Boris Tsessarsky
Bass Violin
Begin. I know this place: existence. How many moments must I spend here?—the squirrels won’t say—such irredeemable moments. This morning I’ve had to keep the heavy wind from entering and blowing our notes too far away. It required more newspaper and tape (which we are out of). Sometimes our books tremble when we, when really you roar, and slice the air! That’s how we cracked one window, no?
We play better without our notes. It’s not like we sit there and stare at them while we play. First we study, devour them, then spit them up in new forms. Yes, the windows will remain open, even with the wind. Somebody may stop downstairs to listen in, maybe she...our neighbors grow weary of us quickly. The preludes and fugues charm them only for so long. My theory is that it’s too transparent for them, that it makes their skin crawl.
They fight us with their sounds, their electric guitars and monster vacuums. Downstairs is lost on me: those folks must be paralyzed from incessant kneeling and listening. We saw them the day we moved in, and never since.
We hear ourselves more than we hear others, but that’s just a thing of life. It’s lunchtime, which means more preludes and fugues with something extra...a suite at the end. The less we think, the less they tell us to stop thinking. I begin because you let me begin, you my instrument, without you...I’d bang my head till the end.
I’m done with books, let me tell you, I’ve read enough. They all say the same thing, that bad weather—rain and snow—make our music also...I can’t disagree. The wind means a lot to me, to us, it brings us closer. This is our 15th winter together! 15...centuries. We’re inseparable now, even though we’ll be separated one day. Your steel strings make my veins and your hairs my hairs.
Look at you, all snug in your case, wrapped in Oriental cloth. (I hold up our mirror). A picture. Let me move you by the window, as the sun creeps in. Your neck is long and luminous. The cold’s good for you, it makes you more sonorous, and tightens your grip.
So long as I live, music courses through my veins, my strings. Especially when I’m just sitting around. And then we are together. Being in, however, has its limitations when you’re underfunded, underfed...undereverything. Outside isn’t the best place to play, but that’s where we make bread. If it was up to me, we’d have microphones in each room recording every sound. If it was up to me, you would crown each concert hall and theater instead of only the concrete in the parks and promenades. And yet when we’re near trees and leaves, you’re more direct, more radiant. Is it because you’re thinking of your relatives? Can you sense them in those oaks?
Occasionally we play with other basses and drums—would we only play more with piano. We express ourselves most when it’s just us, we can make ourselves sound like four or five. We seem to generate more bread that way too, as if each voice deserves a slice. During the holidays, we play the yuletides, and I hum along just below you. People get involved, parents and grandparents. I tell them that if they stay after dark, I’ll play my own stuff.
Often I hear you laughing beneath a note. Your secret laugh? Ha, ha...you’re not funny. You’re sad, mournful, and sometimes quite monstrous. If only money wasn’t an issue. And yet it gives us something to play for, something that will allow us to play more, since that’s the point of it all. We could actually use some repairs for your still busted ribs. The sound you now emit is slightly different than before you were hit. You wheeze more.
Why were you, we hit?—I’ve stopped asking myself. The man simply doesn’t like us, our sound, our look, anything about us—nothing. And since he is in uniform, he thinks he can just knock our hats off on a whim. Unfortunately he can and does, and one drunken evening did a little more, smack in the middle of your favorite passage in our aria. It was a passage we generally close our eyes to, and next thing you know—thwack—you wail, swing, hit me and slice my left pinkie.
Then the old canker gave it to us verbally while walking away: he said that we were rotters and rotting music.—Death unto mo-derns, he cried, death unto apes, death unto all the living!!
And he laughed hysterically, jostling others as he went. Another so-called specialist, I think. The city is full of them. Not just mean men but professors, Doctors of Death. Unless I wear a uniform or possess the right credentials, it’ll be aeons before they stop jolting us. Even if I possess the right ones, someone will toss a bottle at us, curse us blatantly in the middle of an audience.
We saw him again, not long after, in a comelier temper. He said to us—Are you a true Master? and walked away, as is his custom, to leave us ponder.What we've mastered already apparently means nothing. Give us our foot of space, let us and our bucket be. Dear listener, believe me that we've studied the Masters, you know who I mean of. We have no choice but to interpret.
Our song, however, is not so easy to sing, though we make it seem so. The few who really get down with us are in similar positions, catching heat from old cankers. We try our best, but some fall prey and become his pigeons. These friends of ours have also been deemed false masters—destroyers of music, annihilators of sound, living in danger of banishment or worse.
