Wunderkind

by Nikolai Grozni

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Now in paperback, “ Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visual, and visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter” ( Patti Smith). Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity in the bleak and controlled environment of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1980s, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost. Confined to the militaristic Music School for the Gifted for most of each day and a good part of the night, Konstantin exults in his small rebellions—smoking, drinking, and mocking Party pomp and cant at every opportunity. Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with inflamed passion, transported by unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Debussy, and Bach, even as he is cursed by his teachers’ numbing efforts at mind control. Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind ’s dazzling portrait of youthful turmoil gives us a stunningly urgent, exquisitely observed, and wonderfully tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain at the very end of the Cold War while reminding us of the sometimes life-saving grace of great music.

Release date: June 12, 2012

Publisher: Free Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

Wunderkind

Rachmaninov,
“Vocalise,” op. 34, no. 14

November 3, 1987

Russian midgets are the tallest and Russian watches are the fastest, went the joke, and my watch—a Sputnik, which I had bought in Moscow after my recital at the National Conservatory—lived up to its reputation. On average it gained about two extra hours a week, which, considering my incurable habit of arriving late for every class or meeting, was quite helpful. I kept it in the front pocket of my brown leather shoulder bag, as I couldn’t bear having anything on my wrist.

“It’s somewhere between ten thirty and eleven,” I told Irina, who was rubbing the hair of her violin bow with a piece of dark-red rosin. She was leaning up against the window, her right foot pointing away, toward the door, looking at me with her turbid green eyes in a manner at once provocative and inviting. We’d locked ourselves up in room 59, on the fifth floor, skipping classes as we usually did every other Tuesday. Below and around us, the diligent hierodules in red, blue, or Komsomol ties were memorizing Mendeleyev’s periodic table, singing hymns to the gods of dialectical materialism, transcribing four-part inventions, reciting Mayakovsky. Occasionally, the voice of Negodnik, the history teacher, echoed up into the stairwell outside like a stray bassoon.

“I’m going to get you this time,” Irina said, and she tried pulling my shirt out of my blue uniform pants with her bow. “Before this is over, you’ll be running naked through the whole school.”

“That’s what you said last time,” I reminded her, and I emptied the contents of my bag on top of the piano: Chopin’s Préludes, Études, Ballades, and Scherzos; Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet; Scriabin’s sonatas; Liszt’s transcendental études.

“You start first,” Irina said, and she opened to Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata no. 4 for solo violin. “Play the opening seven lines of the Allemande in real tempo, using only your right hand.”

“And if I make a mistake?”

“You’re going to run to the west-wing bathroom wearing nothing but your underwear!”

Irina laughed like a child, tossing her long black hair back and holding her stomach. I sat at the piano and scanned the chromatic zigzags of sixty-fourth notes, an army of angry ants taking the opening page by storm. Playing violin partitas a prima vista on the piano was quite tricky, since notes that seemed nearby on the violin fingerboard were often miles apart on the keyboard. But I wasn’t scared. I just wanted her.

“This is stupid, Irina,” I said, standing up and moving closer toward her. “You’re going to get me kicked out of school. Let’s just skip the duel, and the striptease, and move on to other things.”

She raised her leg and stopped me where I was, her boot digging into my ribs. “Play the Allemande!”

I sat back down at the piano and took another look at the score, noting the double sharp, the triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets, the high B, B flat, and A flat perched four and five lines above the staff, the hazardous string of sixths running up and down, the stretched-out chords. Then I played the entire page, fast and confident, like a well-rehearsed étude, even finding time to observe the accents.

“You’re such a dork!” Irina exploded, in irritation. “God, do you ever make a mistake?”

I could barely contain my joy. I was good, damn it. Really good. Plus, I had the perfect thing for Irina: “Juliet as a Young Girl,” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

“Well, honey, I think you better start undressing. You’re not going to get through this one.”

“Watch how you talk to adults!” Irina said, pointing her bow at me.

“You are just a year older.”

“Yeah, but that’s just in human years. I am talking about my soul, stupid!”

