Maestro: 4 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Years ago he had set up a system like this in a house on a Swiss lakeside. Naldo was there and someone else, he could not quite remember who. His memory played tricks also: perhaps this was the onset of age for him, and it seemed like only a couple of weeks ago that he had met Naldo in a Berlin house, with the American who had been running him. Other words came into his head, hard on the heels of the mental picture of Berlin’s rubble and the days spent in Displaced Persons camps.

  “We have heard the chimes at midnight,” the voice in his head spoke, and he knew then that the voice, long dead, had belonged to another of Naldo’s family, all Shakespeareans to a man and woman, always quoting the Bard, consistently apt.

  He did not undress, but stretched on top of the bed, dozing. Once he woke with a start, thinking he was back in that same Swiss villa which could have told so many stories. Then he slept again; dreamed again—this time of Berlin, the city of his childhood, and of much of his dangerous manhood also. His dream flitted in and out of an apartment. There was a Durer pen-and-ink of an Avenging Angel on the wall, and a set of ruby glasses with fluted stems in a cabinet. Also there was a girl called Ursula. She had been an ever-repeating dream over the years, unexorcized by his marriage. His one true and only love in postwar Berlin. Love among the ruins.

  At seven he woke, showered, shaved, dressed and made coffee for Passau. It was ten thirty before he got the old Maestro sitting comfortably in the library, ready to put him to the question. It was Passau who took over from the very beginning.

  “There are specific things you require of me, Herbie.” He looked rested, and back to his former self, a ninety-year-old with a picture in the attic, for he would have passed for sixty—on the stairs, with the light behind him.

  “My name is not Passau, for a beginning.” He smiled, a loving look that crept into his eyes and spoke of great nostalgia. “My real name was Louis Packensteiner. Louis Isaak Packensteiner to be exact, and even that was not the true family name. The true name was Packenstky. I was born in September 1901, as you already know, but the place of birth no longer exists: a village razed to the ground, depopulated by pogroms and wars.

  “The nearest town of any consequence was Passau. In those days we were part of the Austrian Empire—Bavaria. But let me tell you, Herbie, that, though I’ve had a charmed life, choked with good things, happiness and sadness, the first nine years of my life still remain the most golden time for me. You must understand this, because it underpins everything of any importance that has happened to me. Everything!” he repeated, leaning forward and almost challenging Kruger to deny the fact.

  “You’re an intelligent, musical man, Herb, so if you want to think musically about the first nine years of my life, think of all the schmaltzy melodies, think of Peter’s tune from Peter and the Wolf, think of that major theme in the Third Symphony of Rachmaninov; think of the Sibelius Violin Concerto; think of them all together. I lived, until the age nine, actually, in bliss. I was loved, I had family, a big family and we loved each other as only big Jewish families can. This is the key to everything. I so remember that village. My cousins. My aunts and uncles, the butcher; baker; rabbi. In the village I was. You know what I’m saying, Herb. I … was.”

  Kruger nodded. He knew well enough what the old man meant. There had been a time in his memory which he sometimes broke from the cage of his dreams. A time when he Was. He did not speak. Better to let Maestro Passau talk.

  “You know, Herb, last night at the concert,” he paused, frowning. “No, that was night before last, yes?”

  Again the big nod, like a Buddha.

  “Yea, the Charles Ives—the New England Holidays—we brought in especially the Marine Corps band for the ‘Decoration Day’ section. You know, when I was an up-and-coming young musician, I met Charles Ives. He was an old man. Very gritty; shrewd; unimpressed by the success of others. He said, ‘Listen to me, son. Nothing but fools and taxes are absolute.’ This was his biggest contribution to the conversation. We didn’t say a word about music, but he sang, lamentably, at the piano which he played like a drunk in a barroom. Funny, eh?”

  “New England Holidays, Maestro,” Herbie nudged. He liked New England Holidays, Charles Ives’ tone poem, in four sections: “Washington’s Birthday,” “Decoration Day,” “Thanksgiving” and “The Fourth of July.”

