Violin (31 page)

He started up the steps, the heavy fur-lined coat dancing gracefully just above the heels of his boots.

“The young Princess,” he said glancing over his shoulder at the Russian guard who hastened to follow. “She was my childhood friend. I will come to call upon her at the proper hour. Only let me rest my eyes upon the old Prince and say a prayer.”

The Russian guard started to speak, but they had come to the proper door. It was too late for words.

The death room. Immense, its walls replete with the gilded white curlicues that make the rooms of Vienna look so much like whipped cream; soaring pilasters with gilded tracery; a long row of outside windows, each deep in its rounded arch beneath a gilded soffit, its counterfeit in mirrors opposite and far at the end double doors such as those we entered now.

The coffin lay on a great curtained dais of rich gathered velvet, and a woman in a small gilded chair sat on the dais right beside the coffin, her head bowed in sleep. The nape of her neck showed a single strand of black beads, her dress was the high-waisted Empire style but in strict black mourning.

The whole bier was heaped and surrounded by exquisite bouquets of flowers. Marble jardinieres held sprays of solemn lilies and dour roses in profusion all about the room, becoming part of the engulfing decoration.

White-painted French-style chairs were set out in rows, their solemn damask upholstery of deep green or red, in sharp contrast to the clumsy German-made white frames. Candles burned, singly and in candelabra and in the great chandelier above, a massive thing of gold and glass not unlike that which had fallen in Stefan’s house, all crusted with beeswax, pure and white.

A thousand flames fluttered timidly in the quiet.

To the rear of the room, a row of monks sat, saying the Rosary aloud in Latin, sotto voce, and in unison. They didn’t look up as the hooded figure entered and made his way towards the coffin.

On a long golden couch two women slept, a younger dark-haired woman with Stefan’s sharp features, her head against the other woman’s shoulder, both of them dressed in rich black, their veils for the moment thrown back. A brooch loomed on the elder’s neck. Her hair was silver and white. The younger stirred in her sleep as if arguing with someone but didn’t wake, even as Stefan walked past, though some distance from her.

My mother.

The unctuous Russian guard didn’t dare to stop the imperious aristocrat who boldly came to the dais.

Servants at the open door stood blind, as if they were waxen dummies in their pre-Napoleonic blue satin and pigtailed wigs.

Stefan stood before the dais. Only two steps above, the young woman slept, in her small gilded chair, one arm in the coffin.

My sister Vera. Does my voice tremble? Look at her, how she mourns him. Vera. And look into the coffin itself.

Our vision took us close. I was flooded with the scent of flowers, deep intoxicating perfume of lilies, other blooms. Candle wax; it was the sweeping swooning scent of my little Prytania Street Chapel of childhood, that capsule of sanctity and safety in which we knelt with Mother at the ornate rail, the rich gladioli on the Altar far outshining our little bundles of lantana.

Sadness. Oh, heart, such sadness.

But I could think of nothing but this before me. I was with Stefan in this attempt, and petrified with fear. The hooded figure quietly climbed the first two steps of the dais. I couldn’t bear the heat of my own heart. No memory of mine took first place over this hurt, this harm, this fear of what was to come, of cruelty and shattered dreams.

Look at my father. Look at the man who destroyed my hands.

The corpse looked cruel, but only in a faded dried-up insignificant way, his Slavic features more evident in death, angles hardened, cheeks deeply grooved, nose falsely narrowed by the undertaker perhaps, lips too reddened with cake rouge and turning down, without the breath of life to make them give the quarter smile he’d worn so easily before he was ever angered or brought to this.

Very painted, this face, and his body was excessively
dressed with furs and jewels and colored braids and velvet, sumptuous in the Russian style where everything must sparkle to express value. His hands with all their rings lay like dough on his chest, holding a crucifix.

But there beside him lay nestled in the satin the violin,
our
violin, against which Vera’s sleeping hand dangled.

“Stefan, no!” I said. “How can you get it?” I whispered in our vigilant darkness. “She is touching it. Stefan.”

Ah, you fear for my life as we watch this old tableau. And yet you won’t
give me my violin. Now watch me die for it.

