Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“He’s reading from Esther,” Sam was saying. “For his mother. It’s a nice touch, don’t you think? What did you read? I’ll bet you don’t even remember.”

Ben shook his head. “I didn’t. My father wasn’t observant.”

“Like Sam,” Esther said, nodding to him. “‘A lot of work and who remembers?’ But I think it’s important. Now, I mean.” She faltered a little, embarrassed. “You know, after-”

“Yes,” Ben said, helping her.

“Of course, you would,” Sam said. “You know what he’s making at the studio?” But someone had taken his elbow. “Abe. Wonderful to see you. Esther, you remember Abe Lastfogel. The Morris office.”

“Congratulations again,” Ben said to Esther, letting her go. “He’ll be fine.”

“It’s just, you know, it’s important to have a sense now,” she said, still making a case to herself.

“Yes,” Ben said, moving inside. But was it? Had it mattered before? Even Mischling s had been taken, one parent, people who’d had no teaching at all.

He picked up a yarmulke from a pile on a sideboard. Inside, through the marble arches, people were settling in, waving to friends, the hum before a show. All religion was a kind of theater. He smiled to himself as he walked in. At least here they knew their audience. The whole vaulted ceiling, a night sky, was covered with stars.

He sat with Hal Jasper behind the Lasners, close enough to be in the party without taking anyone’s place. Bunny, who’d also put on a yarmulke, was next to Fay and took his cues from her, rising when she did, mumbling during the unison response. Rabbi Magnin, in wire-rimmed glasses, led the Shabbat service in one of those pleased-with-itself oratorical voices Ben remembered from his childhood. Jonathan sat waiting on the bema, dwarfed in a chair that made him look no older than eight. All of it just as expected. In a few minutes they’d open the ark and walk the Torah through the congregation, letting people reach out to touch it, then finally open it for Jonathan to read and then they’d all go to the Ambassador.

Fasanenstrasse. Otto hadn’t believed in any of it, only allowed them to go because it would have been impolite to refuse the invitations. Drehkopf s, he called the rabbis, head spinners. A hostility that Ben had never really understood until now. No room for two religions. But he would have been killed for either. As a Communist, Genia had said, not as a Jew. But that had only been a matter of time. Ben looked around- all these well-dressed lucky people, faintly bored, waiting to congratulate Sam and go to lunch. It could have been any of them, except they’d been here, out of the way. And Otto had stayed.

He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. It always came back to that. Why make Danny run the same risk? They knew what would happen if they were caught. What did happen, at least to Otto, denounced. And now his denouncer gone, connected somehow to Danny, the link he couldn’t understand but must be there. Could Otto really have believed in it that much, when he didn’t believe in anything else? Or did he know, somehow sense, that he’d left it too late, that he could only help save the others now, before he became one of the millions, no matter what he believed. Somebody Ben had seen standing on the platform and then never saw again.

On the bema Magnin had finished and the cantor got up and walked to the lectern. Another endless wail, Ben thought, another thing he’d hated about the services. He looked at Bunny, wondering how he was reacting, one of the few there for whom this wouldn’t even be a memory, the yarmulke just a prop of respect. Thinking about the studio maybe, or how Polly’s talk had gone with Liesl, a hundred things. How to protect Jack MacDonald.

The first note, high and clear, wavered in the air, dropped, then rose again, a call reaching out. Ben felt his head go up, as if the note were lifting it. A second phrase without a breath, lonely, the voice its own music, but so beautiful that it filled the great room, hushing it. It hung there for a minute, a pure abstraction, and then the imagination rushed in around it, adding color and suggestion as the music began to float, a haunting stream of notes. A few heads nodded, familiar with it, but Ben couldn’t move. A sadness so knowing that it felt like an actual fingertip on his heart. Not a wail, not even a lamentation, but an endless sorrow. He imagined it vibrating through thin air, over bleached rocks, stretches of dry waste, desert music, meant to carry long distances, across emptiness. Had it really been written there, a tribal heirloom, or much later in some Polish village, the desert by then more a story than a memory. There were notes in Gershwin like this, bent midway in a kind of ache. He didn’t know the words-it might have been a simple hymn of praise-but what he saw were figures wrapping a body in linen, laying it into a shallow ditch, rocks and sand. And the body, he knew, was Otto. The day, the temple, had triggered the memories, all the old questions. There hadn’t been a service for him. No details of the death itself, so that it seemed not to have really happened, the official letter a kind of missing persons report. But now here he was in the music, everything he’d denied being, the string that connected Ben to this room of survivors, not lessons but blood.

The music might have meant anything, but in the stillness of the room he saw that it now meant everyone who had gone. It was important to have a sense, Esther had thought. He noticed that Lasner had lowered his head, a tear running down his cheek, overwhelmed by some loss of his own. Or perhaps a sign of age, easily moved. Ben remembered him at the camp, actually sobbing. The first thing Ben had liked about him. Who was it now? The same vast number, a lost father? How long before a blood tie finally dissolved? Never. He was still Otto’s son, after everything. Danny even more so. Ben sat up. Even more so. Otto wasn’t someone he would ever deny, no matter how much his politics had changed. Otto had died for his. You didn’t honor the memory of that by feeding gossip to a Minot. He wouldn’t have done it. But there were the files.

Hal leaned toward his ear. “This is it,” he said softly. “The music. For the pan shot.”

For a moment Ben was confused, still lost in his own thoughts. He needed to think it through, about Otto, and Danny. But the music was moving on and he began to move with it, like a wind, out of the desert, across the steppes to a stretch of cold, flat land. He knew the shot Hal meant. Taken high, from on top of the cab of an Army truck, panning slowly, left to right, over the endless reach of the camp. And as he listened, he saw the finished film, the plain mournful sound passing over the miles of barracks, a perfect match, as if the writer of the song, from its first clear note, had known all along it would end this way.

When the cantor finished there was a stillness. Fay put her hand over Sol’s, bringing him back, the tear discreetly brushed away. Then another piece of music began, the ark was opened, and everything went on.

“You know what it’s called?” Hal whispered.

Ben shook his head and Hal made a note to himself, jotting something on the program.

“You think we could get him?” He nodded to the cantor.

Ben didn’t bother to answer. Did anyone ever say no? But the mood was broken, the haunting music of the dead now just sound to be scored, used. But isn’t that why they were making the film, for them?

“Make it the last shot,” he said. “Use it at the end.”

Jonathan read well, his young boy’s voice surprisingly clear and precise, pitched to his family in the first row. Esther looked side to side, pleased, but Sam kept his eyes on the bema, his face soft with unguarded affection. Around them people were nodding, one of them patting Sam on the arm. A few rows behind, Liesl was following with polite attention, her blond hair hanging back, grazing her shoulders. Another Mischling. Was the hair from Hans, the mother another dark Sara? She turned, meeting his gaze, then looked down, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth, and Ben realized she had misinterpreted. When she looked back again, just a moment between them, she was answering something else, not what had been in his mind at all, and he felt his face answer her, another layer. It could go on this way, he thought, one response building on the next, all begun with a mistake. Maybe that’s how we all talked, not knowing each other, a verbal house of cards.