The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  “We aren’t going to have any more conversation with Mr. Mozart this morning,” he said. “Instead, come tomorrow morning, an extra lesson—” He reached up and picked up his little brown schedule notebook from the top of the piano. He looked at it, moving his mouth around. “Yes, tomorrow morning, ten o’clock.” He snapped the notebook shut. “We’re not going to undo anything. We can’t.” He laughed. “That’s a proven historical fact.” I kept looking at him. “We’ll—well, we’ll take a detour.…”

  * * *

  I stood on the Kaplans’ porch. Mr. Kaplan said, “Don’t punish yourself, Allegra. I mean,” he looked out at the lawn in front of their house, “not any more than you have to. You need both hands free for the work we have to do; and you won’t, if you have a birch rod in one of them.”

  I tried to smile at him. It wasn’t much of a joke, and he knew it.

  He said, “And part of the fault here—a great part of it—” He looked past me, over my shoulder. “It’s mine. We talk too much about ‘mastering’ music. Every time you turn around, someone is concerned with mastering a piece. I do it myself.” He lowered his voice and looked straight at my face. “Great music isn’t something we master; it’s something we try all our lives to merge with. Indeed.”

  I didn’t really see Mr. Kaplan’s face. I saw Deirdre as she sang the low, soft notes in her concert, and I saw Mr. Trouble as he danced his old-fashioned dance on the grass. Then I looked out past them, and Mr. Kaplan was saying good-bye. I said good-bye and went down the steps.

  I walked home. My violin case banged against my leg in regular rhythm. Some leaves were turning yellowish. My skin felt bad, all over me. Don’t upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto. What a horrifying thing. Unthinkable. Don’t think about it. Elephants. I tried walking with my eyes closed, but I slipped off the edge of the sidewalk, so I opened them again.

  Merge with. Not master. It felt so absolutely strange, because I knew that anyway. I’d always known it, in my stomach. I’d committed a crime by forgetting it.

  I thought of the thing I’d told Deirdre about: crying under Daddy and Mommy’s bed when I was a little kid and found out that the music wouldn’t just automatically come out of the eighth-size violin.

  On the kitchen table was a package addressed to me from New York. It had all kinds of post office stickers on it, Express Mail and Insured. My grandmother Raisa gets my birthday mixed up with somebody else’s. I didn’t want a gift. Didn’t deserve a gift. Nobody was home. I put my violin case and music case on the floor and sat down and stared at the brown wrapping paper.

  Then I stared at my violin case on the floor. Then I stared out the window at a hummingbird on the feeder. Heavenly rubbed the side of her head against my leg and walked to her water dish and began drinking. I listened to her tongue going in and out and picking up water, reflexively.

  When you think about how many millions of words old people have written, it’s no wonder their handwriting gets a little bit jerky. I looked at my grandmother’s.

  Don’t upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.

  The package was soft, maybe she was sending me a sweater, for the birthday that was somebody else’s. I didn’t want a sweater; I wanted to undo my crime against Mozart. I got a pair of scissors and cut the tape on the package.

  There were several layers of wrapping, then pink tissue paper with a pink envelope that said READ FIRST. The flap wasn’t sealed, it was tucked in. I opened it.

  Dear Allegra Leah,

  The gift I am sending you would have been for your bat mitzvah, and I hope you would carry it proudly on that occasion but you have a liberated family who have forgotten already in one generation. We are lucky to have a connection, to break such a thing is not understandable. Your mother I forgive, she wouldn’t know. She happened on a Gentile background from Kansas, not her fault.

  I am nervous for you, and your brother David too. You would have to understand such nervousness by going to synagogue. Here is your gift from my love for you so far away 3,000 miles.

  Your great-grandmother Leah was born in the turn of the century, 1900, in Suprasl. This was a shtetl I saw once. There are stories from this place. Poor people, tailors, bakers, and animals all went back and forth on the roadway. Her rabbi was the son and also the grandson of a rabbi. When she was a child she had geese to tend and there is the picture of her with her straw broom and her favorite goose. You know the picture. Where her family lived the field went up on a hill and the morning light came into their house, a blessing.

