Violin Lessons Read online

  Author bio

  Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and educator. His books include Jewels and Ashes, The Fig Tree, Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven and Sea of Many Returns. Arnold is a human rights advocate and president of the International PEN, Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.

  arnoldzable.com

  Dedication

  PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE AND VIOLIN LESSONS

  ‘Infused to their core with melody and rhythm…Zable’s

  deeply compassionate stories of genocide, dispossession

  and pain suggest that even the most savaged of hopes

  may be resurrected.’ Australian

  ‘Intensely imagined, autobiographical non-fiction…a master

  storyteller at work.’ Australian Book Review

  ‘Poignant tales of human struggle…Zable’s evocative prose

  transported me from the olive groves of Italy and memory-rich

  living rooms of Melbourne to the war-torn streets of Cambodia

  and beyond…A wonderfully complex, sad and beautiful read.’

  Bookseller+Publisher

  ‘A gifted storyteller, Zable unearths the hidden symmetry and

  arresting images that make these tales sing.’ Herald Sun

  ‘In Violin Lessons, Zable displays the wisdom and kindness that

  has permeated all his works—the reason they are so loved.’

  Readings Monthly

  ‘Unforgettable.’ Courier-Mail

  ‘Zable’s vision is ultimately optimistic and affirming.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Few writers give us such a sensitive and evocative portrait

  of ourselves as Arnold Zable.’ Good Reading

  ‘Zable has a remarkable gift…He holds pain with

  unsettling gentleness. His prose is such good company

  that you accept its honesty.’ Age

  Title page

  Imprint

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William St

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Arnold Zable 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2011

  This edition published 2012

  Cover art and design by WH Chong

  Page design by Susan Miller

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Zable, Arnold.

  Title: Violin lessons / Arnold Zable.

  ISBN: 9781921922787 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921961588 (ebook)

  Subjects: Zable, Arnold--Travel.

  Voyages and travels.

  Families.

  Dewey Number: 304.8

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts and advisory body.

  Dedication

  Dedicated to Amal Basry, and the 353

  Epigraph

  He holds him with his glittering eye—

  The Wedding-Guest stood still,

  And listens like a three years’ child:

  The Mariner hath his will.

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  Contents

  Violin Lessons

  The Dust of Life

  Bella Ciao

  The Music Box

  Capriccio

  The Wall

  Threnody

  A Chorus of Feet

  The Partisan’s Song

  The Ancient Mariner

  Author's Note

  Violin Lessons

  I received a violin on a recent birthday. It had been forty years since I last played and my first attempts to resume were not promising. I could not produce a sound. I had forgotten that a bow requires rosin to adhere to the strings. When I placed the instrument on my left shoulder, the collarbone bore the stress. My fingers, wrists and forearms ached. Muscles long dormant were rudely awakened.

  Slowly the basic skills returned. My bow movements became more controlled. Like homing pigeons, my fingers found their way back to the correct positions. Scales and arpeggios I had once diligently practised became fluent again. The music notations regained their meaning and evoked the memory of sheets propped against the wall on a kitchen sideboard.

  The sink beside the sideboard was stained with rusted enamel, the linoleum warped and cracked. Hadassah, my mother and faithful audience of one, sat by the table preparing the evening meal. She nodded her head in approval, which was no guide to the quality of the playing. The fact that a son of hers was learning the violin was enough cause for pleasure. She spoke often, and with reverence, of the night she had attended a recital by the teenage prodigy Yehudi Menuhin on world tour. She was a woman who watched every penny, yet willingly drew on limited funds to pay for my lessons. But she did not know that my teacher, Mr Offman, was a tyrant.

  Mr Offman taught violin and piano from his house on the corner of Rathdowne and Pigdon streets. I set out once a week, violin in hand, on the twenty-minute walk to the house, and strolled home after the lesson, relieved the ordeal was over. I felt more at home in the streets than inside Mr Offman’s music room.

  After three years of lessons I took part in a concert. I played ‘Long, Long Ago’ and ‘Ave Maria’. Judging by the applause, the audience was pleased with my efforts. I bowed awkwardly and left the stage thankful I had performed without obvious error.

  After the concert, Mr Offman congratulated me in the foyer. He had never before praised my efforts. He had, it seemed, forgotten the many times he struck me over the back of the neck with his bow in response to my musical transgressions. Three years, I thought, three arduous years it had taken to produce a word of praise. I contemplated the humourless years ahead and, in my moment of triumph, decided to give up playing.

  Years later, I portrayed Mr Offman in one of my novels as Mr Spielvogel, a musician who had performed in pre-war Austria, a post-war immigrant embittered by his loss of status, a teacher who longed for the music salons of Vienna.

  I drew on my memories to recreate his corner house as a ghostly replica of past glories. I lined the passage with photos of musicians dressed in tuxedos and bow ties, instruments poised by their sides. I placed portraits of Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler on the music room walls, and assumed that Spielvogel’s vocation as a musician had been thwarted by the Nazi occupation and the horrors it had visited upon his people. I did not know then that Mr Offman’s journey was far more exotic than the one I had imagined.

