
In early September, 1944, the last ferry evacuating Germans from the province of Vojvodina in northern Yugoslavia had crossed the Tisa. Once again Nanji questioned the wisdom of staying behind, but her husband Peter had studied at the university and knew so much more than she did about such things. The borders might be redrawn, and they might have to brush up on their Hungarian, Peter had explained to Nanji, but nothing bad would happen to them. Besides, the slight limp left from Peter's polio, meant he hadn't been drafted by either the Chetniks or the Germans. Even his work as a junior assistant curator of the history museum in the St. Hubertus section of the village, wouldn't be found offensive by the Communists. Most of the museum's ten employees hoped to stay on and help the new regime.
Still, it frightened Nanji to think that of all the people in the surrounding villages, only Danitza had the courage to come and visit. She watched Danitza walk down the tree-lined street. The leaves of the young trees had been trimmed into small round balls. As a child Nanji liked to imagine giant poodles living under the village streets. When fall winds blew through Charlevil, St Hubert, and Soltur, the three sister-villages making up Banatsko Veliko Selo, it looked like the poodles were wagging their tails in anticipation of the good food the harvest would bring.
On the night of Danitza's last visit, the trees were still, like the tail of a dog just before it bites.
Nanji heard a sound like leather slapping leather. She looked up at the chimney, trying to see what the stork was doing.
For a few seconds, I think My Angels were making an unauthorized visitation, but no. I remind Myself that Nanji is remembering war and war is when children die. The angels were merely collecting.
Back in the house she could hear the mooing of the cow from the inner courtyard. Peter had offered to do the milking so Nanji could enjoy Danitza's visit. He had teased Nanji so often about how long she took milking that after two hours Nanji was feeling more sympathy for the cow than for Peter.
She lit a lamp and walked into the good room, the 'Gute Stube' to check on the sleeping Barbara. The two-year-old wore a white lace cap. Her little pink and white face frowned as the light interrupted her sleep. Nanji blew out the lamp and sang a quiet little lullaby. The very same one My pseudopod is now enjoying back in the concert hall in Vancouver.
Nanji didn't need light to see the heavy wooden bed that one of her grandmother Lisa's ancestors had carved in the original town of Charleville, in the French province of Lorraine, almost two centuries before. She had promised Peter that as soon as they could afford a modern bed for Barbara, she would donate the old bed to his folk museum.
Peter was back in the house eating a cold supper of smoked ham and dark bread when Nanji heard a loud banging on the wooden door. Peter pushed back his chair, rushed up and pulled Nanji away from the door, as the door burst open. A Russian officer, his pistol drawn, had kicked the door in. Standing behind him was a young Serbian woman from the next street.
Nanji and Peter had been betrayed. No Serb, let alone a Russian could have found a flaw in Peter's Serbian. The Russian waved the pistol in front of Peter, motioning him out the door.
"It's all right," Peter told Nanji, as he pulled on his boots. "When they find out I have no record of military service, they'll let me go. You'll see."
Nanji couldn't make herself believe Peter. She followed him to the front door and looked outside. The German men of Charlevil, Soltur and St. Hubert were divided into two groups, each guarded by Yugoslav partisans wearing ragged pants, British military jackets, and German army boots; and carrying Italian guns. In one group were the tradesmen; fat old barber Klinger; Anton Mueller, the baker; Schmidt, the carpenter who'd built the shed for Nanji's cow; and others she didn't recognize. Peter was taken to the group that included Dr. Hoffmann, the German doctor; the German teachers from the elementary school; and some old grandfathers who had retired years ago.
Nanji ran back into the house for Peter's coat.
A thin partisan, burnt black by the sun, a boy of about sixteen, grabbed the coat from her and put it around his own shoulders. "Germans don't need coats," he said in strangely-accented Serbian. He laughed as if he had just told a joke.
Nanji watched the men being marched away, until they turned the corner. Over the nearby town of Kikinda, she saw a blaze of light brighter than anything she had ever seen. She thought at the time she was seeing Russian shells explode, but the fires were My angels collecting.
She ran back into her house, locked the garden gate and pushed a heavy wooden chest in front of the broken front door. Amber light from the lantern she carried into the Good Room muted the bright flowers and birds painted on the bed where little Barbara was sleeping.
At this point, back on Mt. Seymour, I begin to wonder why Anna Weber doesn't remember looking in on her other daughter, Mari.
See, that's what I mean. I can see into the hearts of men and women. I could be All-Knowing, if I could just make them think about what I need to know when I need to know it. Perhaps Mari is justified in her jealousy of Barbara. I will have to find a way to make Anna remember Mari as a child.
The music soothes My curiosity and I eavesdrop on the old lady's thoughts again.
Even when distant shots rang out, puncturing the quiet of baby Barbara's soft even breathing with muffled echoes, Nanji continued to hope. Just some stragglers from the German army sniping at the Russians. The partisans wouldn't shoot Peter's group. Not with all the combined years of learning they had to offer the new communist government of Yugoslavia.
Now, as she hears the tympani being lulled into silence by the violins, Anna Weber is thinking how weeks stretched into months without any news and how she made herself imagine Peter in Russia, under the spell of a beautiful Russian peasant woman who told him fine folk tales of Baba Yaga, the grandmother witch who captured the tsarevitch in her house on giant chicken legs.
Anna remembers how years went by and how she wished for Peter a new little Barbara and some happiness.
For twelve years, Nanji liked to think like this. But in 1956, in Toronto, after she had finished cleaning the offices at the bank and was walking home down Bloor Street, she saw Anton Mueller, the baker from the Charlevil section of Banatsko Veliko Selo, walking into a drug store.
Anton Mueller had been in the other group, not in Peter's. The tradesmen were the ones who survived the partisan massacre.
Nanji slumped in the doorway of a jeweler, already closed for the day. Her back slid down against the shiny glass door and she crumpled into a little heap and cried for Peter.