I tried to turn away. He forced me to look. Rooted in the scene, we would be spared nothing. In our invisible form, I felt his heartbeat, I felt the tight wet tremble of his hand as he turned my head.

“Look,” was all he could say to me. “Look at me, during the last few seconds of my life.”

The hooded and cloaked figure mounted the last two steps of the dais. He stared down with glazed weary dark eyes at the dead Father. And then from beneath his cloak he reached with his thumbless bandage of a hand and scooped up the instrument and the bow, to his chest, quickly bracing it with the other maimed hand.

Vera woke.

“Stefan, no!” she whispered. Her eyes moved sharply, from left to right, a warning. She motioned desperately for him to leave.

He turned.

I saw the plot. His brothers came from the doors of other chambers. A man rushed to pull away the screaming Vera. She reached out for Stefan. She shrieked in panic.

“Murderer!” cried the man who fired the first bullet which struck not merely Stefan’s chest but the violin. I heard the wood splinter.

Stefan was overcome with horror.

“No, you will not!” Stefan said. “No.” Shot after shot struck him and the violin. He bolted. He ran down the center of the room, as they pumped their bullets into him. Bullets came now not only from the fancy dressed gentlemen but from guards, bullets shattering into him and into the violin.

Stefan’s face was flushed. Nothing stopped the figure that we beheld. Nothing.

We saw his open mouth gasping for breath, his eyes narrowed, the cloak streaming out behind him as he ran down the staircase, the violin and bow safe in his arms, no blood, no blood, save that which oozed from his hands, and now look!

The hands.

The hands were unbound and whole and had no need of bandages. They had once again their long and perfect fingers. They clutched the violin tight.

Stefan bowed his head against the wind as he passed through the front door—I gasped. The doors were bolted and he had not even seen. The crack of guns, the screams, rose in a grating splash of dissonance and then faded behind him.

Down the dark street he sped, feet pounding the shiny uneven stones, only glancing down to see that he had the violin and bow safe in his hand, then giving the run all of his young strength until he had left the cobblestoned center of the town, running, running.

Lights were a blur in the dark. Was it fog that wreathed these lanterns? Houses rose up in unrelieved blackness.

Finally, he stopped, unable to go any further. He rested against a chipped and peeling plaster wall, the cloak fallen back to cushion his head, his eyes shut for a moment. The violin and bow were safe and unscathed in his
pale fingers. He took deep breath after breath, and glanced frantically to see if anyone came to follow.

The night was without echoes. Figures moved in the dark but they were too dim to be seen, too far from the lights above occasional doorways. Did he notice the mist that curled along the ground? Was it common for winter in Vienna? Clumps of figures watched him. Were they to him only the tramps of the city night and nothing more?

Once again, he fled.

Only when he had crossed the broad bright Ringstrasse with its string of lights, and its utterly indifferent late-night crowds, and sought the open country, did he stop again and for the first time look down at his restored hands, his hands unbandaged and cured—and at the violin. He held it up by the light of the dim lamps of the city against the welkin to see that the violin was whole, unharmed, not so much as scratched. The long Strad. His. And the bow he had so loved.

He looked up, and back at the city he’d left. From the rise where he stood, the city gave its dim winter lights warmly to the lowering clouds. He was confused, elated, astonished.

We became material. The smells of the pine woods and the cold air, scented by distant chimney smoke, surrounded us.

We stood in the wood not far from him, but too far to ever comfort him, that Stefan of over a hundred years ago, standing there, his breath steaming in the cold, holding the instrument so carefully, his eyes peering towards this mystery he’d left behind.

Something was horribly wrong, and he knew it. Something was so monstrously wrong that he was caught in angst without end.

My spirit Stefan, my guide and companion, gave a soft moan though the distant figure did not. The distant figure held its vivid color, held its vibrant materiality, but it examined its clothes for wounds. It examined its head and hair. Intact, all. Here.

“He’s a ghost, he’s been since the first shot,” I said, “and he didn’t know it!” I sighed softly. I looked up to my Stefan and then at the far figure, who seemed the more innocent, the more helpless, the younger only by countenance and lack of poise. The specter beside me swallowed and his lips were wet.

