SUMKA 43—A CAPTIVE CELLO

THE CELLO CAME to our home (Warriors Mark, Pennsylvania) in a carton box, wrapped up in a lot of plastic filled with air. Not the best way to travel if you are a hundred and twenty years old, and indeed, the cello had two long cracks that hadn’t shown in the sales pictures. But since we didn’t take a photo right away while unpacking the cello, we couldn’t get the damage insurance. We considered returning the cello to the sellers in London, but even in its wounded state, it was way too beautiful and resonant not to keep. It had a deep reddish golden color, the color of Montezuma gold, as though it had traces of blood in it. The backboard was flamed; the widely-separated creases displayed the years of the wood; the tree constituting the cello had been a good drinker and fast and vigorous grower, and consonant with that, it sounded boisterous and chesty, just like a confident entertainer holding court.

My son Joseph, who was almost ten, tested the sound. He tuned the cello pensively, leaning his ear against the instrument’s neck. He stroked the strings, two at a time. The strings, once aligned perfectly, rang. The intensity of the sound, of all the strings in accord, could tell you that the cello was tuned. This cello was much better than the previous one, which he was renting from his teacher in Croatia, who called it My Strad. Hers was a three-hundred-year-old cello, with a dozen cracks running longitudinally. With a change of temperature, the cracks had widened, and it was impossible to keep the boards together. Bucar, a cello maker in Zagreb, spent weeks attempting to do that—he took the cello apart, glued it, even inserted a bit of old wood to cover a big crack, and put the boards into a press. We had paid for the repairs, and on that account, could use the cello for a year. Despite the cracks, the cello sounded noble, and Joseph won two second place awards in international competitions with it, in Gorizia, Italy, and Liezen, Austria. In Italy, he got a special prize as the most talented of the youngest competitors. After that, we took his cello-playing even more seriously. He used to be a shy boy, who covered his face with his hands if you looked straight at him, but the cello helped him overcome stage fright, and now he became a poised performer, an exhibitionist.

Joseph’s teacher in PA, Kim Cook, was the only one not to be seduced by the ancient looks and sounds; she said the “Strad” cello was no good, inaccurate, untunable—and part of the intonation inaccuracies Joseph had she attributed to the irregularities of the cello. And true enough, on this new cello, Joseph’s intonation seemed to be cured instantly. He sounded sharper (not in the key pun way). Authenticity and authority came out of that wood, as though a cathedral organ’s four pipes were hidden somewhere in the cello belly, ventriloquating.

You wouldn’t expect that kind of old-worldly authority to have come out of the Ethernet. The violin-cello had arrived via eBay. How can you trust eBay? I had asked Jeanette.

Why not? Just look at the picture! The sellers guarantee that it’s been appraised at Sotheby’s of London at one thousand pounds minimum, and they set a reserve price of one thousand dollars.

She had offered less, and the last thirty seconds of the auction she offered one thousand.

How come nobody else in the whole world offered more if it’s that good? I asked. I wouldn’t buy it that way.

How would you buy it, considering we are stuck in the middle of the boonies, and in the stock market bubble? Where else will you get a centurion cello?

From Witowski in Cincinnati.

He’d charge you three thousand for something like this.

Anyhow, right after the arrival of the newcomer cello, we went to Cincinnati, and visited Witowski in his shop stuffed with hanging pale unvarnished violins and cellos-in-progress. He used to rent us cellos and sell us bows when Joseph was in a Suzuki program in Cincinnati.

Witowski was outraged that we could buy a cello over the internet. He found the idea sacrilegious. These days, however, you can buy even the relics of various saints on eBay, bottled air from the tomb of Jesus, a flame from the burning bush of Moses, so why not a vintage cello?

After grunting, sighing, knuckling the backboard, and scratching his shiny dome, Witowski admitted that the instrument was quite fine for a three-quarter size training cello, and he was amazed that we had got it for only a thousand dollars. He however didn’t have time to repair it. To me there was nothing “only” about one thousand dollars since this was the beginning of expenditure.

