Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  But by the time the Ukrainians moved in, its society roots were long forgotten. The sanitarium had closed during World War II and had languished until it was converted into a modest resort that catered mostly to shell-shocked Ukrainian immigrants. The newly christened Soyuzivka was modeled on retreats back home in the Carpathian Mountains, right down to the Slavic-village-style buildings with names like “Odessa” and “Kyiv.”

  When my dad drops me off at camp and pulls away, all I want is to run after the car and go home with him. I try to hold back my tears. Some of the other girls gather around, attempting to comfort me, but they’re speaking in Ukrainian, and I don’t know what they’re saying. I cry myself to sleep that first night.

  Dawn has barely broken when I’m jolted awake by a shrill whistle.

  “Mo… Lyt… Va!”

  My eyes fly open. I look around the bunk, noticing the sun’s first rays glinting through a window, trying to remember where I am.

  “Mo… Lyt… Va!”

  The whistle blows again. It’s the pani komandantka, the female commander who runs the camp, shouting, “Stavanya!” Wake up! Time for prayers.

  I stumble outside, following the other campers, watching to see what I’m supposed to do. We line up like soldiers. A couple of campers step forward to raise American and Ukrainian flags. The girls start singing “Bozhe Velyki,” a Ukrainian anthem I have never heard before. I mouth nonsense words along with them.

  The flag ceremony complete, the pani komandantka turns toward us to lead us in prayer. In Ukrainian. Then makes announcements. Also in Ukrainian. Then, apparently, she dismisses us, because suddenly I’m standing by myself, everyone scattering in different directions and me looking around, still in front of the flagpole, trying to figure out where I belong.

  Over the next few days, I scramble after the other girls, trying to figure out how to keep up with the babble of Ukrainian all around. My one reprieve is when the whistle blows and we rush to line up, by height, to march like soldiers to the next activity. At last, I think the first time. Something I’m good at! I can keep a beat with the best of them. But then the chanting starts.

  “Ras! Ya ne chuyu. Dva! Holosnishe,” everyone shouts as they march. I move my lips soundlessly, trying hard to memorize the words that are meaningless to me. This is how I’m going to survive the next two weeks.

  Almost all of our seventy or so campmates already speak Ukrainian and chatter on fluently during meals and while swimming, marching, and sitting around the campfire. I am lost, finding it impossible to make friends. Somehow Steph, who knows even less Ukrainian than I do, is unfazed by the language barrier. She doesn’t care if she can’t understand directions, perhaps because she doesn’t pay much attention in English, either. Her easy warmth fills in where words can’t as she throws herself into Ukrainian songs, dances, and traditional crafts like embroidery. Soon even the harshest pani komandantka is won over.

  “Daddy, let me come home! Please!” I beg when my dad arrives for visiting day. I am sobbing, miserable, as we sit in his parked car with the windows rolled down.

  He looks at me, his face betraying equal parts pity and shame.

  “You must discipline yourself,” he says finally, ending the conversation. Ignoring my tears, he turns to Steph. “So, Stephka, which of the girls do you like most? Do you haf a best friend?”

  “No, Daddy.”

  His face falls for just a moment. But by then she has already thrown her arms open wide.

  “I love them all!”

  The following summer, I get a break. I am to start Ukrainian camp one week late, because I’m preparing for my first full solo recital, which I’ll perform at Soyuzivka. My father takes great pains planning my program. He digs up some Ukrainian music and teaches me his own favorite piece, Massenet’s heartrending “Méditation” from Thaïs, a piece whose emotional depths I am not yet old enough to understand. Afterward, Steph comes onstage to offer me a bouquet—the first time I’ve gotten one for a performance—and the audience laughs and applauds as she trips over the hem of her long dress to give me a hug.

  Soon invitations follow to perform at Ukrainian concerts in Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York City. Usually, the occasion is a tribute to a poet, a politician, or a religious figure—often a long-dead priest, pictured on the front of the program in a big black hat and wearing about a thousand crosses and rosaries. The audiences are filled with elderly men whose eyes tear up when I play Ukrainian folk songs and women whose good suits still bear the faint scent of mothballs.

