Playing with Fire

by Gerald Elias

  ‘Tell him I don’t need any rosin. When I do I’ll call him. Should be in about five years, more or less.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Yumi. ‘He wants to come see you.’

  ‘Fine.’ Jacobus heard Nathaniel stir. ‘Nathaniel, are we doing anything between now and New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘Nope. Free as birds.’ Nathaniel yawned and made his way to the jigsaw puzzle.

  ‘What I thought. Yumi, invite Borlotti sometime next year. Shall we say April? Maybe July?’

  ‘He wants to come over tonight. He says it’s urgent. Here, you talk to him.’

  Before Jacobus could protest further, Yumi pressed the phone into his hand. He felt Yumi’s weight, light though it was, settle on to his hip. He held the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Mr Jacobus,’ said Borlotti. ‘There is something I must tell you. It’s very important. You are the only one who would understand. It’s very important.’

  ‘Third time’s a charm,’ Jacobus said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’ve already told me twice it’s very important. One more time, maybe I’ll believe you.’

  Jacobus curled his legs to give Yumi more room, setting his stomach to growling again.

  ‘It … it is a long story. I don’t feel right talking over the phone. May I come to your home? Tonight? Now? It’s only twenty minutes. I can be right there.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a party-pooper, Borlotti,’ said Jacobus, ‘but it’s past my bedtime, and my elves have informed me my driveway’s already covered with snow. If you killed yourself trying to navigate it at night my insurance company would raise my premium.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen, Borlotti, tomorrow’s Sunday. Christmas Day. Why don’t you stop by in the morning? It should be plowed by then, and I tell you what? I’ll have a pot of Christmas coffee going. We can eat figgy pudding and watch Heidi together.’

  ‘Not tonight?’

  ‘No dice.’

  ‘How early tomorrow?’

  ‘Whenever the cock crows, or nine o’clock, whichever is later.’

  ‘All right, Mr Jacobus, if that is what it must be. Thank you.’ He added, ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘And God bless us, every one,’ Jacobus said and hung up.

  ‘That was nice of you to invite him over,’ Yumi said.

  ‘My Christmas spirit. How could I say no? He was nervous as Trotsky getting a Parvo shot.’

  ‘Why does he need to see you?’

  ‘Beats me. The last time I went to his shop was years ago for an emergency repair. My student what’s-her-face came for a lesson and her soundpost collapsed.’

  ‘Poor kid,’ said Yumi.

  ‘Poor kid? Lucky me! She had a tone a chainsaw would envy.’

  ‘I have a student who sounds like that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s her son.’

  ‘Could be. I wish I had earplugs when he comes for a lesson.’

  ‘What advice do you give him?’

  ‘Switch to trombone.’

  ‘Very sage.’

  ‘I learned from the best.’

  ‘Advice like that could put people like Borlotti out of business,’ Nathaniel interjected, taking a moment from his concentration on the jigsaw puzzle.

  ‘I went to Mr Borlotti’s shop on my way back to the city once,’ said Yumi, ‘just to buy a set of strings. He was a very sweet man.’

  ‘Ah, I like my women like I like my bagels!’ Jacobus exclaimed.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Crusty on the outside, soft on the inside.’

  ‘Like your head, with a hole in the middle.’

  ‘How dare you talk to your elder like that?’

  ‘As I said, I learned from the best.’

  Yumi pinched Jacobus’s bristly cheek, making him smile.

  ‘Do you want me to tidy up the house for Mr Borlotti?’ she asked.

  ‘No, for God’s sake!’ Jacobus crooned croakingingly, ‘I’ve grown accustomed to this place.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Nathaniel. ‘You’ve had the same junk for forty years.’

  ‘Wall-to-wall clutter becomes you,’ Yumi said to Jacobus.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But when he’s here Mr Borlotti might want to be able to walk in a straight line.’

  ‘To quote my favorite hero,’ Jacobus said, ‘“Bah! Humbug!”’ Something clicked in his memory. ‘And what was the name of Borlotti’s shop? Something tacky. Like bad Dickens.’

  ‘Ye Olde Violin Shoppe,’ said Nathaniel.