People stared at her as if she had a strange disease. No one asked what was wrong or if they could help. For this Nanji was grateful. The dream she had lost was stupid. How could she explain to someone in a brand-new country like Canada, that it took her twelve years to convince herself that she would never again hear Peter's voice complain about how long it took her to milk the cow?
Conductor Janowitz turns the page that ends the first movement.
I feel Helmut Janowitz remember an argument his daughter Irene had with Mari. It was about a newspaper article where the fifteen-year-old Janowitz had been interviewed as the youngest person ever to win the Canadian Young Composers Competition. Her mother was furious because Irene had told the interviewer she was German, and it had appeared in print.
"They did this to us. These Canadians and Americans and British. Never forget that. At places called Yalta and Potsdam. The Yugoslavian partisans carried it out, but the British and Americans signed the articles that allowed it. And who decided we were German? Not us. Our family lived in Yugoslavia for almost 300 years. We have almost as much French and Gypsy and Hungarian blood.
"And in the Baltic . . . and in the parts of Germany given to the Poles . . . Germans lived there eight-hundred, a thousand years. Even those with French Huguenot ancestors had lived in Prussia since the sixteenth century . . . They were all expelled." The change in his wife's face frightened Helmut. Her green eyes glazed over as she if wasn't in the same room with him.
"Humane evacuation! Ask your grandmother how humane it was. Two million dead! A piece of paper labeled us all German and took everything, our homes and families, and nobody gave a damn. Nineteen million people! Fourteen million of them at gunpoint! The largest forced exodus in the history of the world. And did the Canucks teach you about that at school?"
Helmut Janowitz could tell his daughter didn't know what to say. Her mother usually spoke so little, she was a mystery to Irene. Irene had never seen her so angry. She wanted to stop hurting her, but she didn't know how to make it right. "Are we Austrian, then?" she asked.
"Austrian! Those ass-kissers with their convenient memories! They don't like to remember how they marched in wearing German uniforms and forced my father, at gun point, to join their army." Mari's face twisted into a grimace that frightened Irene. "And in the meantime . . . they've managed to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. They're even putting up a memorial to the Yugoslav partisans in downtown Vienna. No! We are not Austrian!"
Finally her father spoke up. "She's only a kid, Mari. Why don't you lay off?"
"Can't she see how they're laughing at her? She's just as good as any of those Canuck reporters. Better. She should be ashamed, trying to please her 'masters' like that. 'See, haven't I learned my lessons well.' 'See, I'm not at all the monster you imagine me to be. Oh, I used to be, but you Canadians have taught me well and saved me from myself.' It's degrading. They take everything away, then pretend they did it for our own good."
"What's the girl supposed to say when she uses her grandmother's folk songs as themes in a symphony?"
"She's born in Canada. She should tell them she's Canadian. The rest is none of their damn, nosy parker business. This is what comes of letting the old lady send her to German school all those Saturdays."
The father shrugged his shoulders and turned to Irene. "From now on, you're a Canadian. Got it?"
Irene nodded her head. She hadn't meant to upset her mother.
Janowitz raises her baton again and the violins pluck out a light and airy Russian melody that grows more and more somber as the lower strings join in.
Early on the morning after Peter was taken away, Nanji left the Good Room, careful not to wake little Barbara. Work would make the wait for news of Peter easier. She put on her oldest pair of shoes, a worn-out pair of Peter's trousers and a light sweater and went out into the garden, where she wove garlic greens into long braids to hang in the larder.
A young boy burst through the garden gate. "Out!" he yelled. His gun was bigger than he was, but the shots of the previous night still rang through Nanji's mind.
"I have to get the baby," she said in Serbian.
"No. No baby!" he shouted.
She wanted to ignore him, but at that moment a Russian sergeant walked past the boy and into the garden. He put his pistol in Nanji's mouth. She tasted the machine oil and steel of the barrel on her tongue. Sweat beaded on her forehead and rolled into her eyes, stinging them. The sour smell of burnt gunpowder was in her nose. Fresh death.
"Davai!" the Russian yelled at last. As she closed her eyes, tears squeezed out from under her lashes. He wasn't going to kill her. She nodded her head and followed the soldier without another word. How could it help Barbara if she died?
Outside, in the muddy street, Nanji joined a group of women and girls. German, like herself. On the sidewalk behind them was Danitza Milovic, Nanji's Serbian friend. She pointed to Nanji. Her father's job was impossible without a cleaning woman, she argued to the Russian captain. The officer knocked Danitza into the mud with his rifle butt. The soldiers laughed. The sergeant told her she should learn to operate a broom herself.
As Nanji lined up behind the other women, she repeated the little verse she whispered whenever she passed by a mean dog. Only she changed the words, hoping the Russians would let her go back for Barbara. "Russ', aldr Russ', bleck de Zäh, dass ich newe dranner kann gea." Russian, old Russian, cover your teeth, so I can pass by.
Before the column of women marched the few miles to the Rumanian border, the sole fell out of Nanji's left shoe. An old newspaper from the side of the road became a new sole. It lasted two hours. A piece of cotton ripped from her blouse and tied around her shoe stopped the gravel from digging into her foot, but it didn't keep out the rain or snow. Slosh, goodbye. Slosh, goodbye. Each soggy step reminded her, she was leaving Barbara behind.
Why doesn't she remember Mari? I wonder.
Nanji was loaded onto a railway freight car without a window or a stove. Only a small hole at the bottom of one wall for a toilet. There was no water to wash with. A few days later the first woman died of typhoid. For those who escaped infection, the cold soon offered a gentler death.
After three days, Nanji was given a dented tin can filled with hot water. Into it, Russians soldiers dumped a potato. Sometimes, her daily cup of hot water had no potato, only a lump of sugar. No matter how hungry she was, she choked when she thought of baby Barbara waking up in the Good Room with no one to fix her breakfast.
The woman standing next to Nanji left behind three children. She yelled at her. "You won't help your girl by starving to death, Nanji. Eat, and think of the day they let you go home again."
