Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  I must be honest and admit to you that if the dislike at our first encounter was immediate, it was also entirely on my side. I do not imagine that Herr Sigerson concerned himself in the least over my good opinion, nor that he was even momentarily offended by not having it. He accepted the insulting wage St. Radomir could offer him as indifferently as he accepted my awe—yes, also admitted—when, by way of audition, he performed the Chevalier St-Georges’s horrendously difficult Etude in A Major at my kitchen table, following it with something appropriately diabolical by Paganini. I told him that there was an attic room available at the Widow Ridnak’s for next to nothing, upon which he thanked me courteously enough and rose to leave without another word, only turning at the door when I spoke his name.

  “Herr Sigerson? Do you suppose that you might one day reveal to me your personal reasons for burying your considerable gifts in this particular corner of nowhere? I ask, not out of vulgar inquisitiveness, but simply as one musician to another.”

  He smiled then—I can quite exactly count the times when I ever saw him do such a thing. It was a very odd entity, that smile of his: not without mirth (there was wit and irony in the man, if not what I would call humor), but just below the slow amusement of his lips I felt—rather than saw—a small scornful twist, almost a grimace of contempt. Your Herr Sigerson does not really like human beings very much, does he? Music, yes.

  “Herr Takesti,” he replied, graciously enough, “please understand that such reasons as I may have for my presence here need in no way trouble St. Radomir. I have no mission, no ill purpose—no purpose at all, in fact, but only a deep desire for tranquility, along with a rather sentimental curiosity concerning the truest wellsprings of music, which do not lie in Vienna or Paris, but in just such backwaters and in such underschooled orchestras as yours.” I was deciding whether to rise indignantly to the defense of my town, even though his acid estimate was entirely accurate, when he went on, the smile slightly warmer, “And, if you will permit me to say so, while I may have displaced the first violin—” for I had already so informed him; why delay the plainly unavoidable?—“the conductor will find me loyal and conscientious while I remain in St. Radomir.” Whereupon he took his leave, and I stood in my doorway and watched his tall figure casting its gaunt shadow ahead of him as he made his way down the path to the dirt road that leads to the Widow Ridnak’s farm. He carried a suitcase in one hand, his violin case in the other, and he was whistling a melody that sounded like Sarasate. Yes, I believe it was Sarasate.

  I had mentioned a rehearsal that night, but neither asked nor expected him to attend, only a few hours off the train. I cannot even remember telling him how to find the local beer hall where we have always rehearsed; yet there he was, indifferently polite as ever, tuning up with the rest of the strings. I gave a short, awkward speech, introducing our new first violin to the orchestra (at my prompting, he offered the transparently false Christian name of Oscar), and adding that, from what I had heard at my kitchen table, we could only gain from his accession to my former chair. Most of them were plainly disgruntled by the announcement—a flute and a trombone even wept briefly—which I found flattering, I must confess. But I reassured them that I had every intention of continuing as their devoted guide and leader, and they did seem to take at least some solace from that pledge. No orchestra is ever one big, happy family, but we were all old comrades, which is decidedly better for the music. They would quickly adapt to the changed situation.

  In fact, they adapted perhaps a trifle too quickly for my entire comfort. Within an hour they were exclaiming over Sigerson’s tone and his rhythmic sense, praising his dynamics as they never had mine—no, this is not jealousy, simply a fact—and already beginning to chatter about the possibility of expanding our increasingly stale repertoire, of a single fresh and innovative voice changing the entire character of the orchestra. Sigerson was modest under their admiration, even diffident, waving all applause away; for myself, I spoke not at all, except to bring the rehearsal back into order when necessary. We dispersed full of visions—anyway, they did. I recall that a couple of the woodwinds were proposing the Mozart Violin Concerto, which was at least conceivable; and that same trombone even left whispering, “Symphonie Fantastique,” which was simply silly. He had them thinking like that, you see, in one rehearsal, without trying.

