Violin Lessons

by Arnold Zable

  ‘My friends supplied me with cassettes and videos, and I took the violin back to Melbourne. I was shy to hold it again. It was very strange. My fingers did not move. Then it started coming. Now I must play. My wife goes twice a week to play bridge. First I play. Then I put on the DVDs and videos of Arabic musicians.

  ‘I listen to Umm Khultum, the great Egyptian singer. All the Arabic people loved her. They still love her, forty years after she has gone. When she goes deep into a song, it takes you. Completely. When she sings I must sing with her. Shout with her! Take my violin and play with her. God help me! Go crazy with her.

  ‘For forty years I did not listen. I was busy bringing up my children. Now I spend hours, upstairs, in my music room. I shut the door, turn down the lights, turn on the tape and lie on the sofa, and listen. You get inside the music, and the music gets inside you. You see? There is no politics in it. Only music. You are back with your friends, in Baghdad, in Ramat Gan, on Napoleon’s Hill. You are everywhere, and you are nowhere. You listen to each instrument, the oud, the duff, the cello, the flute and, of course, the violin. The instruments follow the singer like faithful servants. Ya Allah. It drives you crazy. Once I start, I cannot stop listening.’

  Naji leads me up a flight of stairs from the lounge to the upper floor. Unlike Blind Jamil’s spiral staircase the steps are spacious and polished. The music room is simply furnished with a sofa, a fold-back chair and built-in shelves stacked with CDs and cassettes. The room resembles a large cockpit. The windows slant outwards and a long desk runs the length of the room beneath them. It holds a CD player, cassette player, a turntable and a reel-to-reel recorder. Naji lays out jars of cashews and shelled almonds and offers me a whisky. He sits back at the controls and reaches for the violin.

  ‘Would you believe it? This is the instrument I bought from Blind Jamil more than sixty years ago. The man who restored it told me it is a copy of a Stradivarius. It is for sure over one hundred years old. You can tell that the neck has cracked from the pressure of the strings. My friend in Tel Aviv reinforced the neck with metal. Look, he did a great job. The neck is stronger. But with just a small crack a violin loses value. Each blemish affects the sound.

  ‘To be honest I am thinking of buying a new violin. I saw one the other day, without the case and bow, in St Petersburg, an antique shop in a lane off Collins Street. It is a French violin. It has a beautiful sound, but this one I will always keep.

  ‘I touch it and remember the day of my first lesson with Blind Jamil. He did not teach me the correct style of holding it. He was a poor man, and he had taught himself how to play. He held the violin between the thumb and forefinger against the webbing. Like this. You see? You can’t control the strings. The closeness to the neck restricts the movement of the fingers. I don’t know how he played so well with this method. Now I hold it with a gap. Like this. I have more control. I changed to this style when I began playing with Ansar el Musika. They corrected me.’

  He hands over the violin. His instrument brings out the desire to play. There is a lightness and resonance that I do not feel in my violin. I am embarrassed at my lack of artistry, and regret not having persisted with my lessons. I hand the violin back to Naji. He adjusts it on his shoulder. His fingers reach for the strings, and find their way to their places, tentatively at first, building up from uncertain beginnings. He closes his eyes. He is no longer present, but lost in the playing.

  As he plays my thoughts turn back to Mr Offman. I recall the fluency I developed after months of practice, the dread with which I approached the lessons, and the relief I felt when I stepped out an hour later. I recall scenes I had long forgotten, of Mr Offman standing beside me, showing me how a violin should be played, instructing me and then playing. Offman, like Naji now, in full flight, forgetting himself, before coming to a sudden landing and opening his eyes to a room in a rented house, far from the scenes of his musical triumphs.

  Naji is in a reverie. He bends over the violin and hums to the song he is playing. The music is hypnotic. It conveys me to long forgotten places. It awakens memories. I recall a recent remark of a friend I had not seen for decades. She had known Mr Offman and had read my account of him in the guise of Spielvogel. ‘You have got him right in some ways,’ she had said. ‘But he did not live in pre-war Vienna. Instead he performed for many years in the Middle East.’

