Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  The seat belt sign turns off. Around us, my colleagues are pulling on their shoes, digging in their bags for sweaters, and grabbing flute and violin cases out of the overhead bins. Some are grumbling because our trip is during the Thanksgiving holiday, and they resent being away from home. I understand their irritation, but how can they not be as excited as I am to go to an exotic foreign country, behind the Iron Curtain? In any case, even if I do miss Thanksgiving with my family, it will be worth it if I can make a good impression on the conductor and earn tenure with the orchestra when I become eligible at the end of my second year.

  I put away my book and give my father a teasing grin as we edge down the aisle toward the cockpit door.

  “And you’re sure your name isn’t on some list somewhere…?”

  “God, I hope not!” He smiles weakly.

  Leningrad is in the midst of a food shortage. The government is planning emergency food rationing. There are no restaurants to feed us, so the hotel serves dinner each night. As the old joke goes, the food is bad and there isn’t enough of it. But the vodka is plentiful. After dinner, my father makes himself at home with my orchestra colleagues at a makeshift bar he sets up in his room. “You must try my famous Black Russians,” he announces. “Vodka, Kahlua, and secret Ukrainian incantations.”

  In Leningrad, the streets are rutted, and the few stores that are open have nothing on the shelves. In our concrete bunker of a hotel, the water in the bathroom faucet spurts out brown. On the streets, soldiers offer to sell us their medals and caps; on the train, the ticket taker tries to sell his uniform. Moscow, where we travel a few days later, isn’t much better. On Thanksgiving Day, our hotel gamely attempts to serve us a festive meal, notable mostly for the large rat that scampers across the middle of the dining room floor.

  This tour will be one of the last for Chicago Symphony conductor Sir Georg Solti, who is nearing the end of what will be his twenty-two-year run as its maestro. Sir Georg thoroughly intimidates me. A Hungarian-born music legend, he, like my dad, fled his home country and ended up in Germany after the war. He built his conducting career there and at Covent Garden in London, before taking over the Chicago Symphony in 1969.

  Like a benevolent monarch, Sir Georg is warm and affectionate but doesn’t mingle much with the rest of us. His thick Eastern European accent is different from my dad’s but just as difficult to decipher. He floats through our lives trailed by a flurry of attendants. I can’t imagine him buttering his own toast.

  My dad and I are waiting to go down to the lobby when the elevator opens. There inside is Sir Georg himself. I clear my throat tentatively and introduce my father.

  “You have a good girl there!” the maestro says, turning toward my dad.

  My dad stares back blankly.

  My father, who can so intimidate his students, has turned into a starstruck teenager right before my eyes. He looks mutely at Sir Georg. I worry briefly that he will lose his command of the English language as he moves his lips, trying to form the words he wants to say. His chin sways a bit from side to side.

  “Thank you! Thees eez a wonderful opportunity for me, to travel weeth you and hear such great music!” he finally blurts out.

  I exhale, relieved, but then my dad tumbles on. “I feel eet has galvanized me professionally!”

  What?

  Sir Georg smiles politely and steps off into the lobby.

  “ ‘Galvanized professionally’?” I hiss at my dad. “Why did you have to say that? What were you thinking?”

  My dad looks hurt. His head bobbles a bit as he glares at me. I have no idea what he was thinking. But I’m pretty sure I know what Sir Georg was thinking: Weird girl has weird father… no tenure for her!

  On the overnight train ride from Leningrad to Moscow, we cross through snow-covered steppes, illuminated by moonlight. The trees are heavy with fresh snow. The scene from our window is straight out of the film Doctor Zhivago, which my dad and I have watched together many times.

  Inexplicably, the train comes to a stop in the midst of the frozen landscape. Everyone else is asleep as we sit, transfixed, staring out the window. My dad begins to hum. We often play a game of “Name That Tune,” where I hum a few bars of whatever the Chicago Symphony will be performing that week and my dad guesses the name of the piece and the composer. His accuracy is uncanny. This time, I am the one who recognizes the song: “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. I join in, harmonizing with him. Predictably, the water supply on the overheated train has run out. Porters come around offering big bottles of vodka instead. My father and I swish the glasses in our hands as we hum. “I feel like Strelnikov could appear at any moment,” he says, a reference to the film’s evil commissar.

  My dad has had so much trepidation about this trip. Although he has told me very little about his childhood, I know that for his entire life, the Soviet Union has meant fear, death, men in uniform with bayonets. Yet coming here, he’s struck instead by the similarities with his home. He is enveloped in the warmth of the familiar—the snowy landscape, the white birch trees, the people, the meager food and plentiful vodka, and, especially, the music.

  There is something utterly magical about bringing a piece of music home and performing it where it was born. It sounds different—more powerful—in its own home than it does anywhere else in the world. It comes alive, it’s almost tangible, a bridge not just to other people but across time and place. I imagine it must be like standing on magnetic north, holding a compass. There the needle spins wildly, as if brought to life. Playing the music of a particular people in its original place has that enchanted quality as well. My dad, in the audience, feels it as powerfully as I do onstage, as the symphony plays Shostakovich in the hall where Tchaikovsky himself was once the conductor.

  At one of the concerts, my father sits in the audience next to a Soviet school music teacher. As a boy, he had refused to even speak Russian, though he knew the language better than any other. “The Russians came to our country,” he would say. “Let them speak our language.” But now in the audience, he falls easily into Russian with the teacher, who like him has a gravely ill family member, in her case a young daughter. The little girl’s condition is treatable, but the medication she needs isn’t available in the Soviet Union. My father jots down the teacher’s address before he leaves.

  I can see that my dad, swept up in the music and the landscape, isn’t a scared little boy anymore. He’s faced his fear. He has finally moved on. It strikes me that he’s like that compass needle, coming alive as he comes home to his own true north. He’s traveled willingly into the heart of evil that has haunted him since childhood, only to realize that what he feared is just a ghost. The horror is in the past. The music and the landscape and the people that remain are the same as those he had so loved.

  We talk quietly for hours, watching as the snow transforms from moonlit blue to sunlit pink. In the reflected glow of the dawn, his is the face of a man who has confronted the demons that have tortured him for his entire life. For the first time, the demons don’t win.

  A few months later, my dad and Steph come to celebrate Easter with me in Chicago. Easter has always been one of my mom’s favorite holidays. When we were little, she dressed my sister and me in frills and made a big dinner of ham with cloves, with a festive Easter cake for dessert. But as my mother’s health declined, Baba took over the holiday.

  Baba’s Ukrainian Easter was another matter entirely: a dark, days-long ritual that began with a mandatory egg-decorating session that entailed painting elaborate designs using beeswax. Ukrainian legend has it that if you don’t decorate eggs, an evil serpent will destroy the world. The holiday ended with hours in church, where we kneeled before the Plashchynytsia, a plastic tablecloth with a portrait of the crucified Jesus. Elderly women in babushkas, for whom kneeling wasn’t a sufficient display of devotion, crawled slowly on hands and knees from the back of the church all the way to the altar, then kissed each of the wounds on the portrait while crossing themselve
s profusely.

  On a spring day, in my rented house in Chicago, I do my best to meld both my mom’s and Baba’s traditions for my family. Like my mom, I make glazed ham and, for dessert, a bunny-shaped cake. For Baba, I agree to take my father to a Ukrainian church across town. I don’t bother with the complicated egg-decorating ritual. I have to draw the line somewhere.

  “It’s in a dicey neighborhood,” I tell my dad, as he scours a map to find the church Baba has specified. “Can’t you just tell Baba you went? Fib a little?”

  My dad gives me a dark look. “She’s my mother. I can’t lie to her.”

  It is a beautiful church. It’s relatively new, with a colorful mosaic above the entrance that depicts the baptism of the Ukrainians in 988 by Saints Vladimir and Olga. But when we file inside and take our seats for the service, we are surprised to find it almost empty.

  “Ah! Damn!” My father has realized something.

  “Okay, Daddy, spill,” Steph demands.

  “Well… eet isn’t Easter here.”

  There are only a handful of Ukrainian churches in the entire country. As it turns out, two of them are here on this street—and we’re in the wrong one. This one celebrates Easter according to the Orthodox calendar, not the Gregorian calendar used in the West. It was, in fact, built by a group of die-hard parishioners who were outraged when the other church switched calendars back in 1969.

  After the service, Ed is incredulous. “Let me get this straight. At the Ukrainian Catholic church across the street it’s Easter? But at this one it isn’t? They couldn’t agree on what day to have Easter so they built a whole new church?”

  “Apparently so,” my father says sheepishly. So much for celebrating Easter Ukrainian style. We haven’t decorated the eggs with beeswax, and now we haven’t made it to the right church. Baba would have been outraged at the bad luck of it all. Had she been here, she surely would have warned that evil spirits would now rain down upon us.

  Instead, we laugh it off.

  Over dinner at home, we tease my dad as we heap big helpings of ham and macaroni and cheese onto our plates. Afterward, Steph and I snuggle on the couch while my dad and Ed pick over the leftovers and share a nightcap. Steph lays her head in my lap and lets me stroke her velvety cheeks.

  This is what I’ve been missing. My family.

  My whole life, this is all that I’ve longed for. Finally, I feel like I have a normal, happy family. I sleep soundly that night.

  At the airport the next morning, I can hardly let go of Steph, and I unexpectedly find myself sobbing. We talk about how we’ll see each other in August, when she, my dad, and I will spend some time together again at his house in New Jersey. I try to console myself that it’s only a few months away.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Steph says, as her flight is called. “I love you, Mel. Say bye to old Ed for me. I’ll call you, okay?” She gives me a squeeze.

  I wipe my eyes as I watch her walk down the jetway. She’s happily hugging a grocery bag of leftover ham and cake to her chest.

  That is the last time I will see my sister.

  PART V

  I shall seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.

  —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  16

  The Disappearance

  MELANIE

  Ed and I are all packed, our boxes scattered across the bedroom floor, ready for the movers to take us to our first real home, a three-bedroom bungalow we bought on the outskirts of Chicago. It’s a pretty little house in a good neighborhood, where we hope to start a family.

  We’re counting down the last few nights before moving on to our new life, when I wake up with a start from the worst nightmare I’ve ever had. I shake Ed awake, crying. In my dream, Steph and I are walking up a hill, when she disappears over the rise. I search for her and call her name, but I can’t find her. In front of me stretches a dark forest, and I run into it, but no matter how hard I look, I can’t see her. I can’t hear her. She has simply vanished.

  “Ed! Ed!” I sob as I wake him. “I dreamed I lost my sister!”

  I try to shake off the awful feeling the next day. The movers are on their way, and I need to focus. No sooner have they deposited all of our belongings in the new place than Ed is heading off to a summer job playing timpani at a music festival in Connecticut. I struggle to unpack while adjusting to the traffic-clogged forty-minute commute from South Oak Park to the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, twenty-five miles north of the city, where the Chicago Symphony performs in the summer. Complicating matters, our new neighborhood is prone to power outages.

  “Damn!” I say aloud, slapping the steering wheel with my palm as I drive over the Eisenhower Expressway into our new neighborhood after a performance a few weeks later. The streetlights, which had been glowing encouragingly all the way down Harlem Avenue despite the recent thunderstorms, suddenly disappear as I cross over the highway and near home. The electricity in our neighborhood is out again.

  On my doorstep, fumbling blindly with my house key in the blackness, I hear the phone ring inside. Not relishing the prospect of being home alone in the dark, I rush to answer it. Don’t hang up! Please don’t hang up, whoever you are! Shoving my way through the maze of boxes littering the entryway and tripping toward the kitchen, I manage to grab the phone in time. It’s my father. He doesn’t even say hello.

  “We cannot locate Stephanie!”

  What? I’m confused. “Calm down,” I say, still catching my breath.

  “We cannot locate her!”

  “Is she not answering her phone? I just spoke to her a couple of days ago. There must be a logical explanation,” I reassure him.

  During our latest conversation, Steph sounded good. She loves her new job in Greece, New York. She chattered on happily for an hour, telling me about her violin students; like my dad, she works with them through the summer, even when school lets out. We finalized our plans to meet next month in New Jersey. We talked about my dad’s shakiness, which has been worrying us both, and debated over how to get him to a doctor. I told her about the tiny bedroom in our new house that will make a perfect nursery.

  “Ooh! I can’t wait to be an aunt!”

  Steph told me about her new boyfriend, Ken, a violin maker. She’s certain, she said, that he is the one. She assured me that at twenty-seven years old, she’s old enough to know.

  “Now that you have Ken, do you still love me?” I asked her jokingly in the little-girl voice we used when playing with Keester the parakeet.

  Steph answered me softly, not joking at all. “I’ll always love you.”

  My dad fills me in on the details of Steph’s disappearance while I hunt around for a flashlight and some candles. He tells me that Steph didn’t show up for a date with Ken. Hours later, Ken and his sister, also a friend of Steph’s, let themselves in to her apartment. Inside, they found a bag of groceries on the kitchen floor. The light on Steph’s answering machine was blinking. They listened to messages from parents of her students who had shown up that day for violin lessons, only to leave in frustration when Steph didn’t answer her door.

  “Did we come on the wrong day?” they wanted to know.

  That’s when Ken called my father. Steph wouldn’t forget her students. Then they called the police.

  They pieced together the sequence of events. Steph went out for ice cream with a friend and her little girl the previous evening, then stopped at the grocery store on the way home. The receipt was still in the bag, along with the cookies she had bought to give to her students.

  As my dad recounts the story, he works his way through possible explanations, trying on one after another like he’s shopping for a hat that fits, looking for one that will make sense. Maybe she left early for her trip to New Jersey, he ventures.

  “I told her to get her car serviced before the drive,” he says. My dad is a bit of a fanatic about proper car maintenance. “What eef she broke down, or had an accident?”

  “She wo
uld have called,” I answer. “Or the police would have called.”

  “Maybe she went off somewhere, to be alone, to think,” my dad says. “Maybe something awful happened that made her leave. She might haf been having second thoughts about Ken—”

  “No way.” I cut him off. “It’s not that. Her birds are still there, right? She wouldn’t leave them. She wouldn’t leave, period. Not without at least telling me!” I want to believe one of my dad’s theories, but none of them makes sense.

  After hanging up with my father, I first call Ed in Connecticut and then Ken, exchanging awkward pleasantries—“I’ve heard so much about you,” “Nice to meet you, too”—before plunging into intimacy with a near stranger as we work out a plan. By candlelight, the flame flickering across my face, I unearth my phone book and start calling everyone who might know where Stephanie could be. I lose track of time, waking up people all up and down the East Coast, from Martha’s Vineyard to West Virginia University. No one has heard from my sister. I move on to calling hospitals and police stations. Somewhere near daybreak, I fall asleep fully clothed across my bed and awake with a start, the early dawn light filtering through the windows and the hot, sticky telephone still grasped in one hand.

  I don’t want to be alone. Pulling myself out of bed and showering, I head back to Ravinia. Music will be an escape. It’s always been a salve before, a way to lose myself when I am upset. At Ravinia, we are performing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, one of my favorites. Usually when I play the piece, the world falls away. But tonight, the music speaks to me more urgently than it ever has before, especially during the powerful, mournful fugue in the second movement. It soars around me and expresses my feelings in a way words never could. It’s a spiritual feeling; what some people feel in church, I feel on that stage. For a moment, my heartbeat slows and my mind is eased. But once the last familiar note fades away, fear comes rushing back, a tsunami crushing everything in its path.