In the Claws of the Eagle (6 page)

Louise was sick with nerves. Izaac, now aged seven, had grown considerably in the year and a half since Madame
Stronski
had ousted Herr Müller as his teacher. Today he would
perform
for the first time to a group of family and friends. The concert double bill featured
The Tuning Fork Quartet
and the as yet unheard boy violinist Izaac Abrahams. Preparations were well under way.

Uncle Rudi passed in front of Louise’s picture, walking backwards, dragging a heavy armchair over the carpet towards the wall where he angled it towards the performing end of the music room. Beads of sweat glistened all over his head. He rubbed himself down with a large handkerchief, then he joined Nathan, who was assembling a line of chairs robbed from the dining room. They both went off to see what chairs they could find in the bedrooms. Izaac struggled in with a stool from the kitchen and put it at the back, where it would do for any latecomer.

It was the calm before the storm. Members of the family had gone off to bedrooms to change; there were distant shouts of laughter. Izaac, scrubbed to within an inch of his life, appeared. He had been dressed up in a frilly white shirt with a large, floppy blue bow tie, a grey jacket and shorts.

‘Will I be all right?’ he asked, glancing in the direction of Louise’s portrait. ‘I think this jacket will be too tight.’

Louise reassured him.

‘What if I forget my notes?’ he went on.

‘You won’t forget!’ He began to relax. A mischievous smile crossed his face.

‘I think I’ll do my duck act!’

‘No, you won’t do your duck act! Don’t tease me.’

The applause was polite as the four members of
The Tuning Fork Quartet
rose to their feet, pleased, perspiring, and bowing. The chairs were all filled now. The ladies were
comfortably
ensconced in armchairs around the edges of the room, while the men eased themselves on the upright ones in the middle. While the quartet put their instruments away and moved their chairs back to form a semi-circle, Izaac, looking small and scared, took his violin from its case. Madame
Stronski
leant forward and whispered some words of
encouragement
. All eyes were on the boy. They had heard about him, but that not that he was a pupil of the great Madame Stronski, and they were impressed. They all leant forward now, putting their will behind him as he tightened his bow. No one noticed when the door behind them opened to let a tall distinguished looking man slip silently into the room. He looked about him; spotted the high kitchen stool that Izaac had brought in, and tiptoed over to it.

Louise noticed him straight away. Who could this be? His suit was well cut with a discreet stripe, his hair was dark with wings of grey over the ears, and a fine moustache was just flecked with grey. The only other person who could see this stranger was young Izaac, and he was struck dumb.

Izaac gaped, his hands freezing on his violin. He had heard the great Fritz Kreisler, who was certainly Vienna’s, and
possibly
the world’s, greatest violinist, play only a month before,
when Nathan had taken him to the Great Hall of the Musikverein. What could he be doing here? He could feel the audience becoming uneasy, but didn’t they know who was
sitting
behind them? Suddenly he heard Louise calling him.

‘Izaac, Izaac…listen to me!’ She was pleading. ‘Don’t worry about him; he’s just a man come in off the street. Remember Madame Helena’s instructions: your feet, relax your shoulders, breath deeply.’ But his violin felt like lead, how could he ever lift it? Then he realised that the great man was looking at him sympathetically, with an amused smile hovering over his face. As if reading Izaac’s mind, he raised an imaginary violin to his shoulder and rested an invisible bow on the strings, as if about to play. It was all so relaxed, so confident, so full of music that a great weight seemed to fall from Izaac’s shoulders. His violin responded and rose like a feather to his chin.

Over the next two years the list of composers and pieces Izaac mastered grew and grew: Bloch’s ‘Abodah’, Wieniawski’s ‘Scherzo-Tarantelle’, and Schubert’s gorgeous ‘Ave Maria’. To begin with, these were just names to Louise, but now it was dawning on her that when people talked of Izaac as a prodigy, they really meant it. Though Izaac would fret that Madame Helena was holding him back, he seemed gloriously unaware of his genius. Finally he was ready for his proper debut concert.

When Izaac had played in the music room to his family and their friends, the applause had sounded like a sudden shower of rain. As if it had caught them all by surprise. How could this seven year old, in short pants and a floppy bow tie, produce sounds that wrenched forgotten emotions from their hearts? Today, however, the applause was of a different magnitude; it swept over Izaac like a wave, crashing about his ears as he
stared, bewildered, at the audience from which this amazing sound was coming. The uniform black of the men’s suits was enlivened by a speckle of colour from the ladies’ dresses. Their faces merged, hands blurring, clapping as if their lives depended on it. A rumble began that seemed to rise through the boards at Izaac’s feet, like rocks churning in the backwash of a wave. The audience were stamping their feet in an ecstasy of delight.

