Second Fiddle (2 page)

Herr Müller was bald as an egg. Apparently his hair had all migrated down to form one massive gray eyebrow. I’d never heard him say how old he was, but based on the number of orchestras he had played in or composed for, I’d have guessed he was one hundred and twenty-three. He looked out the window and didn’t take the first sip of tea or even pass around the cake. I waited for him to start, but he looked completely lost in thought. I lifted the cake plate and held it so Vivi could serve herself a slice.

“Ladies, you are technically fine players, each one of you,” Herr Müller said, turning back toward us. “I am very proud of your musical progress.”

Giselle and I traded a look, and Vivian hid a smile behind her long sweep of blond hair. What had gotten into him? It wasn’t like Herr Müller to be all mushy. I kept my mouth shut except for
Danke
and
Bitte
. I passed the treats, wondering if tea before international music competitions was one of those customs we hadn’t studied yet in our German language and culture class at school.

“Yes,” Herr Müller went on. “You play with skill and also the warmth of good friendship. The best music comes from the heart in this way.”

Now I was getting worried. Herr Müller was all about technique and precision. He ended every single piece we had
ever played with a list of things in need of “development.” Herr Müller stood up and walked to the window. He surveyed the window box with its required planting of red geraniums.

“You have made such progress. I am very proud.”

“Is there something on your mind?” Vivian asked. “You don’t sound like yourself today.”

“I am not myself,” Herr Müller said. “Not myself at all. I’m sorry, I will not be taking you to the Solo and Ensemble Contest this weekend. We will have to cancel our journey to Paris.”

“What?”

“Why?”

“Aren’t we playing well enough?”

“No, it is not you. I need to have surgery. Not to worry. It is only a small operation. Unfortunately, it cannot wait. I am so sorry. I will be in the hospital for the next five days.”

“Oh.” I slumped back in my chair. I’d packed for the trip last week. I’d saved every dime from babysitting the neighbor kids. I’d told my aunt Cassandra from Minnesota that I was going. She had sent me a camera for my birthday so I’d have one in Paris.

Vivian asked Herr Müller the kind of polite questions grown-ups ask about being sick. I didn’t even hear his answers.

So this is it, I thought. We’ll never play together again. Our parents had decided to let us go with only Herr Müller
for a chaperone because they had known him for years, but mostly I think they let us do it because they were all so busy, and they hated taking time off work.

At the end of tea, Herr Müller gave us a note to our parents about canceling the contest, letters of reference for our new music teachers, and a big bar of chocolate for each of us. It was the kind we all hated, with the raisins and hazelnuts in it. We walked out to the street, blinking more from shock than from the late-afternoon sunshine.

We shuffled down the street hardly noticing it was a beautiful day. After a dreary, dark winter and an equally dreary, damp spring, it was the warmest day of the year so far. I felt numb. The trip to Paris was the thing I was using to keep from thinking about saying goodbye to Giselle and Vivian when we moved in less than a month—one last trip for just the three of us. Berlin was the longest I’d been stationed anywhere in my whole life. I’d been in the same school for three years. When we drove somewhere on the weekend, some of the streets actually looked familiar. I even had a favorite restaurant down by the lake. We’d gone there to play at the beach and eat dinner two birthdays in a row. And I’d known Giselle and Vivian longer than I’d known anyone except my own brothers.

Vivian trudged along kicking at gravel. “There has to be a way to still go,” she said. “Can’t your parents take us?”

Giselle shook her head. “My dad is hosting that military ball, remember? The last one for American forces stationed
in Berlin. It’s such a big deal! That really old chancellor who got the Peace Prize is going to come, and some famous writer, plus officers from the French and British and German armies. Mom has been sweating the details for months. Do you know how many kinds of protocol there are for all those people? Scary.”