She set the score on her violin stand and studied the whimsical scales ridden with accidentals, biting her lips. “And if I screw it up?”

I closed my eyes, savoring all the things that I could have her do. “Then I want to see you walk, slowly, across the third floor, past Teachers’ Headquarters, barefoot, wearing your uniform dress unbuttoned, with nothing underneath.”

I tapped my foot, giving her the tempo at which “Juliet as a Young Girl” is played. Irina looked as if she was going to kill me. She was prettiest when she was angry, the passion and sorcerous impulses of her Gypsy ancestors turning her skin darker, her eyes quicker, her muscles tighter.

She began phenomenally, demonstrating the best bow work I’d ever seen, but then, in bar six, she suddenly let all the notes drop and collapsed in the chair by the piano.

“I have a better idea,” she said, resting the violin in her lap.

“Don’t try to get out of it.”

“No, listen! I’m raising the stakes—I’m going to play something that will make you cry.”

“No chance.”

“If I don’t succeed, I’ll walk through the entire school completely naked. How about that? But if I do succeed, you’re going to—let me think . . . take your pants off and enter your classroom through the window, like some kind of lunatic.” She giggled with abandon, and I detected a few violet notes that reminded me of the fire with which she craved the secret pleasure.

“And how exactly am I going to enter my classroom through the window?”

“You’ll have to go out this window and walk around the ledge.”

“Walk! That ledge isn’t even wide enough for my toes! Not to mention that there’s nothing to hold on to.”

I knew the ledge in question, because not long ago I’d had to stand on it in order to retrieve my report card, which someone had tossed behind the drainpipe on the fifth floor.

“Well?”

“You’re crazy, Irina. Really. But that’s OK, because you will never make me cry.”

Smiling, Irina adjusted the pegs of her violin, drawing a long sol, re, la, and mi with her bow, tucked away her hair on both sides with bobby pins, unfastened the top three buttons of her navy blue uniform dress, and then, legs astride, began playing Rachmaninov’s “Vocalise.”

I couldn’t look at her, because she made me terribly horny. Instead, I looked out the window and thought about the frozen rain that had fallen overnight, leaving everything coated with a thin film of ice. The chestnut trees, still bearing a few yellow-brown leaves, glistened in the dull November sun like fragile glass sculptures. Across the street, the dog-rose bush by the pond in Doctors’ Garden resembled a crystal broach, its scarlet fruits shining like rubies. The gray stucco facades of the apartment buildings were wrapped in silver foil; silver tears ornamented the window sills. Irina was weaving funeral wreaths, honoring each descending note like a fallen hero. The grasping, then the sudden release—wasn’t that the fundamental trait of the Slavic soul? The downward spiral, the darkness, the melancholy, but then also the letting go of all of it, the opening of the great gates of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. I had been clutching to my miserable existence for too long; playing the piano like a machine, obsessing about things that only made me weaker, fighting with others to be number one. I knew that one day I would let go of everything that I cared about. I would rise above it, and I would be happier, for a moment. Si-do-mi-sol-la; going up, like a bird.

I thought about our first kiss, in seventh grade, when Irina and I had rented a small rowboat by the pond at Eagle Bridge; I thought about the cities I’d visited during my performances in Italy—Bologna, Venice, Naples, Rome. Perhaps the difference between me and the other kids in school was that I knew for a fact that we were all imprisoned in a counterfeit reality. I had peeked over the wall and seen what lay beyond. I had proof: a silver Parker pen given to me as a gift by a southern Italian family that had wanted to adopt me after one of my concerts.

Irina returned to the beginning, repeating the main theme. It hadn’t occurred to me before just how painful the F natural was, coming right after the firebird ascent from the underworld, as E minor moved into F major; how sobering it was, how disheartening. I suddenly remembered what Igor the Swan had said to me last time I’d met him on the street, in front of the school. “We’ve all been created idealists!” he had announced with his habitual bravado, shaking his finger at the sky.

