Violin (20 page)

No. Don’t.

I looked at the violin. I reached out. He didn’t move. I couldn’t cover the four feet of table. I got up and came round to the chair next to him.

He watched me the whole time, keeping his pose deliberately, as if he thought I meant to do some trick to him. Perhaps I did. Only I didn’t have any tricks yet, nothing really worth trying, did I?

I touched the violin.

He looked superior and smoothly beautiful.

I sat right in front of it now, and he moved back his right hand, out of the way, so that I could touch the violin. Indeed, he moved the violin a little towards me, still gripping its neck and bow.

“Stradivarius,” I said.

“Yes. One of many I once played, just one of many, and it’s a ghost with me now, as surely as I am a ghost, it’s a specter as I am a specter. But it’s strong. It is itself as I am myself. It is a Stradivarius in this realm as truly as it was in life.”

He looked down on it lovingly.

“You might say after a fashion I died for it.” He glanced at me. “After Susan’s letter,” he asked, “why didn’t you go looking for your daughter’s reborn soul?”

“I didn’t believe the letter. I threw it away. I thought it was foolish. I felt sorry for Susan but I couldn’t answer.”

He let his eyes brighten. His smile was cunning. “I think you lie. You were jealous.”

“Of what on earth would I be jealous, that an old friend had lost her mind? I hadn’t seen Susan in years; I don’t know where she is now …”

“But you were jealous, consumed with rage, more jealous of her than ever of Lev and all his young girls.”

“You’re going to have to explain this to me.”

“With pleasure. You were in an agony of envy, because your reincarnated daughter revealed herself to Susan and not to you! That was your thought. It couldn’t be true, because how could the link between Lily and Susan have been stronger! That’s what you felt, outrage. Pride, the same pride that let you give away Lev when he didn’t know his left hand from his right, when he was sick with grief, when—”

I didn’t answer him.

He was absolutely right.

I had been tormented by the very idea that anyone would claim such intimacy with my lost daughter, that Susan in her seemingly addled brain would imagine that Lily, reincarnated, had confided in her instead of me.

He was right. How perfectly stupid. And how Lily had loved Susan. Oh, the bond between those two!

“So, you play another card. So what?” I reached for the violin. He didn’t loosen his grip. Indeed, he tightened it.

I fondled the violin but he wouldn’t allow me to move it. He watched me. It felt real; it was magnificent; it was lustrous and material and gorgeous in its own right, without a note of music coming forth from it. Ah, to touch it. To touch such a fine and old violin.

“It’s a privilege, I take it?” I asked bitterly. Don’t think about Susan and her story of Lily being reborn.

“Yes, it is a privilege … but you deserve as much.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you love the sound of it perhaps more than any other mortal for whom I’ve ever played it.”

“Even Beethoven?”

“He was deaf, Triana,” he said in a whisper.

I laughed out loud. Of course. Beethoven had been deaf! The whole world knew that, as well as they knew that Rembrandt was Dutch, or that Leonardo da Vinci had been a genius. I laughed freely, kind of softly.

“That is very funny, that I should forget.”

He was not amused.

“Let me hold it.”

“I will not.”

“But you just said—”

“So what of what I said? The privilege does not extend that far. You can’t hold it. You can touch it, but that’s all. You think I’d let a creature like you ever so much as pluck the string? Don’t try it!”

“You must have died in a rage.”

“I did.”

“And you, the pupil, what did you think of Beethoven, though he couldn’t hear you play, what was your estimation of him?”

“I adored him,” he whispered. “I adored him as you do in your mind without ever having known him, only I did, and I was a ghost before he died. I saw his grave. I thought when I came into that old cemetery that I would die again of grief, of horror, that he was dead, that a marker stood there for him … but I couldn’t.”

He totally lost the look of spite.

“And it came so quick. That’s how it is in this realm. Things are quick. Or lingering and seemingly eternal. Years had passed for me in some haze. Later, so much later, I heard of his great funeral, from the chatter of the living, of how they had carried Beethoven’s coffin through the streets. Ah, Vienna loves grand funerals, loves them, and now he has his proper monument, my Maestro.” His voice fell almost to silence. “How I wept at that old grave.” He looked off, wondering, but his hand never relaxed on the violin.

