Violin (34 page)

“No!” he whispered. “Not greed. Never.”

“Let me go. I don’t care if this is madness, dream or witchcraft, I want to get away from you!”

“You can’t.”

I felt the change. We were dissolving. Only the violin had form in my arms. We vanished again. We had no selves. The scene descended; the eerie music beat on.

A man was on his knees, hands over his ears, but Stefan the fiddler left him no peace, drowning out the half-naked coffee-skinned drummers who pounded the
drums, their eyes fixed on the evil violinist, whom they followed yet feared as they beat the rhythm.

Another moment shone bright, a woman banging his tenacious ghostly shape with her fist as on and on he played, a wailing dirge.

There came a school yard with great leafy trees where the children danced about him in a ring, the fiddler, as if he were the Pied Piper, and a teacher cried out and tried to draw them away, but I couldn’t hear her voice over his incessant cantabile.

What did I see now? Figures embracing in the dark, whispers struck my face. I saw him smile and a proffered woman blot out the shimmer of his countenance.

Love them, drive them crazy, it was all the same in the end, because they died! And I did not. I did not. And this violin is my immortal treasure and I will tear you out of life right into this Hell with me forever if you don’t give it up.

But we had come to a certain place. The blur was gone. A ceiling ran above our heads. This was a corridor.

“Wait, look, these white walls,” I said, thrilled with alarm, with such terrifying déjà vu. “I know this.”

Filthy white tile, and there came the demonic taunting of the violin, not music now so much as a rasping, driving torture.

“I saw this place in a dream,” I said, “these white tile walls, look, these metal lockers. Look, the big steam engines. And the gate, look!”

For one precious instant, even as we stood at the rusted gates, the great gorgeous beauty of the dream came back, the dream which had had not only this grim cellar passage and its gated tunnel, but the palace of beautiful marble, and before that the gorgeous sea, and the spirits dancing in the foam, who seemed now to me, not wretched
like the wraiths we watched in horror, but some free and wholesome thing that thrived on the sheer brilliance and volume of the waves—the nymphs of life itself. Roses on the floor. “It’s time.”

Yet all that we saw now were the gates to the dark tunnel, and the engines made a droning sound, and he played his violin in there, in the dark tunnel, and no one spoke now, and the dead man, no, dying now, look, dying, bleeding from his wrists.

“Ah, and you drove him to it, didn’t you? And this is to teach me that I should give in to you? Never.”

I drove his own music out of his head, I drove it out with mine! That became a game as well. With you, I would have driven out the Maestro and the Little Genius Mozart, but you loved what I played. Music was not goodness to you, you liar. Music was self-pity. Music was keeping incestuous company with the dead! Have you buried your little sister Faye in your mind? Have you laid her in a morgue without a name, already preparing for her the noisy rich funeral? With Karl’s money you can buy her a pretty box, your sister who was so chilled and alone in your dead Father’s shadow, still, your little sister, watching your new husband take his place in the house, a blessed flame that you so easily deserted!

I turned in the invisible grip of his arms. I pushed my knee against his body hard, as hard perhaps as he had kicked his own Father. I shoved at him with both hands. I saw him in a flash.

All other imagery deserted us. There was no white tile or drone of engines. Even the stench was gone, and the music. No echo told us we were enclosed.

He flew back from me, the Stefan who had come to me in New Orleans, as if he were falling, and then he plunged forward again, grabbing for the violin.

“No, you will not.” Again, I kicked him. “You will not, you will not! You will not do it again to any one of them, and it is in my hands, and the Maestro himself asked you why! Why, Stefan! You gave me the music, yes, and you give me the perfect absolution for confiscating the origin of that gift.”

I lifted the violin and bow in both hands. I lifted my chin.

He brought his fingers up to his lips.

“Triana, I’m begging you. I don’t know the meaning of what you say, or what I say. I beg you. It’s mine. I died for it. I’ll go away from you with it. I’ll leave you. Triana!”

Was this hard pavement under my feet? What lucid fantasy would surround us now, what more would be revealed? Dim buildings in the mist. A sting of wind.

“Come at me again with solid flesh and I swear, I’ll smash it on your head, this thing!”

“Triana,” he said in shock.

“I’ll break it first,” I said. “I swear it.”

I held it up more firmly, ready with the bow, and I swung it at him so that he staggered back in hurt and fear.

“No, you can’t,” he pleaded. “Triana, please, please, give the violin back to me. I don’t know how you took it. I don’t know what justice this is, what irony. You tricked me. You stole it from me. Triana! Oh, God, and you, you of all of them.”

“Which means what, my darling?”

“That you … you have ears to hear such melodies and such themes …”

“Indeed you did make melodies and themes and memories too. How expensive is the cost of your entertainment.”

He shook his head in helpless frantic denial.

“Such songs for you that there was freshness in them, almost life, and outside your window I looked up and saw your face and felt what you call love, and I cannot remember—”

“You think this tactic will soften me? I told you I have my justification. You haunt no more. I have the violin, as if it were your cock. The rules we may never know, but it’s in my hands and you aren’t strong enough to reclaim it.”

I turned. This
was
hard pavement. This was cold air.

I ran. Was that the sound of a trolley?

I felt the impact of the paving stones beneath my shoes. The air was freezing, bitter, ugly. I couldn’t see anything but white sky and dull leafless trees, and buildings like bulking ghosts themselves in their transparency.

