Uncle Rudolf

by Paul Bailey

  —It would seem that Monsieur Georges Enesco is correct in his judgement of your singing ability. He wrote me a letter recommending you as a pupil.

  —I sang for him in Bucharest, Master. At the Conservatoire.

  (How easily, how naturally, that Master, that Maitre, had come to him.)

  —I know of his skills as a violinist. He is a composer also, I believe. I should imagine that his music is too modern, too new, for my old ears. Do you have money, Monsieur Petrescu?

  —Not very much, Master.

  —I am not asking out of avarice. Let us be practical. Can you afford to remain in Nice for, shall we say, six months?

  —No, Master.

  —That is a problem – a purely financial problem – we shall have to solve.

  It was solved by Jean de Reszke quietly and discreetly, with Mme Barrière informing my uncle that his bill had been paid as far ahead as May. At Christmas, Louis Vachet handed him an envelope containing a small present from the master.

  —Three thousand francs, Andrew. It was a fortune.

  The lessons began each morning at nine precisely. The master descended the stairs, his paunch preceding him, with Koko on his shoulder.

  —He spoke in French, and very occasionally said something in his native Polish, but there was one English word, and one only, that he loved. It was ‘belly’. He would pat his stomach and say ‘Mon belly’ and then he’d laugh out loud. ‘Mon belly, Monsieur Petrescu. C’est énorme.’

  He taught my uncle not to declaim, because he considered declaiming unnatural. In the real world, preachers and politicians declaim, but ordinary people converse. He advised him to cultivate a love of the word – ‘l’amour de la parole’ – since singing is not concerned with music alone. A beautiful noise is merely a beautiful noise. And he reminded him that human feelings are subtle and varied and should be afforded subtle and varied expression. He had never wept on stage, nothing so vulgar, but he had made audiences weep, in all modesty, by shading his voice with sadness or melancholy or sorrow.

  —It is common to think that tenors are stupid, Monsieur Petrescu. That they have a vacant space where their brains should be. And out of that vacant space emerges the lovely tenor sound. You must prove the cynics wrong, as I once did. I sang with my head and my brains, as you must do. Your head notes are good, but you have intelligence also. Give me the opportunity to appreciate both.

  Uncle Rudolf often spoke wistfully of the days he spent at the villa, of the purple clematis and yellow mimosa blossoming in abundance that spring. He chuckled at the memory of Koko’s screech, which he first mimicked for me while I was still a little boy. He was at his most eloquent, however, when he talked of Jean de Reszke’s gentlemanly reticence in the face of suffering. The sweet-tempered perfectionist was in mourning for his beloved brother, Edouard, the great bass baritone – the Mephistopheles to his Faust; the Frère Laurent to his Romeo – who had died in 1916, and for his only son, Jean, who was killed by a stray bullet in Flanders in June 1918, after surviving the battle of the Marne. These were private griefs, not to be shared with his pupils, of whom M. Petrescu was the one the master had singled out for a more-than-promising future.

  Life at Villa Vergemère was largely peaceful and productive, with the master receiving loving support from Louis Vachet, and the American musicologist Amherst Webber, who frequently and patiently accompanied his students at the piano, and from his niece Minia, who adored him as her second father. Rudi Petrescu was at ease with them, and they with him, for they sensed that he was fired by the proper kind of ambition. In those classes, and there were many, when the master did not feel compelled to say bien, the young Romanian did not sulk or fret, as others had. He persevered, as he was meant to do, with the task the master set him. It was the simplest of tasks, and yet the most difficult – to give each word in a song or aria its necessary meaning. There was a French sound, and a German sound, and an Italian sound, and M. Petrescu – the formality of this manner of addressing him did not exclude warmth – must learn, as he had learnt, how to make himself French or German or Italian and not with sound alone. M. Petrescu was to follow the example of actors, who had no music to hide behind. He was to imagine he was speaking what he was, in fact, singing.

