Meister Wilhelm leaned back against the table and rubbed the side of his nose with one finger. “It is perceptive of you to see a bird on a tree and a storm in my music. I call it Der Sturmvogel, the Stormbird. So you want to go somewhere else, Fraulein Rose. Where exactly is it you want to go?”
“I don’t know.” My words sounded angry. He did think I was an idiot, then. “Are you going to teach me to play the violin or not?”
He smiled, as though enjoying my discomfiture. “Of course I will teach you. Are not your kind parents paying me? Paying me well, so that I can buy food for myself, and pay for this bamboo, which has been brought from California, and glue, for the pot there, she is empty? But I am glad to hear, Fraulein, that you have a good reason for wanting to learn the violin. In this world, we all of us need somewhere else to go.” From the top of one of the dressers, Meister Wilhelm lifted a violin. “Come,” he said. “I will show you how to hold the instrument between your chin and shoulder.”
“Is this your violin?” I asked.
“No, Fraulein. My violin, she was made by a man named Antonio Stradivari. Some day, if you are diligent, perhaps you shall play her.”
I learned, that day, how to hold the violin and the bow, like holding a bird in your hands, with delicate firmness. The first time I put the bow to the strings I was startled by the sound, like a crow with a head cold, nothing like the tones Meister Wilhelm had drawn out of his instrument in the Beauforts’ parlor.
“That will get better with time,” he told me. “I think we have had enough for today, no?”
I nodded and put the violin down on the sofa. The fingers of my right hand were cramped, and the fingers of my left hand were crisscrossed with red lines where I had been holding the strings.
On a table by the sofa stood a photograph of a man with a beard and mustache, in a silver frame. “Who is this?” I asked.
“That is—was—a very good friend of mine, Herr Otto Lilienthal.”
“Is he dead?” The question was rude, but my curiosity was stronger than any scruples I had with regard to politeness.
“Yes. He died last year.” Meister Wilhelm lifted the violin from the sofa and put it back on top of the dresser.
“Was he ill?” This was ruder yet, and I dared to ask only because Meister Wilhelm now had his back to me, and I could not see his face.
“Nein. He fell from the sky, from a glider.”
“A glider!” I sounded like a squawking violin myself. “That’s what you’re making with all that bamboo and twine and stuff. But this can’t be all of it. Where do you keep the longer pieces? I know—in Slater’s barn. From there you can take it to Slocumb’s Bluff, where you can jump off the big rock.” Then I frowned. “You know that’s awfully dangerous.”
Meister Wilhelm turned to face me. His smile was at once amused and sad.
“You are an excellent detective, kleine Rose. Someday you will learn that everything worth doing is dangerous.”
Near the end of July, Emma left for Raleigh, escorted by her father, to spend a month with her Aunt Otway. Since I had no one to play with, I spent more time at the cottage with Meister Wilhelm, scraping away at the violin with ineffective ardor and bothering him while he built intricate structures of bamboo and twine.
One morning, as I was preparing to leave the house, still at least an hour before my scheduled lesson with the violinist, I heard two voices in the parlor. I crept down the hall to the doorway and listened.
“You’re so fortunate to have a child like Emma,” said my mother. “I really don’t know what to do with Elizabeth Rose.”
“Well, Eleanor, she’s an obstinate girl, I won’t deny that,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to Adeline Beaufort. “It’s a pity Cullen’s so lax with her. You ought to send her to Boston for a year or two. Your sister Winslow would know how to improve a young girl’s manners.”
“I supposed you’re right, Adeline. If she were pretty, that might be some excuse, but as it is . . . Well, you’re lucky with your Emma, that’s all.”
I had heard enough. I ran out of the house, and ran stumbling down the street to the cottage by the river. I pounded on the door. No answer. Meister Wilhelm must still be at Slater’s barn. I tried the doorknob, but the cottage was locked. I reached to the top of the door frame, pulled down the key, and let myself in. I banged the door shut behind me, threw myself onto the sagging sofa, and pressed my face into its faded upholstery.
