Second Fiddle

by Rosanne Parry

  Arvo nodded, looking very grim.

  Giselle and Vivian stood up beside me and looked down the passageway that led to the back of the train.

  “Arvo,” I said, “I have a really bad feeling about that man.”

  “The KGB? Oh my gosh!” Vivian grabbed the gym bag we’d given Arvo the day before. “You have to hide!”

  “You should disguise yourself,” I said. I slid open the bathroom door. “Go in here. You can put on the shirt and tie we brought you.” I gave him a nudge. “Go!”

  Arvo hopped into the bathroom with his crutches. I dropped his gym bag on the floor beside him and shut the door. I heard Arvo lock it.

  “Okay,” Giselle said. “Let’s get our instruments squared away while there’s still space.”

  Across the aisle from the bathrooms was a long narrow room for oversize luggage. She slid open the door, and I could hear her rearranging the bags to make room for her cello.

  “Here he comes!” Vivi said. She turned her back on the window to the car behind us and pulled me to face her. “Act natural,” she whispered.

  “Um,” I said, racking my brain for a normal girl topic of conversation. “Do you think I should change my hair?” I looked over Vivian’s shoulder. The spy guy was right at the end of the car behind us.

  “Definitely,” Vivian said. She pulled the elastic out of my hair and fluffed it up. “You’ve got to stop wearing a ponytail. It’s such a grade-school look.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, plus look! Curls! If you used some product and styled it, you would be really cute.”

  “Product?” I said. My voice made a squeak, because the spy guy slid open the door and walked into our compartment.

  “Um, we’re pretty much a baby-shampoo-only family,” I said, forcing myself not to stare at the man in the black turtleneck. Something about him made my skin crawl.

  The spy guy stopped and glanced around the compartment. He was not very big, shorter than Giselle for sure, and he had a long nose that was so bony and straight, you could slice bread with it.

  “Baby shampoo, are you crazy?” Vivian went on. “You need curly-girl stuff. Really, Jody, we should shop.”

  The spy guy went into the other bathroom.

  “Oh my gosh, do you think he’s with the KGB?” Vivian whispered.

  I held my breath, hoping Arvo would stay in the bathroom and not make any noise. Giselle came back out of the baggage room and grabbed our violins. As soon as she’d closed the door, the spy guy came out. I leaned toward the wall to let him pass, but Vivi leaned out at the last minute and bumped into him.

  “Entschuldigen Sie, bitte,” Vivian said, and the man said excuse me back in German, but he had a Russian accent. The spy guy looked in the window of the baggage room and then went on to the next car.

  “Is he gone?” Giselle said, coming out of the baggage room.

  I watched through the window in the door until the spy guy was completely out of sight and then said, “You can come out now.”

  “Coming,” Arvo said, but it was five minutes later when he opened the door. Vivi and I just stared at him for a minute, because before we’d only seen him looking nearly dead or slightly homeless. He’d put on the blue shirt and tie and shaved all the hair off his head.

  Giselle took one look at him and said, “Lord! Arvo, what have you done with your hair?”

  “Is gone.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the bathroom behind him.

  “Wow,” Vivian said. “You look totally different—like James Bond or something.”

  He smiled. “I have amazing escape car here in my bag—with rockets, yes? It unfolds. Is very top secret.”

  Vivian giggled, and I said, “There’s more to you than we thought, isn’t there?”

  “The spy guy went that way,” Vivian added, pointing to the front of the train, “and he was Russian for sure. What will happen if he comes back? Will he hurt you?”

  “I will hide,” Arvo said. “If this man is KGB—they are not gentle. You must not be seen with me again. If anyone asks you, Jody, who is this man you helped to catch the train? You must say, he is a stranger. I only helped him out of pity. They have no thought for children. When we come to Paris, get off the train by yourselves, and I will meet you under the big clock as before, yes?”

  We agreed.

  “Is this for packages?” he asked, pointing to the baggage room door.

