Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  ‘Yeah, in anthropology I read all about girls in Egypt, who undergo hymen reconstruction surgery because they’ve broken theirs horseback riding or biking. They get kicked out if they don’t bleed on their wedding nights. In some cultures, they frame the marital sheets. You’d be in trouble, man. You’d be stoned to death.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t. I’d just prick my finger and fake it.’ I bumped my hip against his, our intimacy so much easier now that we’d had sex.

  ‘We read one article about female circumcision. Have you ever heard of that? It happens in places like Sudan and Ethiopia. When the girls turn eleven, they just hack their whole vulva off. It’s barbaric. But some women still experience vaginal orgasms. Did you come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Next time we’ll make it happen.’

  But on Saturday, the letter I’d been waiting for appeared in the mailbox.

  I held onto the envelope, fingering its heavy woven paper. It was tiled with little queens in dark blue and maroon. My name had been typed, the letters indenting the paper. My heart beat fast, beyond the perimeter of my skin. In my hands was my future. If I didn’t open it, I wouldn’t be disappointed. I could still dream of going to London, officially recognised as a cellist of talent. If I didn’t open it, I could imagine my name printed in gold with all the other illustrious alumni: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Julian Lloyd Webber, Dame Joan Sutherland. I weighed the envelope in my hands: it was thick, a good sign. If it was a rejection letter, it would be thin, it wouldn’t have the enrolment information in it.

  ‘Come on, Rebecca, put us out of our misery,’ said my mother.

  ‘If you’re not going to open it, I will,’ said my father.

  ‘Is anyone going to drive me to tennis this morning, or do I have to take a taxi?’ said my sister Nadia, bouncing in wearing a short white wrap-around skirt, her thighs pink, swinging her racket threateningly.

  I slid my finger beneath the lip and started to pull, making the paper all raggedy.

  ‘Use this,’ said my mother, handing me her paper knife with the shamrock head.

  The knife made the cut cleaner, a straight line along the seam. I took the paper out, and opened it carefully, first looking at the insignia, then reading the Dear Rebecca. I couldn’t bring myself to unfold the rest of the letter; I shielded my eyes.

  ‘Here, gimme,’ said Nadia, snatching it out of my hand. ‘Dear Rebecca, we regret to inform you—’

  ‘No!’ I wailed, slumping to the ground, awash with misery.

  ‘Haha, just joking. We are delighted to inform you that you have been accepted into our performance music programme on — get this — a fees scholarship. Blah blah blah. So will someone drive me now? I’m going to be late.’

  ‘Really? Does it really say that?’ I felt weak, possibly low, my heart having retreated to some remote place.

  Nadia threw the letter on top of me. ‘Read for yourself.’

  I read. It was true.

  CHAPTER 18

  Wellington, 1955

  ‘What makes the wheels go round, Mama? Are there cogs and oil and up and down things in there? How does the engine go?’ Frankie’s questions were relentless as the two of them walked up the steep hill, home from his first week of school, his reading books and lunch box in the brown satchel she carried for him. Klara knew that as soon as she answered them, there’d be more. He was hungry for her, but her ability to feed him was limited. Like the latkes that he refused, the oranges he pursed his lips at, the things she knew about were not to his taste. He still didn’t like the sound of the cello, yelling and covering his ears when she practised. When he was younger, he would bat her bow off the string, grab at her arm, try to pull her up and out of the music room. ‘Come outside, Mama! I want to climb up to the treehouse. I want to go to the park.’

  Although Klara was sad that she hadn’t become pregnant again, had been denied a daughter whose hair she could plait, whom she could become friends with, some days she was secretly relieved. It was not through want of trying, but something must have gone wrong while she was giving birth to Frankie. Owen looked troubled when he was home in time for dinner, the parents outnumbering the child at the table. It bothered him that they hadn’t replaced themselves, that Frankie might be a spoilt only child. Esther hadn’t married, and even if she did it seemed unlikely that she would be able to bear children, given her condition. Ensconced in Broadway, Esther was sharing an apartment with her friend Ruby from the chorus line.

