“My father.”
“Yeah? He’s the one married to the German, right?”
“Yes.”
“How come I never saw you before?”
“I’ve been living with my grandparents in Italy.”
“You gonna stay here now? Yeah? How come?”
“My grandfather died. My grandmother says we have to live here.”
“Tough.” He chomped on the candy. “Where you from?”
“Lago di Como. You?”
“Milano. You know Milano?”
“No.”
“I’m from Porto di Ripa Ticinese; that’s a section of Milano. Milano’s the best city in the world. I’d go back there tomorrow if I could.”
Mario tossed his head toward the doorway, now filled with three old women in black shawls, black dresses, black shoes. A touch of the old country. “My parents have their grocery store, though,” he went on. “They say we gotta stay here. What for? I ask. So we can buy a nice little place for our retirement, they say. What about me, I ask, I gotta stay in this hole ’til I rot? That’s when they hit me and tell me to shut my face.”
A battered van pulled up in front of the store. A wiry gray-haired man got out and started unloading crates. I asked, “You live around here?”
“Up above the store. You go in that last door over there, we’re on the third floor.” Mario brightened. “Hey, you wanna go see my radio? I built it myself. At night I can hear Italy on it.”
The wiry man caught sight of us as he hoisted a load of crates and yelled, “Mario!”
Mario’s face took on the pinched look again. “My father,” he said, not turning around. “He’s a saint too, just like my mother. You oughtta hear them when they start blessing each other.”
“Mario!”
“I gotta go,” he said. “He’s just back from the market.”
“Okay,” I said, liking him. “Maybe I’ll see you after we get moved in.”
“Count on it,” he said, grinned, and raced off.
I watched him pick up a pile of vegetable crates almost as tall as he was and shuffle off, whistling. I walked back to my father’s entrance, found the door locked, and pushed the button beside his name. A few moments later the door latch buzzed. I lunged at the door with my shoulder, braced on the frame, and worked it open far enough with my foot to slip through. I walked slowly up the stairs, scuffing and clumping my feet just to hear the echoes fill the dim and silent spaces. I shivered as the musty-smelling warmth slipped through my clothes, making me aware of how cold I had become outside.
My father’s new wife was waiting for me at the apartment door. She looked at me in silence, then turned away. Resentment seemed to roll off her in waves. We had invaded her home, her silence seemed to say. We had angered her man.
As I hung up my coat I heard my father say, “All right. There is a good boarding school near here where we can send him.”
“I did not bring that boy over eight hundred kilometers for you to send him off to a boarding school!” my grandmother snapped. “Are we now a family who does not care for its own young?” She lowered her voice, pleading, “He is weak. He needs the strength of a family.”
“I am his father. I will decide what he needs.”
“Are you? Are you? And where have you been these past eight years? Being a father?”
I entered the room and stopped at the sight of my father’s expression. “It was cold outside,” I said.
“It’s always cold here,” my father said harshly. He turned back to my grandmother, demanded, “When does your train leave?”
My grandmother’s chin jutted out, her mouth set in its grim line. “I’m staying with the boy.”
His face flushed. “Mai,” he spat. Never.
“You talk to your mother like that?” my grandmother hissed, her voice like ice. “First you don’t want the boy, then you do, then you want to keep him just to send him away?” Her voice rose to a shrill cry that hurt my ears. “Who are you to tell me what I will and will not do? You? My son?”
She arched her back, her voice bitter. “You leave a baby boy in my hands and disappear into the night. Did that not happen? I hear nothing for a year, more; then you write a letter saying the pain is too much, please keep him a few months more. Is that not correct? Does this poor old memory still serve me? Was it not this same son who writes a year later to say he has married a German girl his own parents have never even met, that he is trying to put his pain and his past behind him? Do I not recall such a letter?”
She raised her chin higher and stared coldly down her nose. “Ah, the pain, the pain, only you feel the pain, only my son suffers. Where was he when his father died? Where? By his mother’s side? Helping his mother with her own burden of pain? Showing respect for all the world to see? Being the proper son? Ha!”
My father seemed turned to stone. His face was a bloodless mask. His eyes within their dark hollows remained fastened on my grandmother.
“I stay,” my grandmother said with finality. “I stay until I see what kind of father this stranger is, this man who was once my son.”
****
My father never again raised the issues of my going to boarding school or of my grandmother leaving. Four days after our arrival my grandmother moved into a small apartment on the floor below where Mario and his family lived. Two days after that, she returned to Italy for her household belongings. The following three nights I spent in sleepless agony, fearful that she would decide to stay in Como. Who in their right mind would return here if they did not have to? But she did return, and by the end of the second week our lives had settled into a strange routine. I slept and ate breakfast in my father’s apartment, moving about the place like a shadow. The rest of my time I spent away. Anywhere else; just away.