  The format is always the same. There are long speeches in Ukrainian, often lasting more than an hour. Sometimes a lot more. Then come the performers: singers, dancers, bandura choirs that perform Ukrainian folk songs on their zitherlike instruments, poetry readings, and me on the violin. Occasionally, my dad includes our quartet on the program and brings Steph, Miriam, and Joanne along, too.

  Whenever I give a Ukrainian concert, my dad invites my grandparents to go with us. Predictably, my dad gets lost every time. Doodie ridicules him and shouts out directions in Ukrainian, but that only makes things worse. Which is how, one weekday afternoon, my father ends up turning the wrong way onto Madison Avenue in New York City, directly into oncoming rush-hour traffic.

  “Oy, Bozhe!”—Oh, God!—my father shouts as he realizes his mistake.

  “Psia crow!”—Dog’s blood!—Doodie screams back as irate drivers careen around us, honking madly.

  Baba makes the sign of the cross and starts praying aloud.

  Cars whiz by in a blur. Taxi drivers shout at us in languages I don’t understand, shaking their fists and giving us the finger. My dad clutches the steering wheel, white-knuckled, cursing and sweating, while my grandfather waves his arms ineffectually and shouts in Ukrainian. Terrified, I lay down on the backseat and close my eyes so I don’t have to watch us all get killed, until my dad finds his way down a side street.

  The next time we venture to New York, my dad sits down the night before with a map and yellow highlighter and painstakingly lays out our route, like a general plotting an invasion. But the following morning, as we head toward the Ukrainian Institute of America on the Upper East Side, something does not look quite right. There are police cars everywhere. Blue wooden barriers line the streets. When we attempt to make one of our carefully planned turns onto Fifth Avenue, we find the road blocked by a policeman on horseback.

  “You can’t go this way,” he shouts, as my dad opens the window to ask what’s going on. “Street’s closed for the parade.”

  Sure enough, cars are turning down side streets. My father looks longingly at Fifth Avenue, spread out right in front of us, and reluctantly turns into unknown territory while fumbling for the map with one hand. The program will start in just moments, and still we remain mired in traffic, separated from the hall by a wide thoroughfare right now occupied by a marching band. Uniformed trumpet and clarinet players march in unison, clowns juggle, floats slowly roll by, and the sidewalks all around are clogged with onlookers.

  Suddenly, I feel a powerful tug: my grandmother, in her floral-print babushka, pulling me from the car with remarkable force. With her hand grasped around my arm like a hawk’s talon, she propels me into the middle of the crowd. As I clutch my violin and try to keep my gown from dragging in the street, Baba shoves past the barricades and a startled policeman, right into the path of the oncoming parade. We weave our way through a marching band, which barely breaks its stride, Baba ignoring the shouting policemen as we run toward the concert hall on the other side. No parade, much less the New York City Police Department, is going to stop Baba.

  After the performance, Baba is puffed up with pride. “That’s mine granddaughter, mey vnoochka!” she announces to anyone who will listen, while I shake hands with the old ladies and gentlemen who offer congratulations.

  “You played beautifully!” the well-wishers say in Ukrainian, assuming that I speak the language, too.

  “Diakoyu,” I am able to reply. Thank yo
u. It’s pretty much the only thing I know how to say, and most of the time it’s enough.

  That day, as concertgoers greet me after the performance, I murmur my “Diakoyu” to one after the other, nodding and smiling. An older woman in suit and pearls approaches me, burbling prettily in Ukrainian, and I smile back at her. “Diakoyu!” I say brightly.

  The woman looks at me, confused. Apparently she has just asked me “How old are you?”

  Mortified, Baba stalks away, shaking her head in disgust, while the kind stranger switches gears and starts speaking to me in English.

  Afterward, Baba berates me for humiliating her in front of her countrymen.

