A Certain Music Read online

  The child tossed cake to a head-bobbing bird. 'When?' she asked.

  'Soon.'

  'When's soon?'

  'The army will teach me things,' her father continued. 'Things I have forgotten that are important. Like the things that you are taught in school are important.'

  The child continued to toss crumbs.

  The man paused, then, 'When your mother leaves for the factory she believes you are leaving for school. But she is not always right, is she?'

  The child is silent.

  'The authorities have been to the house. It is the law that you attend the Volkschule until you are ten so that you will continue to learn your letters and numbers.'

  'I know my letters and numbers.'

  'There are things to learn besides letters and numbers ... Just think, you and me, both in places where we are learning things. What a happy thought. Every day we shall think of each other and of the new things we are learning ... Imagine that! Think too, Liebling, of your mother who worries.'

  The musicians had returned and were tuning up.

  'The school is on holiday now,' the man pointed out, 'but when it goes back, you will attend. Yes?'

  'Yes.'

  'Every day?'

  'Yes.'

  'You say yes but –'

  'I promise.'

  The quartet had launched into a waltz.

  'You are strong,' whispered the man, 'like your mother. You have a beautiful mind, which is a rare thing. And I love you.'

  With hands that dropped crumbs the child reached for her father and buried her face in his neck.

  Today there was much for the man to do, so when the players were having their next break, father and daughter walked off, one to the clerk's office, the other to the woods.

  In the Vienna Woods the maples, the oaks, the elms and the beeches were heralding the march of winter as the last of their leaves twirled like dancers to the ground.

  Today many people were about. They strolled across the grass or sat on rugs under trees with baskets of cheese and wine ... From the fork in the tree the child watched the comings and goings of carts carrying families of picnickers, and here and there a carriage with fine ladies and men in silk hats would wind along a forest drive. Her eye caught something moving in the distance. It was a funeral. She had observed one before. She loved the black horses with the plumes on their heads that nodded and bowed as they plodded up the hill to the churchyard. This funeral was small, only a handful of people walked behind the carriage draped in black. The child wondered why sad things should look so beautiful.

  A hare scuttled by as she jumped to the ground. She wandered on, leapt to catch the dead leaves that rose with the kick of her boot. They crackled underfoot like the sound of rifle fire and an image rose of jackets with gold buttons.

  The sun had brought the world out on this festive day. This way and that ladies and gentlemen strolled arm in arm, children in dresses ran with hoops, men in uniform clopped along on horseback, carriages rolled, carts rattled, and from somewhere came the sound of marching music. People were moving in that direction.

  The child went the other way. There were many ways to get to the cottage by the granary and taking this route she could play games as she went, asking herself who lived in what house, who they lived with and what – at that moment of passing – they were doing.

  The first street she took was empty. She walked on, past houses with long windows, where chimneys poked from rooftops and boxes with flowers stood at the door. Suddenly she stopped. The house was like any other, but coming from it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It wasn't like that of the wind in the conifer, or the bubble of water in the fountain. The sound conjured up no image. She only heard the music.

  The door was open. She peered inside.

  The man seated at the piano was the man in the woods with the wild hair. Suddenly he stopped, picked up his pencil, marked a page and played on. Again he stopped, looked left and right for the pencil, but it had dropped to the floor. As he bent to retrieve it he saw the child standing in the doorway.

  'Go!' he roared, flinging his hand wide as though he would strike her. 'Get out. Out! Out! Out!'

  She shot away, but didn't leave. Instead she sat on the pavement and listened again for the music.

  But it didn't come. Only the man came. He strode from the door, stared briefly at the small figure sitting cross-legged on the ground, and, with his blue frockcoat flapping, stomped off.

  As if by magic, street urchins jumped out from nowhere to bark at him.

  • • •

  A smell was coming from the kitchen in the cottage by the granary. A most delicious smell.

  The woman inside had let her hair down. It fell in waves to her waist. She was also wearing her best shawl. 'Tonight we are celebrating,' she announced as the child came in. 'We are having meat with potatoes and red cabbage, and wine. Your father is trying on his uniform. And,' delivered in a hushed voice, 'remember to say how handsome he looks.'

  In came the soldier-to-be and indeed he did look handsome. Mother and child clapped. The woman embraced her husband. 'And what did the two of you get up to this morning?' she asked.

  'We heard music and ate cake.'

  The woman turned to her daughter. 'Was it nice – the music?'

  'Beautiful,' the child replied.

  Six

  In two days her father would be leaving. Not that there was any front for him to leave for and die in. Napoleon had been defeated and banished to the island of St Helena. But an army still must train ...

  'It is good for the mind,' her mother said, 'as well as the body. And –' she stopped to cough and spit onto the road, 'you and I will eat well and that will be good too.'

  It was late afternoon and they were walking home from the factory. Often the child would wait at the great iron gate that led to where old rags as well as straw and grass and the bark from trees were turned into paper.

  Today, as she stood waiting, a group from the Volkschule rounded the corner and were idling their way towards her. She turned her face to the gate.

  'Her Vater's a drunkee.'