Now my eyes were stinging, but this didn’t have much to do with Irina’s rendition of the “Vocalise.” At least not entirely. There was something devastating about my chamber music teacher’s pronouncement. Because if we were all created idealists, then life was bound to be one relentless disappointment. But then, there was also music. We unlearned the lies with one hand and repeated them with the other.

I turned to Irina. She had stopped playing and was looking at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. Would she really send me off to do something that stupid? She would, of course. A deal was a deal. One way or another, she’d made me cry.

I took my shoes off, then my ugly uniform pants and socks. Luckily, the ledge wasn’t icy. I tied the shoes together and hung them over one shoulder, my pants over the other. Then I stepped out the window and, facing the stucco wall, extended my right foot onto the ledge. Irina giggled behind me, a hand over her mouth. She found the whole thing amusing! Or maybe she thought I’d give up. Two sidesteps to the right, and there was no longer anything to hold on to. The distance to the corner of the building was about ten meters. Then another ten meters from the corner to my classroom window. And what if it was closed?

I looked over my shoulder and down at the tin roof extending over Chamber Hall No. 1, littered with textbooks, brooms, and sponges. What an absurd way to die! Yet not so much more absurd than my life in Tartarus, under the granite skies, during the reign of the red midgets. But I couldn’t afford to panic now, tiptoeing sideways five stories aboveground, bearing my white underwear to the elderly devushki next door. I knew the feeling of becoming suddenly self-aware while playing in front of a large audience; the halfway panic that seizes your mind and body when you realize that you’ve been playing a Chopin ballad for what seems like ages, and you’ve yet to go through the coda. To forget oneself again, once you’ve woken up in the middle: that’s the hardest thing to do onstage, and perhaps in life. I would make a mistake one day, that much I knew for sure. One day I would fall. Just not today.

From where I stood, I could hear the high-register notes of the Yamaha in Chamber Hall No. 2, five stories below. Someone was rehearsing Chopin’s Prélude in A Minor with unabashed barbarism, exaggerating the inherent ugliness in the chord progression. Balancing on the ledge of the building with nothing to hold on to except my will, I thought back to my twelfth birthday, when Ladybug had given me the sheet music of the complete preludes and instructed me to spend a night reading the A-minor prelude, without touching the piano. In this way, before I ever heard this prelude played, I’d heard it in my mind. I’d heard the raw chromaticism in the left hand and the bleak, determined voice in the right. I’d heard the voice and the accompaniment drifting apart until the voice was completely alone, a quiet monologue going nowhere, saying nothing. What I hadn’t heard while reading the sheet music was the left-hand groove, evoking the sound of a broken barrel organ played in the streets of Paris, or Warsaw, in the middle of winter, an eternal winter with gray skies and chandeliers of ice and stray dogs sleeping on steaming manhole covers. On the bottom staff—the taste of earth, worms, and dust; the smell of dead leaves and frankincense. On the top—the luminosity of awareness making sense of transience and predestination. Three quiet major chords marked the moment of death, because death was sweet. It was our true home, the home we’d left and been trying to get back to. It’s what we had passed through before and would pass through again, a moment of truth that suspended the weight of thought, the weight of the will to inhabit a dead universe.

The third bell rang just as I reached the corner and edged myself toward the window of my classroom, which, fortunately, was open. “Here she comes,” I heard Lilly announce inside. “All students rise!”

Six more meters, maybe seven. I moved slowly sideways, imagining that my fingers were magnets that snapped onto the stucco wall with great force. I felt the frightened eyes of passersby on Oborishte Street, but I refused to look down or behind me. One last step and I was safe. I sat comfortably inside the wide window frame and put on my shoes and pants. The fear was gone now, along with the nausea.

