Dead People's Music Read online

  ‘But I have my dance performance. I can’t go to hospital.’ I was numb, muffled, not understanding what he was talking about.

  He looked at my mother. ‘When is your performance?’

  ‘At one fifteen. In about an hour.’

  ‘Well, I suppose a bit of exercise wouldn’t hurt.’

  My high kicks were amazing, adrenalin channelling a path through my sluggishness; the Moulin Rouge would have hired me. In the mopey scene, where I had to act all hang-dog about being on death row, I shed real tears. Then, when I was rescued from my cage by my owner, I howled for joy so loud that the third formers in the front row put their hands over their ears. I loved performing; I was going to be a famous actress when I grew up — if I grew up. The doctor hadn’t said whether this diabetes was terminal. I wore my tutu to the hospital — my mother had already called in sick and packed two new pairs of pyjamas, still wrapped in plastic, into a suitcase.

  ‘I’ve come to suck your blood,’ said the nurse in his best Transylvanian accent. Or maybe that’s how he normally talked — he was dark, perhaps Arab, a thick beard carpeting his face. His uniform looked extra white against his skin.

  I extended my punctured arm (over the past few days we had discovered that my left arm was best; the veins in my right were like river eels, hiding beneath the bank) and he pulled the green tourniquet tight, indicating that I should squeeze my fist. My veins plumped up, and when he inserted the needle, the blood leapt into the test tube. It was only the first; he had a purple-topped and yellow-topped one to fill. Then he plopped them into his kidney-shaped bowl (did they really put kidneys into them?) and slip-slapped off again in his white-soled shoes.

  I was in the adult ward, a clipboard hanging at the end of my bed, mint green curtains separating me from the young woman in a cystic fibrosis tent, the woman with the blood clot, the old lady whose removed gallstones were displayed like peppercorns in a jar. They had debated whether to put me in the children’s ward, where the curtains were bright and there were owl and teddy bear decals on the wall. But I was fourteen, too old for those things. I prodded the squishy green florist foam of my flower bunches — golds and reds from my parents, pinks from my form room — and my fingers left hollows. Megan and Samantha had brought me in tapes to go in my Walkman, a Tank Girl book and some calla lilies, but my mother threw them out because she said they were bad luck. My mother didn’t much like being in the hospital: she had worked here as a young woman, and she felt thwarted sitting by my bed. She couldn’t help herself from hospital-cornering my sheets, from criticising the nurses for gossiping too much at their station. She found herself pouring water for the old lady, elevating the blood-clot woman’s leg some more, shaking her head in the direction of the cystic fibrosis sufferer, hissing how lucky I was. My father came to visit me once, as did Nadia, but they didn’t stay for long — they were on their way to fencing class. Megan and Samantha had hung out for a while, and I was excited to see them, bouncing on my bed, but the initial buzz gave way to edginess. There were too many eavesdroppers around, and drawing the pale blue curtains only made my room-mates listen harder. We felt self-conscious, as if our lines had been rehearsed. Megan mentioned that she had seen Jeff again, but when I questioned her about it, she wouldn’t say much more, only that they were going to a movie that night. Samantha rolled her eyes.

  As a sick person I was a fraud: no drips, no oxygen masks, no traction. Another diabetic had been brought in; my mother found out that she had been vomiting and convulsing before she lost consciousness. I’d got off easy; in fact, I was probably wasting the taxpayer’s money. I listened to REM; I listened to The Cure. When my batteries ran out I cried with self-pity. Why hadn’t anyone thought to bring me some spares?

  Periodically, the diabetes educators would appear to teach me things. First, how to test myself with a lancet, dropping blood on the end of a stick, watching the second hand until it lapped the clock, then wiping the blood off with a tuft of cotton wool. Then I would have to wait another minute before I could match the colours with the chart on the bottle. Pale beige, light blue, I was okay, but too light, I might have low blood sugars. The remedy: five glucose tablets, wait five minutes, then a cheese sandwich for slow-release carbohydrate. I had to act quickly to stop myself from slipping into a coma. Dark green, dark blue, I was high and required more insulin, more exercise, less food.

  Next, the urine test. Here at the hospital I peed into a little aluminium foil container, to be transferred into a pink-lidded jar with my name on it. But at home I would pee directly onto a stick to see whether I had glucose or protein in my urine that would damage my kidneys. The colours on this test were pretty, a swatch of pale pink if there was only a trace of undesirables, a deep aubergine if I was high.