“Remember when your daughter died, you wanted the whole world to know?”

“Yes, or to stop or to take one second to reflect or … something.”

“And all your California friends didn’t know how to sit through a simple Mass for the Dead, and half of them lost the trail of the hearse on the freeway.”

“So what?”

“Well, the Maestro you so love had the funeral you so desired.”

“Yes, and he is Beethoven, and you knew him and I know him. But what is Lily? Lily is what? Bones? Dust?”

He looked tender and regretful.

My voice wasn’t strident or angry.

“Bones, dust, a face, I can recall perfectly—round, with a high forehead like my mother’s, not like mine, oh, my mother’s face,” I said. “I like to think of her. I like to remember how beautiful she was …”

“And when Lily’s hair fell out and she cried?”

“Beautiful still. You know that. Were you beautiful when you died?”

“No.”

The violin felt silky and perfect.

“Sixteen ninety was the year in which it was made,” he said. “Before I was born, long before. My father bought it from a man in Moscow, where I’ve never been, not even since, nor would I go on any account.”

I looked lovingly at it. I really didn’t care much about anything in the world then but it, ghost or fake or real.

“Real and spectral.” He corrected me. “My father had twenty instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, all of them fine, but none as fine as this, the long violin.”

“Twenty? I don’t believe you!” I said suddenly. But I didn’t know why I said it. Rage.

“Jealousy, that you have no talent,” he said.

I studied him; he had no clear direction. He didn’t know whether or not he hated me or loved me, only that he desperately needed me.

“Not you,” he countered, “just someone.”

“Someone who loves this?” I asked. “This violin and knows it’s ‘the long Strad’ that the elder Stradivari made near the end of his life?” I asked. “When he had broken away from the influence of Amati?”

His smile was soft and sad, no—worse than that, deeper than that, full of hurt, or was it thanks?

“Perfect F holes,” I said softly, reverently, running my fingers over them on the belly of the violin. Don’t touch the string.

“No, don’t,” he said. “But you can … you can keep touching it.”

“You are the one weeping now? Real tears?”

I meant it to be mean but it lost its power. I just looked at the violin and I thought how exquisite, how unexplainable. Try to tell someone who hasn’t heard a violin what the sound is like, this voice of this instrument, and think—how many generations lived and died without ever hearing anything quite like it.

His tears were becoming to his long deep-set eyes. He didn’t fight them. For all I knew, he made them, made them like he made the whole image of himself.

“If only it were that simple,” he confided.

“A dark varnish,” I said looking at the violin. “That tells the date, doesn’t it, and that the back is jointed—two pieces, I’ve seen that, and the wood is from Italy.”

“No,” he said. “Though many of the others were.” He
had to clear his throat, or the semblance of it, in order to speak.

“It’s the long violin, yes, you are right on that; they call it
stretto lungo
.”

He spoke sincerely and almost kindly. “All that knowledge in your head, all those details you know of Beethoven and Mozart, and your weeping as you listen to them, clutching your pillow—”

“I follow you,” I said. “Don’t forget the Russian madman as you so unkindly call him. My Tchaikovsky. You played him well enough.”

“Yes, but what good did any of it do you? Your knowledge, your desperate reading of Beethoven’s or Mozart’s letters and the endless study of the sordid detail of Tchaikovsky’s life? Look, here you are, what are you?”

“The knowledge keeps me company,” I said, slowly and calmly, letting my words speak to him as much as to me, “rather like you keep me company.” I leant forward, and came as close to the violin as I could. The light from the chandelier was poor. But I could see through the F hole the label, and only the round circle and the letters AS and the year, perfectly written as he had said: 1690.

I didn’t kiss this thing, that seemed a wanton vulgar thing even to think of. I just wanted to hold it, put it in place on my shoulder, that much I knew how to do, to wrap my left fingers around it.

“Never.”

“All right,” I said with a sigh.

“Paganini had two by Antonio Stradivari when I met him, and neither was as fine as this—”

“You knew him as well?”

