In the Claws of the Eagle (4 page)

Louise was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she should have been less responsive to Izaac’s performances; now they were likely to get him into trouble, and she felt partly responsible.

Her new-found sense of responsibility was soon put to the test and all because of the Countess von Tischelstein. The ‘Countess’ was a fey creature who wandered about the park greeting invisible friends on empty seats. She was a harmless entertainment to them all. Louise watched Izaac’s careful observation of the Countess with apprehension. Could she trust him not to poke fun at the old lady with one of his impersonations?

‘Izaac,’ she cautioned, ‘you understand; you must be nice about the Countess.’ Even as she said it, Louise realised her mistake. Izaac was indeed going to imitate the Countess, but
he would have given her a dress rehearsal first. All the time he had been thinking about the old lady he had been imagining Louise’s delight in his imitation. Now she had shown that she didn’t trust him and was tut tutting at him like a nanny. The devil got into him and he put on an imitation of the poor Countess that had all the nasty mocking elements that Louise had wanted him to avoid. What could she do now? She knew that this was not the performance he had intended to give, but yet he mustn’t be allowed to get away with it!

‘Izaac! You will not mock her like that, it’s cruel and nasty!”

‘You can’t stop me!’

‘I won’t come out with you any more!’

‘I don’t care.’ And that was that.

Izaac stopped looking for Louise to come out, and she made no effort to join him. It had all ended in a silly little childish spat. The loss for Louise was profound. She had lost the trust of someone who she felt sure wanted and needed her, and, on top of that, in what she thought must be the most beautiful city in the world, all she had to look at now was the wall of the house opposite.

The music room was where family matters, and matters of wider importance in the world outside, were discussed by the Abrahams. Without Izaac as a constant distraction, Louise began to pay more attention to what the family was talking about. Lately their anxieties had been focused on a war, which, Louise remembered from a year ago, everyone had thought would be over in a few weeks, but now seemed to be dragging on, and worse, spreading wider. David Abrahams, Izaac’s father, had been called up and appeared from time to time in uniform, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He was lucky; he had been given a musical post in Vienna so that the
Opera would not be deprived of their favourite piano tuner! Uncle Rudi was too old to be called up, but Nathan might get his papers any day. Louise had always liked Nathan and was fearful for his safety; from what she was hearing, the losses to the Austrian army seemed terrible.

While Louise listened with anxiety to talk of the war, and grieved over her tiff with Izaac, a new life was beginning in the little town of Mödling, a few miles south of Vienna at the point where the Vienna woods swept down and met the plain that stretched east to the borders of Hungary. A woman’s voice, thin but pleasing, was singing the Brahms Lullaby.

 ‘Lullaby…lullaby. It’s not nighttime, it’s morning. Can’t you rock the brat to sleep without all that noise?’ The singing
faltered
and then faded; Sabine always faded in the presence her father-in-law. There must be bad news from the war, she thought. ‘Well, can’t you answer?’ his voice demanded from inside the kitchen.

‘I don’t want to wake little Erich,’ she called softly.

‘Little Erich!’ The voice was scornful. For a second the girl’s mouth hardened into a firm line. You’re jealous of him, she whispered to herself. The voice went on, ‘As if the Emperor didn’t have enough to cope with without another mouth to feed.’ Veit Hoffman appeared in the doorway, a crumpled newspaper in one hand. His grey hair still had a military
spikiness
to it, his moustache drooped and blue eyes glinted fiercely from under deep brows. He was wearing a hunting
jacket with green lapels as a substitute for the army uniform he had worn all his life. As a former soldier of the Austrian
Imperial
Army, he had risen from private to corporal, to sergeant major. Now, with the greatest fight in the history of the world underway, he had been swept aside like so much flotsam. One minute he was a vital cog in an army of armies that included Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, Romanians and Italians, and now, due to age, he had been retired without ceremony. God rot them all! Now he was left with nothing better to do than to listen to lullabies while the Empire that had been his pride and glory crumbled about him.

It had never occurred to Veit that the amazing
conglomeration
of countries making up the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been acquired, not by his army, but almost entirely through the judicious marriages of the ruling Hapsburg dynasty. The entire empire had been built like a house of cards: aces were played, kings and queens produced daughters who married kings, and occasionally knaves, with alliances balanced
precariously
one against the other, until, in 1914, a disgruntled Serbian student had shot dead the heir to their throne,
Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Austria then invaded Serbia, and the entire structure that had kept Europe at peace came tumbling about their ears.

