by Aubrey Flegg
‘What is the matter with them?’ he sneered, glaring at her with satisfaction. ‘We invade Serbia and are defeated, not just once but twice! We can’t even hold our lines in Poland!’ The paper was swishing back and forth now like a lion’s tail; she couldn’t stop her eyes following it. He raised his hand as if to bang the paper again and noticed her wince. He had the ascendancy now. ‘Lost 4,000 men, pushed back to Krakow, and then we have to be rescued by the Germans.’ At each expostulation he forced her back half a step into the room where Erich was sleeping. ‘Defeated in Ivangorod and now Italy attacks us from the south. We can’t expect the Germans to help us down there, can we?’ Sabine had stopped listening; the pure animal instinct to protect her young was stiffening her. When he thrust his face up into hers she didn’t step back. It worked; his voice changed. He shrugged his shoulders; his next question was almost solicitous. ‘So when will Franz get his papers then?’ Franz was her husband and of an age to be called up.
‘Papa, you know very well! Franz has been turned down by the army because of his heart.’
‘Heart be damned! He’s as fit as I am. Don’t you dare try to make excuses for him, woman!’
Sabine looked at him in confusion. How did it always end up like this, with him blaming her for something that he had done? Years ago, when Franz, was a boy, Veit had decreed that the lad needed to be toughened up. Make a man of him. His solution was to take the boy camping in winter. Franz, already heavy with a cold, had been put to sleep in damp bedding and had got chilled to the bone; rheumatic fever followed. By a miracle the boy survived, but was left with a heart murmur that even an army doctor could not ignore. Sabine knew this story because Franz’s mother had told her about it before she died. Sabine was grateful to her now. Perhaps Veit didn’t know that Sabine knew. For once she had a small hold over him but she had the wisdom to keep it to herself.
‘He should be at the front. My own son, clerk in a timber yard, making money for a Jew!’
Having vented his spleen, Viet was civil over breakfast. When he left the house to walk to the shop for tobacco, Sabine checked that he really had gone before crossing to her easel. There she squeezed several inches of carmine and then black on to her palette and painted Veit. As she worked, she could feel the brushstrokes starting deep in her body, rising up, tearing at her insides until they broke on to the canvas with little cries of pain, or could it be rage? After an hour it was done and she stepped back, shaking, her face wet with tears. She looked at the canvas with a mixture of terror and joy: terror that Veit might see it, joy at having expressed her feelings for once.
By the time that Veit returned, carrying a cabbage as a peace offering, the canvas was safe. A gnarled old tree wrapped deeply around with ivy now replaced the enraged Viet. Sabine watched him pass the canvas, pause, snort, and walk on. She breathed again. Then, just short of the door, he turned and came back to look again. Surely he could see nothing of himself in that tangled mass? He caught sight of her watching. His eyes glinted, but it was some time before he bullied her again.
CHAPTER 5
The First Violin
Nobody could blame Nathan Abrahams for his generosity; he had not been there when Madame Stronski had warned Izaac’s parents to keep him away from the violin until he was six. Izaac’s success on the piano had eased his petulance with regard to music, and he would sidle up to Nathan when the quartet met in their house and persuade him to let him hold his violin, or better, to let him use the bow while Nathan picked out the notes on the fingerboard for him. In the days coming up to Izaac’s fifth birthday, Nathan might have been seen scouring the many musical instrument shops in Vienna looking for a suitable small-size violin for his little cousin. He loved the idea of using money from his first job on such a present. He arrived on the day of Izaac’s birthday, calling out his congratulations and carrying a parcel that declared its contents by every curve. If Izaac’s parents remembered Madame Stronski’s warning they just had to forget it now.
The sight of that parcel eclipsed all else. Cakes and presents were graciously accepted, but everyone could see that Izaac’s mind was elsewhere. If the half-size violin looked tiny to the adults, to Izaac it looked like a key to heaven. This was no mere toy: the feel, the strings, the pegs, the bow that tightened with a little twirly nut, all the intricate details assured him that this was the real thing. He demanded a lesson from Nathan immediately and for the rest of the day he carried the violin – safe in its case – with him everywhere. When he went to bed, the violin went too, so that he could reach out and touch it as soon as he woke.
