by Aubrey Flegg
Judit, Izaac’s mother, came in, holding her guest’s violin case and leading a boy of about three and a half by the hand. He was wearing a sailor suit; his eyes round in awe at the sight of their visitor.
‘This is Izaac.’ They shook hands solemnly. ‘You will play for us, won’t you? Izaac would love to hear you,’ said Judit.
‘Humph,’ said the great lady, looking down at Izaac. ‘I bet you’d prefer to be pulling the cat’s tail? Makes the same sort of sound if you think about it.’ She gave him the nearest thing to a wink that a great lady can make and turned to Uncle Rudi. ‘Rudi, all right if I double up with you on the first violin?’ Uncle Rudi made to rise. ‘No no no, don’t get up, I’ll read over your shoulder.’ She put her violin case on a chair, opened the lid and folded back the silk scarf that was wrapped around the instrument. It lay for a moment in its case like a freshly opened horse chestnut in its husk. Izaac leaned forward for a better look. ‘It’s very, very old,’ she explained. ‘It was made by Stra…di…var…ius, I call it Strad for short.’ She took up her bow. ‘And this is the cat’s tail. It looks all floppy now, so we’ll tighten it up like this.’ She turned the tiny mother of pearl nut on the end of the bow until the hairs were tight and straight. ‘Now, all I need is my rosin and we are ready.’ She showed him how she rubbed the rosin on to the hairs of the bow. ‘So, where will I put it? I could put it on top of Uncle Rudi’s head?’ Izaac was still a little awed.
‘Wrong shape, my dear,’ said Uncle Rudi.
‘Uncle Rudi’s a little-ender, isn’t he Izaac?’ she laughed, and dropped the rosin back into her case. ‘Lead off when you’re ready, Rudi,’ she commanded.
The home team launched into the first movement of their quartet tentatively, as if shy in the presence of the maestro. To begin with, she appeared just to be playing very softly, a mere shadow of Uncle Rudi’s lead, but as they got used to her presence she began to play with them, leading them, nudging them, and a subtle transformation took place. They seemed to relax, their bow strokes became longer and they were moving better in time. They found themselves glancing at each other with secret smiles as they passed the notes and phrases back and forth between them. Her magic seemed to be flowing through their fingers and into their bows. When it came to Father’s entry on the cello, the deep notes of the instrument rang out rich and sweet. His eyebrows shot up with pleasure. When they paused between movements they didn’t chat, as they often did, but sat held in a trance. They approached the dramatic finale like ships entering harbour in a line, swinging up into the wind and dropping anchor as one. Only when they turned to applaud their leader, did they realise that Madame Stronski had stopped playing, and that their triumphal finale had been all their own; she had her fiddle under her arm and was applauding them.
While the musicians were recovering, happily congratulating each other on this or that entry, Madame Stronski adjusted her scarves, which always seemed to be about to fall off, but never did, and took up a position near the piano. She raised her bow and launched into the first notes of a piece of music that none of them had heard before.
At her first notes Izaac Abrahams whipped about like someone stung. He had been accustomed to music since babyhood. Father would practise his cello in the evenings, and Mother played the piano in the afternoons, when she thought no one else would hear her. He would go about his business, arranging animals from his ark, putting them in fields outlined in dominoes, building castles from bricks, or stalking the cat. From time to time the music would inspire him to perform acrobatics and other things. Unfortunately people engrossed in making music tend not to notice other people’s performances, so Izaac would have to contrive his own audience. The animals of his ark would be arranged in appreciative rows and performed for, but their attention span was short. After they had been knocked over a couple of times he would dismiss them. Then he would turn his attention to the picture on the wall and would perform for the girl in the green dress. She could be relied on for the correct level of applause; she understood him. On this occasion, when the quartet had finished and everyone else was preoccupied, he had treated her to headstands, and he was doing this when Madame Stronski started to play her solo.
