Violin (26 page)

Stefan my ghost stood beside me, laughing, his hand on my shoulder. The smoke made a veil between us, a cloud in which we stood, ethereal and safe and monstrously set apart, his beautiful face not a day older than the other image, sneering down at me, but a poor mask for its own suffering, an innocent mask in a way for all its intolerable grief.

Then he turned and pointed to this distant and active image of himself, wet, bawling, being dragged from the room by two who had come in from the window, the lost one still groping in the dark, scratching at the carpet, I know, I know, you can’t breathe. He was going to die. The one you called Joseph. He’s dead, too late for him. Dear God, look. A rafter had fallen between us.

The glass flew in splinters from the doors of the étagères. I saw everywhere the fiddles and gleaming bright trumpets left behind. A great French horn. A tumbled tray of sweets. Goblets sparkling, no, flaming in the light.

The young Stefan, irreparably tangled in the moment, fought his rescuers, reaching out, demanding to be allowed to save one more, one more from the shelf of the étagère, let me go!

He reached for one more, for this, this Strad, the long Strad; glittering glass swept off the shelf, as he pulled it with his free right hand, as he was dragged past it. He had it, and he had the bow.

I could hear my ghost beside me draw in his breath; was he turning away from this his own magic? I couldn’t turn away.

A sudden crackling was consuming the ceiling above. Someone screamed in the great hallway behind us. The bow, Stefan had to have that too, and yes, the violin, and then a huge, muscular man, in fury and fright, took Stefan in his grip, and flung him over the windowsill.

The fire rose up, just like it had from that awful Avenue house when I was a child, that dark place of simpler arches and more pedestrian shadows, faint common American echo of this grandeur.

The fire fed and gulped and rose to make a sheet of itself. The night was red and brilliant, and nobody was safe, nothing was safe; the man in the smoke coughed and died, and the fire came closer and closer. The fancy gilded sofas near to us burst into flame, the very tapestry igniting as if from within. All draperies were torches, all windows featureless portals to a black and empty sky.

I must have been screaming.

I stopped, still clutching the ghost violin, the image of which he’d just saved.

We were no longer in the house. Thank God for this.

We stood in the crowded square. How the horror illuminated the night.

Ladies in their long gowns scurried, wept, embraced each other, pointed.

We stood before the long blazing façade of the house, invisible to the weeping frantic men who still ran to drag objects to safety. The wall would come down on all those
velvet chairs. It would come down on the couches thrown out, helter skelter, and the paintings, look at them, frames broken, smashed, great portraits.

Stefan slipped his arm around me as if he were cold, his white hand covering my hand which covered the violin, but not trying to tear it loose. He trembled against me. He was lost in the spectacle. His whisper was mournful and carried over any envisioned tumult.

“And so you see it fall,” he whispered in my ear. He sighed. “You see it fall, the last great Russian house in beautiful Vienna, a house which had survived Napoleon’s guns and soldiers, and plots of Metternich and his ever vigilant spies, the last great Russian house to keep its own full orchestra, like so many waiters for the table, ready to play the sonatas of Beethoven as soon as the ink was dry, men who could play Bach while yawning, or Vivaldi with the sweat on their foreheads, night after night, and all this until one candle, mind you, one candle touched a bit of silk, and drafts from Hell came up to guide it through fifty rooms. My Father’s house, my father’s fortune, my father’s dreams for his Russian sons and daughters who, dancing and singing on this border between East and West, had never seen their own Moscow.”

He pressed close to me, struggling, and clutching at my shoulder with his right hand, the left still over my hand and violin and heart.

“See, look around you, the other palaces, the windows with their architraves. You see where you are? You are in the center of the musical world. You are where Schubert would soon make his name in little rooms and die like the snap of fingers without ever finding me in my own gloom, I can assure you, and where Paganini had not yet dared to come for fear of censure. Vienna, and my Father’s house. Are you afraid of fire, Triana?”

I didn’t answer him. He hurt himself as he hurt me. He hurt so much that it was like the heat.