  “Decoration Day”—Herbie’s favorite—looked back to the composer’s memories of his own childhood, when it was the custom to decorate the town with flowers which were spring’s gift. In particular, Ives depicted, through the music, the solemnity of locals gathering at the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of those who had fallen in the Civil War, the War Between the States; then the brisk march back to town, led by the local brass band. It was for this moment that Passau had contracted the Marine Corps Band to give the roaring, sudden burst of joyously happy military music—scored as if carried on the air in wonderful, daring dissonance that made you want to dance.

  Kruger smiled at the thought. “The brass band. You want to get up and prance around the room, ja?” He almost stood up and demonstrated.

  “You know.” Passau was laughing, almost giggling. “Herbie, I put in New England Holidays for two reasons: first, I love it; and second, I knew my ex-wife, Veronica, would be there, and she would hate it. She loathes Charles Ives’ music.” He giggled again, like a naughty five-year-old.

  “But, when it came, Herbie, something else happened. Something quite incredible. When I brought in the Marine Corps Band, and that huge sound filled the air, I thought of another time. Sadness, for I missed the village where all that love was left behind, yet I relived something else. The band reminded me of my first sight of America. A new period of my life, but one linked to the past, by a sadness for those first happy years of my being. Listen, I’ll explain to you. …”

  (7)

  YOUNG LOUIS PACKENSTEINER WAS happy for the first time since leaving what he still thought of as home. If truth could be told, he was happy for the first time in over a year. The band was playing great raucous blasts of music, brass blaring, drums beating, making the boy want to dance or march down the gangplank.

  The long journey, together with the fear and wretchedness, had begun almost two years before with snatches of conversation and overheard whispers which had brought terror to the little boy’s heart. Now, it ended with this gush of music as they walked down from the ship—the Ellis Island ferry. His mother, Gerda Packensteiner, had trouble holding him back and she turned to shout over the crush to her husband, Joseph.

  “Thank the good Lord for something,” Joseph called back. “He’s happy again.”

  In the now and future time, Louis Passau had yet to make up his mind about the big, bumbling German who was, inexplicably, an Englishman. As they sat in the room of this strange and beautiful Virginia house, with the morning sunshine hot outside the windows, Passau simply had no idea where things would end. Part of him said that he should tell it all, look at it as a final scouring of the soul. But that part of Passau which was so secret and deeply buried at the heart of a plethora of untold facts, was unsure. Aloud, to Herbie he said, “People will tell you that when you become old, so your memory changes. They say you recall things from the distant past with great accuracy and clarity, while yesterday’s happenings escape you.”

  “I’ve heard.” Herbie Kruger sat still and concentrating. He listened to Passau as he had been trained—to hear the music behind the words. Just to be safe he also had a tape running. Part of his night vigil had been to wire the room in the most simple way possible. The tape machine—which had come with him into the United States—was a small “special” provided by the Office: voice activated, with a choice of speeds, which meant that one side of a normal C90 tape would give him three hours.

  “Well, it could be true with most people.” Passau’s eyes were bright and dancing. “But with me it works all ways. Yes, I can bring to mind the distant past as though it were yesterday. Unhappily I can also recall yesterday, las
t week, last month and last year with equal precision. Perhaps it’s something to do with the way musicians train the mind. But, Herb, I can see that gangway, I can hear the music from the band as we got off the Ellis Island ferry. I can even still feel the new happiness, though I also feel the same sadness; the ache, the void which has been with me all my life.”

  He must have been very young for his age, Passau told Herbie. After all he had lived in a kind of enclosed society: the village, and the immediate proximity of his uncle, cousins, and the local people. In the village everyone knew everybody else.

  “When we began the journey, I was terrified. Also, Herb, you must understand that I cannot be accurate about when I learned our family history. Until we began the journey, the one thing that had mattered to me was the village and the family, and I only dimly perceived what lay beyond its borders.”

  “In this village, what language were you speaking?” Herbie asked quietly.