  And we did make changes. Of course we did. You exploit the talent you have available, and Sigerson’s presence made it possible for me to consider attempting works a good bit more demanding than the Greater Bornitz Orchestra had performed in its entire career. No, I should have said, “existence.” Other orchestras have careers. We are merely happy still to be here.

  Berlioz, no. They cannot play what he wrote in Paris, London, Vienna—how then in St. Radomir? Beethoven, no, not even with an entire string section of Sigersons. But Handel … Haydn … Mozart … Telemann … yes, yes, the more I thought of it, there was never any real reason why we could not cope decently with such works; it was never anything but my foolish anxiety—and, to be fair to myself, our national inferiority complex, if we are even a nation at all. Who are we, in darkest Selmira, operetta Selmira, joke Selmira, comically backward Selmira, Selmira the laughingstock of bleakly backward Eastern Europe—or so we would be, if anyone knew exactly where we were—to imagine ourselves remotely capable of producing real music? Well, by God, we were going to imagine it, and if we made fools of ourselves in the attempt, what was new in that? At least we would be a different sort of fools than we had been. St. Radomir, Bornitz, Selmira … they would never have seen such fools.

  That was the effect he had on us, your Mr. Sigerson, and whatever I think of him, for that I will always be grateful. True to his word, he made absolutely no effort to supplant my musical judgment with his own, or to subvert my leadership in any way. There were certainly those who sought him out for advice on everything from interpretation to fingering to modern bowing technique, but for all but the most technical matters he always referred them back to me. I think that this may have been less an issue of loyalty than of complete lack of interest in any sort of authority or influence—as I knew the man, that simply was not in him. He seemed primarily to wish to play music, and to be let alone. And which desire had priority, I could not have told you, then or now.

  Very well. You were asking me about the incident which, in my undoubtedly perverse humor, I choose to remember as The Matter of the Uxorious Cellist. Sigerson and I were allies—ill-matched ones, undoubtedly, but allies nonetheless—in this unlikely affair, and if we had not been, who’s to say how it might have come out? On the other hand, if we had left it entirely alone … well, judge for yourself. Judge for yourself.

  The Greater Bornitz Municipal Orchestra has always been weak in the lower strings, for some reason—it is very nearly a tradition with us. That year we boasted, remarkably, four cellists, two of them rather wispy young women who peeped around their instruments with an anxious and diffident air. The third, however, was a burly Russo-Bulgarian named Volodya Andrichev: blue-eyed, blue-chinned, wild-haired, the approximate size of a church door (and I mean an Orthodox church here), possessed of—or by—an attack that should by rights have set fire to his score. He ate music, if you understand me; he approached all composition as consumption, from Liszt and Rossini, at which he was splendid, to Schumann, whom he invariably left in shreds, no matter how I attempted to minimize his presence or conceal it outright. Nevertheless, I honored his passion and vivacity; and besides, I liked the man. He had the snuffling, shambling charm of the black bears that still wander our oak forests as though not entirely sure what they are doing there, but content enough nonetheless. I quite miss him, as much time as it’s been.

  His wife, Lyudmilla Plaschka, had been one of our better woodwinds, but retired on the day of their wedding, that being considered the only proper behavior for a married woman in those times. She was of Bohemian extraction, I believe: a round, blond little person, distinctly appealing to a particular taste.
I remember her singing (alto) with her church choir, eyes closed, hands clasped at her breast—a godly picture of innocent rapture. Yet every now and then, in the middle of a Bach cantata or some Requiem Mass, I would see those wide blue eyes come open, very briefly, regarding the tenor section with the slightest pagan glint in their corners. Basses, too, but especially the tenors. Odd, the detail with which these things come back to you.

  He adored her, that big, clumsy, surly Andrichev, even more than he loved his superb Fabregas cello, and much in the same manner, since he plainly felt that both of them were vastly too good for him. Absolute adoration—I haven’t encountered much of that in my life, not the real thing, the heart never meant for show that can’t help showing itself. It was a touching thing to see, but annoying as well on occasion: during rehearsal, or even performance, I could always tell when his mind was wandering off home to his fluffy golden goddess. Played the devil with his vibrato every time, I can tell you.