  There was one person in the villa, one very important person, who did not care for M. Petrescu. He, in turn, did not understand why she treated him with such sustained animosity. It was Mme de Reszke’s habit to appear out of nowhere, in a room that seemed to be solely occupied by the master, the pianist and the pupil. She would emerge from behind an unoccupied chair – had she been crouching like a cat, ready to pounce on her prey? – with a cry of ‘Toujours les élèves’ and then storm out, banging the door loudly. She cared for none of the students, it was true, but only Rudi Petrescu inspired her to be openly vindictive. Sometimes she was rendered speechless in his presence, shaking an angry fist in his direction, as if to compensate for the insult she was unable to hurl at him.

  It was the tactful Louis Vachet who offered him an explanation for her curious behaviour. M. Petrescu must understand that Madame had been gravely upset by the death of her son. So had the master, of course, but it was in his nature to be stoical – on the surface, at least. On receiving the terrible news, Madame had become hysterical, completely and utterly hysterical. Doctors were called in to tend to her. There was a fear, a genuine fear on the master’s part, that she might have gone mad. One of the doctors had even suggested that Madame might be placed in an institution, so alarming were the symptoms she was displaying. But that solution, if solution it was, had been averted, thanks be to God, and Madame was now on the way to recovery. She had not been happy with the master’s decision to move from Paris to Nice, and she was not pleased he had resumed his career as a teacher. She was uncomfortable in the company of youth. It was not M. Petrescu himself who caused her to be impolite, it was the very fact of his youthfulness. M. Jean had died young, in an absurd circumstance, and M. Petrescu was alive. M. Jean had been a talented painter, and M. Petrescu was a talented singer and her husband’s protégé.

  —Try not to be too disturbed by Madame. Consider what I have told you, Monsieur Petrescu, and stay calm, if that is possible.

  When Uncle Rudolf heard, a few years later, that Madame de Reszke had not been with the master as he was dying – Minia was with him, and Louis Vachet, and Amherst Webber – he was confirmed in his suspicion that theirs had been a loveless marriage. Jean had wanted to marry Natalie Potocka and she him, but her nobleman father would not countenance a union between his daughter and a man who appeared on the stage in public. Natalie and Jean were to meet at intervals, and on each occasion it was pitifully clear to both of them their love for each other hadn’t waned. Natalie would die unmarried.

  Rudi Petrescu was grateful for those days at the villa when Madame wasn’t lurking behind the furniture; when he could sing the Flower Song from Carmen with only the consummate Don José of the 1890s to interrupt him. And Koko, too. How could he possibly forget or ignore Koko, his sharpest, loudest critic? The master guided him through the Flower Song – word by word; note by note – for the entire month of February, on the very last day of which he received a bien so fulsome and generous that he nearly wept.

  —I did weep, actually, Andrew darling. On the Promenade des Anglais. I stopped walking and cried for joy.

  Jean de Reszke was beaming at him when he arrived for his class at nine o’clock precisely on the fourth of March, 1920.

  —You have a visitor, Monsieur Petrescu.

  —Where, Master? asked my uncle, seeing no one else in the room.

  —Go to the piano.

  He did as instructed and found the score of Don Giovanni opened at Dalla sua pace.

  —Don Ottavio is your visitor. He has been absent since last November, when you had the impertinence to sing on his behalf. He took offence and vanished. He has returned in a more optimistic frame of mind.

  —Do you think he will stay, Master?

/>   —We shall endeavour, between us, to persuade him to do so.

  And persuade him they did, over six long weeks compounded in equal measure of frustration and enlightenment. Bien remained unspoken. Koko screeched twice, though not on the same day. A whole morning was devoted – and devoted it was, in the highest sense, my uncle acknowledged – to the phrase morte mi dà.

  In June 1920, Rudi Petrescu appeared as Don Ottavio in a student production of Don Giovanni in a small opera house in Nice. He was the one member of the cast to achieve fame.

  In my waking hours I was Andrew, because that was what everyone called me. I was Andrew as I dutifully munched burnt toast at breakfast and I was still Andrew when Annie bathed me and helped me into my pyjamas and tucked me up in bed. It was Andrew who listened to stories about giants and goblins and animals who talked like people, and it was as Andrew that I fell asleep. My bedroom door would be left ajar, with a chink of light coming from the passage to remind me I was in a safe place.