  ‘That’s it! That’s one reason I never went back. What’s with this “ye” crap?’ Jacobus lamented. ‘It’s bad enough they misspell words like “old” and “shop” when they put a damn “e” at the end of them, but “ye” doesn’t even mean “the.” It means “you”!’

  ‘You sound like Andy Rooney,’ said Yumi.

  ‘Andy Rooney!’ Jacobus barked. ‘Andy Rooney’s a curmudgeon!’

  ‘Ho! Ho!’ laughed Nathaniel. ‘And what may you be, Daniel Jacobus?’

  ‘Me?’ he replied pensively. ‘I am an analyst.’

  The three lapsed back into their easy silence, eventually broken when Yumi volunteered to do the dishes. Jacobus mumbled that since she had washed them the night before, he’d take care of it. He would have preferred waiting until morning, but if he did, the mice would make his house their winter mecca and crap all over the place. Ah, the hell with the mice. He’d do the dishes tomorrow.

  ‘And why were you so damn reluctant to answer the phone just now?’ he asked Yumi.

  ‘Oh, just superstition,’ she said.

  ‘What superstition?’

  ‘For Japanese, the number four is unlucky. It was the fourth time the phone rang.’

  ‘What’s so unlucky about it?’

  ‘One of our words for the number four, shi, has another meaning.’

  ‘It also means thirteen?’ Jacobus said, pleased with his wit.

  ‘No. It also means death.’

  TWO

  Christmas Day, Sunday, December 25

  Contrary to predictions, the snow continued through the night. By Christmas morning, Yumi’s fire engine red Camaro, which she had driven from New York City with Nathaniel, was locatable only by the antenna protruding like a periscope from a drifting sea of white.

  Jacobus, in his pajamas, taking his turn at the puzzle table, was distracted from his intense concentration assembling Leonardo’s masterpiece by touch alone when Nathaniel commented that the driveway hadn’t been plowed.

  ‘That’s not good news,’ Jacobus said.

  Yumi shared Jacobus’s misgivings.

  ‘Do you think my baby will be OK?’ she asked.

  ‘The hell with your car,’ Jacobus said. ‘How’s Borlotti going to get here? How are they going to deliver my Sunday Times? And what’s a supposedly self-respecting young lady doing with a car like that, anyway?’

  ‘Now that she’s concertmaster of Harmonium,’ Nathaniel retorted, ‘a job, I might add, you helped her win, she can afford whatever car she wants.’

  ‘I’d rather be in your ’78 Rabbit.’

  ‘That’s because Nathaniel’s Rabbit’s just like you,’ Yumi said. ‘Zero to sixty in three hours.’

  ‘Et tu, Brute,’ Jacobus said. He returned to the jigsaw puzzle, but the aggressive patter of windblown snow rattling the house’s windowpanes was an insistent reminder of the increasing improbability of Amadeo Borlotti’s visit. With his driveway impassable, Jacobus called Borlotti to reschedule, dialing the numbers on his phone by feel. The ringing at the other end, higher pitched and faster than customary, suggested something might be amiss with the phone. Whatever the issue, Borlotti didn’t answer and there was no answering machine. Perplexed, Jacobus finally hung up.

  ‘You’d think he’d be inside,’ he groused.

  ‘Maybe he’s on his way here,’ Yumi suggested, ever the optimist.

  ‘He’d have to be
dumber than Trotsky to drive in this kind of weather.’

  ‘Maybe he’s at home and not at his shop,’ said Nathaniel, ever the pragmatist.

  ‘If I recollect, his shop, or shall I say “shoppe,” is in his house. Old World style.’

  ‘Well then, maybe the phone’s out of order with this weather. Or he’s out shoveling. Or at Mass.’

  ‘Catholics.’ Jacobus shook his head, taking a cue that Nathaniel did not intend. The very idea that Borlotti might have gone to church in a blizzard provided confirmation yet again – not that he sought it – of the absurdity of all religion, in Jacobus’s unbiased view.

  With no Times in the offing, so went the opportunity to indulge in the time-honored ritual of Nathaniel reading the news, Jacobus pontificating upon it, and Yumi rolling her eyes. The only newspaper on hand was a three-day-old Shopper’s Guide, and for Jacobus there was but a single purpose for that free weekly advertiser: starting a fire.

