Celestine Du Bois Plays Brahms: 1943

Free Zone, France

         All afternoon in the piano store, Bebe plays Brahms. Since leaving Paris, on the run for weeks until reaching the haven of Aix-les-Bains, she has dreamed only of Brahms, the sonata in C, the centerpiece of the concert she was to have given if they had stayed.

         Her fingertips graze the keys lightly, lovingly, how she would touch a man if she were interested in one, she imagines, but so far in this life she is concerned only with her fingers on ivory, not flesh.

         Sun streams in to illuminate her at the corner of the large store, attracting a crowd of children whom she acknowledges with a nod, then returns her attention to the music, which she hardly needs to read, as the sonatas live in her sinews by now, her fingers, heart and brain following, sometimes catching up if she misses a chord, and then, only then, will she need to find her place on paper.

         The French-Swiss store owner knows she is a Jew, despite Bebe’s blond hair and green eyes, and her sophisticated Parisian French, which has, by now, not even the suggestion of a German accent. Still, Bebe hoards her German zealously, imagining scenarios where might need to use it: to pretend she is one of them.

         By the time Bebe, Freda, Pierrot and the baby left Paris, the other Jews at the Conservatoire had already fled, some to America, another to Cuba, her best friend to Uruguay. The only Jewish student in the entire school whom Bebe despised had somehow managed to be baptized and converted to Catholicism, receiving a new name. Then she had made her way to Vichy, where it was rumored she played Strauss and Wagner for Nazi concerts. Perhaps the story is apocryphal; who can know what to believe in these days of terror? Madame Deville had begged Bebe to stay on; surely they wouldn’t round her up, with her Aryan looks, her perfect French.

         Bebe was to be the next great pianist from the Conservatoire; Madame Deville was molding her to be a star—the beauty with the golden curls to tour the cream of Europe’s concert halls.

         Just then Bebe loses the rhythm, and the subsequent discord, which no doubt only she can hear with an ear so acute it is her finest blessing and deepest curse, causes a pain in her left eustachian tube. She looks at the music, finds her error, and returns to the misbegotten note, but in that briefest of glances in which she acknowledges her audience, she sees a German soldier, towering over a cluster of children. He smiles, and nods, but something in that nod has chilled her, so she stops. A groan of disappointment rises from the crowd. Bebe points to her watch, then rubs her belly. The children appreciate this display of hunger, as they are so often hungry, and they disperse, leaving the soldier with his frozen smile alone in the cobbled street, applauding. Or is he only miming applause? She can hear nothing but the frenetic rush of blood to her heart. With great control—a control she knows only from the conquered hysteria of her early recitals—she slowly rises from the bench, makes the slightest suggestion of a bow, and walks, music in hand, to the rear of the store, where Monsieur Blanchot and his family eat their dinner, surrounded by the carcasses of broken pianos.

         That evening, over supper, she tells Freda and her brother-in-law, Pierrot, about the soldier.

         “Perhaps he just admired your playing,” says Pierrot, cutting his potato into ever smaller pieces. “It was Brahms? A fine German composer—no need to worry.”

         Freda grins, switching her 6-month-old, Charles, from one breast to the other. “Pierrot, my love, your optimism never ceases to amaze me. The larger question, it seems to me, is if Bebe can afford to be so visible in the shop day after day.”

         Bebe blinks back the desire to cry. “But Freda, it was you who said being right in the open was the best disguise of all!” Bebe lights a cigarette, the first she has had that day, for she would rather go without food than tobacco, and she has swapped a ration ticket with Mademoiselle Blanchot, the 16-year-old granddaughter of the proprietor, for 5 cigarettes, which she knows were received from the German troops in exchange for a touch of thigh or breast of the voluptuous though cross-eyed young girl. Although Bebe had planned to give her sister one of the precious cigarettes, her resolve falters.

         “Don’t worry, little concertmistress,” Freda says, “I still think my strategy is brilliant. Foolishly, though, I hadn’t counted on your gaining such a following, eh Pierrot?” But her husband has put his head in his chemistry book, and is lost to them for the remainder of the evening.