  “Vhy you no learn-it to speak good? This eez shame. Shame to me!” she wails. “Shame!”

  My Ukrainian never does improve enough for me to converse properly, but my frequent solo appearances are great musical training, and my dad never tires of hearing the music that reminds him of his roots. Maybe, I think, it will help him in his endless attempts to win approval from Baba, too.

  Unfortunately, that effort proves to be futile. Many years later, she will inform me that she was never as pleased by the performances as she was ashamed of my inability to speak Ukrainian.

  9

  The Audition

  JOANNE

  The first time Mr. K booked our quartet to perform at a Ukrainian festival, I was mystified. I didn’t understand a word of the entire evening, which apparently was a tribute to some dead nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet.

  But that wasn’t nearly as mortifying as the day he sent our quartet to a street fair in the historic district dressed up in Colonial-era villager costumes. I spent the entire afternoon trying to melt into the pavement, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. I tugged at my pink floral-print gown and flattened myself against the brick wall of old Crandall Elementary School, glancing right and left to make sure there were no familiar faces. My hair was giving me trouble, which happened often these days. Long and frizzy, it refused to be tamed. I alternated between the two-hour struggle with a blow dryer required to straighten it, and my clumsy curling-iron attempt at Farrah Fawcett wings.

  My mother told me I was going through what she called an “awkward phase,” which so far as I could tell had lasted, oh, about thirteen years. The boys at school told me I looked like a scarecrow and called me “four-eyes.” What they lacked in originality they made up for in accuracy.

  Being in the orchestra was suddenly social suicide. I had just started Hammarskjold Junior High School—named for a Swedish diplomat most kids never heard of whose name many would never learn how to spell—where the pecking order was clear and an instrument case instantly advertised your position at the bottom. After the first few days, I refused to bring my viola to school—I made up some excuse about how it wouldn’t fit on the bus—and used a school instrument for orchestra rehearsals instead. I began to avoid the music kids in the hallways, even my friends, even Melanie. I don’t think I ate in the cafeteria with her once in three years, even though we spent hours together after school and at ASTA during the summers. If the gods of popularity deemed orchestra kids to be pariahs, I wasn’t in any position to argue.

  The tension between us was unspoken, but the effect was unmistakable. When we got our yearbooks that first spring, even kids I barely knew wrote knowingly intimate inscriptions. But Melanie’s note to me sounded as if it were penned by a distant acquaintance: “Good luck in the future.”

  Middle school everywhere is the killing field of musical ambition. There’s actually a technical term for it—for real, researchers have studied the phenomenon. It’s called the “I want to quit” phase. That’s the span between twelve and fourteen years old, when, as researcher Theresa Chen put it, kids drop out “because of their desire to seek peer attention and approval.”

  Lots of teachers ease up on their students when the calamity that is adolescence strikes, hoping to coddle and cajole them through the worst of it. Mr. K did the opposite. He got meaner.

  He was especially tough on one of my classmates. Ted Kesler was small for his age, with shaggy bangs he was forever shaking out of his eyes and a sweet, slightly foggy expression on his face. Once, when Mr. K was trying to teach him how to play in fifth position—in which the left hand climbs all the way up the violin neck in order to play high notes—he pressed on Ted’s thumb so hard that the knuckle cracked. You could hear it popping, and it hurt like hell afterward.

  “That’s so you don’t forget where fifth position is,” Mr. K barked.

  “I never did,” Ted would say decades later.

  As socially humiliating as viola was, I didn’t consider quitting. Neither did most of the other musicians in school, not even Ted. “Taking lessons with Mr. K felt like playing for the Yankees,” he said. “You put up with the shit because it got you to the championships.”

  Mr. K, it was true, was on a roll. His students were dominating every orchestra competition, and I was one of them. Junior Regional Orchestra at twelve years old, Senior Regional at thirteen, All-State Orchestra at fourteen, the first year I was eligible. Melanie, naturally, was named concertmaster of all three.

