The Woman from Hamburg Read online

  One Sunday he stopped you as you were about to leave.

  You stayed. You both drank wine and talked about love and music.

  Again, you tried to leave.

  He said, “Stay; it’s still early.”

  You stayed.

  The two of you went to bed.

  You returned home the next day. You were surprised that your grandmother wasn’t home.

  That night you phoned him.

  “She died. It’s your fault that I wasn’t with her. I was punished; I deserved it, because I chose you. I was punished with her death.”

  You put down the receiver, not listening to his apologies. You didn’t want to know him any more.

  Many months later the two of you met by accident, on Three Crosses Square, where the building of the Cédib Beauty School had stood before the war, and where the Planning Commission was constructed after the war.

  You walked up to him.

  “I have to see you. I can’t manage without you.”

  After a month it turned out that you could manage.

  “He met a young violinist,” your friend told me. Bitterness dripped from his words, from the dried flowers on the shelves, from the full ashtrays, the medicine vials, and the traveling trunks. The trunks were on the floor in the middle of the living room. Were it not for the dust that had settled on them, one might have thought that they had just been brought in from the entryway. Apparently my host had planned to take a long journey, but had changed his mind.

  13

  After your grandmother’s death you lived alone. The armchair in which she had sat and listened to your playing for hours, half dozing because you practiced most eagerly late at night, was now empty.

  The date of the Chopin Competition in which you were supposed to participate was approaching.

  You told your professor that you had had a breakdown, and that you were withdrawing from the competition.

  People suspected a different reason: you were afraid.

  Even then every public appearance terrified you. Before going on stage you experienced an upset stomach; you were paralyzed by stage fright and made mistakes that you never made during a tryout.

  So you told your professor.

  He replied that by giving up you would be insulting your grandmother’s memory. That for her sake you should redouble your efforts and win the Competition.

  And so you had one more memory to honor.

  Not just your mother, your family, and the Jewish people, but your grandmother, who saved your life.

  Your undeniable duty was to redouble your efforts and win.

  You did not win. You came in eighth. You received ten thousand zlotys and, as the youngest participant in the Competition, a Calisia piano.

  Nonetheless, someone paid attention to you. To be precise, it was Artur Rubinstein, who was present in the audience. He heard something in your playing that the others did not hear. He invited you to the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium Competition that would be held the following year.

  14

  It was not a young violinist. Your embittered friend was deceived by memory. His place in your life was taken by a green-eyed pianist.

  I did not see your lovers when they were young. I know them from novels and I picture them to myself: slender, graceful, golden-haired. Now I observe them at a ball given by the Princess de Guermantes. They have sprinkled their hair with white powder, applied makeup, outlined their lips, veiled their faces with a net of wrinkles. “Time …, in order to become visible, seeks out bodies and subjects them to its power wherever it encounters them.”

  I have a reason to summon Proust. You two were reading him—fortunate ones, not disguised for old age. You brought him back from Paris, returning from Lazare Lévy. You also brought back scores and many recordings.

  In Poland at that time people were playing and reading the classics—especially, Russian and Polish classics. Among the French, they read Balzac and Zola because they had unmasked bourgeois society.

  You informed your friends that there were others: Proust, Gide, and Camus. You played Ravel for the young pianist, especially his Gaspard de la Nuit. You talked about Swann and read L’Étranger aloud. He listened to you as if in a drug-induced trance. You parted in the evening; he’d call you at night and since he didn’t have a telephone, he’d call from a public booth. The nearest phone was on Constitution Square. Sometimes he would stand there for an hour, in the frost, not feeling the cold.

  You longed for a son.

  Your colleague at the conservatory was supposed to give birth to him for you. Halina S. was tall, sensitive, nearsighted; she captivated you with her intelligence and girlish charm.

  “I become a normal man, a real man with you,” you told her, and you went on vacation with her to Czorsztyn. You went out for dinner; right after dinner you were supposed to become a “real man.” In the restaurant, a very handsome Bulgarian was seated at the next table. You fell in love with him at first sight and decided to spend the rest of your vacation in Bulgaria. You came back a couple of days later; it was filthy in Bulgaria and you had come down with a stomach flu.

  You confessed to the young pianist that you really do still love him, but that you are not in love with him.

  “Fine,” he replied with severe, manly restraint, because you two had already begun reading Hemingway.

  To this day that pianist remembers the number he used to dial every night in the telephone booth on Constitution Square.

  He remembers your piano, which had a particular sound, like moving sand flowing through an hourglass.

  Ten years later you met again in France.

  You said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do anything for you,” the way one speaks to a demanding newcomer from Poland who expects you to help him.

  15

  The Queen Elizabeth Competition, one of the most difficult in the world of musical competitions, took place in May of 1956. You took third place; this time, you did not betray the memory of your grandmother or of the Jewish people.