Back in Vancouver, in the symphony, brushes sweep the cymbals, counting out the monotone rhythm of train wheels rolling over hundreds of miles of track.
After nineteen days, the train rolled to a stop in a freight yard in the Urals. The women were told to get off. The Ukrainians, there to unload the bodies, spat at Nanji's feet and backed away from her. "Dirty Nemetzki!" they cursed.
When her eyes adjusted to the light she knew why. Never had she seen such a filthy bunch of women. And the smell . . . the barnyard of even the laziest farmer had never smelled so bad.
The musette accordion Janowitz has written into the Requiem because it is her mother's favorite instrument twists Nanji's lullaby into a lament.
That same day, Nanji entered one of the camps making up the Gulag. The guards told her to put her clothes into a metal barrel for burning. She bathed in cold water, but it felt so good, she didn't mind. A nurse inspected her long black hair. It was full of lice.
Violinists frantically pluck strings.
Nanji thought her feelings were broken after she lost Peter and Barbara, but when the nurse shaved her head, she cried. Her grandmother Lisa always had sung her French-German songs, as she combed Nanji's hair into tight braids.
Nanji was marched into a narrow room with the other naked women. Three doctors sat behind a table and watched. One walked up to Nanji and pinched her upper arm and her buttocks. He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to an orderly. The orderly gave her a quilted jacket and trousers and rubber boots with felt liners.
On Barbara's third birthday, Nanji went down into the coal mine for the first time. She stood in icy water for twelve of every twenty-four hours, sorting coal and loading it onto carts. The women in the mines were always wet and cold, but Nanji kept going. If she had told the guards she was ill, she would have been locked into a water-filled crawl space under her barracks. There the sick women spent the day crouched on an iron grid just inches above the water. The Russians called it 'the hospital'.
Nanji was allowed to work in the kitchen for two weeks after a doctor examined her. It was easy work and she got back some of her strength. Once, when the cook's back was turned, she stole the heads of three herring and some potato peels from the garbage.
Many times Nanji felt like giving up. She forced herself to get out of bed and wash her face each day. The women who lived all had rituals to help them keep on. The East Prussians joked about the House of Stalin, the Moscow couturier who sewed their elegant work clothes. The underpants the designers sent, would have fit a three-hundred pound man. It wasn't their fault German women didn't grow to such abundant proportions on watery cabbage soup.
The Pomeranians prayed as they worked.
Nanji sang her grandmother Lisa's songs and thought how no one in the world would sing them again, if she didn't survive to teach them to Barbara.
A small stove heated the barracks in winter. Only the five sets of bunks next to it were warmed. Mostly, the stove filled the barracks with smoke, especially the top row of bunks. Yet that was where Nanji tried to sleep. On the bottom two bunks, the cockroaches gnawed off her eyebrows and eyelashes.
If she had to pee in the middle of the night, she crawled along the top bunks to reach the wood barrel by the door. The sleeping women cursed her as she climbed over them.
When she was ordered to bury another woman, Nanji used a pick-axe to break open the frozen earth. Her strength gave out after only a few centimeters had been scraped aside. It had to do.
Barbara turned four and Nanji began coughing. After examining her, the doctor promised she could go home. The train did come, but it took her to a collective farm for the summer instead. People still died there, but things were better for Nanji. The guards that walked the German women to the fields each morning were her age and by that time her Russian was pretty good. The Russian women called her 'Nimki', their 'cute little German'. They gave her the fruit and bread that the commune allowed them to leave at roadside shrines. They warned her to tell no one. The fine for unauthorized feeding of Nimkis was five years hard labor.
Sometimes the heat was so bad, just breathing was hard work, but the collective was better for her than the cold, wet mine. During the day, she planted potatoes. At night she crept back out, onto the fields, and dug them up again. She ate them raw, pausing only to break off their poisonous shoots in her hurry to get them into her belly before she was discovered.
One morning during the year Barbara was six, the wake-up whistle didn't blow in the mining camp. It didn't blow for eight days and the camp women were given extra food to eat. They were brought to a new camp with mattresses on the bunks and Nanji was given new clothes. German men, prisoners-of-war, were behind a high fence at one end of the camp.
All the inmates had to sew during the day, but at night, the prisoners-of-war put on Russian plays translated into German. Chekov, complete with costumes and music. They were very good.
For three weeks, Nanji was there. When the Red Cross and United Nations conducted their inspections some of the other women were even given packages and letters from home.
There was nothing for Nanji.
Finally, she was sent to a camp specializing in road-building. She dug drainage ditches. Her quota was two cubic meters a day. Most days she had to keep on working well into the night.
One year later, when her cough grew even worse, Nanji was delivered to a railway yard. A man on a platform told her and a group of other women, in Russian, how the Soviet Union would never forget how the hard work of German women helped the USSR recover from the war. Big crocodile tears rolled down his cheeks.
What about my Barbara? What about the German children? Nanji wanted to shout.
It surprised her when she was actually loaded onto a freight train to go home. No one locked the doors. But when the train headed north, she screamed in horror. Home to Russians meant Germany, not Yugoslavia.
After seven days, the train stopped in Frankfort an der Oder, in East Germany. Nanji cringed when she heard the loudspeakers blare, "Achtung, Achtung, Bahnsteig bitte räumen. Die Kriegsverbrecher aus dem Osten treffen ein." She had been a farmer, a servant, a coal miner, a grave digger, a cook, a thief and a construction worker. Now she was a war criminal from the East, and the East Germans were warned to leave the platform, so they wouldn't contaminate themselves by associating with her.
Maestra Janowitz signals the musicians to begin an atonal impression of twentieth century bureaucratese.
Anna Weber remembers that there were people waiting, in spite of the warning. A sea of strangers searching for barely remembered faces.
No one waited for Nanji.
Once she heard footsteps behind her.
It was a brakeman checking the train doors.
Janowitz turns a page.
I feel the old woman's memories of leaving the train blur. Then, once again she remembers the sea of strangers searching for barely remembered faces.