We got the best strings we could get, at nearly a hundred dollars a set, bows, and expensive lessons. Moreover, every summer we took Joseph to St. Petersburg in Russia, where I teach at the Summer Literary Seminars, and he takes lessons with a member of the Nevsky String Quartet, Dmitry. We got Dmitry’s lessons in a peculiar way. First we had asked a friend of ours, a well-known Russian poet, Arkady Dragomoschenko, to find us a cello teacher, and he found a violinist instead. What’s the difference? he said. They all know the strings.

In the streets, right after a bunch of Uzbeki children stole our kids’ hamburgers and fries, a thin young man with a bony face was carrying a cello case on his back along the Moika River, not far from where Rasputin was clobbered to death. I asked whether he would teach my son. He agreed to teach Joseph for fifteen dollars an hour. Soon we raised his fee to twenty since like many Russian teachers he had no concept of time and his lessons could last for two hours. He was strict with Joseph’s intonation and rhythm, and assigned a lot of gami, scales. At almost every turn, he’d exclaim, Uzhasna! Horrible. Joseph was not perturbed. I told him if Dmitry ever said, Ochen harasho, very good, I would give Joseph a hundred bucks. It took seven lessons before Dmitry said, Da, ochen harasho. Joseph laughed and Dmitry didn’t know why, and for the rest of the lesson Joseph played terribly.

Joseph improved despite all the negativism of the Russian’s teaching. Things are never good enough for Russians. Even Eva, our daughter, age five, had to deal with that. We found a ballerina who would teach her some basic steps and postures, and the ballerina told us how she was trained with a stick. Whenever she made a mistake she was caned, until her posture was beaten into shape. So before the first lesson, Eva ran into the small park in the large courtyard where our rented apartment was and came out with a stick. If that’s what it took, she was willing to do it. Of course, the lessons didn’t proceed with the stick, at least not a physical one.

Convinced we had the best teachers around, we went to admire Dmitry’s playing at the Shermatov Palace, and that made a big impression on Joseph, to see his teacher play Grieg and Tchaikovski so deeply in old splendor.

I told Dmitry that the Grieg quartet was far more exciting than the Tchaikovski second string quartet, and he replied that he as a Russian could not say that—since Tchaikovski was a Russian deity.

To further Joseph’s music education, I took him to many concerts at the Shostakovich Hall. (Joseph has the misfortune of coming from a nonmusical family. On the other hand, if his parents were musicians, I am sure he would refuse to play—music is a world of his. Even early on, when he played the piano, at the age of six, I flattered him, and said, This is a difficult piece. He replied, How would you know? True, I said, I wouldn’t.) We saw Penderecki conduct his Triple Cello concerto—an amazing treat to see one of the greatest living composers conduct his own work. The concerto was full of surprising moves, Baroque-like fugues, Stravinsky-style timpani, Shostakovich jazz… The three cellists, all winners of the Tchaikovski competitions, flung their arms and bows up after each long phrase. Penderecki stood on the podium, big and august, so big in fact that he seemed to me a candidate for a heart attack, but these days, with Lipitor and good medical care, he could last, I imagine. Moreover, conducting seems to be the healthiest sport—conductors on average outlive athletes of any kind.

Last year when Dmitry went on tour with his quartet to Germany, we walked to the Anichkov Palace—there was supposed to be a school for gifted children there—on the Fontanka River. We were warned by the babushka at the entrance that the school was closed for the summer, but after I talked with her she said that there was a cellist at work. On the way, we strayed into a tambourine director’s office, and he lit up when he saw Eva making her ballet steps and wanted to draft her, offering her a cute balalaika. (Though we said no, there was no time for that, Eva never forgot that moment, so we had to get her a balalaika later on). Disappointed, the director sent us to the cello teacher. She seemed to be around fifty, dressed in an old-style worker’s blue uniform. She was teaching two lanky girls. She said to Joseph, Sit down and show us what you can do. My son refused.

If you want to be a cellist, you can’t be shy. You get a chance to show your goods, you take it.

I don’t want to play on another cello, Joseph replied.

