This is My Song Read online

  When the trains rolled in to the end of the line we were positioned on the other side of the platform. From there we played folk songs and tunes from the countries of origin of the new prisoners.

  On Sundays, when the Nazis scheduled public whippings, hangings and shootings, we played melodies as a backing track to mute the screams and death rattles of the condemned.

  We played for the guards as they drank themselves into a stupor and molested girls brought in from the villages, and we played for the officers as they ate pork and sauerkraut, and toasted their Führer and the successes of the Reich.

  I should have hated myself, but I did not. Hate is a feeling, and I had lost the ability or desire to feel anything. Not hatred, certainly not its more cherished partner, love, nothing in between. You see, my child, what I played and heard was no longer music. It was noise, no better or nobler than the discordant jangle of bones made by a cold wind sweeping through tombs and catacombs.

  ‘Rafi? Is that you? Rafael Ullmann?’

  The emaciated scrap beside me looked vaguely familiar. His eyes perhaps, the sense of a lilt in his voice, the curve of his lips –

  ‘Michal?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Before we could say any more we were shunted in different directions. I trudged away. Michal Laks was here, I should’ve been excited. Michal, my tutor, musician, hero …

  The next day, after roll call, I had returned to my barracks and slumped onto my bunk when I heard someone murmur, ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Michal? How did you –’

  ‘Rafi! My friend, it is so good to see you!’

  ‘Sshh. They cannot know! If they find you here –’

  ‘You two,’ said Evzen, a tall man with a scar that closed his right eye. ‘Go under there and keep your voices down. I will let you know if the Kapos are on their way.’

  We slid into the darkness beneath the bunks. Michal gripped my hand and told me that he hadn’t made it to Bratislava, having been intercepted at the Austrian border, swiftly identified, transported and interred at various camps. He mentioned names and I shuddered. Other prisoners had spoken grimly of such places. In retrospect, Terezín was looking more and more hospitable.

  Michal grinned. He had lost teeth. ‘But alive,’ he chirped, ‘alive!’

  I mentioned my family and he nodded his sympathy. We were silent. It seemed enough. I wanted to return to my bunk and slide into a dreamless, never-ending sleep, but Michal said, ‘Rafi, do you remember our plan? America, the clubs –’

  I shrugged. The childishness of such a dream, the distance, the impossibility –

  He said, ‘I still believe. Do you?’

  I did not reply. Michal said urgently, ‘Rafi, we have to. I know in my heart that we will survive all this and then –’

  He grinned again before reaching beneath his shirt and bringing out a single sheet of paper, yellowed, folded.

  ‘See,’ he said, ‘I have written music. It is not yet finished, but when it is, this will be our first song for our first concert.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no, it is –’

  How could I explain the sheer scale of all that had died within me?

  Michal waggled the sheet of paper. He said, ‘Rafi, listen and I will tell you about this. I was in Dachau. You have heard of this place? I was outside, late in the day, when I saw a bird. A sparrow, in fact. Not flying but standing on the soil. We watched each other then I greeted the bird, and lo and behold he came to me. I let him hop onto my foot and leg then my finger, and Rafi, I must tell you, it felt big, like sunshine or a planet. Something like that.’

  His eyes were unnaturally bright. He said, ‘The sparrow only stayed for a minute or two. But it was enough. I watched as he flew and I thought, no matter what happens there will always be one bird that will fly. You see how it is? Always one – for birds are like ideas, they can never be stopped. It is a wondrous notion, don’t you think, that there will always be flight, always be one creature willing and able to embark on a majestic flight? These others might choose to imprison us, torture us, kill us, put us in the ground or turn us to ash and yet still there will be one, then there will be two, then –’

  My child, I wish – have wished ever since – that I might have shared his enthusiasm. The simple goodness of his philosophy. But I could not. His musical composition seemed like a pointless exercise. I thought, we are all dead, if not now then certainly in the near future. Why make the agony of our fate even more acute by writing songs of hope?

  Undeterred, he unfolded the paper and pushed it towards me. I saw notes jotted onto lines and a few scratched-out words wavering beneath.

