A tiny drumming sound grew alongside him, like chubby old fingers on glass, like rain on a coffin. He would here die, too, somewhere underneath living cities too large and important to bow down and take a look. He heard tiny squeaks now; and suddenly Yankel swam back into view, still propped against the wall, but now his half-solid form was surrounded by diners. Rats. Dozens of them, hundreds, with naked pink tails and shifting, beady eyes. Zelig could not even muster a scream; the horrors boiled over in his heart. He opened his case. The fiddle was cold under his cheek. It played nameless dances, the music of might-have-beens. It licked sounds from the semi-transparent red candy of childhood, it scraped on the residue of loss; it vibrated along the frosted windows of winters, tip-toed over rooftops to glide the bow over the moon.
The rats were gone. Zelig’s soul poured viscous and heavy, back into his hollow clothes. The boy put the fiddle back home and said shma for Yankel, but his voice rang inhuman after the fiddle’s.
The corridor stretched before the boy again; endless, lightless. He put his right hand on the damp wall and walked where it guided.
Days later—or was it weeks? months?—he heard a voice, a gentle voice from above. Caro mio, não percas a esperança. A woman was speaking. Was that the city? Her voice of stone mingled with salt water in his eyes, and Zelig walked on blinded, trailing fingers over the wall. Light blinked uncertainly; he dragged his eyelids open. A square of sunlight spread its promise on the floor by his feet.
“Here you are!”
Zelig tilted his head up. The movement made him suddenly dizzy. A girl’s face peered through the grating. “The city sent me to look for you.” Zelig sheltered his eyes against unfamiliar sun, but he could not make out her features. The girl shouted to someone, “Boruch! Borya! Come here quick!” He heard the long scrape of the grate being moved. He wanted to say something, anything, but could not draw a breath. The world tilted.
When he came to, he was sitting on a small piece of cloth under a white awning, overlooking the ocean. Everything was full of sound; in the harbor, ships spoke to each other in a language of metal and rope, and the breeze played a lazy melody tilting small boats in the water. Gulls and pigeons strutted on the pier, waiting for pieces of bread, pieces such as he held in his hand. He bit into his bread hastily, afraid that the world was unstable yet; but it was real enough.
“And a good day to you.” The girl that had found him now sat by his side. She was older, maybe sixteen, seventeen; she had a nose like a potato, and laughing brown eyes. The most beautiful girl in the world, he thought, but said nothing, his mouth full of bread. “I am Reyzl, and this is my brother Borya.” The youth beside her had the same face, only sadder and thinner somehow. “Is that your fiddle?”
“Yes,” he said.” I am Zelig. From Luriberg. Where are you from?”
“Oh. Malin.” Into Zelig’s confused eyes she added, “It’s a small town near the border. We’ve never been to Luriberg, but we heard . . . ”
“How did you escape?” Zelig asked, a bit more harshly than he intended.
“Malin’s kosciol sheltered us. Her name is Sankta Elzbeta.”
Zelig gulped. “A church saved you?”
“Yes, us and some others. We hid in the basement. Malin is a small town, you see. Only four living buildings. Luriberg, now, Luriberg must be so big. I heard that once every hundred years there is a thing called Geddarien . . . ”
Zelig interrupted, his mouth dry. “How many yiddn survived in Malin?”
“More than half, I think. Two hundred are here now, waiting to sail to America.”
The serious boy spoke up for the first time. “How many survived in Luriberg?”
“I . . . I don’t know about anyone else.”
Reyzl frowned fiercely, and said, “Well, you’re coming with us, of course. I play the clarinet, by the way, and my brother is a fiddler like you.”
Borya said. “I lost my fiddle . . . ”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Reyzl said, “It’s not good for you to play. He gets too excited, you see, and he has a bad heart,” she explained to Zelig.
“ . . . but I can sew pants.”
“Our grandfather went to America once,” Reyzl said, “he came back, said it was a poor country. He brought back a sewing machine and he taught us.”
“I will work hard and buy me a new fiddle.”