         “On my rounds today with the housewives, I was told about the beautiful blonde piano player at Blanchot’s shop; evidently the woman did not know we are related.” Freda is dark and manifestly Jewish with deep black eyes and wildly curly hair she tries to hide under hats. Bebe is told she resembles her father’s brother David, whom she has never met.

         “You can’t be suggesting I stay home and not practice?” Bebe lifts her skirt to reveal the packet of cigarettes. She shakes one out for her sister, who puts the baby down for a nap. Although Pierrot is, in theory, the head of the household, it is Freda who rules here, Freda who decided when and how they would leave Paris, Freda who drove the car, found them the house to live in, Freda who sought out the local Resistance connection and put her husband’s chemistry background to work making bouillon cubes from scraps of potato peels and carrot tops—a product she now sells with great success from door to door—so surely it is Freda who will allow or prevent Bebe from concertizing.

         Freda’s eyes twinkle at the cigarette. “Bebe, you know I crave cigarettes like Charles his milk.” She allows her sister to strike the match for her, then exhales very, very slowly, picking a flake of tobacco from her tongue with a pinky nail. “Aah. Now listen, my dearest, I’m not so easily distracted—or bribed. Of course you must continue to play at Blanchot’s, for to stop suddenly would be dangerous; it would call attention to your absence, and now that you have an admirer, we can’t afford anything extraordinary to happen. Did he see your hands?”

         Flummoxed by the question, Bebe looks down to study them, hands that look good to her only atop the keys, though many have admired her slender, shapely fingers. “I don’t know what you mean; he saw me play, as the children do.”

         Freda struggles with her wedding band and wrenches it off to deposit in front of her sister. “Perhaps if you wear this, he will leave you alone. But if he’s seen you without a ring, this will only raise suspicion.”

         Bebe touches her sister’s cheek, then kisses it. “You are my hero, my unaccountably brilliant Freda.”

         “Thanks for the cigarette,” Freda says, winking. “But why unaccountably? Surely you have unfairly inherited all of Mama’s and the Tantes’ musical abilities, leaving none for me or Dora or Berthold. I should hope I have a fraction of Papa’s acumen.”

         The sisters often play this game, debating how the merits of their parents have been distributed among the four of them, with all in agreement over the lyrical gifts bestowed lavishly on Bebe, the baby. But there the agreement stops, for their sister Dora, whom

the rest think is most beautiful and with the sharpest wit, thinks herself dull, while Berthold, who has the ablest way with money, defines himself as inadequate when compared to their businessman father. Freda, the intellectual, who had studied to become a professor of French literature, missed so much university because of a series of miscarriages that she now describes herself, with a soupçon of irony, as an ordinary housefrau. Bebe must remind her sister that, when Freda did finally graduate, she received the top prize for her writing.

         “I can still give my concert, can’t I?” Bebe offers Freda another cigarette.

         It was Freda who had heard of the opening, in a town 30 miles away. A Brahms program. The pianist, a Jew, had been carted off one morning, just after the posters and publicity had been distributed around the region. Freda had contacted the concert hall

and secured the opportunity for her sister, with the proviso that her name not be printed. The proprietor was grateful and asked no questions. Freda gave Bebe’s false name as that of the suddenly available local player.

         “Celestine Du Bois can give her concert, certainly. But I have decided it is better that she go alone. Just in case.”

         “Just in case” is code for their shared agreement that better one is taken than two, or three; most important, of course, is keeping the baby away from the Germans. He has been baptized, and Freda keeps the certificate pinned to his pillow, transported with him at all times. Although they feel relatively safe in Aix-les-Bains, where they know the police and the police know them, every step outside the town is risky. Just last week they heard of a German sweep of nearby Girondelles, where the postman, a member of the Resistance, had been executed in front of the mairie.

         “Naturally I’ll go alone,” says Bebe, but her shaking hand is visible to Freda as she gathers her music from the table. Without reason, she had hoped that Freda would accompany her; Freda keeps them all alive.