  No, Klara was relieved because she could go back to her cello. Shirley Wills cried the whole first week Margaret started school, even though she had two younger children at home and a stomach swelling with a fourth. Klara had shed a few tears on the first morning, but then she went to the music room and opened up her cello case. She played her scales and arpeggios, her études and then Bach, some Vivaldi and Shostakovich. She played from 9.30 until 1.30, then stopped to have bread and cheese and a cup of coffee from the precious beans she’d bought on Lambton Quay. She played again until she had to get up and go to school, her shoulders aching from so much practice, the washing ignored. When she played, she didn’t feel out of place or time.

  ‘The engine goes round when the petrol fires up,’ she told Frankie, even though she wasn’t sure. She was just learning to drive, but the car fought her, lurching if she pressed the accelerator too fast, whip-lashing her when she braked. When she drove round the corners, Frankie would slide along the bench seat giggling, but she knew that if she had mastered the brake-then-accelerate relationship, he would have stayed put. People imagined her to be very coordinated because of her cello playing, but she wasn’t, she couldn’t even pat her head and rub circles on her stomach like Owen did. Anyway, she preferred to walk, or to take the bus. ‘There are spark plugs in there too.’

  ‘What are spark plugs, Mama? Are they like fireworks?’

  ‘I think so. What book have you brought home to read, Frankie?’

  ‘Does the spark plug light up the engine so it can see, Mama?’

  ‘I don’t know, Frankie. Do you like your new teacher?’ She was young and pretty, in high heels and a floral dress. Fresh-faced, milk-fed. These solid New Zealanders ate too much meat, but it made them look robust and healthy. Klara felt insubstantial in comparison.

  ‘She has a funny tooth,’ said Frankie.

  ‘A gold tooth, Frankie,’ said Klara, involuntarily thinking of how the Nazis dug the gold fillings out of people’s mouths before burning them. She felt the bile rise, the blackness flicker across her eyes. The panic attacks should have receded after all these years, but they still overwhelmed her at odd moments each day. ‘But she was pretty, don’t you think?’

  ‘You’re pretty, Mama,’ said Frankie, wrapping his arms around her legs, making it hard for her to walk. How could she not love him unconditionally when he said things like that? How could she feel irritated by his hug, the interruption of the walk? She crouched down and hugged him back, and he pulled away from her, a shrug of hard shoulder, looking at her.

  ‘Thank you, Liebchen. You are my precious little boy.’ He yanked his hand out of her grip, picking up a stick.

  ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’ he yelled. Whack, whack, whack against the railing that was meant to stop you from falling down the scrubby cliffs.

  But this violence was coiled inside her too. Sometimes when Owen walked in the door, smelling of wine and cigarettes from another important client meeting, she wanted to split his lip for cheating her out of her career. Heinrich’s letters often mentioned soloists who commissioned him to build instruments for their international debuts. Although she felt happy for Heinrich, she was jealous of these unknown soloists. That could have been her. Vienna. London. Berlin. Instead she was here.

  But had Owen cheated her? He said that now that Frankie had started school, Klara could join the orchestra. Owen had an assistant; they could hire a housekeeper to look after Frankie while she toured the country. Shirley Wills also offered to have Fran
kie overnight. She had bunk beds and a four-year-old, Andrew, that Frankie got on well with. Klara still hadn’t decided whether it was a good idea: there were so many small towns and the roads between them were hairpinned and twisty. A trip in the car to visit Owen’s parents required stops so that Klara could get out and vomit into the gorse-matted ditches. And was she meant to be part of an orchestra, or should she be a soloist? Probably only the former at present; the first five years of Frankie’s life had robbed her of her form. She had been to a few performances of the NZBC Orchestra, and although they had been ragged in places, there were patches of brilliance. She knew that the members had to work at the same time, some as cabinet-makers, some as clerks. They couldn’t be full time orchestra members like in America. But the audiences were so excited to hear them, wearing their Sunday best, other exiles coming out from the woodwork.

