Uncle Rudolf

by Paul Bailey

  Charlie was the first conspirator to leave us. Maurice’s imprisonment and despairing death – ‘He wasted away, as if of his own accord’ – caused him to suffer, and not endure, a grief he thought could be assuaged with gin, which he drank neat, at all hours. Uncle Rudolf was powerless to help or save him. He disappeared one day in the spring of 1949, leaving the car keys in an envelope with the message ‘Goodbye and thank you very much, Mr Rudolf.’ Nothing more. My uncle contacted his acquaintances, and even visited Maurice’s mother; he telephoned every London hospital and gave the police Charlie’s photograph, but there was no trace of him.

  —He’s vanished, Andrew. Off the face of the earth.

  When it became a certainty that Charlie would never return, my uncle sold the Rolls-Royce in which I had been driven like a prince, and bought himself a small car that befitted, he said, his late-flowering modesty.

  —I am not the singer I was. I am not like him any more.

  Then Annie went, reluctantly, to nurse her ailing younger brother in Glasgow.

  —He’s blood, Mr Rudolf. You have to be loyal to blood. You can’t turn a blind eye to it.

  There was just Teddy left. In June 1950, he collapsed with a stroke at the racecourse when the horse he had bet on fell at the last hurdle. He had appropriated a thousand pounds of my uncle’s money. The trusted, dutiful Teddy, who had entered every penny of Mr Rudolf’s earnings in the ledgers he kept so scrupulously for fifteen years, was in serious debt, we learned, as the result of his infatuation for a younger woman with extravagant tastes.

  Teddy only partially recovered. His speech, when he regained it, was slurred and difficult to comprehend. He was not to leave the nursing home my uncle paid for him to recuperate in. Nothing was seen or heard of the woman, whoever she was.

  I picture Uncle Rudolf sitting at Teddy’s bedside, gently stroking the hand that had, in his own shamed words, ‘dipped into the till’.

  —He would have paid the money back, and I would never have known it had gone missing. That wretched horse. That useless fool of a jockey.

  —I had the proper kind of ambition once, before I was lured to Vienna by Hans Schenk. God curse him.

  Herr Schenk was the villain in the story of my uncle’s life, the original cause of the dismay that blighted his last years. I listened, and doubted Schenk’s villainy. The Rudi Petrescu he was dazzled by in Nice was twenty and darkly handsome, as a photograph of him in costume testifies. His angelic voice apart, he was possessed of the looks and the sturdy physique that suited perfectly the irresistible heroes of operetta – those gypsies; those princes; those gypsy princes; those troubadors, vagabonds and brigands; those detested Cossacks and Hussars.

  Uncle Rudolf would like to tell how the astute entrepreneur had pushed his way into the men’s dressing room after the performance, and ignored the Don Giovanni and the Leporello and announced to the startled Rudi Petrescu that a contract to sing in Vienna was his for the accepting. It was Schenk’s considered plan to get him cast in cameos to begin with – two or three at most – before his remarkable gifts secured him the leading roles he was born to assume. Those leading roles were not to be the ones he and Jean de Reszke had envisaged.

  Schenk became Rudi Petrescu’s manager, working tirelessly on his behalf, persuading sceptical impresarios to let him audition. Within three years, the newly-named Rudolf Peterson was taking on important parts – Alfred in Die Fledermaus, and then, most famously, Danilo in The Merry Widow. He was rich, he was fêted, and he had several affairs, the only one of any consequence being with Hilde Bernhard, whom I met at his funeral.

  —The wisest decision I ever made in my otherwise foolish life was not to marry your uncle. Andrew dear, marriage with Rudi would have been like a play by Strindberg. A minuet, if not a dance, of death. You tell me he was melancholic, but he was melancholic at the height of his career, when he and I were passionately in love. Even then there was something gnawing at him he couldn’t talk about. This is exceptional champagne.

  —It was his favourite. La grande Dame. It was one of his few consolations.