  Then she married and became my mother and soon my father took her to Bialystok. I was born in 1921, and my sister in 1925 who died in childhood. My father played a wooden flute and my mother sang to us. She tried to sing the fever out of my sister and was unsuccessful. I remember her voice. She could sing like leaves falling from off a tree. She also made rich breads and cakes, and even today the smell of some certain kugels makes me unable to speak.

  I saw black armbands when I was 13 years old. I asked what they were and my father replied they were a tribal symbol. I didn’t know from tribal symbols, I wanted a pink dress for my birthday which I did not get. There was hunger and disease and we as well as our neighbors were frightened. Punishments for being Jewish were meted, small ridicules and then larger ridicules. My father’s partner in business had his beard cut off by a soldier’s bayonet. It was this savagery in joking that frightened us all.

  In the year 1939 I was 18 years old. My parents told me one day I was to pack my things to go on a trip to visit my father’s uncle in America. Of course I did not want to go so far away on a boat all alone without the language, but they insisted. Uncle Moshe is a jolly man, they said, with luxuries, a radio, and there are movies just down his street in New York. Uncle Moshe would take me to a school to learn to typewrite while I visited him. His wife I would like, a berrieh, a live wire, and his grown-up children, my cousins, would be my friends for my visit. This would be a vacation for me from the bad life in Bialystok, and they taught me some words to use in English. “So how about it?” “Some milk in the coffee, please.” “I am a nice girl.”

  With these words I got on the boat unwillingly. My father and my mother sent me with blessings and kisses with their arms around me, I will never forget. I believed them about my “vacation” because I wanted to believe them. In Poland we did many things for that reason.

  I never heard my mama’s and my papa’s voice again. I never felt their hand. We believe they died at Treblinka, but one can never be sure.

  My mother Leah had soft arms and her weary eyes were tender with imagination. In the photograph you sent me at my birthday, I see some sameness in your eyes, Allegra Leah. The gift I am sending you have seen in the picture you have on your wall of my mother Leah as a girl with her broom and her goose. It came in my satchel across the Atlantic Ocean in 1939. I did not know it was in my satchel; my mother tucked it inside. Only later I understood this was her final good-bye to me.

  A memory is a thing you always have. But it is about a thing you cannot get any more of.

  You will be all your life this connection with Bialystok and Suprasl. This gift is only for you. You are the one with the name of the great-grandmother, the elter bubbe. I wish you the dreams and not the nightmares.

  When you visit me again you will play your violin for me and we will walk in Central Park and I will tell you the stories. About the “birdseed” that Uncle Moshe put on the window ledge of the apartment and I thought he meant to grow birds. And about my little friend Broche in Bialystok, how she and I peeked at the bride on her wedding morning. And I will show you how my mother Leah made her cakes.

  Now care for this tribal symbol I am sending and with it my great love across the many miles.

  Kiss your mama and dada and your brother David for me.

  Bubbe Raisa

  I read the letter twice. Then I stared at the pink tissue paper and ran my hand over it and listened to the cri
nkles. I was almost frightened to look inside.

  I’d spent the whole summer of my twelfth year doing the wrong thing, trying to be more important than Mozart, and I didn’t even know it. And now my grandmother was trusting me to be the connection with Bialystok and Suprasl. To take care of the tribal symbol.

  Maybe if I’d been all Jewish, or even all Gentile, I’d have known what to do. But I was half-and-half and I sat at the kitchen table not even able to unwrap pink tissue paper.

  How hard to do the most natural thing. Heavenly could walk to her water dish and lap up the water, Mozart could write five violin concertos when he was nineteen years old, Elter Bubbe Leah could have her photograph taken with her favorite goose and her broom and her purse, these were natural things to do. I could unwrap a package if I tried.

  I stared at the paper.

  I saw in my mind a young girl with a satchel getting on a boat for a vacation, knowing how to say “So how about it?” in a foreign language, and I saw arms hugging her, and I saw the black of the armband and I saw something horrifying. It was a thirty-nine-year-old woman with weary eyes doing the most unnatural thing in the world. She knew she would never see her daughter again. And she sent her away on a boat, blessing her and kissing her. To save her life.