Emma and I had discussed the possibility that our mothers did not love us. We had never expected it to be true.
The broken springs of the sofa creaked beneath me as I sobbed. I was the bird clinging to the tree branch, the tree bending and shaking in the storm Meister Wilhelm had played on his violin, and the storm itself, wanting to break things apart, to tear up roots and crack branches. At last my sobs subsided, and I lay with my cheek on the damp upholstery, staring at the maimed furniture standing against the cottage walls.
Slowly I realized that my left hip was lying on a hard edge. I pushed myself up and, looking under me, saw a book with a green leather cover. I opened it. The frontispiece was a photograph of a tired-looking man labeled “Lord Rutherford, Mountaineer.” On the title page was written, “The Island of Orillion: Its History and Inhabitants, by Lord Rutherford.” I turned the page. Beneath the words “A Brief History of Orillion” I read, “The Island of Orillion achieved levitation on the twenty-third day of June, the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and thirty-six.”
I do not know how long I read. I did not hear when Meister Wilhelm entered the cottage.
“I see you have come early today,” he said.
I looked up from a corner of the sofa, into which I had curled myself. Since I felt ashamed of having entered the cottage while he was away, ashamed of having read his book without asking, what I said sounded accusatory. “So that’s why you’re building a glider. You want to go to Orillion.”
He sat down on the other end of the sofa. “And how much have you learned of Orillion, liebling?”
He was not angry with me then. This time, my voice sounded penitent. “Well, I know about the painters and musicians and poets who were kicked out of Spain by that Inquisition person, Torque-something, when Columbus left to discover America. How did they find the island in that storm, after everyone thought they had drowned? And when the pirate came—Blackbeard or Bluebeard or whatever—how did they make it fly? Was it magic?”
“Magic, or a science we do not yet understand, which to us resembles magic,” said Meister Wilhelm.
“Is that why they built all those towers on the tops of the houses, and put bells in them—to warn everyone if another pirate was coming?”
Meister Wilhelm smiled. “I see you’ve read the first chapter.”
“I was just starting the second when you came in. About how Lord Ruther-ford fell and broke his leg on a mountain in the Alps, and he thought he was going to die when he heard the bells, all ringing together. I thought they were warning bells?”
“Orillion has not been attacked in so long that the bells are only rung once a day, when the sun rises.”
“All of them together? That must make an awful racket.”
“Ah, no, liebling. Remember that the citizens of Orillion are artists, the children and grandchildren of artists. Those bells are tuned by the greatest musicians of Orillion, so that when they are rung, no matter in what order, the sound produced is a great harmony. From possible disorder, the bells of Orillion create musical order. But I think one chapter is enough for you today.”
At that moment I realized something. “That’s how Otto Lilienwhatever died, didn’t he? He was trying to get to Orillion.”
Meister Wilhelm looked down at the dusty floor of the cottage. “You are right, in a sense, Rose. Otto was trying to test a new theory of flight that he thought would someday allow him to reach Orillion. He knew there was risk—it was the highest flight he had yet attempted. Before he went into the sky for the last ti
me, he sent me that book, and all of his papers. ‘If I do not reach Orillion, Johann,’ he wrote to me, ‘I depend upon you to reach it.’ It had been our dream since he discovered Lord Rutherford’s book at university. That is why I have come to America. During the three years he lived on Orillion, Lord Rutherford charted the island’s movements. In July, it would have been to the north, over your city of Raleigh. I tried to finish my glider there, but was not able to complete it in time. So I came here, following the island—or rather, Lord Rutherford’s charts.”
“Will you complete it in time now?”
“I do not know. The island moves slowly, but it will remain over this area only during the first two weeks of August.” He stood and walked to the table, then touched the yards of canvas scattered over it. “I have completed the frame of the glider, but the cloth for the wings—there is much sewing still to be done.”
“I’ll help you.”
