Death and the Maiden

by Gerald Elias

  “Funny,” said Lipinsky, “because even though on our international tours we had steak and clean sheets, we were prisoners.”

  “How so?”

  “First of all,” said Greunig, “KGB was with us whole time. Room next door. First row, balcony. Check-in at airport. So we couldn’t talk to nobody.”

  “And second of all?”

  “Our families were hostages,” said Lipinsky, and Jacobus could almost hear Lipinsky’s voice break.

  “It’s okay, Josef. It’s okay,” said Greunig. “They knew we wouldn’t defect, or talk, like I talk to you, Jacobus Daniel, because we knew what they would do to our families if we did. I think that’s really what killed Osvald, a sweet man. Too sweet. The doctors said heart attack, but I think it was fear. I think it was stress. I think it was sadness.”

  No one talked for a while. The little band, oblivious to the old musicians’ sorrow, kept up peppy folk music in the background. A foreign television show droned on. The only sound at their table was of glasses being set down with a hollower ring than moments earlier.

  “They wouldn’t even let us take our good instruments overseas,” said Lipinsky.

  “Your Maginis?”

  “Ha! ha! again, Mr. Jacobus. We never had Maginis. This was propaganda. This was big joke: Magini Quartet and no Maginis! At home we had playable instruments. But even they needed a lot of repair. And on tour, even your worst student wouldn’t be seen dead with what we play on.”

  “Where are you families and your instruments now?”

  “After Chernobyl—”

  Jacobus heard a sudden clatter of glasses, plates, and silverware—maybe something was spilled—and a heavy thud in the middle of the table.

  “Khashi!” said Ivan. “You try, Daniel, Williams?”

  “Why not?” asked Jacobus. “What’s in it?”

  “Never mind. It’s Georgian. Perfect with vodka. No hangover! Guaranteed! You try.”

  Jacobus felt for his spoon, dipped it into the soup bowl in front of him, and made contact with a floating gelatinous lump that he first pinned against the side of the bowl, then with a deft maneuver so it wouldn’t slide off, scooped it into his spoon, splashing only an insignificant amount of the broth onto the table.

  Swallowing the contents he felt briny grease scald the inside of his mouth and gullet. What remained on his throbbing tongue was a small mass of fat that bore vague hints of beef and garlic. He downed the rest of his vodka in an effort to extinguish the third-degree burn in his esophagus.

  “You like?” asked Lipinsky.

  “What’s the meat?”

  “Maybe beef. Maybe finger!” said Greunig, with a laugh. “Maybe not.”

  “I think we now go to A major,” said Ivan, saving Jacobus from having to reply, though he couldn’t.

  Nathaniel escorted Jacobus, his legs beginning to respond semi-independently from each other, to the next table. “Where’s my khashi?” he asked. Glasses were filled.

  “Budyem! Bud’mo!” the Russians said.

  “Budyems up!” said Jacobus just before he belched.

  Jacobus, feeling bleary, needed information before he passed out. He knew at some point, probably soon, he was going to. What were their names again? Ah, yes. Glasnost and Perestroika.

  “So tell me, Glas … boys, why is Kortovsky shit? How’d he ruin your quartet? To my ear he sounds fine.”

  “Blyad! Who says about sound?” asked Greunig.

  “Not so loud, Dimi,” whispered Lipinsky. “It’s very bad word,” he continued to Jacobus. “It means whore.”

  “But we use it like American ‘fuck,’” said Gruenig. “Nice and indignant. So I say it softer for Yosef. Shhhh! Blyad. Lots of people sound fine and are shit. But we didn’t know this in beginning.”

  Lipinsky said, “In beginning, after poor Osvald die, may he rest in peace, we decide we hire Aaron Kortovsky, good young violinist—Ivan was still too young, unfortunately we know that now—and then we will train him to be like us. We have reputation. We have our special…”

  “Style,” said Nathaniel.

  “Yes, style. And no. More than style. We understand the music. The right way for Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich.”

  “There’s a lot of composers between Beethoven and Shostakovich,” said Jacobus.

  “We know right way for that too,” said Greunig.

  Jacobus was starting to feel annoyance creep through his alcohol-induced haze.

  “You have to admit, Vlady,” he said, “there’s more than one right way to play music.”