  To go against everything you think you know. To do something you must do because you must do it. It’s an unnatural thing, and you do it anyway.

  I reached for the package. My fingers went very slowly, lifting off the layers of pink tissue.

  The purse was smaller than in the picture. It was purplish velvet; it had probably once been the color of grape juice. There were places where the velvet had worn thin. It had embroidery on it. Someone had embroidered pink-and-white flowers and green leaves on the velvet. They were faded, very pale. It had a strap, to hang on a girl’s arm. I held it on my lap. Then I held it against my face to feel the softness. It smelled like lavender and mothballs. I stood up and hung it on my arm. I walked around the kitchen with my arm bent, with the purse hanging. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My Jewish half and my Gentile half were standing there with a Polish purse dangling. Elter Bubbe Leah had tucked it into her daughter’s satchel and sent it to America.

  I looked at the purse in the mirror. “Welcome to Portland,” I whispered to it. And I swung my head to the east, toward New York, and said, “Thank you, Bubbe Raisa.”

  I held the purse against my stomach.

  My great-grandmother. Elter Bubbe Leah.

  Dead at Treblinka.

  I felt a homesickness. For what? Something I’d never seen. I didn’t even know what it was. Bubbe Raisa was inviting me to be something—forcing me to be something nobody else had ever even mentioned. I didn’t know how to be it. All I knew was that there was a homesickness. I stared at the purse on my arm in the mirror.

  Then I took it back to the kitchen table and laid it on its tissue paper. I stood there looking at it. Then I picked up the whole thing, the outside wrapping and Bubbe Raisa’s letter and the sticky tape and all of it, and took them upstairs to my room. I put them on top of my chest of drawers where Heavenly wouldn’t sit on them. I looked at the flowers embroidered on the velvet. Eighty years ago? Somebody had used a real needle and real thread thousands of miles away in Poland, embroidering those flowers while geese waddled up the hillside.

  11

  Five minutes later I stood in the doorway of the music room and looked at the plants all over the place. They were Jew-Gentile plants. Or maybe just Gentile ones since they were mainly my mother’s.

  I looked at my violin as I took it out of the case. It’s Italian. And my bow is French, but it has a new thumb guard, and that’s American. The scarf I wrap around the violin inside the case has a tag that says Taiwan. The rosin is American. So are the strings.

  On my father’s music stand was a cello sonata written by a Japanese composer.

  Ernest Bloch was Swiss. And Jewish.

  The white horsehair in my bow is from Poland.

  I rubbed the back of my violin against my stomach. How to unlearn my wrong Mozart? How did I get started doing it wrong? I looked down at the side view of the bridge and strings. Mozart looked at the same side view when he held his violin that way. I was ashamed.

  I sat on the sofa where I’d carried on with Deirdre and I held my violin and bow on my lap. Deirdre had a dead baby she always remembered. Mr. Trouble went around looking for his lost Waltz Tree or a Waltz in Three. Somewhere I’d lost the Mozart concerto I loved and had put something else in my head instead? I saw Steve Landauer’s arms moving in the corner of the rehearsal room. I saw Christine’s head jerk instantly around to watch. I saw Karen in Trout Creek Ridge with her broken fingers, saying Mozart could make you forget your problems. I saw Sarah dancing with Mr. Trouble in Waterfront Park. I pictured Jessica visiting her father’s grave.

  I stood up, walked to the middle of the room, not near the piano, just out in the middle of the room, and I closed my eyes and looked inside for something to start me. If Deirdre was right, and the music was in there all along, maybe a better music had been waiting inside me—waiting to be played. The idea sounded ridiculous.

  Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse was lying on its pink tissue paper in my bedroom. I went upstairs and got it and carried it flat, on its paper, held out in front of me, downstairs and laid it on the sofa in the music room.

  I went over several sections of the concerto and repeated and repeated them. I tried playing some parts with the mute. I played all three cadenzas faster and then slower. There wasn’t any method in what I was doing. I was just wandering around the concerto, like a tourist, trying to make it look different to myself.