We lived only five minutes away, on the Fontanka, and so we managed to come back with his cello in fifteen minutes. Joseph played the Prelude to Bach’s First Suite and a Samartini Etude.

Good, she said. You have a basis, you have the feeling, but you don’t play the scales. I can tell by the upper ranges, your pitch is uncertain. Nada igrati gami! You must play the scales. She proceeded to play the D major scale in many variations, with different bowing. She wouldn’t receive any money for the lesson. She said, I am scared. I can’t do it on the job.

Why don’t you come to our place?

I am scared. It is not safe. My husband wouldn’t approve.

That’s not a compliment to me, I said.

It’s just a principle. I could tell you stories; I have had bad experiences.

She suggested, however, that we could bring her a present, and we did, a bottle of good cognac, after which she had her husband’s approval to come to our place. I don’t know why a taste for alcohol was reassuring to the suspicious husband.

Joseph claimed she gave him superb lessons—she sang for him the pitch of each note he needed to get right. Instead of interrupting his playing, she would lean over and slide his fingers into the right place. She told us how her lessons with Rostropovich went. He was more interested in telling anecdotes and holding court than in teaching technique. It was other teachers in Moscow who really taught. She liked Joseph’s playing, but claimed he needed to get stronger, to do push ups, chin ups, to swim, and play tennis to strengthen his arms. Cello playing is not only an art, it is also a sport, she said. You have to be strong. And you must eat well. Eat!

That sounded peculiar to me, a cello teacher uttering the words of a gym teacher. No point in being a frail and effete musician. I remembered seeing a Ukranian woman pianist in Baltimore, Kravchuk, play Tchaikovski, First Piano Concerto. She had amazing shoulder muscles, like a weight lifter, and those didn’t seem to do any harm when she played the strong chords, plowing through the keyboard.

Joseph, you have a beautiful cello, Tatiana said at one moment. It sounds great. In our country it’s hard to get such a good cello for children.

Dmitry, when he came back, looked at Joseph’s cello, and said, This is wonderful. I didn’t have such a good cello when I was a kid. Yes, you have fine instruments. Now make sure that you play fine.

And Joseph was proud. When he played, the cello seemed to be an extension of his left arm. And he played at many places—at our party, for my class, on the boat on the canals, in front of the Yussupov Palace. It was a beautiful sound and sight—the boards of the boat reverberated with the cello. He played in the lobby of the Herzen Inn. The big hall filled with the gorgeous sounds, and Joseph, letting his blond hair loose, had the cocky poise of a rock star.

Our cello has traveled. We don’t know its peregrinations in the one hundred and twenty years before it came to us (Can you imagine all the wars, upheavals, it has witnessed through the fingers of a dozen generations of pre-adolescent boys and girls?) but with us alone, it has done plenty. Now we took it by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The trouble with traveling with a cello in a large case is that you need extra space, so even the cabs we took had to be large.

We spent the night at our friends’ place—John and Resa, American ex-pats. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans expatriating and exfoliating all over the world, and thousands in Russia, strangely enough, or perhaps it is because of strangeness that they are there.

Trained by American security, I strove to arrive at the airport two hours before the departure of the flight. Considering the impression I got of Shermatovo II, the main Moscow airport, that seemed to be cutting it close, as the customs and security lines seemed to be even longer than the ones at JFK. Moreover, just a few days before, there had been a double-suicide bombing by two Chechen women, which killed some eighteen people and injured fifty, at another Moscow airport. I saw the footage displaying severed arms and heads on the asphalt. The paramedics dealt with all that by simply drawing a big plastic sheet over the whole scene so nobody would have to look at the dead. They seemed to have no interest in checking whether any of the mangled bodies were alive. Moscow is not a good place to be in a critical condition, but perhaps it’s a fine place to be dead.

