Chapter 22 Full of Joy
FULL OF JOY
It took me a minute to come back from that memory. When I did, I realized that we were still in the church, standing around the tombs of my ancestors. Some of the group were looking at me, and some were looking away. Well, I had just shared the kind of nightmare memory that nobody wants to hear.
“Jesus Christ,” Sebastian said.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Veritably.” And gestured around me.
“Also my grandmother and grandfather, and my grandfather’s parents, too, all the way back to Augustus the Strong.
It’s odd to leave a place that holds so much of one’s history, but it didn’t feel nearly as odd on that day.
Dr. Becker and his children were a gift, in a way.
We had to leave in order to keep them safe.
That made the decision much easier. When I think of my parents becoming refugees, fleeing from the Russians …
I can’t imagine it. I don’t think it would have happened, and here we would have been, trapped in a new country that hated everything we stood for. ”
“A remarkable story,” Dr. Eltschig said.
“A killer story,” Ashleigh answered.
“Except that everybody’s missing the point,” Ben said. “Hello? Tiara?”
“Yes,” Alix said. “About that tiara.”
Dr. Eltschig looked at the other trustees, then at me, and said, “You’ve told a most compelling tale. The board will have to confer.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Alix said. “Confer about what? Do you want to find the thing or don’t you? You have a window of opportunity here. Otherwise, what’s to stop my grandmother from waltzing through the tunnel again, once you’re not looking, and getting her tiara back?”
I said, “Possibly not the best argument. What would stop me? Oh, any number of things. Sealing the entrance here? Locking the door to the tunnel? Posting a guard? Not wishing to be apprehended at the airport as an international jewel thief? I don’t run very fast these days, and I hear the food in prison is terrible.
Or, perhaps, my honor. The one thing we can still call our own, after everything else is lost. I find myself unwilling to place it in jeopardy. ”
“How would you be placing it in jeopardy?” Alix was born to argue. “That tiara is yours. It was your grandmother’s, it was your mother’s, and now it’s yours.”
“Not officially,” I said.
“Oh, for—” she began, then threw up her hands. “Fine. Your call. Germans.”
Dr. Eltschig said, “Perhaps you’d like to sit in the cathedral for a bit, Frau Stark, while the board confers.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
How to describe the feeling of standing in the nave again after nearly eighty years?
The columns, walls, and arches of pure white, and the dome overhead.
The magnificent altar, which I’d once told my mother was “as beautiful as an Easter egg,” with its pink and green marble.
The gilded pulpit, too, its solemnity considerably reduced by the veritable army of naked cherubs that frolicked around it.
I walked slowly to the front, to the family pew, on Sebastian’s arm.
There was, as always, nothing marking it out as special, for we were all, my father had explained, equal in the eyes of God.
How, how had Hitler, born and raised Catholic, got that so wrong? How had nobody ever set him right?
I genuflected as always, entered the pew, and sat. Just sat, and let the peace and beauty of the place enter me, and the memories, too. The others sat behind me. I could hear them there.
If I’d been better at kneeling, I would have done so, but my kneeling days, alas, are over. I bowed my head instead and said the words silently.
… And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.
Oh, how important, and yet how difficult!
Even to see one’s own trespasses can take such an effort, and as for forgiveness …
forgiveness is harder still. Forgiveness is, for an obstinate person like me, at times nearly impossible.
Footsteps on the stone. Not the board’s; this was one person, and it was a woman. I could tell by the lighter tap of her heels. The footsteps stopped beside my pew, and I turned my head.
It was indeed a woman. Not a young one. Sixty, perhaps, with a mix of blonde and silver hair pulled back, dressed in a tweed skirt and cardigan with sensible shoes. A practical woman. She said in German, “Excuse me. I understand you are Marguerite von Sachsen.”
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “And you are?”
“You’re wondering how I know,” she said. “Dr. Eltschig told me. He’s a member of this congregation, you see, and I am the organist, Frau Martin.”
“Ah,” I said, and extended my hand. “You have a beautiful instrument.” Her fingers were long, as an organist’s should be.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m very fortunate. But if I may say—if I may tell you—”
“Yes?” I said.
“My great-grandfather,” she said, “was the organist here when you were young. Herr Rudolf Ortmann. You may not remember, of course.”
“But of course I remember,” I said with delight. “How beautifully he played. I was just thinking of it. And you caught the love of the organ from him? Or from your grandfather or grandmother, perhaps?”
“No, I’m afraid not. It’s a bit of a tale.”
“Sit, then, and tell me.”
She sat beside me in the wooden pew. Two practical, sensible German ladies, at ease in God’s house, because its rituals, the sights and sounds and scents here, had been part of our lives forever.
“He was killed in the war,” she said. “Great-Grandfather. I didn’t know him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He was an older man, I think. Of course, to a young girl, all adults seem old. Was it the fire?”
