Felix held up the letter. His hand was trembling like he was stricken with a disease, the paper flapping like he was shaking the terrible truth from it.
“The maid. It is illegal for her to work for a Jew, but the German commander living in my father’s apartment needed a housekeeper, so he hired her to cook and clean for him. She cared about my father, and I think she’s watched out for him as best she could. She said she would have called me, but she was nervous about speaking freely. There are always listening ears on the phone lines. But she thought I should know. When she arrived at the apartment on the fourteenth—two weeks ago!—my father was gone. When she asked the Kommandant where he was, he told her ‘it was his turn.’”
“Where have they taken him?” Camillo pressed.
“She doesn’t know for certain. She writes that the whole building was cleared. There are no Jews left. The officer told her soon there would be no more Jews in Vienna.”
“I read that some of them are just being relocated to Jewish ghettos.” Camillo started pacing, trying to remain positive, his thoughts scrambling for solutions.
“The maid thinks he will be sent to a work camp. Her brother works at the train station, and he told her that every day the trains leave early, before the sun rises, so the people of Vienna won’t see them leave. He says they are loaded with Jews. He says the trains have been going to a place called Mauthausen, near Linz.”
“But Linz is not too far from Vienna. This is good!”
“This is not good, Camillo! None of this is good. He will die.” The certainty in Felix Adler’s voice made Eva wince and Camillo collapse onto a chair. He looked completely defeated.
“They wouldn’t let him bring his violin. The German officer was looking at it when the maid arrived for work. He told her he’s going to send it to his son in Berlin. He’s going to send my father’s violin to his son,” Felix repeated, suddenly enraged, and he swept his arm across the table, upending the lamp and the radio they weren’t supposed to own.
“What are you playing, Eva?” Felix Adler sighed from the window overlooking the garden. “I don’t recognize that. It sounds a little like Chopin, but it’s not.”
“It’s Chopin mixed with Rosselli, sprinkled with Adler, and doused with anger,” Eva murmured, her eyes closed, her chin gripping her violin.
She expected him to scold her, to tell her to “play what is written!” But he was silent. She continued playing, but she opened her eyes, watching him as she let her bow flit over the strings like a bee flirting with a flower. His hands were clasped behind his back, his feet together. It was the way he stood when he was deep in thought or when he was listening.
She and Uncle Felix had had a love/hate relationship since he’d arrived in Italy in 1926, two years after her mother’s death. She had been only six years old and was not prepared for the maestro that was Felix Adler. He had come to Italy with the express purpose of molding her into an Adler violinist, and he had come to Italy out of love for his sister, which he reminded Eva of frequently. It was her dying wish. He’d acquired other students, and he’d played with the Orchestra della Toscana, but his focus had been Eva.
Eva had challenged him at every turn. She was willful and distracted, easily bored, and known to disappear when it was time for lessons. But she had a gift. She had a remarkable ear, and what she lacked in discipline, she made up for in musicality. She loved the violin, she loved to play, and Felix had eventually learned to forgive her for the rest, though it was forgiveness bestowed grudgingly.
It had taken him a while to realize that she wasn’t really reading the music he put in front of her. She was listening and copying. If she didn’t understand something, she would ask Felix to show her. After a few demonstrations she could play bar after bar from memory.
Teaching her to read music had been torture for both of them. She’d hated it, he’d hated it, and they’d hated each other half the time. He made her do everything she despised and rarely let her do what she loved. Long notes and scales and sight-reading, day after day.
“I don’t want to practice long notes! I want to play Chopin.” Eva would stomp her foot.
“You can’t play Chopin.”
“I can too! Listen.” Eva immediately launched into a Chopin nocturne, complete with every variation he’d purposely played, just to test her.
“You can’t. You are parroting. You are not reading. You are listening to me and playing without looking at your music and seeing the music as you create it.”
“I see the music in my head. And it doesn’t look like little black dots and lines! It looks like rainbows and flying and the Alps and the Apennines. Why can’t I just listen and play?” she had whined.
“Because I won’t always be here to demonstrate! You have to be able to read the notes and turn the notes into music, both in your head and on your instrument. You are composing, but the greatest composers can see the notes when they hear music. They don’t see the Apennines! And you will never be able to record your compositions if you don’t understand how to read and write music.”
She had learned, eventually. But she still relied far too heavily on her ability to mimic, to embellish, to adapt.
The word adapt made her think of her grandfather, who hadn’t been able to adapt after all.
“Uncle Felix?” Eva lowered her violin and bow, interrupting her reverie and her freestyle composition to stare at her uncle’s rigid back.
“Please keep playing, Eva,” he said quietly.
“What would you like me to play, Uncle?”
“Play whatever you wish. Something else mixed with Rosselli and sprinkled with Adler,” he said, and his shoulders began to shake. She’d never seen her uncle cry, and in the last months, he’d cried twice. She didn’t know what to do to comfort him. So she played. She played Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major because it was hauntingly beautiful, but she drifted off into her own arrangement and ended up playing something that didn’t sound like anything she’d ever played before. When Eva finally lowered her violin, Felix had sunk into a chair and dried his eyes on a handkerchief he still held wadded up in his hand. He met her gaze, and his eyes were so sad her heart ached in her chest. But he smiled at her with tenderness and began to speak.
His voice was tired, his words measured. “In my life I’ve only been good at one thing. The violin. Not as good as my father. Maybe I could have been. But I drank too much and lost my temper too often. I came to Italy because I failed in Vienna. I came to Italy because I was in love with a woman who wasn’t in love with me. And for the last thirteen years, I’ve taken it out on you. If you hadn’t been so strong, I might have broken you. I might have made you hate me. But you fought back. You shrugged me off. And now I listen to you and I am in awe.”
“You are?” Eva asked in amazement. These were things she had never heard before.
“When you play, Eva, I feel hopeful. They can take our homes, our possessions. Our families. Our lives. They can drive us out, like they’ve driven us out before. They can humiliate us and dehumanize us. But they cannot take our thoughts. They cannot take our talents. They cannot take our knowledge, or our memories, or our minds. In music, there is no bondage. Music is a door, and the soul escapes through the melody. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. And everyone who listens is freed. Everyone who listens is elevated.