The nine-year-old glanced towards the safety of the door at the side of the platform. There was Madame Helena, signalling urgently, bending almost double to get her message across. Of course … he should bow! His paralysis passed and he bowed and then bowed again. He let his eyes sweep the audience, as Madame Helena had told him to do. ‘You won’t see a thing, Izaac, but they will love it,’ she had said, but he was looking for someone special. There, beyond the blur, a spot of colour stood out sharp and clear. There was only one green like that in the world: Louise was there, just as she had promised. He could see her standing at the back, clapping like everyone else. A broad smile lit his face, and the crowd loved it. Those generous Viennese hearts that love music and musicians above all else opened to him as one. A final bow, and he turned to leave the stage.

Once through the door he was engulfed by his dear Madame Helena, simultaneously cuffing him for having
forgotten
to bow, hugging him, and trying not to cry. Having held him as long as she dared, she turned him around and sent him out to play his one short encore.

Once again he scanned the audience, looking for Louise, and there wasn’t a mother in the crowd who wasn’t convinced that his look was for her alone. He found Louise on a second pass, at the back in a seat just vacated by an early leaver. He could feel her laughter and delight running through him. As he
played his encore, the laughter got into his fingers and they danced on the fingerboard.

Three times he was called back. He pleaded with Madame Helena to be allowed to play again, but she was adamant. In the end she just took his violin from him and pushed him out for his final bow. She heard the wave of clapping break, saw Izaac’s last bow, and without waiting for him, gathered her scarves and proceeded towards the Green Room. She had a thing or two to tell him about his vibrato. At that moment there came a roar of laughter from the auditorium. Madame Helena turned, but all she saw was Izaac lunging through the door from the stage, a broad grin on his face.

The following morning, Madame Helena’s maid, Hanna, had been sent out to buy the morning papers and had stacked them neatly on the side of her mistress’s breakfast tray. Helena ran her eye over the front page of the
Neue Zeitung
while she buttered her roll, postponing the reviews until she had both hands free to open the papers. ‘
Food Shortages Ease
,’ was the banner heading. Beside it was a short column about a young comedian. Sliding that paper to one side, she looked at the
Tages Bladt
; its headline reported on a meeting of a new
political
party in Munich that seemed to be upsetting the
Communists
, but she didn’t mind upsetting the Communists. She was about to read further when she noticed that the comedian had made it onto the first page again. She read the first line and her heart nearly stopped. ‘
Prodigy violinist Izaac
…’

Hanna heard her mistress’s shriek from the kitchen and came running. She found her enveloped in as many
newspapers
as she normally wore scarves.

‘Listen to this, Hanna,’ she commanded as she read from the paper. ‘Infant prodigy entertains audience with duck dance …’ She raised her eyes, saucer wide, to the mystified Hanna. ‘Oh, Izaac, how could you do this to me?’ Papers flew and Hanna
rescued sheets on demand as Helena plunged after the serious reviews that were always hidden on the inner pages. Little by little she relaxed. ‘
Superb technique for one so
…
pure
musicianship
…
a credit to his teacher
.’ Then a gratifying mention of the great Madame Stronski. Hanna, who had been worrying about where she had put the smelling salts, relaxed too. ‘
A bit too heavy on the vibrato
…’ Yes, she had been going to tackle him on that when he had careered off the stage, but there was more to come. She read on in trepidation: excellent reviews, but one and all critical about Izaac’s behaviour after his encore. ‘
Vienna expects her young performers to behave with decorum in the halloed precincts of the concert hall, where the ghosts of the great composers linger yet
.’ Even while she cringed for Izaac, Madame Stronski couldn’t entirely suppress a little snort of laughter. ‘Stuffy old fuddy-duddies,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Mozart would have loved it.’ She rather wished she had seen exactly what the little monkey had done.

Izaac was hanging his head as Madame Helena whirled around him like a Dervish, berating him about his fooling on stage.

‘Izaac Abrahams, what … did … you … do?’ Louise, who knew only too well what he had done, was quite glad of the protection of her picture frame. She was already feeling guilty for having been so ready to laugh at Izaac’s antics.

‘I did my duck act,’ he whispered.

‘Your duck act!’ He made to show her. ‘No! I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know about it. I particularly never want to hear about it again. You are never, ever, to put on one of your little performances on stage again. You have disgraced me, and apparently the whole musical profession in the process. I don’t know, in the circumstances, if you even
deserve to hear what the reviews actually say. However …’ Now, walking up and down, Madame told him about the reviews, as if reading him his school report. Musicianship: excellent. Technical ability: good. Vibrato: too much.
Intonation
: good except in pizzicato. ‘No time to slide about looking for the note, is there?’

As she went on, adding glowing comment to glowing
comment
, her voice softened. Her prowling slowed. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you this, but you know that the Konzerthaus is part of the University?’ Izaac nodded. ‘Well, the Professor of music heard you and suggested to me, after your performance, that you should enrol at the University and study with me there.’