But Bridget didn’t give him a chance to pause or think. “Speak clearly!” she whispered as she thrust the music into his hand and spun him around toward the piano again.
“For my encore, uh, I will play a piece by Laszlo Magyar, uh, Capriccio, opus twenty-seven, number two,” recited Humphrey, in the rote Italian we had drilled into him. The audience did not become noticeably quieter. I cursed them silently, suddenly aware of my own hot sweat, and squeezed my eyes shut It was all I could do not to cover my ears.
After the first chords, the house went silent, just the way the interference vanishes when a clear channel on a radio is found. The notes jangled and bounced out into the theater, restless and exuberant, the barbaric harmonies clanging. It sounded almost funny, and I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so tense—not to mention astonished, once again, by Humphrey’s performance. He played the disorderly concoction like a musician, with delicacy and bravado and artful intelligence.
That was unnatural enough, and it should have gnawed at me more, but vanity got in the way. The music worked, and I allowed myself to bask in a self-congratulatory feeling of creative power. I even flattered myself that I might have had something to do with Humphrey’s shockingly adequate performance. “What the hell got into Humphrey anyway?” I whispered to Luc as the piece drew to its close. “He almost sounds like a musician. I bet my music did it to him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Luc said loftily. “It’s obviously because of the way I’ve been coaching him.”
The applause interrupted me in mid-snort Humphrey came beaming out to meet us, and as he stood breathing heavily in the wing, the applause only grew. This time he needed no prodding at all to go back on stage. As I watched him take bow after bow, ever so humbly and shyly, it suddenly hit me: that was my applause.
And where was I while Humphrey was out there piggishly lapping up the reward? Cringing in the wings. And when the critics and fans came swarming backstage, I was still cringing, keeping out of the way, obediently shunning all attention. I was nearly blinded by the sensation of longing and injustice—nearly, but not quite. Bridget’s steely eyes penetrated the fog of envy and rage like klieg lights, keeping me chained in my place, a hungry observer at the fast
This time they were not as skeptical as they had been before. They accepted Humphrey’s unaffectedly told story as though they were looking forward to hearing it—which they probably were, having read the earlier articles. And Nitpikskaya was back again, vouching stolidly for Humphrey over Bridget’s shrill protestations. She repeated her invitation to the clinic in Moscow, more urgently now because she had to return to the Soviet Union the following day. When Bridget once again declined, she extracted from her the name of Humphrey’s agent, so that the director could write with a formal proposal. The reporters ate it up. There was even another photographer snapping pictures. Apparently Humphrey didn’t need starlets any more. The snowball was gaining momentum.
I had shared in the general elation following Humphrey’s performance in Venice. This time I shared nothing, keenly aware of being the mistreated outsider. And so, not being intoxicated like the others, I was the only one who really noticed the little old man waiting outside the stage door, I was the only one who felt the shock of recognition, the only one who heard what he croaked into Humphrey’s preoccupied, uncomprehending ear.
Thus it was fear, not envy, that dulled my appetite in the restaurant later, though I’m sure Bridget and Luc thought otherwise. After months of eating cheap and longing for such a meal, I barely tasted the garlicky scampi, the osso bucco with its fresh piquant gremolata, the creamy rich subtlety of the rissotto a la Milanaise. Even the velvety zabaglione went down my unfeeling throat like so much lumpy tapioca.
“Very nice, very pretty and nice,” the impossible old man had cackled at Humphrey, ruining my dinner. “You do only one … listen, how you say? … only one mistake … You only forget the C sharp major.”
6
WE TRAVELED to Geneva in a first-class compartment. It was uncomfortably small, but the appurtenances were polished, the upholstery was pleasant to the touch, in good repair and not dusty in the least. The others watched as the sunny hills shed their soft complacent curves and cold angular mountains reared up in mist and dampness. I stared at the wall and sulked.