Sabine braced herself; she would have to listen to the latest round of disasters. She looked longingly towards her easel, which stood at the far end of the room. Painting was her refuge, the one place where she dared to be herself, but she knew that the sight of her ‘doing nothing’ would provoke Veit even more than singing a lullaby. She gave Erich’s cradle a gentle push to leave it rocking, and braved herself to face the outraged ex-sergeant major at the door.

Over a lifetime Veit had devised a hundred tricks with
which to terrorise his young recruits. It seemed perfectly
natural
to him to use these devices on his daughter-in-law. Sabine never seemed to be able to anticipate what he would do. He was obviously enraged by what he had seen in the newspaper; he lifted it up in front of her. Naturally, she leaned forward to see what it was he wanted to show her. In the next second the paper seemed to explode in her face as he banged the back of it. She gave a small shriek.

‘What is the matter with them?’ he sneered, glaring at her with satisfaction. ‘We invade Serbia and are defeated, not just once but twice! We can’t even hold our lines in Poland!’ The paper was swishing back and forth now like a lion’s tail; she couldn’t stop her eyes following it. He raised his hand as if to bang the paper again and noticed her wince. He had the ascendancy now. ‘Lost 4,000 men, pushed back to Krakow, and then we have to be rescued by the Germans.’ At each expostulation he forced her back half a step into the room where Erich was sleeping. ‘Defeated in Ivangorod and now Italy attacks us from the south. We can’t expect the Germans to help us down there, can we?’ Sabine had stopped listening; the pure animal instinct to protect her young was stiffening her. When he thrust his face up into hers she didn’t step back. It worked; his voice changed. He shrugged his shoulders; his next question was almost
solicitous
. ‘So when will Franz get his papers then?’ Franz was her husband and of an age to be called up.

‘Papa, you know very well! Franz has been turned down by the army because of his heart.’

‘Heart be damned! He’s as fit as I am. Don’t you dare try to make excuses for him, woman!’

Sabine looked at him in confusion. How did it always end up like this, with him blaming her for something that he had done? Years ago, when Franz, was a boy, Veit had decreed that the lad needed to be toughened up.
Make a man of him
. His
solution was to take the boy camping in winter. Franz, already heavy with a cold, had been put to sleep in damp bedding and had got chilled to the bone; rheumatic fever followed. By a miracle the boy survived, but was left with a heart murmur that even an army doctor could not ignore. Sabine knew this story because Franz’s mother had told her about it before she died. Sabine was grateful to her now. Perhaps Veit didn’t know that Sabine knew. For once she had a small hold over him but she had the wisdom to keep it to herself.

‘He should be at the front. My own son, clerk in a timber yard, making money for a Jew!’

Having vented his spleen, Viet was civil over breakfast. When he left the house to walk to the shop for tobacco, Sabine checked that he really had gone before crossing to her easel. There she squeezed several inches of carmine and then black on to her palette and painted Veit. As she worked, she could feel the brushstrokes starting deep in her body, rising up,
tearing
at her insides until they broke on to the canvas with little cries of pain, or could it be rage? After an hour it was done and she stepped back, shaking, her face wet with tears. She looked at the canvas with a mixture of terror and joy: terror that Veit might see it, joy at having expressed her feelings for once.

By the time that Veit returned, carrying a cabbage as a peace offering, the canvas was safe. A gnarled old tree wrapped deeply around with ivy now replaced the enraged Viet. Sabine watched him pass the canvas, pause, snort, and walk on. She breathed again. Then, just short of the door, he turned and came back to look again. Surely he could see nothing of
himself
in that tangled mass? He caught sight of her watching. His eyes glinted, but it was some time before he bullied her again.

Nobody could blame Nathan Abrahams for his generosity; he had not been there when Madame Stronski had warned Izaac’s parents to keep him away from the violin until he was six. Izaac’s success on the piano had eased his petulance with regard to music, and he would sidle up to Nathan when the quartet met in their house and persuade him to let him hold his violin, or better, to let him use the bow while Nathan picked out the notes on the fingerboard for him. In the days coming up to Izaac’s fifth birthday, Nathan might have been seen scouring the many musical instrument shops in Vienna
looking
for a suitable small-size violin for his little cousin. He loved the idea of using money from his first job on such a present. He arrived on the day of Izaac’s birthday, calling out his
congratulations
and carrying a parcel that declared its contents by every curve. If Izaac’s parents remembered Madame Stronski’s warning they just had to forget it now.

The sight of that parcel eclipsed all else. Cakes and presents were graciously accepted, but everyone could see that Izaac’s mind was elsewhere. If the half-size violin looked tiny to the adults, to Izaac it looked like a key to heaven. This was no mere toy: the feel, the strings, the pegs, the bow that tightened with a little twirly nut, all the intricate details assured him that this was the real thing. He demanded a lesson from Nathan immediately and for the rest of the day he carried the violin –
safe in its case – with him everywhere. When he went to bed, the violin went too, so that he could reach out and touch it as soon as he woke.

