The children looked at one another and then at Mishka. “What?” they said.
“And my next favorite,” Mishka said, “is the 1921 Bartók concerto.”
There was a shuffling of feet in the shadows of the high wall of cane.
“Are you loco, or something?” a tall boy asked. “Wha’d’ya say your name was?”
“Mishka.”
“Mishka the fishka,” the tall boy said, and the others all laughed.
Mishka also laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” the tall boy asked.
Mishka said nothing.
“You have to do what I tell you,” the tall boy said. “You have to answer questions if I ask them. I’m Tony and my father is the police chief for Douglas Shire. Why did that old bloke in the funny car bring you here?”
“He is my grandfather,” Mishka said.
“I know who you are,” Tony said in a burst of enlightenment. “You’re the reffo boy. How come you live up the Daintree? And what does your father do and how come he shot through?”
Mishka did not know how to answer any of those questions, so he said instead, “My grandfather is a cabinet-maker and he also plays the violin. My Uncle Otto is a famous concert violinist. My mother is a botanist.”
“Fuck a duck,” Tony said.
Thus began Mishka’s years in a Queensland state school. This was not an auspicious beginning.
I do not belong on this page, he concluded. He wanted his mother to paint him somewhere else.
At home, in the cocoon behind the waterfall, after Uncle Otto had played the final movement of Bartók’s second concerto and Mishka was in bed and his mother was climbing the stairs to kiss him goodnight, Mishka rehearsed ways to ask the following questions: What does my father do? Is my father a cabinet-maker like Grandpa? Is my father a violinist like Uncle Otto? Did my father run away and leave us? Where is my father?
But when his mother leaned over him and he felt her soft warm lips against his cheek, he could not ask any of his questions. He could feel them low in his throat, wet and sticky, but they were trapped there. They did not want to come out.
My father.
The words were so strange and new that he began to shiver. He pulled up the sheet. Above him, the ceiling fan turned only sluggishly, moving wet air, redistributing the heat, but he felt cold. He could hear the high hum of the generator singing
Where has your father gone?
He could hear the drumbeat of the
rain on the iron roof:
fa-ther fa-ther fa-ther.
It was as though some great bird he had never seen before, an eagle with a wingspan that stretched from the Daintree to Mossman, weirdly feathered like a parrot in emerald greens and blue-blacks and vivid orange, with a sharp curved beak, had swooped down and was pecking at his heart.
When Grandpa Mordecai put Gluck on the record player, Mishka suddenly knew what the aria meant:
What shall I do without my father?
It seemed to Mishka that the great bruise inside him, the hole where his father should have been, crept out into the music like a wounded creature from its cave and cried piteously:
Look at me. How shall I live without my father?
Mishka could no longer hear Gluck without weeping.
He tried to imagine what his father might look like and he imagined him in tea-soaked browns like Uncle Otto in the photographs. He imagined his father in a high white starched collar and vest, with striped trousers that were held close to his ankles inside something that looked like socks that buttoned up the side. He imagined playing the Bach Double with his grandfather while his father sat in the shadows of the veranda and he imagined his father clapping and being as impressed as Uncle Otto had been.
Mishka shivered himself to sleep and when sleep came it came with the rise of the river. Dark water was lapping at his window then flowing in a tidal wave across the sill. His father and Uncle Otto, looking like twins, slipped into the room like fish. They splashed in water and shook themselves. They gave off silver. They picked up Mishka’s violin and his grandfather’s. They played the Bach Double.
During his early years at Mossman State School, Mishka thought of his father the way he thought of Uncle Otto, except
that his father was in a different closed room in a different house.
He told Tony Cavalari at school that his father was a violinist who was traveling all over Europe giving concerts.
“Fuck a duck,” Tony said.
On a late Friday afternoon years later, when Mishka was in Grade 4, and parrots were falling out of trees, and gunshots were peppering the air, a rubber police dinghy with a loud outboard motor moored itself amongst the mangroves in the lee of the Bartok house. Two policemen and a boy got out.
“Hey, Mishka!” the boy called out.
“G’day, Tony,” Mishka said.