“Oh, yes, you might say he unwittingly played a heavy role in my downfall. He never knew what became of me. But I watched him through the dark veil, I watched him
once or twice, that was all I could bear, and time had no natural measure anymore. But he never had an instrument as fine as this …”

“I see … and you had twenty.”

“In my father’s house, I told you. Profit by your reading. You know what Vienna was in those days. You know of princes who had private orchestras. Don’t be stupid.”

“And you died for just this one?”

“I would have died for any of them,” he said. He let his eyes move over the instrument. “I almost did die for all of them. I … But this one, this was mine, or so we always said, though of course I was only his son, and there were many and I used to play all of them.” He seemed to be musing.

“You did truly die for this violin?”

“Yes! And for the passion to play it. If I’d been born a talentless idiot like you, an ordinary person like you, I would have gone mad. It’s a wonder you don’t!”

Instantly he seemed sorry. He looked at me almost apologetically.

“But few have ever listened like you, I’ll give you that.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Few have ever understood the sheer language of music as you do.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“Few have ever … longed for such a broad range.” He seemed puzzled. He looked almost helplessly at the violin before him.

I said nothing.

He became flustered. He stared at me.

“And the bow,” I said, suddenly frightened that he
would go, go again, disappear out of vengeance. “Did the great Stradivari make the bow too?”

“Perhaps, it’s doubtful. He didn’t much bother with bows. But you know that. This one could be his, it could, and of course you know the wood.” His smile came again, intimate and a little wondering.

“I do? I think I don’t,” I said. “What wood is it?” I touched the bow, the long broad bow. “It’s wide, very wide, wider than our modern bows, or those used today.”

“To make a finer sound,” he said, looking at it, “Oh, you do notice things.”

“That is obvious. Anyone would have noticed that. I’m sure the audience in the Chapel noticed that it was a wide bow.”

“Don’t be so certain of what they noticed. Do you know why it is so wide?”

“So that horsehair and wood don’t touch so easily, so that you can play more stridently.”

“Stridently,” he repeated, with a smile. “Strident. Ah, I never thought of it in that way.”

“You attack often enough, you come crashing down. A slightly concave bow is necessary for that, isn’t it? What is the wood of the bow, it’s some special wood. I can’t remember. I used to know these things. Tell me.”

“I would like to,” he said. “The maker I don’t know, but the wood I do know and did when I was alive, and the wood is pernambuco.” He studied me as if expecting something. “Does that ring no chords in your memory, pernambuco? Does it have no resonance for you?”

“Yes, but what is pernambuco? I don’t—”

“Brazilwood,” he said. “And it was only from Brazil that it came at the time this bow was made. Brazil.”

I studied him. “Ah, yes,” I said.

Suddenly, the wide sea appeared, the brilliant sparkling
sea, and the moonlight flooding it, and then a great course of waves. The image was so strong it blotted him out and caught me, but then I felt him lay his hand on my hand.

I saw him. I saw the violin.

“You don’t remember? Think.”

“Of what?” I asked. “I see a beach, I see an ocean, I see waves.”

“You see the city where your friend Susan told you your child was reborn,” he said sharply.

“Brazil—.” I looked at him. “In Rio, in Brazil, oh, yes, that’s what Susan wrote in the letter, Lily was …”

“A musician in Brazil, just what you always sought to be, a musician, remember? Lily was reincarnated a musician in Brazil.”

“I told you, I threw the letter away. I’ve never seen Brazil, why do you want me to see it?”

“I don’t!” he said.

“But you do.”

“No.”

“Then why do I see it? Why do you wake me when I see the water and the beach? Why did I dream of it? Why did I see it just now? I didn’t recall that part of Susan’s letter. I didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘pernambuco.’ I’ve never been—”

“You’re lying again, but you’re innocent,” he said. “You really don’t know it. Your memory has a few merciful rips in it, or places where the weave is too worn. St. Sebastian, he is the patron saint of Brazil.”

He looked up at Karl’s Italian masterpiece of St. Sebastian above the fireplace. “Remember that Karl wanted to go, to complete his work on St. Sebastian, to gather the Portuguese renderings of St. Sebastian that he knew were there, and you said you’d rather not.”

I was hurt and unable to answer. I had said this to Karl, I’d disappointed him. And he had never been well enough again to make the trip.