Vera Read Online Free Page B

piano.
    The Russians enjoy the piano, particularly the sight of a seven-year-old girl in a frilly dress extending her small fingers left and right to pick out the notes of Debussy and Tchaikovsky.
    I am told by my teacher, my mother and my father that I am talented, and perhaps I am. For me, it is not any talent I might possess that delights me, but rather the thrill of making the instrument sound as it should.
    It is at a school concert that the Russians hear me playing. The education officers who came to Lvov with the occupying army (for the Russians are an occupying army) have been invited to the concert by the principal, and they sit in the front rows while I’m introduced and perform my curtsey. I am not the only attraction; other children accomplished in various ways precede me and follow me. As I play, I sense the pleasure of the Russians. They smile, they nod and they applaud. My mother and father, also in the front rows, take even greater pleasure than the Russians in my performance. My fingers dance, the notes rise, and my ignorance of the world keeps me safe and warm and, I might even say, happy.
    After the concert, one of the Russian education officers talks to my father and mother in a serviceable version of the Polish language. He says, ‘Your daughter is very gifted.’
    My father says, ‘Thank you for saying so, sir.’
    â€˜Yes, very gifted. Do you know what I am thinking?’
    â€˜What you are thinking, sir?’
    â€˜I am thinking that your daughter must come to Moscow and attend the conservatory. What do you say?’
    â€˜To Moscow?’
    â€˜She will be well looked after. The best teachers in Moscow. Maybe she is a genius. I don’t know. But maybe.’
    My father’s expression remains congenial, as if he wishes above all to convey gratitude, a cooperative spirit, but I know and my father knows that my mother will never permit me to travel to Moscow at my tender age of seven years. My father says he will think about it – that’s his response. He will think about it.
    His dream is not of his daughter at a music school in Moscow but of me, Werunia, in Paris: me at the Sorbonne. The Germans own Paris at the moment, yes, but in the future, some time in the future when the war is over and Henri Philippe Pétain is hanging from a statue of Marianne – maybe then.
    There is such poignancy in all that we didn’t know, once we come to know it! It is March 1941 when the Russian officer speaks of his plans for me. In three months, Hitler will disown his non-aggression pact with Stalin, and Panzer divisions will race into Ukraine. A week or so later, the German Wehrmacht will move into Poland with their long lists of those to be murdered. In September, the Jews and Romany people and left-wing intellectuals and communists of Kiev, tens of thousands of them, will be ordered to march to Babi Yar, where they will be shot. And in September, the killings will begin here, in Lvov, just as the siege of Leningrad gets underway. As for Moscow, by October the Germans will be camped before the forests to the west of the city and by December they will be closer still. A conflagration that will take the lives of tens of millions will be raging. In the whole of world history, nothing that compares to the savagery about to be unleased has ever been enacted.
    Tears, tears, rivers of tears.
    But at this moment, the smiling Russian education officer thinks it important to put a small Jewish child into the hands of a music teacher in Moscow.
    I want to go. I see only adventure in the proposal, and the opportunity to extend and deepen my understanding of this instrument, this piano. Inside my small chest, my heart beats out the notes of yearning for Moscow.
    When I look back now at the child I was, brimming with delight, I see the piano as a symbol that contradicts the savagery about to express itself in a thousand cities and hamlets. The Bechstein in our parlour at home, my