by Rusalka Reh
“I’ve made a right mess of everything,” she says.
Mr. Archinola immediately forgets the violin, because he can hear from Alice’s voice that she’s on the verge of tears.
“What’s the matter?” he asks. “I’ve been sprinting across half the town like a bat out of hell!”
Alice shuffles across to the corner with the sofa, where there’s a wooden table with jewelry catalogs, a jar full of candy, and a nodding Chinese plastic cat, and she sinks down into the red plush. Mr. Archinola sits next to her.
“Mama’s ill again,” she begins. “You know, it’s her heart.”
Mr. Archinola nods. Last year Alice flew three times to Italy to see her sick mother, and three times he’d missed her terribly. Although, of course, she hadn’t the slightest idea about that side of things.
Alice sounds even more tearful as she continues. “But there’s a boy who’s supposed to spend his job shadowing with me. I was actually looking forward to having him here.” She sobs. “He would have come to me on Monday, but now I’ve got to turn him away, and the principal is furious because she doesn’t know where she can get a place for him on such short notice, and…” She finally bursts into tears.
“There, there,” mumbles Mr. Archinola, patting her on the shoulder. Then he gives her his handkerchief, because he’s a real gentleman. He’s simply forgotten the fact that he’s just been wiping his sweaty brow with it. Alice blows her nose into it, trumpeting like a sad elephant.
“Archie?” she asks diffidently. “It’s just a matter of…three tiny little weeks. They’ll pass with a whoosh…Couldn’t you take the boy on?”
Mr. Archinola leaps up as if he’s sat on a thumbtack and only just noticed it. Indignantly he cries, “I have absolutely no time for silly games like that—you know I haven’t!” He starts pacing up and down and stroking his beard. “Three tiny little weeks, with a whoosh! Really, Alice!” he mumbles, shaking his head.
“Oh, but the poor boy!” says Alice softly. “How’s he going to face his classmates now?”
Mr. Archinola suddenly stops pacing. “What on earth have an unknown boy and his unknown classmates got to do with me?” he snaps. “I’m making a viola da gamba, for heaven’s sake! Lord have mercy on us, it’s going to take months, and it needs every second of my attention! And a kid like that…a problem child…he couldn’t care less about my work!” He looks at Alice and snorts. “He’ll…He’ll be drinking Coke and spending all day long listening to his tralala-rumpety-boom-boom music. I can do without all that, thank you, Alice.”
Alice looks at Mr. Archinola. She says nothing for a while.
Mr. Archinola goes on stroking his beard—which he always does when he needs to calm down, or when he has to think, or when he has to do both.
“Three tiny little weeks and…um…with a whoosh, you say?” he finally asks, breaking the silence.
“Oh, Archie!” Alice jumps up and flings her arms around her friend’s neck. Without another word, she grabs hold of the telephone and presses redial. “Yes, it’s Ponticello again, Alice Ponticello. What would you say to a violin-maker’s for your boy’s project?” She listens, then nods. “Yes, of course. And the boy will even have a bigger guest room than he’d have with me.”
Guest room! Mr. Archinola had just finished calmly breathing in, and now, out of shock and horror, he forgets to breathe out again. The kid’s supposed to live with him?
“Oh, I’m so relieved! Good-bye,” says Alice and puts the phone down. “How can I ever thank you enough, Archie?” She smiles, and she’s as radiant as one of the finest rubies in her shop window.
Mr. Archinola stares at her in complete silence. At the moment he’s only thinking of one thing: whether, out of sheer love, he hasn’t just made the biggest mistake of his life. Then his gaze falls once more on the corner with the sofa.
“By the way, what’s this violin doing here?” he asks, picking it up.
“Oh yes, that,” says Alice, “I’d almost forgotten it in all the excitement. A customer exchanged it yesterday for a silver chain. I didn’t know him. He said he didn’t have any cash.”
Alice comes to stand next to Mr. Archinola, who gives the violin a professional once-over. “The chain was a discontinued line from the season before last,” she explains, “not an expensive one, you know, and I thought maybe you might get some pleasure out of the violin. Do you like it?”
