Broken Song (5 page)

They walked on, talking and smoking, taking the long way home. The mist blew away; the night was black and starless. Reuven listened and wondered and thought. Even on this darkest night he could pick out the cats sliding across rooftops, the chimney pots that sometimes looked like hunched little men, the heap of rags that might be a beggar, the swift shadows that belonged to boys sneaking out of their bedroom windows. This was his home. He had learned how to sift the shadows of the Berischeva night, to pick out the blackness of a cat against the darkness of the evening, or the gray of a weathered fence from the dimness of a muddy yard. Why should they leave?

SIX

SPRING PASSED into summer, and before the green leaves turned to autumn gold, Uncle Chizor left for America. True to this word, he would not celebrate one more Jewish holiday in the
farshtinkener
country of Russia. Reuven had mastered the Bach concerto, and was even mastering the intricacies of the Dvo?ák, which had seemed deceptively simple. He had improved since that first night of seder when he had played it. He had learned that nothing was simple, and many things were deceptive.

But not a day went by that Reuven did not think of Muttle, and now Uncle Chizor was gone too. Reuven had been thinking of him often in the three weeks since he had gone. He sat by the river now and thought about the deception of things, of appearances, of people, of music, of holiness, of words, and of the river itself, where he had last spoken with Muttle five months before. It was still unbelievable, unacceptable, that those words would be the last that he and Muttle would ever exchange. How placid the river had been on that day. How placid it was on this day. Yet Reuven knew that there was a strong current. It was a dangerous river. Here at this very spot the current might not be so strong, but one hundred meters down it grew fierce. Still one would
never know, for it never showed on the surface because the river was so deep. Anyone weighing under thirty-five kilos had no chance if he or she were to fall in.

How many children had been sucked away by this river? Too many. Yet this was the very river that he had run to on the night Rachel was born for cold water. This river, which sucked away life, had caused her to breathe, to yowl, to turn pink and lively. Maybe it wasn’t deceptions but contradictions that filled life. Maybe in order to begin to understand the world, one had to begin to accept contradictions as a fact. But was it a contradiction or a deception now that the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur had passed? There had been no pogroms, no violence, no rumors of harassment from other villages. Why were they being left alone by the tsar and the Cossacks, who loved to kill and kidnap on the holidays?

Tonight was the first night of Sukkoth, the harvest festival. It would be the first time they had built the sukkah hut without Uncle Chizor. For seven days they would have their meals in the outdoor little lean-to constructed against the side of their house. It would be made from wooden planks, branches, and old doors that they had kept over the years just for this structure. Sometimes Reuven had slept out in the sukkah with Muttle and through the spindly tree limbs they had watched the stars all night long.

But it’s not the same, not without Uncle Chizor, not without Muttle
.

These thoughts stayed with Reuven, clung to him,
and would not free him long after he had left the river and gone home.

“Reuven, you don’t like the noodle kugel?” his mother said. “Reuven! Reuven! You’re a million miles away.”

“You going deaf?” his father said. “Not good for a musician to be deaf—except Beethoven. He seemed to do all right.”

“What?” Reuven suddenly was aware that all of his family was looking at him and that they had been speaking to him.

“You’re a million miles away, I say. You haven’t touched your food. You’re not feeling well?” his mother asked.

“No, I’m fine, Mama,” Reuven said. But she was right. He had been a million miles away. He had been looking through the pine boughs of the sukkah roof at the stars, the same ones that were shining now on Uncle Chizor, who was maybe in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe they were shining on Muttle, and only God knew where Muttle was. If the same stars shone over every place and everyone, why … why … But his mind could barely finish the thought. Why was Uncle Chizor having to leave this
farshtinkener
country and why had Muttle been snatched by the tsar?

Rachel crawled onto his lap. She seemed to know that he was thinking about the stars. Perhaps she had watched him looking through the pine boughs of the sukkah roof.

“Up! Up!” She pointed at the roof. She wanted
him to hold her up so she could touch the branches. “Up! Up!”

Reuven raised her in his arms and let her touch the pine branches. She reached out and then suddenly she stopped and pointed her finger right through the bristles.

“Moon … piece of moon,” she said quite clearly.

They could hardly believe their ears.

“What’s that, Rachel?” Reuven asked. “What did you just say? What’s that?” He pointed his own finger right through the branches at the sliver of moon sailing overhead.

“Moon … piece of moon,” she repeated.

They all exclaimed with wonder. The child was barely sixteen months old. She had not just spoken the word
moon
but was so smart that she recognized it as a piece of the moon and not the whole.

“Maybe you’ll grow up to be an astronomer!” Shriprinka cried with delight, and chucked Rachel under her chin. “Or a mathematician.”