I peeked in through the curtains just as the Raven, flanked by Angel and Ligav and shaking all fifty-six bracelets, entered the door and toddled to the middle of the classroom, placing a triangle, a pair of compasses, a daybook, and her purse on the large teacher’s desk. It deserves to be pointed out that the teacher’s desk—in itself an instrument of power—was marred by five white horizontal lines that stood as a permanent reminder of the laborious task of sanding down graffiti that had been etched into the wood with a knife and then filled in with ink, an anonymous five-line manifesto articulating the reality of dating girls who are also professional musicians. The manifesto read: “Lesbians play the piano. Whores play the violin. Airheads play the flute. Bears play the cello. Singers have no brain.” Even the girls in our class had to admit that the manifesto contained some incontrovertible truths, though they were quick to point out that all boy musicians, for their part, were socially retarded, total imbeciles, pussies in love with their mothers, or all of the above—which was pretty much true as well.

Angel had volunteered to be on duty again. Being on duty meant that you were responsible for making sure that the blackboard was spotless, the water in the bucket was clean, the sponge was sitting on the board sill, and there was enough chalk to last until the Americans dropped the bomb on us.

I glanced at the exemplary students in the middle file—Lilly, the violinist; Dora, the cellist; the two Marias; and the twins, Ligav and Mazen, both untalented French horn players who always acted like sixty-year-old pedants—nodding while holding their chins, contemplating the life-altering wisdom of arithmetic with furrowed brows, ever ready with an Aha! were, for example, our history teacher to announce that the French Revolution had actually started in 72 B.C. in southern Italy and had been led by Spartacus, a natural Communist who well understood the works of Marx and Engels without even having to read them.

Normally, I sat alone at the second-to-last desk in the right row, behind Bianka and Isabel. Bianka’s parents were Hungarian Jews, but that wasn’t something you talked about. She wasn’t a particularly good pianist, which was kind of hard for me to swallow because I’d had a mild crush on her since seventh grade. Even now, in ninth grade, with everything that had happened between me and Irina, I was still curious about Bianka, not least because she was an aspiring young apparatchik and it was fun to imagine what it’d feel like to do it with the enemy. Once in a while we met before school or hung out in the afternoon. We sat together during the evening recitals and walked in Doctors’ Garden. We’d been doing all of this for two years and we hadn’t ever touched hands. My friend Alexander—last desk in the left row—claimed it all had to do with the fact that Bianka had no tits. Girls with no tits, he once told me as we smoked in the attic during long recess, have zero passion. Not that I believed him. He’d never had a relationship with a girl beyond fucking tenth graders in a school bathroom.

The Raven was incredibly short—though not short enough to qualify as a midget—and wore a black skirt, stiletto heels, and a woolen cardigan the sleeves of which were rolled up above her elbows. Her wavy, black-dyed hair seemed to be styled after a lion’s mane. She had a triangular chin and an excessive, permanently inflamed triangular nose which created the impression that she was always on the brink of bursting into hysterics.

“Dear Teacher and Comrade,” Angel began the mandatory report joyfully, “the students from grade nine, section B, are fully prepared to begin geometry class. Absent today are students number two, ten, and fourteen. This report is presented by student number one.”

“I’m not absent!” I said as I slipped through the open window and stood behind the teacher’s back, causing a ripple of suppressed laughter to pass through the room.

The Raven turned around abruptly and examined me from head to toe. I looked ridiculous in my school uniform. The blue polyester jacket and matching pants were too tight for me, while my white shirt was always stained and wrinkled. I had ripped the school’s badge (an improbable, poorly executed fusion of a harpsichord and an open book) off my sleeve, tearing a hole in the jacket. I kept the badge in my pocket so that I could show it to the government agents patrolling the streets.

“Where were you when I came in?” the Raven asked me wrathfully, testing the sharp end of her compasses against her thumb.

“There,” I answered, pointing at the gunmetal sky hanging low above the sea of rooftops.

Lilly raised her hand and stepped forward. “I’d like to explain that Konstantin just came in through the window. And he has brought nothing to write on!”

She glanced back at me and then at Bianka, with a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it grimace.

“Greetings, students!” the Raven shouted, ignoring Lilly’s comment.

“Long live the teacher!” everyone shouted back.