  In July you returned to Poland and two months later you left again, this time for good. One September night before your departure you proved yourself a “real man” with Halina S. You were euphoric. You sent a telegram: “We’ll name our son Gaspard.” But your joy turned out to be premature. You gave up sending telegrams and began writing letters. You wrote about three hundred of them over the course of twenty-five years. The majority of them were published in the book, My Guardian Demon: Letters of Andrzej Czajkowski and Halina Sander.2

  You began with plans: a family, a son, a shared “little apartment,” preferably in Paris, but you soon reconsidered. “Enough of this theater, we have to begin life,” you insisted soberly, and you enthusiastically advised Halina S. to marry a certain Marek. You wept at the news of her marriage. You started insisting on a meeting in Stockholm, but you changed your mind. “We can never meet anywhere,” you announced in a sudden feeling of responsibility for Halina S. You both were silent for four years. Then you again began to invite her and withdrew the invitation in confusion.

  The two of you met fourteen years after you left Poland. (Halina S. had married in the meantime, had given birth to a daughter, divorced, gotten her doctoral degree, remarried, and been widowed.)3

  Before her arrival you visited a psychiatrist who knew how to change sexual orientation.

  You rented a room for her in a house near yours, with a beautiful garden.

  You greeted her arrival at the London Station, full of hope, with a bouquet of roses.

  You had changed. You had a beard, were beginning to grow bald, but your hair was still black and wavy, your eyes dark brown (when you were sad or angry, they were slightly crossed), and your teeth were dazzlingly white and even.

  You assured her that you were very happy; you brought her home and opened a bottle of wine.

  That evening you asked if she had brought sleeping pills. You swallowed three at one gulp and lay down. You woke up the next day around noon. You got u
p and went to the psychiatrist.

  The two of you talked in front of the fireplace, played the piano, listened to records, and thought about the same thing. You desired it, and you were terrified. Psychiatrists have come up with a description: the anxiety of expectations. The more a person wants something, the more he fears it. Nurses who treat homosexuals know that to decrease fear it is necessary to diminish expectation, but Halina S. was not a nurse.

  You got dreamy and told her about the son you two would have. What he was supposed to read, what you would play for him. You would begin with atonal music, then follow it with Bach. “He’ll think of Bach as an irritating innovation,” you laughed, thinking of the joke you two would play on your son.

  You embraced her. You whispered, “We’d be marvelously happy together.”

  “So let’s be together,” she answered, and you got angry, because only a man can say such words. A woman is supposed to wait for them, preferably in silence.

  She was silent. You were furious that she acted like a dead worm.

  She fled after a week.

  Then she wrote, and received from you, letters filled with reproaches, explanations, hope, and nonfulfillment.

  16

  At Rubinstein’s request Sol Hurok, America’s most famous impresario, took you on.

  “Andrzej Czajkowski is one of the best pianists of his generation, and even something greater: he is a miraculous musician,” Rubinstein said about you, and Hurok included this sentence in your promotional materials. He introduced one small correction: he changed Andrzej to André, because it was easier to pronounce. You also stopped being Czajkowski. From then on you were Tchaikowsky, like Peter, whom you hadn’t valued even before then, and whom from the time of your new Tch, you spoke of with contempt and loathing.

  In your official biography Hurok wrote about your grandmother, the hiding places, and your murdered family. Which was all true, but it made you into, in your words, an Anne Frank of the piano.

  One of Hurok’s people contacted you so he could order tails for you and come to an agreement on terms. Either you were late or you didn’t show up for the appointment; as an excuse you said, “As you know, I had a difficult childhood.”

  Your smile didn’t disarm Hurok’s representative. He complained about you to his boss, who rebuked you with a fatherly admonition.

  You wrote back: “You are right; I should grow up and change. I am changing; I’ll start with my name. Czajkowski.”

  Hurok sent a telegram: “Tchaikowsky or we go our separate ways.”

  And that was the end of the jokes.

  Hurok’s ideas got on your nerves.

  The Jewish-American ladies who supported artists got on your nerves. They had dyed hair, they adored gold jewelry, they knew everyone, they could do a lot of things, and they twittered about every topic. If the Messiah comes, he will have to come to them because there is no one else, Singer wrote in despair, having in mind precisely those ladies. At the next reception you informed your hostess, who was rich, influential, and very generous, “I am a homosexual, I am attracted to Marxists, I eat with my fingers, I don’t bathe, and I support equal rights for Negroes.” Despite good reviews you stopped receiving invitations to the United States.

  Reasonable admonitions got on your nerves.

  Rubinstein and his court got on your nerves, and you let him see it. You should not have been surprised that his maid turned you away at their door, asking you never to come there again.

  You treated even the Berlin Philharmonic impolitely when they suggested a concert.

  Maybe the world got on your nerves?

  I have known people like that. The world got on their nerves—because it existed. It had no right to be after what had taken place, but it existed as if nothing had happened.

