The Violin Teacher

Around the farmhouse, it was June as long as you remembered—purple lilacs, plush grass, phone poles smelling of creosote, the fresh-tarred road. Then Hudak appeared, cigarette at the sleeve-end of the overcoat he wore, even in summer, lounging on the far side of the screen door. The sound of the rusted spring as it swung open, and you let him in.

*

The black case lay on the drop-leaf table. Unlatching it, lifting the lid, you saw the sunlight candle on the belly, run up and down the tapered neck, eddy in the ribs and inlay. Lombardy ochre over crushed velour, he whispered over your shoulder, leaning forward, brushing the softness it rested in with the back of a finger. The bare grey walls fell away from it, the curtains shuddered, the brute vases huddled in cupboards.

*

When you tucked to the chin rest, you looked querulous, or dreaming. Scales were a form of sleepwalking, the first tunes an obligation, like making your familiar bed.

*

Soon “Humoresque,” and the quick pizzicato, mice skittering behind baseboards. Cicadas meant the busy season, faraway conventions, your father often gone. A night came when you rose to close the window. Downstairs, your mother singing for the first time since the funeral, though the ball game on your radio was long over. The corn dryer droned, tossing the kernels like tiny dice. The new farmhand stood in the lamplight of the barn, smoking, his army jacket on, his collar turned. Yellowjackets burrowed into windfall apples. The stories started.

*

The Boy Virtuoso of Jaszbereny, he’d studied with Hubay till things went bad—trouble with the army, the stupid Rumanians, government doctors. The last time they’d let him visit his mother, she was hissing and cursing in her little cell, lurching against restraints. An archangel had raped her; St. Stephen the Martyr had shown her the body of her blessed mother, whose mouth was moving, though her limbs were severed….He left off there, stood staring, tightening his bow. It was made of brazilwood, strung with Russian horsehair. Before you played, he made you imagine them—their wild manes and flared nostrils—galloping for miles, then stopping to dredge with their noses a fresh-running stream, bodies frothing and steaming in the morning sun. Only the peasant players could capture it, he said, and then he showed you.

*

Each fall the maple kindled first. A burst of sheeted flame, a sweetness and a cauterization, closing summer up before hurricane season, and the big nor’ easters. You could still find trumpets of late-blossoming honeysuckle in the birl of vines. If you pinched the tip and pulled the stamen through, you got one droplet of sugar water that you touched your tongue to. After, it was new year, the first week of school. Brad Brewer had drowned in the Delaware over summer, and would not take part in the Science Fair. In November a new president, said the Weekly Reader. Eisenhower was like ancient history, said your father. The fresh-cut silage smelled sweet for a day, lying in its cinderblock pit. Then the farmer drew the canvas, and the rot set in.

*

That first Friday you stepped down off the bus to hear Hudak playing, over the wild asparagus and purple chickory, a pasture-length away.

*

The Serbs, making joyful music in a minor key. The gypsies, owning nothing, and dancing.

The game was Refugee. Sliding face-down under barbed wire, you tried to avoid the nettles around you and the strung-out stars plucking at the back of your thick jacket. You were ten, half way between the farm boy who pursued you with his BB gun and the scout you’d commissioned and sent ahead.

*

After Donna made landfall, a calm set in. Our three huge spruces stood fog-enshrouded into afternoon; the lesser evergreens spun like augers from a landscape sodden with last night’s rain. He ticked the windowpane with his bow-tip, motioned you over to the low sill. His mother and father were those smoke-souls drifting down the path through the lower garden, obscure beyond the first bend. His sister was the skirt and blooded sweater he abandoned in the rubble of Budapest. You shouldn’t mourn your drowned friend too much, or your little brother. You must practice stubbornness; you must drive your sorrow upwards through your right shoulder and through the bow; you must callous your fingers on the steel-core strings.