And After the Fire Page 4

  What an irony: they caught the perp, as the police called him, but Alan would get away.

  Susanna and Alan began counseling sessions, in a group, as a couple, as individuals. The therapists told them that recovery would take a long time. Gradually Susanna understood what they meant. She experienced panic attacks on the streets of her beloved neighborhood while she was doing everyday chores, like stopping for shampoo at the drugstore or picking up a quart of milk at the deli. Anxieties beset her, fears so irrational she was afraid to tell Alan or Dr. Cindy, as Susanna called her counselor, because they might think she was going crazy. She took a leave from her volunteer job at the Metropolitan Museum, because the tourists began to frighten her with their ever-eager stares. When she went to the health club to swim, she had visions of the fourth-floor pool collapsing through the building to the ground. She couldn’t bear to go to a movie, because of the strangers surrounding her on all sides. She thought she saw the man who attacked her buying coffee at Starbucks, or standing in line outside the Magnolia Bakery, even after he was in jail. Sometimes he looked at her and grinned.

  She remembered the sort of person she used to be . . . confident, forthright, carefree, meeting friends for shopping sprees downtown, hurrying to restaurants, riding the subways at all hours, at ease with herself and the city. Where had her real self gone? When would that woman come back?

  Dr. Cindy said her reactions were normal, which was a comfort even though hearing it didn’t cure her anxieties or her panic attacks. Susanna had tests for AIDS and other STDs, and her doctor repeated these three times. She took a round of anti-HIV medications, routine in cases of rape, a fact that Susanna hadn’t known. She had two pregnancy tests. The perp hadn’t used “protection,” as the euphemism went. The professionals advised that she and Alan “refrain from intimacies,” another euphemism, or “use protection carefully, every time, for all intimate contact,” until the medical results were verified and complete.

  In Susanna’s group therapy sessions with other women who’d been sexually assaulted, several confessed that they found themselves recoiling from intimacy with their partners. Likewise their partners hesitated to touch them, for fear of provoking this reaction.

  Susanna and Alan were experiencing this, too. They could still be affectionate with each other, sitting close together on the sofa while watching movies on TV, cuddling in bed as they fell asleep. But moving beyond simple affection felt impossible. Luckily they were able to talk about this issue. Susanna believed they were moving forward. Her life with Alan seemed stable and secure. She tried to think of the rape as a glitch, something that could be dealt with and put behind her.

  The economy collapsed in the autumn, but Susanna and Alan held on to their jobs. By January, Susanna woke up to the realization that for weeks, Alan had been slipping into himself. He’d become uncharacteristically quiet. Susanna assumed he had professional worries because of the economic situation and that he was reluctant to share these concerns with her. From the earliest days of their marriage, he’d never wanted to bring his work problems home. She didn’t press him.

  Maybe if she’d pressed him, things would have turned out differently.

  “I’m sorry, Susanna.”

  They were in the bedroom, getting ready for bed. Today, Susanna had received a clean bill of health. Physical health, at least. The pregnancy tests were negative, the thrice-repeated AIDS tests were negative, the other STD tests were negative. They no longer needed to protect themselves from each other. They could resume where they’d left off. Susanna felt ready to think about their baby again.

  Alan sat down on the side of the bed. He was still dressed in his oxford shirt and suit trousers. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes. She wore her robe. She’d taken a bath. Her skin radiated heat. She went to embrace him, to stand between his legs the way they often held each other. This time, instead of parting his legs, bringing her close, and wrapping his arms around her, he took her hands, which had the effect of keeping her away.

  “I’m not ready,” he said.

  His cheekbones were sharply defined. He’d lost weight.

  “I can’t.”

  With his dark eyes and chiseled features, his thick curling hair, and tall, lanky frame, she’d always found him attractive and stirring. Now his handsomeness had become a mask, concealing his thoughts and feelings.

  “I might never be ready.”

  “Never?” What did he mean, never?

  “It’s tearing me apart.”

  “What is?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Hurt me? How?”

  “It’s the violation. It’s—I can’t explain.”

  And then he didn’t need to explain. She understood. The sense of contamination. Of a filth that could never be cleansed. She’d heard this from others, in her therapy sessions.

  “I just—”

  She put her hand over his mouth, so she wouldn’t have to hear him describe his feelings about the prospect of resuming their lives, of creating their baby.

  When she took her hand away, he said, “I’m sorry.” He began to cry.

  Like the good wife she was, she held him close to comfort him. She didn’t cry. She was stunned. As she caressed his hair, she stared out the window. Their bedroom faced south, overlooking the rooftops of the brownstones. The skyscrapers glittered in the distance. Each night before they turned off the lights, Susanna opened the curtains so that she could fall asleep to this view, becoming part of the luminous city around her.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  Their marriage, their future, the focus of her life. Finished. Ended in a few minutes on a concrete slab next to three green plastic garbage cans. Plus the sky-blue can for recyclables.

  Chapter 3

  On a Saturday afternoon in late summer, in Uncle Henry’s living room, Susanna sat down to rest for a moment. The windows were open, and the breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass. She heard snatches of the neighbors’ conversations as they worked in their gardens. On the piano was a vase of white snapdragons, a gift from the upstairs renters, Diane and Jenna.