Perhaps the family had felt shy about taking up on Madame Stronski’s offer to teach him, since she was, after all, much sought after. So an elderly neighbour, Herr Müller, who had once played on the very lowest desk in the Volksoper agreed to come in and give ‘the little boy’ some lessons.
Louise watched with amused apprehension while the ‘little boy’ absorbed in seconds what the old man had to offer, and then had to wait patiently through many repetitions and explanations until he was alone and could practise and perfect what he had been told. Within weeks the old man was floundering. It was little wonder; Izaac could already read music far better than he could read words. He would sit looking at a sheet of music and hear the notes in his head; he simply devoured the elementary primers that his teacher produced.
As the euphoria of his first lessons began to wear off, Louise sensed that Izaac was unhappy. She longed for him play for her, as he used to play on the piano. Nearly a year had passed since their tiff over the poor Countess; if he didn’t want her company, there was nothing she could do about it. But now he was like a hobbled pony. Every time he tried to trot he tripped. She had seen his hands flitting over the piano keys as light as butterfly’s wings, now she saw them on the violin looking like arthritic sausages. The coordination that had had him playing Frère Jacques was gone too. She watched in dismay as, week by week, his shoulders began to droop like an old man’s, as if the violin was pulling them down.
He started practising in front of her portrait. She longed to be able to make suggestions, but they had lost their common language. All she could do was look on in horror as Izaac gradually transformed himself – not to a duck, nor yet to the General – but to a second Herr Müller! It had taken the old violinist years of sawing away in his dusky corner of the pit at the opera to acquire his hunched shoulders and the aches and the cramps that Izaac, a natural mimic, now copied from him in weeks. She would watch Izaac putting away his violin like an old man after his lessons, and would feel his despair. Then one day, after Herr Müller had gone, Izaac looked up at Louise’s portrait.
‘Lees, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have done it really.’
‘What do you mean, Izaac?’ she asked.
‘The Countess von Tischelstein, I never would have poked fun at her to any one else. I just pretended to you that I would. I liked her, it was just …’ Tears were balancing precariously on his lower lids. Louise realised how much she had missed sharing things with him.
‘Just that I didn’t trust you, that you didn’t want another nanny?’ she suggested.
Izaac nodded but his shrug suggested that there was something more here that he couldn’t express. She noticed his arm tightening on the violin tucked under his elbow.
‘I love your new violin,’ she said.
‘But not how I play it!’
‘How do you know that, Izaac?’
‘Because when I play for you, Lees, I just know. You don’t have to say anything but I feel it. Oh help me, Lees … why can’t I do it? I hear the music in my head, but my fingers …’ he trailed off. He was crying properly now, the tears running off his chin. He closed the lid of his violin case to keep it dry, and managed an apologetic grin.
‘Izaac, listen to me. Do you remember a woman with lots of scarves who played for you years ago?’
Izaac looked puzzled; then he nodded. ‘Oh yes. I called her the Cloud Lady; I did something terrible to her
violin!’
‘You did indeed,’ Louise smiled to herself. ‘She played her violin for you, and then you played a lovely long note on her violin for us, remember?’ He was nodding; he would never forget that moment.
‘Well, would you like her to give you a lesson?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you! Why don’t you ask Papa?’
‘But I don’t even know her name.’
‘Tell him that she was the one who let you play her violin; he’ll remember.’
‘You’ll stay, won’t you, if she comes?’
‘Only if you want me.’
The front door at the bottom of the apartment stairs opened and closed and Madame Stronski’s distinctive Polish accent rose over Mother’s voice in the hallway.
‘I know… I know. Nathan has a heart of gold, but not the sense he was born with. Izaac, the poor mite, is he still playing it like a cello?’ Her laugh rang out richly while Mother murmured apologies. The door swung open and the maestro made her entry. ‘I left Strad at home. Lost his nerve after last time, the coward.’ Now she spotted Izaac, who had been practising. ‘Izaac Abrahams, is it really you? Good heavens, they’ve been watering you.’ She swept a pale blue scarf over her shoulder as she bore down on him. ‘So this is the new violin. Bless me, Cousin Nathan has done you proud! Now we must have a chat, you and I.’ Turning to Izaac’s mother, she said, ‘Judit, Izaac and I have important matters to discuss.’