  “Yes. Come on.” I held open the door, and Arvo followed me in. There was a narrow aisle and shelves along one side. “I’ll clear a spot for you.”

  I walked to the back. Fortunately, the lamp had burned out, so it was plenty dark with only a little light coming in from the hallway window.

  “Here you go,” I said. “Sorry it’s not very comfortable.”

  I straightened up to trade places, but there wasn’t room to pass by Arvo in the aisle, and I could never decide if it was more embarrassing to squeeze past a boy facing toward him or facing away from him. I stood there feeling stupid. I leaned back as far as I could, crossed my arms in front of me, and looked down at my feet. Arvo was much taller than I’d realized. I barely came up to his shoulder, and he smelled like lemony soap. My hair caught on his shirt button as he brushed past. Just what I hated about my curly hair—it was always in the way. He started to untangle me. I brushed his hand away and did it myself, smoothing my hair down and tucking it behind my ears. He stood for a moment, his feet pointing at mine. Maybe he was going to say something, but I didn’t look up to find out. Then he turned away, put his crutches on the upper shelf, and crawled into his hiding spot.

  As I waited for him to get settled, every warning my mom had ever given me about talking to strangers ran through my head. Dad would freak if he knew I was traveling with a grown-up man he’d never met. Except Arvo didn’t seem like a stranger. I’d thought about him constantly in the last three days and even dreamed about him. But when I forced myself to be logical, the truth was I didn’t know anything about him—not even if he was telling the truth about why those men had tried to kill him. Dad always said I should trust my gut about people, but my gut couldn’t make up its mind.

  I looked for him or even a shadow of him at the back of the baggage room, but in the dim light from the door, he was invisible.

  “Wow, it’s like you disappeared. Good job.” I turned to go, but then I turned back because it seemed wrong to leave him all by himself in the dark. And then I didn’t know what to say, so I left.

  Giselle and Vivian were already in the next car searching for seats. I looked for the spy guy, but he wasn’t in that car or the next one, where we finally found seats together. By the time we’d stowed our backpacks in the overhead bins, given our tickets to the conductor, and showed him our passports, we had left the outskirts of Berlin behind, and the sun was setting behind the pine trees and open fields of Brandenburg.

  There was an announcement that the dining car would close in an hour, so we filed back past Arvo’s hiding place and into the dining car at the middle of the train. It had red vinyl booths like the soda shop on base, white tablecloths, napkins in a stand-up fold, and far more silverware than necessary, which was not like any restaurant I’d been to, not even the nice dining room at the enlisted men’s club. I was going to order a schnitzel, because it’s what I always order when my family goes out to a German restaurant as it’s not very expensive. But Giselle ordered something fancy, and Vivian something even fancier, so I splurged and got the rouladen—meat rolled up in a spiral with a yummy filling. I’d only had it once before, on my birthday last year. It’s my very favorite, and it didn’t come with sauerkraut or red cabbage.

  Giselle and Vivian were starting to get wound up about the competition. Vivian could never put up with less than perfection every time, and I was pretty sure winning was a big deal in Giselle’s family. They were debating who was our toughest competition and whether we should have chosen a faster or flashier piece of music than Pachelbel’s Canon to compete with. I
chimed in a little bit, but my parents weren’t like that at all. They always said, “Do your best,” but they thought winning just came down to luck every time.

  My mind kept wandering back to Arvo. I put all the dinner rolls and the butter packets in the top of my backpack, but I couldn’t think of a way to carry some of my rouladen out of the dining car without making a huge mess, so I ate it all myself. Why hadn’t I thought about food for him on the train? After dinner, Vivian treated us to kuchen and coffee with lots of cream. The coffee was just as awful as I thought it would be, even after three helpings of sugar, but the cake was divine, layers of chocolate and rum and cherries and cream with chocolate curls on top. We were just finishing when they shooed us out to close the dining car.

  On the way back to our places, we passed the car where Arvo was hiding. “Catch up with you later,” I said to the girls, and slid open the door.

