He sold the cello. To his friend Progorny. No fuss, no sentimental self-indulgence—his wife needed extensive (and expensive) medical care, and that was the end of that. Any one of us would have done the same; what was all the to-do about? At least, the Fabregas would stay in the family, just to his left, every night, while he himself made cheerful do on a secondhand DeLuca found pawned in Gradja. There are worse cellos than DeLucas. I am not saying there aren’t.
But the bloody thing threw off the balance of the strings completely. How am I to explain this to you, who declare yourself no musician? We have always been weak in the lower registers, as I have admitted: Andrichev and that instrument of his had become, in a real sense, our saviors, giving us depth, solidity, a taproot, a place to come home to. Conductor and concertmaster, I can tell you that none of the Greater Bornitz Municipal Orchestra—and in this I include Herr Sigerson himself—actually took their time from me. Oh, they looked toward me dutifully enough, but the corners of their eyes were focused on the cello section at all times. As well they should have been. Rhythm was never my strong suit, and I am not a fool-I have told you that as well.
But there are cellos and cellos, and the absence of the Fabregas made all the difference in the world to us. That poor pawnshop DeLuca meant well, and it held its pitch and played the notes asked of it as well as anyone could have asked. Anyone who wasn’t used—no, attuned—to the soft roar of the Fabregas, as our entire orchestra was attuned to it. It wasn’t a fair judgment, but how could it have been? The sound wasn’t the same; and, finally, the sound is everything. Everything. All else—balance, tempo, interpretation—you can do something about, if you choose; but the sound is there or it isn’t, and that bloody ancient Fabregas was our sound and our soul. Yes, I know it must strike you as absurd. I should hope so.
Progorny gave it his best—no one ever doubted that. It was touching, poignant, in a way: he seemed so earnestly to believe that the mere possession of that peerless instrument would make him—had already made him—a musician equal to such a responsibility. Indeed, to my ear, his timbre was notably improved, his rhythm somewhat firmer, his melodic line at once more shapely and more sensible. But what of it? However kindly one listened, it wasn’t the sound. The cello did not feel for him what it felt for Andrichev, and everyone knew it, and that is the long and the short of it. Musical instruments have neither pity nor any notion of justice, as I have reason to know. Especially the strings.
Whatever Progorny had paid him for the cello, it could not have been anything near its real value. And Lyudmilla grew steadily worse. Not that I ever visited her in her sickbed, you understand, but you may believe that I received daily—hourly—dispatches and bulletins from Andrichev. It very nearly broke my peevish, cynical old heart to see him so distraught, so frantically disorganized, constantly racing back and forth between the rehearsal hall, the doctor’s office, and his own house, doing the best he could to attend simultaneously to the well-being of his wife and that of his music. For an artist, this is, of course, impossible. Work or loved ones, passions or responsibilities … when it comes down to that, as it always does, someone goes over the side. Right, wrong, it is how things are. It is how we are.
Yes, of course, I know perfectly well that it was remiss of me not to go to Lyudmilla at the earliest news of her illness. But in the first place, we were told almost immediately that her physician—a Romanian named Nastase—had placed her in quarantine; and if that word has some resonance for your educated ears, try to imagine how it must have reverberated in a near hamlet on the farthest splintery edge of Eastern Europe, where folk still truly believe that a baby can be born with the evil eye. Even within the choir, she had few friends in St. Radomir, and had been seen there less and less since her marriage. Now a slab-faced cook (plainly employed by Dr. Nastase; Andrichev could never have afforded a servant of any sort) drove her trap into town, did her shopping in the fewest words required, and left as shut-mouthed as she had arrived. So there was probably more talk and speculation about Lyudmilla Plaschka than ever before, but no real knowledge—and certainly no social calls.
In the second place, I didn’t like the woman, you see—what a sour old person I must seem to you, so easily to detest both her and your hero Mr. Sigerson—and I was not hypocrite enough, in those days, to look into those ingenuous blue eyes and say that I prayed for the light of health swiftly to return to them once more. Yes, I wanted her to recover, almost as much as I wanted her to leave her husband alone to do what he was meant to do—very well, what I needed him to do. Let her have her lovers, by all means; let her sing duets with them all until she burst her pouter-pigeon breast; but let me have my best cellist back in the heart of my string section—and let him have his beautiful Fabregas under his thick, grubby, peasant hands again. Where it belonged.