The day before our departure, there was another terrorist attack, which only injured a few people, and there was a successful mafia hit in St. Petersburg, with two bosses dead. The bosses of defeated sections get dumped in the Lutheran cemetery, the most neglected cemetery on Vassilievsky’s Ostrov. The cemeteries in St. Petersburg tend to be more beautiful than the living quarters, and the Lutheran cemetery, with the neglect—unkempt trees and bushes, tombstones cracking from extremes of temperatures so you could see into many of the graves, deep into the dark—is the most spookily beautiful. Here resentment against the Germans who had held the siege during World War II that resulted in a million dead is expressed in total neglect. Anyhow, we didn’t worry about Chechen terrorism on the way and we couldn’t care less where the bosses would be dumped. We were at the airport quite early, more than two hours before our departure.

A customs officer, an elderly woman dressed in green, stopped us, and spoke in Russian. What is that?

A training cello.

Do you have the certified papers for it?

No, we didn’t know we needed them for a child’s training cello.

You must have the papers. If you don’t, go to the Ministry of Culture to have it inspected.

We don’t have the time. Our flight is coming up.

That’s your problem. Go to the Ministry of Culture.

Is there anybody at the airport who deals with that?

Lost and Found Luggage. They specialize in things like this.

What, is there someone who can certify the cello as not too valuable there?

We are done. I have nothing else to tell you.

People talk about bribes in Russia, and of course, there are bribes all over the place, but she didn’t seem to be looking for a bribe. Otherwise, she would have been more approachable. I looked at her from a distance. What was her game? Was she doing her job scrupulously? If we weren’t Americans, would she be so unyielding? She looked in her plain dress like someone in the old system, a good Soviet. And I said so to Jeanette, Nothing has changed for many people here. These guys are still Soviets.

This is horrible. They won’t let us leave with our own cello?

Maybe we’ll find something at the Lost and Found Luggage, though it doesn’t sound good.

So we went to the lost and found. In fact, there was a sign in English, LOST AND ABANDONED LUGGAGE. We talked to the three ladies who ran the place, and they all nodded their heads sadly. It probably was not the first cello that ended up there. They suggested that we go to Nachalnik smjeni, the shift manager, and talk to him.

What do you think? I asked. Are they just play-acting and they are all involved in this rip-off game?

They seem quite honest to me, said Jeanette.

We found the airport manager. The man listened to our story sympathetically.

OK, I will go talk to customs officers.

He went but there was no conversation between them taking place. Whenever he came close to her, she turned her back to him, her arms akimbo.

He came back. (Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.)

She refuses to talk to me. She says the case is closed.

But you are the airport manager! You are the boss.

I have no jurisdiction over them. They are their own system.

Who else can we talk to?

Malev. The airline people could perhaps do something about it. I will give them a call.

And he did, he dialed them up on his black phone.

So we waited for the airline people. Didn’t show up. Time was running out. Would it make sense to go to the something-to-declare line? I asked the nachalnik.

I doubt it. You can try, but I doubt it.

I went to the line nevertheless, and the customs officer said, Don’t talk to me. If you keep talking I will have you arrested. You don’t have a certificate, and you can’t get it here.

In the background, we saw the customs supervisor—she was laughing and talking with two young officers. Were they laughing about us? Did it give them joy to make a boy of ten cry for his cello?

The Malev flight to Budapest was being announced. It was unnerving. Do you want to stay in this country to fight for the cello? It could cost a lot of money—changing all the flights. Should I stay behind? I was not in the mood to stay behind. My old mistrust of borders and police kicked in. If I stayed behind, what would guarantee that I could win the right to take out the cello? I was suddenly tired of Russia, though just an hour earlier we all seemed to love Russia, happy with our visit, the music, and the rest.

The customs supervisor was gone. So we went again through the departures line, and the officers, two men, said, Stop, you can’t go through. You don’t have the papers. We know about you.

But it is our cello, we came into the country with it.

That may be the case, but you can’t prove it without the certificate.

But it’s a cheap training cello, and only the goods above one thousand dollars must be declared, said Jeanette.

You must read the rules and regulations of a country before you visit it.

At that rate, we’d visit Russia in three years, I said. Who could possibly know all your rules!

You will learn them. We will teach you.

We read the declaration form before we came in, said Jeanette.