I was angry—and scared. During the night I had been awakened several times by bad dreams about the obnoxious old man. Who was he? What did he want from us? How could he possibly have known about the changes Luc had made in the music? Bridget and Luc had barely listened to me the night before when I told them what he had said after the two concerts, dismissing the incidents as trivial, nothing but misinterpretation on my part. Maybe they were right, but I still couldn’t stop thinking about it Music I had written, which we were passing off as the work of a mysterious and long-dead composer, had precipitated two unexplainable occurrences—and they told me it was just my imagination. Naturally I sulked.
But after an hour or so I began to tire of listening to Humphrey gloat over his latest reviews, so I picked up the Magyar book. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty he had roamed Europe with the gypsies, and on my first reading I had glanced only superficially at that particular chapter. Now I went back to study it in more detail.
The author made an attempt to describe the atmosphere of gypsy life and its influence on Magyar. There were deep forests in central Europe then. At night, the campfire would seem a small thing in the vast sighing darkness under the trees. The talk would be merry at first, as the wineskin made its way around the circle of half-lit, saturnine faces. But gradually the bright logs crumbled to hissing coals, and the stars, dimly perceived through the shifting blackness of the leaves, drifted across the sky, and the conversation drifted with them. This was the time for old family histories, for the trading of gypsy wisdoms and for ancient tribal tales.
Young Magyar did not say much, squatting on a pile of filthy rags at the outer edge of the group around the fire; but he listened and remembered. There was the tale of the white doe who sang with the voice of a woman, whose enchanted music promised to lead the unwary traveler to endless wealth. If he did follow—and it was said that no mortal man could resist her call—she would guide him to a treacherous bog and then vanish, leaving him to be swallowed slowly by the bubbling muck There was the tale of the wise woman’s daughter whose dancing was as fierce and delicate as flame. She performed with jangling bracelets and tambourine in the streets of large cities and was thrown a great deal of gold. She was faithful to her handsome lover and with the gold bought him silk shirts and velvet trousers and jeweled earrings. But one morning she awoke to find him gone, with his fancy clothes and all her gold. When she learned that he had betrayed her for a highborn lady, she returned to her mother, the wise woman. And within a year, the unfaithful lover’s teeth softened in his head, his face withered like a prune, his body grew stooped and feeble, and his skin blistered with pustulent sores. He died alone in a sewer among rats.
When it came to the story of the haunted violin, Magyar would forget to brush the spiders and bird droppings from his hair and would lean forward with special interest. This story was always told by one particular toothless crone. She had heard it in her youth from the only surviving member of the family who possessed the violin, a frail and sickly old man who, the storyteller claimed, actually played her a few notes on the legendary instrument This person’s great-great-grandfather Janos had had the violin made to order by the world-renowned violin builder, Sebastiano of Cremona. When Janos had gone early one morning to pick up the instrument, he found Sebastiano sprawled lifeless across his worktable, his body limp as overcooked pasta and curiously shrunken, as though some vital essence had been sucked out of him. His left hand grasped the neck of the violin, his cracked lips were pressed against one of the F holes. Apparently he had died in the act of making love to the thing. Janos pried the instrument out of the corpse’s hand, tucked it under his cloak and got away from the workshop as quic
kly as he could. Since he hadn’t yet paid for the violin, Sebastiano’s death was uncomfortably convenient for him, and he preferred not to be seen in the vicinity. Perhaps if he had left even one token gold piece in Sebastiano’s moist and cheesy palm, the price he was eventually to pay for the violin would not have been so dear. But perhaps it would have made no difference at all.
Not until he reached the safety of his own wagon in the gypsy campground on the outskirts of Cremona did he touch bow to string. An incredible note came forth, rich, warm, hypnotically intense. Hardly thinking, he let his fingers slip mechanically into a common gypsy tune. Normally Janos was only a mediocre violinist, but the music he produced with this violin was rapturous, transformed, more profoundly beautiful and significant than any music Janos had ever heard. When he finally brought himself to stop playing, after what seemed to him only a few minutes, half the day had gone by and it was almost evening.