  ‘You open the gate, Frankie,’ she said. He was tall enough now, able to reach over himself, able to run down the steps with her key in hand, then insert it in the lock and turn it. He was proud of himself and his newfound capabilities, and Klara felt proud too. ‘I’ll make you some afternoon tea. What would you like?’

  ‘Cookies, Mama, and a glass of milk.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. She had bought some from the dairy on the way down; she should have baked them and cleaned the house as well, washed those tacky floors, wiped the smears off the window from where Frank watched the ships go by. But she had lost track of time, and besides, she could never get the cookies to taste like Heinrich’s.

  The steps were mossy and the ferns slapped her ankles. She quelled her habitual anger at the hill. There would have been stairs in Manhattan too. But this place still felt alien to her, and she wondered whether she would ever feel at home. And the earthquakes: to think the ground might scissor beneath her feet. To think that the road to the Hutt Valley was once under water, that the Basin Reserve was once a lake. Owen said he’d been home from boarding school for the 1942 Wairarapa earthquake, and the grass had rolled as if it were the sea, the trees had bent over and touched the ground.

  Sometimes Klara thought that a giant prehistoric eyelid might open beneath her house. The Makara hills, the Orongorongos might turn out to be folded wings that one day would stretch out, shaking off loose houses.

  She watched Frankie reaching for the lock, his grey shirt coming out of his shorts, thick wool socks bunching at his ankles. His legs were stalk-like. He had her olive complexion. Sometimes he seemed enormous and she couldn’t imagine having given birth to him; other times he seemed small and vulnerable.

  Frank was having trouble opening it. She pulled the handle towards her, the door swollen with damp. Each day she wiped the water off the windowsills, where the condensation had pooled. There, the lock clicked. She kicked the lower section of the door to unstick it, and Frankie ran inside, straight to the kitchen.

  Klara took the top off the milk bottle and poured it into his favourite glass, then put a couple of cookies on the plate next to him. She took one for herself too, conscious that she hadn’t eaten much, that Owen thought she was too thin. But that didn’t stop him from running his fingers along the furrows between her ribs, as if ploughing her. He liked her gauntness, her exotic looks. She was his glamorous American wife (even he didn’t tell the artists she was really German — they might be radical but they were still New Zealanders). Sometimes he brought them home and she would cook for them. If they came on Friday night, she would call it a Shabbat feast, but it was only that in name because she hadn’t even been to a synagogue since she had arrived. When the doctors automatically circumcised Frankie, she was pleased — it saved her from having to organise a bris. It was Passover coming up; she contemplated preparing a seder, but she couldn’t find matzo crackers in the shops. The story, the questions were hazy to her, the ritual unheeded by Tante Dagmar, and Owen would hardly want to reconstruct it with her; he was an atheist. Some of his painters still believed, offering him freshly crucified Christs, coarse Marys, prostrate Magdalenas, but he said his atheism gave him the advantage. He wasn’t shocked; he welcomed every expression of religion. Except, she sometimes felt, her own. It made sense to raise Frankie without religion. She’d had a secular upbringing, and Owen didn’t want him to be teased. But sometimes she longed for ritual, some external order to differentiate the days. She wanted something to counter the charade of Christmas.

  ‘Can I have another cookie, Mama?’

  ‘Finish your milk first.’

  ‘And then will you play trains with me?’

  ‘Yes, Frankie.’ She swallowed her sigh, licking the crumbs from the corners of her mouth. She hated playing trains, yet it was what Frankie liked doing best. She’d had her day of freedom. She was a bad mother. Shirley Wills made it obvious to her, although she never said it explicitly. Shirley Wills was in awe of Klara’s talent, as though it was a precious gift from God. But it was a wriggling, capricious gift, eager to run from her at the slightest sign of neglect. Shirley Wills had organised a number of evenings at which Klara played, accompanied by her pianist friend Glenda, usually to Gregory Wills’ wealthy associates. An audience was what sustained Klara; but it was also only a taste, enough to make her realise what she was missing out on. Glenda was missing out too, having given up a promising piano career for family.