  'A fish Vater.'

  A stone whizzed past her head. The boys threw stones but the words the girls threw hurt harder. A man on his horse clopped by and all four ran.

  The child remained at the gate as a group of older women streamed across the yard. She caught snatches of their talk as they pressed together through the gate.

  'She's dying – that's what I heard –'

  'Can't breathe.'

  'It's the lime –'

  'How is it we're not all sick then?'

  'We might be –'

  'All of us might be –'

  'Blind like Iris –'

  'That was an accident.'

  A second wave of workers appeared. Her mother among them.

  'What's the lime?' The child wanted to know. The woman bent down. 'I haven't had my kiss yet,' she said.

  'What's the lime?'

  'Things are used to make paper – like caustic lime ... '

  'It's bad.'

  'Who said that?'

  'Somebody ...'

  The woman sighed. 'Frau Schultz has been taken to the infirmary and everybody's panicking ... ' She opened her bag and took out a ham roll. 'Here.'

  'That's your lunch.'

  'I wasn't hungry.'

  They walked on.

  'There's accidents,' the child remarked through a mouthful of roll.

  'Don't worry. I'm careful.'

  Eyes followed a cart creak up the hill to the granary.

  'Its wheel is wobbling,' the woman said.

  Seven

  As the moth returns to the flame, so the child returned to the house in the Reinerstrasse.

  And again the door was open. But today the sounds were different. They came in waves and spurts and at times with long breaks in-between. Often the man would crash down on the keys with both hands and the chords were harsh and angry.
/>   The child stood to the left of the door and listened. A long silence followed. She peeked around the door. The man was at the piano, his hands poised above the keys. He sat very still, for what, to the child, seemed an eternity. Then he played.

  The sound he made was more beautiful than before, more beautiful than anything she had ever heard. The man, without pausing, suddenly turned his head as though he sensed someone was watching. 'What do you see?' he said.

  What did he mean, 'What do you see?' The child didn't know. She thought of the tree in the woods and of the million colours and shapes she saw from the fork in its branches. Nothing was right. There were no images to describe what she heard, not even in the flow of the fountain or the wind in the conifer. And then suddenly a picture did form, of a night when she had looked from the window and seen the world cast in silver.

  'Moonlight,' she said.

  The man continued to play. 'Write it,' he ordered.

  The child peered inside. Near the door was a small table and on it stood a notebook and a pencil. She crept towards it, wrote, crept back, sat on the step and went on listening.

  Finally the man lifted his hands from the keys. He got up, grabbed the blue frockcoat that was lying on the floor and, pulling the door behind him, strode out. The child watched him pass. He was taller than she first thought and, with his coat billowing behind him and his long hair sticking out from under an old hat, he made a weird shape. People stopped and stared and nodded their heads.

  The man walked in the direction of the woods. The child followed. It was a day of biting air and sweeping mist.

  He paced along a path strewn with leaves and flanked by oaks. He came to a seat and sat hunched in the mist turned rain, his head in his hands.

  The child peered from behind a maple and waited, but he didn't move. Still she waited. She came closer. Now she stood before him.

  Again, as if sensing the presence of someone, he raised his eyes. 'You!'

  From somewhere came the distant clanging of a bell. The child turned.

  'Tell me what you hear,' he said.

  'A goat is lost,' replied the child.

  The man shook his head from side to side and looked down. Then he spoke. 'You have heard something. Perhaps the distant sound of a bell, or the calling of a bird, and I have heard nothing. When someone has heard a shepherd singing, or a flute being played, again I have heard nothing ... '

  Now rain fell in thick globs, it splashed onto his boots, dropped from his hat, from her braids, like a metronome's beat.

  The child studied the man's face, the jutting lower lip, the eyes that glowed. Silently she stood before him.

  'Why?' he barked.

  Silence.

  'Why do you follow me?'

  Silence.

  'Have you nowhere to go that you sit on my doorstep?'

  The child said nothing.

  'I cannot work when people watch. It sends me mad.'

  Still silence.

  'You sit hour after hour. Why? For what?'

  At the child's feet was a stick. She picked it up and in the wet earth beneath a giant oak, wrote, 'The music.'

  Eight

  That night the man dreamed. On a crumpled bed in crumpled clothes he dreamed: his hat, his frockcoat and boots, like pieces of a jigsaw, tossed upon the floor.

  He is four. He is wearing a white shirt and yellow britches. The shirt has frills. He is playing in the square. A group has gathered. He doesn't have to tell his fingers where to go or how long to rest upon the strings. They know. The violin is a quarter size, the smallest. Another Mozart, they're whispering. His father smiles.

  The boy loves this little instrument. It sings for him. But now his violin is gone from its peg in the hall, and the bow with it, and his father is saying that from now on he will play only the piano. And the sound he makes is slurred with drink. The boy says nothing, for there is violence behind the words, and fear too. And both come from knowing poverty and sickness and despair ...

  Now the scene changes. It is dark, it is late, well after midnight.