“Sit down! That doesn’t apply to number fourteen, however. Number fourteen is going to prove the theorem that we discussed last time. Go on, pick up a stick of chalk.”

“I had a recital last night,” I said. “I didn’t have time to study.”

The Raven let out a laugh in her heavy smoker’s baritone. “So what? Everyone in—”

“The Communist Party, and the higher echelons of power, including the National Institute for Gnomics and the Ministry of Forests and Heavy Metals!” barked Alexander, jumping from his seat to perform a military salute. Short and beefy, Alexander had a doughy face and angelic blue eyes that concealed a cruel streak. He played the piano but was training to become an opera singer. We’d been friends since the fourth grade.

“Sit down!” the Raven commanded, her face flushed with anger. “Interrupt me one more time, Alexander, and you’re out! As I was saying, everyone in this school plays an instrument and performs in public, and that cannot diminish their ability to study all the subjects that are going to teach them how to become respectable members of the working class. Without physics, biology, chemistry, math—without math, you’re nothing! You’re half human, despite the fact that everyone may treat you as if you’re somehow special.”

The Raven, ever the staunch empiricist, was perpetually irritated by the fact that students of the Sofia Music School for the Gifted were taught physics, biology, chemistry, algebra, and geometry only through the ninth grade. She couldn’t bear the thought that one day we’d all immerse ourselves in the sorcery of sound, perfectly free to forget that the sciences ever existed.

“All Bach and Chopin did was transpose basic mathematical principles to the field of music,” the Raven went on. “Anything you can think of is explained by math. Even—”

“The unanimous declaration of the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party expressed the view that our immediate and long-term goals are—”

“Alexander!”

“Disarmament, stabilization, and the abolishment of the Cult of the Person, without saying who the Person was, since naming the Person would also mean creating a Cult of the Person, which—”

“Hand me your report book and leave the classroom!” the Raven screamed, pounding the table with a clenched fist. At any moment, Angel would offer to bring her a glass of water.

Alexander marched past the Raven, right hand raised in salute, head turned to the left, face twisted in a vacuous smile—just like the cretinous soldiers from the Military Academy one would see marching in front of the mausoleum on days of national celebration. As he passed me, I nodded my thanks. Thanks, kopeleh, for mocking the bitch.

Just before exiting, Alexander turned around and took a bow. Then he slammed the door with enough force that the soprano and pianist practicing down the hall fell silent and an angered teacher inquired loudly whether this was a school of music or a circus.

Standing close to the Raven, one could never resist the urge to examine the enormous hairy mole at the base of her nose, and her bushy eyebrows, thick enough to hide a small pencil in, and perhaps a few paper clips, for good measure.

“Give me an F,” I said and headed for my desk. I wanted to slap Lilly on the neck and knock all her stuff on the floor, but then I remembered that day when I had decided to sit in on one of the regular after-school orchestra sessions in Chamber Hall No. 1 attended by all the string students—they were playing Schubert, I think—and the conductor told everyone to stop so that he could hear Lilly play her part alone. The toxicity of her playing—the radiation—made everyone absolutely sick. Then again, it wasn’t her fault that she had been born a peasant, with the musical proclivities of a crocodile, and—with the help of her daddy, a Party member, and a system that championed mediocrity—ended up enrolled in a music school for the gifted. If you’ve ever competed with other musicians for a prize, you know that achieving perfection can cost your life. One wrong note, one convoluted melodic phrase, and you could end up in an insane asylum—or worse, in a bathtub with slit wrists. To see mediocrity thrive in a place where perfection was the norm, then, was not just offensive; it was torture. Still, I felt sorry for Lilly. She knew she was useless. The untalented always know what they’re worth. That’s their tragedy.

“Get back to the blackboard and start working on the theorem,” the Raven said calmly to me now, flipping through the daybook. “You’re going to have to earn your F, number fourteen. And if you decide to ignore me, I’ll kick you out and put you down with an absence—I see here that one more absence is just what you need to have your personal standing lowered to Satisfactory. And we all know what a slippery slope it is from there. I wonder what kind of pianist you’ll be once you’re kicked out of the Sofia Music School for the Gifted!”