  He cautiously felt the air around the wood stove. Determining that the heat had dissipated sufficiently overnight, he gingerly gripped the still-warm handle, opened the door to the stove, and tossed in a few crumpled pages. Within seconds, he heard dormant embers begin to crackle.

  ‘Let there be light,’ Jacobus proclaimed with sacerdotal reverence when he heard them burst into flame. The heat quickly caressed his face and warmed the metal frames of his dark glasses. Retreating to his couch, he almost tripped over the great bulk of Trotsky, who had taken his proprietary, prone position next to the stove.

  ‘Careful, Jake,’ Yumi said.

  ‘I know where I’m going.’

  ‘Not that. A cinder popped out of the stove. I’ll shovel it up. I wouldn’t want you to catch on fire.’

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Jacobus.

  ‘You want to catch on fire?’ Nathaniel asked.

  ‘Not me. Brünnhilde. Since there’s no Times, how about a little immolation, at least until we find out if Borlotti’ll show up? I haven’t listened to Götterdämmerung since Birgit Nillson kicked the bucket. That ought to warm our Christmas cockles.’

  Trotsky, with the acute sixth sense dogs possess, pawed at the front door to escape the five-hour Wagnerian marathon. Nathaniel opened the door and found a wall of new snow. Though as old as Jacobus, Nathaniel was a stronger, much larger man – horizontally so in recent years – and managed to shovel a small alley to give Trotsky a head start on his odyssey to his favorite tree. The dog, oblivious to the snow as he was to most things, tunneled into the drifts and disappeared.

  Nathaniel closed the door and turned on the LP of Götterdämmerung, Hildegard Behrens singing Brünnhilde. Yumi made a pot of Jacobus’s favorite coffee – percolated instant Folgers – and Jacobus resumed work on the puzzle.

  Decades ago, Jacobus lost his sight literally overnight to foveomacular dystrophy, in a single stroke ending his promising career as a concert violinist. With that drastic change in his life’s path, he made an intensive effort to rally his other senses to compensate for his lost one. As a musician, his most precious commodity was hearing, so that came first. He dedicated a half hour a day listening to an encyclopedia of almost inaudible sounds that others wouldn’t even have perceived, from floor creaks to melting icicles, composing an aural picture of the world around him. For smell, he ‘memorized’ the aroma of innumerable teas, coffees, cigarettes, and cigars. And even of perfumes and colognes, not that he would ever apply such odious concoctions to his own body, but simply to have a way to test himself against a labeled product.

  Not the least of his long-term development projects had been to hone his tactile memory, already highly advanced as a professional musician. Jacobus took up the jigsaw challenge mainly because people told him he’d never be able to do it. Starting with an eight-piece wooden turtle, ‘for Toddlers to Six Years,’ he gradually worked his way to five-hundred-piece puzzles. He could have gone to a thousand, he boasted, but he found them boring and repetitious.

  His puzzle assembly method required the crucial, first step of feeling both sides of each piece with his fingertips, placing the shiny side face up. Then he felt the lobes and crannies of each and sorted them based upon similarity of shape. Corners and edges pieces he could do in his sleep. Finally, with an ‘Aha!’ of self-satisfaction, he found the correct piece and inserted it into a welcoming opening.

  ‘I don’t think it goes there, Jake,’ Yumi said, placing a mug of coffee on the table with a calculated thud that enabled Jacobus to hear the mug’s precise location.

  ‘Of course it does. It fits perfectly.’

  ‘Maybe not. I don’t recall that Leonardo painted a pomegranate in the middle of Jesus’ face.’

  ‘Unless it was during his Magritte period,’ Nathaniel added.

  ‘Go to hell, both of you,’ said Jacobus. ‘But first give me the phone.’

  He dialed Borlotti’s number again with the same result as before. Trotsky, gleeful and covered with snow, barked to be let back into the house.

  After Götterdämmerung’s two-hour first act, Nathaniel donned his apron in Jacobus’s oft-neglected kitchen. He conjured up his Kentucky grandmother’s recipe for a savory stew of beef and root vegetables in a cast-iron pot, which simmered on the wood stove during the second and third acts. At the opera’s climax, Brünnhilde rode her heroic steed, Grane, into the flames to join Sigfried, her lord and lover, for eternity. Thus the curtain fell on the Twilight of the Gods and dusk settled upon the Berkshires. The stew, its flavor enhanced by the pungent aroma of woodsmoke, was ready.