  In dreams I became Andrei again, as often as not, running across the wonderful carpet in search of Mama and Tata, whose backs I could make out somewhere in the far distance. Why did they never stop for me? I shouted after them. I am Andrei; I screamed, I am Andrei, your son. But they never turned to look at me, and they kept on walking away, further and further away, until even the sight of their backs was denied me. I was blinded by whiteness.

  The Andrei I became in dreams was not always the same happy Andrei who had clutched his mother’s skirts and marvelled at the pictures in his father’s magazine. This Andrei was not to be comforted by his parents, who were either walking away from him or frighteningly absent. The cabbage soup he tried to eat in the snow had frozen over, and the spoon in his hand was unable to crack its surface. The Virgin in the icon came to cackling life, dropping the baby Jesus at his feet. The holy child broke into tiny pieces, as if he were a doll, and it proved impossible to put him together again. The pieces were resistant to Andrei’s touch.

  —That’s the Debt Collector’s daughter (sneered the woman in the market) striking a hard bargain.

  And then I heard my mother’s sobs, and awoke with my own.

  —There, there, my darling, whispered my uncle, retrieving me from the sheet in which I was entangled. You are here with me, in London. No harm will come to you, I promise. Your uncle loves you, my little angel.

  He lifted me up in his arms and carried me to his bedroom, where he set me down on his vast double bed. He took off his dressing-gown and lay beside me.

  —Let me cuddle you to sleep.

  I was living between two languages, the old words and the new. At the age of eight, as I was soon to be, I was not in possession of a vocabulary that could encompass either Andrew’s feelings of wonderment or Andrei’s confusion at having been abandoned. There were times during the day when the wondering Andrew would be seized by a numb, wordless despair that had to be Andrei’s, so blindingly white was it, so redolent of the snow that transformed the huts of peasants into igloos. It was Andrew, not Andrei, who asked his uncle to please sing Waft her, angels, as his special present on his eighth birthday, and it would be Andrew who requested it again and again, until Uncle Rudolf – bored at last – sang Dalla sua pace for him, as he had once sung it in the enormous room at Villa Vergemère, with its view of the Mediterranean, for the fastidious and demanding Jean de Reszke.

  The dreams persisted, with the helpless, lost Andrei for ever in pursuit of his departing parents. The Virgin Mary scoffed, and the infant Jesus – the saviour of my mother’s world – was so many shards of china or clay. Sometimes the woman in the market kept her peace, and sometimes she didn’t. Then the old woodman Mircea said Wickedness, wickedness as he had done that icy morning when Tata and I had fled the town, and then one night his ancient horse was there, clouding the air with his foul breath, and opening his yellow mouth wider and wider the better to gobble me up. My head was in the grip of his rotting teeth when the chink of light from the passage came to remind the screaming Andrew that all was safe.

  Uncle Rudolf removed my pyjamas, which were damp with the chill sweat of terror, and lowered me gently into his bed. It was a very hot summer night. I was naked now, and so was he, and as I lay enfolded in his hairy embrace, I felt comforted and calmed. My protector: I knew that’s what he was long before the word was mine to use. When I slept alongside him, I was the Andrew he had deemed me to be, the nephew he had chosen to protect. Protect me from what? He would tell me, in time, of the legal problems he had had to combat and overcome in order to keep me with him in England – the documents he’d had to sign; the endless wrangling with solicitors and lawyers. It had been his impossible task to explain to those blinkered individuals, whose knowledge of the Europe beyond their shores was restricted to French accordion players and onion sellers, Germans in lederhosen eating sauerkraut, and lecherous Italians consuming ice cream, that the country of his birth was not a suitable place for a sensitive boy to be raised in. The orphaned Andrei Petrescu had no future, no civilized future, there. How could he have? He implored them to consider the reason why he had brought the child to London and safety. He talked of the forest, and of Roman Petrescu’s decision to extricate himself from a life that was unendurable.

  There was a night, not to be forgotten, when Andrei ran after his Mama and Tata, when the Virgin cackled and Jesus fell out of the icon and smashed into fragments, when the woman in the market was at her nastiest, and when his mother’s tears became the waking Andrew’s, that I was taken up and borne to my uncle’s bedroom. My boy’s body was still wracked with sobbing as I realized that the bed was occupied by someone else – a blonde woman I had never met and, as it transpired, would not meet again.

