Roses, roses, roses.
Laughter shot up the damp crawling stones; the doors were alive with hidden listeners. Shapes hovered in the alleyways, and a man darted over the bridge just above as the gondola went under it. A woman in the very middle of the bridge leant down to bare her breasts in the light of the passing lantern.
"To study with you, I came," said Stefan, in the gondola, to Paganini. "I came with the clothes on my back, and without my father's blessing. I had to hear you with my own ears, and it was not the Devil's music, curse those who say that, it was the enchantment yes, ancient, most likely true, but not the Devil in this."
A great rip of laughter came from the more hunched figure of Paganini, whites of his eyes bright in the dark. Beside him, a woman clung to him, like a hump growing all over his left side, with only a handful of red curls snaking down his coat.
"Prince Stefanovsky," said the great Italian, the idol, the Byronic fiddler par excellence, the romantic love of little girls, "I've heard of you and your talent, of your house in Vienna, where Beethoven himself presents his work, and that once Mozart came there to give you lessons. I know who you are, you rich Russians. You take your gold from a bottomless coffer in the hands of the Czar."
"Don't mistake me," Stefan said, gentle, respecting, desperate. "I have money to pay you well for these lessons, Signore Paganini," said Stefan. "I have a violin, my own, my cherished Stradivarius. I didn't dare to bring my violin, traveling the post roads, days and nights to get here, I came alone. But I have money. I had to hear you first, to know that you would accept me, that you see me as worthy--"
"Oh, but Prince Stefanovsky, must I school you on the history of Czars and their Princes? Your father is not going to permit you to study with the peasant Niccolo Paganini. Your destiny is the service of the Czar, as it has always been with your family. Music was a pastime in your house, oh, don't take offense, I know that Metternich himself"--he leant forward to whisper to Stefan--"the happy little dictator himself, plays the violin and well, and I have played for him. But for a Prince to become what I have become. Prince Stefanovsky, I live by this, my violin!" He gestured to the instrument in its case of polished wood, which seemed ever so much like a tiny coffin. "And you my handsome Russian youth must live by Russian tradition and Russian duty. The military awaits you. Honors. Service in the Crimea."
Cries of praise from above. Torches at the dock. Women in rustling clothes rushing up against a new and steeper bridge. Pink nipples in the night, bodices laid back like wrapping to display them.
"Paganini, Paganini."
Roses again, falling down on the man as he brushed them away and looked intently at Stefan. The great cloaked hump of the woman beside him flashed a white hand down in the dark between Paganini's legs, fingers playing as if his private parts were a lyre, if not a violin. He seemed not even to notice.
"Believe me, I want your money," Paganini said. "I need it. Yes, I play for the dead, but you know of my stormy life, the lawsuits, the entanglements. But I am a peasant, Prince, and I will not give up my itinerant victories to prison myself up in Vienna in a drawing room with you--ah, the critical Viennese, the bored Viennese, the Viennese who did not even give Mozart his bread and butter; did you know him, Mozart? No, and you cannot remain with me. Already, no doubt, Metternich, at your father's behest, has sent someone to look for you. I'll become accused of some nasty treason in all this."
Stefan was crushed, head bowed, cheeks so tender with pain, and deep-framed eyes glittering with the reflected light from the torpid but shiny water.
An interior:
A Venetian room, unkempt and blistered from the damp, chalky dark walls and soaring yellow ceiling with only faded remnants of a pagan swarm that had burnt so new and bright before its death in Stefan's rich Viennese palace. A long drape, a slash of dark dusty burgundy velvet and a deep green satin tangled with it, hung from a high hook, and out the narrow window, I saw the ochre colored wall of the palace opposite so close that one could reach across the alley if one wished and knock upon the solid wood green shutters.
The unmade bed was heaped with tapestried robes and crumpled linen shirts with costly Reticella lace, the tables stacked with letters, wax seals broken, and here and there lay the stubs of candles. Everywhere bouquets of dead flowers.
But, look:
Stefan played! Stefan stood in the middle of the room, on the shiny Venetian oiled floor, playing not this, our spectral violin, but another undoubtedly by the same master. And round Stefan, Paganini danced, playing variations that mocked Stefan's theme, a contest, a game, a duet, a war perhaps.