No one waited for Nanji.
Once she heard footsteps behind her.
It was an angel of the Lord.
He stood at the end of the train, feathers blazing with a ferocious white light. "I have a message for you from Heaven," he told Nanji, as he glided toward her.
The angel is Mashhit, the angel of the death of children, and he's making an unauthorized visitation across time and space. At first I think My angels have discovered the secret of Conductor Janowitz's music, but then I feel the old woman remember what else Mashhit told her.
"Heaven has spared you from your ordeal, but now you must pay the price. One day you will have a grandson. No trumpet must ever touch his lips, he must never learn to read music nor play any instrument."
A grandson! What bigots My angels are! Maestra Janowitz is safe a little longer.
Anna Weber remembers how she felt both delight and sadness at Mashhit's words. If she were to have a grandson, it meant that she would find her daughter, Barbara. But it also meant that grandmother Lisa's songs would be silenced forever.
That sadness turned to joy, when the prophesied grandson turned out to be a granddaughter, Anna remembers. And that granddaughter's talent was so prodigious that it beggared her wildest dreams for keeping Lisa's simple folk songs alive.
In the audience, My pseudopod feels six other people who suddenly have memories of an angel appearing to them in the years after the war.
My angels will pay for their interference. I wonder if they have noticed My absence from Heaven yet.
I send out another pseudopod from Mount Seymour to see if any of them have joined Me on Earth. In Akron, Ohio, I find Mashhit, who frequently takes on the persona of a television talk show guest whenever he feels the supply of souls for the angels' collections about to dwindle.
He's calling himself Menge Kifkif and he's trying to get American support for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Holy Land. He cites as a precedent for this noble idea the Anglo-American-backed expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe which he says was humane and orderly without a single instance of loss of human life.
An Akron woman watching begins shaking as she remembers her Uncle Willi's first wife and two small sons, all of whom froze to death trying to cross Frisches Haff. As she realizes that Mashhit has cleverly arranged for no phone calls to be taken during his segment, she walks into her kitchen, picks up her toaster and carries it back into the living room. She smashes the picture tube, in memory of her uncle's first family.
I hurry away, not wanting Mashhit to notice Me in Akron.
Conductor Janowitz looks tired as she lifts her baton to begin the second movement. She steals a quick look into My box to see if her mother still hasn't arrived.
At the house on Marine Drive, Mari is still frightened by Irene Janowitz's symphony. She decides to rewire a needle juniper from her bonsai collection to keep from dwelling on her fear. The juniper has outgrown its pot. Mari must go down into her mother's greenhouse to look for some soil.
She crosses the small bridge leading into her own Japanese garden and climbs down the mossy bank into the dry stream. Saucer-shaped stones arranged in a fish scale pattern form the stream that seems to flow into the ocean. Lacy fern fronds splatter bright green over olive mosses and gray stones and onto Mari's white legs.
The stream ends at a round opening in the garden wall. Seen from the house, the opening frames the shakkei, the borrowed view out in the ocean. Close at hand, it leads to a staircase down into Anna Weber's garden which surrounds the pool.
Mari wrinkles her nose as she walks through the cacophony of color. Her own garden, like her buildings, defines a restful space, a place of order carved out of chaos. Her mother's plantings are an obscene celebration of chaos. Espaliered pear, apple and peach trees line the walls. Petunias and nasturtiums costume onions and garlic in a carnival of bright confetti. Clay pots next to the pool spill red geraniums onto the brick paving. Anna's life is collage of chaotic events. She is as besotted with sea spray and sunshine as the pigeons in the coop behind her greenhouse, Mari thinks.
Mari's own life has a linear progression from one event onward. Like her garden, its structure is economical. Her life defines order in a world of chaos and noise, like a musical symphony. Like the music of any composer except her own daughter.
I turn My attention back to the concert hall. The music begins with tunes recalling the fifties.
The old woman, Anna Weber, remembers being examined in Friedland, in West Germany, by a Red Cross doctor who certified her ninety percent disabled. She weighed eighty pounds. To survive the camps, she had to make herself stop feeling anything. In the hospital, when for the first time in six years she was treated like a person, not a slave or an exotic pet, she became a bit unravelled. She hoarded dry bread under her pillow and shat on the shiny linoleum floor next to her bed.
She watched the sisters shake their heads, as they looked at her chart. She heard them whisper something about months. "No!" she screamed and jumped out of bed. "My daughter!"
"Get Sister Patrizia! Quick!" the head nurse ordered. "Gnädige Frau. Bitte. Ein Moment."
Sister Patrizia entered. "This is the one from Yugoslavia?"
The other sister nodded.
Sister Patrizia motioned to the young woman behind her, a stern-looking 22-year-old dressed in a drab, gray suit. "This is Fräulein Roswitha Kepner, Nanji," Sister Patrizia said. "She is from the Christian Aid Society. Please, if you lie down again, she will help you find out what happened to your daughter." Sister Patrizia put her arms around Nanji and pulled her back to the bed.
"Grüss Gott." The woman in gray nodded her head at Nanji. "May I sit on the chair next to your bed?"
Nanji shrugged bony shoulders and tied her memories of Barbara back up, into an even smaller bundle. She crept back into the bed.
"Has anyone told you what happened to our people who remained behind?"
Nanji stared out the window.
Now they were going to take the dream that kept her alive in the Russian camps. She knew it. The knots tightened.
"Have you heard of Gakowa, Rudolfsgnad, Jarek . . . Molidorf?"
"They are towns in Yugoslavia. Molidorf is close to my home," Nanji said coldly. Who was this woman, she wondered. How could she talk to her like this when all she wanted was to find her little girl? Did she have no thought for what Nanji went through in Russia?
"They are all the same," the young woman said. "I was brought to Gakowa. Your family was probably taken to Molidorf. Twenty Germans to a room. Forty to each house. When all the houses were full, barbed wire was stretched down the main street to divide the town in half, then more barbed wire was rolled around the whole town. Old people and children too young to work in one part. Larger, stronger children and young adults in the other.