Most of the sheep—Ligav, Mazen, Angel, Lilly, and Emile (a befreckled pianist with thin blond hair)—burst into laughter. Which was absolutely fine. After nine years of school and four years of government day care, where the bad kids were sent home with black stickers on their blue uniforms, I was virtually immune to every form of humiliation, except the kind that occurred while performing onstage. In the end, it was who you were onstage that really counted. The Raven and the sheep could never hurt Konstantin the pianist. Even standing idle here, beside the blackboard, a piece of chalk in my hand, I still made them feel small. When I laughed with them, I laughed at their pedestrian imagination. As for the Raven, shaking her fifty-six bracelets, she was just a cursed old spirit with an insatiable appetite for revenge and not a single blessing. I could see it in her eyes. These lands were infested with old, conniving, fallen spirits: the spirits of Thracian and Mongol warriors, of Roman slaves, of blinded and beheaded Serbs and Bulgarians, of exiled Greek philosophers, of Turks and Illyrians; they say that everyone born here is cursed, and it’s true that I, too, carried the shadow of the curse in my soul.

I couldn’t remember exactly how the feud between the Raven and me had started. Had she hated me from the moment we met five years before? Or had she only begun to hate me a few years later, when her niece, a second-rate piano player with waist-long hair and incredibly short fingers, was admitted to the school under dubious circumstances? Or did it all start in sixth grade, when my father, during his last appearance at a parent-teacher conference, told the Raven he’d given up on me?

“Draw an acute triangle and label the angles,” the Raven said, without turning around to look at me.

“Excuse me . . .” said Slav, sitting at the front desk near the door, as he held his pen and pointed at his lips and tongue, which were stained with black ink. Slav—a violinist who looked remarkably like Paganini—was known around the school for his habit of sucking the ink out of his pens. He claimed that he did this in order to earn a trip to the bathroom and get away from the teachers, if only for a few minutes. On any given day of the week, Slav might be seen walking around the building, carrying his cracked, hundred-year-old violin case, ink smeared all over his face, hands, shirt, and jacket. Both he and Ivan—another violinist who sat next to Slav in class—were very talented, especially Ivan, and were often cited as proof of the widespread view that gifted musicians were invariably messed up in one way or another. Ivan, for instance, was capable of transcribing the first ten bars of a four-voice fugue upon a single hearing—a feat of genius bordering on sickness, for even the best trained ears in the school could transcribe only seven or eight bars of monophonic melody after a single hearing. Ivan was also the kid who famously walked onstage to give a recital (a bow in his right hand and a violin in his left), tripped, and fell to the ground, his hands stretched behind his back like a pair of wings, in defiance of every self-preservation instinct known to man. He broke his nose and split an eyebrow, but hadn’t let his bow and violin touch the floor, which, as he later explained, would have been a “major faux pas.”

Slav returned from his trip to the bathroom with water dripping from his face and hair, his lips still black from the ink. I had been standing in front of the blackboard for ten minutes now and was prepared to stand another thirty. The Raven wanted me to feel humiliated, to feel as if I had walked onstage and suddenly forgotten every note from my repertoire.

“Just write anything!” Lilly complained.

“He’s wasting everyone’s time,” the twins murmured, dusting the sleeves of their jackets. I wasn’t embarrassed to look at the faces of my classmates. They had all stabbed me in the back, at one time or another. Except Bianka and Alexander. But none of this really mattered to me. This wasn’t a stage, and geometry had nothing to do with life. Life was so much larger than the Raven and her dreadful mole, her Pythagorean bracelets, her meaningless numbers; larger than the glaring faces of my classmates, the mustard-colored classroom, the ripped linoleum floor, the Chaika upright with dented lacquer and missing lid; it was larger than the seven-foot-tall windows with their century-old locking mechanisms and brass handles, the clay-tiled rooftops, the golden dome of Nevski Cathedral, the tree limbs weighed down with ice,