“In the old country,” Grandma Malika would say, laughing with wonder and rubbing at a bruise on her arm, “in the winter, we would be snowed in. In a strange way, it was like this.”
“Like this,” Grandpa Mordecai would concede, “but very different.”
Usually the power would fail for an hour or two, and the ceiling fan would stop and the wet air would settle like a layer of damp on the diners who moved a breeze back and forth across their faces with woven reed fans. Grandma Malika would light the candles, and Mishka thought of himself and the three people he loved as figures inside a music box, leaning toward each other over the white linen cloth. They were inside the light, inside the golden circle, and just beyond the table, on all sides, were the heavy drapes of rain, folds of water flashing white and silver like roped silk.
“Otto will have competition tonight,” Grandpa Mordecai would say, having to raise his voice over the heavy percussion of the rain. “This he never had to contend with in Budapest.”
“Snowstorms,” Grandma Malika would murmur dreamily and Mishka would know she was back in that other place where frosted powder, cold as whipped ice-cream and as unimaginable, was piled high against the windows until the house was blanketed in white. “This reminds me of blizzards,” his
grandmother would say, indicating the little cocoon in which they were suspended, cut off from the world, “except it was cold outside instead of hot, and the air was so dry, if you touched someone, little blue flames would leap up.” She reached out to touch Mishka’s wrist by way of demonstration and the damp left a wet band on Mishka’s arm.
“Snowstorms, yes,” his grandfather said. “I remember a concert in Budapest, let me see, I think I was ten years old, so 1930, and Otto was eighteen, performing already since seven years, giving concerts, a child prodigy he was, just like Mozart and Mendelssohn. Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály, they were both teaching at the Academy in Budapest, and they told Otto he had great promise and they were present at this concert and the drifts were four feet deep in the streets. The people who managed to get to the concert hall came in horse-drawn sleighs, Mishka. This was the only way. It was so cold that we kept our overcoats and boots on during the concert, and Otto had to play with gloves on his hands with the fingertips cut out.”
“Mishka,” his mother would say. “Look at the way the light moves in the rain.”
And he would see, in the fluted wall of water beyond the veranda eaves, the shredded rainbows of moonlight and the ribbons of candle-glow that were tossed and tangled about.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” his mother asked, fanning herself and then setting the fan down on the table and taking hold of her cotton shift at both shoulders and lifting the garment slightly away from her body and shaking it, ventilating herself. She lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered her dress. She picked up her fan and waved it languidly back and forth. “When light is scattered,” his mother said, “it multiplies itself.”
“Like music,” his grandfather said. “When I was your age, Mishka, when I was five, we thought music was much more
important than food.” He laughed. “A good policy, since we had more music than food. When we didn’t have enough to eat, our mother would say: Let’s eat music. And she would sit at the piano and Otto would play his violin and we all would sing. And our mother would say: think of the notes as
pirogi
and fill yourself up. And we did. And afterwards, I didn’t feel hungry. And now look: we have real food and real music,” indicating the laden table and the drumming on the roof and the sweet antiphony of the wall of rain.
“The promised land,” his grandmother murmured. “This is where we escaped to, Mishka: the promised land.” And it
was
, Mishka thought: the roar and push of the rain, the candlelight, the family, the night creatures, the forest, what more could anyone ask for? Mishka did not have a name for the feeling which flooded him, and at the time he did not know any other way to be. Many years later, when he could summon up that same feeling—when he was addicted to summoning up that feeling again—he would attempt to label it: safety, belonging, connectedness, the promised land, but the feeling did not readily translate into words. The feeling was made up of a mélange of sounds and sensations. In that time, inside that feeling, he had no sense of where he ended and where his family or the forest or the night creatures began. This was before he had started school, before he knew other children, before he learned he was different and peculiar, before he knew the Bartoks were reffos, before he noticed that he did not have a father. He did not have a name for the feeling, but he could
see
it and
hear
it, and it was a river that rose and rose in its banks like the Daintree in the Wet season until it washed his body with warmth and rushed all around him, foaming and splashing him with Gluck and Mendelssohn and Uncle Otto’s violin and bird cries and fragrant night-blooming flowers.
“And now, Devorah,” his grandfather would say as the coffee was served, “will you tell Otto we are ready?”