  I began to make enquiries. All leads proved false until I did the obvious. I looked for the name in the phone book and found one Offman listed. A woman answered my call. ‘My name is Rose,’ she says. ‘My husband, Sam, was Felix’s son.’ It was the first time I had heard my violin teacher called Felix. I had always known him as Mr Offman. ‘My husband died two years ago,’ Rose says. ‘I know something of the family history, and I have photographs.’

  The photos are on the kitchen table when I arrive the following morning. The oldest is a portrait of Felix as a young man, violin in hand, in the city of Lodz, circa 1930. The next image is of Felix and his wife Julia in Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East as its French occupiers called it. Julia is radiant. Felix’s hair is black and slicked back. His face is unlined, his gaze direct and confident. He is dressed in a stylish suit, a dapper man at ease with the world.

  There is a photo taken in Tehran of Felix playing clarinet as a member of a jazz quintet, and a photo of a band clustered around a female lead singer, a dog sprawled on the carpet before them. There is a shot captioned ‘Tehran 1937’: Felix is bending over towards Julia, who is holding their newborn son on a hospital bed. The couple appear secure and relaxed, firmly bonded.

  Next is a photo of Felix squatting on the pavement in a Beirut street beside his three children. Felix’s young son, Sam, stands between Sonia and Mimi, identical twins with identical white bows in their hair. The girls are infants; the photo was taken in 1947.

  The final image is of the Mr Offman I knew. His hair is greying, receding to the point of balding. He looks ill at ease, his confidence eroded. The photo evokes memories of my dread as I approached the Rathdowne Street house for my lessons.

  Rose does not recall her father-in-law ever holding an instrument, neither clarinet nor violin. She never saw him seated at the piano, never heard him talk about music. Instead she has an enduring memory of him clutching a transistor to his ear, listening to the Saturday races, and bent over racing form guides, circling the names of horses. Her knowledge of his life is composed of fragments from conversations with her mother-in-law, Julia, who lived far longer than her husband.

  Felix Offman was born in the Polish city of Czestochowa, Julia in Lodz. Felix played violin, clarinet and piano; Julia, classical piano. Rose knows little of their early life at that time. In the 1930s they left for the Middle East. Rose believes that during the war Felix was interned for two years in the Syrian city of Aleppo. She knows no other details. Apart from this interlude they led a life as musicians with stays in Beirut, Tehran and other Middle Eastern cities.

  Sam and his father were both strong-willed men. They often argued. A child prodigy on piano, Sam had given up his music career at an early age, despite his love of performing. He never spoke of his father with emotion. He rarely spoke of him at all. Yes, Felix was an ill-tempered man, Rose affirms, a hard taskmaster, but she admired his straight-talking ways.

  Felix died in 1974. His daughters were overseas at the time. Sam helped carry the body out of the house with a member of the Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish burial society. Together they lifted him from the bed and placed him on a stretcher. Sam remained haunted for years by that final sight of his father, a frail man in pyjamas, stripped of his dignity in death as he had been stripped of his ambitions in life.

  Rose provides the phone number of Mr Offman’s daughter Mimi. The next afternoon I am again looking at black-and-white photos. Mimi regrets there are so few. I have not seen her since I stopped playing the violin. I recognise her and remember my first visit to the Rathdowne Street house, with my father, to be introduced to the music teacher.


  Mr Offman was on his best behaviour for the occasion. I had not yet signed up. He called in the twins to demonstrate their skills. Sonia and Mimi entered politely, sat side by side at the piano and obliged with a duet. I was impressed by their fluency, but I sensed an air of uneasiness in the room, the awkward silence that greeted them, and the silence when they stood up from the piano before quickly leaving. My memory of the incident is vivid. Mimi does not recall it.

  I lay out the photos like cards arranged for a hand of patience. Felix Offman stands at a microphone with two musicians in a Beirut cabaret on the Avenue des Francais; all three are clowning about. Felix plays the clarinet in a sextet in a nightclub. The band members are dressed in black bow ties and white tuxedoes. There are duplicates of photos Rose had shown me the previous day, and snaps of Julia and Felix in post-war Melbourne.