Reyzl sighed. “But who knows if they even need musicians there . . . ”
“What are they, not people?” Zelig shrugged. “Everybody wants music.” Even the people who kill do, he thought, yes, even the stone-clad cities.
“Everybody wants pants,” Borya said. “That’s for sure.”
“Would you like to play a bit now?”
Zelig nodded. “Of course! Anything but ‘Hava Nagila’.” When he saw Borya’s haunted expression he added quickly, “I can show you this melody. ‘Patsch Tants’ for clarinet and hands.”
He took Borya’s palms between his own to teach him his grandfather’s music.
The Wings of Meister Wilhelm
Theodora Goss
My mother wanted me to play the piano. She had grown up in Boston, among the brownstones and the cobbled streets, in the hush of rooms where dust settled slowly, in the sunlight filtering through lace curtains, over the leaves of spider-plants and aspidistras. She had learned to play the piano sitting on a mahogany stool with a rotating top, her back straight, hair braided into decorous loops, knees covered by layers of summer gauze. Her fingers had moved with elegant patience over the keys. A lady, she told me, always looked graceful on a piano stool.
I did try. But my knees, covered mostly by scars from wading in the river by the Beauforts’ and then falling into the blackberry bushes, sprawled and banged—into the bench, into the piano, into Mr. Henry, the Episcopal Church organist, who drew in the corners of his mouth when he saw me, forming a pink oval of distaste. No matter how often my mother brushed my hair, I ran my fingers through it so that I looked like an animated mop, and to her dismay I never sat up straight, stooping over the keys until I resembled, she said, “that dreadful creature from Victor Hugo—the hunchback of Notre Dame.”
I suppose she took my failure as a sign of her own. When she married my father, the son of a North Carolina tobacco farmer, she left Boston and the house by the Common that the Winslows had inhabited since the Revolution. She arrived as a bride in Ashton expecting to be welcomed into a red brick mansion fronted by white columns and shaded by magnolias, perhaps a bit singed from the war her grandfather the General had won for the Union. Instead, she found herself in a house with only a front parlor, its white paint flaking, flanked by a set of ragged tulip poplars. My father rode off every morning to the tobacco fields that lay around the foundations of the red brick mansion, its remaining bricks still blackened from the fires of the Union army and covered through the summer with twining purple vetch.
A month after my first piano lesson with Mr. Henry, we were invited to a dinner party at the Beauforts’. At the bottom left corner of the invitation was written, “Violin Recital.”
“Adeline Beaufort is so original,” said my mother over her toast and eggs, the morning we received the invitation. “Imagine. Who in Balfour County plays the violin?” Her voice indicated the amused tolerance extended to Adeline Beaufort, who had once been Adeline Ashton, of the Ashtons who had given their name to the town.
Hannah began to disassemble the chafing dish. “I hear she’s paying some foreign man to play for her. He arrived from Raleigh last week. He’s staying at Slater’s.”
“Real-ly?” said my mother, lengthening the word as she said it to express the notion that Adeline Beaufort, who lived in the one red brick mansion in Ashton, fronted by white columns and shaded by magnolias, should know better than to allow some paid performer staying at Slater’s, with its sagging porch and mixed-color clientele, to play at her dinner party.
My father pushed back his chair. “Well, it’ll be a nice change from that damned organist
.” He was already in his work shirt and jodhpurs.
“Language, Cullen,” said my mother.
“Rose doesn’t mind my damns, does she?” He stopped as he passed and leaned down to kiss the top of my head.
I decided then that I would grow up just like my father. I would wear a blue shirt and leather boots up to my knees, and damn anything I pleased. I looked like him already, although the sandy hair so thick that no brush could tame it, the strong jaw and freckled nose that made him a handsome man made me a very plain girl indeed. I did not need to look in a mirror to realize my plainness. It was there, in my mother’s perpetual look of disappointment, as though I were, to her, a symbol of the town with its unpaved streets where passing carriages kicked up dust in the summer, and the dull green of the tobacco fields stretching away to the mountains.
