Pizzicato: The Abduction of the Magic Violin

by Rusalka Reh

  The violin-maker has already stepped down from the platform when a little voice pipes up. “Mey-Mey can play the violin! You can, can’t you, Mey-Mey?”

  The guests turn around and look at the little girl with the giant bow in her hair.

  All this time, Darius has not been able to think of anything else but Pizzicato, which is in his duffel bag under the chair. For the thousandth time he’s imagining telling Mr. Archinola why he took the violin out of its cabinet and thus started the whole wretched affair. But now, as he looks at Mey-Mey, these thoughts suddenly stop racing around his head. He says, “Yes, you should play. You’ve practiced Schubert so many times!”

  Mey-Mey’s parents give him a look that could kill. “Well,” says Mr. Archinola hesitantly, “what do you think, Mey-Mey? Are you prepared to take a shot at the second violin?”

  The audience has been holding its breath, but now a few people call out.

  “Go on, girl, play for us.”

  “It’ll be a farce! You can’t play Schubert as if it was ‘Ring Around the Rosie’!”

  “Let the girl play!”

  “I’m leaving if you’re going to have kids playing.”

  “Isn’t that the handicapped girl?”

  Darius takes Pizzicato out of his duffel bag and then presses Mey-Mey’s hand. “Go on, you can do it!” he whispers, and in his two hands he holds the beautiful violin out towards her. “Take it. The violin will help you.”

  Mey-Mey looks across at the stage and then at Darius. “No, Darry,” she says, putting one hand on Pizzicato’s strings and the other on his shoulder. “I’ll try my own magic up there.”

  She stands up.

  She goes past the rows of chairs, past the line of cellos on the walls, and past all the eyes that are looking at her. She goes to the case near the display cabinet. She bends and opens the clasps. Gently she lifts out the violin on which she has practiced so often over the last few months. She picks up the bow and climbs onto the platform, which greets her with a soft creak. She gives a slight bow to the audience, which has now fallen as quiet as a churchyard. Then she sits on the front chair, her back ruler-straight. She nods solemnly to the other musicians, places her chin against the chinrest, and lays the violin on her shoulder.

  “Isn’t that great!” whispers Alice, who has sat next to Mr. Archinola and Darius. Queenie has clambered onto Alice’s lap and is now leaning back against her breast.

  “Let’s wait and see,” says Mr. Archinola, who is still trembling from the shock, and he dabs the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. “It’s not going to be easy for her.”

  At this moment, the music begins.

  With bated breath Darius watches every movement that Mey-Mey makes, and he hears every note that soars from her violin. To him it sounds as if someone has opened a floodgate in a river, and the dammed-up water is now flowing forth with a soft and beautiful, but powerful rhythm.

  He also looks at the other musicians. The violin appears tiny on the arm of the big man in the dark suit. His pant legs are at half-mast, and his shoes are as brightly polished as crystals of ice. At this moment he raises his eyebrows, and the tone of the violin becomes gentler. The notes hover delicately between the guests. And then the music becomes wilder! Mr. Kaplan saws fiercely at his viola, and his gray hair flies up into the air like wings and then flops down again.

  Minute by minute, the music floods deeper and deeper into Darius’s body. The notes, which fit together so beautifully, bring order to everything that had been lying higgledy-piggledy inside him.

  And Mey-Mey! She plays as if the violin was actually part of her neck and shoulder. Her cheek nestles so snugly against it, and the two seem so closely bound together, that Darius feels almost jealous! All four musicians turn the pages of their scores at the same time and quickly fix the paper with the ends of their bows before they play on. Their breathing provides a gentle, regular accompaniment to the music. The sun is low now and sheds a deep glow over the room. Slowly the light creeps over the face of the first violin and onto the white paper of the score. Then suddenly it covers Mey-Mey’s face in a radiant glow, like a golden fleece. She seems to be unaware of everything around her. Again and again she whips the bow vigorously away from her violin, as if she has to hold herself back from playing on when it’s no longer her turn to do so. The breath of all four eases in and out. Scrolls and hands are reflected in the glass doors of the display cabinet.