Then she turned to Izaac with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I hate to have people about when I’m practising, don’t you?’ Louise, from the security of her picture, wondered if she should go too, but Izaac had specifically asked her to stay. Now the maestro stood back and assessed the boy with narrowed eyes. ‘Let me see you hold the violin for a moment. Just tuck it under your chin. Now raise your bow as if you were about to play.’ She swept around him like a comet, trailing scarves. Louise watched Izaac’s eyes swivel anxiously as she passed. ‘Harrumph! Aged about seventy …’ she muttered. ‘Vintage? Vienna café-orchestra perhaps.’ Then to Izaac: ‘Now, let me hold this little beauty,’ and she held out her hand for his violin. She ran her fingers over the strings. ‘In tune too.’ She put it down into its case.
‘Now, let’s look at the other half of the equation, that’s you, Izaac. You don’t mind if I push you around a bit do you…you don’t bite?’ Izaac managed a nervous smile. ‘Just stand in front of me, will you, feet comfortably apart, left foot a little forward, as that’s where the weight of the violin comes.’
Louise watched, fascinated, as the great lady got to work on Izaac. She was like a sculptor working with soft clay, pushing his body around and moulding it while murmuring the reasons for each adjustment as she did so.
‘If we get this right now, Izaac, you will never have trouble with your body. We are athletes, you see, we go out on to the platform and we do things with our bodies that would leave the average person from the audience tied in knots.’ She stood back, head on one side, to admire her work. Then she reached out and put her hand on Izaac’s head.
Louise thought that she was going to give him a blessing; in a way she was.
‘Now, Izaac, push up against my hand. This is the most important thing I can teach you. Every thing about the violin strives upwards. The only thing that presses down is the bow, and that you hold in your fingers. Reach up with your body, and so will your violin, so will your music, and your audience will feel themselves rising too. This is why they sometimes even rise to their feet … they can’t help it, you see. But before that, my love, there is work, a lot of hard work.
Madame Stronski came every week when she could, and Louise watched and listened with silent admiration as she quietly undid the damage inflicted on Izaac by the well-meaning Herr Müller. Izaac would play her the piece she had given him to work on. Louise noticed that she would always begin by pointing out something that he had done well.
‘Your open strings are really buzzing now …’ Then having softened the blow, she would begin to tackle the problems. ‘Your thumb, Izaac, your thumb! Get your left thumb perched on the neck as I show you and it will be right for life!’ One time she got cross. ‘Izaac, don’t you think it would be polite if you were to play to me and not to the wall.’
Even though she could only manage one lesson a week, Izaac was now streaking ahead. He only had to be corrected once, would remember what he had been told, and would build on it. He was able to look at a page of music and hear it in his mind; his problem was to get his fingers, his arm, and his whole body to translate this into sound. Here Madame Helena, as he now called her, was his guru. She would pounce on him, holding his violin by the scroll and getting him relaxed until the violin came to be like a feather in his hands. When his notes became thin and wispy she would make him use his bow so slowly that the sound came out grating like gravel. ‘There, Izaac,’ she would shout, ‘horrible isn’t it, but that is what sound is, those pebbles and the stones rattling around in your violin are what you turn into your castles and palaces. We have to shape them and cast them into sound.’
One day, when his lesson was over and Izaac had been taken out to buy a new pair of shoes, Madame Stronski lingered on in the music room with the excuse that she wanted to practise, but she soon put her violin down and began to prowl, moving about the room as if trying to find the exact position where Izaac had been standing during practice.