  At one audition for a youth orchestra the year I turned thirteen, the primary judge had a particularly intense rivalry with Mr. K. She sneered at me as I carefully closed the door behind me. The door had a glass window, but she had covered it with paper so no one could see inside. She looked me up and down and shook her head in disgust even before I began to play.

  “B-flat scale,” she said in lieu of a greeting.

  On a viola, B flat is the highest three-octave scale there is. It’s the scale that requires you to crawl your fingers all the way up the instrument’s neck, where it’s harder to play in tune and your fingers have to be thisclose together and the bow can scrape and scratch like a screeching cat if you aren’t careful. Mr. K had drilled me on it probably a million times by now. I handled it without a problem.

  She scowled.

  “Faster.” She gave me a hard look.

  I played it again, concentrating fiercely. I stared at my fingers, willing them to hit their marks on the neck of the instrument as I played all three octaves on a single bow: BflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatFGABflat. Then down again: BflatAGFEflatDCBflatAGFEflatDCBflatAGFEflatDCBflat, also on a single bow. I hit each note. The endless drilling during my lessons had clearly paid off.

  Thank you, Mr. K.

  The judge gave me a look of loathing.

  “Faster!”

  I took a deep breath. I had never played it any faster. I had never heard anybody play it faster. I had never heard a judge make that kind of demand, either. The cruel expression contorting her features unnerved me. What did I ever do to her? I could feel the muscles in my arm tensing up. My palms were sweating. Both hands were visibly shaking. I steeled myself, closed my eyes, and dug in.

  BflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatFGABflat, on a single bow. Then down again: BflatAGFEflatDCBflatAGFEflatDCBflatAGFEflatDCBflat, also on a single bow. The scale went by in a flash. Notes that were too sharp and too flat and off in a variety of ways hung in the air. At least I got through it.

  “Faster! Do it faster!” Sadistic glee was playing across her lips.

  I looked helplessly toward the judging desk. A second teacher sat next to her, but he looked just as cowed as I did. He turned away from me and didn’t say a word. By this time my breath was coming in short, shallow bursts. It was clear this woman was out to get me. You could see in the expression on her face that she wanted me to fail, that she was putting all of her energy into willing me to fail.

  “I said faster.”

  My hands were visibly trembling as I dug into the scale once more. My brain was telling my fingers to go faster, faster, but like a jockey that whips his horse until the beast collapses and dies mid-race, my fingers didn’t have the wherewithal to cooperate. BflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatFGABflatCDEflatF—

  And smack. My left hand spun out of control, falling rig
ht off the neck of the instrument.

  “Ha!” she said. With a theatrical flair, she lifted her pencil and brought it down with a swoop to mark my presumably failing score.

  The rest of the audition was a disaster. Muscles I didn’t even know existed tensed into knots I had no idea were possible. Between the flop sweat, the shakes, and the sneering from the sidelines, I barely got through my solo piece and sight-reading. When I finally was dispatched out the door with its square of window strategically taped over, I ran to the closest unoccupied corner of the corridor, sank down against the cinder-block wall, and cried.

  MELANIE

  “Ewww! It’s Melanie!”

  I don’t remember the first time I was concertmaster of an orchestra, but by junior high, I am earning the title regularly. The year I turn fourteen, I am named concertmaster of six different orchestras. One of them is Senior Regional Orchestra, made up of high school students. It’s a qualifier for All-State Orchestra, where all three regions of New Jersey are represented.

  When I show up for the All-State auditions, in a big suburban high school a good hour away from home, some of my new acquaintances are already there. In the warm-up room, I’m unpacking my instrument when behind me I hear the girl’s voice. “Ewww!” she says again.

  Turning around, I see a violist with long, beautiful hair whose name I don’t know but whose face is familiar. She’s surrounded by a group of her friends. I smile tentatively and continue rosining my bow. The girl approaches me from across the room. She’s dressed in tight hip-hugger jeans and smells faintly of cigarettes.