“You, liebling?” He looked at me with amusement. “You are very generous. But for this cloth, the stitches must be very small, like so.” He brought over a piece of canvas and showed me his handiwork.
I smiled a superior smile. “Oh, I can make them even smaller than that, don’t worry.” When Aunt Winslow had visited two summers ago, she had insisted on teaching me to sew. “A lady always looks elegant holding a needle,” she had said. I had spent hours sitting in the parlor making a set of clothes for the china doll she had given me, which I had broken as soon as she left. In consequence, I could make stitches a spider would be proud of.
“Very well,” said Meister Wilhelm, handing me two pieces of canvas that had been half-joined with an intricate, overlapping seam. “Show me how you would finish this, and I will tell you if it is good enough.”
I crossed my legs and settled back into the sofa with the pieces of canvas, waxed thread and a needle, and a pair of scissors. He took The Island of Orillion from where I had left it on the sofa and placed it back on the shelf where he kept the few books he owned, between The Empire of the Air and Maimonides: Seine Philosophie. Then he sat on a chair with a broken back, one of his knees crossed over the other. Draping another piece of canvas over the raised knee, he leaned down so he could see the seam he was sewing in the dim light that came through the dirty windows. I stared at him sewing like that, as though he were now the hunchback of Notre Dame.
“You know,” I said, “if you’re nearsighted you ought to buy a pair of spectacles.”
“Ah, I had a very good pair from Germany,” he answered without looking up from his work. “They were broken just before I left Raleigh. Since then, I have not been able to afford another.”
I sewed in silence for a moment. Then I said, “Why do you want to go to Orillion, anyway? Do you think—things will be better there?”
His fingers continued to swoop down to the canvas, up from the canvas, like birds. “The citizens of Orillion are artists. I would like to play my Sturmvogel for them. I think they would understand it, as you do.” Then he looked up and stared at the windows of the cottage, as though seeing beyond them to the hills around Ashton, to the mountains rising blue behind the hills. “I do not know if human beings are better anywhere. But I like to think, liebling, that in this sad world of ours, those who create do not destroy so often.”
After the day on which I had discovered The Island of Orillion, when my lessons had been forgotten, Meister Wilhelm insisted that I continue practicing the violin, in spite of my protest that it took time away from constructing the glider. “If no learning, then no sewing—and no reading,” he would say. After an hour of valiant effort on the instrument, I was allowed to sit with him, stitching triangles of canvas into bat-shaped wings. And then, if any time remained before dinner, I was allowed to read one, and never more than one, chapter of Lord Rutherford’s book.
In spite of our sewing, the glider was not ready to be launched until the first week of August was nearly over. Once the pieces of canvas were sewn together, they had to be stretched over and attached to the bamboo frame, and then covered with three layers of wax, each of which required a day and a night to dry.
But finally, one morning before dawn, I crept down our creaking stairs and then out through the kitchen door, which was never locked. I ran through the silent streets of Ashton to Slater’s barn and helped Meister Wilhelm carry the glider up the slope of the back pasture to Slocumb’s Bluff, whose rock face rose above the waving grass. I had assumed we would carry the glider to the top of the bluff, where the winds from the rock face were strongest. But Meister Wilhelm called for me to halt halfway up, at a plateau formed by large, flat slabs of granite. There we set down the glider. In the gray light, it looked like a great black moth against the stones.
“Why aren’t we going to the top?” I asked.
He looked over the edge of the plateau. Beyond the slope of the pasture lay the streets and houses of Ashton, as small as a dolls’ town. Beyond them, a strip of yellow had appeared on the hilltops to the east. “That rock, he is high. I will die if the glider falls from such a height. Here we are not so high.”
I stared at him in astonishment. “Do you think you could fall?” Such a possibility had never occurred to me.
“Others have,” he answered, adjusting the strap that held a wooden case to his chest. He was taking his violin with him.