Mind you, I had no idea how I would ransom it back, and reimburse Progorny (sad usurper, cuckolded by his own instrument) the money that had gone so straight to Dr. Nastase. And kept going to him, apparently, for Lyudmilla’s condition somehow never seemed to improve. Andrichev was soon enough selling or pawning other belongings—books to bedding, old clothes to old flowerpots, a warped and stringless bouzouki, a cracked and chipped set of dishes—anything for which anyone would give him even a few more coins for his wife’s care. Many of us bought worthless articles from him out of a pity that not long before, he would have rejected out of hand. I wonder whether Sigerson still has that cracked leather traveling bag with the broken lock—I think the moth-eaten fur cloak is somewhere in my attic. I think so.
So, though none of us ever saw Lyudmilla Plaschka at all, we read her worsening condition, and the wasteful uselessness of each new treatment, in Andrichev’s face. He shrank before our eyes, that bear, that ox, call him what you like; he hollowed and hunched until there seemed to be nothing more to him than could be found inside his cello. Less, because the Fabregas, and even the DeLuca, made music of their emptiness, and Andrichev’s sound—there it is again, always the sound—grew thinner, dryer, more distant, like the cry of a lone cricket in a desert. I still squirm with bitter shame to recall how hard it became for me to look at him, as though his despair were somehow my doing. My only defense is that we were all like that with him then, all except his comrade Progorny. And Sigerson, remote and secretive as ever, who, nevertheless, made a point of complimenting his playing after each performance. I should have done that, honesty be damned-I know I should have. Perhaps that is why the memory of that man still irritates me, even now.
Oh—Dr. Nastase himself? Yes, he had other patients, certainly, but by every account he offered them no confidences, and very gradually dismissed them, one after another, either assuring them that they were quite cured or politely passing them on to other physicians, apparently in order to concentrate his skills fully on Frau Andrichev’s critical illness. They were all gone by the late-summer afternoon when, with Sigerson’s comment, “We are more alike than you may think, Herr Takesti,” continuing to plague me, I determined to pay a call on Lyudmilla Plaschka myself. I even brought flowers, not out of sympathy, but because flowers (especially a damp, slightly wilted fistful) generally get you admitted everywhere. I must say, I do enjoy not lying to you.
Andrichev’s house, which looked much as he had in the good days—disheveled but sturdy—was located in the general direction of the Widow Ridnak’s farm, but set some eight miles back into the barley fields, where the dark hills hang over everything like thunderheads ripe with rain. I arrived just in time to see Dr. Nastase—a youngish, strongly built man, a bit of a dandy, with a marked Varna accent—escorting a tattered, odorous beggar off the property, announcing vigorously, “My man, I’ve told you before, we’re not having your sort here. Shift yourself smartly, or I’ll set the dogs on you!” A curious sort of threat, I remember thinking at the time, since the entire dog population of the place consisted only of Lyudmilla’s fat, flop-eared spaniel, who could barely be coaxed to harass a cat, let alone a largish beggar. The m
an mumbled indistinct threats, but the doctor was implacable, shoving him through the gate, latching and locking it, and warning him, “No more of this, sir, do you understand me? Show your face here again, and you’ll find the police taking an interest in your habits. Do you understand?” The beggar indicated that he did, and meandered off, swearing vague, foggy caths, as Dr. Nastase turned to me, all welcoming smiles now.
“Herr Takesti, it must be? I am so happy and honored to meet you, I can hardly find the words. Frau Lyudmilla speaks so highly of you—and as for Herr Andrichev …” And here he literally kissed his fingertips, may I be struck dead by lightning this minute if I lie. The last person I saw do such a thing was a Bosnian chef praising his own veal cutlets.
“I came to see Frau Lyudmilla,” I began, but the doctor anticipated me, cutting me off like a diseased appendix. “Alas, maestro, I cannot permit sickroom visits at the present time. You must understand, her illness is of a kind that can so very, very easily be tipped over into”—here he shrugged delicately—“by the slightest disturbance, the least suggestion of disorder. With diseases of this nature, a physician walks a fine line—like a musician, if you will allow me—between caution and laxity, overprotectiveness and plain careless negligence. I choose to err on the side of vigilance, as I am sure you can appreciate.”