  I am astonished to hear that when her father was alive, Mimi didn’t know he had been a jazz musician. She had never known him to play in a band, or to play with anyone except his students. She knew him only as a classical violinist and pianist. She learned of his pre-war jazz career after his death. Just recently she too has become interested in jazz. She confirms that her father was an ill-tempered teacher who would rap her over the knuckles if her performance displeased him. After a time, she and her twin sister refused to be taught by him.

  Like Rose, Mimi knows only fragments of her parents’ pre-war life. Her mother once mentioned she had played piano for the silent movies in Lodz. She recalls nothing of her infancy in the Middle East, and has vague memories of their arrival in Melbourne in the final weeks of 1949.

  In common with many immigrants of the time, they were taken straight from the ship by train hundreds of kilometres inland to the migrant camp of Bonegilla. The men and women were separated and directed to army barracks. Her father was assigned to a gang of road workers. He had asked to be allowed to wear gloves to protect his musician’s hands. He had beautiful hands, says Mimi. The workers laughed at him.

  After a year’s stay, the family moved from Bonegilla to the city, and lived for a time in a rented room in Brunswick. Felix worked as a machinist in a hosiery factory and ran a clothing stall in the Victoria market. He taught piano and violin after the family shifted into the house on Rathdowne Street, but the fees for the lessons did not provide enough income. Felix gave up teaching and the family moved to Ascot Vale where the Offmans ran a milk bar.

  ‘My name is Felix, but call me Fred,’ became Offman’s standard greeting when customers entered. It was about this time that he stopped playing music. Mimi recalls his moodiness and outbursts of anger, upending the table and sending dishes flying, and his growing obsession with betting.

  Mimi’s sense of her father oscillates. He was remote. She respected him. He was a strict disciplinarian. She loved him. She was afraid of him. She was close to him, but he rarely spoke to her. Her twin sister Sonia, I find out later, recalls a little more: of once coming upon Felix playing violin, alone, lost in his performing; of their home in Beirut, a large house with a veranda; of being wheeled in a pram by the beachside and across a boulevard lined with palm trees. Good times. But she too was wary of her father’s temper.

  What does Mimi know of the ancestors? Felix had four brothers and two sisters in Poland. The sisters were married and had children of their own. Felix had performed in a band. Or was it an orchestra? Felix and Julia wanted to return to Lodz in 1937 to show off their infant son, but the news was not good. The clouds of war were looming. It was too dangerous to risk the journey.

  Felix never spoke of his internment in Aleppo. Or was it Beirut? It was during the war. Or was it later? He never talked about the past. Julia had mentioned it. He was separated from his family and held for over a year. Or was it seven months? That’s all Mimi recalls. Her parents never explained it. Or perhaps she does not remember. The matter remains veiled in mystery, a black hole in the Offmans’ Middle East sojourn. She does know that when the war ended Felix learned that his parents and siblings had perished in Auschwitz.

  There are two objects that may throw more light on the story, Mimi says, as an afterthought. She retrieves two framed pieces from the wall and places them on the table. The smaller frame encloses a business card. Felix Offman’s name is printed in Arabic and English, his vocation listed as saxophoniste. The larger frame encloses an A4-sized sheet of business stationery. In the top left-hand corner is a passport-sized shot of Felix, captioned ‘Chef D’Orchestra, F. Offman’. The letterhead reads, ‘Felo and his Swingers, Baghdad, 21/3/1938’.

  This last shard of information arrests me. I have found the point the storyteller yearns for, the moment a tale yields its symmetry and attains an unexpected harmony. Mr Offman, my violin teacher, who had led me via a circuitous route to Naji Cohen, had lived and performed in Baghdad at about the same time that Naji had stopped beneath the balcony, transfixed by the playing of Blind Jamil. Perhaps all stories if pursued will eventually yield their symmetries, their unexpected meanings.

  Then again, perhaps this is the storyteller’s illusion, an innate longing to make sense of life’s fragility and chaos, to contrive order out of what is in reality a play of chance. Does it matter? Perhaps it is enough to tell the story.

  There is one other vital fragment in Mr Offman’s story, an observation made by Rose, his daughter-in-law. Just months before his death in 2008, from Parkinson’s disease, Sam Offman was on weekend leave from a nursing home. His movement was severely restricted. He could no longer play the violin or piano, yet music remained his great passion.