Perhaps the family had felt shy about taking up on Madame Stronski’s offer to teach him, since she was, after all, much sought after. So an elderly neighbour, Herr Müller, who had once played on the very lowest desk in the Volksoper agreed to come in and give ‘the little boy’ some lessons.

Louise watched with amused apprehension while the ‘little boy’ absorbed in seconds what the old man had to offer, and then had to wait patiently through many repetitions and
explanations
until he was alone and could practise and perfect what he had been told. Within weeks the old man was floundering. It was little wonder; Izaac could already read music far better than he could read words. He would sit looking at a sheet of music and hear the notes in his head; he simply devoured the elementary primers that his teacher produced.

As the euphoria of his first lessons began to wear off, Louise sensed that Izaac was unhappy. She longed for him play for her, as he used to play on the piano. Nearly a year had passed since their tiff over the poor Countess; if he didn’t want her company, there was nothing she could do about it. But now he was like a hobbled pony. Every time he tried to trot he tripped. She had seen his hands flitting over the piano keys as light as butterfly’s wings, now she saw them on the violin looking like arthritic sausages. The coordination that had had him playing
Frère Jacques
was gone too. She watched in dismay as, week by week, his shoulders began to droop like an old man’s, as if the violin was pulling them down.

He started practising in front of her portrait. She longed to be able to make suggestions, but they had lost their common language. All she could do was look on in horror as Izaac gradually transformed himself – not to a duck, nor yet to the
General – but to a second Herr Müller! It had taken the old violinist years of sawing away in his dusky corner of the pit at the opera to acquire his hunched shoulders and the aches and the cramps that Izaac, a natural mimic, now copied from him in weeks. She would watch Izaac putting away his violin like an old man after his lessons, and would feel his despair. Then one day, after Herr Müller had gone, Izaac looked up at Louise’s portrait.

‘Lees, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have done it really.’

‘What do you mean, Izaac?’ she asked.

‘The Countess von Tischelstein, I never would have poked fun at her to any one else. I just pretended to you that I would. I liked her, it was just …’ Tears were balancing precariously on his lower lids. Louise realised how much she had missed
sharing
things with him.

‘Just that I didn’t trust you, that you didn’t want another nanny?’ she suggested.

Izaac nodded but his shrug suggested that there was
something
more here that he couldn’t express. She noticed his arm tightening on the violin tucked under his elbow.

‘I love your new violin,’ she said.

‘But not how I play it!’

‘How do you know that, Izaac?’

‘Because when I play for you, Lees, I just
know
. You don’t have to say anything but I feel it. Oh help me, Lees … why can’t I do it? I hear the music in my head, but my fingers …’ he trailed off. He was crying properly now, the tears running off his chin. He closed the lid of his violin case to keep it dry, and managed an apologetic grin.

‘Izaac, listen to me. Do you remember a woman with lots of scarves who played for you years ago?’

Izaac looked puzzled; then he nodded. ‘Oh yes. I called her the Cloud Lady; I did something terrible to her violin!’

‘You did indeed,’ Louise smiled to herself. ‘She played her violin for you, and then you played a lovely long note on her violin for us, remember?’ He was nodding; he would never forget that moment.

‘Well, would you like her to give you a lesson?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you! Why don’t you ask Papa?’

‘But I don’t even know her name.’

‘Tell him that she was the one who let you play her violin; he’ll remember.’

‘You’ll stay, won’t you, if she comes?’

‘Only if you want me.’

The front door at the bottom of the apartment stairs opened and closed and Madame Stronski’s distinctive Polish accent rose over Mother’s voice in the hallway.

‘I know… I know. Nathan has a heart of gold, but not the sense he was born with. Izaac, the poor mite, is he still playing it like a cello?’ Her laugh rang out richly while Mother
murmured
apologies. The door swung open and the maestro made her entry. ‘I left Strad at home. Lost his nerve after last time, the coward.’ Now she spotted Izaac, who had been
practising
. ‘Izaac Abrahams, is it really you? Good heavens, they’ve been watering you.’ She swept a pale blue scarf over her shoulder as she bore down on him. ‘So this is the new violin. Bless me, Cousin Nathan
has
done you proud! Now we must have a chat, you and I.’ Turning to Izaac’s mother, she said, ‘Judit, Izaac and I have important matters to discuss.’