It was a somber Adagio Stefan played, by Albinoni, in G minor for strings and organ, only he had made it his solo, moving from part to part, his grief encompassing his fallen house, and through the music I could see the burning palace faintly in the Vienna cold and all the beauty turned to kindling. The music, slow, steady, unfolding, held Stefan himself so in thrall he seemed not to see the cavorting figure near him.
Such music! It seemed the very maximum of pain that could be declared with perfect dignity. It bore no accusation. It spoke of wisdom and deepening sadness.
I felt my tears come, my tears which are like hands to applaud, the signal of the empathy in me for him, this boyman standing there, as the Italian genius made his Rumpelstiltskin circle about him.
Thread after thread from the Adagio Paganini pulled loose to race it into a caprice, a frolic of fingers darting too swiftly along the strings even to be traced, and then he would with perfect accuracy descend to catch the very phrase which Stefan at his somber pace had only just reached. Paganini's dexterity seeming sorcery, as it was always said, and in all this--this lone imperially slim figure played immune in his pain, and Paganini, the dancer who mocked or tore the shroud for its gleaming threads--there was nothing discordant but something wholly new and splendid.
Stefan's eyes were closed, his head tilted. His full sleeves were stained from rain perhaps, the fine punto in aria lace torn at the cuffs, his boots streaked with dried mud, but his arm was perfect in its measures. Never had his dark straight eyebrows looked so smooth and beautiful, and as he took the organ part of this famous music now, I thought my heart would break for him, and even Paganini drew in, slipping into this most tortured of moments merely to play with Stefan, to echo him, to cry above him and below but with honor.
The two stopped, the tall boyish one looking down with utter wonder at the other.
Paganini laid down his violin carefully on the tasseled covers and pillows of the jumbled bed, all golden and midnight blue. His big pop eyes were generous and his smile demonic. The man seemed embraceable in his exuberance. He rubbed his hands.
"Yes, gifted, yes, you are! Gifted!"
You'll never play like that! That was my ghost captain whispering in my ear, even as his whole body clung to mine and pleaded with me for solace.
I didn't answer. Let the picture roll.
"You'll teach me then," said Stefan in flawless Italian, the Italian of Salieri and all his like, the wonder of the Germans and the English.
"Teach you, yes, yes, I will. And if we must get out of this place, then we shall, though you know what you do to me in these times, with Austria so bent on keeping my Italy under her thumb, you know. But tell me this."
"What?"
The little man with the huge eyes laughed; he walked up and down; his heels clicked on the oiled floor, his shoulders were almost humped, his eyebrows long and curling at the ends as if he'd enhanced them with stage paint when he hadn't.
"What, dear Prince, am I to teach you? For you know how to play, yes, that you can do. You can play. What is it that I must bring to a pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven? An Italian levity perhaps, an Italian irony?"
"No," said Stefan in a whisper, eyes fastened on the pacing man. "Courage, Maestro, to throw all else aside. Oh, it is sad, sad to me that my teacher will never hear you."
Paganini paused, lips puckered. "Beethoven, you mean."
r /> "Deaf, too deaf now even for the high notes to pierce, too deaf," said Stefan softly.
"And so he can't give you the courage?"
"No, you misunderstand!" Stefan held the gift violin that he had played, looked at it.
"Stradivari, yes, a present to me, fine as your own, no?" said Paganini.
"Indeed, perhaps better, I don't know," said Stefan. He took up the former point. "Beethoven could teach anyone courage. But he is a composer now, deafness forced this on him as you know, boxed the ears of the virtuoso until he couldn't play, and left him locked up with pen and ink as the only means of making music."
"Ah," said Paganini, "and we are the richer for it. I would so like just once to see him from a distance perhaps or have him watch me play. But if I make an enemy of your father, I'll never even enter Vienna. And Vienna is ... well, after Rome, there is ... Vienna." Paganini sighed. "I cannot risk it, to lose Vienna."