  ‘I scored it for piano,’ he said, ‘but you can see that I have had trouble with the lyric.’

  ‘Words don’t matter,’ I said bitterly, thinking of my father’s passion, the impotent prettiness of Rilke.

  Michal considered for a moment then he said, ‘My music is about the sparrow flying but like I said, I cannot find the lyric to match. So, Rafi, when I saw you yesterday, I thought straightaway that you might help –’

  ‘Michal,’ I interrupted, ‘no doubt this is a beautiful song but I have to ask, why? What does it matter to have a thing of beauty? When all around –’

  ‘Rafi, because it is music! And we must have music. My uncle taught me this –’

  But our music is different, I thought. We play with marches, hangings, shootings … music is death and I will never think of it otherwise.

  I pulled from his grip and whispered, ‘It is gone.’

  ‘No! Rafi, my friend, my dear friend, remember Shabbat! Zachor, shamor … there is still music in the world and you must rediscover it. If not in this song then perhaps in the breaking of the day or in the wind or in the faces of our friends, departed or present – Rafi, you must find it!’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘You must,’ said Michal with great intensity, ‘for without music there is nothing! Rafi, in such a world we are beyond the reach of anyone, even God.’

  There was little point in arguing. He insisted that I keep the sheet of paper, sing or at least imagine the tune in my mind, imagine the possible integration of words to accompany those inspiring notes –

  ‘Perhaps then,’ he said, gripping my pale tattooed arm. ‘Perhaps then …’

  And so, my child, we close upon the end of this section of my retelling.

  Should I have spoken to Jakob about Michal joining the orchestra? No doubt. He was a talented player and the prevalence of disease meant that the orchestra was low in number.

  Did I speak to Jakob? To compound my shame, no.

  Why not? Was I forgetful? Deliberately, stupidly mute? Protective of my place, perhaps?

  None of those. I did nothing because I had lost the hope that sparks all action. Blunted, without feeling or spirit, I was unable to reach out to the one whom I had admired and loved.

  Nor did I read his song. Instead, I shoved it beneath the straw and planned on leaving it there.

  Late 1944, a sense of panic amid the darkness. The remains of the orchestra played as the trains rolled in. We played as the marchers left and we played as the crematoriums burned, a pasty green smoke filled the sky and ash fell in tandem with the snow.

  Twelve days after our meeting beneath the bunks Michal was marched out of Auschwitz. I tightened my grip on the saxophone so that I would not be tempted to wave, filled my narrow lungs and blew a weak noise into the grey, greasy morning. The long line of men snaked beyond the gates and I thought of the tales that we had all heard; pits being hollowed from the dank earth by the prisoners who then lined the edges and waited for a hail of bullets to catapult them into the darkness.

  January 1945, daily marches. Our captors screamed, their brutality given over to the worst kind of insanity, that without limits. The ash thickened to a pall and I waited my turn, blank-hearted beneath a sooty sky – until the night of fires, explosions and volleying gunshots. Just moments bef
ore he was killed, Jakob implored us to hide. I did so, lay down to sleep before dying – and was later lifted from the floor, wounded in the thigh but somehow alive, by a soldier wearing a Soviet uniform.

  The war was over, Europe left broken and burned. I limped out of Auschwitz, the rags and the human unable to be properly distinguished or separated. With no real knowledge of my grandparents or other relatives, I knew that there was no one for me to go to, no place for true repatriation. I was utterly alone, imprints of my immediate family lodged forever in my dreams. To this day I continue to be haunted by visions of my sister’s unseen but no doubt violated body, my mother’s fluttering heart and my mad father chanting his beloved verse as he stands forever naked beneath a shower nozzle that will never know water.

  I see them and I see many others such as the Old Man, Dominik, Jakob … my shame swells as I see Michal Laks plying the instrument that he loved and then his gaunt, earnest face on the day that he tried in vain to pull me back to a world of music, enchantment and love.

  I see and feel the pain and horror of what I became, and like a caterpillar I crawl into my pupa … but this caterpillar will never emerge, he will never unfold his butterfly wings.