He and his mother and his grandparents were leaning over the veranda railing.
“G’day,” one of the policemen called out. “Sergeant Cavalari, chief of police for Douglas Shire. We got word of marijuana crops up here, north side of the Daintree. Know anything about that?”
“No, sergeant,” Mishka’s grandfather said.
“Mind if I poke around your garden a bit?” He turned to his son. “Tony, why don’t you go on up into the house and play with your little school mate for a bit.”
“Wow,” Tony said, when he joined Mishka on the veranda. “Reffo Castle is really weird, it’s really super. Can I go up in those pointy things?” He gestured at the turret and the gables.
“Okay,” Mishka said, though it was alarming to have Tony in the wrong place. He took Tony to his own bedroom with its gabled window-nook and window-seat.
“Fuck a duck,” Tony said, standing on the banquette and looking out on the rainforest canopy and down at the brown snake of the river. “You can almost see down to Mossman,” he
said. “Can we go in that round pointy thing?” The turret was what he meant, though he found the inside of the little tower a disappointment, an anticlimax. He had imagined something exotic, a torture chamber with chains, a closet for witches, but all he saw on the inside was a small round sitting room equipped with books on shelves and two armchairs. “I never seen round bookshelves before,” he said, salvaging an element of strange.
“Hey, what’s this?” He opened a closet door into the eaves and yelped at three glowing pairs of eyes.
“Possums,” Mishka explained. “They live there.”
“Fuck a duck!” Tony ran from room to room, excited, whooping like a TV cowboy. He reached for the handle on the door of Uncle Otto’s room.
“No!” Mishka shouted, appalled. “You mustn’t open that door.”
But it was too late.
“Why not?” Tony asked, his hand still on the knob of the open door. He was staring into the room.
Mishka was almost sobbing. “You’re not allowed, no one’s allowed except my mother.”
“Fuck a duck. Why not?”
“It’s Uncle Otto’s room. You’ll upset him. You’ve got to close the door.”
“There’s no one in here,” Tony said. “There’s
nothing
in here.”
Mishka could feel a pain in his chest. His heart was beating so fast that he thought it might burst. He joined Tony at Uncle Otto’s door. The wood floor was completely bare but the walls were covered with framed photographs.
“We can’t go in,” Mishka said with sudden and absolute authority. “Come on.” He pulled Tony with him and shut the door.
From below, Sergeant Cavalari called out: “Tony! Come on down, mate. We’re going,” and when Tony pelted downstairs, followed slowly by Mishka, Grandpa Mordecai was saying to the policemen: “There are some hippies living further up the river. We see them going past in their boat.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Sergeant Cavalari said. “Quite a place you got here. Come on, Tony.”
Later, when darkness fell, the Shabbas candles were lit on the veranda. The Shabbas meal ended and Mishka’s grandfather said: “Devorah, will you tell Otto that we are ready?”
Mishka’s mother climbed the stairs and Mishka heard her knock on the door of the empty room. She came down again, her bare feet on the treads like drumsticks muffled with velvet. “He will play the Mendelssohn,” she said. “The second movement.” The rainy season was over, the air hushed except for the skittering of small creatures and the night birds’ cries. For the first time in his life, Mishka did not close his eyes while Uncle Otto played. He watched his grandparents as they listened, the way they smiled, the way their bodies moved with the phrasing. He watched his mother and he saw how her body was slack with something for which he had no word, something that frightened him. Years later, in the Music Lab off Harvard Square, when he replayed this night for himself, he saw that the name for what his mother felt was resignation, that she was suspended in some high narrow place of great stillness, with sorrow on one side and the surrendering of hope on the other. It was as though the smallest movement would take her over the lip of the abyss. Even so, it seemed to Mishka that she could hear Uncle Otto: the way her head was tilted up toward the music, the way her right hand sometimes moved as though she were conducting. Mishka himself listened to the loudest silence he had ever heard.
There was the sudden sound of the police boat passing back downriver, though Mishka could see from the three other faces that the motor did not overwhelm the sound of the violin. He had a sensation of falling the way a shot parrot falls, falling into the river and on down through the river bed and down and down below it to where a vast underground cavern opened up and he felt that his falling would go on and on without end.