         The plan is for Celestine Du Bois to get a ride with Monsieur Blanchot to the train station, where she will buy a one-way ticket to Ourse, perform the concert, then return on the last train of the night to Sauterne, five miles distant, where Monsieur Blanchot will again transport her in his car. If there is trouble, she is to call the store with the message that the new piano cannot be delivered until—and here she will supply the time by which she thinks she can return—and if she fears she cannot make her way back, she will say simply “until a later date.” Of course, if the Germans take her, she will not be able to send any message at all.

         Bebe tries to be Celestine, to think like Celestine, to make music such as Celestine would make: music of the heavens. The name is not an invention, however; Freda bought it from the ever-wealthier keeper of the prefecture’s death certificates. The real Celestine Du Bois had been a 12-year-old [KC1] disabled girl in an asylum who had starved herself to death. For this reason, Bebe feels she must be especially careful with the Brahms. It must tread the border between sweetness and despair, retaining the hope of salvation that the dying Celestine must have grasped in her last moments, while capturing, simultaneously, the realism of her death. Although Bebe has never seen a picture of her namesake, she can imagine her corpse: unkempt hair tangling to her waist, bony shoulders poking out like skeletal wings.

         Celestine boards the train and looks for a seat beside the window, studying the lush summer-green hills as she reminds herself not to make eye contact with anyone, especially the omnipresent German soldiers. But neither can she appear strained or awkward. She smiles at an old man talking gibberish to his tiny dog as he moves aside to let her pass to an open seat. She carries only a large envelope containing her music scores and the Celestine Du Bois documents, with the birthdate altered from 1931 to 1913. She practices the facts of her life: born to Catherine Le Peletier and Jean Baudron Du Bois, into a poor home with two sisters and two brothers, her father a bookkeeper. Freda had suggested inventing a more esteemed profession, since Bebe would have only her music, and not many rural French bookkeepers produced classical music-playing daughters, but Bebe prefers to stick to the truth. The parents are long dead—a fact sworn to by the prosperous record keeper—so none of the facts is immediately verifiable.

         A blind woman sways through the car, selling apples. Suddenly Bebe is desperate to eat one, but she is afraid to speak. Her accent is too urban for this place, even when she tries to rusticate her vowels. It seems the blind woman is looking at her, but Bebe tells herself she is crazy. Having stopped in the aisle, her dead eyes directed to the extreme right and left, the woman resembles a peasant in a Breughel painting. “Who wants one, who wants one?”

         The woman is nearly yelling; surely she will attract the attention of the two young soldiers just entering the car. Bebe finds a loose franc in her jacket pocket and presses it into the woman’s hand, saying nothing. The woman hands her an apple, then another, and yet another. She calls Bebe “Madame” after she has passed her fingertips over Bebe’s ring finger. At last the woman departs, and Bebe hands an apple to the old man beside her, who continues his intimate babble with the dog. He grins at her, and she sees he has no teeth.

         The ride seems to last forever, with various stops and controls that make Bebe sweat in her yellow dress and wish she were back in the piano store, playing for the children. She sees the folly of her desire to concertize in the middle of war. If she lives, she vows, she will teach; she will give up her urge for glory. Yet still she thrills to remember the “Bravos!” at her concert last spring, bravos that wouldn’t stop until she bowed again, and again, and finally, after ten minutes of applause, she sat to play, spontaneously, Beethoven’s “Appassionata.” Although Bebe has been the object of men’s affection, she had never felt with them the flooding satisfaction that came when she played the final chord of the sonata and the audience rose, as one, shouting their love and approval.

         Madame Deville insisted that the Conservatoire crowd had never before shown such rapture for a student.

         Forty minutes later, the conductor passes through, announcing the next station, which is her stop. (Fortunately Freda had foreseen delays in organizing her sister’s journey.) Returned from her reverie, Bebe hopes she will play well tonight, but understands she should not play superbly. As planned, the concertmaster will announce that the billed pianist has cancelled, and if anyone wants his money back, he may have it. However, they have found a replacement for the all-Brahms program, in a young woman from Aix-Les-Bains, Celestine Du Bois.