“Oh yeah,” Vivi said, “Mom and Dad are going, too. And Mom’s got some other big diplomatic thing this weekend. Something about what to do about all these little countries that are wanting to leave the Soviet Union. It’s crazy. She’s on the phone constantly. She even got this weird new kind of phone that you can carry around in your briefcase.”

They both looked at me.

“Look, Giselle, if your dad’s working, mine is.” My dad was on General Johnson’s staff. “And my mom has been working a ton of extra shifts at the hospital.” I shrugged. “Sorry.”

“We aren’t going to give up, are we?” Giselle said. “Come on! We have to think of something!”

Which is what I imagine officers say when they want their enlisted men to solve whatever the problem is. I started lining up excuses in my head. It’s not like Mom wanted to work the hours of a crazy person, but without her income, we could never afford a good violin and lessons.

“We need gelato!” Giselle commanded. “We can’t possibly think clearly without ice cream.”

“Exactly,” Vivian said, turning right instead of left at the
corner. There was a new shop on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate. “If everyone had just sat down for gelato together every afternoon, the Cold War would have been over a decade ago.”

Giselle laughed. “Ice cream—the instrument of world peace! Why else would we have kept Italy around all this time?”

Vivaldi and the
Four Seasons
, I thought. Rossini, Puccini, and the best violin makers in the entire world! But I didn’t say anything.

We turned north away from the S-Bahn and toward the Reichstag and the center of Berlin. It was hard to believe that only seven months ago this street had run beside the Berlin Wall—a concrete slab twenty feet tall, behind it a no-man’s-land with barbed wire, land mines, and armed guards ready to gun down anyone who tried to cross. Now we could just stroll right through the Brandenburg Gate into East Berlin.

Vivian walked in front, and even though I’d gone into East Berlin once already with my family, Giselle and I hesitated on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate. When your dad was a soldier stationed in Cold War Germany, it wasn’t just a wall to keep Communists from running away from home. It was a barrier between us and the enemy. Except they weren’t the enemy anymore. They were nothing but sad, shabby former Communists in a broken-down city that used to be the glamour capital of Europe: richer than London and wilder than Paris. Giselle looked at me,
and I shrugged back, and we both laughed to cover our pause and crossed over into enemy territory.

The area right around the Brandenburg Gate had been cleaned and tidied, for the sake of TV cameras, mostly. Last winter it had seemed like every news station on the planet was covering the New Year’s Eve dance-on-top-of-the-wall party. But the crowds were gone now. Powder gray crumbs of concrete crunched underfoot as we crossed where the Wall had been. Off to the right was a crew of German Army Pioneers testing for land mines. To the left a long line of dump trucks stood waiting for work crews to fill them with concrete and steel.

The East German neighborhood beyond the Brandenburg Gate was full of shuttered buildings and the empty doorways of apartments that belonged to people who had left everything behind for a chance to live in the West. The main signs of life were the street peddlers with their wooden trays full of Communist souvenirs, mostly Soviet army gadgets—insignia, watches, pocketknives, and the like. They were all young, clean-shaven men with cigarettes and tattooed arms.

“You buy, miss?” one of them said as I looked over his tray of army badges. Some of the insignia were easy to figure out—parachutes and submarines look the same no matter whose side you’re on—but others were harder to guess. I wanted the rank insignia that was the Soviet version of sergeant major for my dad. Father’s Day was less than a month away. Dad had a whole collection of army coins and patches
from his twenty years in the service. Giselle glanced at the pins and patches and then glared at the vendor.

“It’s not legal to sell these things, is it?”

Giselle’s dad was the commanding general of American forces in Berlin. You’d think she had rank herself, the way she bossed people around, even grown-ups. The crazy thing was, most people did what she told them to just because of the way she said things. Or maybe she could pull it off because she was going to be six feet tall, possibly by next week.

“No, miss, is very proper.” The peddler held up both hands to show he wasn’t hiding anything.

“Oh yeah? Explain that.” Giselle pointed to an open sack on the ground. It held what looked like tiny black pineapples.