  Not long after the novel was published I was invited to discuss it at a Sunday morning book club. When the formal discussion was over one of those present introduced himself as Naji Cohen. He had taken up the violin many years ago and performed in a Baghdad orchestra. He still possessed his original instrument. Would I like to see it, and would I like to hear the story of its journey?

  Weeks later I approached the townhouse to which he and his wife Myra had retired. Naji did not waste time on pleasantries. He had a tale and he was eager to tell it. He tilted his head towards me as he talked, leaning forward, in a gesture of communion.

  His lifelong obsession began one afternoon in 1940 when he was ten years old. He was walking home from school through the streets of a Baghdad su
burb when he was stopped by the sound of a violin. The Arabic music emanated from the balcony of a two-storey house. Naji was captivated.

  ‘Ya Allah, I swear to God, that first time I stopped and listened, it clicked with me,’ he says. ‘All my life belongs to that moment. Would you believe it? I stood there for an hour. I did not want to leave. I went crazy on it.’

  For two years Naji followed the same route home from school and stopped by the house to listen. The player was a violin teacher known as Blind Jamil. Every afternoon, at the same time, it was his habit to play his violin on the balcony.

  Naji pleaded with his father, a well-to-do merchant, to allow him to take lessons. His father refused. Don’t be stupid, he argued. Music was a lowly job fit only for itinerants and drifters. It would take time away from his studies. He had plans for his son to study in America and had set his sights on him becoming an eye doctor. Baghdad was not for his son. Baghdad was the past, not the future.

  ‘Ya Allah, a father had absolute power at that time,’ says Naji. ‘He told me to stop thinking about the violin, but whenever I passed by Blind Jamil’s and heard him playing, I became crazy with it.’

  Naji saved up and secretly bought a violin from the musician. The arguments resumed, and with greater force, until his father could no longer abide his entreaties. He allowed him to take lessons as long as they did not interfere with his studies.

  Once a week Naji climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the upper room. ‘I can see it now,’ he says, eyes narrowing. ‘I swear it.’ He stretches out his arms, and extends his fingers as if touching the memory. Naji does not know the details of Jamil’s life, whether he was married or single. He cannot remember the layout of his rooms. He recalls only the spiral staircase, his conduit to the lessons. ‘Ya Allah, I was only interested in the music.’

  Blind Jamil would greet him, feel his way to a chair and begin his instructions. He wore dark glasses and was dressed informally in an open-necked shirt and trousers. He taught him as he had been taught to play, by ear.

  At fourteen, Naji was invited to join a circle of young musicians. They called themselves Ansar el Musika, the Lovers of Music. ‘This is how I translate it,’ says Naji. ‘That is what Ansar means for me. We were crazy about Arabic music.’

  There were ten players in the ensemble: five violinists, a cellist, a tabla player, a duff player, an oud player and a singer. The singer was a Muslim, the rest were Jewish. At first they played only for themselves. They met in each other’s homes several nights a week. They ate and drank, and played until the early hours of the morning. ‘That’s all. Only music. We had no other subject to deal with.’

  To expand their repertoire, the group spent hours watching films featuring renowned Egyptian musicians. They studied each film, session after session until they had memorised every note. They invented their own system of notation with instructions to go faster, slow down, and so on.

  Sometime in 1945, Ansar el Musika came to the attention of a Baghdad broadcaster. The musicians were offered a weekly half-hour radio program and they gained a loyal following. As their reputation grew they were asked to perform at private gatherings and celebrations. They travelled to Mosul, three hundred and fifty kilometres north of Baghdad, hired by a sheikh to perform at his daughter’s wedding. They were driven to the reception through the streets in horse-drawn carriages, playing. People lined the footpaths, waving. The group performed before the guests for three days and three nights and lost track of the hours.

  An avid fan of their radio program offered them the use of a houseboat on the Tigris River. The group practised every evening and partied until well past midnight. People in riverside homes sat on their balconies and listened. Strollers on the banks of the river would stop to listen.

  On warm Baghdad nights, the group crossed over to an island. ‘The people on the island caught the fish from the Tigris, cut it along the back, and split it clean in half. Like this,’ says Naji, demonstrating with vigorous gestures. ‘They washed it. Cleaned it. Sprinkled it with pepper and spices.’

  He lifts his hands. ‘Look, this is how it was done. My hands are the fish and each finger is a pole. They placed one fish on each pole, twenty fish at one time facing a wood fire. This is how they grilled them. We ate and drank, and played till four in the morning.

  ‘Ya Allah,’ says Naji, his eyes alight with the memory, ‘Baghdad was a beautiful city. Directly opposite our house stood a mosque. I can see it now. I swear it. The cry of the muezzin woke me every morning. His prayers reminded me of the music played by Blind Jamil.’