  She’d begun the job of clearing out Henry’s home. A specialized firm would handle the bulk of the organizing and removal, but she was going through everything beforehand, to find what she and her mother might want to keep. This morning, she’d packed the photographs to send to Evelyn in Florida. Without pictures of herself everywhere she turned, she felt more relaxed. She’d already reviewed the books and CDs, making a stack of items she wanted. Progress was slow, but her attention to the task was a way of honoring her uncle, or so she told herself as she once again sneezed from the dust.

  The piano bench caught her eye, and she got up and opened it. Her childhood music books were piled inside: Teaching Little Fingers to Play; Scales and Chords Are Fun. She remembered herself at seven and eight, making her way through these collections. She’d hated taking piano lessons, but Evelyn had insisted on it. When she was a teenager, Henry had dragged her to concerts by the Buffalo Philharmonic.

  Pieces Are Fun, Books One, Two, and Three. From the progression of the books, she recalled that even though she’d hated the lessons, she’d gradually advanced. In My Favorite Solo Album, she’d dog-eared the page for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s “Solfeggietto.” In My Favorite Program Album, the page for Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” was paper-clipped, the music marked with her teacher’s notations. She’d performed this piece in a year-end recital, and she remembered her happiness that she’d gotten through it with only a few mistakes. Here were Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fifteen Two-Part Inventions, also marked by her teacher, high-flown pieces indeed for someone who professed to hate her music lessons.

  She came upon a manila envelope about the size of a large-format magazine. A letter-sized envelope was taped to it, and For Susanna was written on this smaller envelope in Henry’s scrawl.

  She returned to the chair and sat down. She detached the letter and opened it. H
enry had used the thick stationery that Aunt Greta reserved for special correspondence.

  It was dated the same day he pressed fentanyl patches onto his chest, drank a bottle of vodka, and went to bed.

  Dear Susanna,

  I knew that sooner or later you’d find this note.

  He was teasing her? He thought hiding a suicide note was a joke?

  The truth is, I’ve had enough. That’s all I can say.

  Her anger flared, mixed with anguish. His suicide felt like an attack against her, an act of hostility and rejection.

  I took this from Germany at the end of the war. I found it in Weimar, which became part of East Germany. It was in a piano bench stuffed with music, in a house that belonged to murdered Jews. In those days I saw and did things that have stayed with me forever. I was at Buchenwald after the liberation. I killed a girl when I didn’t mean to.

  I’ve always protected you from that. I’m telling you a little now only so that you’ll understand.

  She would have understood better if he’d told her when he was alive, when they could have talked about it. Susanna knew Henry was brilliant, with wide-ranging interests and a gift for languages. He always kept a stack of books, mostly history, beside his reading chair, the faux-leather recliner positioned on the opposite side of the room. And yet Henry had settled for what seemed, to Susanna, like so little. He’d never gone to college. He’d moved to Buffalo when his army buddy, Pete Galinsky, offered him a job at his family’s clothing store, and he worked there for forty-five years. To Susanna, he’d seemed somehow haunted. Preoccupied. He was always kind to her, but he lashed out at Greta and at Evelyn unpredictably.

  She cautioned herself against judging him. She had no idea what the war, or any other experiences, had done to him, because he never talked about himself. At least not to her.

  After I figured out what this is, and what it says, I was angry, but I couldn’t destroy it, not the work of the great master, not even after what the Germans did to our family. I still think about the cousins you should have grown up knowing.

  From whispered conversations among Henry, Evelyn, and Greta, conversations that Susanna had overheard and pieced together by standing outside doorways after she was supposed to be asleep, she knew she’d had many relatives in Europe before the war. Susanna looks like her, Greta said. Little Franz, just a child, said Evelyn. Jakob was my age, Henry said.

  Once Susanna had interrupted, demanding to know who they were talking about. We aren’t talking about anyone. Go back to bed. Their brutal reactions taught Susanna that such questions from her were forbidden.

  These unknown relatives would have been the companions of Susanna’s life. Their photographs would have filled the living room shrine, too.

  I leave it to you, Susanna, to decide what to do with this. If you discover it’s a forgery, that would make me happy even though I’ll never know.

  The last phrase, the bleak joke, sounded so much like Henry, he might have been in the room with her.

  After the Iron Curtain fell, I wondered about going back to see if by some miracle the owner’s family survived. I even made a map, so I’d know where to go. Then I realized I never wanted to set foot in that country again. I’ve enclosed the map, though, because I know how curious you are about everything. There were no road signs then, so it’s a little confused, and so many years ago, too, but I think my memory’s pretty good.

  The second page of the letter was a roughly drawn map of roads in and around the town of Weimar, Germany, with arrows and descriptions to explain the route.

  You’re a smart girl, and you’ll figure out what’s right.

  Love, Uncle Henry.

  Susanna felt tears smarting in her eyes. You’re a smart girl, and you’ll figure out what’s right. Henry had told her this throughout her childhood. Despite his desire to protect her from the past, he’d always supported her future. He’d told her that she could, and would, accomplish whatever she set out to do.