“You died in that room,” I said.

I felt such a piercing pain within me that I wanted only to love him, to know him completely with my soul and to embrace him. I turned and kissed his cheek. He bowed his head to receive more kisses, pushing his cold hard forehead against mine, and then he gestured to the distant newborn ghost yonder.

The distant newborn ghost examined his cured hands, his violin.

“Requiem aiternam dona eis Domine,”
said my companion, bitterly.

“The bullets shattered you and the violin,” I said.

Frantically, the distant Stefan turned on his heels and began a trek through the trees. Again and again he glanced back.

“My God, he’s dead but he doesn’t know it.”

My Stefan only smiled, his hand on my neck.

A journey without a map or destination.

We followed him on his crazed wanderings; this was the hideous fog of Hamlet’s “undiscover’d country.”

I was gripped in a fierce chill. In memory I stood by Lily’s grave, or was it Mother’s? It was in that suffocating
monstrous time before grief begins when everything is horror. Look at him, he’s dead and he wanders and he wanders.

Through quaint small German towns with sloped roofs and crooked streets, he moved and we behind him—both of us bodiless again or anchored only in our shared perspective. He walked across great empty fields and into the light forest again. No one saw him! Yet he heard the rustling spirits gathering: he tried to see what moved above, below, beside.

Morning.

Coming down into the main street of a small town, he approached the butcher’s stall, spoke to the man, but the man could not see or hear him. He touched the cook on her shoulder, tried to shake her, but though he saw his gesture plain enough in some deep conflict between will and fact, she sensed nothing.

A priest came in a long black cassock, bidding good morning to the early shoppers. Stefan grabbed hold of him, but the priest could not see or hear him.

He was wild, watching the milling village crowd. Then solemn, trying desperately to reason on this.

Now, with greater clarity, he saw the dead hovering near. He saw what could only be ghosts, so broken and fragmented were their human shapes, and he stared at them as a living being might, in terror.

I squeezed my eyes shut; I saw the small rectangle of Lily’s grave. I saw the handfuls of dirt strike the small white coffin. Karl cried, “Triana, Triana, Triana!” as I said over and over, “I’m with you!” Karl said, “My work’s undone, unfinished, look at it, Triana, there is no book, it’s not done, it’s—look, where are the papers, help me, it’s all ruined.…”

No, go away from me.

Behold this figure staring at the other shades who come as if drawn by his sheen. He feared; he searched their evanescent faces. Now and then he called out the names of the dead he had known in childhood, beseechingly, and then with a twisted frantic look, fell silent.

No one had heard this noise.

I moaned, and the figure beside me held me tight, as if he too could scarcely bear the sight of his own stranded soul, vivid and beautiful in his cloak and shimmering hair, in the middle of a crowd no more or less brilliantly tinted than himself that couldn’t see him.

Deliberately he grew calm. The tears hovered, giving his eyes that great lustrous authority that motionless tears give. He lifted the violin and looked at it. He put it to his shoulder.

He began to play. He closed his eyes and gave himself to his terror in a mad dance that would have drawn applause from Paganini, a protest, a lament, a dirge and, slowly, opening his eyes, as the bow moved, as the music ripped through us, he realized no one, no one in the square of this town, no one anywhere near or far could see or hear him.

For one moment he faded. Holding the violin in his right hand and bow in the left, he brought these hands up to his ears and bowed his head, but as the color drained from his shape, he shuddered all over and opened his eyes wide. The air around him swirled with ever more visible spirits.

He shook his head; he brought his mouth back as a child might when crying. “Maestro, Maestro!” he whispered. “You are locked in your deafness, and I am locked out of all hearing! Maestro, I am dead! Maestro, I am as
alone now as you are! Maestro, they cannot hear me!” He screamed the words.

Did days pass?

Years?

I clung to my Stefan, the guide in this murky world, shivering though there was no real cold, watching the figure walk again, and now and then lift the violin to his ear and play some frantic series of notes, only to stop in rank rage, his teeth clenched, his head shaking.