  ‘Only a warped genius like Wagner could create ecstasy out of self-immolation,’ Jacobus said, digging unceremoniously into a turnip.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s a connection between pleasure and pain?’ Yumi asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I never knew what they were singing about at the end there, but if you read the libretto: “Radiant in the fire, there lies your lord, Siegfried, my blessed hero. Are you neighing for joy to follow your friend? Do the laughing flames lure you to him? Feel my bosom too, how it burns; a bright fire fastens on my heart to embrace him, enfolded in his arms, to be one with him in the intensity of love!”

  ‘Couldn’t one argue that the greater the pain, the greater the pleasure?’

  Jacobus was about to agree, in theory at least, but then he considered the three pillars of pain on which his life had been based: his abuse as a youth at the hands of a judge at the Grimsley violin competition; the death of his parents in a German extermination camp; and the blindness which deprived him of a career as a concert artist.

  ‘No,’ he finally replied. ‘No. You’d have to be a real sicko. Except for the part about feeling her bosom.’

  After eating too much yet again, Jacobus collapsed on the couch and Nathaniel fell asleep in the old recliner. Jacobus tried calling Borlotti once more, but this time he couldn’t even get a dial tone and roundly cursed the phone company for having allowed their wires to succumb to a measly blizzard.

  Yumi tried calling on her mobile phone but the device searched unsuccessfully for a signal.

  ‘Don’t you get cell phone service here?’ she asked Jacobus.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’

  Grumbling under his breath, Jacobus added a few logs to the woodstove to last through the night. Using the potholder that he kept on top of the woodpile next to the stove, he reached for the hot handle on the front, which he knew by design was directly above the single raised brick in the middle front of the hearth. After opening the door and adding the logs, he turned down the baffle handle on the left side of the stove, efficiently redirecting the heat that had been going straight up the chimney into a system of S-curves. Then, in the back of the stove, where there was a self-adjusting coil that attached by a chain to a metal flap that regulated how much heat the stove was producing, Jacobus closed the flap so that the fire would burn slowly all night. Finally, again on the left side of the stove, there was a one-inch hole, which, if closed by
rotating a small panel over it, would essentially cut off the remaining air supply to the fire and slowly extinguish it. Jacobus carefully closed it halfway, so that in the morning the smoldering coals would be reduced to glowing, easily reignited embers. Usually a comfort to Jacobus, on this occasion the chore evoked a troubling ennui, the origin of which he could not yet define.

  Jacobus sat in front of the stove long after he had chased Nathaniel and Yumi away, all but ordering them to go to bed and leave him alone. From time to time a charred log inside the stove would collapse on itself and send a fresh wave of dry heat on to his face. As much as he tried to derive some insight from the heat – comfort, passion, epiphany – it aroused but a single sensation in response to Amadeo Borlotti’s sudden, mysterious intrusion into his life. It was a sensation he struggled to dispel from his consciousness but which relentlessly insinuated its way back in, like the cold outside his window, demanding precedence over all others. It was fear.

  THREE

  Monday, December 26

  Jacobus, who resisted sleep for its haunting dreams that persecuted him without warning, was as usual the first one to rise on Monday morning. It hadn’t been the muffled whir of tires, informing him that snow-packed Route 41 was now navigable, that awoke him. Rather, it was the same pervasive, undefined unease tugging at the edge of his consciousness that had overcome him when he’d loaded the woodstove the night before.

  The fire had burned down and it was cold in the living room. On his knees, he poked at the embers. He blew on them and little by little their liberated heat warmed his face, signaling him to ball up some sheets of old newspaper and place them on the eager coals. Upon hearing the whoosh of the paper’s ignition he tossed in some kindling, then a log. The fire was restored.

  Jacobus tried Borlotti yet again but the dial tone was still out and his apprehension mounted. He made a pot of coffee, a task at which he had become adept even in blindness. He always kept the can of coffee, the pot, the measuring spoon, the potholder, and the mugs in the same place. He knew how to jiggle the knob on the kitchen stove to boil the water faster, and how many seconds of pouring it would take to fill a mug.