Mr. Archinola blinks and peeps through one of the f-holes. Then he turns the violin to and fro and holds it at arm’s length.
“There’s something special about it, yes,” he murmurs. “Definitely something unusual.” He turns to look at Alice. “It’s a nice piece, and I’ll put it in my collection for now. Then when I’ve got time, I’ll restore it. It’s certainly not valuable, but it’s very beautiful. Thank you, Alice.” He kisses her on the cheek and then immediately feels embarrassed.
“Have you bought a new lamp, by the way?” he asks, because he’s just remembered the bluish light from a moment ago.
“No. Should I?” asks Alice, a little anxiously. “Do you think it’s too dark in my shop?”
Mr. Archinola looks at the violin and then at the corner where it had been standing. If he had the slightest idea of what would soon be happening, he would certainly start mopping his sweaty brow again.
CHAPTER THREE
Just You Wait, Slugboy
Darius is hoping to avoid Max until the evening. Max really gets on his nerves. He’d like to go out on his bike now and do a bit of skidding and braking. But just as Darius is about to leave the house, the phone rings in the hall. Although he hardly ever gets any phone calls, he stands rooted to the spot, as if knowing that this call is for him. And when Ben picks up the receiver, Darius listens with ears pricked.
No doubt about it, the call is for him. It’s for him and him alone and nobody else.
After a minute, Ben hangs up. “Ah, good, there you are!” he says.
Darius is really on tenterhooks now. In silence he looks at the giant. There’s something important going on—he can sense it. And it’s so important that he begins to feel dizzy.
“Don’t look at me like that,” says Ben, ruffling his hair. “It was only your school. This Lisa…Pontissimo, or whatever her name is, has suddenly had to go abroad somewhere.”
Queenie comes running through the front door, and when she sees there’s something exciting going on in the hall, she stops. “What’s up?” she asks, wiping her nose.
“What’s going on here?” asks Daniel, who also comes crashing through the door. “Plotting something, eh?”
“Nothing like that,” says Ben. “The jewelry shop has fallen through, so Darius will be doing his project with a violin-maker. That’s all. So now you can buzz off.”
For a moment everything is swirling around in Darius’s head. A violin-maker. But he can’t tell one key from another.
“What’s a violin-maker?” Queenie wants to know. She always asks lots of questions because she thinks she’s still only four, and kids ask lots of questions when they’re four.
“Well, it’s someone who makes string instruments that people can play music on,” explains the giant.
“What are string instruments?” asks Queenie in a high-pitched squeak. When you’re four years old, you must always ask another question after the first one, and preferably in a high-pitched squeak.
“Well, violins, for example,” answers Ben. “Cool!” says Queenie and looks at Darius with great respect. “Will you make a violin for me too, Darry?”
Now Darius realizes that there are quite a few children standing around in the hall. Suddenly the whole population of House Four has assembled. Or maybe not—there’s one missing.
“Can he also make electric guitars?”
“Can I go to the violin-maker’s too? Please!”
“Can we come and visit you there?”
Darius really hasn’t a clue what’s happening to him. A moment ago he’d been the miserable jewelry
-shop slugboy, and now this. Suddenly he picks Queenie up and whirls her around in a circle. She squeals with pleasure and puts her head on his shoulder.
“Will you come back soon?” she asks, winding her thin arms around his neck.
“I haven’t even gone yet!” whispers Darius. He can’t help laughing. It all feels almost as nice as when he snuggles under the comforter with the pink radio.
“Where’s my duffel bag?” Darius asks Ben and gently lowers Queenie to the floor.
“Back there in the garden shed,” says Ben, smiling. “I expect it’s all covered in dust. You can go and get it on Monday morning.”
No one has noticed someone sitting in a dark corner by the staircase, listening to everything with a grim expression on his face.
“Just you wait, slugboy,” he murmurs.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lilac and Woodlice
On Monday, the church bells in the distance are striking two o’clock when, from inside the garden shed at the end of the Stork’s Nest campus—where there are piles of striped sunshades, deflated soccer balls, and several suitcases—someone rattles the door.