         The train halts in the middle of a cow pasture. Several calves dart from near the tracks to the safety of their mothers’ udders. Another control. Bebe hears German: first, the young voices of the soldiers, then, a deeper, older male voice asking them about the inhabitants of their car. It appears someone is being searched for, a Resistance member, assumed to be getting off the train at the next stop. Bebe begins to sweat anew, and removes the scores to study them, or to pretend to study, trying to remain calm. The Germans ask intricate questions of each passenger—origin and destination, even the children, not permitting the parents to speak for them. Because the soldiers’ French is heavily inflected, the children fail to understand their questions, and soon the group of youngsters just in front of Bebe is in tears.

         Suddenly Bebe worries that the music out in the open was a bad idea; she will stand out amongst this crowd, but to put the scores away in a hurry will also make her suspicious.

         Now at her seat, the commandant asks for her identification, and Celestine Du Bois hands him her papers. He is an old man, her father’s age (she thinks of him at home in Rumania with Dora and her husband and children, none of whom she has heard from since the war began 4 years ago). Sadness fills her as she looks up into the man’s eyes and believes he has recognized her Jewishness, fears she will never see her father again, never see Freda or Dora or Berthold, never see the baby walk. The German’s perusal of her papers is distracted by the nonsense-spouting old man, who pays the commandant no attention, as he is focused solely on his dog. The commandant, smoothly and without apparent rage, hits the old man on the side of his head with the heel of his palm, saying, politely, “Sie still!” A cow moos outside, and all the passengers, now silent, move their glance from the old man to the exterior.

         The commandant still holds Celestine Du Bois’s papers in his hand. Bebe hopes he will not ask her for anything, for she is balanced precariously at the edge of terror. If she is caught, Bebe thinks, she will simply go with him. She will not talk. He hands her back her documents, saying nothing, and just as she is allowing herself to breathe again, he says, in German, “I see you like Brahms.”

         It is a trick, she thinks. She looks at him uncomprehendingly.

         “Brahms,” he repeats, and she acts as if she has only just now understood that he is pronouncing the name of the composer, which is printed on the music in her lap. “Ahh. Brahms!” She points to the name and smiles like an idiot.

         In his heavy French, he says that Brahms is his favorite composer, an excellent German musician.

         Smiling dumbly, she continues to repeat the composer’s name. After reading the opening bars of the sonata, he begins to whistle, and she intuits that he, too, is a musician, his key disarmingly perfect. She hums along with him, not knowing what else to do, and just then the train lurches into motion. The station is only fifty meters off, and she manages to keep wearing her dumb-blonde smile as she departs the train, brushing up against the old man, now mute, whose dog is licking his master’s hands.

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         The hall is only half full, and half of these take up the concertmaster’s offer of a refund. Bebe is relieved by the small turnout, the shabby chairs and battered piano bench. Still, it is a handsome old Steinway, and she sets her hands upon the keys with relish, barely listening to her introduction, which is mercifully brief, or the coughing of the country audience. She is vaguely aware of the coldness of the hall, despite the summer heat outside.

         Inside her, in the marrow of her arms and legs, Brahms awakes.

         She has only to play the opening notes to discover herself freed from Celestine Du Bois and the fearful scene upon the train. The Brahms itself erases the shame of her music-making with the Nazi officer; it travels with ease into the large empty corners of the auditorium and makes the world ring back to her a sound she perceives to be one of its truths. She looks not at the music before her but somewhere back inside her body, into her history, while simultaneously hovering in the rafters, hearing herself with something like objectivity. When she sees her hands moving too quickly she slows herself down without disturbing her cadence; it seems to happen on its own. She has no separate self when she is playing, no identity as Bebe Solomon or Celestine Du Bois, no Rumanian passport sewn into the mattress back in Aix-les-Bains. She is the Brahms, she is Brahms himself (Brahms! Brahms! she had sputtered, laughing with the Nazi). She is simply music, the ineffable loneliness of the piano telling this story: there is no peace. There is no peace.

            When the audience finishes its lackluster applause, Bebe is grateful to be going home to Freda and Pierrot and the baby, none of whom will ever know of her impromptu concertizing with the commandant, nor will she ever allow herself to think of it again.

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