  —Ah, Rudi. Always in need of consoling.

  I thought I knew what had been gnawing at him. I had written evidence, in the form of two letters, both dating from the 1920s. I showed them to Hilde Auersberger, as she now was, that evening, after the other mourning guests had gone.

  (The first is from Jean de Reszke. He wrote to M. Petrescu in 1924, some months before his death, to this effect. I have translated it from the French):

  My dear young friend and pupil.

  Minia, Louis, Amherst and I read news of your success almost daily. We send you our congratulations and warm greetings. I predicted fame for you, in my silent fashion, and now you have found it.

  Permit me to offer you some words of advice. As your teacher, I believe I am qualified so to do. In my long years in opera – both as a baritone and then (wonderful discovery) as a tenor – I had occasion to sing music that was mediocre or worse. Who now remembers M. Bemberg’s Elaine, in which I played Lancelot? I remember and shudder. It is time you ordered the persuasive Herr Schenk to arrange for you to number Messieurs Verdi, Bizet, Mozart and Wagner among your musical acquaintances. You should be Radames, Don José, Don Ottavio, Lohengrin and, one day perhaps, Tristan himself. You should not confine yourself to operetta. You have wings to be stretched, and the talented Herr Johann Strauss and the whimsical Lehar will not stretch them for you. Think of your art, my diligent pupil, and of your artistry. I demand that you think of them now that you are rich and famous.

  The voluble Koko has just screeched salutations.

  I embrace you paternally, Jean de Reszke.

  P.S. Try not to be a STUPID tenor. With a vacant space in his head.

  The letter from Georges Enesco, dated 30 May, 1929, is in the old words, which I translated for Hilde’s benefit. It runs as follows:

  Dear Rudi Petrescu or Rudolf Peterson – You are embarked on a course that I must tell you I find regrettable. When I heard you singing Mozart at the Conservatoire ten years ago I had hopes of your becoming one of those great artists who put music before such transient matters as fame. Those hopes are being dashed every time you appear in yet another piece of froth. This is a sadness for me and for our country. I want you to know my feelings and to give them serious consideration. You are still young. I entreat you to change direction. Your friend in music. G.E.

  —He said nothing of these to me, Andrew. Or, I suspect, to anyone else. He kept them his very close secret.

  —And from me, too. I found them only yesterday. I wonder why he kept them – as reminders, perhaps, of what he might have been – and if he ever replied. I think he must have answered those letters, because de Reszke and Enesco were his heroes and he believed in courtesy. He might have promised to change his ways. And then he couldn’t. He said to me once, when he was very unhappy, that he would have had a better life if he had been born plain, or even ugly. Then his voice, and his voice alone, would have justified his existence.

  I did not mention Uncle Rudolf’s love for my mother to the sprightly Hilde, who looked much younger than seventy-four, but I did tell her about the humiliation of his last public recital, for which he had prepared so long and so thoroughly with Ivan Morris.

  I remembered that he came on to the platform and scanned – I think that’s the accurate word – the audience. He registered that it was largely composed of middle-aged and elderly women – the same women who had flocked to see him in Magyar Maytime and the other operettas he despised. He stared at his applauding fans as if they were his enemy, which – in a way – they were. He was about to become the boyish miller who is helplessly in love with the boss’s daughter – die schöne Müllerin. His face showed only contempt. Then he shook his head, smiled, and signalled to Ivan he was ready to begin. He sounded nervous to start with, but he did manage to capture the youthful ardour in those first ravishing songs. Then, in the ninth song, the one that tells of the bright blue f
lowers growing by the stream that remind him of his sweetheart’s eyes, his voice cracked on ‘Fensterlein’ (her window), and he gasped for air and forgot the rest of the words while Ivan played gamely on. ‘Enough,’ he said loudly. ‘Your money will be refunded. Goodnight.’ He walked out of the concert hall and continued walking for several hours. When I saw him next, it was two in the morning.

