Stefan slipped his arm around me as if he were cold, his white hand covering my hand which covered the violin, but not trying to tear it loose. He trembled against me. He was lost in the spectacle. His whisper was mournful and carried over any envisioned tumult.
"And so you see it fall," he whispered in my ear. He sighed. "You see it fall, the last great Russian house in beautiful Vienna, a house which had survived Napoleon's guns and soldiers, and plots of Metternich and his ever vigilant spies, the last great Russian house to keep its own full orchestra, like so many waiters for the table, ready to play the sonatas of Beethoven as soon as the ink was dry, men who could play Bach while yawning, or Vivaldi with the sweat on their foreheads, night after night, and all this until one candle, mind you, one candle touched a bit of silk, and drafts from Hell came up to guide it through fifty rooms. My Father's house, my father's fortune, my father's dreams for his Russian sons and daughters who, dancing and singing on this border between East and West, had never seen their own Moscow."
He pressed close to me, struggling, and clutching at my shoulder with his right hand, the left still over my hand and violin and heart.
"See, look around you, the other palaces, the windows with their architraves. You see where you are? You are in the center of the musical world. You are where Schubert would soon make his name in little rooms and die like the snap of fingers without ever finding me in my own gloom, I can assure you, and where Paganini had not yet dared to come for fear of censure. Vienna, and my Father's house. Are you afraid of fire, Triana?"
I didn't answer him. He hurt himself as he hurt me. He hurt so much that it was like the heat.
I wept, but then weeping with me now was so common that perhaps I should forget to take note of it here or anywhere else as we continue. I cried. I cried, and watched the carriages coming to take the grieving ones away, women in loose fur waving from the carriage windows, the wheels big and slender and delicate, and the horses noisy and unruly in the pandemonium.
"Where are you, Stefan? Where are you now? You did get out of the room, where are you? I don't see you, the living you!"
I was dazed, yes, but apart with him, and what he could point out were only images of things past. I knew it, but in my childhood such a fire would have had me helplessly screaming. Well, childhood was no more and this was a nightmare for a mourning woman, this was a thing for soft sobs and a crumbling within of all strength.
The icy wind whipped the flames; one wing of the house did fly apart, walls unhinged, and windows cracking open and the roof exploding with torrents of black smoke. The great bulk looked like a grand lantern. The crowd was swept backwards. People fell. Screamed.
One last doomed figure leapt from the roof, a little cutout of black limbs tossed in the yellow fiery air. People cried out. Some rushed towards this tiny falling black stick-thing that was a man, a helpless, doomed man, only to fall back, driven by the gusting of the blinding blaze. The windows of the lower floor burst open into blazing flowers.
Another great shower of sparks caught us up, sparks touching my eyelids and my hair. I shielded the spectral violin. The sparks flew against us, heavy and stinking of destruction, as they rained down on all those around us, and on us, on this vision and this dream.
Break this vision. This is a trick. You've broken these lucid dreams before that folded you up so tight you thought you'd died and gone on. Break this one.
I stared down hard at the filthy paving stones. Reek of horse manure. My lungs hurt from the bitter air, the smoke. I looked at the high multistoried long rectangular palaces around us. Real, real, these Baroque facades, and the welkin above, dear God, look at the fire on the clouds, this is the worst measure of its catastrophe--either that or one single victim, and how many had there been here. I breathed the stench of the fire in as I cried. I caught the sparks with my hands that died in the frigid wind. The wind hurt my eyelids more than the sparks.
I looked at Stefan, my Stefan the ghost, staring past me, as if he too were riveted by this hellish vision, his own eyes glazed, his mouth tender, the delicate muscles of his face moving as though he struggled desperately against what he saw--Couldn't this be changed, Couldn't that be changed, Did that have to be destroyed?
He whipped around and looked at me, caught in this moment of preoccupation. Only sorrow. Some question in his eyes to me, Do you see?
The crowd continued to tumble over us, yet never saw us; we were not a part of the frenzy, no obstacle, only two figures that could feel and see all that this world contained, in perfect empathy.
