The first morning light is a hint of deep blue as I fix coffee for Anna and carry it back to her bedroom. I listen outside her door to see if I hear any sign of her being awake. All is still. I quietly open her door and carry her coffee in. I set it down on the oval table by her bed. Anna likes night-lights. Her suite is lit up like a runway, lights inserted in almost every receptacle. When 1 first became aware of this, I thought it odd. Now I begin to understand. Perhaps she associates utter darkness with being alone and terrified in her bedroom, waiting for a drunken, stinking Nazi to come in and overpower her young body. No wonder she has spent her life dealing with damaged people. She understands damaged people. She is as much a student of her past tragedies as she has said I am of mine.
“Anna?” I whisper. I see her stir. “Anna? It’s me. I’ve brought you coffee.”
She sits up with a start, squinting, her white hair in her face and sticking up in places.
Merry Christmas, I start to say. I tell her “happy holidays” instead.
“All these years I celebrate Christmas while I am secretly Jewish.” She reaches for her coffee. “I am not known for a sweet disposition early in the morning,” she says.
I squeeze her hand, and in the dark she seems suddenly so old and delicate. “I read your letter. I’m not sure what to say but I can’t destroy it, and we must talk about it,” I tell her.
For an instant she pauses. I think I catch relief in her silence. Then she gets stubborn again and waves me off, as if by a mere gesture she can dismiss her entire history and what she has told me about my own life. Night-lights cast exaggerated, deep shadows of Biedermeier furniture and antique lamps and oil paintings in her large, gorgeous bedroom. Thick silk draperies are drawn. “I probably should not have written any of that to you,” she says firmly.
“I wish you’d written it to me sooner. Anna.”
She sips her coffee and pulls the covers up to her shoulders.
“What happened to you as a child isn’t your fault,” I say to her. “The choices were made by your father, not you. He protected you in one way and didn’t protect you at all. Maybe there was no choice.”
She shakes her head. “You do not know. You cannot know,”
I am not about to argue with that.
“There are no monsters to compare with them. My family had no choice. My father drank a lot of schnapps. He was drunk most the time on schnapps and they would get drunk with him. To this day I cannot smell schnapps.” She clutches the coffee mug in both hands. “They all got drunk, it did not matter. When Reichsminister Speer and his entourage visited installations at Gusen and Ebensee, they came to our schloss, oh yes, our quaint little castle. My parents had this sumptuous banquet with musicians from Vienna and the finest champagne and food, and everyone was drunk. I remember I hid in my bedroom, so afraid of who would come next. I hid under the bed all night and several times there were footsteps in my room and once someone yanked the covers back and swore. I stayed on the floor under the bed all night dreaming of the music and of one young man who made such sweetness flow from his violin. He looked at me often and made me -blush and as I hid under my bed later that night, I thought of him. No one who made such beauty could be unkind. All night I thought of him.”
“The violinist from Vienna?” I asked. “The one you later… ?”
“No, no.” Anna shakes her head in the shadows. “This was many years before Rudi. But I think it is when I fell in love with Rudi, in advance, having never met him. I saw the musicians in their black cutaways and was mesmerized by the magic they made, and I wanted them to steal me from the horror. I imagined myself soaring on their notes into a pure place. For a moment, I was returned to Austria before the quarry and the crematorium, when life was simple, the people decent and fun and had perfect gardens and such pride in their homes. On sunny spring days we would hang our goose-down duvets out windows to be scrubbed by the sweetest air I have ever breathed. And we would play in rolling fields of grass that seemed to lead right up to the sky while father would hunt in the woods for boar and mother would sew and bake.” She pauses, her face touched by sweet sadness. “That a string quartet could transform the most dreadful of nights. And then later, my magical thinking carries me into the arms of a man with a violin, an American. And I am here. I am here. I escaped. But I have never escaped, Kay.”