Izaac had never heard music played by a maestro. He had never heard a bow bite into the strings as if the note to be played had existed in the air, expectant and impatient ever since the composer had first conceived it. His small body became rigid; two powerful forces were running through him like competing electric currents. The first, a sustained vibration, came from the music, the outward flow of something both beautiful and terrifying. The second came from his own sense of affront. He, Izaac, was the performer in this house! This was his territory. That Cloud Woman, the one with all the billowing scarves who talked about cats, was his competitior. He stamped his foot in temper.
As if sensing his challenge, the Cloud Woman half turned towards him; the violin gave the smallest dip of acknowledgement, her eyes glinted, but she played on. How dare she! He stood his ground, small, dark and sturdy. But Izaac had no defence against music like this, not in the hands of a master. In minutes he was overcome. The music penetrated every fibre of his small body, running like liquid silver into his bones where it hardened into something both brittle and sensitive. When the Cloud Woman finished playing, Izaac was the only one in the room who did not clap; neither did he turn somersaults.
Madame Stronski observed Izaac’s reaction and had a pang of conscience. She had noticed his sudden rigid attention when she had begun to play. It was a compliment, and what musician can resist the compliment of complete attention? So, she had played for him, a personal message of power and beauty, an example of musicianship that she was delighted she still had in her. But had she laid a trap for him? Oh, Helena, she said to herself, what have you done? Perhaps there was still time to get the genie back into the bottle. She pulled herself together and called out to Izaac’s father:
‘Come David, soon Judit will be lighting your Sabbath candles for our dinner, let’s play a round for Izaac before he goes to bed. How about ‘Pani Janie’, as we call it in Poland, ‘Frère Jacques’ in French, what is it in German?’ They laughed and told her, ‘Bruder Jacob!’ But with variations!’ They smiled as they bent for their instruments. ‘Rudi, you begin. Then Nathan, then Uncle Albert, you, David, and then me. One, two, three.’ Uncle Rudi started playing the simple tune. Then, while he played on, Nathan started, beginning again so the tune was overlapping on itself. Uncle Albert came in on the viola, followed by Father on the cello, and last of all came Madame Stronski. Now they were all playing and the tune became a little symphony. Faster and faster they played until they all had to give up in laughter. The double doors opened and Mother stood there smiling. Dinner was ready. With a sweep of scarves Madame Helena laid her violin in its case.
‘Judit, I’m starving,’ she said, and led the way into the dining room, while Izaac was picked up by Lotte, and carried off to bed.
Voices rose and fell behind the double doors that separated the dining room from the music room. Dinner was progressing at a leisurely pace. Next door in the music room, Izaac, in pyjamas, was edging silently along, hugging the wall under the picture where he thought the girl inside it wouldn’t see him. This wasn’t a performance, it was more like a commando raid, and she had a habit of making him uneasy about his plans.
He was also apprehensive about the Cloud Lady. Her reference to cats had disturbed him; he still had scars from the time he had given their cat a loving hug. His interest was in her violin; he wasn’t sure whether it was alive or not, so he must be careful. Uncle Rudi and Nathan both played violins, but clearly these were just toys when compared to the Cloud Lady’s instrument. It, he had decided, was the key to her performance. If he could tame it, then he would turn everyone’s head and make their legs go wobbly as his had just done.