  That Saturday afternoon he was lying on a couch in the living room, while his son Arieh was in the kitchen. Sam turned to his wife and said, ‘Rosie, get my father’s violin.’

  ‘The violin?’ Rose replied. ‘You can’t even hold a fork.’

  ‘Bring me the violin.’ Sam insisted.

  She handed the encased instrument to him, and with great effort he squeezed it between his right leg and the back of the couch, to conceal it. It took five minutes to complete the task. When the case was finally in place he asked Rose to bring his son Arieh to him. An accomplished musician, Arieh plays violin, mandolin, clarinet, guitar and classical piano, and composes.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but there is something I would like to give you,’ Sam replied.

  He reached down with shaking hands and grasped the case by the handle. With strenuous effort he lifted it and turned towards Arieh. ‘Put your hands out,’ he instructed.

  ‘This is your grandfather’s violin. It’s the most precious thing I have of my father’s. I know he would love you to have it, and I know he would love me to give it to you. He brought it with him from Lebanon. He played it with such finesse. I would like you to have it. I want you to have it now.’

  The Dust of Life

  In mid-January 1970, I arrived in Phnom Penh after a flight from Saigon. I rented a room in a travellers’ hotel, but could not sit still. I was anxious to keep moving, as I had been for many weeks now.

  I left my backpack on the floor and found my way down to the banks of the Tonle Sap River where a fisherman sat cross-legged mending his nets. Behind him, fishing boats swayed at their moorings beside thatched houses built over the shallows. I was taken by his unhurried movements, his quiet deliberation. He lifted his eyes as if all along he had been aware of my presence. I cannot recall how we spoke—perhaps in the broken French I owed to my high school studies—but I understood his invitation to accompany him that night to his fishing grounds.

  With hours to spare before we were to set off, I walked along the river. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had found what I was looking for: a riverside teahouse, and a table with a view of the water. I started writing as soon as I was seated, spurred by a need to unburden myself of what I had witnessed in the past weeks in Vietnam.

  Hours later, the lanterns in the teahouse had been lit and I was still writing, lost to a sequence of events that had begun when I
boarded a plane in the southern Laotian city of Pakse bound for Saigon. We flew in a DC3, ‘a collection of parts flying in loose formation’ as it has been called, the nuts and bolts rattling, the engines grinding east over the border into South Vietnam.

  The impact of the war, a certain kind of war, was soon apparent. In dried-up pockmarked paddies, and in swathes of field and forest scorched by chemical bombardment, trees denuded by defoliants, stripped of their bark just as napalm sears skin back to raw tissue. Blackened tracts of land were interspersed with surviving patches of forest, and somewhere beneath me I imagined them: Vietcong units moving in a network of tunnels, wielding machetes to cut through dense undergrowth and wading in the muddy waters of rice paddies, stalking the enemy, perhaps pausing to listen to the old workhorse of the air droning above them.

  Nature itself was an enemy in this new era of warfare. The theory was simple. If the forests were removed, the guerillas would be denied their natural advantage.

  The DC3 was rattling over a land where war had raged unabated for decades. This was my plan: to go in quickly, see the madness and get out before I incurred any damage. Twenty-year-olds in my country were subject to conscription and, since I could have been one of those conscripted if my birth date had come up in the lottery, I felt compelled to see it. At least, that was how I justified the journey, how I defined it. Only later did I begin to suspect there were other reasons for the venture.

  Within hours of landing I was walking the streets of Saigon: a city of tree-lined boulevards, cathedrals and villas designed and built during decades of French occupation, now a ragged metropolis, overtaken by an under-class scavenging for survival, many in the service of troops on Rest and Recreation.

  There was little sign of rest, but streets and alleys teeming with enterprises that flourish during times of war: black-market exchanges, bars and nightclubs tailored to the tastes of the occupying armies, hotels, from five star luxury to shabby hostels that doubled as bordellos. Never before had I seen so many people disfigured and crippled: maimed peasants and war veterans, men in wheelchairs, double amputees on improvised trolleys, invalids sitting in doorways and gutters, immobile, eyes barely flickering, staring at the flow of the city about them, at countless bicycles and trishaws careering between cars and trucks, motorbikes and military convoys.