Chapter 27

Finale.


Dearest Max,

I don’t blame you if you are cross with me but I hope you will take the time to read this letter as I risked my life getting it out of the country. I offer that as an amusing incentive. If it does not suffice, I have taken the liberty of ruling the backs of these pages for you to compose on, also not an easy task if you consider my means, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I hope my letter and or scrap paper finds you well.

First off, I suppose I owe you and apology regarding my abrupt escape from New York and what must have seemed like an impulsive move, a hasty sloughing off of my western calluses in favor of eastern bunions. But the longer I stayed the more I felt pushed towards some sort of invisible edge that my old bones had no interest in testing. The new west is for the young, people like you. It was too much for me. I can admit that now from the oppressive comfort of new China. That, and I missed the mist.

If you were to see me in my current surroundings, now, as I write this letter, you, my dear XinSi, would recoil in horror. Either that or you would laugh. I can picture it, your reaction to the dirt floor, the stonewalls and the leaky bamboo roof. You would assume a very serious tone and gently question my sanity regarding the hay cot, the fishing equipment, and my peasant’s attire. You would assume I had gone mad, but before long I would convince you of exactly the opposite, for never in all my life have I been more content.

Here on the ocean one has no choice but to fully embrace contentedness. The Pacific is the great cleanser, and the sky is the infinite starry map that forces us to look at life from her harsh perspective. You recall my obsession with radiuses? Here my radius is the smallest it has ever been. For the first time I can see its edge from wherever I stand, how it juts out into the surf. If it were possible to walk its perimeter, twice a day it would drown me. I belong to no one but the tide.

But my Max, I can feel you turning the paper over so I will stop rambling and get on with it. I live on the outskirts of a small village of stone whose name does not matter. It was the last place she was seen which is why I came and when the lead went cold, when I had exhausted every last option, every last chance of finding her, I decided to stay on till I mustered the nerve to arrange for myself a tidy exit from the human race. Luckily, I remain the coward I have always been and while mustering in vain, stumbled, in the oddest way, on the most glaringly obvious reason to live.
In Stone Village I am inconspicuous. As a westerner I am the enemy, but for some reason they seem to tolerate me, at least for now. I suppose every village needs an idiot, every bridge, a troll. I am the shaman of the old religion passing out my elixirs and talismans to the surfs ignored by the converted blue bloods that secretly fear a peasant revolt. What are they, you ask? What are my talismans? What does the old man by the sea supply like a drug to the rebellious few? It’s so shocking I doubt you will believe me. It’s G clefs, rests, sharps and flats. Notes. Musik ist hier verboten.

It’s all forbidden. They have outlawed western music. Can you even begin to imagine it? Oh Max, how you must be cringing at all this. I know what you think of me. I’m not stupid. I must thrive on misery, mustn’t I, like a professional martyr? Joshua Streng in a world where music is punishable by death--masochism perfected, despair achieved.
“Congratulations,” you would say, “for stumbling on such an efficient method of self-punishment. Maybe now the ghosts will retreat, maybe now the universe will be appeased.”

And in a way, Max, you would be right. I took a cue from the monks and the Buddhists, even the Communists--clear your mind, negate all feeling, separate. Commit suicide of the ego. It was wonderful. Just me and the sea--till one day a visitor came knocking at my hovel.

I was shaken, physically by the sound. It had been some months since I had been in contact with other people--fish sure, but people--knowing they were near by and music-less was good enough for me. I didn’t need them. So when I saw the woman and the girl, I was dazed.

The woman was persistent, talkative and loud. I wondered if her shrillness was the side effect of a life without music and didn’t care. I’ve always been selfish in regard to the concerns of others (the sea told me that.) She knew me, she said. From Harbin. I was friendly with the music teacher, Miss Bai. So was she. Of course I questioned her, but turned up nothing.

“LanLan vanished into thin air soon after you left,” she told me, which was the same story I got from everyone in Harbin. Chen was no help in Shanghai. Her family knew nothing in Hong Kong. BaiLan is gone and gone and gone. And here was this woman with a strange looking child reminding me of it. Annoyed, I asked her to leave but not before she could make her intended request.

“I want you to teach my daughter music,” she said.

By this point the girl had circled my mud hut hacienda three times and found The Lion propped in a corner holding up a wall or two. And Max, I’ll be darned if I didn’t see the most delectable opportunity in this. An alternative to my monk like existence (which in all honesty had been growing somewhat intolerable) had reared her little head, a child, who to my surprise is quite the prodigy. Sha-Sha composes, and has inspired me to start writing again. We scribble in the margins of the Communist newsletter then line the hut with them. We write Symphonies in sand and watch as the tide washes them away.

She plays The Lion like you did, with a hunger to fill the void inside her head that she can’t yet understand. She is filled with wonder.

