Everything You Are(43)
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“You asked why I started drinking. I’m trying to tell you.”
Braden presses his hands to his temples. His head is going to explode. Memories creep and crawl in and out of the dark space inside him like flies, like maggots. The more Phee talks, the more likely it is they’ll get out. He can’t have that.
“Don’t!” he shouts. “Don’t tell me some coincidental horror story and try to connect it to mine.”
Her tears, he sees, are not weakness but strength. She feels what she feels, and does what she needs to do, anyway. “I need to tell you a story about your cello, about why she needs to be protected.”
“Oh my God. She is protected. She’s safe and warm and cared for. Allie’s been playing her. I know everything I need to know—”
“You don’t, actually. He said, if you should ever put aside the cello, I should tell you this. I’m not going to leave you alone until you hear it, so you might as well sit.”
Braden hesitates, but the dog decides for him. He’s not going anywhere without permission.
“My grandfather fought in World War Two,” Phee begins. “He called it the Great Evil. He was a musician. A craftsman. How must that violence and destruction have marked him? He wouldn’t talk about the war itself, only of the aftermath.
“He told me about bones and gas chambers and tattoos and mass graves. And he told me about Hitler’s instrument collection. He targeted fine violins—Stradivari, Amati, Guarneri . . . the Nazis stole and collected them, the same way they collected art.
“Some of the soldiers took pleasure in torture, and how easy is it to torture a musician? To destroy her instrument in front of her eyes, to mutilate his hands. Musicians in the concentration camps were forced to play while others were marched into the gas chambers, or to provide weekly concerts for their captors.
“My grandfather said there was nothing he could do about the dead, but the instruments and the surviving musicians, that was different.
“After the war, before he and my grandmother immigrated here, he set up a repair shop in London. Many came to his shop asking him to help them. Most had lost everything—homes, money, family. There was no replacing an instrument that had been in the family for generations, one built by the masters. Some brought instruments to be repaired. Violins, violas, cellos, guitars—instruments that had survived concentration camps and bombings.
“He did much of this work for free. To restore what was lost, to help them heal.
“Some—some brought him fragments. ‘This is what is left of my Guarneri,’ they would say. ‘Can you help me?’ And he would build a thing that was both new and old, marked by the scars of the war but made beautiful again. He did this work at low cost, his repayment, he said, for Ireland’s staying out of the war.”
Phee pauses. Her face has a faraway look, as if remembering, and her voice fades.
“And my cello is one of these?” Braden asks.
“Yes . . . and no. The cello is made of fragments. Stradivarius, yes, and Amati and Guarneri. He said she had a soul. Here are the words he made me memorize:
“‘This cello carries the soul of a woman murdered in the gas chamber, the soul of a gypsy shot like a dog in the street. She has been beloved, she has been abused, she has suffered the touch of evil. I promised her, when I coaxed the pieces into one, that she would be ever loved, that if she would give of her music, she would not be passed from hand to hand but cherished by one musician and one only. And so I made the boy swear an oath to me when he bought her.’”
Braden stares at Phee. He wants to deny this, all of this. A cello cannot have a soul, and yet he has always felt that his does. He tries to shake off the mood Phee has created with questions and logic.
“Wait. You said the MacPhee luthiers have been creating these . . . contracts . . . between musicians and instruments for generations, long before the war. So this is just a bullshit story, meant to make me feel guilty.”
“I’m telling you what he told me,” she says. “Some of the MacPhee specials were built from scratch. Some were pieced together as was your cello. All of them, he said, carried a soul. Whenever he spoke of the cello, he became more . . . intense . . . than when he spoke of the others. You remember your oath?”
“I remember.”
He stands, one hand on the warm wood of the cello, feeling that she is already a part of him and he a part of her, and it is easy to lift the other hand and repeat after the strange old man, “I swear to love and cherish this cello as a part of my own soul. I swear to play her until the day of my death. If I should break my oath, the consequences be on me and my children.”
Braden, in the first heady rush of falling in love, had barely registered the solemnity of the oath. Of course he would love the cello and play her as long as they both should live.
His mother, practical and disapproving, had rolled her eyes, tolerating this foolishness as the eccentricity of a master maker, even as she must have dimly understood that she herself was under some kind of spell or she would never have consented to the shift from violin to cello in the first place.
“I know how it sounds,” Phee says. “When he first told me this tale, I asked so many questions, but he would tell me no more. He wouldn’t tell me by what craft or magic he believed he had put the cello together. He never told me what dark magic he believed he had invoked that any of the instruments should carry a soul. But he made me promise I would hold you to your oath. You, and the others on my list. So here I am, and here you are, and the only question is, What do we do now?”