The Musician's Daughter (9 page)

When we emerged, I saw with dismay that the twilight had already started to draw in. How would I get back to Vienna now? Mother would be worried. And Toby? Had he found his way home all right? Would he be punished for my actions?

We sat with the others on mats of carpet woven with fanciful pictures of animals and flowers, positioned around a large fire with a cauldron hung over it on a makeshift frame. No sooner had I settled in my place than the girl, the one who seemed to be my age and who I had seen peering in when the flap of the hut opened, came and sat down next to me.

“I am Mirela,” she said. “You are Theresa. I know. I speak German. I can tell you what they say.” She swept her arm to indicate the entire camp. At that moment, everyone chattered noisily in that odd language I had heard before. Mirela spoke with a strong accent, but I could understand her. And the accent had a kind of music in it.

“Thank you,” I said, and asked about the woman whose hut I had been in.

“That’s Maya, and Danior is her cousin.”

A toothless woman with skin so wrinkled and tanned it looked like tough leather ladled out portions of stew into wooden bowls and broke hunks of brown bread off the loaves on a table at her side. A very small girl child brought me the first bowl. I thanked her. There were no spoons, I observed. Once all had been served, they stared at me.

Mirela whispered in my ear. “They will not eat until you do. It’s polite.” I turned to her, and she made a gesture as of lifting a bowl to her lips.

I did as she indicated and drank the broth. It seemed to be what was required, because immediately after I finished, everyone else did the same and the assembled crowd resumed chattering in their language with a few words of German sprinkled in.

Mirela proved a useful source of information about everyone in the camp. She pointed out the elders, the ones who resolved all disputes and dispensed justice, and then she arranged the assorted children into family groupings. These numbered around five.

“Where are your mother and father?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, shrugging, “they have died, so long ago I hardly remember them. Maya took care of me, with Danior.”

I thought about asking her how it was not to have a father, wondering if she could understand what I felt. She seemed just like any other girl to me, aside from her clothes. “See that boy there? That’s Omar. He teases me.” She put on a pout, but I could tell the teasing pleased her. Omar smiled in our direction.

“How shall I get back to Vienna?” I asked, interrupting her constant prattle. Everyone around us appeared to have settled in for a long, social evening.

“Back? Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure you must not worry.” When I thought back later, I could have sworn her eyes flicked to the area around my neck. But I was so distracted at the idea of not being able to get home that I soon forgot the impression.

As it grew darker, my heart sank. The liveliness of the conversation and the music of laughter swelled into the night. Mirela offered me a cup of wine and I willingly accepted, hoping to numb my growing sense of panic. The wine was stronger than I thought it would be. It warmed my throat, and soon I fell into a drowsy state. The fire crackled and danced, and Mirela’s voice lulled me. I was at the center of several rows of people who had gradually filled in the space behind me. When the meal ended, the talking died down, and here and there men and women stood. Some wandered off into the bushes, I thought probably to relieve themselves. I felt the need, too, but I didn’t want to venture alone away from the group.

When those who had left returned, some carried instruments—tambourines and drums, a recorder of sorts, and a couple of mandolins. They did not start to play right away, only strumming the occasional soft chord or riffling a tune full of strange intervals. They were waiting for something it seemed.

“This is my favorite part of the night,” Mirela whispered. “I forget all my troubles.”

I wondered what she was referring to, but there was no time to ask. Everyone quieted and turned toward the woods, where a torch had been planted in the ground. I watched as Danior emerged from the shelter of the trees with a violin at his shoulder. In the dusk he looked like a ghost, the torchlight flickering across his face, as he lifted his bow high and brought it down across the strings. The sound silenced everyone and locked them in what ever position they happened to be, sitting, standing, crouching, bent over to pat an infant on the head. Even Mirela was still. And me? I entered heaven—or hell—as I always did at the sound of a beautifully played violin. I thought then that it was my too-lively imagination, but I felt as if I had heard those Gypsy melodies before. Not exactly those, perhaps, but others like them, as if it were me and not my father who had made a habit of sneaking away to hear the Gypsies in the dead of night. I could not place the scraps of tunes, so after a bit I stopped trying. I stopped thinking altogether and surrendered myself to the power of the music. It was warm there, by the fire. Mirela slipped her arm around my waist and rested her head against mine. The companionship comforted me. I could have remained where I was until the end of time. I did not care if I ever returned to Vienna.

CHAPTER 11

I
f I gained no specific information about my father’s death during the hours I spent at the Roma camp, I grew to understand why he came there. Music was part of everything and everyone.