You're the true master—my 1872 Bulgarian, fully-carved—you are old enough. But only I can show them what a master. I’ve given myself over to you, and you have made me achieve trees and leaves, by plucking and sawing you. You’ve given me children and animals. They’re almost fans. All they have to do first is see your (to them) massive frame, and we’ve done something. See me so much smaller than you stand atop our stool to reach your topmost string. See me spin you round with ease and stroke your belly with your magic wands. Watch me pick you up and carry you on my back.
First they flee to their moms, then slowly, like timid creatures, gather around us. The kids are our staples. There’s certainly more of them out, their parents looking more and more dissimilar. Two nights ago, if you recall, one of them, a light skin boy with an Afro, visited us on our rooftop. He was all bug-eyed and trembling but stayed with us till the morning, stayed with us through the incessant slamming, rolling, and clanking of the wind.
I think he was our longest audience. The only thing he said that I understood was that he thought (for the longest) that we were the moon playing. He said when he looked out the window he saw the moon and heard music, and finally had to come investigate. I told him we were still the moon.
I tell you, the streets are not easy to play. You’ve got to strike quick and often, before the trains roll in. The average person listens for about ten second stretches if he hears something that interests him. What you and I do, friend, is look for the faces, the impressionable ones, with their glances, to whom we sing ballads, Slavic melodies, and they’re under our spell. So many faces, a ballad for each one.
It helps we’re on our own so often; one canker or another chases us away, leads us to other space. It’s a miracle we’ve lasted in our present place as long as we have, enough to gather goods that will mostly find the trash or another beggar’s bag. With you, my dear, there is little room for bags, I go equipped with pouches, pockets sewn, special folds in my caps. Before long, I bet we’ll be back on the street, though people here seem to like us: they smile at us, ask us to play a number, and sometimes request pictures (which you oppose taking).
From one spot to the next, from one prelude to the next, fugues interspersed. Bach to Bach. A little extra cash this time of year helps. I got gifts to give also, besides music. I know you don’t like when I bring her up, but I’d like to buy some gift for the girl that now and then comes by our window...I could always make her something, but I want to be more fancy, I want to show her I've got a little shine in my jingle. She’s been around for years...we’re like kindred spirits, and you know how well she can sing.
She’s older now, I don’t know why I still call her girl. I guess I see the girl in her, perhaps will always, since I knew her growing up, before we met. We’ve seen each other in all of the boroughs, but have yet to speak. We’ve heard each other playing, stood there and listened to each other. She’s older now and I feel closer to her. Can’t you just see us performing, like a trio or quartet? Next time she comes to our window, I’ll be ready: I’ll call her upstairs, give her the gift, toast to her health, and tell her to stay a bit.
You shake your head. You’ll get over it. If you can’t stand it, you’ll chill in your coffin.
Yesterday morning we saw the old canker in uniform again! He was once homeless, too, you know, when we were living on the street. People would pick on him, take everything from him—razors, files, boots, gloves, umbrellas, you name it. But then something clicked in him, he went ballistic, and within a few years be-came a Uniform. Now he’s taking out his anger on those that wronged him, and those that provoke him in the slightest.
This morning he chased us off the block and said that if we returned we would go downtown. I had to control myself from responding; my mouth has always got me in trouble. Now it’s your mouth. We found a different spot to play, that’s all, but he found us here also, the fourth time in the last few days, and the result was fatal (this block apparently an extension of the forbidden other).
It’s the cost of living in a city in which the crime rate is down. The canker has all the more reason to pick on us now. Let me fast-forward some and say that we’ve survived this ordeal, except that we’ve never been separated, you and I, so long, and never treated so ill before, handcuffing me to a wall. Not even the fact that it was Xmas and the streets full of Santas ringing their salvation bells. The old canker really got off, didn’t he. How do I know? I could hear them playing with you. That’s how cruel they are: they’ll do you up out in the open, so other prisoners may hear what awaits them.
Not only did they stretch you crudely, but they used your various wands on you, inserting them wherever they could, damaging your innards. When I stuck out my free hand through the bars I got it bent backwards by one of the guards. I was going to say—Can you take it easy on her?
They owe us a new wand, two, but we won’t get even one, not even a single horsehair. They opened up your old rib wound. My defense said to plea guilty. Your defense (your charge was cutting remarks) said to plead not guilty. We both pleaded guilty and were released. The court officer said we were lucky to get a trial at all. Read your history, he said to us—play only when it’s trafficky.
Land of the free, home of the brave! I exclaimed as we exited. I took you to the instrument shop and spent our little holiday savings to repair you. You sound better now but decidedly not the same; you’ll have to wear it like a dignified wrinkle until I can afford surgery. The sound the bastards tore from you was a real horror, a cat getting pumped by a vacuum for several hours...I’d say for only six seconds was it music.
