The Girl with the Peacock Harp

by Michael Eisele

  It is on one such afternoon that we see her with two acquaintances, when one of them spies a gaudily dressed figure advancing deliberately in their direction.

  ‘Oh look!’ says the first companion, ‘‘A gypsy woman! Let us have our fortunes told!’

  ‘Yes!’ agrees the second. ‘Isobel, you must also!’

  In vain Isobel protests that she wishes no such thing, for the first lady is already advancing on the woman, who at first seems startled at being accosted, but then, spying Isobel, gives a grim nod and allows herself to be drawn to a nearby bench. ‘Now,’ says the first, ‘you must tell your very best fortunes for us both, and there is a silver piece for you if you do so.’

  Isobel thinks that she alone takes note of the fact that even the smallest of the gold coins in the necklace the gypsy woman is wearing would be many times the worth the silver groshen being offered, but the woman complies with good grace, foretelling handsome suitors and much happiness in store for the two ladies of the gaje. Then with a dangerous glint in her dark eyes she turns to Isobel. ‘To you must I speak alone,’ she announces, and simpering with mischief the two ladies withdraw to a discreet distance.

  The gypsy woman studies Isobel silently for a moment. ‘You have done well in the world of the gaje, Kisaiya of the wagons,’ she says in the language of the People.

  ‘I thought you were going to tell my fortune,’ says Isobel haughtily as if uncomprehending, ‘not spout gibberish.’

  The woman smiles without rancour. ‘Give me your hand, then,’ she says, adding, ‘if you dare.’

  Isobel stares back for a moment, then with a defiant gesture she strips the kidskin glove from one elegant hand and lays it in the gypsy woman’s leathery palm.

  The gypsy takes hold of Isobel’s wrist with the other hand and peers at the offered palm, nodding to herself the while. ‘I see . . . one who is lost,’ she intones slowly, ‘One who has left her people and . . . shut the doors of her heart to them.’ Isobel makes to snatch her hand away but the woman is strong, stronger by far than Isobel who has servants to labour for her. ‘I see cold ashes in a campground in the bend of a river,’ continues the gypsy inexorably, ‘I see grass growing tall, that once was fodder for the horses of the People, I see gates that are shut against them. . . .’

  With a frantic wrench Isobel reclaims her hand and stands up, but the gypsy woman does not move, and holds her now with a glittering anthracite stare as she says, chanting the words, ‘You will have a short life, Kisaiya of the wagons, a short life and a grievous one. You will give birth to the Vadni Ratsa, the wild goose, and you yourself shall lead him back to us in the end.’

  Isobel backs away as if tethered, and delves desperately into the purse at her waist. Her fingers encounter a coin and she does not care that it is a gold florin as she hurls it to the grass at her feet. ‘That for your dukkering!’ she cries in a voice that is nearly a scream.

  The gypsy woman rises from the bench and calmly picks up the coin, bites a corner to prove its worth and holding it between thumb and forefinger she bows to Isobel, then to the two ladies, then strides away and is gone.

  ‘A whole florin!’ exclaims one of the ladies, ‘That must have been a marvellous fortune! Tell us what she said, Isobel!’

  ‘Yes, do!’ says the other. ‘I could not for the life of me understand what you were saying, was that the Spanish, pray?’

  In the days that followed, Isobel was not able to put the encounter with the gypsy woman from her mind. The perfect life she had created, the heights to which she had climbed, suddenly seemed founded on a bog which at any moment might draw her back down to where she had been. With forced casualness, as it were a matter of small moment, she asked Tomas how things were on the estate. For example, did the gypsies (the gaje word felt like a stone in her mouth) still have their camp by the river?

  Tomas seemed pleased by her show of interest in his affairs, and said that all was very well. His Uncle Guntrum had agreed to stay on as manager, and the rents on the estate were showing a fine return. As for the gypsies (he looked slightly uncomfortable) it had been decided to exclude them, as the Estate could no longer support their depredations in the matter of firewood and prime grazing land that might well be put to other uses. ‘Besides,’ he added with a forced laugh, ‘one of them might have stolen you back some dark night!’