And Mishka would listen again to the soft shushing of his mother’s feet on the stairs. She would carry a candlestick and the light would lick up and down the polished treads like tongues of fire.
“Tonight, because of the rain,” his mother might say, “he will play Bartók. The 1921 concerto.”
“The 1921,” his grandfather would say. “That is good. A good choice. Full of lightning and as loud as the rain.”
And the four of them would huddle close to the candle’s halo, heads bowed, rapt, and listen as Uncle Otto played.
W
HENEVER
D
EVORAH SAID
, “Tonight, he will play Beethoven, the
D Major for Violin
,” Mishka knew they would hear the third movement, since that was Uncle Otto’s favorite. Once upon a time, Grandpa Mordecai said, there had been many recordings of Otto’s concerts and no doubt, here and there throughout the world, there were music-lovers who still owned their original copies, but all copies owned by Otto’s own family had been lost or destroyed in the war. Nevertheless, through a broker in Cairns, Grandpa Mordecai had been buying second-hand copies, often damaged, one by one; and other more modern recordings of Otto’s favorite concerti were so constantly played in the Bartok tree-house that Mishka knew entire works by heart. This was why, even when the nightly deluge drowned out the music, the listeners heard each note as it fell from Uncle Otto’s bow. Mishka could close his eyes and feel the river welling up inside him, pressing against the levee of his skin with such urgent rapture that he would feel it could not be contained.
There were framed photographs of Uncle Otto on the walls. The photographs had a brownish tinge as though they had been steeped in tea or soaked by Daintree overflow in the Wet season or as though the lens of the camera were looking at Uncle Otto underwater. Because of this, Mishka once had a strange dream.
In his dream, Uncle Otto fell overboard on the voyage to Australia and drowned, but Grandpa Mordecai dived into the ocean and saved him. On the deck of the ship, he applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Uncle Otto’s face was as white as a fresh-caught fish slit open, but after a while his blue lips kissed Grandpa Mordecai back, and he sat up and played his violin. All the sailors and refugees cheered.
Uncle Otto wore high white starched collars and waistcoats and trousers that buttoned close at the ankle, so that Mishka often wondered, especially during the season of the Wet, if Uncle Otto might not be covered in heat rash from head to toe.
He had asked his mother about this, but his mother had a way of not answering when he asked about Uncle Otto.
“Can I watch when he plays his violin?” Mishka begged.
“Uncle Otto likes to be undisturbed,” his mother said, and indeed, the door to Uncle Otto’s room was always closed. “He prefers night time, when we’re asleep.”
“Like the night birds,” Mishka said. “And the night bloomers.”
“Like the moonflowers,” his mother agreed.
“Will you ask him,” Mishka begged, “if I stay up very late, would he teach me the second movement of the Mendelssohn?” because Mishka’s grandfather also played the violin “though I cannot hold a candle to Otto,” his grandfather said, and he was teaching Mishka on a custom-made half-size instrument especially ordered from Sydney and shipped to Cairns. “From where,” Grandpa Mordecai declared, “they must have sent it by carrier pigeon or given it to one of the larger fish,” but it did eventually reach the Daintree post office and Grandpa Mordecai drove Mishka down to collect it.
“It is acceptable,” Grandpa Mordecai said, bouncing the bow on the strings, “though barely. It is better suited to the
size of your fingers, Mishka, but the sound is not as lush and rich as it should be.” He shook his head in distress. “You must make up your mind to grow quickly, especially your hands, so you can play on my violin, though mine is also, alas, a very second-rate instrument.” His grandfather sighed. “I bought it after we came to Australia. It is to Otto’s Guarnerius as the Daintree community hall is to the concert hall of Budapest. If only Otto would teach you,” his grandfather said. “You have his touch and his musicality already. Like Otto, you are a genius, Mishka. You could play for the Empress Maria Theresa herself.”
“Can we ask Uncle Otto to teach me?” Mishka begged.
“I will ask him,” his mother promised, “but Mishka, darling—” and his mother stroked his hair, his mother had in her eyes that look that in later years, when he was outside the charmed circle of Chateau Daintree, Mishka would think of as the “going away” look, a look to which both his mother and his grandparents were susceptible, a look that made him think they were watching him through the wrong end of a telescope and were reaching toward him, momentarily, from a different world—“you can listen to the recordings and teach yourself.”
