The Musician's Daughter (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

I
thought a lot, at the beginning, about my father playing the violin. I still remember the first time I ever saw a concert. I was very small, and we had just come to Esterhaza, a magnificent palace in Sopron, Hungary, when the prince’s house hold moved there from his winter palace, at Eisenstadt, near Vienna. I think it may have been the first concert Papa took part in there. I had a new dress for the occasion, and Mama looked beautiful. I don’t think Toby was born yet, or if he was, he was a small baby and stayed in our rooms with a nurse.

The palace at Esterhaza was so new that it still smelled of raw wood and paint. The rooms were very grand. I had never seen so many candles in one place before. And they were expensive wax candles, not foul-smelling tallow. We stood to the side to watch the fine ladies enter. I thought they looked like dolls, their faces were so perfect. Later my mother told me that they painted them with white lead to make their skin artificially smooth and pale, and then rubbed rouge into their cheeks and lips, and drew lines of charcoal around their eyes so they would appear larger. And the headdresses—in those days the fashion was to have hair that towered up, stuck into place with diamond combs, with ribbons and pearls festooned around. And no matter what color it was naturally, ladies powdered their hair to snowy whiteness, so that the light of the candles was magnified by the glow from the people themselves.

And the men, too, were powdered and patched. Their gold buttons and lace were almost as gaudy as the ladies’ finery. But the enormous panniers that held the ladies’ skirts out to the side so far that they had to move sideways through doorways fascinated me most of all. I could barely be persuaded to turn my eyes to the orchestra when the concert started.

We were not seated with the guests. In fact, I think we were tucked away in an anteroom. The door was open so we could see through, and everyone pushed me forward to let me watch my father, who looked up now and again from the music and gave me a quick smile. The candlelight danced over the rich wood of his violin, the beautiful Italian instrument, an old Amati, that my grandfather had given him. Kapellmeister Haydn—who was also my godfather—sat at the harpsichord, smiling broadly all the time, waving one hand in the air to direct, then putting it back on the keys and instead using his head, bobbing and nodding to bring the winds in, or to indicate the entrance for the cellos. He looked like the music, I remember thinking. I wish I could bring that particular sound to my mind, but it has since blended with countless other concerts. I’ll always remember what it looked like, though. The light. The shimmering glow of everything and everyone.

That morning, the day after the bleakest Christmas I had ever spent, I had to deal with the awful reality of getting my father buried. He became a macabre object, now that his soul was gone. I tried to remember everything I could about him. Already some of his expressions seemed to have faded from my memory. The sound of his voice was very clear, though. I kept it in my mind as I watched the gravediggers dump his wrapped-up body into a large pit with a dozen other poor souls who lacked the money for a private grave.

It’s not really Papa.

I clung to that thought. His spirit would never be buried. His body was only the useless shell of flesh and bone that descended into the earth.

Yet when I thought about it, I had so little of him except insubstantial snatches of memory—memories, and the medallion Frau Morgen had found in my father’s pocket. I had put it on as soon as I had a private moment and worn it ever since. The medallion was not very large—barely as big as my thumbnail—and I had tucked it inside my bodice, thinking I might find an opportunity to ask Zoltán if he had ever seen my father with it before. I hadn’t shown it to Toby. Its unaccustomed weight around my neck, the tickling of it against my skin, kept reminding me of everything I didn’t know.

When the gravediggers had finished letting the different-sized parcels of the dead tumble from the cart and into the ground, everyone in the small, ragged group of mourners assembled outside the cemetery gates began to trudge off in different directions. The day before, Zoltán had told me that he wanted to bring more of the members of the orchestra to the burial, but I was ashamed. It was not right that Papa should be interred with so little ceremony. If my mother could have said anything, I believed she would not have wanted more witnesses than strictly necessary, either. On the other hand, if my mother were able to say anything, she might have been able to tell us where we could find money to pay for a better funeral. But the funeral was not the most important thing. Better to wait until everything was clearer; then I could pay for a special Mass for Papa. Perhaps Godfather Haydn would compose the music, and no one need ever know we had sent my father to a pauper’s grave.

Toby, Zoltán, and I were by far the most respectable-looking people there. The others were little better than beggars. I was suddenly furious. How could this have happened? How could my father, who had promised he would teach me to play the viola no matter what Mama said and one day buy me a violin; who promised he would earn enough money so that I could have a silk gown and attend one of the public balls in a year or two, when I was old enough; who told us stories and laughed, who scooped us up in his arms with joy—how could he have been so careless as to go drinking and end up murdered, leaving me with so many unanswered questions?