  He is five. He's in bed, he's shivering, it's winter and the room is damp. He curls into a ball and pulls the coverlet higher; blocks out the rattle of his mother's breath, her coughing and gasping, hears voices, boots lurching on the stairs ... The cover is ripped away. In the dark, his father's voice is thick with drink. 'Downstairs, you hear?'

  'Please, Vater –'

  A hand reaches out as if to strike. Instead it yanks the small shivering body from the bed. 'Now!'

  'Yes, Vater.'

  He is five. He pulls the cover around his nightshirt and creeps along the cold stone floor, descends the stairs, sees his breath rise like autumn mist in the stuttering candlelight.

  They stand before the last dying embers in the grate, his father and Herr Pfeiffer his friend, who is to be the boy's teacher. Both are red-eyed and watchful.

  His father points a wavering finger at the piano. 'Start playing!'

  He is five. He sits at the piano. His teeth are chattering, it's the cold, the fear, it's the shame of it...

  'What shall I play, Vater?'

  The man lurches into a chair, tips a second one over, 'See how I suffer! Imagine Mozart asking ''What shall I play"?'

  The small boy places his hands on the keys, hands that are stiff with the cold. The sound they make is cold ...

  Fists crash upon the table, a glass shatters. 'You dare to humiliate me –'

  'I'm cold, Vater –'

  'Play, damn you!'

  'Please, Vater –'

  The man staggers up, sinks down, clasps his head in his hands. 'Another Mozart, they said. Fools ... fools and idiots ... '

  The small figure hunched at the piano closes his eyes and starts to play. Only music can take away the cold, only music can relieve the hunger, and the pain. He plays on. When finally he stops, the visitor has left and his father is asleep at the table.

  He puts down the lid and creeps upstairs.

  The dreamer stirred, poured from the bowl of wine that stood on the sideboard, drank deeply, dreamed on ...

  Now he is standing in front of a carved door hewn from oak. He is wearing a blue frockcoat. It has gold buttons and is trimmed with lace. Frills of lace flow from his throat and also from his wrists. His britches are the colour of chocolate, and there are gold buckles on his shoes. His hair explodes in curls of red. His face, by contrast, is pale.

  He is seven and a half and is about to give his first public concert. His father is by his side.

  It's like a palace. The boy has never seen such a room, with its rich red carpet, its walls of mirrors, its magnificent paintings, the enormous deep-hanging circlets of fluttering light. And the women and the men, so elegant in their silks and laces and gold brocades ...

  The room is full of circle upon widening circle of balloon-backed chairs that face the platform on which stands the piano, all shiny and black.

  He is seven and a half.

  He moves to it and sits, he adjusts the chair, hears silence fall.

  Now there is only the music. He places his hands on the keys.

  And begins.

  >• • •

  The man pulled himself up and stood long in the dark. He paced to the window and back, to the window again, sloshed down wine, whipped up a sheet of manuscript that was lying on the floor, lit a candle, and in a frenzy started to write and play and play and write. But the sound he made was full of pain, and had no purpose, but to ignite pain.

  In the darkness of his lonely room he lifted up his head. And howled.

  Long he stood. Then once again he went to the piano and began to play. Now the sound was different. He was seven and a half again, in that wonderful room with its walls of mirrors. Over and over he played what he had performed on that evening when he was seven and a half ...

  He played until the white light of morning leaked into the room. He threw open the door and went on playing.

  From time to time he glanced into the stre
et ...

  Nine

  Beneath the conifer that grew beyond her window, the child sat, a sheet of paper in her hand. From time to time she'd look up as the body of needles above her rippled in a rush of wind.

  Eight days had passed since her father had embarked upon his new life, and now word had come and with it a page for her.

  ' ... I am sleeping well, Liebling,' he wrote, 'for the day begins early and there are many things to do, and you will be happy to know that your papa is fit and has been praised for his diligence and cooperation.

  'Also I have a friend. His name is Manfred and he is the son of a farrier. I was a blacksmith for a long time, and he and I talk about axles and rims for wheels, and the shoeing of horses – how very dull, I hear you say, but it makes me happy to talk about things I know of, and it's good to have a friend.

  'Here is something that will make you smile. At the garrison we have a pet, a red squirrel. He has taken up residence in the elm tree on the edge of the parade ground. We feed him grains and bits of fruit, and nuts when we get them. He is quite tame and on one occasion he lined up with us on parade. It was difficult for everyone not to smile. His name is Fritz.

  'I have sent Mutti some money and a little extra to buy something for my best girl ... '

  The words concluded with a plea to keep helping her mother, enjoying the last days before school goes back and holding him close to her heart ...

  The child went into the house and returned with paper and her box of crayons.

  She would draw a picture of the conifer. She hoped she could suggest the swaying of its needles in the wind.

  It would make him feel he was home ...

  Ten

  Now the winds of winter swept through the Vienna Woods. The elms and the maples, the beeches and the oaks were bare, their leaves sunk deep into the earth.

  Soon the child would return to school, so now when night fell she would plan the following day with care. And today she would relive a time that would remain with her for the rest of her life; the time she had taken a different path home and had heard the music.