And Mishka did listen to the recordings. He listened to them over and over. He listened to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Bartók. He knew them by heart.
“The interesting thing about Bartók,” his grandfather told him, “to whom we are not related, except in spirit, is that he was not Jewish. Maybe his great-great-grandfather converted, who knows? But we do know this. He felt himself an outsider, like us. In Hungary, they accused him of being unpatriotic because he was interested in the folk music of the Slovakians and the Romanians. When he was a child, they were all part of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, but after the First World War, the Slovakians and Romanians were foreigners. Like Beethoven, Bartók believed passionately in the brotherhood of mankind. In 1919, he and Kodály were suspended from the Budapest Academy by the fascist regime. And in the 1930s, he refused to perform in Nazi Germany. He refused even to let his work be broadcast there. He moved to America in 1940, while we were, you know, still wandering in the wilderness”—this was the closest Mishka’s grandfather ever came to mentioning Auschwitz—“and I didn’t learn that he was in America until after all that bad time was over and Australia took us in. But Otto played for Béla Bartók in Budapest in 1930 and he was proud to play Bartók in 1940 when Bartók was unfashionable and ‘inappropriate’ and he is happy still to play Bartók today.”
There were many versions of Béla Bartók in his grandparents’ house: the three violin concerti—the 1921, the 1922, and the 1938—and the six string quartets, interpreted by Jascha Heifetz, by Yehudi Menuhin, by Itzhak Perlman, by David Oistrakh, by many others. By the time he was five years old, Mishka could identify the work and the performing artist after five bars. So on the rain-thundering nights, when Uncle Otto played his favorite movements, the listeners sat around the candle one floor below and closed their eyes and heard every note.
The violin was the first love of Mishka’s grandparents, but they had other loves too, especially opera and the music of the early Renaissance and the ethereal arias written for the counter-tenors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recordings arrived by mail order with some frequency, and the crocodile hunters on the river reported in the pubs of Mossman and Cairns that the reffo family must get some very strange visitors: blokes who sang like sheilas at the top of
their lungs, blokes who sang as though they had been kicked in the you-know-where.
There was one aria in particular that Mishka’s grandparents loved as much as they loved Otto’s playing: the counter-tenor aria from Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
.
“It is a song of the utmost grief and pain, Mishka,” Grandpa Mordecai explained. “Orpheus has found Eurydice in the Underworld and then lost her forever and he does not think he will be able to live without her. But when he sings his grief, he touches her again.”
Whenever the aria—
Che farò senza Euridice?
—was on the record-player, Mishka noted that the going-away look settled on his mother and grandparents and that they wept silently, and so for him the song evoked simultaneously their sorrow and the musky happiness of his closeness to those he loved.
This was before Mishka himself knew loss.
By day, Uncle Otto kept to his room and Grandma Malika made bread and made everyone’s clothing and made European seedlings grow incongruously in the rainforest shadow, and Grandpa Mordecai made cabinets and tables and chairs from mahogany and silky oak, red cedar and teak. Once a month, he loaded his goods onto a large flat-bottomed barge and took them downstream to the Daintree ferry crossing. There he met a man who had come up from Cairns with a truck. The man bought the cabinets and tables and chairs and took them back down to Cairns and then shipped them to Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne.
Grandpa Mordecai also spent many hours of each day with his violin. “I cannot hold a candle to Otto,” he told Mishka, “but he has always liked to hear me play. When I was six and he
was fourteen, he taught me the Bach Double so that we could play it together, the Brothers Double Bach we called it.”
When Mishka was five, and the special half-size violin had arrived from Sydney, Grandpa Mordecai began to teach Mishka the Kreisler exercises and the Mendelssohn and the Bach Double which they finally performed together in a gala concert for Mishka’s mother and for Grandma Malika and Uncle Otto when Mishka was seven.
Grandpa Mordecai told Mishka that Uncle Otto was moved to tears.
By day, Mishka’s mother worked on the veranda at her drawing board. She clipped a large sheet of art paper to her easel, and on a small table at her side she placed an arrangement of the leaves and flowers and fruit of some exotic plant that she and Mishka had gathered in the forest.