  Then there were the injections. I was to start on two, while I was still in my honeymoon period, but soon I would move on to four. I practised on an orange, its firm dimpled skin, its pith and fibrous inside echoing my own physiology. There were nerve endings like grass roots; I was to push the needle in on an angle in the hope that I went between them.

  There were a number of places where I could inject myself: my upper thighs, my stomach, my hips, my buttocks. The diagram echoed a butcher’s guide. But then I would have to expose my flesh, which I had swaddled since puberty. I would have to pinch a fold, and if I could do that, then I must be fat.

  I pulled the plastic off the base of the syringe, then the ribbed orange lid. I turned the long-acting, zinc-suspension insulin up and down, emulsifying it. Cloudy mixed with clear. I drew up the short-acting first, then the long-acting, flicking the bubbles out with my forefinger, making sure I didn’t push any of the insulin back into the bottle.

  The syringe made a popping sound, or maybe it was a sensation, as it passed through the cutaneous layers. I pushed down the plunger and the insulin seemed to stay beneath the surface, in a little throbbing lump. I pulled out the syringe, and a few drops came out.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said my nurse educator. ‘Plenty went in. Well done, your first injection. You’re very brave.’

  But I wasn’t brave; I was absent. I knew that something big had happened — my parents had bought me Doc Marten boots — yet I didn’t know the measure of it. The boots sat in the bottom of my hospital cabinet, and whenever I opened the door, out rushed the smell of leather, rubber and dye. They were very stiff. I would put them on and walk up and down the ward corridor to the bathroom and they would creak, digging into my feet. I thought that maybe I should feel sorry for myself, I should cry, but then I had a stack of Cosmos and Rip It Ups to read, and I could take the wheelchairs for a spin, skidding them round the corners, leaving rubber on the polished floor. Also I was special. A blur of doctors came to visit me, asking me questions. House surgeon, registrar, consultant, specialist, endocrinologist — the higher their ranking the less they seemed to worry.

  A week after I was admitted, I was released, with notebooks to record my sugar levels and photocopies to remind me what foods I should and shouldn’t eat. We stopped by the dispensary to buy two boxes of one hundred syringes, and then we dropped off at the pharmacy to pick up my own insulin, my own blood and urine monitoring sticks. My mother gripped the steering-wheel, and when the lights turned red, she looked at me nervously, smiling, as if I might be a different person now. And I was — somehow even more naked and ashamed than ever. My body wasn’t to be trusted; or maybe it discerned my self-hatred too clearly. It had destroyed an essential hormone-secreting organ as if it were the Death Star. What else might it do to me? Already the sunlight was too bright, the traffic noises too jangly; I wanted my neat hospital bed back, the cheerful cast of doctors and nurses.

  When I opened the door to my house, my sister hugged me, as if I had returned from a foreign country. The next week I would have to go back to school. I would have to put my books in a locker and sit in my classes as if nothing had happened. I would have to endure the sly glances, the whispers. I would have to excuse
myself to go to the bathroom halfway through a class because my blood sugars were too high; I would feel dizzy and faint in maths class, but be too self-conscious to administer the necessary glucose. That would call attention. That would announce my difference. In the mornings before school, my mother would count three Weet-bix into my bowl, slicing half a banana, pouring on half a cup of milk. She would help me with my tests, making sure I wrote the results and my doses in the correct squares. She would hiss impatiently as I prodded my skin, searching for a place where nerves didn’t grow. Just shove it in. Some mornings there seemed to be more of them, sprouting like weeds. ‘You’re doing really well,’ she would say, but her crimped brow would contradict her. I would withdraw the syringe and the blood would well, another bruise upturned like clods on my stomach.

  CHAPTER 3

  New York, 1936

  When Klara thought back to the ship, and the cabin that she and Esther shared, bed like a box, little curtains to pull across, she felt homesick, which was odd because she had only lived there for two weeks. And for the eight years before that, she was in Berlin with her Mama and Papa. She ought to be missing her room: the vine of flowers that grew up her wall, the dolls’ house, the dark wooden floor with its Persian rug, the rocking chair where her mother had nursed both Klara and Esther.

  And yet, she couldn’t put it together in her head. It was all in pieces, a game of memory, the cards facing down. When she recalled the fleur de lis pattern of her pillow, she could not summon the sheet to match. She could hear rugs being beaten in the courtyard, but she could not remember who held the cane switch.

