Free Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell Page B

falling.
    Whenever I passed Father’s study, he was sitting, not at his piano but in the tall wing-chair, a tiny, defeated man who no longer beckoned me inside to play duets. Once his room fell silent, our home became a strange, uneasy place, not only because of the unsettling hush, but because I knew my father was afraid.
    One day, he hurried into the ballroom where I was playing a Mendelssohn sonata.
    “Stop,” he shouted, trying to grasp my music from the piano. His hands were shaking and the sonata skated across the polished floor.
    From someone so quiet and modest, almost afraid to shine, this sudden forcefulness was a shock.
    “Forgive me,” he said, packing the offensive sonata into a sack along with all the other sheets of music from the pile on top of the piano. Afterwards he closed his eyes for a moment, as if order might be restored while he was not looking.
    “No one can risk keeping this music in the house, let alone playing it.”
    “But why?”
    “Apparently Mendelssohn’s music is degenerate. It has to be rewritten.”
    He sounded weary, unable to find any logic in pretending the composer had never existed. But this was life in the Third Reich. People either obeyed or fled.
    We took the sack into the freezing night. The wind was hurling leaves into the air. After many attempts, Father struck a match that lit up the fear in his eyes and Mendelssohn’s work soared into flames. I had tried so hard to master Piano Concerto Number One and knew every crease in the paper that blazed to nothing in seconds.
    Father stood so close to the fire the charred fragments flew into his face, but he remained still, watching until not a single note remained. He flashed his torch at the embers, searching for stray crochets. At last, we left the ashes and walked inside, back to the piano.
    My mother came in, elegant as always, her clouds of perfume drifting through the room and the lace edge of her handkerchief foaming beneath her silk cuff. Whether trying on picture-hats, arranging flowers or dancing in the ballroom, she radiated joy. But that day, her smile was a thin, tense line.
    “Please play Beethoven for us, dear,” Father said to me.
    “Beethoven?”
    Father cupped my face in his cold hands as if to press the point and restrain me from defying him. “Please understand.”
    “All right. I promise to fill this house with the heroic German spirit,” I said, not understanding at all.
    After lighting the candles on top of the piano, I thumped out the music we were told was the essence of the Germanic soul, while my parents sat close together in the shadows. When my mother cried, Father held her tight and told me to play louder.
    In the autumn of 1938, the three of us celebrated my eighteenth birthday with an elegant meal in the dining room. I had always imagined an enormous party, a gold ball gown and a small orchestra, but the miserable tap of forks on fine china was the only sound. After the cake was cut, a suitcase appeared in the hall.
    “You are going to visit your aunt and uncle and the two girls. Just until this madness is all over. You can be their third daughter,” Father said, as if it were customary to send daughters out on loan.
    “Just until it’s over,” my mother repeated, twisting the sudden separation into a mere inconvenience, like a burst pipe or a lost glove.
    Father tried to hold me, but his thin arms felt like old string. I pulled away, frightened of his hoarse voice. Fathers shouldn’t cry.
    I was to become someone else’s third daughter, not my parents’ only child anymore. I ran from them, trying to hide, but they caught me in the orchard, marched me to the front of the house like an intruder and bundled me into the cold back seat of a waiting car.
    The driver’s face seemed carved from pumice stone, his voice like gravel. “Your poor mother is crying, look,” he kept growling. “Come on, you. How about sending her a smile through the window, eh?”
    They were standing on the