After Danior’s first, long solo finished, he stepped into the group and the other musicians clustered around him. They played music for dancing, and this was the signal for everyone except the very old to rise to their feet and begin to move. Mirela took my hand and drew me into a circle of children who clapped and stepped. The men formed their own figure, snaking around in a line through the camp, lifting their feet and slapping them with their hands, stopping now and again for one of them to perform an acrobatic leap or turn. These became more and more difficult as time went on, and the children and women gradually stilled to watch their antics. One fellow rested one hand on the ground, tipped himself up so that all his weight was on it, then danced his legs in the air for what seemed like a very long time, until sweat poured off his face and onto the ground. Mirela and I stopped dancing and stood to the side with some other women to whoop and cheer him on, until with a catlike spring, he pushed upward and landed on his feet, a smile stretched across his face.

I entered into the spirit of the music and dancing as much as anyone. When the men’s dance finished, I thought the entertainment was over, and was about to ask Mirela again how I was to return to Vienna so that my mother would not be worried, when the plaintive sound of Danior’s violin once again silenced the crowd. This time, though, he was not the focus of the performance. Several of the men lit torches in the fire and stood in two lines leading from the tent I had been taken to when I first arrived, forming a sort of grand entranceway.

“It’s Maya! She will dance. It must be in your honor, Theresa,” Mirela said, and she took me to a spot near the center of the crowd to sit. After Danior’s sinewy, twisting introduction ended on a long trill, Maya, the woman who had given me tea in her humble hut, stepped out of it, dressed not in the plain clothes she had worn earlier, but in a skirt edged in bright ruffles, with filmy scarves hanging from her head and draped in her fingers. I could not take my eyes away from her hands and arms. She moved them as though there were no bones in them, in perfect time to the music Danior played.

How different was this dancing, with its movements that seemed to rise from the soul of the music itself, from the formal minuets and contredanses at court balls. I remembered watching from a balcony once, admiring the symmetry of the figures below me, the controlled movements that let a toe point here, a head angle there, the arms held just so for the entire dance. The ladies’ stiff gowns hardly moved, only the sparkle of their diamond earbobs catching the light as they turned to whisper something to their partners when they stepped through a close figure. How shocked those dancers would be to see the Gypsies!

As the music gradually became faster, Maya changed her movements to match. At one point, every part of her body seemed to be in motion, from the ends of her long, dark hair to the tips of her toes. She slowed, and a child took two wooden bowls and upended them on the ground. A man brought a long, curved sword. In time to the music, Maya stepped up on the bowls and placed the flat of the sword on her head. As she continued to dance on the tiny platform of the bowls, she let go of the sword and balanced it on her head. I held my breath. I had never seen anything so thrilling in all my life.

In those hours that I stayed and listened and watched, I believed I had found the soul of music. I understood, as my father must have, that it did not live only in the opulent courts of princes, nor could it be fixed to a page with ink and quill. It came from within, from the place where one’s spirit lived. Directly from God, perhaps. Or from something beyond God.

Maya’s dance ended, and the band was about to begin another lively tune, but one of the older men raised his hand high and a sudden hush descended on the company. Everyone stopped their noise and revelry and listened intently. Mirela grasped my wrist so hard I could feel her fingernails begin to dig into the soft flesh on the inside. I heard nothing except the rustling of the wind in the evergreen trees behind us. I opened my mouth to ask a question, but Maya put her finger to her lips and gave me a look that would frighten a Turk.

With hardly any warning, a group of about five men burst out of the forest and ran, crouched low to the ground. In hoarse whispers they said something in their language that started everyone scrambling to pick up their belongings and douse the fire. I stood in the middle of a whirlwind, while around me huts were broken down, belongings packed onto wagons, and livestock herded onto carts or shooed off into the forest, no doubt to reclaim at a later time. Mirela wrapped her arms around me in a brief, fierce embrace, then skittered off to join the frantic activity. Even the children behaved as if they had been rehearsed in a ballet, no one in the wrong place at the wrong time, until horses were harnessed to carts and everyone was ready to move on—except for me.

One of the men who had entered the camp, a lighter-skinned fellow with sandy hair, barked something toward Danior, who now sat on his wagon seat with the reins in his hands. Danior answered. I thought I heard the word “
Geiger,
” and assumed he was explaining that I had come in search of my father’s violin. I didn’t have much time to wonder what would happen next, because the fellow grabbed me by the waist and slung me over his shoulder like a sack of turnips. I opened my mouth to scream, but another man stuffed a rag into it to stop me up like a wine bottle. They tossed me with little ceremony onto the back of Danior’s cart. I landed amid some pots that jabbed into my side. I heard the crack of a whip, and the cart lurched off over the rough ground. My heart pounded. From being soothed by music and dancing, I had been thrown once again into a state of fear. What would they do with me?