It is not that simple, you need to have a certificate for any antique you bring into the country. Westerners have plundered our treasures already.

But it is a simple cello, no point in treating it as an antique.

We are not experts. Go to the Ministry of Culture.

Just look at it, said Jeannette. How do you say cheap?

Deshevo, I said.

In the meanwhile, I thought I saw a Malev employee, so I went away a few paces. I heard the ringing of Joseph tuning the cello. Hundreds of people started to gather. The guards looked furious. Joseph struck the first notes of Tchaikovski’s Nocturne and wept. If he needed to get the feeling right, for the piece, the sorrowful longing, he got it now.

Enough. Stop right now, shouted the guard. Or you will all be arrested. Stop! Jail, prison, you hear me?

Joseph wanted to say goodbye to his cello. This reminded me of a boy in my hometown who leapt into the grave to kiss the wood of his mother’s coffin before the soil could thud over it. There was that sensation of desolation, of nevermore, with the police closing in on our holy wood. The cello sounded soulful and majestic—the airport acoustics were splendid— and that wasn’t helping our point that it was just a cheap piece of junk, a learning cello for a kid.

Jeanette packed the cello back into its blue case, and she also took out two bows.

You can’t take the bows either, the guards said. They must stay with the cello.

Why? Where is that rule written?

Maybe they need the whole set for their nephews, I said. Anyway, don’t argue with them.

I guess we can’t bribe them or anything, Jeanette said.

The supervisor probably wants to make sure they don’t let us through, and if they did, she would sack them.

We took the cello one floor below, to the Lost and Abandoned Luggage department. Jeanette took out the two bows, each worth about two hundred bucks, and put them in our big suitcase. Would the customs officers notice the bows and freak out? We looked at the case. Maybe we should take the case? We registered the piece of luggage, the cello, as Bag # 43 (Sumka 43).

Luckily, I still had a few minutes left on my cell-phone calling card. I called our friends, John and Resa, and told them what had happened. Could they come to the airport and retrieve our Sumka # 43?

Yes, but not right away. We have a lot to do today.

I will understand if you don’t do it. We’ll send you the cab money. (Cabs in Moscow, to the airport at least, are more expensive than in NYC.)

So, I explained to the old ladies that a friend of ours would come by to pick up the cello.

Good idea, said one of them.

How much do I need to pay?

Forty-eight rubles for one day (a dollar-sixty).

Can I pay for more than one day?

Not necessary.

(What, they weren’t angling for bribes either? I was disappointed.) What if my friends take two days to get here?

Not necessary. Ne nada. (If one looked for a similarity with Spanish, it would sound like doubly nothing.) Give us your passport number and we’ll register the sumka. (Actually, nada, besides necessary, also means hope.)

I wrote down John’s last name on the little tag on the cello case. Later I regretted I hadn’t also written his name by mine in the registration form.

Would the cello make it? Wasn’t this just a setup for stealing cellos? Won’t now one of those customs guys come downstairs to confiscate the cello, to take it home? Will they also take note of my passport number, put me on some sort of list, not let me into the country the next time? At this rate, I wouldn’t miss Russia. We had thought of perhaps buying an apartment in St. Petersburg, but now it was clear that might not be such a good idea. If we didn’t have a proper stamp on a piece of paper, we might lose the apartment altogether.

Joseph cried as we walked through. The customs officers now didn’t look at us at all. People filed by. We were their torture quota for the morning. Joseph kept weeping.

Don’t cry, I said. Worse things could have happened.

Yeah, like what?

Like a bomb going off right now and killing us, like losing an arm, like losing a lung. I can think of a million worse things that can happen.

I can’t.

Besides, John will pick up the cello, so next time you come to Russia, you will have your Russian cello. (I didn’t believe what I was saying but it was good to have some nada.)

But now I have nothing.

We’ll get you a cello in Zagreb.

Worse things could happen indeed. Joseph had an old picture in his passport with short hair, and now he wore long hair. His baby face had elongated. Instead of a little pug-nose, now he had a straight thin one. The policewoman looked at him and at his passport many times, and said, You are Joseph?