  Isobel made some light reply, and their talk moved on to other matters, but that night her sleep was troubled by strange dreams, in which the gypsy woman followed her down the street, repeating over and over, louder and louder, ‘Closed the doors of her heart! Closed the doors of her heart!’ Then when there was nowhere else to go she sank down to the ground as the black glittering eyes drew closer and closer and a voice whispered, ‘A short life and grievous . . . you shall bear the Vadni Ratsa . . . the Vadni Ratsa. . . .’ The next day Isobel found that she was pregnant.

  It was only a slight nausea after breakfast, but somehow she knew, and a visit from the doctor confirmed it. Tomas was jubilant, and her women twittered around her like a flock of birds, vying with one another to provide comforts, and no, the Grafin must not exert herself, must keep to her bed as much as possible. Isobel, bemused, let herself be cosseted, a memory sharp in her mind’s eye of a woman giving birth squatting over a trench rudely hacked in the earth and lined with sheep’s wool, her hands clenched around the spokes of the wagon wheel and her head thrown back in a somehow triumphant agony. She noted with sour amusement that the corsets with their tough whalebone stays were immediately relegated to the bottom of the clothes press, for there were stories of women giving birth to monsters, who had tried too long to follow the dress fashions of the day.

  The birth was a difficult one, and at one point, half out of her mind, Isobel tried to imitate the woman of the People she had remembered, scrambling up in the huge feather bed and holding to the carved headboard with both hands, but she was prevented, and firmly forced to lie back and try again, and again, and in her mind she saw the infant indeed as a wild goose trammelled in her swollen belly, beating and beating with its great wings to be free, until at last the midwife, a stolid great woman from Wallachia, forcibly ejected the dark suited doctor and his nurses and let the Grafin do as she would, and thus her child was born in the old way, head downward to the soft cushion of the coverlet for a precious few moments still connected to her, to her breath and to her madly beating heart, and she looked down, exhausted and triumphant, and saw the misty blue eyes open and stare wonderingly it seemed into her very soul before the midwife, shaking her head, cut and tied the birth cord and held the scarlet little being up to take his first wailing breath.

  Something changed in her with the birth, and although she was Isobel the Grafin still to others, walking in the park while the nurse wheeled the elaborate baby carriage along behind, it was Kisaiya of the wagons who nursed her child in secret, the wet nurse sworn to silence, Kisaiya who sang him to sleep with songs of the People, sung softly so that none but he should hear. When he lisped his first word, it was daj, mother, and it was this which led to the quarrel with Tomas which we have seen, for the nurse, outraged, went to her master and complained that the wife of the Graf was teaching his son some foreign gibberish instead of civilised speech.

  ***

  Kisaiya stands in the corridor of the silent mansion holding her throbbing cheek. So swift is thought that the journey from the earliest days to the present has taken only a few brief moments. She had been seeking her room, but suddenly there is another destination that is the more urgent. Suddenly she wants nothing more than to see her son, and resolutely she turns a corner to the nursery door.

  The nurse on duty tonight is not the grim old harridan who betrayed her to Tomas, but one of the younger girls, and though she tells the Grafin that the baby is asleep, it is Kisaiya of the wagons who confronts her, Kisaiya who recognises no will but her own and in moments the nurse is sent away and Kisaiya enters the silent nursery where indeed her little boy sleeps, his dark curls so lik
e her own spread on the pillow and his breath a soft regular snore.

  At her touch his eyelids move and open and shadowed by long lashes his eyes are like two black pools in the dim light, and he reaches out with one chubby hand and touches her damaged cheek. Something rises up in her then and she clutches his shoulder fiercely and whispers words in the language of the People, her people, words he is too young to understand but she must say them: ‘Never forget! Your soul comes from my soul! Listen when it calls to you!’ Then she soothes him with a gentle touch and watches while he drifts back into slumber.