“Open the door!” he shouts. “Open the door!”
In front of the door sits Max. He plucks a daffodil out of the grass and sticks the stem between his lips. Then he looks smugly around him. The sun shines into his eyes.
“Let me out! They’re expecting me! I’ve got to be at the violin-maker’s at three. Please! I won’t tell anyone you locked me in!”
Max grins. The daffodil hangs out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette.
Cool, the way he’s yelling, he thinks to himself. Of course they’re waiting for him. You bet they’re waiting!
He stands up and spits out the flower. “Cheers, slugboy,” he says quietly and disappears behind the lilac.
“Where the hell is Darius?” Ben is standing on the veranda, looking agitatedly at his watch. “It’s half past two now, and we’ve got to go all the way across town. It’ll take at least an hour. Darry!” he shouts, cupping his hands in front of his mouth. “Daaaaarryyyyy!”
But Darius doesn’t respond. Not now, not one hour later, and not even two hours later.
In the end, Ben picks up the phone and dials the number of Master Violin-Maker Archinola’s workshop.
“Yes, all right, I’m not deaf! I understand! Good-bye!”
Mr. Archinola slams the receiver onto the hook of his ancient telephone and lets out a loud snort as if trying to catapult two large boogers out of his nostrils. He takes off his stylish leather shoes, which he put on this morning especially in honor of the expected visitors, and slides his feet into his slippers. With vigorous movements he ties on his apron.
“Waste of time!” he mumbles, and stomps to his workbench. “What a nerve!”
He strokes his beard. Then he picks up his favorite saw. “I knew this would happen! The kid’s caused havoc even though he isn’t here!” He begins to saw. “Can’t find him. Don’t make me laugh. And I stop work just for that, and go to all the trouble of tidying up my beautiful living room as a guest room for him!”
Furiously he saws on. “And I even turned little Mey-Mey away because of him! And the poor girl has nowhere else to practice her violin!”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the wood. He doesn’t see that, in the display cabinet, where today he hung Alice’s present, there is suddenly a soft blue light.
A long, thin, almost white piece of wood falls from the workbench onto the parquet floor. Mr. Archinola picks it up and examines it critically against the viola da gamba that he’s making.
“That’ll do nicely,” he says, still looking grim-faced. But this whole mess with the boy will not do nicely. Well, he can forget about doing his project with me! Mr. Archinola thinks to himself and switches on his bending iron to let it warm up. Then, frowning with concentration, he holds the thin slat of wood against it and with both hands slowly pulls the wood toward him, then repeats the action several times. He spends almost an hour doing this.
In the cabinet the blue light is getting stronger. Now it’s shining through the glass doors down onto the floor, as if it were trying to make its way across to the man who is so busy at his workbench.
Apart from the church bells outside, there is not a sound in the workshop. The master violin-maker is still pretty angry as he broods over the letdown. And even now he hasn’t noticed the blue light. The sun comes flooding through the tall south window, shedding a golden glow over the wooden objects—practically everything around Mr. Archinola is made of wood.
Finally, he picks up the slat, which now looks like a large C, and with bated breath he places it in the body of his model. Then he feels the weight of the head.
“Hm,” he murmurs, and clicks his tongue. “The gamba mustn’t be absolutely perfect, or it won’t sound right, but it has to be almost perfect.”
He goes to an ancient chest of drawers, takes out three screw clamps, and fastens the wood to the model. Then suddenly his face lights up with a smile.
“Almost perfect!”
With rapt attention, he gazes at his work. Just wait till the viola da gamba is finished and shines forth in all its glory! he thinks, and he can hardly wait for the great day.
“Just for you, my darling, I’ll organize a soirée musicale!” he says aloud to the nascent viola, bowing as if to a princess and gently kissing the wood.
Mr. Archinola’s musical evenings are famous throughout the town. As indeed are his wonderful musical instruments.