We rise with the pigeons, you and I, forget all these clowns, we hardly sleep. Two hours after dawn—two suites down. The sea is loud this morning. We investigate, walk over the bridge, onto the boardwalk, a good half-mile from the Avenue. The buildings here look abandoned, half are windowless, and home to gulls and rats. The tide is up, no doubt, and a steamboat steams like an organ. On one side is the ocean, on the other the city—a gang of skyscrapers.
We set up shop and before long are rolling with the waves and whistling to the boat. We’re rocked, shaking back and forth, and can even hear the fish leaping. Time is lost. Eyes emerge from the windowless buildings, and we stop playing, like a broken box. Why did we stop? What are we afraid of? We start again; the sea and the boat were waiting.
From the direction of the city then comes an awful buzzing and droning, picking up speed and volume as it approaches, gaining momentum with each new block it scorches. It even stuns the sea and boat, as if making them pause to think—What the hell is this? And you can probably guess: it is the old canker in a veritable tank, his lackeys and he seated all up top like generals.
Their radio motors sounds that, accompanied by wicked lyrics, make your hair stand for all the wrong reasons. We stop. Is it possible they hear us from the city? They are coming for me, for us, of course. There’s nowhere to go but the sea, not a bad choice. But when the children start shrieking, we start to play again. Then and there we decide we’ll go out playing, once and for all, like those musicians aboard that sinking liner.
They’ll have to give us our own island, I think, if we’re to live in any peace. Let the piglets charge. I strum away, employing three bows, and bells between your strings, sending musical bolts down the throats of their speakers. They have the back of their scrapers, but we the sea and the eyes shrieking. Multiple explosions follow, like air raids, hurtling all.
When some smoke clears, we’re still standing strumming, even after their overturned vehicle catches fire. Soot is everywhere, smoke, blood. And the eyes cheer as if the home team won, silencing the enemy in the coliseum or something. No time to celebrate, we’ve got a date in hell if we stay. Arrivederci! Don’t look at those mangled bodies. This old longhair emerges to say to us that the lackeys turned their guns on themselves and their leader.
Thanks, I say, and bounce. Onto the train and the next nook. This time it won’t be so easy. We’re too easily visible: I need a disguise—platforms, yellow stockings, stilts perhaps—how else can we go unnoticed? One canker lost us, another’ll find us—they are a network. From now on we can’t get comfortable on corners, never more than two hour stretches. To what extent are they even allowing us to live now? I wonder.
We find an even cheaper room than the last and are playing preludes in the closet to control our decibels. Our neighbors may be pigeons. The closet is your chamber now too. The nights are getting shorter apparently, though I haven’t noticed. One day I’ll buy my own case and we’ll sleep side by side like true vampires. We have a window but no fire escape. They’re waiting for us to jump, but it won’t happen unless we’re pushed out.
All in all the prices here are okay, but that might change, and we have no clientele. All these new faces to learn; it still isn’t safe to play outside. Don’t ask me what I do now for change; it’s been deemed degrading. But I’m no chump, I take my licks, and I pillage when it’s right. The ceiling drips and the place stands on a tilt. The wooden floors creak by themselves, and you can see right through the easy chair.
Still in all...there’s reason to hope. We can play the 48 in two and a half hours if we’re assiduous. I’ve noticed quite a few hipsters and college longhairs, so that next time we play outside we’ll make a sign that offers a bit of history about the pieces. I bet it gets us pizza.
We’ll never be completely separated. Though you wouldn’t mind if someone else took hold of you, eh? Your condition would likely improve, your case would be roomier, the climate milder. If I had the power,I would play you all day every which way.
Today is our first day back out, like we were released from a cage. I notice some bassists, well-to-do—club players. We tip our caps and go to the local park (we always start there before we play the Avenue). The hood itself is dirty (only the boutiques look clean), but the park is a marvel! It must be new, I think, looking for an inscription or a tomb. Not finding one, we enter into the lower deck. There’s two levels here, and both bedecked with trees and itty stone tables. The further we proceed the more difficult it becomes to see us. Right here, I think. We stop to pluck.
The birds are undisturbed, continuing their pecking and poking. Kids start to pass us by. From where? Looks like they’re entering through this hole in the gate. Some stop. One says—Do the otter dance, mister. We do, or try. Two think we’re funny. We play and make three dollars off lunch money. Our day is well under way.
©2005 by Boris Tsessarsky