  It was as if he had just called Jesse James a cheater. All sound came to a halt. He waited.

  “Mr. Daniel,” said Lipinsky, “we rehearse Shostakovich quartet number eleven with Shostakovich himself. Forty-six times we rehearse before we perform! We memorize every Shostakovich quartet. Do you think Aaron Kortovsky’s right way is better than our right way?”

  “Point taken, Uncle Yosef,” said Jacobus. He picked up his glass. Empty again! “But I must say—Don’t shush me, Williams Nathaniel! Let go of my arm!—I am not the world’s biggest Shostakovich fan. I mean, it’s okay to hate Stalin, okay? He was a baaaaad man. And to express that hatred, okay? But in every fucking piece he wrote? I mean—”

  “Poshel ty na khui,” mumbled Greunig with menace. “Go fuck—”

  “Ha!” said Ivan, delivering another whack to Jacobus’s back. He was getting used to this. “Good joke, Daniel! And now, E major.”

  Jacobus removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, trying to stay awake. Where are my glasses? he wondered. Always losing them. Ah, here they are, in my hand.

  “Kortovsky has a sound,” said a voice, either Lipinsky or Greunig. Now they were starting to sound so alike. How did they do that?

  “And plays so in tune it’s frightening,” said another voice.

  “Okay. In tune. But that is all,” said another.

  “No, that’s not true. He has one other thing. He is political. I thought here in America I would be free, but Kortovsky knows pressure.”

  “You couldn’t take heat, Yosef.”

  Jacobus heard Lipinsky fumble with his glass. “Za uspekh nashego beznadezhnogo dela,” he said, slurping its contents.

  “Huh?” said Jacobus.

  “‘To the success of our hopeless cause.’ You are right, Dimi. I don’t like heat. Every day the small insults. The quiet intimidation: ‘Yosef, maybe you should put on new strings. Yosef, it sounded so good … last year. Yosef, are you sure you feel well?’ Life wasn’t the same. So I leave.”

  “Then we hire the blonde.”

  “Kortovsky’s girlfriend,” Jacobus elaborated, proud of himself for being able to stay on top of the conversation’s intricacies. He even remembered what “blonde” meant. But where, oh where, has my Annika gone? Oops, someone was talking to him.

  “… no, my friend. The Englishman’s girlfriend. She plays good. Maybe not like Yosef—right, Yosef?—but good. Maybe now Kortovsky’s happy. For year, two year, okay. Then, little by little, they give Pravda and me the Yosef treatment—”

  Ivan Lensky interrupted. “Today, Annika blonde, she say to me, do I know Smetana quartet? ‘What!’ I say. I say to her, ‘I know both Smetana quartet, both Janáček quartet, all Dvořák quartet, because my coach was Borodin Quartet in Moscow and they know Czech music better than New Magini will ever!”

  “See?” said Greunig. “This what I mean. What do I need this for? I ask me. Good old days are gone. So one day we rehearse and Kortovsky go to bathroom. So I go to bathroom on his music and leave. Bye-bye.”

  Jacobus felt a tear of laughter brim up from his left eye and form a rivulet over the bridge of his nose, guided by the rim of his glasses, merging with the tear from his right eye to form a little puddle on the table, upon which he suddenly realized the right side of his face rested. Abruptly, without missing a beat, the tears of joy became tears of grief. Why was he thinking about his older brother, Eli. Why? Then he heard it, behind the conve
rsation, behind the sporting event being broadcast in a language that had no vowels, his heart had been listening to the folk band playing its rendition of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance no. 2 in E Minor. He had played the violin-and-piano arrangement of that poignant dance with his brother Eli. Eli, the one with the real talent. It had been the last music they had ever played together, for their parents the night before Jacobus left Europe to study in the United States before the war.

  It was to be the last time he ever saw any of them. His parents had died in the camps. That was a fact. But where was Eli? Jacobus had searched, but all traces were swallowed, engulfed by the voracious gut of the Holocaust. Missing. He could have been dead for fifty years. He could still be alive. For all Jacobus knew, Eli could be the blind beggar on the street.

  What does “missing” mean? Missing to whom? Eli could be searching for him, in which case Jacobus would be “missing.”

