“Mein lieber Froschi,” Hani said, laughing and kissing him again, leaving a trace of red lipstick on his left cheek. “Froschi, as in frog,” she explained. “When he was a baby he was always smiling and sticking out his little pink tongue as if he was trying to catch a fly. Exactly like a frog. Despite that, he was the cutest little baby. Just rolls of fat and a head. But that name, I’m afraid it stuck.”
“I like it. It’s a good nickname,” Emi said, happy that Leo was no longer just rolls of fat and a head. “And I’d love to play now. I’m sure your piano is better than the one at school.”
“Perhaps a little,” said Hani, poker-faced. She led Emi through the long, dark hall to the piano, which was in a separate music room with a sweeping view over the Ringstrasse. Hani opened the lid and gestured to Emi to join her.
The Hartmanns’ piano wasn’t just nicer than the piano at school, it was one of the nicest pianos in the world: a hand-painted, rosewood turn-of-the-century Steinway, which Emi knew were made only on commission in the company’s Hamburg factory.
She sat down on the polished bench, wanting to embrace the keys, to breathe in the piano and the memory of all the hands that had ever played it, but she managed to just rest her fingers on it carefully and smile up at the Hartmanns as if it were an everyday occurrence for her to play such an instrument.
She took a deep breath and launched into the piece, quickly forgetting the opulence of her surroundings and focusing only on the notes, simple and unfussy, but some of her favorite ever written. She played the étude with more emotion than she had felt in months, transported by her company, the instrument, and the happy afternoon. Above her hung a Fragonard painting, but she wouldn’t know that until weeks afterward, when Leo’s father, Max Hartmann, took her on a tour of the apartment, explaining each of his paintings with a curator’s eye.
Emi had practiced almost exclusively on Steinways when she’d lived in Germany, but never in her life had she played on an instrument more beautiful than the Hartmanns’.
After she had finished playing, letting the étude’s last hopeful note linger, Hani looked at her with tears in her brown eyes and shook her head. “What a gift you have. What a tremendous gift. Look at me,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Joy. Tears of joy.”
She walked over and sat next to Emi on the piano bench. “You must come back and play for us, Emi. Come every day that you and your family live in Vienna. I beg you. Froschi went off to school with a leather bag and some books he won’t read and came home with a concert pianist. What a very memorable day.”
That hot September afternoon—filled with the charismatic Hartmanns, Hungarian servants, Fragonard paintings and clothes that needed to be mended—was the start of Emi’s days in Austria playing the rosewood Steinway for the family. Sometimes she would play for Leo and both of his parents; sometimes she would come in the evenings and provide the entertainment for a dinner party the family was hosting. But no matter how many people were there, she was always just playing for Leo.
After a few weeks, she called him Froschi, too, and after a few months it was mein Froschi. Leo quickly became hers, and everything that Vienna would come to mean to her was tied up in him.
CHAPTER 16
LEO HARTMANN
SEPTEMBER 1937–NOVEMBER 1938
Leo Hartmann was a good son. He had been an easy baby to take care of, and in later years he was certainly going to be a good man, Hani Hartmann would say to anyone who would listen, but mostly to him. Ever since he was old enough to understand, she’d told him that she’d thought she would have more children but after she had him—with his wild brown hair and bright green eyes—she knew she could never love another baby as much.
“It would have been selfish to have more children,” she’d told him when he was younger and would ask why he didn’t have any siblings. “How could I have loved anyone even half as much as I love my Froschi? When you were a baby you had the fattest little hands and I would squeeze them and saliva would bubble out of your mouth like a hot spring. I’d pray for you to stay small forever. Sadly, it didn’t work,” she’d say, kissing the top of his head, which got harder for her to reach every year. Leo would roll his eyes at his mother whenever she spoke in her sentimental way, but secretly he was glad he was the only one. He couldn’t imagine having to share his mother’s love with anyone else.
The kindness that Hani Hartmann appreciated about Leo, and that he learned to appreciate about both his mother and father, was also highly regarded by their community in Vienna. Having old money, made in honest ways, was something that caught people’s attention, but what held their attention were the Hartmanns themselves. Perhaps it was the smallness of their family, coupled with the largeness of their home, but the ornate rooms were never empty for long. Both Hani and Max—Max especially—came from prominent Jewish families that had been in Austria for more than a century. The Hartmanns had been chocolate tycoons for several generations, as Leo’s grandfather had founded the largest chocolate factory in Vienna in 1850. Max, surprisingly the family’s rebel, had opted not to continue in confectionery and had gone into banking, where he did exceedingly well. He kept his stake in the family business while allowing his enterprising younger brother, Georg, to run it. Hani, who came to Vienna from Linz when she was eighteen years old, did not grow up with the level of wealth Max had, but she was from the Baum family, a name that Max’s mother happily approved of. Even if Hani had sprung from the gutter, Max would have married her. Her joie de vivre was even more intoxicating than her looks and together, they agreed, they would live a wonderful life.
While Max didn’t work at his family’s factory after he went off to the University of Vienna to study economics, he was still monetarily and emotionally invested. If a worker was down on their luck, between roofs over their heads, they were invited to stay with Max and Hani Hartmann. If one had a family member moving to town, needing shelter before they embarked on their own, they stayed at the Hartmanns’. And there was always a handful of Hungarians coming and going, friends and relatives of their staff who needed a few days in Vienna without spending their own money. Max and Hani’s open-door policy made them popular not only within the city’s Jewish community, which they were fairly active in, but among the blue-collar Viennese employed at the Hartmann chocolate factory.
That same openness, the charisma that came effortlessly to the Hartmanns, worked on Emi right away.
It took only one afternoon for Leo and his parents to captivate her, and it took only one more for her to realize that at their school, in 1937, she was the only admirer Leo Hartmann had left.