"We were allowed to bring nothing. Only the clothes we were wearing when we were rounded up by the partisans. I was sixteen when my dress wore out. We stole potato sacks from the villagers on our way home from the fields, but still the Serbian boys teased us. 'Are you boys or girls?' they yelled from trucks as they drove past the fields where we worked. 'Boys. Don't you see our shaved heads?' Ingrid from our work group shouted. 'We can see that you're lying,' the boys yelled back and pointed at their chests. Our potato sack vests didn't cover much, and some of us didn't even have that.
"At Gakowa, in the workers' part of the camp, we were given each morning only one little loaf of cornmeal, as big as my hand." The woman held her rough red left hand out in front of Nanji. "Then I had to decide. Should I eat it all at once and be very hungry two more times that day? Or should I divide it in half and be hungry once? Or should I divide it into three and be a little hungry all through the day?" The woman took her right hand and divided her left hand into threes. "For little children and people too old to work, there was even less. In most camps, no child under two survived."
"Why do people do such things to each other?" Nanji asked.
Fräulein Kepner went on as if she hadn't heard the question. "After a while, in some of the city-camps, people were a little luckier. If they had a Serbian or Hungarian relative nearby, the relatives were allowed to pass food through the fence to their sister-in-law or niece or whomever, but they were forbidden to speak to them. The outside world was not to know what went on behind the barbed wire.
"One thing. One thing was more terrible that the rest," Fräulein Kepner said. She shuddered. "My shoes wore out the first year. For more than three years, I walked everywhere barefoot. Through the animal pens and over wheat stubble. My feet were always bleeding.
"One day, the guards got us girls out of bed before daylight and gave us all long spears and bags of lime. In between the house where we slept and the next house was a grave. Nine or ten layers of bodies were piled in it, covered by twenty centimeters of earth. People were always buried at night, usually inside the main room of a house, so the local farmers wouldn't be frightened of the partisans, their liberators. But they had run out of space." A sneer shimmered over the young woman's face for an instant. "That morning the grave had started to bubble up, and because our house was right at the edge of the camp, the guards were afraid the local farmers would see something coming up out of the ground they shouldn't see. I had to walk over the grave in my bare feet and stab my spear into the earth. Then I had to pour lime into each hole. With each step, the dirt shifted under me, like a bowl of jelly.
She looked down at her big, chapped hands. "I'm sorry. If your daughter was not old enough to work, it looks quite bad. It was not much better for us older children. I was lucky. The collective farm I was sold to rented my services out each day to a farmer. I was his shepherdess, in charge of seventeen sheep, two donkeys and three goats. Out in the fields, where no one could watch, I drank the milk.
"On my way to the meadow each morning, I passed another commune. A group of fifty German girls, all about my age lived there. When I could, I would stop and say hello. At the end of two years, four were still alive."
"It must have been terrible for you," Nanji said. She stared out the hospital window at the clouds in the blue sky, remembering the angel at the train station in Friedland. "But Barbara, my little Barbara is alive! I feel it."
"Perhaps she is," Fräulein Kepner said quietly. "I will help you fill out these Red Cross forms to try and find out. But please . . . You shouldn't hope too much. Less than a third of our people who stayed in Yugoslavia were still alive when world public opinion finally forced the Yugoslavs to end the camp system in 1948. We think there may be as many 30,000 children still alive in state homes, but very few have any kind of papers."
Nanji refused to give up.
Three months later, when she was released from the hospital, she stayed on to work in the kitchen.
In 1951, when Barbara was nine, Nanji wrote the Yugoslavian Repatriation Delegation in Vienna. They replied that without the original birth certificate, typed, in Serbian, they were powerless to help. When she left Barbara, she had been braiding garlic in the garden.
Rosi Kepner and the International Red Cross couldn't help either.
One day, when Nanji was emptying the garbage in the alley next to the hospital, Rosi walked up behind her.
"Say, are you crazy?" she said to Nanji.
"What do you mean?"
"They tell me you are thinking of going over the border."
Nanji shrugged and dumped her pail.
"You are, aren't you?" Rosi's face was incredulous. "Without papers, they won't even let you into Austria. And the Yugoslav border is full of land mines."
"I'll find a way. I have a little money now. I'll hire a guide and with some bribes . . . "
"You'll end up in jail, or back on a prison collective. For the rest of your life."
"I don't want to go on living. I can't. Not without trying."
"It's been eight years. She won't even remember you. If she's alive. And what if you find her in an orphanage in Macedonia? How's your Albanian these days? Have you found someone to teach you? Barbara won't speak any German."
"She'll learn."
"You're really going?"
"Nothing will stop me."
"Please . . . do one more thing first. Come with me when the next children's train from Salzburg comes into Piding."
At the children's camp in Piding, Rosi pointed out twin boys who spat at their mother and called her a capitalist pig.
Nanji had eyes only for a very thin girl of about 14, who asked her father timidly, "May I speak German now?"
Rosi gave up. She pressed a little bundle of money into Nanji's hand and hugged her. "Please, write down the names of as many children as you can. And if they remember, the town where they were from."
Nanji was captured two weeks after she walked into Yugoslavia.
The minimum sentence for illegal border crossing was six months, but as she sat in the jail in Kikinda, the city closest to Banatsko Veliko Selo, she was content. She had done more than write letters and fill out forms to find Barbara.
After three days, Nanji was very surprised to be released. The police captain handed her some papers. "These documents should get you back to the border."
Nanji accepted them sadly.
Outside the police station, under the poodle trees on the other side of the street, a woman was waiting. Nanji couldn't believe it. "Danitza!" she cried, and ran to her old friend, the daughter of the Serbian doctor she used to clean house for. Both women laughed and hugged each other.
Danitza's father had heard about the German woman in the jail. When one of her father's patients told him who it was, he had arranged for Nanji's release from jail and for the travel permits.