“No. He was called up to the Volkssturm, there at the end, to defend the city. When the Russians came.”
“But surely he was too old.”
“Sixty. And a gentle person, by all accounts. I doubt he did much damage to anyone, but he was killed all the same.”
“Your grandfather, then?” I asked.
Again she shook her head. “My grandfather died on the Eastern front when my father was a baby.”
“A waste,” I said. “A criminal waste. All these wars. Our fathers, and our father’s fathers. A waste.”
“Indeed,” she said. “I learned to play the piano as a child, though, as girls did then, at least petit bourgeois girls like me.”
“As I did myself.” I was happy to move on from thoughts of war. “It was felt that a young lady should have at least some accomplishments, and my needlework was always shocking. How long ago that seems. But please go on. How did the organ come back around to you again?”
She laughed a little. “Maybe it was in my blood, or maybe it was the dullness of growing up in East Germany. Did you ever, as a girl, mix all the colors in your box of watercolors, thinking you would create a beautiful new color that nobody had ever seen?”
“No,” I said, “but then, I was a rather practical child, and no more talented at art than at needlework. Did you find a new color, then?”
“I found brown. That’s what you get when you mix all the colors together: muddy brown.
And when you try to make everybody and everything the same, the world becomes like that, too.
Those dreary Soviet apartment blocks! I longed for beauty, so I studied music.
Piano, primarily, but the organ, too, although there’s really no point in learning to play the organ.
It’s complicated and difficult, and no symphony hires an organist. One never hears of an organist making her debut at Carnegie Hall. ”
I laughed. “You’re right. An impractical ambition, but you did it anyway.”
“I did, although as a hobby only. I taught music at the university here. I still do, in fact. The government began restoring the church in the 1960s, as you may know, but the organ was only fully restored after the Wall came down. The palace, of course, wasn’t touched until recently.
It was a symbol of decadence, and the church not much better.
The Frauenkirche was the church of the people, and that, they could make a case for despite the awkward religious element. But this? The church of the princes?”
“And both of them too beautiful, really,” I said. “All this Baroque ornamentation. Bah!”
“And now,” she said, “here we are, having the last laugh, because we’ve outlasted all of it. The war, the Nazis, the Soviets … all of that destructiveness is gone, and the cathedral stands again. As do you.”
“Antiquities,” I said with a smile.
“Treasures,” she said. “I came in today to practice my music for Sunday. I’d be honored, though, if you’d allow me to play for you.”
“Please,” I said. “I’d like that very much.”
“Is there any special piece you’d like to hear?”
I told her, because I knew. I knew exactly.
Frau Martin slid out of the pew, and about two seconds later, Alix and Ashleigh slid in.
“How do you meet so many people?” Alix demanded. “You just stand there, and people come up and talk to you.”
“I’m harmless, that’s why,” I said.
“Ha,” Alix said, and I had to smile. Then, of course, I had to explain the story. Quickly, because a few notes were sounding already from the organ pipes.
“That’s, like, a really sad story,” Ashleigh said.
“Oh,” I said, “they were all sad stories then. But I believe she’s about to play the piece I requested. You’ll pardon me if I sit in silence for this.”
I knew, during the next five minutes, that Ashleigh was filming me again. I knew, too, that the tears were running down my cheeks, my handkerchief unable to keep up with them. It was the music, bringing it all back to me.
Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Bach’s masterpiece, pouring from the pipes like a river of golden sound.
I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my father in his chair before the fire, listening to the Berlin Philharmonic on the wireless, as happy to hear the music there as he was to hear it at the Semperoper in his evening dress.
My mother, so beautiful in her blondness, the fineness of her bones, sitting beside him in her own chair, their hands touching.
As much of a public display as they ever made, but the current running between them nearly visible all the same.
My mother, I believe, didn’t love my father less for his scars.
She loved him more, for his scars were but the visible symbol of his strength.
And, always, I thought of Joe. In our tiny Nuremberg flat, bent over the battered cello he’d bought from a dignified old man in a music shop.
His bony face intent, his wiry arm wielding the bow with so much authority, his body swaying a bit, because Joe felt the music all the way through his body, and because he did, I felt it all the way through mine.
I’d never thought, somehow, that I’d have what my parents did, not in the nightmare of cruelty that my homeland, that all Europe, had become. I’d never met a man as decent, as fundamentally good, as my father. Until I met Joe.
I remembered, too, him propped on an elbow over me after love, smiling into my eyes a little blindly, because he couldn’t see without his glasses.
“Making love with you,” he’d said, “is like playing music with the best partner. When it takes you to that other place, the place you almost never find.”
“Yes,” I’d said. “Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it?” And had felt, for the first time in so long, since the night when I’d run from this very church with only as much as I could carry on my back …
Happy. Safe. Hopeful.
And full—so very full—of joy.