  —Andrew has had a bad dream, Sylvia.

  —Oh, the poor thing.

  —I shall hug him for a little while, and then he’ll fall asleep. It always does the trick.

  His hugs didn’t do the trick on this one occasion, I remember, because I was curious, in the way children are curious, to learn more about this Sylvia, smoking a cigarette through a long holder. Wrapped in Uncle Rudolf’s arms, I feigned sleep and listened.

  —Was that the last rubber johnny?

  —No.

  —You’re well stocked, are you? Keep a supply of them, do you?

  —That’s right, Sylvia.

  —Prepared for every emergency, are you?

  —Exactly.

  —Is what’s-his-name asleep?

  —Andrew. He seems to be.

  —Get a fresh johnny then.

  —I can’t. I can’t take the risk.

  —We were having fun before cry-baby started bawling.

  —He’s twelve years old. He’s not a baby.

  —You could bring me off with your fingers.

  —I could and I couldn’t. Charlie will drive you back to London.

  —You bastard.

  —A generous bastard, Sylvia. You won’t have to suffer the discomfort of the milk train. I shall call for Charlie while you’re washing and dressing.

  Uncle Rudolf was startled to learn during breakfast that I had overheard his conversation with Sylvia.

  —How much of it did you understand, you scamp?

  Not the rubber johnny and not the fingers, I replied. Thus it was that I received my first, thorough lesson on the facts of life. He did not talk of birds and bees. He said that a ‘rubber johnny’ was a contraceptive. He showed me one from his stock. Men wore them to prevent their girlfriends or wives becoming pregnant. And as for the finger or fingers – they had often saved the sexual day for him when his penis had been unwilling to function. I would discover more for myself, by and by, and with pleasure, he hoped, and with love.

  —I suppose you have Sylvia to thank for your new-found knowledge.

  Another kind of knowledge was imparted to me, the unmistakably English Andrew, some months after my eighteenth birthday. As a result of what Uncle Rudolf revealed to me – slowly, haltingly, over large, medic
inal brandies – Andrei gave up the vain pursuit of his Mama and Tata; the family’s icon remained intact; Mircea’s horse’s mouth no more than yawned, but the woman-in-the-market’s taunts became louder and fiercer than ever.

  Uncle Rudolf was joyously happy that Magyar Maytime turned out to be a disaster. The critics were unanimous in their loathing of it. Not even Mr Rudolf Peterson’s undoubted charm and winning way with a melody, one of them wrote, could rescue it from the oblivion it so patently deserved.

  —Finely phrased, said my uncle, helping himself to apricot jam. Nicely put. I shall send that discerning gentleman a case of champagne. He deserves nothing less.

  In spite of the bad notices, the show ran for longer than anyone had expected. In Act Two, the fearless Zoltan suffered an injury to his leg, and András, his faithful batman and fellow brigand, was required to apply a bandage to the wound. The scene in which my uncle’s left calf and knee were exposed while András went about his healing business brought forth cries of ecstasy from the mostly well-bred women in the audience. Some swooned; some actually fainted. There was a ridiculous spectacle one evening when a uniformed nurse vaulted into the orchestra pit, clambered up on to the stage, pushed the actor playing András aside and prostrated herself in front of Zoltan with the words ‘I am yours, Rudolf. I am highly trained. Put your faith in Betty.’

  —The poor, deluded soul, my uncle would remark whenever he told the story of that extraordinary occasion. They had to drag her, kicking and screaming, off the stage and out of the theatre. And all that for a glimpse of Rudolf Peterson’s leg. I hope she came to her senses. I do hope so. I hope she met a sensible man and raised a sensible family and used her highly trained skills to help lots of genuinely wounded people. That’s my hope for her in this nonsensical world.

  At that time, Uncle Rudolf’s jet-black hair, large brown eyes and athlete’s physique made a combination that was irresistible to his admirers. Unlike other noted heart-throbs of the age, he had nothing feminine in his appearance. Someone once said that Michelangelo would have found him the perfect model. Uncle Rudolf, recalling this, laughed.