  —When we were together – in Budapest and Paris, as well as in Vienna – he gave no indication that his melancholy moods had anything to do with the shows we were performing. No indication at all.

  —He claimed that Hans Schenk lured him away from the music he ought to have sung. He called him a villain.

  —A villain, Hans? No, no – he was a shrewd businessman, who made your uncle very rich. Rudi never complained when Hans presented him with a large cheque. It seems from what you are saying that he should have had the courage to follow de Reszke’s advice. He didn’t. He must have been afraid. He sang Danilo with such happy confidence, Andrew. He relished every note. No wonder the public adored him. Have you any more of that champagne? Let’s toast the happiness he brought into the world.

  —Let’s.

  —What on earth is that on the wall? How could I have missed it? Am I really that drunk?

  —No. It’s a collage. Thoughts after Géricault, or The Raft of the Medusa Revisited, to give it its full title. There’s a story behind it.

  —I’m sure there is.

  I related the story, in the meticulous, and often diverse, detail that comes with tipsiness, but had to stop to accommodate Hilde’s tearful laughter.

  —Prostitutes would have exercised more decorum. Ladies, indeed.

  I was back in the everlasting market this morning, but this time the woman wasn’t there. Uncle Rudolf, surprisingly, was. He was waiting to greet me, dressed in that same astrakhan coat he wore in February 1937, on the platform at Victoria Station.

  —Welcome home, he said.

  What age was I? Was I seven again? I could neither see nor hear myself.

  —You have your mother’s beauty.

  He had said this to me, in English, in 1946, after my one and only appearance on a stage. I had played Florizel that evening, as I reminded him when he commented on my beauty. The other boys in the makeshift dressing room blushed and giggled.

  —I was Florizel, Uncle Rudolf. Not Perdita.

  —I know you were, Andrew. It’s your eyelashes, that’s all. They are very like your mother’s.

  In the market, in his astrakhan coat, he beckoned Andrei to come to him.

  —You have your mother’s beauty, he told the nephew he never called Andrei, in the language he had rarely spoken to him.

  I am tempted to destroy what I have written so far, and nearly did so today after my uncle, my dead uncle, had coaxed me to him, only to vanish. Perhaps I should have embarked on a biography of him as I once intended to – listing the relevant facts and dates, and keeping myself to myself. But that’s a book I am unable to write, if only because my life – such as it is, what is left of it – is inextricably linked to his. I cannot be disinterested.

  And that is why I have to go on, writing late into the night, warding off as many dreams as I can, summoning my beloved ghosts to me. And now I catch myself laughing as I stop and think of this whole ludicrous enterprise. For who will read these pages? My contentedly married son, perhaps, whose unworldly wife may have to be spared my one truly shocking revelation, which I have yet to make, if I ever will.

  —I was surprised they didn’t take you in for questioning as well, Andrew. You were eleven, and that’s a dangerous age. I’m sure they’re employing eleven-year-old spies in our beastly country.

  Why, I asked, had they – whoever they were – taken him in for questioning?

  They, he said, were officials in the War Office, who had discovered – it was no secret – he was Romanian by birth. Romania was in league with Germany, ergo: a singer of operetta who had not been in Bucharest for almost a decade was bound to be under suspicion for something or other. He was a respected British citizen, what’s more, which meant he was a likely traitor, traitors being masters of plausible disguise. He had to be guilty, and they – the two men and a ferocious woman in tweeds – were intent on proving it. He was detained for the most degrading week of his entire life, locked in a room that only the most severely self-lacerating monk would have found congenial. And, yes, a spotlight was trained on him – but then, he was accustomed to the spotlight, having sung many a rousing call for liberty and justice in its inspiring glow. They questioned him when he was on the point of sleep, or desperate to go to the lavatory, or scared of confessing to a crime he was incapable of committing, in the interests of being left in peace. They were diligent. They were determined to have him admit he was in the pay of General Antonescu, the ruler of Romania, if not Adolf Hitler. And then, at the peak of his degradation, he had said to them:

  —Look, the three of you, my brother’s wife was dragged into the forest by three men whose ideology you are accusing me of espousing and supporting with money. My brother drowned himself in Paris, leaving me to raise his orphaned son. Am I that devious, that cunning? I seem to be in the thrall of two diabolical holy trinities.