I knew it was unreasonable to be angry, but I turned away from the sight of that horrid burial and started walking back toward the city gate, not caring whether Zoltán and Tobias came along or not. They did, of course.

It had been awful, telling Toby what had happened while he slept. He had never seemed smaller to me than when his impish face crumpled into confused tears at the sight of Papa stretched out on the table. Since then, he had not let me out of his sight. And Zoltán had been hovering like a great sheepdog, too, showing up at dawn on Christmas morning, the day after he had found my father, and staying as long as was decent, then helping me by finding two or three vagrants who would shoulder my father’s body to the burial cart for the price of a few Kreutzer.

There were no formalities, no papers to sign for someone so poor.

But we weren’t that poor! The skirts that caught between my legs and made it impossible for me to run were of fine, soft wool. And unlike a really poor girl, I could afford the pocket hoops and petticoats required to make them hang properly, even if they were of coarse linen and had no lace or ruffles. My feet were well shod in good leather boots. My hands, clenched in tight fists that made them colder instead of warmer, were hidden inside a muff of softest rabbit fur. The musical instruments in their cases at our apartment—which we owned, thanks to a rare moment of generosity on the part of my late grandfather—could be sold for enough money to support two families.

I stopped so abruptly that Toby, who had practically been on my heels, crashed right into me.

“Watch where you’re going!” I snapped.

“It’s not my fault.”

Those were the first words Toby had spoken since the morning before. He only came up to my shoulder, and had to lift his chin to look into my eyes. I noticed then that his best coat wasn’t buttoned correctly. I took off my muff and let it dangle on its cord while I unbuttoned and rebut-toned his coat and made sure his cloak was fastened at the neck. He continued to stare at my face, as if he was still waiting for me to explain myself.

“The question is, where is Papa’s violin?” I asked, not really expecting an answer from my brother, but suddenly realizing no one had even attempted to answer the same question the other night. I turned from the gaze of Toby’s round, brown eyes to face Zoltán. Even though I wasn’t in the mood to notice them at that moment, I had always found Zoltán’s eyes unsettling. They were that indistinct color that sometimes looks green and sometimes blue, but the color didn’t seem to matter. It was something deeper inside them that made them extraordinary. I could never look into them for long without beginning to feel warm.

“I don’t know,” Zoltán said.

What use was he if he knew so little? I found myself growing cross at him, too. “It must have been stolen.” Stolen, I prayed, not destroyed. That was something to think about later, when everything was clearer.

“Yes, perhaps it was. It was a valuable instrument.”

Zoltán was right, but it still felt wrong. But then, everything felt wrong. In one night I had become the only person in the house hold capable of making decisions. Mama was incoherent, attended every few hours by the apothecary whom we could not afford, and fussed over by Greta, who left her side only to ensure that Toby and I were still alive. Toby was seven years younger than I was, and that was too young to become the head of a house hold. He needed my father even more than I did. I stole another glance at him. He was still looking at me, and he reached out his hand to take hold of my arm, but I turned and continued tromping back toward the center of the city, which meant crossing the cold, sluggish Danube by the city bridge and passing through one of the gates that pierced the Bastei, the thick wall that ringed the city. There was no mother present to yell at me for taking strides that were too big. And it helped me think, to walk so fast.

I kept going, not even noticing the cold or the fact that my shoes were wet through. But poor Toby! He was so small he had to run to keep up. Instead of entering the crowded streets, once the sentry had let us pass through the gate I mounted the stone steps to reach the top of the Bastei. It was cold and gray, so no one promenaded around it to take the air and enjoy the view over the city and the countryside. That suited me. I could stride as fast as I wanted to and not bump into a soul. I think we circled the city about five times. Only then did I calm down enough to realize that nothing would be accomplished by storming around in anger at our dead papa. When I finally stopped, Toby positively rattled with cold, and a light snow had begun to fall.

“Let’s have something hot to drink,” Zoltán said. He held his arm out in the direction of the steps down, and led us to a nearby café. Its small windows were completely steamed up. It would be warm inside, and crowded. I looked up at the sign. It was Biber’s, a favorite place of the musicians in the prince’s orchestra. I shot a questioning look at Zoltán, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wondered if somehow he had managed to steer us here, even though I was the one leading the way.