Not all the children from Charlevil died in Molidorf, Danitza told Nanji. A few survivors were sent to a children's home not many kilometers away. She insisted on going with Nanji.
The director of the home was a heavy set woman who still affected a military jacket and cap. "It's been eight years. Children change a lot. How will you recognize your daughter?" she asked. Over the woman's left shoulder a huge picture of Josip Broz Tito glared down at Nanji. "We have no record of a Barbara Weber from Veliko Selo."
"I will know her," Nanji insisted.
The woman shrugged her shoulders. "Follow me." Outside on the playground, she rang a large handbell.
Girls of every age from eight to sixteen ran from the classrooms out onto the field. They lined up in two long rows facing each other.
The director walked along the rows with Nanji. She stopped in the middle of the second row. "These girls are about the right age." She put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot impatiently. "Well? Which is yours?"
Nanji wanted to cry as she walked from one girl to the next. None of them looked like what she thought Barbara would look like. The brown eyes were too light. Or the mouth was too large. Or the hair too curly. "I need time," Nanji told the director.
The woman gave the sign for the girls to disperse. "Fine." She rang her bell and girl of about eighteen walked up to the women. "This is my assistant, Irina Cvetkov. She will show you out."
"What does your little girl look like? Perhaps she was sent to another home," Irina asked, as they crossed the schoolyard.
"Dark brown hair, brown eyes. She would be ten now," Nanji answered.
"I don't want to make this more difficult for you, but she may have been adopted. The dark ones are the first to be chosen, because they are less conspicuous." Irina unlocked the iron gate and pulled it open for Danitza and Nanji.
Nanji walked through silently.
"Please, Madam, may I ask a favor?" Irina said in Serbian-accented German.
"Of course," Nanji answered, surprised that Irina spoke German.
"My name wasn't always Irina Cvetkov. If anyone asks you about Anni Seifert from Ruma, tell them I'm here."
"Perhaps the girl is right. She has been adopted," Danitza said, when they were back at her house.
"Yes. I hope so. God, don't let her be dead."
"You really think none of them was Barbara?"
Nanji shook her head.
Danitza put her arms around Nanji. "Take one of the others!" she whispered in Nanji's ear.
"What!" Nanji pulled away, shocked. "It wouldn't be right."
"Look. They owe you a child. What isn't right is for those girls to rot away in that home. Not one of them would refuse to walk away with you. Even if they knew you weren't their mother."
"It's kidnapping."
"Isn't taking their language, even their names away, kidnapping?"
"What if I pick one and the director has records to show she's not Barbara?"
"So what? You made a mistake. And you have the name of a child to give the Red Cross and Christian Aid when you get back to Austria." Danitza's face lit up. "We'll do even more. I'll keep the director busy, and you write down the name and village of every girl who can remember."
"What if the director finds out?"
"What can she do, send me to Siberia?" She winked at Nanji. "My dad has too many friends for that."
Suddenly, from Mt. Seymour I see Mashhit enter the concert hall. As the music continues, My pseudopod is still obscured in old Anna Weber's thoughts, but I'm afraid to stay. Mashhit's appearance has put Conductor Janowitz in great danger, and though I'd like to know how Janowitz's music robs My angels, I don't wish to add to the danger by alerting Mashhit to My presence.
I
retract My pseudopod from the concert hall. When you live for all eternity, you get used to waiting for little mysteries to be explained. I decide to come hear Janowitz conduct this symphony another time.
I'm about to return to Heaven when I hear Mari calling to Me in her great fright.
She doesn't know she's calling Me, of course. Like all good communists, she was brought up not to believe in Me. Shame, really. Faith is a gift that should never be taken from children. People lose the knack for it later in life.
Mari is staring at the brick wall above her mother's potting bench. The three wooden frames containing the pages of the War Requiem written for Barbara are missing. She is frantic as she searches the greenhouse.
Finally, Mari finds the frames under a pile of crumpled newspapers and pot shards. The glass is broken, the paper backing torn away. Mari shivers as she realizes the sheets of music have been stolen.
Outside the greenhouse, wind and rain whip Mari's face. She forgets about repotting the juniper. Instead she walks to the wrought iron gate opening onto the cliffs surrounding the house.
Beyond the gate is a wooden bench and a rose bed. Today, the white-petaled roses with green edges called Barbi's Summer Fields echo the colors of the stormy sea. The ocean is pale green silk embroidered by frothy white lace where water slams against the cliffs.
Mari sits on the bench and tries to control her fear by admiring My rain and how it intensifies the color of the rock faces next to her. Mist mutes the forests and cliffs of distant coastal islands into a gray-blue strip of rick-rack. The understatement is calming. Trees, rock and water are her refuge from the chaotic events in the world of men. She tries to recreate the order of My world in her own buildings.
Irene's art makes Mari shudder. She wonders briefly if Irene has reinserted the missing pages into her Requiem. No, she decides. She wouldn't have broken the frames like that. But why would anyone steal sheet music? She shivers again. Irene's music creates such chaos in the world. At least Anna confines her need for confusion to her own garden. What is Irene playing with in that horrible symphony? The dead should be left in peace.
Mari gets up and looks down into the swirling water. It makes her dizzy. Perhaps she shouldn't have left Irene alone with the old lady so often, but Anna enjoyed teaching her all the old songs so much. The songs that Barbara would have sung.
Mari smiles as she remembers the first time Irene amazed her with her music. While Mari spent six months in Maryland supervising the building of a new shopping center, Irene grew tired of her violin and keyboards and persuaded her grandmother and father to buy her a French horn. It had stormed the day Mari came home. Like today, she thinks. Irene sat perched on the cliffs with her horn, trying to coordinate the waves sishing in the grotto, her own playing, and the echoes of her playing, into a recognizable Mozart horn concerto.