Then she turned to Izaac with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I hate to have people about when I’m practising, don’t you?’ Louise, from the security of her picture, wondered if she should go too, but Izaac had specifically asked her to stay. Now the
maestro stood back and assessed the boy with narrowed eyes. ‘Let me see you hold the violin for a moment. Just tuck it under your chin. Now raise your bow as if you were about to play.’ She swept around him like a comet, trailing scarves. Louise watched Izaac’s eyes swivel anxiously as she passed. ‘
Harrumph
! Aged about seventy …’ she muttered. ‘Vintage? Vienna café-orchestra perhaps.’ Then to Izaac: ‘Now, let me hold this little beauty,’ and she held out her hand for his violin. She ran her fingers over the strings. ‘In tune too.’ She put it down into its case.

‘Now, let’s look at the other half of the equation, that’s you, Izaac. You don’t mind if I push you around a bit do you…you don’t bite?’ Izaac managed a nervous smile. ‘Just stand in front of me, will you, feet comfortably apart, left foot a little forward, as that’s where the weight of the violin comes.’

Louise watched, fascinated, as the great lady got to work on Izaac. She was like a sculptor working with soft clay, pushing his body around and moulding it while murmuring the reasons for each adjustment as she did so.

‘If we get this right now, Izaac, you will never have trouble with your body. We are athletes, you see, we go out on to the platform and we do things with our bodies that would leave the average person from the audience tied in knots.’ She stood back, head on one side, to admire her work. Then she reached out and put her hand on Izaac’s head.

Louise thought that she was going to give him a blessing; in a way she was.

‘Now, Izaac, push up against my hand. This is the most important thing I can teach you. Every thing about the violin strives upwards. The only thing that presses down is the bow, and that you hold in your fingers. Reach up with your body, and so will your violin, so will your music, and your audience will feel themselves rising too. This is why they sometimes
even rise to their feet … they can’t help it, you see. But before that, my love, there is work, a lot of hard work.

Madame Stronski came every week when she could, and Louise watched and listened with silent admiration as she
quietly
undid the damage inflicted on Izaac by the well-meaning Herr Müller. Izaac would play her the piece she had given him to work on. Louise noticed that she would always begin by pointing out something that he had done well.

‘Your open strings are really buzzing now …’ Then having softened the blow, she would begin to tackle the problems. ‘Your thumb, Izaac, your thumb! Get your left thumb perched on the neck as I show you and it will be right for life!’ One time she got cross. ‘Izaac, don’t you think it would be polite if you were to play to
me
and not to the wall.’

Even though she could only manage one lesson a week, Izaac was now streaking ahead. He only had to be corrected once, would remember what he had been told, and would build on it. He was able to look at a page of music and hear it in his mind; his problem was to get his fingers, his arm, and his whole body to translate this into sound. Here
Madame Helena
, as he now called her, was his guru. She would pounce on him, holding his violin by the scroll and getting him relaxed until the violin came to be like a feather in his hands. When his notes became thin and wispy she would make him use his bow so slowly that the sound came out grating like gravel. ‘There, Izaac,’ she would shout, ‘horrible isn’t it, but that is what sound is, those pebbles and the stones rattling around in your violin are what you turn into your castles and palaces. We have to shape them and cast them into sound.’

One day, when his lesson was over and Izaac had been taken out to buy a new pair of shoes, Madame Stronski
lingered on in the music room with the excuse that she wanted to practise, but she soon put her violin down and began to prowl, moving about the room as if trying to find the exact position where Izaac had been standing during practice.

‘This is the spot,’ she said to herself. Then crouching down to Izaac’s height, she looked up and gazed directly into
Louise’s
portrait. ‘Well, well, well, I guessed as much. So he’s not just playing to the wall. Well, young lady. What have you got to say for yourself? If I remember rightly, I asked you to look after my little wonder for me. Fat lot of good you’ve been.’ She heaved herself to her feet. ‘So, he plays for you, does he? Well, we all need somewhere, or something, don’t we, some rock or tree or marble saint to which we can speak our minds and hear ourselves think. But you’re no saint, are you, dear? That’s why I like you. You’re like my Copernicus.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘There is a statue of him as a young man outside the University in Kraków holding his astrolabe, and I thought he was wonderful. He was the first man, you know, to work out that the earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. A sad story: he didn’t dare publish his discovery in case he was excommunicated, or worse. I would tell him, his statue, all about my love life and woes. One day I was giving out to him about the fuddy-duddies in the conservatory, when I heard his voice – remember, I was only eighteen – “Wake up Helena! Where is the musical sun? In Vienna, of course. So off you go, my little planet, stop expecting the musical world to spin about you, and go and spin about it.” I’d like to think he said, “I’ll miss you,”’ she added wistfully, ‘but I don’t suppose he did.’