‘This is the spot,’ she said to herself. Then crouching down to Izaac’s height, she looked up and gazed directly into Louise’s portrait. ‘Well, well, well, I guessed as much. So he’s not just playing to the wall. Well, young lady. What have you got to say for yourself? If I remember rightly, I asked you to look after my little wonder for me. Fat lot of good you’ve been.’ She heaved herself to her feet. ‘So, he plays for you, does he? Well, we all need somewhere, or something, don’t we, some rock or tree or marble saint to which we can speak our minds and hear ourselves think. But you’re no saint, are you, dear? That’s why I like you. You’re like my Copernicus.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘There is a statue of him as a young man outside the University in Kraków holding his astrolabe, and I thought he was wonderful. He was the first man, you know, to work out that the earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. A sad story: he didn’t dare publish his discovery in case he was excommunicated, or worse. I would tell him, his statue, all about my love life and woes. One day I was giving out to him about the fuddy-duddies in the conservatory, when I heard his voice – remember, I was only eighteen – “Wake up Helena! Where is the musical sun? In Vienna, of course. So off you go, my little planet, stop expecting the musical world to spin about you, and go and spin about it.” I’d like to think he said, “I’ll miss you,”’ she added wistfully, ‘but I don’t suppose he did.’
While Madame Stronski was talking, Louise kept seeing little glimpses of – Kraków surely – through her eyes. A great square lined with cafés and restaurants, carriages passing; a trumpet that called from a high spire and then stopped, tantalisingly, in mid-phrase. Then they were walking under trees where a statue rose in a small clearing, and there he was! Copernicus, looking down at them, holding his astrolabe. Louise wasn’t surprised that the young Helena had brought her troubles to him; his was a face to confide in. She looked at her companion, and saw Helena as the eighteen-year-who had stood under Copernicus’s statue that day: rebellious, troubled, but at that moment glowing with her new idea. Had Louise known it, she was seeing the same radiant beauty that she herself had shown one day in Delft, the day when the Master had captured her likeness. The vision faded … her new friend was now at the window gazing down on the Viennese traffic.
About this time Izaac first walked into the music room wearing a school uniform. It came as a surprise to Louise, who was inclined to forget that Izaac had a whole life of his own that was beyond her ken. Perhaps he was as good at his homework as he was at his violin, because it was always a very short time between hearing the bang of the apartment door and his eag
er appearance in the music room, particularly when Madame Stronski was waiting for him. As his confidence returned, so too did his good opinion of himself.
‘Izaac! Stop, stop, stop! You are swelling like a toad. If you swell any more you will burst and I will have to mop you up,’ Madame Stronski shouted. Louise was amused. Izaac was standing with his violin, the picture of offended dignity, but Madame Stronski gave no quarter. ‘I want to hear Izaac playing, not Master stuck up little Abrahams. You’re not in the Musicverein, nor yet at the Carnegie Hall in New York. You are plain ordinary Izaac, a little squirt of a schoolboy who happens to be good at the violin. Just be kind enough to play for me. I like Izaac’s playing, but, frankly, Master Abrahams gives me a pain.’
‘But Madame Helena, how do I know when Izaac is playing and when it is Master Abrahams?’
‘Um Gottes willen! Because I begin shouting at you for a start! Don’t you feel it when you are swelling like a toad, eyes boggling, buttons about to burst, imagining that you are the great Mr Kreisler himself?’
Izaac opened his eyes wide. ‘But when you’re not here to shout at me?’
‘Well, play for your friend, Louise!’ Izaac looked at the ceiling, then at the floor, studiously avoiding any glance towards Louise’s picture. ‘And don’t go all innocent on me; you know perfectly well who I mean. You’ve been playing to that picture since I first came here.’
‘Oh, Lees!’ he said. ‘But she doesn’t know anything about music.’ Louise gave a mental sniff.
‘She doesn’t have to,’ Madame Stronski snapped. ‘Izaac, get this into your head: ninety percent of our audiences know nothing about music, but we still play for them, and if we play like self-conceited little brats they will tell us. Just as I tell you – sure as rosin-your-bow – if you play for Louise here as you played for me just now, either she will reach out and bop you on the head with her telescope, or you will know in your conceited little heart that Master Abrahams, the toad, has just pushed you off the platform! Now go away and play, I need to negotiate pay and conditions with Miss Louise!’