Who would have thought such a charming child would come to this? It was frightening to watch how she shared her grandmother's obsession. Mari had plenty of stories of her own to tell, but she hadn't wanted to burden her daughter. She wanted Irene to grow up free, but the old woman had shackled her with stories of that horrible time. As the girl's mother, she should have forbidden it, Mari thinks. And now this horrible symphony. She doesn't actually know of anyone her daughter's music has brought back to life, but then, if they were now living since the time of the war, how would she know they hadn't always been there?
Mari decides to walk down the concrete stairs to the water.
She is almost totally drenched by rain and sea spray, but she remembers being dry. Dry and dusty.
She was standing at the end of a long line of girls. Opposite her stood another line of girls. A Serbian woman was talking with the director about repairs to the school building.
Another woman, a skinny one, spoke to the older girls at the other end of the line from Mari. "Quickly girls," she said in Serbian. "I want those of you who can remember to give me your real names and those of your parents and the town where you lived."
The older girls immediately began chattering. Mari wished they'd shut up. If the director heard them, they would all be punished.
"Shsh," the woman warned, as she walked between the two rows of girls. Her hand shook as she scribbled onto a bit of crumpled paper.
"I'm supposed to call myself Sava Petrovich, now." a fourteen-year-old said. "But my name used to be Anneliese Straub. Vater Michael. Mutter Gertrud. Kikinda."
Mari's stomach growled. Why couldn't they shut up, she thought. There was so little food as it was. The girls were just giving the director an excuse not to feed them. Again.
"Last year, they sent my sister away. Irina thinks she's in home number 83," another girl told the woman. "Her name is Veronika."
"I'm barber Lindhof's Doris, from Katarina."
"If we speak German, we get no dinner."
Mari was getting angry. Why were they telling all this to the skinny woman? What did they hope to change? Better to accept what happened and make the best of it.Sweat from the skinny woman's hand smeared her scribbles.
"Please Lady, take me with you. Ich kann Deutsch!"
Silly goose, how degrading, Mari thought. How could they beg like that? But deep down she understood. The woman was German, and she was looking for her child. The girls were hoping the woman would smuggle their names out to the Red Cross so their parents would know they were still alive. If their parents still lived.
"I was Bauer Klein's Resi from Stefansfeld."
The woman stumbled. One of the girls took her elbow and helped her up. "I can sew and knit," Mari heard her whisper into the woman's ear.
"I know twenty recipes by heart," said another girl.
The woman stared at the girl's brown eyes for a minute, then shook her head and turned away.
"I can milk a cow. Please. Take me out of here!"
The woman looked down at the red brick dust of the playground.
At last she came to Mari's part of the line. The girls here had nothing to say to the German woman, but she looked at them so intently, Mari guessed the woman's own daughter would have been their same age. She felt the girls next to her tense just as they did when a Serbian woman came in looking for a child to adopt. They didn't remember their mothers. They just wanted to belong.
Idiots, Mari thought. The Serbians just wanted them to help work their farms, or to cook, or to watch their real children. With her yellow hair and pale green eyes, she looked too different to hope for adoption. And Mari knew no German mother would ever come looking for her. Unlike the other girls, she could remember her mother.
She remembered a village surrounded by barbed wire. She remembered her mother sneaking off at night and returning in the morning, her hands filled with bits of potato, a carrot, some peas. She remembered secret fears that her mother was stealing, and a morning when she didn't return home. She remembered walking to the town square with the other people and seeing four women kneeling. Their hands were tied behind their backs, a partisan with a pistol at each skinny woman's neck. She remembered hands pulling triggers and hearing shots just as she recognized the woman closest to her.
Her mother fell face forward into the dirt before she could run to her. Hands lifted her mother into a wheelbarrow. Mari held her mother's hand. Her mother squeezed her hand and whispered, "Sh-sh." She held Mari's hand all the way to the mass grave. Hands tipped the wheelbarrow, and her mother whispered up, "Sei gut, mei' Herzje!", before a partisan could shoot his pistol again.
Another partisan filled Mari's hand with dirt and showed her how to throw it into the grave. All things had their proper ritual, their order and their place.
Her mother did a last crazed polka as the dirt flew down onto her green and white flowered apron dress.
Sei gut. Herzje. Be good. Sweetheart. How Mari wished her mother had used her real name so she might have remembered it. But it was for the best this way. Just as the school was better than the camp. Be good. That was useful advice, Mari decided. She would not risk being bad by speaking with the German lady.
"Liesi Heidenreich," said the last girl. "I used to have my birth certificate and a photograph of my brother, but the director took them away last winter."
The woman folded up her scribbles and put them into her pocket.
The director pointed out a broken drain pipe on the school building to the other woman, but the woman wasn't paying attention. She couldn't stop watching the girls and her friend. When the skinny friend turned away from the girls, she shook her head. Then she shook her fist.
The skinny one paused, then walked back to the ten-year-olds in Mari's line.
Mari was horrified when the woman bent down next to her. "What's your name?" she asked in Serbian.
Mari looked at the director hoping she would turn around and rescue her. Why had the woman picked her to speak with? Finally the girl answered, "Mari Broz." It wasn't being bad to tell the skinny woman her name. She was proud to share a name with Marshall Tito. She stared at the red dust on the woman's scuffed black shoes.
"Mari, I'm looking for a little girl to come live with me. Would you like to be that girl?"
Mari knew it was bad to go with the woman, but the hand reaching out to her reminded her of when she had a mother. She didn't know what to do. One of the other girls poked her in the ribs. "Go, stupid!" she whispered.
Mari reached for the woman's hand.
"This is my daughter," she heard the woman tell the uniformed director. Behind her stood Irina Cvetkov. Mari was afraid Irina would stop them, for she knew Mari's mother was dead, but she came forward and gave Mari a hug goodbye.
A salty wave splashes through My pseudopod. I hear the adult Mari scream, "No! Irene! Stop the music!" Then I hear nothing but waves slapping rocky cliffs.
Mari is gone. She hasn't climbed back up the cliff. I look into the water, then feel around with My pod. She's not anywhere in Canada.