  The music is wonderful, thinks Darius to himself. Unbelievably beautiful! He closes his eyes. But then he opens them again, because he has to keep looking at Mey-Mey, at the soft yellow sash that she wears tied around her neck, and which falls in two long bands over her back, at her closed eyes, curved at the corners.

  It takes a long time for Darius to realize that the music has ended. It seems to him as if there are still fragments of the notes hovering around the room like creatures that have been set free and are now scattering through the air. Time does not stand still, but it seems to Darius somehow to be more solid, as if it had turned to gold.

  “Fantastic!” whispers Mr. Archinola. Then he swiftly leaps to his feet. “Absolutely fantastic!” he cries, clapping wildly.

  Then the whole audience suddenly rouses itself as if from some deep dream.

  “Bravo!” shouts a woman, also standing. “Fabulous!” cries an old man whose glasses fall from his nose as he, too, jumps to his feet.

  The first violin and Mr. Kaplan have stood up, and each of them smilingly wipes his brow and neck with a white linen handkerchief. The cellist stands up, too, and they all bow. Everyone is applauding. They clap and clap and can’t stop clapping. It sounds like summer rain. Someone lets out an enthusiastic whistle.

  Darius has eyes only for Mey-Mey. She, too, now bows to the cheering audience, and her face is radiant. Finally, her gaze turns to her parents. The two of them stand, very slowly. Then they raise their arms in the air and clap—louder than everyone else.

  “She’s my daughter,” says her father. “No, she’s mine,” says her mother.

  “Lovely fiddling by Mey-Mey, that’s what I say!” cries Queenie and gives Alice a very wet kiss.

  “You’re absolutely right,” says Alice, laughing, and strokes her hair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Room to Dance

  Three weeks have passed since the musical soirée. After the thunderous applause, Darius plucked up courage, returned Pizzicato to Mr. Archinola, and told him the whole strange story. The blue light in the cabinet. The healing of his finger. The poor woman on the bench. His plan to help Mey-Mey, although she didn’t really need his help at all. He left nothing out.

  The violin-maker had been skeptical, but after what Alice had told him about the empty glass cube at the violin museum in Cremona, and after he’d inspected the yellowed sign through the f-holes in the violin itself, he seemed to be a bit more convinced. Under no circumstances, though, was he willing to test its extraordinary powers.

  “Either one makes violins or one plays them,” he stated with authority, “and the rest is simply nonsense.” And he swore that, as sure as he was Archibald Archinola, master violin-maker, he was never going to part with Pizzicato, because only then could he make sure it never fell into the wrong hands again. Unless all of them together took the instrument back where it belonged—to the museum in Cremona.

  But then he suddenly turned his attention to Darius, and he had a very serious expression on his face. “One more thing,” he said. “Even though it’s laudable that you wanted to do good with the violin, the fact is, you stole it from me.”

  “But I only—”

  “Enough!” Mr. Archinola raised his finger. “There is now a violin missing from my cabinet—true or false?” he asked, pointing toward the salesroom.

  “True,” said Darius, feeling very guilty. “And so it has to be replaced, does it not?”

  Darius nodded. “You are going to make a new one,” said Mr. Archinola firmly. “The first violin that you
make—as your qualification to be a journeyman—will belong to me, and then we shall be even.”

  Although Mr. Archinola had actually been telling him off, after this conversation, Darius had been happier than he’d ever been in all his life.

  He was going to be a violin-maker.

  Nevertheless, after all that, he had finally had to say good-bye to Mr. Archinola, Alice, and also Mey-Mey, though he had tried hard not to show how sad he was to do so.

  Now everything is the same as before. For his essay, “The Work People Do: Three Weeks Job Shadowing with Violin-Maker Archinola,” Mrs. Helmet gave him an A, but somehow he didn’t really care.

  He’s often haunted by thoughts of the Needhams. But by now he’s almost convinced that they might not even have existed and that he had simply imagined everything that had happened.