He flung open the doors of his wagon and cried out to the others in the camp to come and listen. Naturally they were curious about the sound of the new instrument and soon a crowd had gathered. As soon as Janos began to play, he was so hypnotized by the thrilling, celestial music that he lost consciousness of everything else.
A large and slimy potato making contact with his right temple knocked him out of his trance. Reluctantly he lifted the bow from the string and looked around him with hurt, bewildered eyes. The camp was in an uproar. His listeners were gnashing their teeth, holding their ears, cursing, groaning, begging him to stop. Women and children were bending over being actively sick “But what’s the matter with everybody?” Janos cried out: “Didn’t you hear the music?”
“Music? Is that what you call it?” someone replied. “I didn’t hear any music.”
“It was like the sound of wagon wheels that have never been oiled!” cried someone else.
“No, no, it was like wildcats being slowly disemboweled!” insisted another.
“It caused every fiber of my body to vibrate with feverish loathing,” moaned a young woman, wiping her mouth. “May I never experience such sounds again.”
“Hear me, Janos,” announced an elder of the tribe. “If you again torment the air with such poison, may your hands blacken and wilt like fungi and your eardrums burn forever with the pain of flaming coals inside your head.”
This was something of a dilemma for Janos. To his own ears the music of the violin was so exquisitely, addictively pleasurable that already it was misery to refrain from playing the instrument. But apparently no one else found the music so enjoyable. Though Janos longed to ignore their ridiculous protest and play as he wished, he could not ignore the elder’s curse. To a gypsy, such pronouncements are very serious indeed.
The only solution was for Janos to spend as much time as possible out of earshot of everyone else. Naturally this solitary behavior resulted in his becoming more and more ostracized by the others—an unhappy situation for the gypsy, who is ostracized by the entire world and whose tribe is his only home. Janos soon became frail and sickly like a man addicted to wine who trembles when deprived of his bottle. On Janos’s death, the violin passed to his son.
For every generation it was the same. He who possessed the violin would be hopelessly obsessed by its music, while all others found it made only noise, intolerably repellent. Finally came Janos’s great-great-grandson—he who told the story to the old crone—who died without an heir. The instrument was not found beside his deathbed, nor was it in fact ever seen or heard again.
“And when he played it for you,” Magyar would ask the crone, “what did it sound like?”
“Ah,” she would croak, and pause to inhale deeply on her pipe, stroking the bowl with veined, arthritic fingers. “Ah, such a monstrous sound, like nothing I have heard before or since. Even now, after eighty years, the mere thought of it causes my bowel to writhe like a worm on a fishhook.”
“Yes, but what did it sound like?” Magyar would press her.
“Once I was privileged to observe the public execution of a witch” said the crone. “Though her neck was so tough that it took the headsman five strokes, she made no sound at all, until her head was finally severed from her body. When that happened, a kind of sour and whistling wail bubbled out of the exposed end of her throat and persisted for a full minute. That is the closest sound I can think of to the music of the haunted violin.”
“But why was the violin haunted?” Magyar would ask her, when he was still very young. “Was it because Janos did not pay for it, or was there another reason? And was it the Devil himself who made it haunted, or someone else?”
“Hush!” commanded the crone. “It is not for us to know the answers to such questions. We observe the patterns, and we accept.” And the group would move on quickly to other tales.
Magyar did come to believe that the forces of good and evil in the world—of God and the Devil if you like—were equally powerful and equally unpredictable. But unlike the old crone—who insisted that the pattern of one’s life was written on the hand in infancy and could not be changed—Magyar was never willing merely to accept. He loved the story of the haunted violin because of its depiction of the power of music. But he was at the same time appalled by the fatal helplessness of the characters, as well as by the unknowable mystery of the curse. The more he thought about it, the more determined he became that he would never be so helpless. He would take control of the power of music and any other powers that might be helpful and with them determine his own fate. And if this particular old crone did not possess the knowledge and the answers that he needed, then he would search out someone who did.