“Y
OUR GRANDFATHER WASN’T
always like that,” Mishka’s mother said. “He remembered Otto’s death only too vividly when I was young, but he couldn’t talk about it. He never spoke about the camp. It seemed to get more and more painful over time, and then one day he simply un-made the past.” She and Mishka were walking along the esplanade in Cairns. The night was warm but blustery. “Your Beethoven brought tears to your grandfather’s eyes tonight,” his mother said. She reached up and brushed Mishka’s cheek. “You are like Otto restored to him. We are so proud of you.”
It was a warm night in December, end of the school year, the night of Mishka’s high school graduation. He had been showered with prizes, he had won a scholarship, he would be heading south to the university in Brisbane.
A sharp breeze was barreling along the seawall and the palms were groaning and tossing their multiple arms like windmills in rage. Lower branches, the ones hanging vertically against the trunks, discards already, simply waiting for their shedding number to be called, were falling on all sides with soft booms that sent seismic vibrations along the esplanade. Mishka felt the thump and tremble against the soles of his feet, and the buffetings seemed to him heralds of change as well as warnings.
“Do you mind waiting here for a minute, Mum?” They had reached a bench that looked out to sea. It was late, and there were no other strollers in sight, but the esplanade was well lit. “I’ll just nip into the hostel and leave my violin in my room. Then we can walk.”
His mother smiled. “Take your time,” she said. Already he could see the going-away look settling on her like the salt mist that came off the bay. She is preparing herself, he decided, and the thought was like a heavy suitcase that would have to go with him. When he had kissed his grandparents goodnight at the hotel further down the esplanade, his grandfather had held him and said: “I will not see you again, Mishka, not after Hanukkah, I mean, but I give you to the world. Give the world music.”
And Mishka had felt almost ill with love and irritation in equal parts. “Grandpa,” he said, “of course you will see me again,” though even as he said it there lay between them the unspoken fact that his weekend trips back to the Daintree had grown further and further apart.
“Mishka,” his grandmother said, “a little gift, so you will not forget us,” and she pushed something tissue-wrapped into his pocket.
“Grandma,” he said, “how could I possibly forget you?”
He left his mother on the bench by the seawall and ran two blocks down a side street to the hostel where he had been boarding for his four high-school years. He put his violin case on the bed and took stock of the room that had been his chrysalis, his private cocoon. Very soon, in a matter of days, he would spread his wings and never see it again. He had never let anyone visit. The room was small—a bed, a desk, a chair, a music stand, books: that was all—but he could see palms and passionfruit vines from his window, and from the small balcony he could see the bay.
He had taken music lessons privately as well as at Cairns High, and he had spent all his spare time in the practice rooms at the school. He was solitary. He did not know what to say to fellow students. He did not know how to be with them. He had quietly accustomed himself to the knowledge that the three people he loved were peculiar and perhaps quite mad in a harmless kind of way, and he felt an immense protectiveness and tenderness for them. He thought that very likely he too was crazy and therefore it was important to conceal his condition. For one thing, there was the matter of shame. For another, it was possible that madness was infectious and therefore he had a moral obligation to keep his distance from other people. It was important to be crazy as discreetly and privately as possible, and this seemed to him not so difficult since the strange and beautiful house of his childhood existed outside of ordinary time and ordinary space. He himself continued to live in this limbo of not-here and not-now, and for this reason he knew it might never be possible for him to be certain of what was real and what was not.
He took off his evening jacket, since the night was very warm, and felt the slight bulk of his grandmother’s tissue-wrapped gift in one pocket. He took it out and unwrapped it. It was a diptych, a small hinged frame in a hand-crocheted cover. When he opened it, he saw two photographs. On the left, sepia-toned, was Uncle Otto, aged fourteen, and Grandpa Mordecai, aged six. On the right, in black and white, was a family portrait dated 1956: his grandparents, looking youthful, seated in wicker chairs with banana palms behind them. On the grass at their feet was his mother, aged six. They must have had photographic copies made in Cairns, he thought, since he knew the originals were among the most precious things they owned. He knew that the frame itself, of
oiled silky oak, would have been made by his grandfather. He stroked its intricate crocheted cover, his grandmother’s handiwork, with one finger. The cream silk was as soft as the tassels on the quandong flowers. Mishka pressed the totemic object to his heart and gave himself to the warm rising waters of the river of emotion within him. It had not taken him in flood this way since he moved to Cairns, putting all of one hundred kilometers between his hostel room and Chateau Daintree. He did not know how long he stood there, swept by love and grief and obscure unidentified pain, before he placed the frame like a half-opened book on his desk.