  “And Lenskaya?” he simpered. “Is she missing? Like Kortovsky?” He wasn’t sure anyone heard him, though. “Why didn’t she quit?”

  “After I leave, the Englishman come. Was what Kortovsky wanted all along. He hire Haagen to get Short because he think, ‘He and I, we are the same.’

  “But that turned out to be problem, not a solution. They were same! Same ego!”

  Someone was laughing. Far away, it seemed.

  “—so funny?” Jacobus managed.

  “Uncle Yosef says Annika didn’t think they were same. Is funny.”

  “Obviously same. Annika obviously didn’t think they were same.”

  “Here’s to Annika!” blurted Greunig. “Shtoby myaso byloi khui stoyal! To the hope that there will always be meat and our pricks stand tall!

  “So Crispin, now he lose music war to Kortovsky. He lose politic war to Kortovsky. And he lose Annika war to Kortovsky. But he’s not smart like me. When I lose, I leave. Short doesn’t leave. He gets fired. Boom! He is very angry.”

  “Maybe he should drink more!” blurted Jacobus, receiving howls of laughter and a whack on his back that seemed to him to have been endured by someone other than himself. Poor guy. Poor Pravda!

  “Lenskaya! Lenskaya! Why’dn’t she quit?”

  Jacobus felt another cheek next to his, sharing his spot on the tabletop. Cheek to cheek, are we? A well-shaved cheek. Cologne and garlic.

  “After they kill my father in Chernobyl,” whispered the voice, “my mother stop arguing. She has life but lost soul.”

  I really should shave more often, thought Jacobus. Not easy to shave when you’re blind. No one understands. Fuck the razor blades! Cut my throat that way. Electric safer, safer. But boy, do you look stupid if you miss a spot!

  “Where’s Kortovsky?” shouted Jacobus as loud as he could. “I want to know! Where the hell is Kortovsky?”

  “Jake,” said a voice jiggling his shoulder. It was a familiar voice this time. “We best be going while we can still move.”

  “But we’re only on E major!” Jacobus explained rationally. He would make it clear enough for even a schoolchild. “We still have B, F-sharp, then R, then double Yoohoo, then”—Jacobus began to giggle—“Special K.” He burst out laughing.

  “That’s what I mean. Let’s go.”

  Jacobus felt himself being lifted up. One of his friends on each side of him. He had been so comfortable. Where were they taking him? To Kortovsky? His feet were running but they were not reaching the floor. People laughing. Old friends. New old friends. He was glad they were happy.

  “Toodle-oo! Toodle-oo!” Such nice people.

  The voices were so far away, talking too fast. Why didn’t they slow down for him? He heard garlic-and-cologne use the word “Vaseline,” and his big black friend—he had his name on the tip of his tongue—reply with “oat car.”

  Infinitely somber, he began to sing the melody to “Death and the Maiden” with a new text: “Va-se-line oat-car, Va-se-line oat-car.” Annika! Yumi! Jacobus loved them both.

  “Hey, Ivan the Terrible! My big black friend tells me … in other words, who, who the hell’s listenin’ to Winterreise in yo mama’s garage? Yo, Ivan? Who the hell—”

  “Peter the Great,” came the chuckling response. “My baby brother. But he is not listening. He is singing.”

  “You have a brother too? Like me? Pretty damn nice voice, my friend tells me!” sang Jacobus. “But can he sing ‘Vaseline oat car,’ I ask you? And who’s playin’ piano in the garage? Sweeascheslavic … Rikter?”

  “No, that baby brother too. He’s talented one in family.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  Then, as Jacobus was being dragged, he heard someone snoring. He wasn’t sure, but it might have been himself.

  FIFTEEN

  WEDNESDAY

  His dream was making no sense. The ringing. A heavy weight pinning him down as he lay on his left side. Something wet and slivery penetrating deep into his right ear.

  “Get off me, you goddam mongrel,” Jacobus growled. The admission of his consciousness, though, only spurred Trotsky’s enthusiasm. The licking spread to Jacobus’s unshaven face, as he struggled to answer the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said with all the vitality of his withered tomato plant. His head felt like a football kicked by Lou “the Toe” Groza and his stomach as if that had been its destination.

  “Hi, Jake!” It was Yumi. “Coffee?”