A flash caught my eye, a familiar figure.
"But there you are," I cried. It was the living Stefan, far off, I saw him, the young Stefan of life in the flaring fancy coat with the high collar, safely away from the fire, the instruments strewn about him. An old man leant to kiss Stefan's cheek, stop his tears.
The living Stefan held the violin, the rescued violin, a young Stefan, in dirty bedraggled finery. A woman now came, cloaked in fur-trimmed green silk, and lifted her drapery around him.
Young men gathered the precious salvage.
A hard blast struck me, like a wind not of this vision. Dream, yes, wake. But you can't. You know you can't.
"Of course not, and would you?" Stefan whispered, his hand cold on my hand, which held the true violin. And what had become of that, the toy the young man had saved? How were we propelled to this?
But something brightened fiercely in the corner of my eye.
There stood the Maestro, not alive in this world at all any more than we were. Apart from the crowd; and horrifyingly intimate with us, coming close so that I could see the tufts of his gray-black hair growing from his low brow and his keen black eyes dancing over us, and the pout of his colorless mouth, my God, my guardian, without whom I cannot even imagine life itself.
I wanted no protection from this.
"Stefan, why this now!" said Beethoven, the little man I knew, the man all the world knew from scowling statuettes and dramatic windblown drawings, pockmarked and ugly yet fierce and a ghost as surely as we were. His eyes fixed me, fixed the violin, fixed his tall spectral pupil.
"Maestro!" Stefan pleaded, tightening his embrace, even as the fire burnt on and the night thickened with cries and bells. "She stole it! Look at it. Look. She stole my violin! Make her give it back to me, Maestro, help me!"
But the little man glared, shook his head as he had before, and then turned, sneering, grunting, disgusted, and once again walked away, the crowd eating him up again, the black confusion of jabbering and crying people all chaos around us, and the infuriated Stefan clutching me, trying to close his hand over the violin.
But I had it.
"Turn your back on me?" he said. "Maestro!" he wailed. "Oh, God, what have you done to me, Triana, where have you led me! What have you done! There I see him and he leaves me--"
"You opened this door yourself," I said.
Such a stricken face. Defenseless. No emotion could have made him anything but beautiful. He stepped back, frantic, wringing his hands, truly wringing them, look at his white fingers as he wrings his hands, and he stared with wild tormented eyes at the great crashing collapsing shell of the house.
"What have you done?" he cried again. He stared at me and the violin. His lips shook, and his face was wet. "You cry for what? For me? For it? For you? For them?"
He looked from right to left, and back again.
"Maestro!" he called out, eyes searching the night. He stood back, lip jutting, sobbing. "Give it back," he hissed at me. "Give it back. In two centuries, I have never seen a shade as sure as myself, never and now! And this shade is the Maestro and this shade turns its back on me! Maestro I need you, I need you--"
He moved away from me, not deliberately; it was only the idle dance of his desperate gestures, his searching gazes.
"Give it to me, you witch!" he said. "You're in my world now. These things are phantoms and you know it."
"And so are you and so was he," I sa
id, my voice small, broken, even lost, but insisting. "The violin is in my arms, and no, I won't give it up. I will not."
"What do you want of me?" he cried. His fingers outstretched, his shoulders hunched, the dark straight eyebrows expressionless, themselves giving the eyes beneath them all the more expression.
"I don't know!" I said. I cried. I gasped for breath and found it and didn't need it and it wasn't enough and didn't matter. "I want the violin. I want the gift. I played it. I played it in my own house, I felt myself give in to it."
"No!" he roared, as if he would go mad in this realm where he and I alone stood, ignored by all these fleshly beings rushing and calling.
He came head on, and threw his arms around me. His head came down on my shoulder. I looked up, even as he held me, as I felt all the silky hair of his head falling down wild over my face. I looked up and past him and saw the young Stefan, and there with him a living Beethoven, surely it was, a gray-haired living Beethoven, stooped and belligerent and full of love, hair a fright, clothes snaggled, taking his young pupil by the shoulders as the pupil wept and gestured with the violin as if it were a mere baton, while others sank down to their knees or to sit on the cold stones in their weeping.