  My child, I am tired. It is late and my heart is heavy. Soon I will tell of your mother and our precious silent world, but for now I must sleep.

  I must sleep.

  Her clearest memory from her early days was not a pair of eyes, not a smile or colour, object or feeling. It was a sound, a note. She was lying in her narrow bed when a bird’s unfamiliar morning-call cleaved the silence – and just like that, Annie’s world began to change. With a speed that gladdened her but also left her a little nonplussed, possibilities were germinated. The blankness and stiffness of life thus far, that flat pale scrim that had always been firmly in place, no longer seemed so overwhelming.

  She never knew what type of bird it was that uttered the call but never thought that it mattered either. The not-knowing was irrelevant, the point being that it had happened. Close by too, a shrill blast that was not merely happy but welcoming. Not merely welcoming but suggestive. But, she realised later, the greatest significance was this: the bird’s call, a herald’s trumpeting of joy, had forced a tiny split in the muffled, predictable panorama within which she had been born – and splits, by their very nature, must eventually widen. They must.

  As quickly as the note had come, Annie responded. Not yet six, she was nevertheless able to sense both the loveliness of the bird’s call and the notion that someday, in her yet to be determined future, that note might grow to become grand and unique … She snatched its tremulous shape from the blank air and quickly snuggled it into a place where, to that point of her childhood, nothing else had been. She found this process, the sudden unlatching and filling of her heart, to be like opening a cupboard that had never before been opened and shining in a light; not just any light, but a welcome, unfiltered radiance. It was also surprisingly tiring. Annie lay in bed a while longer before rising, covering herself against the chill of early spring and treading softly into the kitchen of their log cabin where, as was usual for that time of day, her father was staring over the mountain tops and her mother was stirring eggs.

  She became twelve years of age on a sunless, soundless day in November of 1974, the family still living as they’d always lived, near mute and alone in that dipping cusp that provided an ending for the prairie lowlands and a beginning for the spruce forest that fringed the ranges. To celebrate her birthday, Annie’s parents gave her a slim black plastic box that she quickly discovered to be a camera, labelled as a Kodak Instamatic.

  She was both surprised and thrilled. Nancy Jefferson had a camera, bigger of course, with a proper lens, but that was okay, the way of things. The Jeffersons were ranch people, rich enough to travel overseas and fund the conversion of their barn into a schoolhouse and own what seemed like a thousand horses and pay Annie’s father to cut their wood and mend their fences. Once Nancy had even allowed Annie to look into the viewfinder of her camera and see that impressively coloured, boxed-in world – but you won’t take a photo, Nancy had told her, for that is a powerful skill that needs powerful knowledge. Expo-sure and aper-ture, she had said importantly. Taking photos is hard, not for anyone.

  Not for you. Annie had understood that much. Photography was amidships on that long deck-board of activities forbidden to someone like her, a cabin girl, edge-of-the-prairie type.

  But now, the Kodak Instamatic!

  She turned it over and over in her hands, taking great care as she marvelled at the simple design. Her father watched before pushing the tiny instruction manual in her direction and tapping it with a long, calloused finger. Annie obeyed by opening the pages and pretending to read – but she didn’t want instructions, she wanted to experiment, to play.

  Satisfied with her behaviour, Rafael, her father, reached out and touched her shoulder. This was what he did, had always done. Instead of kissing or hugging her, he touched her shoulder. In her younger years she had yearned for this act, thinking his touch to be near electric; now that she was older – twelve already, in such a short time! – she found it to be an irritant, a dull push done for no more reason, it seemed, than to check if she still existed.

  Despite her advanced years, Annie still had the grace to smile. Her father stared at her a moment longer before limping out to his truck and chugging away to build fences and deflect whatever silvered light might eventually drift down from above.

  Annie picked up the Kodak Instamatic, signalled to her mother that she too was going outside, and left the cabin.