  When lessons are over, he has lunch with the others at the big table. His favorite is still hot dogs and potato salad with apple, but even while he’s chewing away, he’s generally thinking of something else.

  Darius no longer listens to music.

  On his old pink radio Queenie plays the latest pop songs and sings with her squeaky voice into a plastic microphone. In her pink room she also practices complicated dance routines and sometimes invites Darius to come and watch her, because her latest burning ambition is to be a pop star. After her encounter with Pizzicato, she has grown a whole centimeter. Everyone is amazed! And she has made up her mind to carry on growing, because then people will get a better of view of her when she’s dancing.

  It’s Friday. Outside it’s drizzling. Through the open window comes the sweet smell of acacia blossoms. Darius takes his giant calendar from the desk drawer and spreads it out on the floor. He drew it himself on graph paper, and it was a lot of work: each box represents a day until he can finally leave school, which he figures amounts to twelve hundred days. That’s how long he must wait before he can go and do his violin-making apprenticeship under Mr. Archinola.

  He takes the top off his green felt pen and carefully draws crosses in the days that have now passed. There have been three since his last entry. Then he sticks the top back on again and gazes at the calendar. Time passes so slowly!

  I can’t go out cycling in this rain, he thinks, and so he takes off his shoes and crawls under the comforter. He hasn’t done that for ages! It feels almost like it did before, except that he’s not listening to the pink radio. But at least no one pesters him here about why he looks so gloomy and how it’s time he started laughing again.

  Outside there’s the rumble of thunder. He snuggles down deep under the feathers and even covers his head with the comforter. A minute later, he’s fallen fast asleep.

  Darius dreams. Mey-Mey is playing a pink violin. She waves to him and blows him a kiss. Queenie performs a dance with a fire extinguisher and afterward bows to the audience with it. Mrs. Needham beckons to him with a bony finger. Her poisonous snicker makes his heart pound. But at the moment when his fear is so great that he wants to wake up, Mr. Archinola appears to him in his dream. Loudly he clears his throat and says, “Violin-Maker Archinola speaking. Can you hear me, Darius?”

  Darius wants to shout “Yes!” and tries to do so, but not a sound comes out of his mouth.

  “Can you hear me, boy? If you don’t answer, I’ll have to leave!”

  Darius tries one last time with all his strength to call out, but he simply can’t do it. Then, with a start, he wakes up. With his heart knocking, he stays under the comforter. Outside, the rumble of thunder is now louder, and the rain is beating down.

  “Boy?” says a voice.

  Darius lies there as stiff as a plank of wood. “It’s me. Is that you under there?”

  Slowly Darius pushes back the comforter.

  In front of him, big and bearded, stands none other than Mr. Archinola!

  Darius leaps from his bed and reaches out his hand to Mr. Archinola, who grasps it. But instead of shaking it, he holds it for a long time in his own.

  “Let’s sit down for a moment,” he says at last. He perches on Darius’s rumpled bed and pats the spot beside him. “Now tell me how things have been for the last three weeks.”

  Feeling both shy and happy, Darius sits down next to him. This time he feels as if it’s not just his shoulders but his whole body that’s made of porcelain.

  “Okay,” he says softly. He just can’t think of anything cleverer to say, which is irritating.

  “Okay, uh-huh, well, that’s good,” mumbles the violin-maker. He straightens his pant legs even though they’re not crooked. And he strokes his beard even though he gave it a thorough brush this morning.

  Suddenly he pulls a folded piece of newspaper out of his coat pocket, spreads it out, and passes it to Darius. “Read this.”

  Wonder Couple Caught

  Last night, the police pulled off a spectacular arrest. The self-proclaimed Wonder Doctor Needham and his mother, who had hit the headlines for several days thanks to their sensational cures, were captured at the airport shortly before their attempted escape to Mexico City. The pair is accuse of numerous cases of fraud and the kidnap of two children, whom they held captive in the cellar of their house. Among other serious offenses is the fact that the accused man had forged all his medical degrees and had no qualifications at all apart from a first-aid course for his previous job—as a haunted house operator at an amusement park. His mother had been a ticket collector. The couple denies all charges, but have been arrested on the strength of overwhelming evidence against them. Large numbers of patients of the so-called wonder doctor have filed complaints. After treatment at Needham’s practice, they all fell victim to inexplicable new illnesses, for which the accused refused to take responsibility. We have been informed by reliable sources, however, that after a few days, these at times dangerous symptoms disappeared.

