“That may be why I’ve never brought this up. For I’m exactly the same. Music was everything, absolutely everything I lived for. It’s purely accidental, a cruel joke really, that I ended up in the army. My grandfather gave me his own violin on my eighth birthday; I played it eleven years. But something in my wrist protested the violin. The angulation, is that a word, Anton? The angulation was all wrong. So very severe, violins. But when I picked up the cello I knew I was home.”
He goes on. It truly is Lupescu; Anton knows his hesitations, misspellings, the twitch that makes half his r’s into d’s. He wants to scream for a witness, but who would come? Tatiana, the lame, the slow-witted? Was she even out of bed?
“My masters presented me to their masters; I was universally adored. I rode to Venice on the Kaiser’s train, and played when he entertained the American ambassador. I was so happy, Anton! They paid me to do precisely what I loved! But one night changed it all.”
Stop, thinks Anton. Please stop, Colonel. But he knows Lupescu won’t.
“When are your trials?”
“The ninth.”
“Day of judgment! Ha! You must be ready for anything. My own—God knows I’d rather forget it—came right there, in your palace. When the Magar was new to power, his cruelty a rumor. We didn’t know what cruelty meant, we who guarded Constanta against ships that never attacked, watching Bucharest’s boys tramp off to the slaughter. But we gained an education that night.
“All of us knew that the Magar was the one voice of power east of the mountains, that he could order the symphony dissolved, could even have us shot if he wished, but what does one do about that as a cello player? He was a dandy, too, our little tyrant, a great lover of the arts. Fresh from Paris, from those five exiled years, whoring and sobbing into crystal champagne, waiting for his star to rise. As it did.
“We learned later that he had proposed to a young violinist, a student in the Sorbonne, and that she had not even rejected him, but simply told her butler not to accept his letters, not to let him in as far as the cloakroom. A great shame, a fiasco. Think of his rage—no troops at his service to storm that door. No view from his palace windows, no dance in the Summer Ballroom to tempt her. And every day the contempt of Parisians, certain the Danube delta was a Godforsaken land of grog halls and fever. As it is.
“He ordered our performance in the Round Hall, and it had never been more beautifully decorated, Anton, with gardenias and roses from God knows where laced round the pillars, and yellow candles in the mezzanine. Three hundred chairs for the listeners. My parents sat in the second row, behind the dignitaries. Mother wore a lily in her hair—”
Anton blinks. His mother?
“Yes, she was already ill; in fact she only lived a few more weeks. But we could not dissuade her. She sat with her piccolo in her lap, beaming: she couldn’t play it any more, but believed the old thing’s presence would bring me luck. The next day she threw it from her window into the canal.
“All were seated and smiling; we waited only on the Magar. But we waited long. A whisper raced the hall that he was taking tea, alone, in the Paris room. I’ve never known for sure.
“But finally he came: in dress uniform. With no one on his arm. He bowed smartly to the audience, then turned and looked at us so long and coldly that we began to fidget in sheer nervousness. Our conductor held his little ivory baton as though it burned him. Finally, instead of taking his seat, our host walked to the east entrance, and leaned with crossed arms against those big, barnlike doors, shut as always against the noise of the yard. At last he gave our horror-stricken maestro a nod.
“We played two movements of Beethoven’s Pastoral. Bold and bright and flattering. And we were perfect. The crowd whooped, almost too loudly. The Magar clapped as well, but his face was a chilly mask. We followed with Debussy’s Nocturnes, and for that we earned a meager smile. Then the soloist walked forward, slowly, into the hush before Ravel.
“She was lovely, all of sixteen, vague Gypsy lines to her eyebrows. A prodigy. Our conductor pumped her arm like a hysteric; the Magar’s handshake was slow. Detaining her, he studied us once more, and this third look was positively mortal. He worshipped Ravel. We knew it, had known it for months, and right down to that pimpled pipsqueak with the silver triangle, we trembled at the thought of a bad performance. A clarinetist massaged his wrist, pouting voicelessly; the second violinist traced a cross—”
Now Anton interrupts, convulsive. “Colonel Lupescu! I don’t want to know what happened. It has nothing to do with me!”