He could see the chair with her violin case on it, a tongue of the scarf she had wrapped around the instrument peeped from under the lid. Eve
n the case had a special magic; it was old and scarred, the only bright thing about it was a scarlet hotel sticker on the lid with a picture of a dancing clown. He was afraid of it now, but the more he looked the more strongly it drew him, filling his vision until his feet had no alternative but to move. The case lay on a chair at chest-height to him. He reached out. The lid was unclasped; he lifted it cautiously, alert in case the violin might spring out at him. The silk was soft on his hands, but so had been the cat’s fur. He parted the folds, and there it was – the violin. The grain of its wood seemed to pulse with life. He reached out cautiously and touched the polished surface. It wasn’t cold like the marble floor in the hall; it was warm. He decided that it was probably alive. When he ran his fingers across the strings, they murmured back at him the familiar notes he heard whenever his uncles tuned up. Perhaps it liked him. He got it firmly by the neck and lifted; it was lighter than he expected, but when he tried to put it under his chin he found that his arms were too short. He looked around for the bow. The silly woman had called it a cat’s tail – nonsense – it was a sword. Uncle Rudi called his a sword and used it to duel with Izaac and the toy sword he’d been given for his birthday. There were two bows in the lid of the case; he put the violin on the floor behind him so he could pull properly. But the clip holding the bow was old and the bow came away in his hand. Izaac reeled backwards, waving it above his head for balance. For a moment his backside wavered dangerously above the violin before thumping down on the floor only inches away from it.
Louise, observing from the confines of her picture, was in an agony of apprehension as this saga developed, but all she could do was watch. Izaac did a swash and buckle or two to save face and then examined his prize. The hairs were floppy. He remembered that the Cloud Woman had had the same problem. He was good on technical details and he found the small mother-of-pearl nut on the end of the bow and turned it. That made it worse. He made a couple of rather angry swipes in the air and then got the direction right and the hairs tightened. Now he turned his attention to the violin. The music he was about to play was already loud in his mind. As he couldn’t manage to put the violin under his chin, he laid it on his knees with the thin end away from him and prepared to play.
Izaac knew that the place where the music came from was where the strings were held up on a wooden little bridge. So, gripping the bow by the middle, and still thinking more of a sword than of a bow, he thrust it lustily into the gap between the strings and the fiddle. To his surprise and amazement the creature let out a most terrible screech, not at all the music that Izaac had expected. He looked at the impaled instrument in horror; he hadn’t meant to hurt it. An unnatural silence had fallen over the house; it gave him a sense of urgency. There was only one thing he could do, and that was to pull out the offending bow A second appalling shriek rang out. He heard the clatter of knives and forks, the cries of ‘Izaac’. They were coming for him. However he still had the violin, and even to a three year old, possession is nine tenths of the law. All he needed was a little time to tame the creature.
An appalling, jarring screech cut through the quiet conversation about the dining room table. In the shocked silence that followed, only the flames of the Sabbath candles dared to move, shifting in the summer air from the half open door into the music room. Forks were arrested on the way to mouths; knives were held poised.
‘What on earth was that?’ breathed Father.
‘The cat?’ wondered Mother.
‘A violin?’ said Uncle Rudi. A second screech rent the air.
‘Izaac!’ burst out as one voice from around the table. There was a clatter as the entire company dropped their cutlery onto their plates and headed for the door.
At any other time the sight of all four members of the Tuning Fork Quartet trying to get through the dining room door at the same moment would have had him in stitches, but today Izaac meant business. When eventually they uncorked and burst into the room towards him he waved his bow menacingly. Their expressions changed to horror as they all realised that what Izaac had on his knees was not one of their own violins but the priceless Stradivarius. They faltered to a man, held back by the thought that at a wrong move from them Izaac might do literally anything. They were hopping around him like vultures when a cry rang out from the door.
‘Stop. Leave the boy!’
The four men fell back, walking on the tips of their toes in an agony of apprehension. Izaac had a momentary glimpse of the Cloud Lady standing like a fairy godmother in the doorway. This was his moment. He lifted the violin as if to fit it under his chin as Uncle Rudi did, but that’s where things had gone wrong last time; his arms were too short. He was aware of the expectations of the audience gathered about him; it was clearly up to him to entertain them, but whether with a solo performance or a full-scale tantrum he wasn’t sure. The Cloud Lady was standing above him, but for some reason she seemed to be encouraging him. At that moment he remembered how Father held his cello. So, still sitting, he spread his legs wide and put the bottom of the violin on the carpet. He exercised his right arm, remembered how his father played and took a cello-like swipe at the strings. It was not a success; the bow slipped and skittered across the strings, but fortunately the noise was deadened by his grip on the neck of the instrument. The Cloud Lady bent down and gently guided his left hand so that he was holding the violin by its shoulder; now the strings were free. As he drew back his arm, he could feel her fingers over his on the bow, light but firm. Now at last the magic he had been looking for was flowing through him. His bow found the lowest of the four strings, the G string. As if of itself it began to move and the full rich tone of the open string sang out.