When he returned to the sea front, his mother was not on the bench, though her shoes were. He scanned the esplanade, but could not see her. The tide was going out and the sand flats were littered with shells and kelp and jellyfish and small crabs that skittered back and forth. Then he saw his mother, far out with the receding tide, her skirt lifted up to make a pannier, barefoot and ankle-deep in wet sand, no doubt gathering seaweed specimens. He cupped his hands, megaphone-style, and called to her and she straightened up, startled, and stood there like a seabird, delicate and watchful. Then she seemed to remember where she was and who was calling her and she made her way back toward the wall.
The concrete levee below the steel railing was four feet high, and Devorah held the pannier of her dress up to the level of the esplanade. Mishka took the antlered and parsley-like sea plants, one by one, and laid them down on the grass beside the bench. “For my book on water plants,” she explained. “I started with rainforest pools, but I’m going to do saltwater plants too.”
“How will we carry these?” Mishka asked. “I’d better take them to my room until we’re ready to go back to your hotel.”
He extended his hand and pulled his mother up the concrete wall until she had a foothold on the esplanade and then she clambered between the steel rails. “I’ll use my scarf,” she said, unknotting the silk square from her neck and gently placing the sea plants in it and tying the corners.
Mishka stood at the railing to watch the cruise catamarans coming in from the outer reef on a path of moonlight. “So when exactly did Grandpa bring Uncle Otto back to life?” he asked.
“Uncle Otto?” his mother repeated vaguely. “You know, I still don’t have any red seaweed. It’s much harder to find.”
Mishka said patiently: “You said Grandpa decided to unmake the past. When did he do it?”
“Oh.” His mother brushed at her eyes as though insects were bothering her. “It happened while I was away in Sydney,” she said. “I was gone for nearly ten years and when I came back, things were different.”
“Was it because you went away?”
His mother suddenly picked up her silk bundle by its knot and began to walk along the esplanade as though she were late for an appointment. Mishka had to run to catch up. They walked for fifteen minutes before she spoke. “They never tried to stop me. I know they were proud of my fellowship. My father kept saying: ‘Otto went away too, to the academy in Budapest. It’s a necessary thing.’ But they believed they would never see me again.”
“That’s what Grandpa said to me tonight.
I’ll never see you again, Mishka
. I told him that was ridiculous.”
“Of course you will come home with us tomorrow,” his mother said.
“Or in a day or so.”
“And you’ll stay until Hanukkah.”
“Of course. So why did Grandpa—?”
“In case you don’t.” They walked for another five minutes without speaking.
“It was the look on their faces,” his mother said, “when the train pulled out of the station. I should never have gone by train. Trains are difficult for them. I shouldn’t have let them come to Cairns to see me off.”
“We should turn back,” Mishka said.
“For ten years it haunted me, and for ten years it kept me away. I was afraid if I came back, I’d never get out again.” She turned to him and made a gesture with her hand that might have meant resignation. “I was right about that, wasn’t I? I tried to get them to visit me in Brisbane, and then in Sydney. I mailed them train tickets, but you know how it is. They don’t like to leave the house. It’s where they’ve escaped to.”
“We should turn back. It’s not so well lit here.”
“Do you know that the Queensland government has tried to farm quandongs? Tried to grow them commercially? But it hasn’t worked. They won’t grow outside the Daintree. The rainforest ecology is so intricate that its plants can’t survive outside it. They don’t transplant. We’re the same, Mishka. Our family.”