  —I was delighted with that unhappy conceit, my darling. It eased my pain, saying it. For one sarcastic moment, anyway. Yes, for that one sarcastic moment – and it was nothing longer than a moment – I felt I had riled them as they were riling me. I was mistaken, of course. They resumed their questioning with a fresh sense of purpose. And when they let me go it was without apology. Why should they apologize for nearly succeeding in breaking me? They had been trained, and paid, to do exactly that. They shuffled up their papers and left me alone for an hour or so. Then a man I hadn’t seen before came in and said the car was ready. I was untied from the chair. He waited for me to stand up. He placed a sheet over my head and guided me out of the room and the building but not out of the degrading experience. No one can ever do that. Sometimes when I’m lying in the bath I have this notion of a water that can cleanse the soul of all its torments, the way water cleanses the body. You pour some of it on the worst of your memories, drop by drop, and they vanish like a stain vanishes. They’re eradicated.

  I hear my uncle saying this, and remember how deeply he was scarred by those six days in the summer of 1941, when his precious conscience – as precious to him as the praise he had earned from Jean de Reszke – was not simply questioned but maligned and soiled. The two men and the tweeded woman could not have known with what sudden fierce disdain he had responded to Marthe Watson’s remark about the evrei (I use the old word because it conjures up for me the venom with which she spoke it) and that the otherwise satisfactory teacher was dismissed on the instant. They scoffed at him when he referred to the once beloved, but now beastly, country he had abandoned, and did not believe his repeated claim to be a contented and responsible exile, as anxious as anyone to see Hitler and his vile henchmen destroyed. They reminded him that he had sung in German, and he reminded them that he had also sung in English and French. He refrained, absurdly, from adding Italian and Hungarian, sensing that his mentioning them might inspire the deadly trio to accusations of his being on the side of Fascism.

  —There was one terrible day, Andrew, when I would have been happy to be that idiot Zoltan again, declaring to Zelda that his heart was hers and hoping, oh so fondly, that hers was his in return. Just think, my darling, how seriously distressed I must have been to have even considered such a prospect. I had reached the very lowest of all lowest ebbs. I couldn’t have plunged any further.

  Uncle Rudolf gave me a wan smile and then, as if fully realizing the preposterousness of his admission, he laughed as I hadn’t heard him laugh for months. Yet it was, in its intensity, I understood, the laughter of despair.

  On one of those afternoons that stayed sunlit for my uncle – he had merited a bien – the master invited his brightest pupil to drink some wine and eat some biscuits. This was th
e rarest privilege. Rudi Petrescu, in his confusion, found that he couldn’t reply. While he struggled for the one simple word of acceptance, Louis Vachet entered bearing a tray.

  —Monsieur Petrescu has accepted my invitation, Louis.

  The wine was an iced rosé, the biscuits orange wafers. Rudi had guessed that his teacher was in the mood to reminisce, and – prompted by Louis Vachet – that is what he did, for far too short a time. What made the occasion memorable for the gawping student was not the fact that de Reszke and his brother had performed at Windsor Castle in private audience with Queen Victoria, but rather the master’s way of reliving the great roles he had blessed with his genius. He spoke, that afternoon, of Otello, a part he had accepted with reluctance, since he was ill when he was first offered it, and although he loved Verdi’s music it was against his temperament to play a murderer.

  —A very silly reason, Monsieur Petrescu. I think you will agree that, on this disturbed planet of ours, some murderers are nobler than others. The misguided Otello is one of them.