"I'll see to all this!" Stefan said under his breath. He turned and looked out the narrow window, eyes roving the stone walls. How squalid this place looked compared to the confectionery corridors that had gone up in smoke, but it was perfectly Venetian. Russet velvet piled on the floor, fancy satin shoes thrown about--a peach cut open and all the romance squeezed out here.
"I know," said Paganini now. "I understand. Had Beethoven been playing still in the Argentine and the Schonbrunn and gone to London, and been chased by women, he might be as I am, not much for the composing but always for the center of the stage, for the man alone with the music, for the playing."
"Yes," said Stefan, turning. "You see, and it is playing that I want to do."
"Your father's palace in St. Petersburg is a legend. He'll soon be there. You can turn your back on such comforts?"
"I never saw it. Vienna was my cradle, I told you. I dozed on a couch once as Mozart played keyboard games; I thought my heart would burst. Look. I am alive within this sound, the sound of the violin, and not--like my great teacher--in writing notes for myself or others."
"You have the nerve to be a vagabond," said Paganini, his smile chilling just a little. "You do, but I cannot picture it. You Russians. You I will not ..."
"No, don't dismiss me."
"I don't. Only resolve this thing at home. You must! This violin you speak of, yours which you took out of the fire, go home for it and take with it your father's blessing, otherwise they'll hound us, these merciless rich, that I've seduced from his duties to the Czar as ambassador's son. You know they can do it."
"I must have my father's permission," said Stefan, as if to make a memorandum of it.
"Yes, and the Strad, the long Strad of which you spoke. Bring that. I don't seek to take it from you. Look, you see what I have. But I want to play on that instrument too. I want to hear you play it. Bring that and your father's blessing, and the gossips we can handle. You can travel with me."
"Ah!" Stefan sank his teeth into his lip. "You promise me this, Signore Paganini? My money is adequate but no fortune. If you dream of Russian coaches and ..."
"No, no, little boy. You're not listening. I say I will let you come with me and be where I am. I do not seek to be your minion, Prince. I am a wanderer! That is what I am, you see. A virtuoso! Doors open to me for what I play; I needn't conduct, compose, dedicate, mount productions with screaming sopranos and bored fiddlers in the pit. I am Paganini! And you shall be Stefanovsky."
"I'll get it, I'll get the violin, I'll get my Father's word!" Stefan said. "An allowance will be nothing to him."
He smiled openly, and the little man advanced and covered his face with kisses, in an Italian style perhaps, or one that was purely Russian.
"Brave, beautiful Stefan," he said.
Stefan, flustered, handed back to him the precious gift violin. Looking down at his own hands, he saw his many rings, all jeweled. Rubies, emeralds. He removed one and held it out.
"No, son," said Paganini. "I don't want it. I have to live, to play, but you need no bribe to have my promise."
Stefan clamped Paganini's shoulders in his hands and kissed his face. The little man rumbled with a laugh.
"And that violin, you must bring it. Ah, I have to see this long Strad as they call it, I have to play it."
Vienna once more.
The cleanliness was the dead giveaway, every chair gilded or painted with white and gold, and parquet floors immaculate. Stefan's father, I knew him at once, as he sat in the chair by the fire, a blanket of Russian bear fur over his lap, looking up at his son, and in this room, the violins all there in cases as before, though this was not the splendid palace that had burned but some more temporary quarters.
Yes, where they had put up until we could make the move to St. Petersburg. I had come dashing back. I washed and sent for clean clothes before I came into the city gates. Look, listen.
He did cut a different figure, spruced in the bright fashions of the time, a smart black coat with fine buttons, crisp white collar and silk tie, no pigtail anymore or any of that, hair lustrous and still long from his journey as though it were a badge of his coming detachment from all this, like the hair of rock singers in our day and age that shouts the words Christ and Outcast with equal power.
He was afraid of his father, the elder glowering up at him from the fire:
"A virtuoso, a wandering fiddler! You think I brought the great musicians into my house to teach you this, that you should run off with that cursed bedeviled Italian! That, that trickster that does pranks with his fingers instead of playing notes! He hasn't the nerve to play in Vienna! Let the Italians eat him up. They who invented the castrato so he could sing volleys of notes, arpeggios and endless crescendos!"