  To do her justice—very reluctantly—she had the decency, or the plain good sense, to avoid involvements with any of her husband’s colleagues. As I have implied, she preferred fellow singers to instrumentalists anyway; and as Andrichev could not abide any sort of vocal recital (“Better cats on a back fence,” he used to roar, “better a field full of donkeys in heat”), her inclinations and his rarely came into direct conflict. Thus, if we should chance to be performing in, say, Krasnogor, whose distance necessitates an overnight stay, while she was making merry music at home with Vlad, the clownish basso, or it might be Ruska, that nasal, off-key lyric tenor (there was a vibrato you could have driven a droshky through) … well, whatever the rest of us knew or thought, we kept our mouths shut. We played our Smetana and our Gilbert and Sullivan medley, and we kept our mouths shut.

  I don’t know when Andrichev found out, nor how. I cannot even say how we all suddenly knew that he knew, for his shy, growling, but essentially kindly manner seemed not to change at all with the discovery. The music told us, I think—it became even fiercer, more passionate—angrier, in short, even during what were meant to be singing legato passages. I refuse to believe, even now, that any member of the Greater Bornitz Orchestra would have informed him. We were all fond of him, in our different ways; and in this part of the world we tend not to view the truth as an absolute, ultimate good, but as something best measured out in a judiciously controlled fashion. It could very well have been one of his wife’s friends who betrayed her—even one of her playmates with a drink too many inside him. I don’t suppose it matters now. I am not sure that I would want to know, now.

  In any event, this part of the world offers certain traditional options in such a case. A deceived husband has the unquestioned right—the divine right, if you like—to beat his unfaithful wife as brutally as his pride demands, but he may not cut her nose or ears off, except perhaps in one barbarous southern province where we almost never perform. He may banish her back to her family—who will not, as a rule, be at all happy to see her—or, as one violist of my acquaintance did, allow her to stay in his home, but on such terms … Let it go. We may play their music, but we are not altogether a Western people.

  But Andrichev did none of these things. I doubt seriously that he ever confronted Lyudmilla with her infidelity, and I know that he never sought out any of her lovers, all of whom he could have pounded until the dust flew, like carpets on a clothesline. More and more withdrawn, drinking as he never used to, he spent most of his time at practice and rehearsal, clearly taking shelter in Brahms and Tschaikovsky and Grieg, and increasingly reluctant to go home. Often he wound up staying the night with one Grigori Progorny—our fourth cellist, a competent enough technician and the nearest he had to an intimate—or with me, or even sprawled across three chairs in that cold, empty beer hall, always clutching his cello fiercely against him as he must have been used to holding his wife. None of us ever expressed the least compassion or fellow feeling for his misery. He would not have liked it.

  Sigerson was perfectly aware of the situation—for all his air of being concerned solely with tone and tempo and accuracy of phrasing, I came to realize that he missed very little of what was going on around him—but he never commented on it; not until after a performance in the nearby town of Ilyagi. Our gradually expanding repertoire was winning us both ovations and new bookings, but I was troubled even so. Andrichev’s playing that evening had been, while undeniably vigorous, totally out of balance and sympathy with the requirements of Schubert and Scriabin, and even the least critical among us could not have helped but notice. On our way home, bumping and lurching over cowpaths and forest trails in the two wagons we still travel in, Sigerson said quietly, “I think you may have to speak with Mr. Andrichev.”

  Most of the others were asleep, and I needed to confide in someone, even the chilly Herr Sigerson. I said, “He suffers. He has no outlet for his suffering but the music. I do not know what to do, or what to say to him. And I will not discharge him.”

  Surprisingly, Sigerson smiled at me in the near darkness of the wagon. A shadowy, stiff smile, it was, but a smile nevertheless. “I never imagined that you would, Herr Takesti. I am saying only”—and there he hesitated for a moment—“I am saying that if you do not speak to him, something perhaps tragic is quite likely to happen. What you may say is not nearly as important as the fact that he knows you are concerned for him. You are rather a forbidding person, concertmaster.”