  Passau gave a shrug, “Who knows? A mixture, I think. I know it took some time for all of us to speak even a little English when we arrived in America. I think we possibly spoke a mixture of Hebrew, Russian, German. We certainly spoke German, otherwise I could not have followed what happened a year later. I will come to that, but first let me tell you the family legend as I now know it to be. How we got to the village which became my life.”

  He told the story briskly, with no frills, only the occasional overheard and remembered fact which was the icing on the cake of the story.

  His grandparents—Isaak and Madja Packenstky—originally came from the small town of Kotovsk in the Ukraine. Like a great multitude of Russian Jews, they were confined there, living in what was known as The Pale of Settlement. There were two sons, Chaim and Isaak, the latter named for his father. Also, in those last decades of the nineteenth century, there was fear. Sudden reprisals for something they knew nothing about. The ruling powers of Russia would reach out from St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the Cossacks would ride into a village, or the soldiers would come and drag people away to slaughter, or move them to another location. Those Jews living in The Pale of Settlement were safe in theory only from becoming scapegoats.

  “That’s what the Jews were, Herb. What they have been at many times in history: scapegoats; a people, a race, who became the sacrificial victims of so many societies; a people who salved collective consciences by suffering. They made the ruling classes, and their serfs, feel that justice had been done if a few hundred Jews were put to the sword, or taken to do hard and necessary work others would not do—the salt mines, the stone quarries, but you know all about that.”

  Herbie nodded; he had known it all at a tender age, because most Germans of his generation knew. Many lied, of course—“We knew nothing of the terrible things that were done to the Jews.” But they did know. Herb, as a teenager had known: the stories were everywhere. If you lived in Germany during those years it was difficult not to know, unless you were blind, deaf and dumb.

  Old Isaak Packenstky was a craftsman. A shoemaker of immense talent. It was a craft that would be passed to his sons and, while they all had strength and health, there was always a living to be made.

  When Chaim was three years of age, and little Isaak barely twelve months, Madja became pregnant again, and the great fears seemed worse. There were rumors that even the Ukrainian Jews were not safe anymore. People came to their village with stories of other places, less than a hundred miles distant, being pillaged, the inhabitants tortured, raped and murdered.

  Isaak began to hear the warnings and the advice—“When the Cossacks reach the next village it is time to move on.”

  Isaak made careful plans, for he was not a man to do even urgent things without having some decent plan in mind. Life was like making shoes: if you did not get the right leather and the correct measurements, you might as well not make shoes at all. He knew which way to go, but would wait until the new child arrived, and Madja had recovered. In the event, Madja did not recover.

  “My father, like myself, was born in September: at the turning of the year: summer’s deathbed—poetic, huh?” Passau did not look at Herbie, but spoke with his eyes set on the wall behind him, as though looking at some spot a couple of generations ago. “My grandmother died giving birth to Joseph Packenstky, my father, and he was brought up by a young girl who wet nursed him and became my grandfather’s second wife, though I knew her only as Aunt Nesta. They had hardly buried my grandmother before the final news came. The Cossacks, or whoever they were, had reached the next village. Grandfather and a number of others left, heading west. It was said, in the family, that Isaak, Chaim, Young Isaak, Joseph and Nesta were the only ones to reach comparative safety. They were separated from the others within a week or so, and never seen again.”

  The family seemed to have an oral tradition concerning grandfather Packenstky’s journey. For them it became a kind of legend, a story with many facets, told and retold during long winter nights.

  They encountered hardship and great danger, as well as kindness on the long march. In the mountains there was the raw cold, and the baby, Joseph, almost died.

  One village, somewhere in what was now Austria, rose against them, refusing shelter, driving them out with stones and setting the dogs on them. But another nearby village took them in, fed and clothed them and, in return, Old Isaak made stout boots for many of the menfolk. Then the family continued their journey, crossing plains and mountains, fresh pastures, lush valleys, bare flatlands, or dark brooding, frightening forests.

