by Rusalka Reh
“You’re good at it,” he says quickly, and when she gives him a puzzled look, he adds, “Playing the violin.”
He’s surprised at his own boldness. After all, Mey-Mey’s a girl, and what’s more, she’s a complete stranger.
She immediately goes red. “But I have to practice quite a lot,” she says and awkwardly raises her hand to the brown patch on her neck.
“You’re bound to become famous!” says Darius. He doesn’t even think of her stiff forefinger.
“Hm,” she murmurs, shrugging her shoulders. She points to Darius’s jacket, which is hanging over the back of the chair. “By the way, I like that lovely old jacket of yours.”
“Thanks,” he says, somewhat surprised, because apart from himself, nobody likes his old jacket.
Mey-Mey puts her palms together, as if in prayer, and makes a little bow to Mr. Archinola. “Thank you for letting me practice here,” she says, very seriously.
Then she turns once more to Darius. “Will we meet again at the musical evening?”
Darius’s heart suddenly starts beating faster. With some difficulty he manages a lighthearted “Maybe.”
“That would be nice.” Once again she puts her hands together and gives him a little bow as well. “Because with Schubert, too, it’s quite easy to disappear into heaven,” she says.
Then suddenly she’s gone.
The door to Mr. Archinola’s apartment closes softly. Darius can’t help himself. He stands up and goes to the open window. He positions himself so that he can quickly jump to the side if Mey-Mey should look up. But to his surprise, he sees a man and a woman in St. Matthew’s Square, and they’re having an animated discussion just a few yards away from the front door of the house. Isn’t that the new doctor—what’s his name? Needham?—and his mother? Instinctively, Darius pulls his head back inside and listens to the angry but muted voice of the man.
“Don’t be such a damned worrywart, Mother! You’re beginning to make me nervous! No one’s going to figure out the fact that I—”
The front door slams shut and drowns the rest of his sentence in the thunderclap. Darius peeps out of the window again. When Mey-Mey suddenly appears and looks up at him, he can’t draw back quickly enough. Their eyes meet. He raises his hand and waves. Mey-Mey smiles, waves back, and then disappears from view.
“Fiddle-di-dee, I need to go to the post office!” says Mr. Archinola, and Darius is forced to return his body and mind to the workshop. “It won’t take long, boy. Can I leave you alone for a quarter of an hour?”
“Of course,” replies Darius. “As soon as I come back, I’ll let you do some work with the chisel!” the violin-maker calls out.
When the door to the apartment closes for a second time, everything is quiet. Darius bends over his notebook. But then he takes a sideways look into the salesroom. And once again he lets his gaze wander almost randomly over the glass doors of the cabinet. It must have been an optical illusion before, when the violin…glowed. Glowed blue. Darius shakes his head, like Ben calling for a bit of common sense, but at this precise moment once again, there is a glow in the cabinet. Blue. And this time it doesn’t stop glowing, not even when he blinks a few times, shakes his head, and looks elsewhere, as if the cabinet and everything in it were not of the slightest interest.
Darius’s heart again beats faster. He puts his pen down and stands up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
No Cut
It seems like an age before Darius reaches the cabinet. And yet all he has to do is walk across two large rooms. The sun is shining through onto his right cheek, the cello, the chair with bent legs, and the violin case that is lying on the floor, as if abandoned. The sun makes the glass doors of the cabinet, before which he is now standing, sparkle and flash.
It’s so bright I can’t see a thing, he says to himself and pulls the brass handle on one of the doors. It’s locked.
He opens the top drawer and finds a lot of little tins and wooden boxes in it. He opens some of them. They contain amber-colored stones that smell of incense. It’s rosin. But where is the key to the cabinet?
Darius pulls the drawer a bit farther out, and in the back left-hand corner he finds a little yellow cloth like those used to clean glasses with. He lifts it up. Beneath it is a brass key, old and tarnished. Darius picks it up and puts it in the lock. He turns it. With a little creak, the cabinet door opens. As if awakening from a long sleep, the violins rock on their scrolls, click against each other, and of their own accord let out softly vibrating sounds. Into his nostrils wafts a smell of dust and wood that was once moist but is now quite dry.