The smoke filled my lungs, but it didn't touch me. The sparks made their ceaseless whirl around us but had no fire to burn us. He held me, shivering, and careful not to crush this precious thing. He held me, blindly, burrowing his forehead against me.
Clutching the violin tight, I lifted my left hand to hold his head, to feel a skull beneath his thick, soft, velvet hair, and his sobs were a muffled vibrant rhythm against me.
The fire paled, the crowd faded; the darkness became cool, not cold, and fresh with the salt air of the sea.
We stood alone, or at a great distance.
The fire was gone. Everything was gone.
"Where are we?" I whispered in his ear. He seemed in a trance, as he held me. I smelled the earth; I smelled old and molding things, I smelled ... I smelled the stench of the newly dead, and the old dead, but above all of clean salt air blowing it all away, even as I caught it.
Someone played a violin exquisitely. Someone brought sheer enchantment out of the violin. What was this facile eloquence?
Was this my Stefan? This was a prankster at the instrument, with an immense power and confidence, tripping and tearing through a song more likely to make fear than tears.
But it pierced the night like the sharpest blade. It was crisp and originless in the gloom.
It was mischievous, gleeful, even full of anger, this song.
"Stefan, where are you? Where do we stand now?" My ghost only held tight to me as if he himself didn't want to see or know. He sighed heavily, as though this frantic song didn't touch his blood, didn't galvanize his spectral limbs, as though it could not ensnare him now in death as it ensnared me.
Soft winds off the sea came again over us, and again the air was full of the damp of the sea, I could smell the sea, and far off I realized what I saw:
A great crowd with candles in their hands, cloaked figures, figures with gleaming black top hats, and long dresses, full skirts gently sweeping the earth, dark gloved fingers protecting tiny quivering flames. Here and there the lights clustered to illuminate a whole gathering of attentive and eager faces. The music was fragile then bursting with strength, a deluge, an assault.
"Where are we?" I asked. This smell, it was the smell of death, of the rotting dead. We were crowded amongst mausoleums and stone angels. "Those are graves, look, marble graves!" I said. "We stand in a cemetery. Who is playing? And who are these people?"
He only cried. Finally he lifted his head. Dazzled, he stared at the distant crowd, and only now did the music seem to strike him, to awaken him.
The distant solo violin had broken into a dance, a dance for which there was a name but I couldn't recall it, a country dance which always carries with it in any land some warning of the destruction inherent in abandon.
Not turning away, only releasing me a little, and looking over his shoulder, he spoke.
"We are in the cemetery, true," he said. He was tired and worn from crying. He held me close again, carefully regarding the violin, not to hurt it, and nothing in his poise or manner suggested he would try to snatch it.
He stared as I did at the distant crowd. He seemed to inhale the power of the leaping music.
"But this is Venice, Triana," he kissed my ear. He gave some soft moan like a wounded thing. "This is the graveyard of the Lido. And who do you think plays there, for effect, for praise, for whim? And the city under Metternich all full of spies for the Hapsburg State which will never let another Revolution come or another Napoleon, a government of censors and dictators; who plays here, taunting God as it were, on sacred ground with a song no one would consecrate."
"Yes, on that we do agree," I whispered. "No one would consecrate it." The notes brought the inevitable chills. I wanted myself to play, to take up my violin and join as if it were a country dance and fiddlers could step forward. What arrogance!
It came like steel, this song, but such dexterity, such swiftness, such boundless and tender power, and now it did glide into its appeal. I felt my heart shrink as if the violin were begging me, begging me as Stefan had for the violin I still held, for something else far more precious, for everything, for all things.
I tore my eyes off the scattering of candles and faces. Marble angels protected no one in the dripping night. I reached out with my right hand and touched a marble grave with pediment and doorway. This is no dream. This is as solid as was Vienna. This is a place. The Lido, he had said, the island off the city of Venice.