I avoided my father and his wife as much as possible in their apartment. I remained there only because my grandmother said I must. She turned a deaf ear to my tears and pleas until once, finally losing her patience, she slapped me hard and told me that I would stop pestering her or she would leave me here alone and return to Como. I gaped at her, filled with a cold horror. My worst nightmare had suddenly flashed before me. I walked softly around my grandmother for a few days after that, dreading the moment that she might decide to leave anyway. But she never did.
One week later, on the second of May, I entered a school where foreign children learned the German language. I attended the school four hours a day, five days a week, all summer long. After lunch I would do my homework under my grandmother’s watchful eye, and then play my guitar for two hours. That was all the practice my grandmother would allow me. It was summertime, she said, a boy should be outside playing with friends and growing strong.
I never played the guitar in my father’s house. Once my grandmother was settled in her apartment, I moved my instruments over and left them there. My father never mentioned my music. We rarely spoke at all. We would sit together in uncomfortable silence at breakfast, the three of us, until I left for school and they for work. They worked together in the same factory, my father as a clerk and translator in the international department, and his wife as a secretary.
After school I would lunch with my grandmother, practice, then play with Mario or help in the store until someone told me to go home. Sometimes at Mario’s apartment they forgot I was in the back room where Mario was building his radio set. Once his mother came back to send him to bed, and a look of surprise and sadness filled her face when she found me still there. They were always nice to me at Mario’s.
My grandmother made me sit with her every evening as she covered her head with the little lace prayer shawl and said her rosary. Not every day did I feel that peace reach out and cover me, but when it did the whole world seemed to slip away. In those moments I lost all concept of time—where I was, what was troubling me. I was content to sit and listen to the music sing through my mind like a summer breeze through an open window.
On the days when the peace did not come, I wou
ld sit in silence and try not to fidget because I knew it was important to my grandmother. One evening, the week after I started the summer-long language course, she opened her eyes sooner than I expected and found me swinging my legs and staring out the front window at the building across the street.
“What are you doing, figlio mio?” she asked me. “Is this not a time to pray?”
I hesitated for a moment, but because her eyes were filled with concern rather than irritation, I spoke the truth. “Who am I supposed to pray to? A God that brought me here to a land I hate and makes me live with a man who hates me?”
My grandmother sighed softly and replied, “Your father does not hate you, Giovanni.”
But I had said it and did not want to retreat. “I am afraid to pray,” I said. “If I pray I feel the anger inside me, and it scares me to be so angry at God. I can’t play my music and feel the anger. So I don’t pray.”
My grandmother looked at me in sad silence for a time, then said, “I do not want to go to Mass alone, Giovanni. Mass is too important to allow you to just give it up. If I sat in Mass alone and knew you stayed here without me, I could not pray. You will do this for me?”
“I don’t mind sitting here,” I said, wanting very much for her to understand. “Sometimes it feels nice, like, like . . .” I struggled to find the words, could not.
My grandmother was quiet for a while, then said very softly, “Sometimes you feel the peace, is that what you are trying to say?” I nodded, not sure if peace was the right word, but grateful that she was trying to understand something that was so important to me, especially here, especially now.
“You could find this peace within yourself, figlio mio, if only you were to learn to pray,” she said. “It is not right to have another person be the bridge between yourself and our Lord Jesus.”
The coldness reached up from within me. I shook my head in fear. I did not want to bring that anger any closer. Not ever.
My grandmother’s expression turned immensely sad, but all she said was, “You may come and sit with me whenever you wish, Giovanni, but I will not force you. No one can force another person to pray. It is a discipline that must come from the heart, otherwise it is not done in truth nor in spirit.”
“I will come,” I told her, not understanding her words, but glad just the same for having been let off so easy.
Every once in a while my grandmother would ask me to play for her at night, usually on the guitar, but six or seven times that summer she said she missed my grandfather’s music. She never thought she would ever confess to such a thing, my grandmother would tell me, but why did I not play her a little on Enrico’s accordion? So out would come the gaudy machine. Straps were adjusted, knobs pressed, bellows unbuckled and opened, keys punched, and suddenly the room was transported to a fire-lit cottage on a steep mountainside overlooking a broad blue lake.
I would see my grandfather perched on his stool, pipe clamped between yellowed teeth, his stubby work-worn fingers coaxing song after song from his instrument. He gave life to ancient tunes of lost loves and eternal passions, speaking of an Italy that now existed only in half-forgotten songs. I would sit beside my grandmother and play those old songs until wordlessly she would rise, sigh, pat me on the head, and go silently off to her room. I did not play the accordion unless my grandmother asked me. It was too painful.
Chapter 2
At the end of August, four weeks before my fourteenth birthday, I entered the German public school system.
The school was new and made of brick and glass in the shape of an H. The asphalt courtyard in front of it was filled with wandering students when I arrived. I hesitated at the sight of so many strangers. Mario grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and dragged me forward. We entered the narrow center section, and I saw through the high rear windows that the back courtyard was a little garden.
“C’mon, Gianni, we gotta find your class.”
I followed Mario over to the bulletin board running down one side wall. The school years were blocked out by strips of gold ribbon, with each class list printed on a separate sheet of paper. I joined Mario by the first class and searched for my name.