Danior turned the horses sharply and I was thrown into the pile of his possessions. That was when I must have hit my head, because I do not remember what happened next. Everything was a blank until I awoke in a strange apartment, lying on a cot with a vinegar-soaked cloth on my forehead. “What?” I could not even form a question. My head hurt where it had been bruised.

“So, you are back with us.”

I tried to sit up. That was Zoltán’s voice. A woman’s hand pressed me back into the soft pillow. I turned my head to look at her. She was very beautiful, with soft, curling blond hair peeking out from under her cap, and blue eyes that seemed almost too large for their sockets brimming with concern. “There,” she said, “lie still.” She removed the cloth and soaked it in a basin, then pressed it on my forehead again.

“Where am I?” I managed to ask.

Zoltán said, “Danior broke away from the caravan and brought you here to my apartment. He took a terrible risk. Why the—”

“Hush, my dear, do not trouble her now. Can’t you see she is hurt? And I daresay there will be time enough for Fräulein Schurman to regret what happened.”

The lady’s voice was melodious and kind. She had called him “my dear.” Was Zoltán married? Why did I not know? And why did that knowledge suddenly make me feel like weeping, even more than understanding how close I had been to mortal danger? I heard footsteps—Zoltán’s, I imagined—stride across the room, and a door open and close. I did not want to look. I couldn’t face the idea of him. He must think me such a fool, not to have trusted what he’d said and to go storming into the Gypsy camp as though I could do no wrong. I reached instinctively for the medallion around my neck.

It was gone. I sat up quickly. My head swam. “Where is it?”

“I think it would be good if you could take some broth,” said the lady. “Where is what?”

“I was wearing a gold pendant. A medal, on a chain.”

“You did not have it on when you came here.”

It must have been stolen
, I thought. But when? While I was unconscious? Or before? Was that why the Gypsies had gagged me and tossed me into Danior’s cart? I could not understand why they would treat me so roughly after having been so kind. And why did everyone disperse like that? What threatened them, that they would have to pick up everything they owned and move so quickly in the middle of the night? My head was too full of questions, and I was still too groggy, to fix on any one thing to say to this gentle lady.

The lady’s back was turned. I saw her rinsing something in a basin. When she came back, she had a damp cloth with her, and she patted my face with it.
I must look a mess,
I thought.

“We sent word to your mother,” the lady said. “We told her you had been detained at the prince’s with your godfather, and that Zoltán brought you here to meet me.”

Of course, I realized how my mother must have worried, and that should have been my first concern. “Thank you. The medallion—I don’t think it was valuable, at least, that’s not why I wore it. My father had it, when he … died.” I felt ashamed again, and I noted that she had said
we
sent word. Why did that make me so sad? Why did it suddenly feel as though I might as well not bother to rise from that comfortable bed ever again? I had betrayed Zoltán’s trust. And he was
married.
I watched the lady I assumed to be Madame Varga move around the room, hoping to find some fault with her. I tried to discern some lack of grace in her movements. I looked for something less than perfect symmetry in her features. I searched to uncover some evidence that she was not worthy of my friend’s love. I wanted to ask her name. I couldn’t bear the idea of calling her Madame Varga aloud. I did not even think of Zoltán as Herr Varga. He was too young, really only a few years older than myself. I remembered him when he was still a youth and I a small child. I considered him more a friend of mine than my father’s, my only ally who did not consider me a pointless little girl and pay attention to me out of pity. “To whom do I owe …”

“I am Alida. My brother tells me you recently lost your father in a terrible manner.”

Her
brother
? Could I have misunderstood everything so completely? It was all too confusing. “You are Zoltán’s sister?”

“Yes. I was living in Buda until recently. I have come to be a maid of honor to Archduchess Maria Elizabeth.”

“But—” A maid of honor? They were not really maids, not like the scuttling creatures who empty chamber pots and sweep up ashes. They were more like companions. To attend the empress’s family members, one had to be high born at least, and most likely noble. And normally one lived in the palace; that I knew from stories I had overheard my mother telling Greta of intrigues and scandal. “Why aren’t you at the Hofburg?”

“My mistress is very lenient. She lets me come and keep my brother’s house for him once a week while he is in Vienna. Otherwise we would never see each other.” She paused to ladle some broth into a bowl and bring it to my side. “Zoltán tells me you are a musician, too. I might be able to arrange for you to attend a concert at the Hofburg sometime.”

I smiled. I was beginning to think Alida the kindest, most beautiful person I had ever met. How could I have harbored even the smallest amount of ill will for her? “I wouldn’t dare hope.” The idea of the concert almost made up for my disappointment about losing the medallion. I thought perhaps I deserved to lose it. It was stupid of me to wear something that might be valuable out on the streets, let alone to the Gypsy camp. And I had neglected to show it to Haydn or to Zoltán, who could have helped me figure out what it was and where it had come from. Now it was too late.