I looked up at him and he down at me, and he seemed sweet, almost, and wondering. I think he smiled, but I couldn't be sure. The candles gave a poor light and it was far away. He bent and kissed my lips. The sweetest shiver.
"Stefan, poor Stefan," I whispered, kissing him still.
"You hear him, don't you, Triana?"
"Hear him! He's going to take me prisoner," I said. I wiped at my cheek. The wind was far less cold than that in Vienna. It had no bite, this wind, only its freshness, and the deep corruption of the sea and the cemetery carried lightly on it. In fact, the stench of the sea seemed to fold into it the stench of the grave and declare that both were only natural.
"Who is the virtuoso?" I asked. I deliberately kissed him again. There was no resistance. I reached up and touched the bone of his forehead under his satin eyebrows, the ridge across which they were so straightly and thickly drawn. Soft, brushed hair. Very thin and flat and dark, wide but not thick, that is, and his eyelashes danced willingly against the palm of my hand.
"Who plays like this?" I asked him. "Is it you, can we move through the crowds? Let me see you."
"Oh, not I, my darling, no, though I might have given him a little sport, you'll soon see that, but come, look for yourself, look. There I stand, see? A spectator. A worshiper. Candle in hand, listening and shivering with all the rest as he plays, this genius, for the love of the thrill he makes in us, for the love of the spectacle of the cemetery and its candles, who do you think he is, whom would I come to hear, so far from Vienna, on dangerous Italian roads--see my dirty hair, my worn coat. For whom would I come this long way?--if not the man they called the Devil, the possessed one, the Master, Paganini."
The living Stefan came into focus, cheeks flushed, eyes catching two identical candle flames, though he himself held none, gloved hands twisting, right fingers around the left wrist, listening.
"Only you see ..." said the ghost beside me. He turned my face away from the living. "Only, you see ... there's a difference."
"I understand," I said. "You really want me to see these things, you want me to understand."
He shook his head as if this was too harsh and too horrifying, and then faltering, he said, "I've never looked at them."
The music went soft; the night closed, opened on a different shade of light.
I turned. I tried to see t
he graves, the crowd. But something else altogether had taken its place.
We two, ghost and traveler--lover, tormentor, thief, whatever I was--we two were invisible spectators, without locus, though I felt the violin safely in my hands as ever, and my back firmly against his chest, and my breasts, with the violin held reverently between them, covered by his arms. His lips were on my neck. It felt like words spilling out against the flesh.
I looked forward.
"Want me to see--?"
"God help me."
12
THIS WAS a narrow canal; the gondola had turned from the Canale Grande into the strip of dark green reeking water between the rows of shoulder-to-shoulder palaces, windows of Moorish arches, all color bled out in the darkness. Great overbearing facades of clustered splendor rooted in water, an arrogance, a glory, this: Venice. Its walls on either side were so drenched and glazed with slime in the lamplight that Venice might have likely risen from the depths, bringing up nocturnal rot into the moon's light with sinister ambition.
Now I understood for the first time the sleekness of the gondola, the sly black facility of this long, high-prowed boat for striving swift between these stony banks, beneath these rocking feeble lanterns.
Young Stefan sat in the gondola, talking frantically to Paganini.
The man himself, Paganini, seemed enraptured. Paganini, with the large hooked nose and giant protuberant eyes given him in many a painting, a burning presence in which drama has surpassed ugliness effortlessly to make pure magnetism.
In our invisible window on this world, the ghost beside me shuddered. I kissed the fingers curled on my shoulder.
Venice.
From a high flapping shuttered window that opened out like a perfect square of yellow in the night, a woman threw flowers, shouting in Italian, the light spilling down on the blooms as they tumbled onto the virtuoso, her sentence ringing in a peculiarly Italian crescendo: "Blessed Paganini, that he would play without recompense for the dead!" Like a necklace with the very mid-phrase flung out the farthest and then breath drawn back on the word for the dead.
Others echoed the same cry. Shutters opened above. From a rooftop, running figures heaved roses from baskets onto the green water ahead of the boat.