Reuven was excited too, until it suddenly dawned on him that she would be none of these things if she grew up in Russia. There was no place for Jewish astronomers, let alone women who were Jewish astronomers, mathematicians, or writers.
In fact
, Reuven thought as he raised her once more to touch the roof,
what is the point of growing up at all in Russia
? His uncle had been right.

That was the night when Reuven stopped playing his violin.

SEVEN

IT HAD taken the rest of autumn for the calluses on Reuven’s string fingers to soften, then disappear almost entirely. Now it was winter. A stinging cold had set in, and as Reuven went out to the woodpile with a wheelbarrow to load up with logs for the stove, he had to blow on his hands to keep them warm. Had the calluses, he wondered, insulated his skin? It was certainly true that the wood felt rougher. He paused and looked at his hands. They were no longer the hands of a violinist. Odd, he thought, how those thick patches of rough skin that made it so easy for him to finger the strings with just the right pressure could vanish, and yet the music still lingered in his head.

In the beginning, his family questioned him. But Reuven was unwavering. Soon they stopped asking him if or when he would play again. It didn’t matter, however. For they didn’t have to say anything out loud. They asked a thousand times a day in their own way. His father would pull out his watch every afternoon at the time Reuven had gone to Herschel’s for his lesson and then look from it, as if to say,
Why are you still here
?

His mother, who was not exactly musically gifted, had taken to humming disjointed snatches of the pieces she had remembered Reuven practicing. And Shriprinka,
more on key, would also hum. Rachel had taken a more direct approach. She toddled over to where Reuven’s violin case rested on a shelf and pounded her chubby fist on it, then looked at Reuven. He merely walked over and, feeling every eye in the room on him, put it on a higher shelf.

“Not now,” he had said firmly to his baby sister. The unspoken word
When
? seethed in the air.

“All right, enough is enough!” Herschel stood at the foot of Reuven’s bed. Herschel’s father, Reb Itchel, was there as well. Reuven blinked. It was late. The sun was up.

“What’s he doing here?” Reuven asked, nodding toward Reb Itchel.

“You need all the help you can get, young man. I’ll bring the cursed tsar in here if I have to, in order to get you out of bed.” He held up the violin, which Reuven had not touched in several months. “You see this? This is what you were born to do. This is your gift. You must play.”

Then Reb Itchel muttered an old Yiddish phrase. “
Az me redt tsu im, is azoy vi me redt tsu a toyte vantz
.” Talking to him is like talking to a dead bedbug.

“Oh, you’re some help, Papa! You’re supposed to be praying for this stupid boy.”

“Oh!” said the old rebbe, suddenly remembering his role. He began to rock back and forth in prayer. Reuven’s eyes fixed on the little wisp of the white beard. He had once played Bach while watching the beard keep the rhythm and quiver to the vibrato.

Herschel continued. “I’ve had enough of your parents’
thoughts on this subject. ‘Oh, go easy. He will come back to it. He is just a boy.’ No, enough is enough. You be at my house tomorrow. We begin with the Dvo?ák. Also, be ready with the Beethoven Romance in G major, and you take a look at the
Kreutzer Sonata
. You were making a real mess out of that one last time.”

Herschel pulled on his fathers shoulder. “We’re going now and leaving this miserable piece of a boy to his thoughts.” Just as he was about to walk out the door, he turned. “By the way, tomorrow evening Hanukkah starts. Hanukkah is a time for miracles. So it would be a miracle if you could play the first four measures of that Dvo?ák with anything approaching subtlety after so much time with no practice.”

From his bed, Reuven could see the river. The sunlight glinted off its still surface. Then something odd happened. There were radiating glints of light on the water, as if a stone had been skipped across. It seemed as if an invisible hand had tossed an invisible stone. And then Muttle’s words came back to Reuven: “You carry the music. I carry the words.”

Reuven thought Herschel and Reb Itchel had gone, but suddenly he saw a little wisp of white drifting into his side vision. Reb Itchel had leaned back into the room and fixed Reuven in the pale light of his nearly translucent eyes. Had the rebbe made that stone skip across the river? Was this a miracle or a prayer? Then Reb Itchel seemed to whirl out in the wake of his very angry son.

Reuven got out of bed and stood barefoot in his pajamas. He looked at his fingers and wondered how
long it would take for the calluses to come back. He picked up the violin. The first sheet of the
Kreutzer Sonata
was out on a low chest. He began. It sounded as if mice were gnawing on the strings. Rachel peeked around the corner now. She had a perplexed look on her face.
In another second she will be sticking her fingers in her ears
, Reuven thought.
It’s going to take more than a miracle
.