  While I played the third movement, I looked now and then at the embroidered flowers on the velvet purse lying on the sofa. Peaceful little flowers, growing up the purse and bending back and forth. Little faded pink-and-white petals brushing against their pale green leaves.

  There wasn’t even any grave where my father would be able to put flowers for his grandmother. Not even any date when she died. She had become just a blank. A nothing.

  I went to the dining room and sat down at the table. David says the world is an insane asylum, and he’s absolutely right.

  A-n-n-i-h-i-l-a-t-e.

  My violin was made two hundred years before Elter Bubbe Leah sent her daughter away on a boat. Pieces of wood and some glue. The Portland Art Museum has a wooden Chinese horse from the third century B.C. When Jessica was in her horse period we used to go to see it all the time. Save a wooden horse for twenty-three centuries, but kill somebody who had a pet goose and straw broom and a velvet purse and two daughters, one of them dead.

  There was no word for how angry I was.

  Deirdre. No wonder she got strange. And Mr. Trouble. His whole life of lost things.

  Losing things. That was what the whole world was about. Why bother to get born in the first place?

  I went back to the music room. When Itzhak Perlman’s wife was pregnant, André Previn wrote two songs for the baby. They didn’t know if it would be a boy or a girl, so he wrote “Noah” and “Naava.” I looked through stacks of music on the shelves and found them. I played “Naava.” It’s a perfect song for a little girl.

  The Bloch Competition was five weeks away. I asked myself: Allegra, are you going to play it? If it had been five minutes away, of course the answer would have been no. Allegra, I said to myself, you do what you say you’re going to do.

  And I’d told Mr. Trouble I’d help him find his lost song. I had no idea how I was going to do it.

  I looked at Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse on the sofa, I closed “Naava” and put it back on the stack of music, and I took out the Mozart. I would read the notes, like a beginner, and I would start all over again.

  It would be like learning a new language. I stood in front of the music stand and read the top of the page: Mozart. Concerto no. IV in D Major. K. 218. “So how about it?” I said, out loud. Like a beginner, I
felt my way up the fingerboard to the first note and made myself read every single note, not letting my brain or my fingers run ahead. I tried to listen to the concerto as if I’d never heard it before, but it was impossible to forget.

  Remember everything you know and forget it simultaneously, so you can invent a new thing. The divine inspiration of the NBA.

  I couldn’t unlearn the concerto. But I could unlearn my wrong attack on it. If I could find exactly the spots where my arm was going wrong. Those spots were in my brain. Where in my brain? I looked at Elter Bubbe’s velvet purse on the sofa.

  I called Sarah. She had her verdicts. Steve Landauer was a class-A jerk. He was Neek for his show-off manners; it didn’t matter if he was good-looking or not. “Arrogant” was one of the words on her summer list, and Steve Landauer was arrogant. It was partly that he had four mothers, but he was still arrogant. If anybody could find Mr. Trouble’s lost song it had to be me; I knew more music than anybody. His story was the saddest one she’d heard all summer. Mr. Kaplan was the one to blame for my Mozart problems. He was the one who told me to say “ME: Allegra Shapiro. I’M playing this concerto.” And it was no wonder I’d played too aggressively after spending a whole rehearsal with Mr. Aspen Celebrity Jerk Landauer; it was my anger coming out. And I was lucky to get such a symbol in the mail, and it was going to bring me good luck.

  “But it’s a symbol of—it’s a symbol of terrible luck. My great-grandmother was dead at Treblinka. And I’m alive and what am I even doing to deserve it?” I said.

  She didn’t say anything for a little while. Then she said, “You’re finding a lost song for a lost soul, Legs. I’m gonna call Jessica.”

  They both showed up in less than an hour. The velvet purse was still lying on the music-room sofa on top of its tissue paper.

  “I’m afraid to touch it,” Jessica said. “It’s a holy thing. I’m not even a little bit Jewish.” She stood very still on the spot where my mother had rocked Deirdre. Chinese people do ancestor worship, and it makes them feel different about their dead ones.