I will write again, Max. I am taking on two more secret students in my new role of note smuggler, cultural counter-revolutionary, Liszt liberator, Beethoven bolsterer, supporter of Schubert... Till then, be well, mein sohn.

Alle meine Liebe,
JS


Igor read the letter four times while on the subway back up town. He had one more stop before taking the A Train to the airport, one final destination that would bring him that much closer to his past, Seventh-avenue and Fifty-seventh Street.
When he was a boy, Maestro would take him on outings around the city. Museums, the zoo, parks, they were very adventurous in those days, but if it had to be said that there was one place above all others that was theirs, it was without a doubt beneath the tan brick arches, flags and deco-marquee of Carnegie Hall. It was their temple and Joshua had instilled it with so much holiness that a young Igor cried out for weekly pilgrimages.

He would run up to the doors and try them gaining access to the golden lobby where they would sit on the stairs, or sometimes in the Weill Recital Hall if it was free.
“They named this room after a very old friend of mine,” Joshua would tell his wide-eyed grandson.

“Tell me the story of Mom and Grandma,” he would demand and every time Joshua would comply, telling the story as if for the first time.

“It all started far, far away in the north of China when your mother was a pretty little girl,” he began. Igor knew the story so well his lips would silently move with Joshua’s as if he were singing along to a familiar song.

“In those day’s China was not a very nice place to live, especially if you like music as much as we do. The leader of the country had made music illegal so anyone caught playing it would get his head chopped off.”

“Why?” Like a well-rehearsed actor, Igor knew all his cues.

“Because that was the law. Now, your grandfather lived in a tiny house by the sea. If I got hungry I would pluck a fish or two from the ocean to eat, and at night, I would play my violin to the moon and think about your grandmother.”

“Where was she?”

“Well, that was the funny part, I didn’t know where she was. I had lost her and after searching far and wide, I decided to wait and hope that she would find me. It is easier to be found if you stay in one place, right?”

“Right. And she did find you, she--”

“Slow down. Your grandmother was a very smart and very beautiful woman, much smarter than me. She knew where I was all the time and had been watching me from a far. She also knew something I didn’t know. Years earlier, before they made music illegal, when we were together and happy, we made baby. Do you know who the baby was?”

“Mom!”

“Your mother, yes. The baby grew inside your grandmother for nine months but by that time your dumkopff grandfather was long gone.”

“Where were you?”

“I was here in New York living with your uncle Max.”

“And Barry?”

“No, this was before Barry.”

“Oh.”

“But Igor, we’re getting off the subject.” Igor liked getting off the subject. Every detail, every question made the story last longer.

“Where was I? Okay. Life was very hard in China for your grandmother. People were forced to work all the time. She couldn’t tell anyone she was going to have a baby because if she did, the police would come and take it away and make it work too. So she hid the baby while it was in her belly, and when it was born…”

“When she was born.”

“Yes, she, your mother was born she gave the baby to a family who could take care of her. But she never stopped watching. Six years later, when she heard that I had come back from America she watched me, too. And then your grandmother came up with the most wonderful idea.”

“I know what it is.”

“So you don’t want to hear the rest?”

“No! I do.”

“Okay then, be quiet. The most important thing in your grandmother’s life, aside from your mother, was music. But as you know, she couldn’t play for fear that she would lose her head. The police in the town where she lived knew that she had been a musician before music was outlawed so they watched her very carefully, just waiting for her to do something wrong so that they could lop her head right off. But your grandmother was too smart for them. She didn’t give them a chance. Instead she pretended to hate music as much as they did in the daytime, and at night she would hum into her pillow and let her mind drift off to concert halls and parlors like this one, filled with chamber music, and symphonies.

The problem was, it made her very mad to know that her daughter was growing up without knowing what she knew. Think Igor, what kind of person would you be today if you had never known music? What would you do if you weren’t allowed to play your violin?”
“Play basketball, probably.”

“You’re too short. Anyway, it was thoughts like this that consumed your mother, so she went to the family who had adopted Sha-Sha and told them of her predicament. YongLi, your mother’s guardian was sympathetic, but didn’t know what could be done about it without getting all of their heads cut off.”

“This is where you came into the picture.”

“This is where I came into the picture. Your very clever grandmother knew that I had been looking for her. She also knew that if I found her it would put both of our lives in danger, so she stayed hidden from me. I had searched all of China for that woman, and for ten years she was less than a mile away. Women are much smarter than men, Igor. Know this now. Your grandmother came up with a brilliant plan. She had YongLi bring Sha-Sha to me and demand that I teach her to play the violin.

Your mother was a magical child. Her eyes were almost violet which made me think there was something wrong with them at first; see how stupid I was? Your Uncle Max would say that I was always too consumed with myself to notice anything, and maybe he was right, but even with her talent and her eyes, and the way her hair fell, not pin straight, but in waves, there was no part of me that ever suspected that she was mine.