  Finally they reached the small community where they would settle and make a new family life. The people of this place, which seemed to have no name (or, perhaps, Herbie considered, Passau did not want to name it), gathered around the Packenstky family. Old Isaak returned their kindness by making certain that, each year, the people had first choice of the boots and shoes over which he labored through the heat of the summers and cold of the winters. The years went by and the three boys began to work with leather as soon as they were old enough. The Packenstky family started to prosper. Word got out into surrounding towns and villages that, if you wanted good, strong boots or shoes, you should go to Isaak Packenstky.

  Passau said, “I remember my father telling me that, when he was about ten years of age, they had a great outing to the nearby town of Passau, which was some thirty miles away. He described to me that he had been frightened of the noise, the bustle and the crowds of people. They also saw the great cathedral of St. Stephen and, for the first time in his life, my father discovered that other folk worshipped God in different ways.”

  It was about this time—Passau thought—that their name changed. “My father told me that on the first visit to Passau they spent much time waiting in official offices, where people seemed to avoid them as much as possible. In fact, what happened was that they discovered that the law called for people to register their nationality and my grandfather decided they would be Austrian. So, when they got back to the village, the children were told their name had changed. No longer would they have their Russian name, but a new one, allotted to them by the officials in Passau. Now they were Packensteiners, and as Packensteiners they flourished. The years passed quickly.”

  Chaim scandalized everyone by going against his father’s wishes and leaving the village for America, which he had heard was the land, promised to all Jews, flowing with milk and honey. Young Isaak married the butcher’s daughter, Eisa Kellerman, a dark-eyed girl sought by all the young men in the village. A few years later, Joseph also took a bride, a Polish baker’s daughter, Gerda, whom he had met while traveling to Passau to take samples of the family’s shoes.

  “When I came on the scene”—Passau still looked at the far of point on the wall—“my grandfather was worn out, dying, and my Uncle Isaak was already the father of three children—David, Rebecca and Rachel. Rachel was my age—born a few days before me—Rebecca a year older, and David just over two years my senior. But they were my closest and most beloved friends, and this, my dear
Herbie, is important. You should know that, while I loved my mother and fattier, I adored my three cousins, my Uncle Isaak and Aunt Eisa. They were like a ring of faith and strength around my early happy years. They are with me always. Still, to this day. They are one of the reasons of my life.” His eyes came down to meet those of Kruger. He gave a sad smile. “Foolish, eh? The folly of an old man to admit that the truly earth-moving actions of his life were based on the love and proximity of a handful of relatives he knew only for a very few years: a dust mote in the eye of time?”

  “No.” Herbie gave the impression of thinking hard about the question. Passau laughed—

  “Herbie, how could you know? How could you possibly tell? You have no idea how my dearest cousins play a part in my life, except that which I will tell you now, at the beginning of our long tramp through the years together.”

  Herbie’s head snapped round. When he spoke it was with a tinge of harshness. “Maestro Passau, you are known as a musical genius; a man of great staying power, a man who has lived and loved life to the full, so I take it that you have emotions, that you are an old man with memories crammed full of feelings, passions, temperament, hatred as well as love. I can believe anything of you. You should know this, Maestro, as we go together, cheek by jowl, through your life. Also, remember, I am not easily fooled.”

  Passau held up his hand. A sign of peace. It did not escape him that Eberhardt Lukas Kruger could speak excellent, grammatical English when he required it.

  Now, Passau began to speak of those few years he had spent in the village, close by his cousins, and it appeared to Herbie that the man’s powers of memory were like his genius with an orchestra. He painted a picture of that golden time which seemed to dance before the eyes. You could hear the children at play, and see the village with its rough green-painted wooden houses; its characters, like Herr Kellerman, his Aunt Elsa’s father, the butcher; Frau Butterbusch, the schoolteacher; Rabbi Ephrahim, always in a hurry, tripping over his own words; Herr Gottlieb, who smelled of flour, the baker always with a cheery wave to the children; the drunk, Ravisch, whom they teased, and a whole cast of characters who, Herbie thought, could have stepped out of the pages of something written by Shalom Aleichem. He expected that, any moment, Tevye would walk into the picture as though he had come straight from Anatevka, stating that their lives were as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.