Beside us at the end of the bulletin board was a full-length mirror. Staring back at me was an undersized boy who seemed to be all skin and bones and sharp angles. The face looked very pale, very sallow. Tousled black hair hung like disorderly fringe around enormous black eyes. The reflection looked lost and a little afraid.
At the age of eleven or twelve, German children were given a national examination that influenced the rest of their lives. If they did well, they could begin at a Gymnasium, an intensive high school that prepared its students for university and the higher professions. If a student did poorly, he or she was assigned to a Hauptschule. There used to be a third form of high school called a Realschule, where students who failed the national exam at eleven could prepare to take a second exam at sixteen. When I entered German school, the Realschule was slowly being phased out, and the Hauptschule was taking responsibility for helping students prepare for the later Gymnasium-Staatsexam as well.
All this came out in a discussion we had with an official of the school board. The first week in August a letter arrived telling us that I was to report to such and such a building with my parents within five days. In the end, my father, my grandmother, and I went.
The officious little man from the school board sat behind his bare desk in his white-walled room and asked a lot of questions. I translated both the questions and my father’s answers for my grandmother as best as I could. When the man finally laid down his pen and closed my file, he said that now he would answer our questions. My father said nothing. My grandmother watched my father for a long moment, her expression unreadable; then she told me to ask where I would be going to school.
Because I had not taken the state exam two years ago, the man said, I would be assigned to the local Hauptschule. He explained the German system. He could see that what he said upset my grandmother, so he adopted his most professional manner and said that the German school system was the best in the world and was laid out in a precise and logical manner. My grandmother asked if I could take the state exam now. Of course not, the little man replied, I was two years too late. Ah, of course, my grandmother said.
When I was sixteen, the little man said, I could sit for the second state exam. If I passed I could enter Gymnasium then, which would still leave me with three years to prepare for the Abitur. How many students do that, my grandmother asked. The little man shuffled papers and replied, from this school, three students made the jump last year. Out of how many, my grandmother asked. The man replied, from a class of four hundred and ten.
My grandmother was silent for a time, then asked quietly, I need to trouble this gentleman with one further question, Giovanni. Ask him about religious training in the schools. For the first time the man seemed at a loss. I don’t understand the question, he replied. My grandmother said, tell him that you have been raised a good Catholic, and have been taught in a Catholic school. I need to know if this will continue. The little man showed contempt in his face and his voice. Religious training has no place in a proper school, he said. It is the task of a school to teach, not to indoctrinate. You can rest assured that no such dogmatism will be tolerated within the German school system. My grandmother sat silently through it all as I rushed to keep up. My father did not say a word. When the little man was finished, my grandmother sighed and said, I have no more questions. Thank the man for his time, Giovanni.
Wait, I said, and to the man I asked if I could take guitar lessons at my Hauptschule. He consulted another paper and replied, no, there was music appreciation twice a week, but no lessons for individual instruments. What about at the Gymnasium, I asked. He looked at me, then searched for another paper. No, not there either. But at sixteen or seventeen a student could apply to the Musikakademie. I sat and wondered dismally if my father would pay for private guitar lessons. My grandmother finally asked what I ha
d said. When I told her she looked at me for a moment, then said quietly, thank the man, Giovanni. We have taken enough of his time.
* * *
As I stood in the hall beside Mario and searched for my name, I wondered how much private guitar lessons would cost in Germany. More than my grandmother could afford, I was fairly sure. I dreaded having to ask my father for the money, dreaded having to plead with him, dreaded being forced to go begging to my grandmother after my father said no.
“Here’s your name, Gianni. Class 26-B.” Mario showed disappointment. “We’re in different classes this semester. Tough.”
“Can’t we ask them to change us?”
Mario shook his head. “They don’t like switching people around.”
“But I won’t know anyone in my class, Mario. Who can I talk to?”
He gave me an amused look. “You’ll find somebody, Gianni. The Germans aren’t all cold as machines. Some of ’em are okay.” He turned away. “C’mon, I’ll show you where your class is. You don’t wanna be late your first day.”
The classroom, at the end of the building, had small windows up high on the back wall. The outer wall had tall windows covered by floor-to-ceiling curtains of green gauze. Light coming through the curtains transformed the classroom into a murky den.
Mario left me at the doorway with instructions to find him in the front hall after classes. The room was half full. I walked in and chose a desk in the far back corner.
Out of the side of my eye I watched the room fill rapidly. I kept my face turned toward the windows. Through a space in the curtain I could see the stone wall of the next building. I listened to the students laugh and chatter around me. Some of what they said I could understand, but much was slurred or shouted or distorted and meant nothing to me.
Abruptly the overhead lights went on, and into the sudden silence walked the teacher. With brisk movements she walked to the front of the class, wrote her name on the blackboard, and introduced herself as Fraulein Rohr. Twice a week we would be staying over with her for the first class, she told us, when she would teach music appreciation. The other three days we would have sports.
The Maestro Page 6