Emi’s peripatetic adolescence crossed with Leo Hartmann’s stable one in Vienna in September 1937, two years after she and her parents had arrived in Austria. In 1937, the country was run by an extremely conservative government, which it had been since 1932. But that fall, the city started to feel different. Emi’s father said it had the beginnings of a tornado about to strike, with the city changing color, just like the sky does before a storm. When Emi had arrived in 1935, she was aware of the country’s Austrofascist regime—her father never allowed her to arrive in a country without a solid grasp of its history and politics—but she also knew that the Jews were not being violently persecuted like they were in Germany. Some German Jews—prominent actors and musicians—were even seeking refuge in Vienna. In those early days, when she was discovering the city, she could not have imagined how the tide would turn just two years later.
It was a very hot September in 1937, and on her walk to her school, the Gymnasium bei St. Canisius, Emi was sweating in her short-sleeved cotton blouse paired with the requisite long navy blue skirt issued by the prestigious Catholic school. As she was switching from an all-girl institution to a coeducational one for her two last years, on her insistence, her mother had brought her to a conservative Austrian seamstress to fit her uniform and now the skirt fell down her slender hips perfectly, though no one would have called the cut flattering.
On her walk that day, she noticed that there was already a small rip in the shoulder of her new blouse. She would ask her amah to repair it when she got home, but until then she couldn’t help but stick her finger in it, which made it bigger and bigger, so that half her left shoulder was visible by the time she entered the centuries-old school building.
It was in this state that Emi encountered Leo Hartmann for the first time.
Two years later, when she’d packed her clothes to leave Vienna, she had put the white school shirt in layers of tissue paper at the top of her trunk, the hole still there, unrepaired.
Emi was in the music room practicing the piano as she was told she could when she interviewed for her position in the eleventh-grade class. When she came to tour the school with her parents, she had sat with the music teacher, who, after listening to her play two notoriously difficult Brahms pieces, had given her permission to use the piano for as long as the school stayed open in the afternoons. Emi immediately took her up on her offer. Three days a week she had to travel outside the inner city to piano classes with a renowned conservatory teacher, but on days when she didn’t, the thought of practicing away from her apartment, especially away from her mother, who made her play every song twice as many times as she would have liked, was too tempting to pass up.
Leo thought he could hear piano music when he turned the corner away from his chemistry classroom, where he’d stayed late to clean up a glass tube that had shattered on the floor. It wasn’t his fault that the tube had fallen, but he was the one tasked with sweeping up the tiny shards. When the music grew louder, he continued toward it, wondering if his mind was deceiving him. The building had soaring stone ceilings and wide marble floors, and the combination often caused strange sounds to echo through the halls, especially on hot days when the thick walls seemed to shift. When Leo reached the door of the music room, he was happy to discover that it wasn’t just an effect of the wind that he’d heard. He leaned against the door and listened. His mother played the piano quite well, but he recognized instantly that she didn’t play nearly as well as whoever was playing here. When the music ended, he opened the door slowly and looked at the slight girl with long black hair sitting on the piano bench.
“I’m sorry,” Leo said in German when she smiled at him.
“Did I startle you?” Emi replied, looking at him with interest.
Leo shook his head no.
“Really? Because you should see the expression on your face,” she said, her amusement apparent. “You look as if I were a cat playing the piano.”
“Do I?” Leo started to laugh. “I’m sorry. How embarrassing,” he said, walking into the music room. “I was just surprised to see you. You weren’t whom I was expecting. Not that I know whom I was expecting.” He paused to think about it and admitted, “Just not you.”
“Let’s hope I’m a pleasant surprise,” said Emi, standing up. She noticed that her skirt had turned sideways, and without embarrassment, pulled the button around to the front. “Did you enjoy the piece? Chopin, Opus Ten, étude number three. In E major,” she added.
“I know the piece,” said Leo. “I only heard the end, but you played it very well. It pulled me all the way here from the chemistry room.”
“Good!” Emi smiled at him and then sat down again and pressed on a few of the black keys quietly as he looked at her.
“Are you a student here?” he asked, after he had offered her his hand and introduced himself.
“I am,” said Emi, “but I just started today. Which is why you haven’t seen me before. My name is Emiko Kato. Emi Kato. If you had seen me, I think you’d remember . . . being that I’m not Austrian. I stick out a little bit.”
“Do you?” he said neutrally. “Either way, you sound Austrian.”
“That’s wonderful to hear,” said Emi. “I’ve worked very hard to keep up my German. My parents will be thrilled when I tell them.”
“Did you not grow up in Austria?” Leo asked, resting his arm on the piano. Emi looked at it, stocky even under his neatly pressed white school shirt. He had an athlete’s build, thick and muscular but without making him look inelegant. And he was the perfect height to look her square in the eye, just a few inches under six feet, as tall as she was. She was sure that most people first noticed his eyes, wide and green and bright, but she looked back down at his arm, feeling a sudden urge to place her hands on top of it and keep them there for a while. She realized, when she was inspecting the curl of his brown hair, that she hadn’t answered his question.
“No,” she said suddenly. “I’m not from Vienna. I’ve only been here two years. My father is in the Japanese Foreign Service. We’re Japanese. You might have guessed that already, or you might be thinking that all Orientals look the same and that perhaps I’m Chinese or Korean.”
She raised her eyebrows and Leo shook his head no.
“My father is the consul general at the consulate here,” Emi went on. “Prior to Vienna we were posted in Berlin for four years, and we were in London for a few before that. I’ve tried not to let my German slip away. I like speaking it.”
“I’d say you succeeded,” Leo said, looking at the sheet music in front of her. He flipped through a few pages, then stopped suddenly.