“Oh,” I said, remembering the picture of Otto Lilienthal. Of course what had happened to Lilienthal could happen to him. I had simply never associated the idea of death with anyone I knew. I clenched and unclenched my hands.
“Help me to put on the glider,” said Meister Wilhelm.
I held the glider at an angle as he crouched under it, fastened its strap over his chest, above the strap that held the violin case, and fitted his arms into the armrests.
“Rose,” he said suddenly, “listen.”
I listened, and heard nothing but the wind as it blew against the face of the bluff.
“You mean the wind?” I said.
“No, no,” he answered, his voice high with excitement. “Not the wind. Don’t you hear them? The bells, first one, then ten, and now a hundred, playing together.”
I turned my head from side to side, trying to hear what he was hearing. I looked up at the sky, where the growing yellow was pushing away the gray. Nothing.
“Rose.” He looked at me, his face both kind and solemn. In the horizontal light, his wrinkles seemed carved into his face, so that he looked like a part of the bluff. “I would like you to have my books, and my picture of Otto, and the violin on which you learned to play. I have nothing else to leave anyone in the world. And I leave you my gratitude, liebling. You have been to me a good friend.”
He smiled at me, but turned away as he smiled. He walked back from the edge of the plateau and stood, poised with one foot behind the other, like a runner on a track. Then he sprang forward and began to sprint, more swiftly than I thought he could have, the great wings of the glider flapping awkwardly with each step.
He took one final leap, over the edge of the plateau, into the air. The great wings caught the sunlight, and the contraption of waxed canvas fastened on a bamboo frame became a moth covered with gold dust. It soared, wings outstretched, on the winds that blew up from the face of the bluff, and then out over the pasture, higher and farther into the golden regions of the sky.
My heart lifted within me, as when I had first heard Meister Wilhelm play the violin. What if I had heard no bells? Surely Orillion was there, and he would fly up above its houses of white stucco with their belltowers. The citizens of Orillion would watch this miracle, a man like a bird, soaring over them, and welcome him with glad shouts.
The right wing of the glider dipped. Suddenly it was spiraling down, at first slowly and then faster, like a maple seed falling, falling, to the pasture.
I heard a thin shriek, and realized it had come from my own throat. I ran as quickly as I could down the side of the bluff.
When I reached the glider, it was lying in an area of broke
n grass, the tip of its right wing twisted like an injured bird. Meister Wilhelm’s legs stuck out from beneath it.
I lifted one side of the glider, afraid of what I might see underneath. How had Otto Lilienthal looked when he was found, crushed by his fall from the sky?
But I saw no blood, no intestines splattered over the grass
—just Meister Wilhelm, with his right arm tangled in a broken armrest and twisted under him at an uncomfortable angle.
“Rose,” he said in a weak voice. “Rose, is my violin safe?”
I lifted the glider off him, reaching under him to undo the strap across his chest. He rolled over on his back, the broken armrest still dangling from his arm. The violin case was intact.
“Are you going to die?” I asked, kneeling beside him, grass tickling my legs through my stockings. I could feel tears running down my nose, down to my neck, and wetting the collar of my dress.
“No, Rose,” he said with a sigh, his fingers caressing the case as though making absolutely sure it was unbroken. “I think my arm is sprained, that is all. The glider acted like a helicopter and brought me down slowly. It saved my life.” He pushed himself up with his left arm. “Is it much damaged?”
I rubbed the back of my hands over my face to wipe away tears.
“No. Just one corner of the wing.”
“Good,” he said. “Then it can be fixed quickly.”
“You mean you’re going to try this again?” I stared at him as though he had told me he was about to hang himself from the beam of Slater’s barn.
With his left hand, he brushed back his hair, which had blown over his cheeks and forehead. “I have only one more week, Rose. And then the island will be gone.”
Together we managed to carry the glider back to Slater’s barn, and I snuck back into the house for breakfast.
Later that day, I sat on the broken chair in the cottage while Meister Wilhelm lay on the sofa with a bandage around his right wrist.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 7