Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,89

in B Minor, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by George Szell. And how was it, Ezra Blazer, being a soldier in Germany?

EZRA BLAZER: Well, it was not entirely pleasant for me. I liked directing traffic. I liked wearing a uniform, and being a tough-guy MP. But this was 1954. The war had ended only nine years earlier. And it was only in the years after the war that the total destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis had been revealed in all its horror. So I had no love for Germans. I couldn’t stand them, couldn’t bear to hear them speaking in German. That language! And then, alas, what should happen but that I met a girl. A pretty, blond, blue-eyed, strong-jawed, one-hundred-percent Aryan German girl. She was a student at the university, and I saw her in town carrying some books and I asked her what she was reading. She was lovely, and she knew a little English—not a lot, but the way she spoke it I found charming. Her father had been in the war, and this to me was not so charming. I was ashamed to imagine what my family would think of my falling in love with a Nazi’s daughter. So it was a very fraught affair, and I tried to make it the subject of my first book. I couldn’t do it, of course. But yes, the first book I wanted to write was about this love affair with a German girl when I was a soldier, and the war having ended only nine years earlier. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to her house to pick her up because I didn’t want to meet her family, and this was crushing for her. We never fought, but she cried. And I cried. We were young and we were in love and we cried. Life’s first big blow. Katja was her name. I don’t know what became of her, where she is now. I wonder if somewhere in Germany she reads my books in German.

INTERVIEWER: And your efforts on this first book? Where are they? In a drawer somewhere?

EZRA BLAZER: Gone. Long gone. I wrote fifty terrible pages full of rage. I was twenty-one. She was nineteen. Lovely girl. That’s the story.

INTERVIEWER: Record number four.

EZRA BLAZER: Well, I wanted to see more of Europe after my service, so I took my discharge there, and I stayed. I had a big duffel bag, my army duffel, and my army overcoat, and my separation pay, which amounted to about three hundred bucks, and I took a train to Paris and moved into a shabby little hotel in the Sixth. One of those hotels where you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and go out to the hallway and you can’t find the light, or if you do blindly find the switch you turn it on and go six steps and the light goes off again. And if you ever do find the bathroom, you’re in worse trouble, because the toilet paper in those postwar years—May I speak about toilet paper on a family program?

INTERVIEWER: You may.

EZRA BLAZER: The toilet paper was like emery board. Not sandpaper: emery board.

INTERVIEWER: So you lived in Paris for a year—

EZRA BLAZER: A year and a half.

INTERVIEWER:—after your service in the army.

EZRA BLAZER: Yes. I lived near the Odéon Métro station and I used to go to the Café Odéon and of course I met a girl. Geneviève. And Geneviève had a sputtering little black motorbike—they were all over Paris then—and she would roll up to the Odéon at night and meet me there, and somehow, this girl, who was not . . . Well, she was pretty, certainly, but she was kind of a street girl, and yet she too had musical taste, like my army pal, and it was she who introduced me to the chamber music of Fauré. And that’s also when I learned about the beauty of the cello, which of course I have Marina Makovsky play in The Running Gag. For months that was the only instrument I wanted to hear. The sound of it thrilled me. There are beautiful piano passages in Fauré, but it’s the cello, that wonderful [growls like a cello]—Those sounds whose depths only the cello can reach. That got me. It has this lilt, this freshness, just gorgeous. I’d never heard music like it before—a long way from “Mam’selle,” you see, though we’re in the