  Frankie took her hand, pulling her into his room, his fingers hooked around her palm. She loved that sense of possession, that she was a person worth pointing things out to. He hadn’t wanted to hold her hand as a determined two-and three-year-old, insisting on doing things himself. When she clasped his wrist to cross roads, he twisted and squealed and other mothers looked at her; she shouldn’t be letting her child behave that way. She should be giving him a clip across the ears.

  He pulled the crate from the shelf and they knelt down together, laying out the wooden pieces, clipping one piece into the next. Frankie had his own ideas as to how he wanted the tracks configured. He created bridges where none existed, layering blocks so that the tracks ascended, frustrated when the pieces wouldn’t stick together. He wanted tracks to thread underneath each other and form figures of eight, and for there to be a long dark tunnel, preferably under his bed. He could sit on his bedroom floor for hours perfecting the arrangements, then taking his imaginary passengers on hair-raising journeys. She had suggested he might like to learn the violin, with its train-track strings, the crossings one could make with the bow, but he shook his head. ‘I don’t like music, Mama,’ he said. Although sometimes she heard him singing, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ or ‘Down at the Station’, and he sang in tune, something Shirley’s children couldn’t do. He was being perverse, withholding his music from her.

  There, the last piece was fitted and it looped around without beginning or end. Frankie had got the angle of the bridges right this time, and the train ascended smoothly. Maybe she could stand up and leave him to it. Owen was inviting some clients around tomorrow night to contemplate the Mrkusich that hung on their living room wall, and he wanted her to call Glenda, to play something for them. They were adventurous art collectors, Klara had suggested they might play Bartók, but Owen said that although he loved it, Beethoven or Bach might be more conducive to opening the cheque books. She would have to cook, starting with a shrimp cocktail, then the obligatory meat, jelly for pudding. Owen’s parents drove a leg of lamb down to Wellington the last Sunday of every month, and Vera always appraised Klara’s performance, gauging how New Zealand she had become. Although Klara had stopped thinking of Heinrich’s lost leg or asking for the brisket, although she could now make gravy, boiled broccoli, apple crumble and custard, there was something about her meals that disquieted Vera. Something foreign. She talked cheerfully about her other daughter-in-law, Michael’s wife Shona, who had gone into labour while milking, and still had time to bottle the peaches with three little ones underfoot. Shona dropped in every other day, and they were wonderful friends. The implication was clear: Owen’s mother could never be friends with Klara, and
her inability to keep breeding, her stubborn insistence upon her foreign name widened the rift.

  Klara picked up her cello. ‘Hello, Heinrich,’ she said, because on the stroke of G she could hear his voice. That was his resting pitch. A fresh letter from Heinrich, nibbled by snails in the damp letterbox, was drying out on the windowsill, undoubtedly mentioning a friend of hers, perhaps another cellist, who had a glowing review in The New York Times. He sent clippings of her fellow alumni and she pasted them into her scrapbook, her teeth gritted.

  Klara played the first bars of Bartók’s ‘Romanian Folk Dances’, just in case Owen changed his mind.

  ‘Mama! My train track’s broken!’ yelled Frankie from the other room.

  ‘Well, fix it then!’ she yelled back, still playing.

  ‘I need you to fix it,’ he called.

  No! cried her inner voice. Let me get to the end of this piece! But she had to be generous; motherhood was a selfless act. What about me? I’m your first child! insisted the cello. Shush, she told it.

  ‘Okay, Liebchen, coming in a minute.’ She knew how false this was, the minute would be stretched out to five, then she would be diverted by a pile of washing that needed folding, the carrots to be peeled for dinner. She had to call Glenda too, to make sure she could accompany her tomorrow. In fact, that’s what she would do now.

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Shush, no, not you Glenda, sorry. It’s Klara Quinn.’ There were yells in the background, apparently from all three of Glenda’s children.

  ‘Hello, Klara, it’s chaos here. The children all have colds.’

  ‘Oh. I was hoping you could come to dinner tomorrow night. Owen wants me to play for his collectors, I thought you might be able to accompany me on that Bartók I gave you last month. Or maybe the Beethoven we played at Shirley’s.’