Mishka watched as his mother drew the leaves and tasseled flowers and blue berries of the quandong tree. First she drew in pencil, and then she used watercolors. Her work was slow and meticulous because she had a contract with a Sydney publisher for
An Illustrated Botanical Encyclopedia of the Rainforest
. Mishka waited for her paintbrush to turn the fallen leaves of the quandong bright red and the quandong berries their vivid cobalt blue. The flowers were golden tassels on a slim green stem. At the bottom of the sheet, with a very fine brush and black paint, she wrote in cursive script:
Elaeocarpus angustifolius (Blue Quandong).
“You should put lorikeets and parakeets in there, Mummy,” he said.
“This is a plant book, Mishka darling, not a bird book. This will become the Blue Quandong page.”
“I know,” he said, “but there are
always
birds in the quandong trees.”
“This is the way the publisher wants it. Birds don’t belong on the page.”
This made no sense to Mishka. It seemed to him that not only the birds but his grandparents and his mother and himself and Uncle Otto’s music and Gluck’s aria and their house also belonged on the page. He understood the business of dissecting and naming. He could draw and identify stamens and axils and pistils and sepals and bracts, he could label them, he could list them in categories, but bees belonged with sepals, and birds with seeds, and everything seemed to him to flow into everything else and to be on the same page and to be part of the river of feeling without a name that welled up inside him and pushed against his skin until he would believe that the pressure of so much beauty would lift him off his feet and loft him into the rainforest canopy, and at night, when the moon hung low between the veranda posts, he really believed he could fly and he could join the lorikeets in the quandong trees. It was entirely logical to him that the brilliant birds with trumpet voices would like noisy colors. They would cry and chatter and he would respond on his violin and they understood one another because they could all speak without words, and Beethoven’s
D Major
rose up from the quandongs in a dense flutter of strings.
“When I grow up,” he told his mother, “I am going to write a concerto for quandongs and parrots.”
When Mishka was six years old, he began to go to the closest public school, which was in Mossman, forty-five minutes to the south on an unpaved road. His grandfather drove him down when the morning lay like gold leaf on ocean and on cane fields and on the steep forested slopes. Last night’s rain was always steaming up from the road so that Mishka saw
hundreds of wraith-cobras performing for the snake-charmer sun. After school, and after the after-school sports, his grandfather drove him home again under black skies that were low and heavy with the nightly deluge that politely waited for six o’clock. His grandfather’s car was a dowager Buick, old but well preserved and full of dignity, so that among the two or three other cars on the deck of the Daintree ferry, the Buick presided like a queen.
In those days, before the fruit-cropping time, before sugar gave way to avocados and passionfruit and mangoes, the cane stood to attention in green and purple-plumed ranks each morning and saluted as Mishka arrived at school. The cane marched to the very boundaries of the buildings and yard, an invading force, every day gaining ground, every night sending out advance reconnaissance troops, so relentless that children playing cricket or soccer would stumble over spiky green shoots the next morning. This was the growing time. Once the cutting and crushing began, once the cane trains were trundling along the narrow steel tracks to the mill, the air was so heavy with a mist of molasses that the drowsy children would brush soot from their arms and lick sugared air from their lips.
The first days at school were a wonder and a terror for Mishka, since he had never known—had never before talked to or played with—other children. He had seen them occasionally, on those rare journeys to Mossman or Cairns to pick up mailorder parcels or to buy something that could not be grown or raised or built at Chateau Daintree. Once in Cairns another child had approached him and asked, “Where did you get those funny shoes?” and Mishka had lowered his eyes, too shy to speak.
Alone at the gates of Mossman State School, as the Buick retreated, Mishka thought of the way crows would swoop down
on an injured scrub turkey and peck it to death. There seemed to be hundreds of children who flew at him.
“Who are you?” they asked him.
He said in a small voice: “Mishka Bartok.”
“What’s your favorite TV show?” they demanded, but Mishka did not know how to answer this question.
“What’s your favorite hit song?”
Hit song?
Mishka puckered his forehead, mystified. Hitting music? What would that be?
“Your favorite song,” someone said, and that one was easy.
“
Che farò senza Euridice
,” he said.
The children blinked and stared.
“Or maybe the second movement of Mendelssohn’s
Violin Concerto in E Minor
, except that isn’t a song with words.”