I ran and ran. The balls of my feet hurt; my toes went numb. The cold made my eyes shed their first wasted tears. My chest ached. Run, run, out of this dream, out of this vision, find yourself, Triana.

There came the sound of a trolley again, lights. I stopped, my heart pounding.

My hands grew so cold suddenly they hurt. I clutched the violin and bow in my left hand and sucked my right fingers to warm them. Sucked them in my mouth, my lips chapped and cold. God! This was the cold of Hell. The wind went through my clothes.

These were the simple light clothes I’d worn when he stole me away. Velvet tunic, silk.

“Wake up!” I shouted. “Find your place. Get back to your own place!” I screamed. “End this dream. End it.”

How many times had I done that, come back through fancy, or daydream or nightmare to find myself safe in the four-poster in the octagonal room with the traffic of
the Avenue rushing outside? If this is madness, I will have none of it!

I’d rather life with all its agony than this!

But this was too solid!

There rose modern buildings. Round the curving tracks two streetcars came, sleek, of the present time, linked together, and just in front of me I saw a blazing sight that was no more than a kiosk opening up in spite of the winter, its portable walls hung already with multicolored magazines.

I rushed towards it. My foot stuck in the streetcar track. I knew this place. I fell, and only saved the violin by turning to the side, my elbow hitting the stones instead of it.

I climbed to my feet.

The sign that loomed above read words I’d seen before.

HOTEL IMPERIAL. This was the Vienna of my own time, my own moment, this was the Vienna of now. I couldn’t be here, no, impossible. I couldn’t wake anywhere but where I had begun.

I stamped my feet, I danced in a circle. Wake up!

But nothing changed. It was dawn and the Ringstrasse was coming to life, and Stefan was utterly gone and ordinary citizens walked the pavements. The doorman came out of the great fancy hotel where such greats have stayed as Kings and Queens, and Wagner and Hitler, damn them both, and God knows who else in its royal rooms which I had once glimpsed. God, this is here. I am here. You have left me here.

A man spoke to me in German.

I had fallen against the kiosk and knocked the wall of magazines askew. We were crashing, all of us, these
magazine faces and the clumsy woman in the foolish summer silk with the violin and bow.

Sure hands caught hold of me.

“Please forgive me,” I said in German. And then in English. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—Oh, please.”

My hands. I couldn’t move them. My hands were freezing. “Is that your game?” I cried out, disregarding the faces gathered round. “To freeze them so they die, to do to me what your father did to you! Well, you will not!”

I wanted to hit Stefan. But all I saw were people too regular and indifferent to be anything but utterly real.

I lifted the violin. I lifted it to my chin and I started to play.

Once again, this time to delve, this time to know, this time to heave my soul upwards to discover if a real world received it. I heard the music, true to my innermost harmless desires, I heard it rise with loving faith. In a blur the real world was as the real world should be in a blur—kiosk, people gathered, a small car come to a halt.

I played. I didn’t care. My hands grew warmer from the playing, poor Stefan, poor Stefan. I breathed steam into the cold. I played and played. Wise grief seeks no vengeance from life itself.

Suddenly my fingers stiffened. I was too cold, really, really cold.

“Come inside, madam,” said the man beside me. Others came. A young woman with her hair drawn back. “Come inside, come inside,” they said.

“But where? Where are we? I want my bed, my house, I’d wake up if only I knew how to get back to my bed and my house.”

Nausea. This world was darkening in an ordinary way,
I was going numb from the cold, I was slipping from consciousness.

“The violin, please, the violin, don’t take it,” I said. I couldn’t feel my hands, but I could see it, see its priceless wood. I could see lights before me, dancing like lights might do in rain, only there was no rain.

“Yes, yes, darling. Let us help you. You hold it. We hold you. You are safe now.”

An old man stood before me, beckoning, directing those around me. A venerable old man, such a European old man with white hair and beard, such a strange European visage, as if from the deep deep past of Vienna, before terrible wars.

“Let me hold the violin in my arms,” I said.

“You have the precious instrument, darling,” said the woman to me. “Call the doctor at once. Pick her up. Gently, be careful with her! Sweetheart, we have you.”

The woman guided me through the revolving doors. A shock of warmth and light. Nausea. I’ll die, but I won’t wake up.

“Where are we? What is this day? My hands, I need warmth for them, warm water.”

“We have you, child, all right, we do, we’ll help you.”

“My name is Triana Becker. New Orleans. Call there. Call the lawyer of my family, Grady Dubosson. Get help for me. Triana Becker.”

“We will, my dear one,” said the old gray-haired man. “We will do it for you. You rest now. Carry her. Let her hold the violin. Do not harm her.”

“Yes …” I said, expecting then that all the light of life would suddenly go out, that this was in fact death itself, come in a tangle of fantasy and impossible hopes and filthy miracles.

But death did not come. And they were tender and gentle.

“We have you, dear.”

“Yes, but who are you?”

15

T
HE
R
OYAL
S
UITE.
Vast, white and gold, walls paneled in a taupe brocade. Beige plaster circles above. Such soothing beauty. The inevitable scrollwork in whipped cream along the ceilings, a great cartouche in each corner. The bed itself was modern in size and firmness. I saw galloping gold filigree above. I was heaped with white down counterpanes—a suite fit for the Princess of Wales, or a millionaire madwoman.