  “Arvo?” I whispered.

  “Jody?” he whispered back.

  I walked to the back of the baggage compartment and sat on my backpack across from his hiding place.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just bread.”

  “No, it is fine. Thank you,” Arvo said. “I am not thanking you enough for clothes and food and money. What would have become of me if not for you?”

  “You would have done it for me,” I said. “If some American soldier was in trouble in your town, you would help him, right?”

  “Rescue an American? I cannot imagine this. Americans never need to be rescued.”

  I asked him about his nights under the bridge, and he told me about watching the stars and the stray dog that visited him twice. He finished the bread and butter, and I wished I had more to give him.

  “Are you still hungry?”

  I could just make out his smile in the dim light. “Good company and plain bread is better than a feast all alone,” he said. He brushed crumbs from his lap and shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor. “In the army I was always alone.”

  “It must have been lonely to be the only Estonian in your unit.”

  Arvo nodded.

  “Didn’t you have any friends at all?”

  “Not one man I could trust.”

  “Wow. That would be hard.”

  I thought of myself next fall in a new school looking for someone to eat lunch with and not a single girl I could trust.

  “I don’t need a thousand friends,” I said, more to myself than him. “I just need …” I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my head on them, glad it was too dim for Arvo to read my face. I just needed to make time stop, so that I would never have to move away from Germany.

  “You just need your quick-witted Vivian and your fearsome Giselle,” Arvo said.

  “Yeah. The army is moving us. After this weekend, I’ll never see them again. When I was little, I didn’t mind the moving so much.”

  “These friends are more dear?”

  “Mm-hm.” I bit at the corner of my lip. I was not going to cry. I hated crying.

  “Musical friends are the very best kind,” Arvo said.

  “Musical friends?”

  “When I was eight, I joined a choir in my town, an allboy choir. That was very important to me at the time—no girls allowed.” He chuckled quietly, and I had to smile thinking of him only a little older than my brothers.

  “Later I did not mind the girls so much, but sometimes boys only is a very good thing. When I got homesick in the army, I sang to myself and in my thoughts I could hear my friends sing with me—Jüri and Jaan and Anton and little Mati, our tenor. I left my town and the choir seven years ago, but my friends’ voices have never left me, even on my darkest day.”

  “Was it a church choir? I was in a church choir once.” I was seven, so it must have been Missouri.

  “No, people only go to church secretly in the Soviet Union. It was a town choir. Almost every town has one, for children and for adults, too. It is a very Estonian thing, to sing together.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “The Young Pioneers made us sing all the patriotic Soviet songs.” He sang a few lines of a song, sitting up straighter and moving his arms as if he were marching. I didn’t speak a word of Russian, but I could tell it was a stupid song.

  “Russian songs with no words are not so bad,” he said. “Tchaikovsky and all those pretty ballet tunes, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty—everyone likes those. But starting when I was your age, I learned songs in secret, songs in my own language.” He put his hand over his heart and tapped a tempo with his fingertips, and then he began to sing a soft, slow song: “Mu isamaa on minu arm.” He closed his eyes as he sang. The song came back to the same phrase many times.

  “Gosh, that’s pretty,” I said when he’d finished. “What does it mean?”

  “ ‘Land of my fathers, land that I love.’ It is the Estonian anthem. We have been forbidden to sing it for fifty years. A person could go to jail. Two years ago at our song festival grounds the audience sang it. There were three hundred thousand of us singing in our own language. My little sister wrote me about it. I’ve never heard her sound so excited—so proud of her country.”

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  Arvo reached into his pocket and took out a tattered photograph and handed it to me. It was well worn and the colors had all gone faintly orange. In the dim light from the door I could see that the girl was about ten and had the same nose and chin as Arvo. She wore one of those dresses that come with an apron that the German girls wear for Octoberfest. She wore a crown of daisies and cornflowers.