Hm, nothing at all glowing here, thinks Darius. But he knows exactly which violin it was that had given off that strange blue light a few moments ago. Resolutely, he takes the second violin on the left from its support.
A thought suddenly occurs to him. If Mr. Archinola should catch me now, he’ll think I’m trying to steal something. Only I just want to have a closer look at this violin.
He hastily sticks it under his arm and closes the cabinet door. Oh no, now you can see a gap! With trembling fingers, he opens the door again and arranges all the violins so that they’re the same distance from one another. Then once more he closes the door.
No one’ll notice now, he thinks to himself with relief. As he puts the brass key back under the yellow cloth, he hears the heavy footsteps of Mr. Archinola coming up the stairs. He quickly closes the drawer, hurries into the guest room, and hides the violin under the sofa.
“Ouch!”
Soon afterward Darius is standing at the workbench. He lets go of the handle of the chisel, and with a loud clatter, the tool falls onto the wooden floor. Shocked, he sticks his left forefinger in his mouth. He grimaces and sniffs. There’s a taste of metal.
“Oh, good Lord!” cries Mr. Archinola and hurries across to the medicine cabinet. He pulls open a drawer marked Clips and Clasps, rummages around, and comes back with a white bandage. “Let’s see.”
Darius holds his finger out to the violin-maker. It’s bleeding quite heavily.
“That’s gone pretty deep!” Mr. Archinola clicks his tongue with annoyance. “I should never have let you work with something as sharp as that!” He winds the bandage around Darius’s finger. “Is it very painful?”
Darius nods. It certainly is. Max’s forefinger digging between his ribs is nothing compared to this. And what a fool he’s made of himself! Clumsy oaf! Now Mr. Archinola will think he’s totally incompetent—that’s obvious.
His finger is starting to throb. “We must keep an eye on that cut,” says Mr. Archinola, tapping the workbench with his knuckles. “If it gets inflamed, we’ll go and see the doctor. Maybe the new one here in St. Matthew’s. What’s his name again? Oh yes, Needham.” He sweeps a few wood shavings off the workbench and throws them in the bin.
Darius doesn’t know why, but at the moment when Mr. Archinola says the name of the doctor, the cut starts to burn like fire.
In the middle of the night, Darius wakes up. He hears footsteps clattering across St. Matthew’s Square, coming nearer, and then fading into the distance. The wind is rustling through the plane tree, and a branch knocks against the window. Darius looks at the cross-shaped pattern of the window on the ceiling. Inside it, the shadows of the leaves are waving and trembling, just as they did on his first night. But tonight he doesn’t have a fever. There is something else keeping him awake.
Silently, he slides off the sofa and sits cross-legged on the carpet. His finger is still throbbing. Gently he pulls the violin out from under the sofa. Its thin, light wood creaks in his hands, and its strings let out a soft sound.
“Now what’s the matter with you?” he whispers to himself.
He turns the violin round and round. “You’re beautiful, that’s for sure.” Then he runs his good forefinger around the curved f-holes to the right and left of the strings. He raises the violin in front of his face and holds the openings close to his eye. Too dark. He reaches for his jeans
, and from one pocket he fishes out a little flashlight. He switches it on with a click, shines it into one of the narrow holes, very slowly turns the violin around, and peers through the slit. There! He can definitely see something! A little yellowed sign stuck on the wood. Darius has to move the violin away from his eye for a moment, because everything is blurred. He takes a deep breath and then looks inside again.
“Pizz…ica…to. One…six…nine…two,” he reads. “Sixteen-ninety-two, Pizzicato.” He lowers the violin and looks out of the window. The first light of morning is brushing against the moss on the church roof. A nightingale sings. Maybe the violin was made in 1692, but what’s the meaning of “Pizzicato”? Darius holds the violin tenderly on his lap. It looks as if the neck had been broken at some time. At least there’s a fine line like a crack. For a moment he lightly plucks the strings.
This thick bandage is a nuisance, he thinks to himself. I can’t hold the violin properly.
