The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 46

Madison said, ‘You know, I’ve been hearing this goddamn tale all my life. Never thought I’d find myself retelling it to a total stranger in an all-night café in the armpit of Belgrade.’

‘We saved each other’s lives tonight,’ Ben said. ‘That’s about as closely connected as two strangers can get.’

In the spring of 1975, Rigby Cahill’s New York offices received an unexpected call from a prospective new client by the name of Miriam Silbermann. She was fifty years old, currently resident in Zermatt, Switzerland, and a retired classical violinist of international repute, who in her prime had been favourably compared to contemporaries like Michèle Auclair and Patricia Travers. At the peak of her career she had toured with the New York Philharmonic and performed the Brahms Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall, three times.

Rigby Cahill had just so happened to be in town on a rare trip home that week. As a lover of Brahms and patron of the NY Phil, he was excited at the prospect of meeting the famous violin virtuoso.

‘But he could never have predicted what she was about to tell him,’ Madison said. ‘Even less the effect their meeting would have on his life forever afterwards.’

Miriam Silbermann travelled to New York City and first met with Rigby Cahill for lunch at the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street, 23rd April 1975, the same day that President Gerald Ford declared an end to US military involvement in Vietnam. For Cahill, the day was no less momentous. At 50, five years his senior, Miriam Silbermann was still bewitchingly beautiful; many years later he would confess to his daughter that he hadn’t been able to stop staring at her throughout lunch.

‘I’ll never forget what he told me,’ Madison said, ‘about the amazing quality she had in her eyes, a light so bright it would blind you to look into them for too long, and a pool of sadness so deep and dark you would be lost forever if you let it swallow you up. But what she had to tell him was even more amazing.’

Madison related that the Silbermanns had been living in France when, in July 1942, the Germans came knocking on their door to deport them.

‘Silbermann is a Jewish name,’ Ben said. ‘The Nazis had been detaining French Jews since 1940, but April ’42 was the start of the major round-ups and deportations. Something like thirteen thousand of them were scooped up within a couple of days and taken to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris.’

‘That’s the story she told Dad. She would have been about seventeen at the time, if I remember. Now, the Silbermanns were a musical kind of family, as you might guess from Miriam’s later career. She spent a long time telling Dad all about her little brother Gabriel, who she said was this tremendously gifted pianist. Her father, Abel Silbermann, taught at the Paris Conservatoire for quite a few years, but then being Jewish got in the way of his career, thanks to the Nazi puppets who were running France by then. He was also a collector of all kinds of musical artifacts, I guess mostly a bunch of valuable old instruments. And also—’

‘A certain Bach manuscript?’ Ben already knew the answer.

Madison nodded. ‘You got it. After all those years, she still remembered the name of the German commander of the soldiers who raided their home that day. I’ve heard Dad repeat it so often, it’s branded on my memory too. He was SS Obersturmbannführer Horst Krebs. As it turns out, he was something of a musician himself. When he spotted the manuscript sitting on the Silbermanns’ piano, he snatched it for himself.’

‘And then?’

‘Dad said Miriam Silbermann wouldn’t talk much about what happened next. All I know is that the family never saw their home again after that day. They were taken and loaded into a truck with a bunch of other Jewish families, and imprisoned. The house was commandeered by the Wehrmacht for quartering officers, and later on was wrecked by Allied bombing. And that was that.’

‘And so, thirty years after the end of the war, Miriam Silbermann came to your father asking him to recover the stolen manuscript. Why wait so long?’

‘I think she simply assumed it was lost forever, until she heard about Dad’s reputation for finding plundered Nazi loot and realised that maybe there was hope after all. Or maybe that’s how long it took for her to put the pain of the war behind her. Who really knows?’

‘What happened to her and her family after they were taken away?’

Madison shrugged. ‘She never talked about that, either. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Dad said she would go quiet whenever the subject came up, and the pain in her eyes would become so intense that it was terrible to look at. I think she channelled those emotions into her violin playing, you know?’

‘If we don’t know what happened to the family, what about the manuscript?’

‘That became Dad’s mission, from that moment on. He was so deeply touched by Miriam Silbermann that he lost interest in any of the other projects on his books, even though they could have been worth millions to the business. Like I told you, money wasn’t what drove him. He went at it full steam, literally not sleeping for weeks at a time. When I was born five years later, he was still at it.’

‘Did he ever get close?’

‘You’re talking about the journey of a skinny little document, in the middle of a giant war that was ripping the whole world apart. It was almost an impossible quest, but Dad tracked the path of the manuscript to Berlin. He thought Krebs might have taken it there as an offering to Hitler. Old Adolf loved music, apparently, and not just Wagner. In fact the Nazis thought Bach was the most “German” of all the great composers, whatever that means exactly, and they revered his music more than anyone’s. Might have been a real feather in Krebs’s cap to hand a trophy like that to his supreme leader.’

If the theory was right, Ben was thinking, then it was a pretty rich parallel. The SS commander Krebs taking the manuscript to Berlin to ingratiate himself with his Führer; three-quarters of a century later, Dragan Vuković stealing the very same artifact away to Belgrade as an offering to his prospective employer, Zarko Kožul. History sometimes repeated itself in the most bizarre ways.

‘Whatever the case,’ Madison went on, ‘Dad was pretty sure the manuscript was still in Berlin in 1945.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wasn’t the only one searching for it,’ Madison replied.