  The years passed and the seasons changed, and the Graf’s young son, who was called Maximilian by his father, and Pulika in secret by his mother, grew like a young tree. He was intelligent and curious, exploring everywhere as soon as he could crawl, and it was not long before his explorations brought him to the oaken chest where, wrapped in a linen shroud, he discovered the one treasure his mother had retained from her childhood, the violin made by her grandfather. He was sitting in a patch of sun in the nursery, fingering the strings and experimenting with different sounds when his father the Graf made an unexpected visit, accompanied as it happened by the dozent, who among other subjects taught music in the household

  Tomas spoke harshly to the nurse, demanding to know where his son had found ‘that old piece of rubbish’, and was stepping forward to snatch the offending object away when he was forestalled by the dozent. Bidding the Graf stay his hand, the man crouched down on the carpet and asked Maximilian politely if he might see his treasure. Somewhat reluctantly the boy relinquished his hold, and the dozent beckoned to Tomas to join him at the window.

  ‘See here, my lord,’ he said, holding the instrument so that the sunlight fell across the polished back of the body, ‘this is no common violin, still less a piece of rubbish.’ He pointed with a forefinger at the place where the neck joined the body. Deeply into the little semi-circle of wood was carved the likeness of a bird. ‘That is the mark of a great violin maker of the gypsies, O Chirico, The Bird,’ said the dozent, a note of awe in his voice, ‘so called by the maker’s mark that is on all his instruments. I myself have never seen one, and to actually hold such an instrument in my hands . . .’ he gave a little half laugh as if he lacked words to describe his feelings.

  ‘Is it very valuable?’ said Tomas dubiously.

  The dozent sighed and told himself to remember that this fool was his master. Delicately he diverted the conversation. ‘What your son was doing when we came in showed the signs of great musical talent,’ he said. ‘I would count it an honour to be allowed to instruct him.’

  Tomas was pleased at the idea, thinking to himself that music was indeed a very aristocratic pastime, and gave his consent.

  Some weeks later Kisaiya came upon her son as he was practicing some scales on the diminutive half size instrument used to instruct very young children. Withdrawing the tongue he had thrust between his teeth in his concentration he smiled proudly.

  ‘Miri daj’, he cried, ‘listen to what I can do!’ And he ran the tiny bow in a series of see-sawing sweeps as his little fingers danced down the strings, emitting an intricate embellishment of the scale he had been practicing.

  Kisaiya fought to keep her face stern. ‘That is beautiful, Maximilian,’ she said, putting stress on the name.

  Her son’s face fell for an instant. ‘I’m sorry Mother, I forgot,’ then, brightening again, he continued, ‘But I made that up myself, and the dozent says that I am his best pupil! He says that in a year or two I will be ready to try the big violin I found!’

  Kisaiya paled but her son did not notice, prattling on about his new accomplishment. ‘What violin was that?’ she said, when she could trust her voice.

  ‘Oh, the old one I found in your chest last month,’ said the boy artlessly, and then paused as a thought struck him, ‘You do not mind? It was right on top, and so beautiful. The dozent says my hands are not large enough to manage it properly . . .’ he paused and stared at his hands as if they suddenly belonged to someone else. ‘Is there any way to make hands grow faster, Mother?’

  Kisaiya forced a laugh. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said, ‘you will just have to wait until the dozent says you are ready, miri chav.’

  The boy crowed delightedly. ‘Now you are doing it!’ he said.

  ‘You are right, Maximilian,’ Kisaiya said, all the while thinking that to the best of her recollection her grandfather’s instrument had lain in the very bottom of the big chest since she had put it there herself ten years previously. ‘I should know to be more careful,’ she added thoughtfully.

  The young dozent was astonished at the progress shown by his star pupil. There was something almost uncanny in the ease with which the boy mastered the fingering, the use of the bow, and his ability to match any note once heard showed that he had that rarest of all musical gifts, perfect pitch. Only in the reading of musical notation was there any real difficulty. It was not that Maximilian could not learn to read the notes as printed on the stave, but that he seemed not to understand the purpose of writing down music at all.