He quickly unwinds the white gauze from his finger. The wound is wide and deep.
Darius goes on plucking the strings. He does it very softly, so as not to wake Mr. Archinola. I mustn’t say anything till I know what’s so strange about this violin, he thinks. Somehow, these soft notes remind him of Mey-Mey. How she moves her head. How she walks. How she speaks.
Darius plucks. And at the same time, he feels the pain in his finger getting stronger and stronger, and it’s throbbing like mad.
Shoot, I must put the bandage back on, he says miserably to himself.
He’s just about to stop plucking the strings when, all at once, the terrible pain disappears.
“Now what’s happening?” he asks.
He takes his hand away from the violin and stares at his finger. There is no cut to be seen. “It must have…It can only have been my right forefinger then!” he mumbles in confusion. Then he looks at it in bewilderment. No cut. His heart pounds. Now he examines all his fingers, one by one, and turns his hands this way and that.
There is no cut.
CHAPTER NINE
Everyone’s In a Hurry
“Did you sleep well, boy? You look so…so…Somehow you look different from yesterday,” muses Mr. Archinola the next morning as Darius comes from his room into the kitchen.
Darius looks at the floor. “No, I mean, yes, I slept very well,” he says quickly.
The truth is, he didn’t get a wink after his strange adventure with Pizzicato. Almost all night long, he looked at the violin, touched it, and carried it around the room like a sleeping baby. And again and again he stared in disbelief at his finger, which after several hours still looked perfectly normal, with not even a scratch.
“So how’s the cut? Let’s have a look.” Mr. Archinola comes across to see it.
“I’ve just looked at it myself and put the bandage back on,” Darius says hastily and holds up his bandaged finger as if to prove it. “But it hardly hurts at all now.”
Mr. Archinola furrows his brow. “Well, all right, if you’re happy with it. We’ll look at it again tomorrow morning.”
Suddenly he puts his arm around Darius’s shoulders. Darius is so pleased that he scarcely dares to breathe. It’s as if his shoulders were now made of porcelain. He tries to keep his porcelain shoulders from moving under the warm, heavy arm of Mr. Archinola.
“Please can I help you again today?” he asks, holding up his injured finger. “In spite of this?”
The violin-maker says nothing for a while.
The “while” lasts long enough for Darius to start thinking about Pizzicato again. I must find out as quickly as possible what’s special about it, he resolves. Otherwise, I’ll begin to believe I’ve gone crazy. I’d better not tell Mr. Archinola yet, or he’ll think so too! No way must he realize there’s anything strange going on.
“Today I’m going to show you how to string a bow,” Mr. Archinola says, finally breaking the silence. “It’s Mr. Kaplan’s—he plays the viola in our quartet. It’s got to be ready by tomorrow.” He clears his throat. “Because if you’re going to be a violin-maker, you must also learn how to string a bow.”
You need about two hundred horse hairs for a bow. They are secured by the so-called frog with the help of a little block of wood, writes Darius. His writing is a bit more shaky than yesterday, because he keeps thinking about Pizzicato and his healed finger underneath the bandage. He himself is a bit shaky too, because he really hates having to lie. And he will have to lie to Mr. Archinola today, even though he likes the violin-maker more and more with every hour that passes.
He goes to join Mr. Archinola at the workbench. “Without a good bow,” says the violin-maker cheerfully, “even the best Stradivarius doesn’t sound right.” He holds a thick bundle of white threads, each as long as an arm, out in front of Darius’s nose. “My bow hairs are from the tails of Mongolian horses, drawn three times. They’re tied double and knotted three times. They last incredibly well.”
He has put Mr. Kaplan’s bow in a screw clamp, and now he tests it with his fingers.
“When you’ve done your work properly, the bow feels wonderfully springy, and it sits so comfortably in the hand that violinists can make their instruments sing with the sound they’ve been dreaming of,” he says enthusiastically. With his left hand he’s holding the white horse hairs firmly over the block of wood, and with his right he runs a comb along them. “Try it,” he tells Darius, then steps aside and hands him the black comb.
Darius stands in front of the clamped bow. He’s nervous, just as he is every time Mr. Archinola lets him try something.