I look down into the concert hall from Mt. Seymour. Mashhit is no longer alone. Angels hover in the air and sit cross-legged on balcony railings. They hang from the chandeliers by their feet, flapping silver-studded, dark leather wings.
To Me the angels are almost black, but to the humans the hall seems ablaze with light. They are forced to shield their eyes, even though they can't actually see the great host of angels causing the glare. I should be thankful the angels still apply to Me before manifesting themselves to humans. At least in the present.
On the podium, where Conductor Janowitz stood, is a mound of soft black velvet.
Dazed musicians pack their instruments and leaf through music. A xeroxed sheet entitled, 'Barbara Sleeps' drifts to the floor in front of an oboe player, then disintegrates into a pile of dust.
I feel the musicians wonder what it was they just finished playing, but in this new world, what they just finished playing never existed, so they can't remember it. Oh, I suspect that one or two of the more astute may be troubled by strange symphonic dreams from time to time. Perhaps they'll jot some of the songs down, and I'll even hear them again.
The audience too, is wondering why they were in the concert hall. Mostly, they are simple working people not given to fancy entertainments.
The box where My Pseudopod sat in Mari's empty chair is now filled. Helmut Janowitz, formerly the conductor's father, now wonders what he is doing listening to music with an old cleaning woman, her daughter and three grandchildren. On his wife Tammy's birthday, of all days. He hurries off to the check room for his raincoat and umbrella.
Anna Weber wonders why she is in a concert hall. Neither her daughter Barbara, nor any of Barbara's sons are interested in symphonies. Anna has dutifully followed the angel's instructions, and none of the boys can read a note of music. They live in Burnaby, where Barbara is an art teacher at the high school. Two of the boys own a pet shop selling salt water fishes, the other studies biology at Simon Fraser U. Their rock-and-roll CD's were collected to impress their friends and not because of any passion for music.
Anna Weber wonders what the musicians have been playing, but she is afraid to ask. She knows her family thinks she's going senile. She's afraid she is too. The past of long ago seems so much easier to remember than the music she was listening to five minutes ago.
Barbara's sons are wondering how they ever let the old lady con them into making such a weird scene, and who sold her the poppy seeds in that cake they ate for desert.
Barbara is admiring the chandeliers when the angel Hadraniel belches and a lightening bolt arcs through the room. She turns away. "Come boys, let's get home," she says, and stands up.
Mashhit flaps his leather wings and swoops down onto the podium. The chains joining the bolt in his nose to the one in his ear slash his cheek with three silver stripes. He pokes his nose into the black velvet dress, then kicks it with a shrivelled foot.
The musicians don't see Mashhit, of course, but the principal player of the second violins watches the dress float in the air for few seconds before she gets dizzy and is forced to sit.
"For it is written," Mashhit yells to his fellow angels. "Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live."
The angels are pleased with themselves. By reinserting the passages written for Barbara back into the Requiem, they have used the magic against Janowitz, and Mari's worst fears are realized. Mari now has never left Yugoslavia, has never met Janowitz's father. Conductor Janowitz has written herself out of existence with her own music.
I feel around Vancouver and the world. Except for the sudden appearance of Barbara and her three children, Janowitz's father's marriage to someone called Tammy, and Mari's disappearance, all traces of the conductor's magic have vanished. The angels have all their little souls back.
I send another pod to Yugoslavia, and find Mari Broz sitting on a wooden bench in the back of a canvas-covered truck with fifteen other workers from the farm where Mari drives a tractor. The women wear dark blue pants and jackets with kerchiefs around their hair. Mari wears her hair loose, flaunting the few blonde strands still streaking the white. She sits apart, furthest from the opening.
Two of the women laugh a little too loudly. Yes, Mari thinks. Let them joke that I still wait for my German mother to find me. Germans are rich. The women are jealous.
Deep down though, the women frighten Mari. She shudders to think what they would say if they knew she was the daughter of a thief. None of their business, Mari tells herself. I'm a good worker, a party member, and I share a name with the father of Yugoslavia. My mother's crimes have nothing to do with me. I'm a good person, Mari thinks, a real communist. Not like those hypocrites in Belgrad changing the name of the Serbian League of Communists to the Serbian Socialist Party. Anything just to appease public opinion in the west.
She lets the jostling of the truck over the rutted dirt road drown out the women's voices, vowing not to let them spoil her favorite part of the day. She likes to pretend she has a daughter, and that when she arrives home that night, a letter from her daughter will be lying on the plastic tablecloth under the single naked light bulb illuminating the kitchen.
Tonight, she imagines, there will be no arguments with the Jankovics, the people with whom she shares a two-bedroom house. A house that belonged to a Hungarian family before the break-up of Yugoslavia forced the Jankovics north. Tonight, she hopes, no one will call her immoral for refusing to share her bedroom with the Jankovics' teenaged daughters.
Tonight her daughter will be a fashion model in Hong Kong and she will send a Chinese magazine with her face on the cover for Mari to glue on the rough plaster wall above the kitchen table she shares with the Jankovics.
No, tonight her daughter will be a novelist from Entre Rios in southern Brazil and she will tell the world how Mari's mother died, only she won't have been a thief. In the novel, her mother will be a partisan, a resistance fighter who helped defeat the Germans.
Or even better, tonight her daughter will be a world-famous composer, and after her concert in Belgrad, she will be driving up to visit Mari. Mari smiles to think what the women sharing her bench would say then.
Back in Vancouver, a celebratory flight with loud whooping ensues. Humans notice neither the angels' jubilation nor the black leather wings slapping into one another in the confusion, but they feel the wind. And they smell the smoky jasmine scent of the angels. Those who weren't in a hurry to leave before, get up to go.
What My angels don't know is that in an abandoned greenhouse next to a house off Marine Drive, a sheet of music lies hidden behind stack of cracked clay pots. It's scored for accordion and the title at the top reads, in French, 'La chanson d'Irène', 'The Song of Irene.'
Copyright © 1993 by Astrid Julian
Want to learn more about the Donauschwaben, the ethnic group that Nanji belonged to? |
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