  There was, as always, a wind. It came not in coastal snatches and swirls but as a sheet, pulled steadily and relentlessly across the landscape as if the bed of the earth was being tucked and smoothed. The dried-up grasses had already lowered their dun heads in preparation for winter, reminding Annie of that time, her one time, when she had visited the city of Calgary and seen hundreds of people scurrying as if for their lives beneath a fierce squall of rain.

  Oh, but she had adored Calgary! Just nine years of age and somehow gifted a day with the Jeffersons in that wondrous city. Sometimes she took out her rainbow scarf – too precious to be properly worn – to check that the trip had actually occurred, that it was a real part of her. She especially remembered the zoo and the glittery department stores and how much she had enjoyed walking below the majestic height of the skyscrapers, and it warmed her, all of it.

  She zipped her jacket higher as she brushed past the wavering stalks that grew like hair from clotted clumps of black soil. To her left were the Jeffersons’ canola fields, golden-green pretty in the warmer months; to her right, the brown-paper stretch of grassland where the child version of herself had often searched for moles and squirrels. But today Annie wanted the forest – patches of moss, blown-down branches left to rot in hollows and those dark, measly tracks that flowed like streams between the spruce trees, gushing into tunnels and cavities where she knew she must not roam. Bear country, said her father in his clippy, un-Jefferson-like way. Some beasts do not want you in their homes.

  Hot-breathed and -bodied from the exercise, she stopped near a line of trees, swivelled once, twice, aimed her camera, trembled for a moment at the hugeness of what she was about to do – and pressed the button. The camera click-clacked and even seemed to warm a little beneath her fingers.

  Time captured. Now she was twelve, she sensed that this place and all that went into it would never be the same. In the future – which was now! – the leaves would shiver a different dance. Their parent twigs would bend to a deeper or shallower angle. Pockets of air would enter and depart, their lifespan less than that of the briefest insect. The layered sky would separate and reform but with new widths and shades and messages.

  She furrowed her brow and thought, nothing will be as it was when I took that photo. Everything moves; nothing can ever stay the same.

  Powerful idea. Allowable? Annie wasn’t sure. But she flushed with pleasure a
t the possibility then turned her camera to the dark forest of spruce and pressed, to the low sky, to the limits of the prairie. She had snapped all but one of the twelve-shot roll when a bird screeched raucously. It was a surprising, unfamiliar sound, a kak-kak. Annie spun, aimed the lens and clicked, hoping that she might cage the creature for all time. Minutes later she was running home as the greyness melted towards rain.

  That afternoon her mother did that rare thing, that special-occasion thing that Annie loved. She played music.

  The record player was buttoned into its case and hidden in a blanket box that was kept beneath Annie’s bed. Her father, who refused to allow music, television or radio in the cabin, did not know about the existence of the record player. They had bought it in Honey, the town where they shopped for groceries once a month, going to the hardware store to buy a sink plug and walking instead into a sale of record players, each coming with a spare diamond needle and a ‘bonus’ classical music LP. At the time neither Annie nor her mother had thought to question why a hardware store should have a sale of record players when it didn’t normally stock such an item. Instead they had looked at the display stand and fallen instantly in love with perfection: the turntable so wonderfully circular, its spindle an exact miniature copy, the needle as sophisticated and sharp as something you might only ever read or dream about, a minaret or a rocket to Mars.

  Somehow they’d conspired to buy one, Annie hiding the contraption under her discarded coat all the way home. Groceries were quickly stowed then they’d unboxed the player, plugged in the cord and been transfixed as their bonus LP, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, had spun slowly, enticingly, beneath the measured descent of the needle –

  Something new, indescribable! Surely these sounds were part of a magic trick! The music was a pewter storm thundering across continents. It was autumn colours blinking in fresh sunlight, the blood that raced around and kept her alive. Annie had tapped and la-laed before guiltily remembering her mother’s deafness. How wonderful that she had been willing to share in this strange event! What cruelty that these notes should be kept from her, as if to further thicken the prison walls – but when Annie had turned to stop the music, she had seen that Helen had placed her hands flat to the floor, next to the player. Her mother was feeling tremors, the music marching a physical beat through her fingertips and wrists.