Slowly he strokes the hairs with the comb. There’s a gentle chirping noise as he does it, and it blends with the song of the blackbird from outside. He combs over and over again, slowly and carefully. He wishes he could take the bandage off his finger, but then Mr. Archinola would see that the wound has already healed! You and an Australian wombat would really make a fine couple! He can suddenly hear Mrs. Helmet’s sneering voice in his head. He’s shocked and immediately stops combing. They get run over because they’re so slow! The voice jangles on. The mocking laughter of his classmates sounds as real as if they were all sitting right behind him here in the workshop.
Humiliated, he lets the hand with the comb drop to his side. I’m just a stupid slugboy, he thinks. They’re right, and that’s it.
“Not bad, boy.” Mr. Archinola breaks in on his thoughts. He nods his approval and strokes the bow hairs with his fingers. Then he murmurs softly, “Not bad at all—in fact, pretty good!”
He looks at Darius with interest, as if this were the first time they’d met. “Okay, let me try again now,” he says.
Darius is pleasantly surprised and makes way. “You’ve got a rare tranquillity in those hands of yours,” says Mr. Archinola. “That’s important for violin-making.” He pauses. “Everyone’s in a hurry today! It’s all one long rush! So how are good violins made, eh? Good violins aren’t made—how shall I put it?—with a whoosh! And certainly not with all these modern…adding machines!” Now he sounds almost angry.
“You mean computers?” asks Darius. “Yes, these modern gadgets,” grumbles the violin-maker. For a while the two of them remain silent. Darius watches Mr. Archinola very closely, and his movements imprint themselves on the boy’s memory. He’s hugely delighted that the violin-maker praised him. But that makes it all the worse that he will soon have to lie to him.
“Is Mey-Mey coming today?” he finally asks. He would like to hear her music again and see the silver birds in the wide blue sky. And her.
Since she was at the workshop, he can’t help thinking about her sometimes. In fact—often. Well actually, he thinks about her nearly all the time.
“No, she won’t come till Sunday after next, for the soirée. She still needs to practice her pizzicato and martellato—those are her biggest weaknesses,” murmurs Mr. Archinola, as if lost in his own thoughts.
Darius starts. Practice her pizzicato? He gulps. Pizzicato 1692, he thinks to himself.
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nbsp; “What…What does pizzicato actually mean?” he asks as casually as possible.
“Well, it’s one of many ways of playing the strings,” explains Mr. Archinola, loosening the clamp. “When you see the word on the score, it means you have to pluck the strings instead of bowing them.”
He takes out the bow and looks at it with an expression of satisfaction.
“I see,” says Darius with exaggerated calm, though his thoughts are galloping around his head like startled horses after a pistol shot. If what he’s slowly beginning to suspect is actually true, and if the violin under the felt-covered sofa can do what he thinks it can do, then maybe…no, surely, he’ll be able to help Mey-Mey!
CHAPTER TEN
Rags and a Gold Mine
Next morning, endless lines of cars drive past Darius, and in the sidewalk cafés people are sitting in their sunglasses behind their newspapers, as if they’re all from the crime squad and are keeping watch on him. This early in the morning, it’s still quite chilly. In one hand Darius has his duffel bag. It’s light, because there’s nothing in it except Pizzicato.
Mr. Archinola thinks Darius has to go to school today in order to discuss his project. Darius is deeply ashamed at having made up such a cock-and-bull story, but he has to find out what’s so special about this Pizzicato. And there’s one thing above all that he wants: to help Mey-Mey and her violin playing so that no musical door will ever be closed to her again. Because he knows how well she can play! He’s never seen silver birds before, and he’s never been able to fly! Mey-Mey is a sorceress when she plays the violin, that’s for sure.
He stops in a large cobbled square. A jackhammer is making an unholy racket, and there are pigeons pecking at crumbs on the ground. Underneath a lime tree with yellow-green buds is a bench on which a woman is sitting. Next to her stands a shopping cart, and in it are piles of plastic bags, newspapers, and a dirty gray blanket. These seem to be her only possessions.