  “I?” I demanded. I was absolutely stunned. “I am forbidding? There is no one, no one, in this orchestra who cannot come to me—who has not come to me—under any circumstances to discuss anything at all at any time. You know this yourself, Herr Sigerson.” Oh, how well I remember how furious I was. Forbidding, indeed—this from him!

  The smile only widened; it even warmed slightly. “Herr Takesti, this is perfectly true, and I would never deny it. Anyone may come to you, and welcome—but you do not yourself go out to them. Do you understand the difference?” After another momentary pause, while I was still taking this in, he added, “We are more alike than you may think, Herr Takesti.”

  The appalling notion that there might be some small truth in what he said kept me quiet for a time. Finally, I mumbled, “I will speak to him. But it will be no help. Believe me, I know.”

  “I believe you.” Sigerson’s voice was almost gentle—totally unnatural for that querulous rasp of his. “I have known men like Andrichev, in other places, and I fear that the music will not always be outlet enough for what is happening to him. That is all I have to say.”

  And so it was. He began humming tunelessly to himself, which was another annoying habit of his, and he was snoring away like the rest by the time our horses clumped to a stop in front of their stable. Everyone dispersed, grumbling sleepily, except Andrichev, who insisted on sleeping in the wagon, and grew quite excited about it. He would have frozen to death, of course, which I think now was what he wanted, and perhaps a mercy, but I could not allow it. Progorny eventually persuaded him to come home with him, where he drank mutely for the rest of the night and slept on the floor all through the next day. But he was waiting for me at rehearsal that evening.

  What are you expecting? I must ask you that at this point. Are you waiting for poor Herr Andrichev to kill his wife—to stab or shoot or strangle the equally pitiable Lyudmilla Plaschka—or for her to have him knocked on the head by one of her lovers and to run off with that poor fool to Prague or Sofia? My apologies, but none of that happened. This is what happened.

  It begins with the cello: Andrichev’s Fabregas, made in Lisbon in 1802, not by Joao, the old man, but by his second son Antonio, who was better. One thinks of a Fabregas as a violin or a guitar, but they made a handful of cellos, too, and there are none better anywhere, and few as good; the rich, proud, tender sound is surely unmistakable in this world. And what in God’s own name Volodya Andrichev was doing with a genuine Fabregas I have no more idea than you, to this day. Nor can I say why I never asked him how he came by such a thing—perhaps
I feared that he might tell me. In any event, it was his, and he loved it second only to Lyudmilla Plaschka, as I have said. And that cello, at least, truly returned his love. You would have to have heard him, merely practicing scales in his little house on a winter morning, to understand.

  So, then—the cello. Now, next—early that fall, Lyudmilla fell ill. Suddenly, importantly, desperately ill, according to Progorny; Andrichev himself said next to nothing about it to the rest of us, except that it was some sort of respiratory matter. Either that, or a crippling, excruciating intestinal aliment; at this remove, such details are hard to recall, though I am sure I would be able to provide them had I liked Lyudmilla better. As it was, I felt concern only—forgive an old man’s unpleasant frankness—for Andrichev’s concern for her, which seemed in a likely way to destroy his career. He could not concentrate at rehearsal; the instinctive sense of cadence, of pulse, which was his great strength, fell to ruin; his bowing went to pieces, and his phrasing—always as impulsive as a fifteen-year-old in June—became utterly erratic, which, believe me, is the very kindest word I can think of. On top of all that, he would instantly abandon a rehearsal—or, once, in God’s name, a performance!—because word had been brought to him that Lyudmilla’s illness had taken some awful turn. I could have slaughtered him without a qualm and slept soundly afterward; so you may well imagine what I thought of Lyudmilla Plaschka. Murderous fancies or not, of course I favored him. Not because he suffered more than she—who ever knows?—but because he was one of us. Like that—like us. It comes down to that, at the last.