One autumn night, when Magyar had been with the gypsies for about a year, the group found themselves camped in the mountains, not far from an ancient castle with a sinister reputation. Glancing frequently over their shoulders, the elders traded stories of heads of enemies displayed like hunting trophies in the great hall, of elaborate mosaics made of eyeballs and sculptures of polished bone, of ritual feasts where the succulent flesh of human infants was devoured. Magyar was experienced enough to know that such stories become exaggerated over the years. Nevertheless, he was just as startled as any of the others when an intruder suddenly appeared out of the darkness.
The man lurched into the firelight, gasping for breath, one foot dragging painfully behind him, clutching against his stomach a bundle wrapped in rags. “Help me, please,” was all he managed to utter before he toppled into a puddle of mutton grease and vegetable peelings and lost consciousness.
Magyar’s mother had always been a hospitable woman, as well as more curious than most about the behavior of the Gaje, or non-gypsies. She and Laszlo dragged the stranger into the wagon they shared. She took the responsibility for nursing him back to health. The man’s leg was badly wounded, but he turned out to be a strikingly handsome young man. He stayed in the wagon with them for over a month.
The stranger awakened me to many things, and what I learned from him I shall carry with me for as long as my consciousness exists,” Magyar wrote about the experience. But to the dismay of his biographer, he never divulged the nature of what he learned, only that it was of profound importance. The only other reference the biographer made to the incident was to mention that the stranger had left the rag-wrapped package as a token of his appreciation. Apparently Magyar always kept it with him. But the biographer, despite a long and obsessive search, could find no indication anywhere of what it was the rags contained. It was shortly after this incident that the piano was mysteriously stolen on its way from Hamburg to Prague, and soon after that Magyar’s Gaje relatives began having fatal accidents.
The author of the biography made no attempt to analyze these events, leaving all interpretation up to the reader.
The chapter only made me more irritable than I had been before I read it. It was nothing but coincidental rubbish, and Magyar was merely a self-involved, not very talented eccentric with superstitious tendencies. Only a gullible moron could take seriously the implica tio
n that he had used some sort of supernatural power, devilish or otherwise, to kill off his relatives, achieve his fame and preserve his youthfulness. Only a retarded fool could imagine that he might be able to use the same power to effect events after his death, (if he had really died at all), or that the old man I had seen had anything to do with Magyar, or had some secret way of finding out about our hoax. A person would have to be even more stupid than Humphrey to waste one minute worrying about that kind of supernatural nonsense. I slammed the book shut and began struggling to pull open the window.
“Do you have to be so fidgety, Sam?” said Bridget, “What are you doing with the window?”
“Trying to open it, naturally.”
“Open it? But ifs so drafty in here already.”
The window refused to budge. “I just want to open it for a second, so I can get rid of this stupid piece of garbage. I’m sick of carrying it around.”
“That Magyar book? But you seem so fascinated by it. And you might need it.”
“It’s just a lot of made-up stuff, and it bores the hell out of me,” I said, still struggling with the recalcitrant window.
“But I don’t want you to throw it out,” whined Humphrey. There was a petulance in his voice that I had never noticed before. “I might want to read it someday.”
As if he were capable of reading anything more erudite than a comic strip! “Don’t make me laugh, Humphrey. There’s more than ten words on a page,” I said. But I shoved the book back into my bag.
GENEVA GLEAMED, white and clean, the air crisp, the lake like brightly polished glass. I felt as filthy and used-up as old bath water. A couple of English-speaking newsmen and a photographer met us at the station. Humphrey was so eager to get to them he almost knocked me down on the way out of the compartment He babbled happily at them on the platform while I struggled with luggage and porters. At the hotel, it turned out that there had been some mistake with the reservations made by Humphrey’s agent, and there was no bed for me. A narrow and flimsy folding cot with a mattress like cardboard was irritably jammed into the small space between the wall and Humphrey’s double bed. Not that I expected to sleep much anyway.
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