Broken Song (16 page)

“It seems cold and far,” she had written.

Now as Reuven sat at his usual table in the cafè, he tried to remember that map of America he had looked at nearly five years ago. He had been fifteen; now he was
almost twenty. He had grown a thick mustache. Not a beard, the beard interfered with the violin.

He had just ordered another glass of tea when the rowdy hoots and guffaws of some soldiers coming through the door interrupted his pleasant daydreams.
They are such boors, all of them
. That was his last conscious thought before his blood ran cold. The soldiers took a table next to him.

“Play us a tune, Fyodor!” said one of the soldiers.

The man drew something from a case. A warm light emanated from the violin case like a small sun rising in the smoke of the cafè. Reuven’s eyes locked onto the violin.
His
violin! His Ceruti from Berischeva, stolen on that bloody night. He held tightly on to his glass of tea. This simply could not be. Carefully he lifted his eyes toward the man. The pasty pockmarked face. The large pit in the side of his nose. The dark red eyebrows. The pieces began to reassemble themselves. It was a bland face, exceedingly bland, but it was the face of a killer.

The man lifted the violin and tucked it under his chin. His large meaty fist encircled the bow. A thin wail came out of the violin and then a cheap little staccato tune. It was all Reuven could do not to rip the instrument from the soldier’s hands.

“He plays good,” one of the soldiers said as he turned to Reuven and smiled quickly.

“Yyyess,” Reuven stammered. In a split second he was back to his senses. He nearly thanked the soldier who had turned to him, for he had been on the brink of standing up and taking the violin. But now he would
do nothing like that. He would be patient. He would watch this man, he would follow him, and when they were alone, he would kill him. His task was clear. His focus absolute. Nothing else mattered.

So began the strangest interlude in Reuven Bloom’s life. If anyone asked how long he had stalked the Cossack who had murdered his sister, he would not have been able to say exactly. A few days, no, more like a week, possibly two weeks, maybe the better part of the month. He would learn so completely this Cossack, his habits, his gestures, his small idiosyncrasies, as perhaps only a mother knows a young child. Reuven began following him that night, always at a careful distance. The soldiers left the cafè and went to another for dancing.

Unfortunately the man never left the violin unattended. But even if he had, Reuven was not sure he would have stolen it back right then. His object was to kill; reclaiming his violin was secondary. One night, the man danced with several coarse young women. He steered them about the floor in a rough manner with those hands, the same hands that had pumped a bullet into Reuven’s sister’s chest. After the dancing cafè, the man went to another place. It was a smoky den filled with Russian soldiers. By midnight they were very drunk and had decided to go into Alexandra Park. Throwing stones at the swans in the pond was their sport. They were too drunk to hit anything. Finally at two in the morning, they began to head across town. There were some gray stone buildings, barracks, on St.
Peter Street. The guard opened the gates and the drunken soldiers tumbled into the courtyard, half carrying one another. The soldier named Fyodor, his sister’s murderer, still clutched the violin case.

Reuven would not return home to his basement room that night. He slept in some bushes across the street from the barracks. At dawn he was up. Completely alert, untired, charged with energy. He had already checked the other gates that entered the courtyard. This was the main one. He was pretty sure that the others were not often used. But he climbed a tree, and from this perch he could see into the courtyard, observing the barracks and the movement of people within. If soldiers began moving toward another gate, he would be able to tell.

He did not have to wait long for Fyodor. He came out of the gate shortly after six o’clock in the morning with another soldier, an officer of higher rank. Damn! Was this fellow never unaccompanied? He and the officer headed down the street to the ordnance buildings and entered. Reuven waited. In an hour, Fyodor emerged with another man, not a soldier.
Aah
! thought Reuven.
Fyodor must be an ordnance inspector or purchasing officer
. This man he was with looked like a manufacturer’s representative. He would probably go with Fyodor to the factory or the warehouses. Reuven was right.

He followed the two men to a nearby mattress factory. From there Fyodor continued to a cooperage, where barrels were being made. He was alone between the two locations but he was walking down busy streets in broad daylight.
Patience
! Reuven told himself a thousand
times every hour—patience. That evening, they were back in the same cafè.

Days slipped into evenings, evenings into mornings. He rarely left his quarry. He would win. He knew it. He would see this man’s blood. He had bought himself a knife. He carried a pistol, but he wanted to plunge a knife into this man. He wanted to feel the flesh tear. So far he had been lucky that no agent had come to him with an assignment. If one came, he would have to refuse it. Killing Fyodor was now Reuven’s sole purpose in life.

He had come back briefly to his basement room one morning on perhaps the seventh or eighth day that he had been following the Cossack when there was a sharp knock on the door. It was Anna. Her face was absolutely distraught.
Had Moses died
? he wondered.

“Reuven, thank God!”

“Thank God what?”

“We thought something terrible had happened to you!”

“Why?” Suddenly the awful knowledge flooded through him. He had not been to play for Moses since he had first caught sight of the Cossack.

“Oh God, Anna.” Reuven muttered a curse under his breath. “I have completely forgotten … I … I …” he stammered. “I have had some very pressing business. However, I shall come up right now.”

“That would be wonderful, but we are just so happy you are safe.”

“Oh, I am safe.” But an odd tone must have crept
into his voice, for he noticed that Anna seemed to stop as she was walking out the door and look at him curiously. “I shall be right up,” he added.