I taught her to play in secret. Just the two of us and the ocean. Not to mention Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, and Beethoven. There were other students, parents who like your grandmother longed for the old ways, who wanted their children to know the beauty of music, but they all fell away eventually. When you open a soul it’s not so easy to close it. Sometimes it’s safer not to open it at all. That was the plan of the communists, close every soul, by force if necessary, and in time hope people forget.
But Sha-Sha’s soul was as wide as the horizon. I have never known a child so eager to play music; it was like a sugar addiction. She would run to my cottage and slam the door in grabbing The Lion and launching into the most complicated of pieces. It was ear-bleedingly awful for a long time but with practice she soon became great. By the time she was in her teens, I was looking into ways of getting her out of China. She had a talent so unique, it would have been a crime to deprive the world of it.
I had almost figured out a way to get her to Taiwan and from there, to Japan, when YongLi came to see me. She said that she was happy I thought so highly of Sha-Sha’s talents but that there were certain things I didn’t know, things that prevented her from giving Sha-Sha permission to escape the country. I was livid, fuming like a smoking chimney at the poor woman who just sat there looking at me. When I was finished she handed me a small piece of paper with an address written on it.
‘Go tomorrow, she wants to see you.’”

“Grandma?”

“You always ruin the story, Igor. Yes, your grandmother. My love. She wanted to see me. Now, by this point your dumkopff grandpa had figured it all out so, I put on my best clothes, picked a bunch of wild flowers from among the weeds, and walked the mile that had separated us for twelve years.”

“Did you kiss?”

“Not at first. We embraced, we talked for hours—there was much to be talked about. Secret things from the past, but mostly about Sha-Sha, she was nineteen by then, our daughter was nineteen.”

“When does she play at Carnegie Hall?”

“I thought you wanted me to stretch out the story, now you want me to skip?”

“It’s my favorite part.”

It was his favorite part. It was the reason he wanted to stop in and see it before leaving. He wanted to picture himself there on the night his mother played Carnegie Hall. Igor pushed the door open and entered the familiar lobby. It looked smaller than he had remembered, but that’s the way with childhood, the world shrinks, as you get older, the ceilings lower, the sparkle fades. But he remembered the smell and was transported. After explaining who he was to the guard--the name Sha-Sha Streng opened many doors--he was granted access to Weill Hall.

“At least it wasn’t Brecht,” he whispered, and after bidding the ghosts farewell he entered the magnificence of Carnegie Hall herself. Igor felt like a pious man come to pray. And when he looked over, saw that his grandfather was already there in a tuxedo with his head bowed and his eyes closed, his preferred listening stance. Beside him in the front row sat BaiLan Streng, his wife, adorned in royal blue, clutching his hand, and on stage playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saens, was their violet-eyed daughter Sha-Sha.

“Look at her,” BaiLan whispered to her husband. But he had gone off into the music.
“You fell in love with me to this piece in a smoky Shanghai Club,” he said to her.

“Shh. Look.”

They watched, rapt, Igor, Joshua, BaiLan, and a full house of friends, extended family and music lovers as she played the piece accompanied by the Philharmonic Orchestra.
Igor wished he could have been there when she brought him up to conduct one of his own compositions, a concerto written in colors that told the story of his life.

“Mein Vater, der Stolz von Berlin, Joshua Streng,” she told an emotional crowd, “Er überlebte die Nazi's.” He survived the Nazi’s. “Er überlebte die Kulturrevolution.” He survived the Cultural Revolution. “Er ist mein Held, und er ist hier zu spielen für Sie heute abend.” He is my hero, and he is here to conduct for you tonight…

If it is possible to be the master of one’s destiny and choose the center point of one’s own radius, the point of perspective from which you see the world, then Igor picked the spot upon which he stood, a tape mark put in the middle of the Carnegie stage for the soloist. His mother had seen the world from here and so had his grandfather. He thought of their journeys as he gazed into the heavens above the orchestra, the plight of his family and how in many ways, even unintentionally, they led here, to this, the most sacred of musical temples, a place where art, creativity, and freedom are worshipped. It was from here, he decided, that his journey would begin.
Igor looked up and saw the same security guard from earlier walking down the isle catching him on the stage.

“Sorry, I’m just leaving,” but the man didn’t reprimand him. Instead he picked up his violin case.

“Sha-Sha Streng’s son, huh? So, I guess you know how to play this thing?”

“I’m okay.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Hey, I tell you what, my boss is on lunch, why don’t you give it a whirl?” The guard offered the case to Igor, but he just smiled.

“That’s okay,” he said hopping off the stage, “I’ve got a plane to catch, but I’ll be back someday soon.”

And with that, he collected his things and set out to explore his world.




The End.