  There is a large photo above the article, showing two policemen pushing the Needhams through the open door of a police car. Mrs. Needham’s mouth is wide open, and Darius can just imagine her crying out, “Oh, Bunny!” Her son’s reflecting sunglasses have slipped down so far that one of his horrified little piggy eyes is clearly visible.

  Darius can’t help grinning. “So it wasn’t a dream after all.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” says Mr. Archinola and lets the article flutter to the floor, where it lies like a worthless fake certificate. The two of them say nothing for a while.

  Haunted house, thinks Darius. That fits both of them perfectly.

  “Now there’s something else,” says Mr. Archinola. “I’m not too good with children. But just in case you could sort of picture it, I’d…” He gets up and paces to and fro. “I’d be very happy if…” He paces even more quickly and strokes his beard as if he were a contestant in the Beard-Stroking Olympics and had reached the final strand. “If you would come and live with me,” he says at last. “I mean, you could have the guest room all to yourself. There’s plenty of space. It’s as good as empty, don’t you think?” He looks uncertainly at Darius, as if the guest room is a pretty poor offer.

  Darius is speechless. “And could you perhaps picture changing your name to…um…Archinola?”

  Darius sits there as if turned to stone. Has he heard right? Can it really be true that the violin-maker wants to adopt him—the slugboy from the children’s home who stupidly stabbed himself with the chisel, lied to him, and almost lost his Pizzicato?

  No! he convinces himself. He must certainly have got this all wrong. Absolutely impossible. Lost in his thoughts, he shakes his head.

  “Oh, all right then…” says Mr. Archinola when he sees Darius shaking his head. “I understand. I just thought you might perhaps…We could…Well, why would you want to come and live with an old block of wood like me?” He laughs with embarrassment. “It was probably, yes, a selfish thing for me to think.” He cracks his knuckles, tries to smile—which makes him look really sad—stands up, and walks slowly and stoopingly toward the door.

  “I wish you all the
very best, my boy,” he says. “Maybe you’ll come and visit me occasionally.”

  Only gradually does the truth dawn on Darius. All the violin-maker’s words land gently and make their way first to his head and then directly into his heart. After that, the little wheels in his head start turning again, and slowly he begins to think, Darius Archinola. Darius Archinola. Darius Archi…

  “Yes,” he says at last, as if he’s just woken up from a strange sleep in which he’s been trapped all his life. But Mr. Archinola’s hand is already on the door handle, and he hasn’t heard.

  “Yes!” cries Darius at the top of his voice. Then he jumps off the bed and runs after Mr. Archinola. The violin-maker turns with a look of astonishment. Darius laughs. He laughs just as half an eternity ago he had laughed in the hall of House Four and had swung Queenie round and round with joy. He cries, “I would like to be called Darius Archinola! And I would like to be a violin-maker! And most of all I would like to come and live with you!”

  The violin-maker stands there thunderstruck. “My boy!” he says, and the laugh lines spread all around his blue eyes. “I’m so happy! Wonderful!”

  “When…When? I mean, when can I come?” asks Darius, lowering his voice.

  Mr. Archinola’s face is becoming brighter and brighter, like a flower that’s been watered after a long period of drought.

  “Have you got school tomorrow?” he asks. “N-No.”

  “Then come and spend the weekend with me now, and we’ll get the formalities started. For the adoption, I mean. Ben has already said he would help if you said yes,” explains Mr. Archinola. He takes the boy in his arms. “Ah, my boy, I really missed you. And it wasn’t just me. Alice and Mey-Mey keep asking about you.”

  “Boo hooooooooooo!” A high-pitched howl suddenly enters the room. It’s Queenie. She stands in the doorway, shedding bitter tears. “Boo hoooo!”