The next three seconds would prove to be Izaac’s most enduring musical memory, the moment when he realised that it was he who was making this magical sound. And what a sound! Not just a single note but the countless other notes and harmonics that make the sound of the violin unique. His mind, like a well-prepared plot of land, was ready for this and he would remember the moment as minutes not as seconds. Half a bow was all that his reach would allow but he used every inch of it and sustained that note to the very end.
Now came the applause, but Izaac was too shocked and dumfounded even to acknowledge it. He dropped the bow as Madame Stronski swooped forward and lifted the violin from his hands. Without saying a word he rushed out of the room, past his mother, and buried his head in the neutral starchiness of Lotte’s apron.
Some hours later, when the visiting members of the Tuning Fork Quartet had departed, still laughing at the incident, Madame Stronski came back into music room to collect her violin. For a moment she shed her merriment and turned to Izaac’s parents.
‘About your little Izaac …’
‘Oh, we’re so sorry. We hope he didn’t …’ they exclaimed in unison.
‘No, my dears, it’s for me to apologise. I’m very much afraid I have woken a monster in your little fellow. Hopefully he will get over it and become a banker or keep bees, but if he takes an interest in the violin, keep him away from it till he is six or more. Then send for me, and I will help him if I can.’
She gathered up her things and turned to leave, looking around the room with affection. Her eye was caught by the portrait of the Girl in the Green Dress hanging on the wall. ‘You know, this really is a little gem, have you told me where she came from?’ she asked, sailing up to look at it closely.
‘Oh, Louise? She’s been in the family, passed down from father to son, ever since we had to flee from France at the beginning of the last century.’
Madame Stronski shook her head. ‘I would say she had broken a few hearts before that,’ she said and she sighed: ‘You won’t believe this, but I was once as slender as her. Look how she challenges us! I’d like to think that I looked like her when I told the Academy selection board in Kraków what I thought of them. Lot of old fuddy-duddies, misogynists to a man. “The concert platform is no place for a woman.” Pah! I told them. So I came to Vienna instead. I stil
l miss Kraków though,’ she sighed.
She smiled at the portrait and said: ‘Look after my little protégé for me, won’t you.’ Then, gathering her scarves about her, she left.
CHAPTER 3
Partners in Crime
Autumn changed to winter. Izaac was restless and irritable and inclined to interrupt people when they were playing or practising. Mostly he ignored Louise; if he wanted her attention he would either act out his frustration in front of her picture or try to explain it in long speeches that would end in frustrated gobbledegook. Then, quite suddenly, the situation changed; he found he could lift the lid on top of the piano keyboard. Louise couldn’t see him from where her picture hung but could hear him playing notes, as if searching for a tune. Then there would be clashing chords, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. He was self absorbed, not looking for an audience, so Louise withdrew into her own distant thoughts. Then, all at once she was in demand again.
‘Lees, I want you! Come here!’ Izaac had never addressed her directly like this before. Invariably their exchanges had been his one-way commentary on life, with her just making encouraging thoughts. Clearly something had happened over by the piano, the one part of the room which she couldn’t see, and where he couldn’t see her. She could feel his frustration and anger mounting; he wanted her and he wanted her now! There was only one thing she could do to avoid a scene, and that was to go to him. She didn’t want to frighten him by suddenly appearing, but she needn’t have worried. As soon as he began to see her outline forming, he waved her forward.