  It so happened that one day the boy was playing in the garden and came upon the gardener who waged perpetual war against the starlings that robbed his fruit trees, stringing the dead birds he had shot upon a wire to be hung as a deterrent for their kind. Maximilian asked his nurse innocently how the birds could fly like that, to which the nurse replied gently that they were dead and could not fly anyway. That night the boy awakened crying from a nightmare, and could only babble of dead birds upon a wire, unable to remember that in the dream he had seen nothing more sinister than a page from his music book.

  Maximilian was fourteen when his father’s pride in the musical genius of his son overflowed the rigid bank of social restraint, and in spite of the dozent’s protest that it was too early, Tomas announced a private concert at the mansion. His son, the Graf announced, would play a selection from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D.

  Isobel who was also Kisaiya felt herself torn in two. Pride in her son’s achievement could not be denied, but there were darker feelings she could not suppress either, a sense that there was something not quite right about such a concert. She tried to speak to Tomas about her misgivings but although he listened politely she could tell that her words made no impression on him, save perhaps to confirm his opinion (which she had overheard him voice to a male acquaintance recently) that his wife had never completely recovered from the strain of her son’s birth. The friend’s reply still caused her to seethe inwardly. ‘Ach, but you must be firm with her, my dear sir, that is all a woman understands. They have not the strength of a man, after all.’

  Maximilian who was also at times Pulika experienced in full the usual contradictory emotions of any young person suddenly thrust into public prominence. Of course, he told himself, his parent’s pride in him meant a great deal, even though the thought of playing before his father’s important friends seemed as terrifying as entering a den of wolves. His friend the dozent, who would be accompanying him on the pianoforte, did his best to reassure him, but Maximilian could tell that his teacher suffered some doubts as well.

  Again and again he had been told that he must play the notes as they were written on the page, that Beethoven and the rest were great composers and it was wrong, it was practically a sin, to think that one could improve upon their sacred works. Maximilian sighed to himself. It was hard to think that a man like Beethoven, who had composed such beautiful music, would have objected to a little . . . exploration. That was it, he thought, as if one were walking a path in the lovely spring woods, and saw a little byway leading away to the side, which one had never before glimpsed. One could explore, certainly, and then return to the main path? Suddenly he smiled to himself, and dried the sweat upon his palms, passing the old violin from hand to hand as he did so. The curved sound holes in the polished body seemed to smile in answer, and as the conversation in the next room stilled, Maximilian touched his forefinger to the carved bir
d upon the neck of the instrument in secret homage and walked out to where the ebony pianoforte waited.

  He and the dozent had practiced the passage over and over, and Maximilian had no need to look at the musical score propped up on the rack for the pianist. Patiently he waited through the introduction, adjusting the ebony rest under his chin, the bow poised, and then, hardly needing the nod from the dozent, he began. The strange faces seated before him were a distraction and he tried to focus above them, his fingers automatically stopping the familiar gut strings and the music as always flowing out of the vibrating body of the instrument. He closed his eyes as he sometimes did in order to hear better, becoming lost in the music, seeing the melody dancing through the spring woods, dappled in sunshine, the notes on the page becoming a row of black birds, but they were not dead, for in a moment they took wing, and flew up, up, up into the sunshine, and he tried to follow but . . . suddenly the quality of the sound around him alerted him that something was not right, and he paused and opened his eyes. Mortified, he realised that he had been playing for some moments while the pianoforte had fallen silent, the dozent’s fingers frozen in confusion above the keys, and that people in the audience were murmuring together. He heard the word ‘cadenza’ and someone replied that yes, but not until the second movement and in any case . . .

  Then there was a sound like thunder, but it was only a heavy chair scraping back as a dignified old gentleman rose to his feet, his medals and the style of his whiskers proclaiming his army origins, and the room fell silent as he cleared his throat. His apologies to the Graf, he rumbled, sketching a stiff bow in the direction of Maximilian’s father standing white-faced by the door. ‘What we have just heard,’ he pronounced in a voice that sounded as though it were being dragged through gravel, ‘was no doubt very interesting, but it was not Beethoven.’ And with another bow, this time to the assembled guests, he turned and marched from the room.