There was a good deal more in this vein. I finally interrupted him myself, saying, “In other words, Frau Lyudmilla is to receive no visitors but her husband. And perhaps not even he?” Dr. Nastase blushed—very slightly, but he had the sort of glassy skin that renders all emotions lucid—and I knew what I knew. And so, I had no doubt, did Volodya Andrichev, and his business was his business, as always. I handed over my flowers, left an earnest message, then left myself, hurrying through the fields to catch up with that beggar. There was something about his bleary yellowish eyes …
Oh, but he was positively furious! It remains the only time I ever saw him overtaken by any strong emotion, most particularly anger. “How did you know?” he kept demanding. “I must insist that you tell me—it is more important than you can imagine. How did you recognize me?”
I put him off as well as I could. “It is hard to say, Herr Sigerson. Just a guess, really—call it an old man’s fancy, if you like. I could as easily have been wrong.”
He shook his head impatiently. “No, no, that won’t do at all. Herr Takesti, for a variety of reasons, which need not concern us, I have spent a great deal of time perfecting the arts of concealment. Camouflage lies not nearly so much in costumes, cosmetics—such as the drops in my eyes that make them appear rheumy and degenerate—but in the smallest knacks of stance, bearing, movement, the way one speaks or carries oneself. I can stride like a Russian prince, if I must, or shuffle as humbly as his ostler—” and he promptly demonstrated both gaits to me, there in the muddy barley fields. “Or whine like a drunken old beggar, so that that scoundrel of a doctor never took me for anything but what he saw. Yet you …” and here he simply shook his head, which told me quite clearly his opinion of my perceptiveness. “I must know, Herr Takesti.”
“Well,” I said. I took my time over it. “No matter what concoction you may put in your eyes, there is no way to disguise their arrogance, their air—no, their knowledge—of knowing more than other people. It’s as well that you surely never came near Lyudmilla Plaschka, looking like that. That doctor may be a fool, but she is none.” It was cruel of me, but I was unable to keep from adding, “And even a woodwind would have noticed those fingernails. Properly filthy, yes—but so perfectly trimmed and shaped? Perhaps not.” It was definitely cruel, and I enjoyed it very much.
The headshake was somewhat different this time. “You humble me, Herr Takesti,” which I did not believe for a minute. Then the head came up with a positive flirt of triumph. “But I did indeed see our invalid Lyudmilla Plaschka. That much I can claim.”
It was my turn to gape in chagrin. “You did? Did she see you?” He laughed outright, as well he should have: a short single cough. “She did, but only for a moment—not nearly long enough for my arrogant eyes to betray me. As you must know, there is a cook, especially hired by Dr. Nastase to prepare nutritious messes for his declining patient. A kindlier woman than her somewhat grim appearance might suggest, she let me into the kitchen and prepared me a small but warming meal—decidedly unhealthy, bless her fat red hands. When her attention was elsewhere, I took the opportunity to explore that area of the house, and was making a number of interesting discoveries when Lyudmilla Plaschka came tripping brightly along the corridor—not wrapped in a nightgown, mind you, nor in a snug, padded bed jacket, but dressed like any hearty country housewife on her way to requisition a snack between meals. She screamed quite rightly when she noticed me, and I was rather hurriedly removing myself from the premises when I ran into the good doctor.” He made the laugh sound again. “The rest, obviously, you know.”
I was still back at the moment of the encounter. “Tripping? Brightly?”
“Frau Plaschka,” Sigerson said quietly, “is no more ill than you or I.” He paused, deliberately theatrical, savoring my astonishment, and went on, “It is plain that with her lover, Dr. Nastase, she has conceived a plan to milk Volodya Andrichev of every penny he has, to cure her of her nonexistent affliction. Perhaps she will induce him to sell the house—if he has sold his cello for her sake, anything is possible. You would understand that better than I.”
A sop to my own vanity, that last, but I paid it no heed. “I cannot believe that she … that anyone could do such a thing. I will not believe it.”