“Oh my gosh!” I said. “Are those hand grenades?” I took a step closer.

“Jody!” Giselle shouted. “Don’t move!”

I froze.

“Those fat Frisbee things in the box behind the grenades. I’m pretty sure those are land mines.”

I slowly edged back toward her and Vivian, clutching my violin case across my chest.

“What do you people think you are doing?” Giselle said, putting on her father’s command voice. “You can’t have ordnance around civilians. It’s dangerous. You fools do know that that stuff tends to blow up from time to time?” She stretched up to her full five feet ten, hands on hips and glaring at the peddlers like they were a pack of bratty third graders.

They started to look nervous. A few of them glanced down the street like they were expecting Giselle to call up her own reinforcements.

“You stay right here, now. I’m going over to that phone booth to call the Polizei.” She turned away, shaking her head. “Land mines! Idiots!”

The peddlers shoved their wares into sacks and dashed off to the graffiti-tagged back alleys of East Berlin.

Giselle surveyed their departure with satisfaction. I just shook my head, once again dazzled by Giselle’s flair for command. It must be genetic.

“Think we should tell our dads?”

“Maybe,” Giselle said. “If he actually comes home tonight. I need to catch mine in the right mood for talking.”

I totally got what she was talking about. Dad had worked all night last night, too. I’d heard him come in for a shower and a shave about five a.m. Mom had gotten up to fix him breakfast and have their usual argument about the hours he worked, and Dad had had his usual pot of deeply dark coffee and then gone straight back to work without a nap.

“He probably knows,” Giselle said. She looked down the side street. “Dad talks to the German police commissioner about Soviet soldiers a lot these days.”

I nodded and kept walking. Without the peddlers, the street was practically empty. There had been stuff in the news about the Russian soldiers not getting paid. I wasn’t a genius history student or anything, but it seemed like if you
were going to stop paying soldiers, it would be smart to take away their weapons first.

We walked to the corner where Gelato Mario was an oasis of red tables and sparkling clean windows in a drab gray block of empty storefronts. I held open the door, and we filed in, dropping our cases and backpacks in the booth by the window.

From behind the ice cream counter Mario flashed a movie-star smile. “
Buon giorno!
What will it be, ladies?”

Vivian smiled. She said something in flawless Italian. Vivian was no one special; her mom was just the U.S. consul general to West Berlin, and Vivian was one of the ten smartest kids on the planet. She came to eighth grade for half days. The rest of the time she studied math and languages at the high school, and dance at the Berlin Opera Ballet. I could barely keep up with square dancing in PE. If I took ballet with dancers who spoke German and a teacher who spoke French and an accompanist who spoke Russian, my head would explode.

I studied the ice cream choices: hazelnut, espresso, cherry, spumoni.

“What? No mint chip?” I said. “What’s the matter? Is it against the law to have mint chip in this country?”

“It is not wise,” Mario replied in the grave tone most grown-ups reserved for talking about the economy. “With chocolate you must have orange or amaretto. Chocolate mint is not correct.”

“Let’s have sundaes,” Giselle butted in. “I’ll treat.”

“Mmm, yes,” Vivian said. “Let’s have doubles.”

They weren’t actually sundaes in the whipped cream, nuts, and hot fudge way. In Germany they made sundaes with liquor and fruit. Apparently it was perfectly legal to sell alcohol to kids, so long as ice cream was involved. I used to hate it when we first moved here, but now I’m not sure I want to go back to plain old banana splits.

“I don’t know, guys,” I said. “If I come home smelling like rum and cherries, Mom’s going to think we skipped out on our music lesson.”

“So we won’t go home,” Giselle said. “Not right away. We can tell our moms we went to the National Gallery. They aren’t going to mind if we look at art, are they?”

I should have said no. I should have gone straight home on the train like the good girl I’d always been and not made my parents worry, but it was our last afternoon together, and I didn’t want it to end.