  Despite the semblance of peace, all was not well. Naji does not wish to dwell on the politics, the contested versions of the street battles, and on what brought his family’s many years in the city to an end. ‘Music and politics should not mix,’ he insists. ‘I loved Baghdad. I loved the music and my fellow musicians, but times changed when Israel became part of the equation: in 1949, there were mass demonstrations against the newly formed state. It was time to leave, and I left.’

  This is all he wishes to say. ‘They have their story and we have ours. We were only interested in making music.’ I try to push it further. Naji refuses. He is resolute. Emphatic. ‘The subject is music. If we are discussing music, I don’t want to discuss any other subject.’

  Naji travelled by train from Baghdad south to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. He engaged smugglers in the city of Basra for the onward journey. He had with him Razi, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been entrusted to Naji by his family. They hid by day and moved by night, on foot and by donkey, following the course of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. On the third night, a smuggler rowed them to the opposite shore, and deposited them on the Iranian side.

  ‘It’s still in my head,’ says Naji. ‘I swear it. When the smuggler rowed we had to be quiet. Not a murmur. We were very nervous. The smuggler rowed so slowly no one could hear him. It was three o’clock in the morning. In the middle of the river there was an iron ball, two metres in diameter. He told us, this is the border. When we pass it we will be in Iran.

  ‘He dumped us in no-man’s-land. It was dark and freezing. At five o’clock it started to get light. I saw women dressed in black abayas. They were walking on the beach. They carried jugs of water on their heads. They surrounded us, maybe thirty women. They called the police, who told us they would hand us back to the Iraqis if we did not give them our money. Razi was crying. He was hysterical. I emptied my pockets. In this moment you think only of survival. If they took us back over the waterway, we thought the border police would kill us.’

  In his haste, Naji had left his violin in Baghdad. Two years later his family joined him in Tel Aviv, where he had settled after leaving Iran within months of his clandestine arrival. While the refugees from Iraq tried to smuggle out some of the wealth they had been ordered to leave behind, his sister brought only the violin. Naji had rung her up before she left Baghdad. ‘I want nothing else,’ he told her. ‘I am lost without it.’

  At that time the members of Ansar el Musika were spread throughout the land, one in Tel Aviv, another in Haifa, a third in Jerusalem. One by one they found each other. In 1955, they re- assembled and established the same group, except for the singer, who remained in Baghdad. They would gather to play every Friday.

  Yet in the new state they remained outsiders. The Mizrahi Jews, the Easterners, as they were called, were not warmly welcomed. Many lived in tent cities and struggled to find employment. The trauma of displacement was compounded by their status as fringe dwellers. Arabic music was not appreciated. It was the music of newcomers who had to conform to the demands of a new country, an alien culture. The Lovers of Music confined their playing to their weekly gatherings.

  ‘People did not want to hear our music,’ says Naji. ‘We found a place near Ramat Gan called the Hill of Napoleon. The hill was far from everyone. We had it all to ourselves. We could do as we liked, and play as long as we wanted. Every Friday night our friends brought food, folding ch
airs and blankets. One man brought crates of watermelons. Others brought Iraqi delicacies. The number of people who attended grew. For fifteen years we gathered at the same place every Friday. Just eat. Just drink. Just play, till four in the morning. That’s all.’

  Naji travelled to Melbourne in 1964. He left his wife Myra and one-year-old son in Tel Aviv while he explored his options. ‘Ya Allah, the reasons I left are not so complicated. I wanted to dare myself to build a new life. I wanted to know what it is to be in a new country. My eyes were set on the future.’

  Myra and their son joined him several months later. Naji entrusted his violin to a friend in Tel Aviv. ‘Why? It is simple. A violin needs to be played. If an instrument is not played, it dies. My friend said why don’t you leave it with me? He used it in my absence and kept it alive. I thought maybe I will bring it over in a year, but I was always busy. Time passes. Soon it is ten years. Then twenty. Then, would you believe it? It was almost forty years.’

  Naji pauses. ‘There is another reason I didn’t bring the violin with me,’ he says. ‘I could not just sit and play by myself. It’s not easy when for twenty years you have played with one group. They were my closest friends. I loved to play with them. How could I replace them? And who played Iraqi music here at that time?’ He lifts his hands, palms facing upwards, and shrugs. ‘I would have been playing alone.’

  In 2002 Naji regained possession of the violin. ‘Why? It is not so complicated. I was retired and had time on my hands. I visited my friends in Ramat Gan. Ramat Gan is now a little Baghdad. I swear it. In the coffeehouses you can hear the music I heard when I first stopped at Blind Jamil’s. When people talk, they are waving their hands, like this, like Iraqi people. There is a family that sells mastic ice cream. The mastic is like chewing gum. It can stretch for half a metre without breaking. The recipe is a secret handed over from father to son. No one else knows how to make this.