"Father, only listen to me. You have five sons."
"Ah, you will not do this," said the Father, his white hair Lenten as it tumbled to the shoulders of his satin robe. "Stop! How dare you, my eldest." But the tone was gentle. "You know that the Czar will soon command your first military service; we serve the Czar! Even now, I depend upon him for our restoration in St. Petersburg!" He cut the tone, softening it with compassion, as though the years between them had given him a wisdom that made him sorry for his son. "Stefan, Stefan, your duty is to the family and to the Emperor; you don't take the toys I gave you for delight and make them your mania!"
"You never thought them toys, our violins, our pianofortes, you brought the finest here for Beethoven when he could still play ..."
The father leant forward in the big white-framed French chair, too broad and squat to be anything but Hapsburg. He turned his shoulder to a great ornamented stove that climbed the wall to the inevitably painted ceiling, the fire enclosed beneath gleaming glazed enameled white iron and dizzying gold curlicues.
I felt it, I felt it as if I and my ghostly guide were in the room, very near to those we saw so completely. Pastry smells rising; grand broad windows; the dampness here was clean, as fog is clean off the sea.
"Yes," said the Father, obviously struggling to reason, to be kind. "I did bring the greatest of all musicians to teach you and delight you and make your childhood bright." He shrugged. "And I myself, I liked to play the violoncello with them, you know this! For you and your sister and brothers, I gave everything, as it had been done for me ... great portraits hung on my walls before they burned, and you have always had the best of clothes, and horses in our stables, yes, the best of poets for you to read, and yes, Beethoven, poor, tragic Beethoven, I keep him near for you and for me and for what he is.
"But that is not the point, my son. The Czar commands you. We are not Viennese merchants! We don't seek taverns and coffeehouses full of gossip and slander! You are Prince Stefanovsky, my son. They'll send you to the Ukraine, first, as they did me. And you will pass the necessary years before you go into the more intimate governmental service."
"No." Stefan backed up.
"Oh, don't make it so painful for yourself," said his father wearily. His gray mane hung down around his wobbling cheeks. "We have lost so much, so very much; we
have sold all that was saved, it seems, to leave this city, and it was only here that I was ever happy."
"Father, then learn from your own pain. I can't, I won't give up the music for any Emperor near or far. I wasn't born in Russia. I was born in rooms where Salieri played, where Farinelli came to sing. I beg you. I want my violin. Just give me that. Give it to me. Release me penniless and let it out you couldn't stop my headstrong ways. No disgrace will fall on you. Give me the violin and I will go."
There came a subtle threatening change into the Father's face. It seemed there were steps nearby. But neither figure acknowledged any but each other.
"Don't lose your temper, my son." The Father rose to his feet, the bear rug falling to the carpeted floor. He was regal in his satin robe, with furs beneath it, his fingers covered with brilliant jewels.
He was as tall as Stefan, no peasant blood here it seemed, only the Nordic mixed with the Slav to make giants of the ilk of Peter the Great perhaps, who knows, but these were true princes.
His father came close to him, then turned to survey the bright, lacquered instruments that rested all along the sideboards with their rampant painted Rococo gardens on every cabinet door. Silk paneling in the walls, the long streaks of painted gold rising to the muraled cove above.
It was a string orchestra. It made me shiver just to look at it. I didn't know this violin from any other there.
The Father sighed. The son waited, schooled obviously not to weep as he might have done with me, as he did now with me in this invisibility from which we watched. I heard him sigh, but then the vision overwhelmed again and held firm.
"You can't go, my son," the Father said, "to chase around the world with this vulgar man. You cannot. And you cannot take your violin. It breaks my heart to tell you. But you dream, and a year from now you will come to beg forgiveness."
Stefan could scarcely control his voice, looking at this heritage.
"Father, even if we dispute, the instrument is mine, I took it out of the burning room, I ..."
"Son, the instrument is sold, as are all the Stradivari instruments, and the pianofortes and the harpsichord on which Mozart played, sold, all, I assure you."