I wept, but then weeping with me now was so common that perhaps I should forget to take note of it here or anywhere else as we continue. I cried. I cried, and watched the carriages coming to take the grieving ones away, women in loose fur waving from the carriage windows, the wheels big and slender and delicate, and the horses noisy and unruly in the pandemonium.

“Where are you, Stefan? Where are you now? You did get out of the room, where are you? I don’t see you, the living you!”

I was dazed, yes, but apart with him, and what he could point out were only images of things past. I knew it, but in my childhood such a fire would have had me helplessly screaming. Well, childhood was no more and this was a nightmare for a mourning woman, this was a thing for soft sobs and a crumbling within of all strength.

The icy wind whipped the flames; one wing of the house did fly apart, walls unhinged, and windows cracking open and the roof exploding with torrents of black smoke. The great bulk looked like a grand lantern. The crowd was swept backwards. People fell. Screamed.

One last doomed figure leapt from the roof, a little cutout of black limbs tossed in the yellow fiery air. People cried out. Some rushed towards this tiny falling black stick-thing that was a man, a helpless, doomed man, only to fall back, driven by the gusting of the blinding blaze. The windows of the lower floor burst open into blazing flowers.

Another great shower of sparks caught us up, sparks touching my eyelids and my hair. I shielded the spectral violin. The sparks flew against us, heavy and stinking of
destruction, as they rained down on all those around us, and on us, on this vision and this dream.

Break this vision. This is a trick. You’ve broken these lucid dreams before that folded you up so tight you thought you’d died and gone on. Break this one.

I stared down hard at the filthy paving stones. Reek of horse manure. My lungs hurt from the bitter air, the smoke. I looked at the high multistoried long rectangular palaces around us. Real, real, these Baroque façades, and the welkin above, dear God, look at the fire on the clouds, this is the worst measure of its catastrophe—either that or one single victim, and how many had there been here. I breathed the stench of the fire in as I cried. I caught the sparks with my hands that died in the frigid wind. The wind hurt my eyelids more than the sparks.

I looked at Stefan, my Stefan the ghost, staring past me, as if he too were riveted by this hellish vision, his own eyes glazed, his mouth tender, the delicate muscles of his face moving as though he struggled desperately against what he saw—Couldn’t this be changed, Couldn’t that be changed, Did that have to be destroyed?

He whipped around and looked at me, caught in this moment of preoccupation. Only sorrow. Some question in his eyes to me, Do you see?

The crowd continued to tumble over us, yet never saw us; we were not a part of the frenzy, no obstacle, only two figures that could feel and see all that this world contained, in perfect empathy.

A flash caught my eye, a familiar figure.

“But there you are,” I cried. It was the living Stefan, far off, I saw him, the young Stefan of life in the flaring fancy coat with the high collar, safely away from the fire, the instruments strewn about him. An old man leant to kiss Stefan’s cheek, stop his tears.

The living Stefan held the violin, the rescued violin, a young Stefan, in dirty bedraggled finery. A woman now came, cloaked in fur-trimmed green silk, and lifted her drapery around him.

Young men gathered the precious salvage.

A hard blast struck me, like a wind not of this vision. Dream, yes, wake. But you can’t. You know you can’t.

“Of course not, and would you?” Stefan whispered, his hand cold on my hand, which held the true violin. And what had become of that, the toy the young man had saved? How were we propelled to this?

But something brightened fiercely in the corner of my eye.

There stood the Maestro, not alive in this world at all any more than we were. Apart from the crowd; and horrifyingly intimate with us, coming close so that I could see the tufts of his gray-black hair growing from his low brow and his keen black eyes dancing over us, and the pout of his colorless mouth, my God, my guardian, without whom I cannot even imagine life itself.

I wanted no protection from this.

“Stefan,
why
this
now!”
said Beethoven, the little man I knew, the man all the world knew from scowling statuettes and dramatic windblown drawings, pockmarked and ugly yet fierce and a ghost as surely as we were. His eyes fixed me, fixed the violin, fixed his tall spectral pupil.

“Maestro!” Stefan pleaded, tightening his embrace, even as the fire burnt on and the night thickened with cries and bells. “She stole it! Look at it. Look. She stole my violin! Make her give it back to me, Maestro, help me!”