  “Bring it here. I can’t move. Literally.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Why? What else could ‘can’t move’ possibly mean?”

  Yumi laughed. “I guess you are, then. Can I bring anything else? I’m going to Lower Crust.”

  “Doughnut.”

  Yumi began to sing the ditty Jacobus had taught her on the train to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”: “Oh, I went into a baker shop to get a bite to—”

  “Shut up! I mean,” he continued in a more palliative tone, “you can tell me why you’re so goddam cheery when you get here.”

  He hung up, the cue Trotsky was waiting for to eat the telephone, and hunched his way toward Nathaniel’s bathroom, his hand against the wall for guidance and to keep him upright. “‘No hangover. Guaranteed,’” Jacobus grumbled in an imitative Russian accent. “My ass.”

  He risked scalding himself in Nathaniel’s temperamental shower that on occasion would either sputter like the last drop of a canteen in the desert or, with the pressure of a riot control hose, gush superheated water from some secret nuclear-powered heating device that only New York City knew about. After scrubbing off enough of the previous night’s debauch, he managed to stand erect. He fumbled through Nathaniel’s medicine cabinet and found what he hoped were aspirin, swallowed a few, and returned to his bedroom where he donned one of Nathaniel’s flannel robes, which would have fit Trotsky and him combined. Shaving was out of the question.

  When he answered the doorbell, he wordlessly gestured to Yumi not to talk to him but to just hand him the coffee, which she did with practiced understanding. With his other hand he found her arm and guided her to the kitchen table. There he sat and sipped the life-giving caffeine that gradually brought him back from the precipice of a vegetative state.

  Halfway through the coffee, he reached out his hand and said, “doughnut,” and felt an old-fashioned plain cruller silently placed in his palm.

  “Ah, good girl,” he said, but immediately regretted even such a modest utterance, as the pain in his head vengefully reasserted its dominance.

  With the cup half empty, Jacobus knew he could dunk the cruller, confident it would not overflow. One. Two. Three, he said to himself silently, and removed the cruller. Any more than three seconds and it would become saturated and fall apart in his hand. Any fewer and it would not have absorbed sufficient caffeine. When the pastry was finished, Yumi handed him a napkin, with which he wiped his mouth and fingers.

  “Now,” he said as softly as possible, so softly that he could feel Yumi’s sweet breath close to his face in order to hear him. “You’ve got news to tell me.”


  Yumi spoke just as quietly, and Jacobus thanked the powers of the universe for having provided him this one student out of all others. “Annika’s okay,” she said. “She was never really missing.”

  “Mmm. Go on. But please talk slower.”

  “She was just so disgusted seeing that finger there, she had to get away. She went to the bathroom backstage to wash her face and decided not to go back for her case. She knows it was stupid, but she just couldn’t face it. She went to a bar where she had a few drinks and—”

  “What’s the name of the bar?”

  “Um, she didn’t say.”

  “And how do you know this?” asked Jacobus, still whispering.

  “Because she called me from the bar.”

  “She called you?” Jacobus asked, again regretting the unintended increase in decibels. “That’s a new one.”

  “I was surprised too,” said Yumi. “But she said she wanted to get together and patch things up. That the shock of the finger made her realize that we need to work together to figure out what’s going on.”

  “And?”

  “And so she invited me to her spa over on Second Avenue, Perfect Finnish, for a massage and a sauna. She told me—”

  “You were both naked?”

  “That’s what one usually is in a sauna.”

  “But she told me in so many words she was … you know.”

  “Bisexual?”

  “Yeah. I hope she didn’t harass you, give you the Kortovsky treatment.”

  “What if she did? I don’t see the problem here, Jake.”

  These were uncharted waters for Jacobus, who couldn’t recall the last time he had sex but nevertheless considered himself squarely in the heterosexual corner. It wasn’t as if he had been incapable of sexual gratification—his misguided fling with Victoria Jablonski, his then protégée, was more than proof of that, though it happened only after she was the one to make the first move. On the other hand, he had faced the possibility of true emotional intimacy with Yumi’s grandmother, the Englishwoman, Kate Padgett, and found that that prospect paralyzed him. He knew where it all traced back to—the Grimsley Competition, that swine judge, Feodor Malinkovsky, who called him into his office and …