Reuven began playing a simple Kreutzer etude. It wasn’t working. He knew within the first measure. But he kept on. He could tell that Moses and Sarah were wondering as well. Anna did not seem to notice. But Moses’ hand did not tap the bedsheet and his body remained rigid with its pain. It became worse. He felt as if something within him had dried up, some reservoir that held the primal materials of music had simply evaporated. His ear could not imagine the harmonics, his fingers were leaden to the vibrations of the strings, notes flew apart and left not even the dimmest tracery of their passage. He was in a strange vacuum, a vacuum he imagined that was like death itself—without air, without sound, and what was left was perhaps only the tantalizing shards of what had been music. Finally Reuven stopped.

“Perhaps today is not my day. I don’t mean to make excuses, Moses, Sarah, but I prefer to come back and play when, when …”

Moses spoke with his eyes closed. “When you do not have other things on your mind.”

The image of a gaping wound pouring with blood slashed through Reuven’s mind’s eye—a Cossack, his strangely pale blue eyes frozen in fear as he felt his own throat being slashed.

“Yes. Yes. Thank you for understanding.”

But Reuven knew that no one except himself would understand these blood-drenched reveries that hounded him day and night.

Finally some nights later, his hour came. Fyodor and his friends were at the smoky cafè that was always jammed with soldiers. They normally spent an hour there. Reuven had taken up his usual perch behind some trash bins at the corner of an alley, which gave him concealment as well as a good view of the door. The soldiers had not been in the place long when he saw a figure emerge. It was Fyodor, and he was alone. Reuven could tell from the manner in which he was walking that he was not feeling well. It appeared as if he might have stomach cramps; perhaps the vodka had finally gotten to him.

“Well, let me and not the vodka finish you off,” Reuven muttered. He drew the knife from a sheath inside his coat pocket. Fyodor was carrying the violin. It looked as if he was heading back to the barracks when he suddenly turned down an alley. Reuven followed in the dense shadows of the moonless night. The Cossack set down the violin and leaned against a wall. There was a retching sound.

“May I help you, my friend?” Reuven had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket.

“How kind.” The eyes pale like blue ice.

“Not at all, Fyodor.” The Cossack looked at him now, suddenly wary. A split second passed, and Reuven’s knee jackknifed up into the man’s groin. A terrible gasp, then a surge of reeking vomit poured out. He had the
Cossack on the ground. Reuven’s knee pressed down on the man’s chest. He gripped the knife against Fyodor’s throat. How hard would he have to press it to make the first cut? To see blood? Should he slice quickly, right through the main artery to spare the man pain? One deft stroke so that he would instantly lose consciousness—the way the kosher butchers killed animals? But this man was worse than an animal. He did not deserve such sanctifying rituals. Fyodor must remain alert. Reuven stared deep into the man’s eyes. He could see the delicate scrawl of blood vessels on the glazed white orbs. Fyodor was breathing, but was this really life that he now possessed? Reuven could feel his own knee rise and fall on the man’s chest with his every breath. The blue eyes filled with fear, overwhelming fear. Their color seemed to become more intense, bluer. A sound came from his throat.

“Why? Why?”

“Does the animal ask why?” whispered Reuven. He was enjoying this. His head became full of engaging banter while he pressed the knife to the flesh. “Should I say a benediction before I slice your throat? That is the way of the
shochet
, the kosher butcher. What do you think of that, Mr. Fyodor? I am about to kill you according to the laws of ritual slaughter? Perhaps that is too good, eh?”

Reuven cocked his head, tipping his ear up, as if to listen for a response. There was nothing, of course. There was less than nothing. Reuven could not hear a thing. The vacuum he had experienced when playing for Moses suddenly seemed to envelop him. A cat jumped
off a fence, but he did not even hear the impact as it lighted on the cobbles. A wind stirred the leaves of a tree, but Reuven heard nothing, and the sound of this man’s pounding breath was swallowed into the great all-consuming silence. Had Reuven crawled into a coffin with the corpse, it could not have been more silent. The world of sound was disintegrating before him. He looked down at the knife. Fleshy folds gathered on either side of its edges. He had dreamed about this forever. He had imagined the blood. He had imagined his knee just where it was feeling the weakening pulse of the heart. Each pump draining out the blood. A metered heart, and he was here with his knee to play the beats to the end of the piece. A blood symphony.

Suddenly nothing seemed to make sense to Reuven. The blood-drenched dreams were retreating.
Stay with me, stay with me. It is all I have. All I have wanted all these years. My blood dreams. Don’t leave me
, he prayed and he pressed the knife harder. But still he did not cut.

“Why?” the Cossack croaked. “Why?”

Reuven took a deep breath. A ragged voice, a voice he had never heard, came from his own throat. “I want my violin back.”

There was a clatter on the cobbles as Reuven dropped the knife and then reached for the violin. He took his knee off the Cossack’s chest and got up. Fyodor took a deep breath but did not move. His eyes followed Reuven.

“Good night,” Reuven said, and walked away listening to his own footsteps and the beat of his heart.

EIGHTEEN

IT WAS lucky, Reuven thought, that he had managed to steal a good wagon because for the last few miles, the road had been terrible. Walking would have been preferable, but it was his understanding that this was not the walking kind of family. There were babies and an old grandfather, a mother, a father, a young woman, and a child. Reuven had managed to get a pot of chicken soup, cold by now even though he had wrapped it in layers of cloth for insulation. He had wedged it in between some sandbags that had been put in the back of the wagon for some weight. The family, he was told, would be along this pathetic excuse of a road somewhere.