After breakfast I ran to the Beauforts’ to find Emma. The two of us had been friends since our first year at Ashton Ladies’ Academy. Together we had broken our dolls in intentional accidents, smuggled books like Gulliver’s Travels out of the Ashton library, and devised secret codes that revealed exactly what we thought of the older girls at our school, who were already putting their hair up and chattering about beaux. I found her in the orchard below the house, stealing green apples. It was only the middle of June, and they were just beginning to be tinged with their eventual red.
“Aren’t you bad,” I said when I saw her. “You know those will only make you sick.”
“I can’t help it,” she said, looking doleful. The expression did not suit her. Emma reminded me of the china doll Aunt Winslow had given me two summers ago, on my twelfth birthday. She had chestnut hair and blue eyes that always looked newly painted, above cheeks as smooth and white as porcelain, now round with the apple pieces she had stuffed into them. “Mama thinks I’ve grown too plump, so Callie won’t let me have more than toast and an egg for breakfast, and no sugar for my coffee. I get so hungry afterward!”
“Well, I’ll steal you some bread and jam later if you’ll tell me about the violin player from Slater’s.”
We walked to the cottage below the orchard, so close to the river at the bottom of the Beauforts’ back garden that it flooded each spring. Emma felt above the low doorway, found the key we always kept there, and let us both in. The cottage had been used, as long as we could remember, for storing old furniture. It was filled with dressers gaping where their drawers had once been and chairs whose caned seats had long ago rotted through. We sat on a sofa whose springs sagged under its faded green upholstery, Emma munching her apple and me munching another although I knew it would give me a stomachache that afternoon.
“His name is Johann Wilhelm,” she finally said through a mouthful of apple. “He’s German, I think. He played the violin in Raleigh, and Aunt Otway heard him there, and said he was coming down here, and that we might want him to play for us. That’s all I know.”
“So why is he staying at Slater’s?”
“I dunno. I guess he must be poor.”
“My mother said your mother was original for having someone from Slater’s play at her house.”
“Yeah? Well, your mother’s a snobby Yankee.”
I kicked Emma, and she kicked back, and then we had a regular kicking battle. Finally, I had to thump her on the back when she choked on an apple from laughing too hard. I was laughing too hard as well. We were only fourteen, but we were old enough to understand certain truths about the universe, and we both knew that mothers were ridiculous.
In the week that followed, I almost forgot about the scandalous violinist. I was too busy protesting against the dress Hannah was sewing for me to wear at the party, which was as uncomfortable as dresses were in those days of boning and horsehair.
“I’ll tear it to bits before I wear it to the party,” I said.
“Then you’ll go in your nightgown, Miss Rose, because I’m not sewing you another party dress, that’s for sure. And don’t you sass your mother about it, either.” Hannah put a pin in her mouth and muttered, “She’s a good woman, who’s done more for the colored folk in this town than some I could name. Now stand still or I’ll stick you with this pin, see if I don’t.”
I shrugged to show my displeasure, and was stuck.
On the night of the party, after dinner off the Sêvres service that Judge Beaufort had ordered from Raleigh, we gathered in the back parlor, where chairs had been arranged in a circle around the piano. In front of the piano stood a man, not much taller than I was. Gray hair hung down to his collar, and his face seemed to be covered with wrinkles, which made him look like a dried-apple doll I had played with one autumn until its head was stolen by a squirrel. In his left hand he carried a violin.
“Come on, girl, sit by your papa,” said my father. We sat beside him although it placed Emma by Mr. Henry, who was complaining to Amelia Ashton, the town beauty, about the new custom of hiring paid performers.
The violinist waited while the dinner guests told each other to hush and be quiet. Then, when even the hushing had stopped, he said “Ladies and gentlemen,” bowed to the audience, and lifted his violin.