Sigerson sighed and, curiously enough, the sound was not in the least contemptuous. “I envy you, Herr Takesti. I truly envy all those who can set limits to their observation, who can choose what they will believe. For me, this is not possible. I have no choice but to see what is before me. I have no choice.” He meant it, too-I never doubted that—and yet I never doubted either that he would ever have chosen differently.
“But why?” I felt abysmally stupid merely asking the question. I knew why well enough, and still I had to say it. “Andrichev is the most devoted husband I have ever seen in my life. Lyudmilla Plaschka will never find anyone to love her as he does. Can she not see that?”
Sigerson did not reply, but only looked steadily at me. I think that was actually a compliment. I said slowly, “Yes. I know. Some people cannot bear to be loved so. I know that, Herr Sigerson.”
We became allies in that moment; the nearest thing to friends we ever could have become. Sigerson still said nothing, watching me. I said, “This is unjust. This is worse than a crime. They must be stopped, and they should be punished. What shall we do?”
“Wait,” Sigerson said, simply and quietly. “We wait on circumstance and proper evidence. If we two—and perhaps one or two ethers—set ourselves to watch over that precious pair at all times, there is little chance of their making the slightest move without our knowledge. A little patience, Herr Takesti, patience and vigilance.” He touched my shoulder lightly with his fingertips, the first time I can recall even so small a gesture of intimacy from him. “We will have them. A sad triumph, I grant you, but we will have them yet. Patience, patience, concertmaster.”
And so we did wait, well into the fall, and we did trap them, inevitably: not like Aphrodite and Ares, in a golden net of a celestial cuckold’s designing, but in the tangled, sweated sheets of their own foolishness. Lyudmilla Plaschka and her doctor never once suspected that they were under constant observation, if not by Sigerson and myself, what time we could spare from music, then by a gaggle of grimy urchins, children of local transients. Sigerson said that he had often employed such unbuttoned, foul-mouthed waifs in a similar capacity in other situations. I never doubted him. These proved, not only punctual and loyal, but small fiends for detail. Dr. Nastase’s preferred hour for visiting his mistress (married himself, there were certain constraints on his mobility); Frau Andrichev’s regular bedtime routine, which involved a Belgian liqueur and a platter of
marzipan; even Volodya’s customary practice schedule, and the remarks that he grumbled to himself as he tuned his cello—they had it all, not merely the gestures and the words, but the expression with which the words were pronounced. They could have gathered evidence for the Recording Angel, those revolting brats.
“I have discovered the time and destination of their flight,” Sigerson told me one morning when I relieved him as sentinel—as spy, rather; I dislike euphemism. He had gained entrance into the house on several occasions since the first, knowing the occupants’ habits so well by then that he was never surprised again. “They are interesting conspirators—I discovered the trunks and valises stored in a vacant, crumbling outbuilding easily enough, but it took me longer than I had expected to find the two first-class railway tickets from Bucharest through to Naples, and the boat vouchers for New York City. Do you know where those were hidden?” I shook my head blankly. “At the very bottom of the woodpile, wrapped quite tidily in oilcloth. Obviously, our friends will be taking their leave within the next two or three weeks, before the nights turn cold enough for a fire to be necessary.”
“Impressive logic,” I said. Sigerson allowed himself one of his distant smiles. I asked, “What about the money they’ve swindled out of poor Andrichev? They’ll have hidden it in some bank account, surely—in Italy, perhaps, or Switzerland, or even America. How will we ever recover it for him?”
If only Sigerson could have seen his own eyes at that moment, he might have understood what I meant by the impossibility of masking their natural lofty expression. “I think we need have no concern on that score,” he replied. “Those two are hardly the sort to trust such liquid assets to a bank, and I would venture that Lyudmilla Plaschka knows men too well ever to allow her spoils out of her sight. No, the money will be where she can quickly put her hands on it at any moment. I would expect to find it in her bedroom, most probably in a small leather traveling case under the far window. Though, to be candid”—here he rubbed his nose meditatively—“there are one or two other possible locations, unfortunately beyond my angle of vision. We shall learn the truth soon.”
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years Page 9