Yes, of course.

You don’t look like Joseph.

His hair grew long, that’s all, I said.

She kept looking at him sternly, making her thin lips thinner.

You just don’t look like Joseph. How do I know you are Joseph?

Just look at the features, I said.

Don’t tell me what to do. I know my job.

She stared at him.

Are you you?

What, now they wouldn’t let us take our son out of the country either? What insanity was that? How do you prove that you are the same person the papers claim you are?

My God, said Jeanette. Is this for real?

We had run into skeptical people. Maybe it had to do with our being Americans—if I don’t look American, the rest of my family does, and it certainly sounds American. I could understand what the customs had to deal with. You could come into the country with a kid’s passport, and then find a similar kid, and take him along—buy him, steal him, whatever. Sure, that could happen.

See Joseph, worse things could happen.

Just a shutka! the officer said. We have to joke now and then, life is too boring.

The customs officer let us through, and soon we were sitting in the very last seats of not the Malev, but of Aeroflot. If the aircraft at least were Hungarian, we’d feel freed. As long as we were in the Russian plane, we were not out of Russia, and worse things could happen.

From Zagreb, later that day, I emailed John and Resa, and said that maybe it would be a good idea to go to the airport as soon as possible. I knew that was an obnoxious request since they were tired. They replied that they could go in the middle of the next week.

Next week! By then the cello would be stolen for sure, I thought, and emailed them to at least make a call to the Sahranyenya department. The Russian storage word sounded like funeral, Sahrana, in Croatian, and no doubt, Sahrana was a euphemism, meaning storage, just as Russian for cemetery, Skladbische, sounds like Skladishte in Croatian, storage. The whole thing sounded like a funeral to me, and at the time I wished that Joseph had got to play the Nocturne by Tchaikovski. He had learned the words of sorrow there too well. Dmitry insisted that certain passages should be played in a weepy way, as though you were devastated with hopeless love. And Joseph was.

We got another three-quarterssize cello in Zagreb—freshly handmade, from Bucar, who first took us on a tour of the hills around his hometown, showed us on a map where the wood came from in Bosnia, claimed it was the same wood that the Italians plundered for their Amati and Stradivarius, showed us his attic where he’d aged the wood for twenty years, got drunk in the process, soulfully canonizing the wood. As soon as Joseph grabbed the new cello, tainted in fresh red varnish, looking like a bloody plump toddler, he played the Nocturne, and it sounded like a salute to his old friend.

At this point, we all gave up on the old cello. Sure—Russian border police were evil people, they stole, they loved to torment.

Strangely enough, three days later, John and Resa emailed that Sumka 43 was in their hands. The three kind babushkas had guarded it, and certainly nobody could come close to it. They had examined and re-examined John’s passport, comparing the name on it with the name I wrote on the cello, before they released the cello. That was a moment of joy. Joseph—you have your cello back! Well, at least in Russia. So when we go, you don’t have to carry a cello to Russia.

We need to get a passport for the cello. We took pictures of the birthing moment, or the baptism, the varnishing, of Joseph’s new cello. We’ll sign all kinds of papers, maybe we’ll even read the zodiac for the cello. July 13, Cancer. It makes sense. We will have to certify our new family member. Cello is not just a thing, it is a member of the family. Even the ruthless police know that, why didn’t we? We will get him—does a cello have gender?—a shiny photo.

And what name should we give to the captive cello? It’s not an Amati, we don’t know the maker; it’s an orphan in that sense, and in many others. Should the name be German (since the cello was made in Germany) or English, Russian, Croatian? I will ask Joseph what name he wants to give it. At the moment, he’s having a cello lesson with Laszlo Metzo, from the Bartok String Quartet, on the island of Hvar in the Adriatic. There is the smell of smoke all around us, because the island is burning; thick smoke is rising from the hill behind us. The smoke is stinging my eyes.

I’m imagining what the unnamed émigré cello is doing. John and Resa have loosened her strings, put her up high on their shelf, and there she lies, without music, silent, and who knows when she will get to sing her nocturnal feelings again.