  “Pretty. How old is she?”

  “Eleven in this picture. She will be thirteen in a month.”

  I handed the picture back, and he put it in his pocket like it was a thousand dollars. My mom sent Aunt Cassandra new pictures of me and the boys every month. I had a whole bulletin board full of my favorite brother and cousin pictures. I couldn’t imagine having only one picture of my own brothers.

  “Does your sister have a choir? Does she have a good voice?”

  “Last time I heard her sing, she still had a little-girl voice-all chirp like a bird. She will grow into a strong voice if she practices.”

  “Practice makes your voice louder?” I said. “I thought some people were just naturally loud.” I was totally thinking of Giselle.

  Arvo laughed. “Being bigger helps, but a strong voice takes practice. How about you? Are you in a choir now?”

  “Oh no, I can’t sing!”

  “Not sing? Bah! If you can breathe, you can sing.”

  “No, really, I’m not a singer. I’m a composer.”

  What on earth made me say that?

  “A composer?” Arvo looked at me as if I’d just claimed I was a movie star. “Tell me what you write. Sing it.”

  “It doesn’t have words. It’s classical music. It’s just the kind I know the best. I’ve got a lot to learn.” Usually when adults asked about my music, they were done being interested when I told them it was classical music.

  “I would love to hear something you have written. Will you play it at your competition tomorrow?”

  “No, we’re playing something traditional, Pachelbel’s Canon, but the piece I wrote is a canon, too.”

  “Show me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Please.”

  I got off the backpack I’d been sitting on and took out my music notebook and the book light I used to read at night. I flipped through the first dozen pages to the opening measure of “Canon for Three Friends.” We both scooted so we were sitting side by side with our backs against the wall.

  “This is the part I play. The first violin for Vivian starts here.” I flipped ahead a half dozen pages. “This is Giselle’s cello part.”

  “Ah, cello,” Arvo said, “the man’s voice.” He looked over Giselle’s part, fiddling with the book light so that it fell on the page. “Tempo?”

  I tapped my hand on my knee for moderato speed. Arvo listened for two me
asures and then he started to sing the cello part—just dum, dum, dah, dee, dum—but it sounded exactly like it had in my head when I wrote it. I had been nervous when I wrote the cello part, because I couldn’t play the cello to check if my notes were correct. I closed my eyes to drink in the sound.

  “Let’s hear it together,” Arvo said. “You sing the violin part.”

  “I can’t sing.”

  “Everyone can sing. If you can breathe—”

  “—you can sing. Right. Okay, I’ll try.”

  “What is your starting note?”

  I closed my eyes, because I had the violin part memorized. I hummed my opening note, and Arvo hummed his. The notes fit together perfectly. I knew they would, but knowing it and hearing it are not the same thing. Arvo tapped his foot to the same tempo I’d just given him and we began. At first I was thinking, I hope he likes it. I hope he says it’s good—I got distracted, and I was out of tune. But then I concentrated on my music, not just singing the right note, but singing the note with the right feeling. By the time we were all the way to the end, I didn’t need him to tell me anything. I knew.

  woke up the next morning as the train slowed down on the outskirts of Paris. Vivian yawned and stretched in the window seat beside me, and Giselle got up mumbling something about a bathroom and a toothbrush. We got off at the Gare du Nord. Early-morning sun angled through the gray metal grid on the arched windows up by the ceiling. The lollipop-shaped lights were still lit on either side of the green columns that went the length of the station.

  We headed toward the clock. I thought we’d have to wait for Arvo to get off the train, but he was there ahead of us, crutches tucked out of sight behind him, and a cap pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t look up as we came, so we stood nearby but pretended we were not together. I looked around for the spy guy, but there were hundreds of people in the station even though it was early in the morning.

  “We need to find the Métro, right?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Vivian said. “I looked at the map last night. We should take this red train to the Latin Quarter and get off at Odéon and take the green line to Cluny, and then we are only three blocks from the Sorbonne.”