  17

  Józef Kański, a musicologist (you considered him a friend in the conservatory, but you didn’t send him a single postcard after you left), told me how you sat at the piano and were afraid to begin.

  You were supposed to play Chopin’s Nocturne in Eb Major, which begins with a single protracted note, Bb, after which the melody unfolds.

  You sat down, and were afraid to touch the key. You knew how the Bb should sound, you could hear it, and you panicked, afraid that your hand would not replicate the longed-for sound.

  “You play it,” you finally said, and Kański touched the key without hesitation.

  “You see how easy it is?” he said encouragingly, but you continued to sit there, staring at the keyboard, and listening intently to some inner sound.

  Kański says that whether playing other people’s works or composing your own, you always knew more than you were capable of expressing. The most beautiful composition, after all, is the work that exists inside oneself. You write it out afterward for instruments, for all those strings, keys, or words, too, and with every note and word that is written down you depart helplessly from the ideal sound.

  Your fears overwhelmed you. (Were you afraid that your playing would not meet the expectations of your grandmother, your mother, your family and people?) The nervous diarrhea returned before every entrance onto the stage.

  Before your concert in the Palais de Chaillot you locked yourself in the toilet and could not get out. You finally succeeded in opening the door at the last minute, and wrote about this to the green-eyed pianist, with humor, as befits a description of a most amusing event.

  You can’t fool me.

  I see you in that palace toilet, covered in sweat, trembling, as you struggle with the gilded latch.

  It surprises me that you locked yourself in at all.

  In New York, at a meeting of Hidden Children—people who were hidden as children during the war—a questionnaire was distributed. One of the first questions was: “Do you lock the door behind you when you go into a toilet?”

  I assume that, like the majority of Hidden Children, you did not lock doors; so, what happened in the Palais de Chaillot? Did you lock it because you were distracted?

  Tormented by your fear, you played imprecisely. The audience did not notice. You had that magnetic power with which true artists—miraculous musicians, as Artur Rubinstein would say—are endowed.

  You played this same composition differently each time—sometimes with feeling, at other times with cold deliberation. You might disrupt the tempo of your playing with rubato in order to draw attention to a fragment that struck you as especially beautiful that day. You communicated not the work but your own spiritual state. However, is there really an objective truth of a musical composition?

  Today, people play differently than in those days: more quickly and without mistakes. It sounds good on compact discs. It is by no means certain that you would have sounded as good. Compact discs don’t register the magnetic forces that pulse from the stage.

  More about fears …

  You were tormented by bad dreams.

  (That was the next question in the New York questionnaire: “Do you have nightmares? Do you dream that someone is approaching your hiding place and is going to find you at any moment?”)

  Did someone approach your hiding place? Did you know that the door to the wardrobe would open in a minute and he would notice you, squeezed into a corner, soaked with urine, using the chamber pot to conceal, unsuccessfully, your hair that was growing out dark?

  You took sleeping pills. You took too many pills: for sleeping, for waking up, for your nerves, for your stomach, for headaches …

  From the New York questionnaire:

  “Do you get upset about things out of proportion to their significance?”

  You worried about everything.

  “What do you think, should I start practicing today at eleven or at eleven thirty?” you would ask your friends.

  “It’s eleven thirty already, and lunch is in an hour. Maybe I should start after lunch?”

  “What do you think, should I go at four? Or would six be better?”

  And so forth.

  18
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  Occasionally, you would allow yourself to perform wild improvisations.

  At the request of the director of a traveling circus whose pianist had fallen ill, wearing a bizarre circus hat on your head you played music that not a single lion or elephant could dance to.

  “Can’t you see that the animals don’t want to dance to your music?” the director screamed, ushering you away from the piano.

  “It’s because they are listening intently,” you replied with dignity as you left the tent.

  You agreed to play the Ravel piano concerto in Norway, although you didn’t know the music. You had two weeks to learn it. You spent a week with a friend who showed up unexpectedly; at his manager’s request you substituted for a sick colleague in the provinces. Only two days were left. You decided to travel by train and learn the notes en route. In your compartment, you reached for your suitcase. You realized that the score was still on your piano.

  The director, in despair, greeted you at the station. “A terrible story: the harpist poisoned himself; we can’t play the Ravel.”

  “Mozart,” you proposed, resignedly. “Whatever. I play everything.”

  In fact, you had one concerto “in your fingers” then—the twenty-fifth.

  Flipping through scores in the library, you said, “This one’s too short, this one’s too easy; oh, this is what we’ll play!”

  You played magnificently. There was a banquet after the concert. You raised a toast to the orchestra, to whom you wished to confess something.

  “In the first place,” you said, “I have never in my life played the Ravel concerto. In the second place, I remembered only one Mozart concerto, the twenty-fifth. And in the third place …” You paused. “It was I who poisoned your harpist.”

  No one laughed; it’s not clear why.