Mishka shivered. An icicle of fear, sharp as a dagger, nicked his heart. “People are not plants,” he said, annoyed. “How come we have photographs of Uncle Otto? I thought they lost everything.”
“They did. In the fifties and sixties, your grandfather wrote to the music academies in Budapest. He tapped into a network. People in Europe sent him the photographs. What he wanted more than anything was to get hold of Uncle Otto’s recordings, and he’s managed to get a few, as you know, although they’re not in good condition. His real dream was to find Uncle Otto’s
violin, because he’s certain it must still exist. No one, not even a Nazi officer, would destroy a Guarnerius. But he’s never found any trace.”
“Do you know what happened to Uncle Otto?”
“More or less. I put it together from bits and pieces. My mother told me some of it. She told me Otto kept his little brother alive. The camp commandant was a music lover and he used to bring Otto in to play at dinner parties for his guests. Of course, Otto’s Guarnerius had been taken when they were first rounded up, but somehow the commandant tracked it down and Otto sobbed when it was put in his hands. That’s what he told his brother, and that’s what my father told my mother. Your grandparents met after the war, on the ship to Australia. They both lost everyone else. They have me and they have you. It’s a heavy load for us.”
“It’s heavy,” Mishka agreed.
Otto, his mother said, was given extra food for performing, and he stole leftovers when he could. He was shot for stealing. No one knew what had happened to the violin.
“Once I started school,” Mishka said, “and I heard about Santa Claus, I thought of Uncle Otto like that. He was Santa Claus. Kids know he’s not real, but they believe in him just the same.”
And that is how I think of my father, he did not tell her.
“Yes, it’s like that,” his mother said. “For a while, I believed my parents were invisible to everybody but me. Since I was about ten, I’ve thought of them as gifted children. I had to protect them.”
Mishka almost said: That is how I think about you.
“When you went away,” he said, “when you were in Brisbane and Sydney…”
“I was mostly lonely, but I was passionate about botany and
that saved me. I buried myself in my work, and as long as I was working, I was okay.”
“You’ve never told me anything,” Mishka said.
“You’ve never asked.”
“Do all families avoid talking about the things they think about most?”
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “I don’t know anything about other families.”
“I don’t either,” Mishka said. “It doesn’t matter as long as I’m practicing or listening to music or composing.”
“I know,” she sighed. “I would have liked to make it different for you if I knew how. Maybe it’s history, or maybe it’s because we both grew up in that house, or maybe it’s just in our genes.”
“Or maybe all three,” Mishka said. “How old were you when you left?”
“Eighteen. End of high school. Same as you. I had a Commonwealth Scholarship. I went to Brisbane first, to Queensland Uni, then on to Sydney for my master’s.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?”
“I did. I stayed away for ten years. I worked for a publisher, the same one I work for now.”
“But then you came back.”
“Yes. And when I did, Uncle Otto was playing after dinner every night.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“Because I was pregnant with you and I was desperately lonely.”
So now he would ask.
Who was my father? he would say. Where was he? Where
is
he? Does he know I exist? As soon as his heart stopped jumping like a fish on a hook, he would ask. There was a sharp
pain in his chest and very suddenly he swung himself over the steel railing and jumped down onto the sand flats and began running through the brackish salt water of the outgoing tide. He called back in a strangled voice: “I can see some red seaweed. I’ll get it for you.” He ran, chasing the tide, his feet pressing deeper and deeper into the wet sand, great fans of water spreading like wings from his ankles. The tide-line was far out now, and he ran as though he could retrieve something essential to his survival if he could just catch up with the sea and stop its retreat. He ran until he was at last knee deep in ocean and could feel the pull of the undertow. He was out of breath and he had a stitch in his side. He bent over and splashed salt water on his face. He turned back and could barely see the white smudge of the concrete sea wall, though a path of moonlight shone on the wet sand like a bright white line joining him to the figure he could no longer make out on the shore.
He turned back to the Pacific. He thought he would probably have to walk another kilometer before the water would be deep enough for swimming. If the tide were not so far out, he thought he would simply start swimming and keep swimming until the void swallowed him. Instead he turned and followed the path of light to the esplanade.