  Susanna put the letter aside. She stared at the manila envelope. She felt reluctant to open it. She pushed herself forward and unsealed it. Inside she found a folder made of—it wasn’t any type of paper she recognized. It was thick, and the surface was scratchy against her fingertips. Vellum might be the word for it. Its color was brownish beige, and the corners were stained black.

  A few lines of German were written across the folder in a showy style. This looked like a title, although she didn’t know German and she wasn’t even able to identify many of the letters. A listing of musical instruments appeared under the title, and these she could mostly make out.

  Two sentences followed the listing. These were also in German, each sentence written by a different hand, using a different ink. This much was evident to her. The most she could read, however, was a place and year, Berlin . . . 1783.

  She opened the folder. It contained five folded sheets nested into one another. Musical notation covered both sides of every sheet, creating twenty pages of music. The sheets were the same brownish beige as the outer folder. The ink was brown and had bled through to the opposite side, so that each sheet showed both what was written on it and a faint image of the notation on the other side. The edges of the paper were soft, nothing like the sharp-edged paper she was accustomed to.

  Susanna leafed through the sheets. Cross-outs and smudges covered parts of some pages. The ink went from gloppy to thin, gloppy to thin—a quill pen, dipped and used until it ran out of ink, dipped and used again. At the end of the lines, the notes were cramped together, as if the composer realized he or she was running out of space at the end of a measure and tried to fit everything in. Between some of the lines of music, words had been written, hastily. Susanna couldn’t decipher them. On the sixth page, the paper had been scraped to make a correction, and the scrape had created a small hole.

  Despite the smudges and cross-outs, the notes seemed to flow easily from the hand. Susanna sensed that the person writing the music had been pressured to finish, with no time for the niceties of proper spacing and perfect presentation. The impression of forward momentum brought an immediacy to the work, a tactile feeling of creativity that glided across the pages.

  This was nothing like the collections of printed sheet music she’d used during her years of piano lessons, nothing like Teaching Little Fingers to Play or My Favorite Program Album. Nor was it a neat, final, handwritten copy created for the publisher after everything was in place. This must be an original composing manuscript. As she turned the pages, she experienced an eerie sense of the composer’s presence.

  She returned to the first page of music. Studying the writing at the top, she was able to decipher some of the words. The calligraphy was graceful, with well-practiced curves that added a hint of playfulness.

  On the upper left, a lithe hand had written J.J. She didn’t know what that meant. Two words of Latin followed: Dominica Exaudi. And then, Concerto, followed by words in German that she couldn’t make out. On the upper right was a name she recognized among the flourishes: J. S. Bach.

  Chapter 4

  PALAIS ITZIG, BURGSTRASSE

  BERLIN, PRUSSIA

  October 1776

  Today, for the first time in his life, he felt like an old man. Yes, he—Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, eldest son of the mostly forgotten master Johann Sebastian Bach—felt like an old man. Leaning upon his walking stick amid the Aubusson carpets and the French bric-a-brac that were de rigueur in palaces these days, he stared at the vivacious girl playing the harpsichord before him.

  “I finished the first section without a mistake, Monsieur Bach,” Sara called to him, tossing her head in pleasure. Such high spirits, she had. She spoke French, mais oui, also de rigueur in palaces. The wealthy followed the example of King Frederick (he who was commonly called the Great), and the king worshipped French language and literature.

  “Kindly concentrate on playing the piece through, Mademoiselle.” He hated to curb her high spirits, but he must. He was her teacher. By definition
, teachers curbed high spirits. “We will discuss your supposed perfection when you’ve reached the end.”

  Sara frowned. Her dark, thick eyebrows gave her an exotic look. Exotic was, he knew, a standard description for Jewish females, yet it suited her. He admired her full, brown, wavy hair, so different from that of the ubiquitous blondes he saw on the streets of Berlin. He felt within himself a cutting regret that he would never be more than an honorary uncle or father figure to her. She was fifteen. He was sixty-five.

  “Brava for the Passagen,” he said.

  “Merci.” Sara bit her lower lip, and he knew she was girding herself for the fugal section ahead, the most challenging part. So typical of her, so poignant, that bite of the lower lip when she prepared for a section of special difficulty.

  He had composed the piece to highlight her talents. And to bring out the qualities of this instrument. She played a six-octave harpsichord, with F as the lowest note. Designed and built by Johann Adolph Hass in Hamburg, its sound was powerful and clear. Physically it was an instrument of beauty, too. Carnations, tulips, and periwinkles had been painted upon the board, with birds frolicking among them. It was the best harpsichord he’d ever come across.

  As he watched Sara play, he felt a protective delicacy toward her. The fact that she lived in a palace contributed to his sense of restraint, he had to admit. The expansive music room, with its two harpsichords and a fortepiano, was on the second floor of the house and faced the river Spree. At this hour of the day, sunlight poured at an oblique angle through the long, open windows. He heard the sound of water tumbling through the fountains in the gardens below. Paintings of voluptuous women decorated the walls. He recognized the styles of Rubens and Poussin, although he would never be so ill-bred as to ask if he was correct in these identifications.