But the little man glared, shook his head as he had before, and then turned, sneering, grunting, disgusted, and once again walked away, the crowd eating him up
again, the black confusion of jabbering and crying people all chaos around us, and the infuriated Stefan clutching me, trying to close his hand over the violin.

But I had it.

“Turn your back on me?” he said. “Maestro!” he wailed. “Oh, God, what have you done to me, Triana, where have you led me! What have you done! There I see him and he leaves me—”

“You opened this door yourself,” I said.

Such a stricken face. Defenseless. No emotion could have made him anything but beautiful. He stepped back, frantic, wringing his hands, truly wringing them, look at his white fingers as he wrings his hands, and he stared with wild tormented eyes at the great crashing collapsing shell of the house.

“What have you done?” he cried again. He stared at me and the violin. His lips shook, and his face was wet. “You cry for what? For me? For it? For you? For them?”

He looked from right to left, and back again.

“Maestro!” he called out, eyes searching the night. He stood back, lip jutting, sobbing. “Give it back,” he hissed at me. “Give it back. In two centuries, I have never seen a shade as sure as myself, never and now! And this shade is the Maestro and this shade turns its back on me! Maestro I need you, I need you—”

He moved away from me, not deliberately; it was only the idle dance of his desperate gestures, his searching gazes.

“Give it to me, you witch!” he said. “You’re in my world now. These things are phantoms and you know it.”

“And so are you and so was he,” I said, my voice small, broken, even lost, but insisting. “The violin is in my arms, and no, I won’t give it up. I will not.”

“What do you want of me?” he cried. His fingers outstretched, his shoulders hunched, the dark straight eyebrows expressionless, themselves giving the eyes beneath them all the more expression.

“I don’t know!” I said. I cried. I gasped for breath and found it and didn’t need it and it wasn’t enough and didn’t matter. “I want the violin. I want the gift. I played it. I played it in my own house, I felt myself give in to it.”

“No!” he roared, as if he would go mad in this realm where he and I alone stood, ignored by all these fleshly beings rushing and calling.

He came head on, and threw his arms around me. His head came down on my shoulder. I looked up, even as he held me, as I felt all the silky hair of his head falling down wild over my face. I looked up and past him and saw the young Stefan, and there with him a living Beethoven, surely it was, a gray-haired living Beethoven, stooped and belligerent and full of love, hair a fright, clothes snaggled, taking his young pupil by the shoulders as the pupil wept and gestured with the violin as if it were a mere baton, while others sank down to their knees or to sit on the cold stones in their weeping.

The smoke filled my lungs, but it didn’t touch me. The sparks made their ceaseless whirl around us but had no fire to burn us. He held me, shivering, and careful not to crush this precious thing. He held me, blindly, burrowing his forehead against me.

Clutching the violin tight, I lifted my left hand to hold his head, to feel a skull beneath his thick, soft, velvet hair, and his sobs were a muffled vibrant rhythm against me.

The fire paled, the crowd faded; the darkness became cool, not cold, and fresh with the salt air of the sea.

We stood alone, or at a great distance.

The fire was gone. Everything was gone.

“Where are we?” I whispered in his ear. He seemed in a trance, as he held me. I smelled the earth; I smelled old and molding things, I smelled … I smelled the stench of the newly dead, and the old dead, but above all of clean salt air blowing it all away, even as I caught it.

Someone played a violin exquisitely. Someone brought sheer enchantment out of the violin. What was this facile eloquence?

Was this my Stefan? This was a prankster at the instrument, with an immense power and confidence, tripping and tearing through a song more likely to make fear than tears.

But it pierced the night like the sharpest blade. It was crisp and originless in the gloom.

It was mischievous, gleeful, even full of anger, this song.

“Stefan, where are you? Where do we stand now?” My ghost only held tight to me as if he himself didn’t want to see or know. He sighed heavily, as though this frantic song didn’t touch his blood, didn’t galvanize his spectral limbs, as though it could not ensnare him now in death as it ensnared me.

Soft winds off the sea came again over us, and again the air was full of the damp of the sea, I could smell the sea, and far off I realized what I saw: