by Неизвестный
“Who are your parents?” Mother charged the older two. “Tell me who your parents are and I’ll have a word with them.”
The older one, a dark-haired, shifty eyed kid, giggled impudently and didn’t answer. The other one, who was fat and rosy-cheeked, said, “That’ll show him he’s not so hot.”
Mother glanced anxiously at the skinny little boy and checked to see if he was hurt.
“They broke my fingers!” he bawled. “They did! They broke my fingers so I won’t be able to play.” He fretted primly over his hands. “They wanted to break my fingers!” He held them out for Mother to see, and she examined them with some concern, but there was no sign of injury. “Now I’ll never be able to play, and Mr. Alfredi will have something to say about that!” he added.
The two older boys stood in the corner looking chastened, and the dark one with the shifty eyes took one cautious step in the direction of the door, while the fat one with the rosy cheeks tugged nervously at his poncho with a sideways glance at the skinny boy to see how he was faring.
“He started it,” said the dark one, “He always does.” Mother looked at the pale skinny boy and said to the older two, “Shame on you! Two big, strong boys knocking a little kid down in the dark.”
They picked up their violin cases and their music folders and we all stepped out on the porch to wait for the storm to end.
“There’s nothing wrong with your fingers, Yoram, quit bawling,” said the dark one. “Let me see.”
Yoram held out his hands with a terrible grimace of pain. His eyes were pale, too pale, and his hair was short cropped and blond. The dark one examined his fingers and announced, “There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s a liar!”
“We were just messing around,” said the fat one, trying to appease my mother. “We always do it and nothing ever happens.”
“And does Mr. Alfredi allow this kind of behavior?” asked Mother.
The two boys laughed sheepishly and Yoram leaned against the banister, hugging his violin case and his music folder and resting his chin on them as he contemplated the interminable rain. “When Mr. Alfredi finds out,” said Yoram deep in contemplation, “he’ll kick you out like dogs.”
They laughed again.
After a while the older two, who were tired of waiting for the rain to stop, tied their hoods on, slipped their violin cases under their ponchos, and walked out to the road. Yoram did the same and ran after them as fast as he could in the pouring rain till he finally caught up and we saw them disappear around the corner.
Next day the rain stopped, and once again, Mother and I set off for Mr. Alfredi’s music academy. As we walked in, Mr. Alfredi was showing the dark boy with the shifty eyes how to play a certain passage. Then the dark boy raised his bow and repeated the passage. Mr. Alfredi had seen us enter and motioned us to sit down and wait. It seems the boy was one of his new pupils, but he played quite well. Mother and I observed the teacher, who was very tall with ginger-gray hair, a sharp face, and a long nose that seemed to have been gnawed off at the tip. I thought him very ugly and judging by the expression on Mother’s face, she was no more impressed than I was. When the boy had finished playing the passage, he turned to the teacher and, catching our eyes, smiled unctuously at us in case we were planning to report what he had done the day before, but then Mr. Alfredi told him what to practice at home and ended the lesson abruptly.
I tried to think of Mrs. Chanina’s house in Haifa, but the memories of a few years before had faded like a distant dream. All I could remember was the color of the braid she wore rolled up at the nape of her neck and the polished furniture that stood out against the clean white walls. Yes, and one more thing: the sensual quivering of her nostrils in a way probably only I could discern, whenever her eyes narrowed in rapture. I also remembered what she told me when we said goodbye at the recital and I wondered if I would ever understand. Mr. Alfredi’s lesson room was small and shabby. The dilapidated shutters banged in the wind and Mother and I sat on a peculiar-looking sofa with an even more peculiar rug covering it, surrounded by an odd assortment of chairs, some of them folding chairs. Mother told Mr. Alfredi about my musical accomplishments, but he didn’t seem to be especially impressed.
From close up, I could see the large freckles all over his face and the pockmarks on the gnawed-looking tip of his nose. His watery little eyes were of an indefinite color. He handed me a training violin, flipped through the pages of a beginner’s book, and asked me to play whatever I remembered.
I stared at the music and the violin in my hands, but couldn’t remember a thing. No illuminating flash from the not-so-distant past came to me in my moment of trial. All was lost; I had labored in vain. I stood dumbly before him, looking from his face—with its scorn and doubt—to the little violin I held in my hands. He asked me to play a note for him, any note. I drew the bow over one of the strings, producing a sound so ghastly I dropped the bow and looked down at the floor.
“What did you use to play?” asked Mr. Alfredi. “What pieces did you play in Haifa, what exercises?”
I opened my mouth to tell him, but nothing came out. I tried and tried to think of a name but I was baffled. After a long silence, he turned to Mother and said, “We seem to have forgotten everything.”
My eyes implored her to come to my rescue and she said, “He did play Schubert’s ‘Musical Moment’ at the recital, and Mrs. Duniah-Weizman said…”
Mr. Alfredi interrupted her, “We’ll have to start all over again. He doesn’t know anything.” And again he looked doubtful. A little girl had walked in, and I was overcome with shame at my failure to remember.
“And why do you blink like that all the time?” asked Mr. Alfredi. “You think that’s nice? Huh? How will you be able to stand up and play at a concert going blink, blink, blink all the time?”
The girl giggled quietly and hid her face. A golden heart-shaped ring twinkled on the little hand that cupped her mouth.
“Never mind,” said Mother on our way home, “he’s an excellent teacher, never mind.”
In truth Mr. Alfredi did prove to be an excellent teacher, and a fairly nice man at that. As I grew used to his face, I even found a certain charm in it. Yet there was something incongruous about his lanky person and the manner he played the violin. Whenever he stood up to demonstrate a passage, he would go suddenly limp, wheezing and moaning so noisily you could hardly hear the pianissimos. Rocking his left wrist to and fro for the vibrato, he would close his eyes with extreme pathos and hold his breath till he seemed about to collapse and die. Then, just in time, he would breathe his fill, and again he would moan and groan with every sweep of the bow. I did not particularly care for Mr. Alfredi’s histrionics, which he employed at the most inappropriate moments, even in midst of the dullest exercises. I began to take a strong dislike to these shows of emotion in music, to shows of emotion of any kind. When I first heard Yoram play, I was astounded. So young, and already Mr. Alfredi’s best pupil. I didn’t care for the way he played either, perfectly mimicking Mr. Alfredi, though amazingly enough, the teacher’s own playing sounded like a pale imitation of his pupil’s. Yoram surpassed him both in technical control and histrionic style. He could handle difficult passages, complicated chords and tricky transitions with ease, with the grace of a Wunderkind, but whenever he got to a slow, tender movement, he played even more mawkishly than Mr. Alfredi.
There was something offensive about Yoram’s shamelessly whiny vibrato and the tragic accents of his bowing. It was all mechanical—a sanctimonious baring of the emotions that was so calculated, it made you suspect that inside the pale, skinny boy lurked an old buffoon who would use any trick in the book to enthrall his audience and tug at their heartstrings. Still, I couldn’t help admiring his courage to stand undaunted on the side of bad taste against the whole world and its dictates. There was something of the trained monkey about him when he played—uncanny, freakish, vulgar, yet heroic, too, in his audacity.
I myself never learned how to produce
a vibrato. No matter how we tried, Mr. Alfredi and I, my wrist would petrify at the critical moment. He would loosen my left elbow and check my grip, but my hand just wouldn’t move the right way. I knew that without a vibrato, my playing wasn’t the real thing, though I thought it would be better to produce it with a little more reserve. Mr. Alfredi said it would come in time, but one, two, three years went by and still no vibrato. Perhaps it was my dislike of showing emotion that turned my wrist to stone. Still, when I returned home after the lesson, I would try even harder to play vibrato, to no avail. Maybe by that time I realized I would never be a great violinist, or even Mr. Alfredi’s prize pupil. I found out that pupils come and pupils go, to other teachers perhaps, but I would always remain somewhere in the second rank. My stumbling block, of course, was the failure to play vibrato, and it was convenient to blame everything on a mere technical flaw. Nevertheless, a few years later, I was chosen to play second violin in the Bach double concerto with Yoram at the annual recital.
Yoram lived nearby, on the same street in fact, but I didn’t meet him until the day of the flood, the day Mother and I found him brawling with the other two boys, crying “They broke my fingers so I won’t be able to play!”
Yoram and I went to different schools, and he was several years younger. We decided to rehearse for the recital in our own homes part of the time, at Yoram’s request. He and his parents lived in the one-room ground floor apartment of a two-story house with a yard. A clump of wild bushes and a tall grove of Casuarina trees planted on the roadside obscured the entrance to the house.
As I approach the house in my mind’s eye now, I linger under the old trees and gaze at the two-story house behind the bushes. I am rooted to the spot. The sight of the bushes and the house behind them induces a fathomless pain, an anxiety that suffocates me no matter how much air I breathe.
For a whole week this inexplicable anxiety has prevented me from continuing my story. I am restless and cannot concentrate. I have sat for hours by my typewriter, but my fingers are as sluggish as my mind. Skip this part, I counsel myself, go on to the next, but I can’t shake off this terrible oppression so I will just have to face it and figure out its underlying cause. This picture of the old Casuarina trees in front of Yoram’s house will appear three times in the story: before the rehearsal at Yoram’s house, in the Eitan episode, and in the street-scene which in time reminded me of a folk play. Naturally, the waves of pain arise from only one of these three incidents, but as I try to discover which one it is, I hit a wall and experience the same paralyzing shortness of breath.
I remember other bouts of anguish, under various circumstances, that left me suddenly paralyzed and of course the root cause always lay in something I had neglected whether in thought or deed. Whenever this happens I know I must struggle through to the moment that gave rise to the feeling, to untie the knot and restore it to its true proportions. I have not always been successful at this, but when I am, the wheel turns back; I face the moment and settle my accounts with it. With this comes a sense of exhilaration, as though some precious loss were finally recovered or as though a long-standing feud were over at last. But now I don’t know how to find the moment. Where did it go, and what is its relevance to the story I’m trying to tell? A long arm grabs me by the shoulder, demands satisfaction, will not let me get away from this spot, in the shade of the old Casuarina trees and the bushes that hide the first floor of Yoram’s house.
It’s terribly late, I’ve locked the door, and I put a record on to drown out the noise of the air conditioner. It’s very hot outside. Sometimes the stubborn hum of it soothes me like a lullaby droning to the silence all around, but when I suffer, it fills the room with wrath. Sometimes I see a reflection of this phantom pain in various objects not yet tainted by the hand that once held them. At the moment, it is the page rising out of my typewriter line by line.
A week has gone by, and now I feel better. I try to envision the path leading up to the overgrown bushes that hide the first floor of the house from the road. The tiles on the path were cracked and broken. I knocked on the door. Yoram’s mother answered. She was pale and skinny like him. Her movements seemed unnecessarily brusque. Yoram wasn’t home, much to my surprise, though I was right on time. She said he would be home soon and asked me to wait for him despite his bad manners. She showed me where to put my violin, and interrogated me about my family, and I guess she was satisfied, because she left me alone in the room. I don’t remember what the room looked like anymore, but I do remember that it was dark there in the early afternoon, maybe because the bushes in front of the house kept the light out.
A little while later Yoram’s mother walked in again and I saw she was much older than my mother even though Yoram was younger than I. Her hair was gray, her face was wrinkled, and her back was slightly bowed. She sat down beside me, and looked at my face.
“What do you think?” she began abruptly. “He’s doing it on purpose. He knows perfectly well that Yoram has a rehearsal, so he’ll bring him home late, if you don’t mind.”
I began to feel uncomfortable.
“A fine time he chooses to go to the shops in the moshava. You think all that equipment he buys him is any use, and before the recital, too? It’s no use at all, if you don’t mind. What does he want from the boy? What does he want from him, you tell me. Let him practice in peace. But no, not him, not him, he buys him all those rifles and guns and all those complicated boxes, anything to get his mind off the violin. You think that’s how Yehudi Menuhin was raised? You think that’s how they raised a Yasha Heifetz? Not on your life! And he wants him to go out for sports at the Junior Maccabbee Club, if you don’t mind… . Who needs it? You think that’s good for his hands? A violinist needs the most sensitive hands in the world, if you don’t mind. But he’s afraid he’ll grow up like a girl. Who ever heard such nonsense—grow up like a girl? Playing the violin turns you into you a girl? Is Yehudi Menuhin a girl, is Yasha Heifetz?” She hooted in triumph. “They’ll get home soon, what do you think?”
She didn’t wait for my reply, but said, “If you want, you can wait for Yoram outside,” as if she had noticed something in my manner. “You have to practice for hours and hours. You have to dedicate your life to it, if you don’t mind, otherwise it’s no good. Unless you dedicate your whole life, it’s a waste of time, am I right? Because afterwards it’s too late, everything gets hard and rough like steel. Mr. Alfredi doesn’t understand either. Oh my God! Oh my God!” she clasped her hands. “Nobody understands. They see but they keep silent. Nobody cares. It’s under their noses, but they turn away. You have to throw it in their faces. You have to pry their hearts open, you have to break inside like a thief to make them understand, am I right? You can go outside and wait,” she said, and opened the door for me.
I sat on the front steps and finally Yoram and his father turned up, empty-handed. I rose to greet them. Yoram’s father was short and skinny too, and he wore a visor cap, and when he looked at me I saw that his eyes were cold and pale like his son’s, and very arrogant. Yoram’s father went off somewhere. Yoram said nothing. He took out his violin, rubbed colophony on the bow, and mumbled something to himself. We tuned our violins and began to play the Bach Double Concerto. A few minutes later Yoram’s father stood in the doorway yelling, “Horrible! Disgusting!” He stared at me in revulsion, as though accusing me of something and then he slammed the door.
Yoram stopped playing. He stood still for a moment and concentrated, and then he asked me to take it from the top, because anyway my entrance was a little off. We started to play again. We had practiced so often with Mr. Alfredi that we rarely needed to interrupt with corrections. In the tender slow movement, where the second violin answers the other, echoing it, Yoram played with his usual mawkish vibrato and I was as embarrassed as ever by his exhibitionism, and maybe trying to offset it with my own drier, more functional tone—when suddenly we heard a long, horrible scream behind the door. And then another, and another. And then there was sile
nce. Yoram stopped playing and hurried out with his violin to see why his mother was screaming. I was left alone in the room and I was frightened. I could hear doors opening and shutting and the sound of muffled voices. Yoram’s mother’s piercing scream rang in my ears like the cry of a wounded animal. Suddenly Yoram’s father swaggered into the room unperturbed and said, “You’d better go home now, Yoram is busy. Come back another time.”
He waited while I packed up my violin, and walked me to the door. In the hallway I heard her scream again, and this time I could make out the words—“Murderer! Murderer!” And he closed the door behind me.