He began with a simple melody, like a bird singing on a tree branch in spring. Then came a series of notes, and then another, and I imagined the tree branch swaying in a rising wind, with the bird clinging to it. Then clouds rolled in, gray and filled with rain, and wind lashed the tree branch, so that the bird launched itself into the storm. It soared through turbulence, among the roiling clouds, sometimes enveloped in mist, sometimes with sunlight flashing on its wings, singing in fear of the storm, in defiance of it, in triumph. As this frenzy rose from the strings of the violin, which I thought must snap at any moment, the violinist began to sway, twisting with the force of the music as though he were the bird itself. Then, just as the music seemed almost unbearable, rain fell in a shower of notes, and the storm subsided. The bird returned to the branch and resumed its melody, then even it grew still. The violinist lifted his bow, and we sat in silence.
I sagged against my father, wondering if I had breathed since the music had started.
The violinist said “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” The dinner guests clapped. He bowed again, drank from a glass of water Callie had placed for him on the piano, and walked out of the room.
“Papa,” I whispered, “Can I learn to play the violin?”
“Sure, sweetheart,” he whispered back. “As long as your mother says you can.”
It took an absolute refusal to touch the piano, and a hunger strike lasting through breakfast and dinner, to secure my violin lessons.
“You really are the most obstinate girl, Rose,” said my mother. “If I had been anything like you, my father would have made me stay in my room all day.”
“I’ll stay in my room all day, but I won’t eat, not even if you bring me moldy bread that’s been gnawed by rats,” I said.
“As though we had rats! And there’s no need for that. You’ll have your lessons with Meister Wilhelm.”
“With what?”
“Johann Wilhelm studied music at a European university. In Berlin, I think, or was it Paris? You’ll call him Meister Wilhelm. That means master in German. And don’t expect him to put up with your willfulness. I’m sure he’s accustomed to European children, who are polite and always do as they’re told.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Real-ly?” she said with an unpleasant smile, stretching the word out as long as she had when questioning Adeline Beaufort’s social arrangements. “Then stop behaving like one.”
“Well,” I said, nervous under that smile, “should I go down to Slater’s for my lessons?” The thought of entering the disreputable boarding house was as attractive as it was frightening.
“Certainly not. The Beauforts are going to rent him their cottage while he stays in Ashton. You’ll have your lessons there.”
Meister Wilhelm looked even smaller than I remembered, when he opened the cottage door in answer to my knock. He wore a white smock c
overed with smudges where he had rubbed up against something dusty. From its hem hung a cobweb.
“Ah, come in, Fraulein,” he said. “You must forgive me. This is no place to receive a young lady, with the dust and the dirt everywhere—and on myself also.”
I looked around the cottage. It had changed little since the day Emma and I had eaten green apples on the sagging sofa, although a folded blanket now lay on the sofa, and I realized with surprise that the violinist must sleep there, on the broken springs. The furniture had been pushed farther toward the wall, leaving space in the center of the room for a large table cracked down the middle that had been banished from the Beauforts’ dining room for at least a generation. On it were scattered pieces of bamboo, yards of unbleached canvas, tools I did not recognize, a roll of twine, a pot of glue with the handle of a brush sticking out of it, and a stack of papers written over in faded ink.
I did not know what to say, so I twisted the apron Hannah had made me wear between my fingers. My palms felt unpleasantly damp.
Meister Wilhelm peered at me from beneath gray eyebrows that seemed too thick for his face. “Your mother tells me you would like to play the violin?”
I nodded.
“And why the violin? It is not a graceful instrument. A young lady will not look attractive, playing Bach or Corelli. Would you not prefer the piano, or perhaps the harp?”
I shook my head, twisting the apron more tightly.
“No?” He frowned and leaned forward, as though to look at me more closely. “Then perhaps you are not one of those young ladies who cares only what the gentlemen think of her figure? Perhaps you truly wish to be a musician.”
I scrunched damp fabric between my palms. I scarcely understood my motives for wanting to play the violin, but I wanted to be as honest with him as I could. “I don’t think so. Mr. Henry says I have no musical talent at all. It’s just that when I saw you playing the violin—at the Beauforts’ dinner party, you know—it sounded, well, like you’d gone somewhere else while you were playing. Somewhere with a bird on a tree, and then a storm came. And I wanted to go there too.” What a stupid thing to have said. He was going to think I was a complete idiot.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 6