He has almost forgotten the missing visitor. And deep down he doesn’t want him there anyway.
Why on earth did I let myself be talked into it? he asks himself, but of course he knows exactly why. “A donkey in love, that’s me!” he grumbles at himself. “If the kid does come now, I’ll tell him to go away.”
For the first time in hours, Mr. Archinola straightens up, stretches, and looks around. The blue light in the cabinet has gone out.
This evening, Queenie is riding around the Stork’s Nest campus, balancing on her unicycle.
Suddenly she turns her head. Wasn’t that someone shouting, back there, near the lilac trees? She strains to listen and tries to bring herself to a stop, which isn’t easy. But now she can’t hear anything, apart from the distant rumble of traffic down Park Avenue and the cawing of the pair of crows that live on the campus. But just as she starts to pedal again, she hears it once more.
There is someone shouting—she can hear it quite clearly now. He’s shouting, “Help!”
Queenie pedals furiously, past House Eight and the trash cans behind the fence. When she reaches the garden shed, she jumps down. The unicycle falls silently onto the grass. She’s pretty breathless now. She turns around. No one in sight. Silence. There are daffodils growing here, and it’s like some beautiful magic garden. It all looks so peaceful.
“Hello! Is anybody there?” cries a voice from the garden shed.
It gives Queenie a shock. She wonders if the best thing wouldn’t be to cycle off again at top speed. Who knows what might be sitting in there? she thinks. Maybe a criminal. Or a sorcerer, or a robot.
“Help! Open the door!”
Then Queenie recognizes the voice. “Darry?” she asks. “Is that you?”
“Fetch someone here, quick!” yells Darius. “I should have been at the violin-maker’s ages ago!”
Instead of getting onto her unicycle, Queenie looks around with a frown. Finally, she picks up an ivy-covered flowerpot from the ground next to the door. A few terrified woodlice come scurrying out in all directions and crawl into the next best cracks. A key glints from underneath. Queenie smiles. A good thing she noticed that when she was watching Ben tidying the place up last autumn. Still smiling, she unlocks the door.
Blinking in the sunlight, Darius comes stumbling toward her. “How the heck did you manage to do that?” he asks.
Queenie looks smug.
Then, as quickly as they can, they hurry back to House Four.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hands
“Honestly, that’s the last straw,” thunders Mr. Archinola when the doorbell rings at nine o’clock that night. He looks at his watch with a shake of the head. Then he squares his shoulders and strides to the door. When he opens it, at first he can see nothing in the semidarkness. But then he looks down and sees a tiny girl. She’s holding a bunch of daffodils out towards him.
“Here!” she pipes.
Out of the darkness behind her steps a gigantic figure. “I’m Ben Cherry,” he says, introducing himself and, at the same time, pushing a boy out in front of him.
Mr. Archinola briefly and somewhat ungraciously shakes Ben’s outstretched hand. “I was expecting you at three o’clock,” he says, “no earlier and no later. And certainly not at 9 p.m. I’ve got things to do. And so if you’ll excuse me—”
The man swiftly interrupts him. “We’re really, really sorry, but there were some unexpected difficulties which prevented us from getting here on time.”
“Here!” pipes the little girl and once again holds out the bunch of daffodils toward Mr. Archinola. “Darry was locked in, and I’m the one who set him free!” she adds proudly. “It was that stupid Max who shut him in…”
“Be quiet, Queenie!” whispers the boy with a helpless flap of his hands.
At this moment, Mr. Archinola sees the boy’s hands, motionless and frozen in the air, as if on a photograph. He is astonished. These hands, he thinks, look almost exactly like my own when I was a child. I often used to look at them and wonder if I might be able to use them to make violins.
Mr. Archinola feels like someone under a bell jar. Inside it is himself and…yes, this boy is next to him!
What’s the matter with me? he asks himself, irritated. The bell jar dissolves into thin air. Uneasily, he decides. I’ll say good-bye to them, shut the door tight, turn around, and go back into the workshop. Hands or no hands, this kid has kept me dangling all day long and has stopped me from working.