  Klara was angry with herself because she couldn’t see all of her mother. Her hands took up too much space. How neatly her nails curved, how she buffed them to a shine, pushing her cuticles down with a cresent-moon-shaped instrument. Klara remembered Mama’s anger when she had taken the manicure kit out to dig in the geranium-planted window box, and again when she had eaten the plums being saved for the cake. But she was pleased she ate those plums: their sharp, sour taste was still on the back of her tongue, sometimes to be reconstituted into a whole mouthful.

  Her parents said they would come soon, once they had finished their important work. Klara reminded herself of that whenever she felt panicky about not being able to remember the colour of Mama’s eyes. Her parents had sent Klara and Esther away to their Aunt Dagmar’s in New York for safety, and they were writing letters, arranging foster families for other Jewish children. The other children weren’t as lucky as them; they didn’t have family in safe places.

  But now, as she sat fanning herself on the bed at Tante Dagmar’s Lower East Side apartment, the grind of the sewing machine coming from the next room, she didn’t feel safe. She wished that she was boxed in again in the cool ship, able to pull the curtains on her surroundings, to block out the tired green walls, the voices yelling on the streets, in Yiddish, in German, the horses, the cars. She longed for — oh yes, here was her home again, for once a whole chunk of it — the quiet drawing room in Berlin, the grand piano that she practised on every afternoon after school. She was good, she could play beyond her years, her teacher called her the kleine Mozartina. And she played because that’s what she most liked to do, creating little walls of sound against the kids who saw the yellow star stitched onto her coat and threw things at her.

  When she had played the piano in the ship’s dining room, the other passengers had cheered and clapped, and the pianist had said Klara would do her out of a job. Klara imagined herself wearing a long black dress, her hair knotted at the nape of her neck. In ten years’ time, that would be her.

  But she couldn’t practise the piano at Tante Dagmar’s because there wasn’t one. There was only a sewing machine, droning on G-sharp, E when it reversed, and bolts of fabric to be stitched into gowns for plump, rich women, who arrived with their little dogs. Klara wanted to play with the dogs, but usually the women wouldn’t let them out of their handbags, or if they did, the dogs would be skittish, peeing on the floor, snapping at her hand with their sharp teeth. Klara sometimes sat out on the stoop wiggling scraps of paper tied to string at the cats, but then she had developed red spirals on her skin which she scratched until blood appeared. Tante Dagmar said it was ringworm and smeared her with thick, smelly, pinkish ointment. She wasn’t to touch any more strange animals. Tante Dagmar said it would be better when school started up again; the weather would have cooled, and there would be more to keep Klara busy.

  Klara didn’t want to go back to school, though. She’d started before summer break, and she’d been unable to understand most of what her teacher was saying. Every day, she was taken out for an hour of English lessons, but her classmates were rough, some without shoes, speaking to each other in Russian or Polish, yanking the collars of each other’s shirts while the teacher scratched words onto the blackboard. When Klara finally worked up the courage to copy the English sentence in her book, carefully replicating the American-style handwriting, her teacher had not believed that she had done it, accusing her of cheating. Klara felt hot with anger whenever she thought of the teacher’s mean, fat face. How could she have cheated? Which one of the Russian children would have written the words for her? When it came time for break, Klara had no one to play with — Esther was at another school — so she stood in the yard alone, watching the girls skip and play hopscotch, the boys chase each other, shoot marbles. Then she envied the Russian children, all friends together.

  Esther was busy: she helped Tante Dagmar sew beads onto the rich women’s dresses. Tante Dagmar said having Esther help was like the old days, but it wasn’t really. In the old days, Tante Dagmar’s house used to be a factory, filled with women and men making suspenders, buttonholes and artificial flowers, relics of which could be found on bookshelves and windowsills. Tante Dagmar would stop sewing to prepare soup and bread for the workers and play with her two-year-old son, Sigi. He was a happy boy, she said, with a head of curls that people couldn’t help but run their hands through, always laughing and making others laugh. But then the Spanish flu came, and took away Tante Dagmar’s husband and her son.

  Klara could feel Tante Dagmar’s sadness, especially when Tante looked at Esther, who was born the same year as Sigi. Klara wished Sigi was still alive; he would have taken her on adventures, shown her all the neighbourhood hidey-holes.

  Tante Dagmar was kind to Klara and Esther, but something prevented her from wrapping her arms around them, from sitting Klara on her knee to read her a story. Klara didn’t think she would want that anyway: that was her father’s job. Whenever Esther or Klara asked how soon their parents would come, Tante Dagmar would stare at the glass jars of beads on the other side of the room and mutter, ‘I’m not sure. Soon, I think.’ Then her eyes would become sharp pins, fixing Klara in her place. ‘But are you hungry? Would you like some bread?’

  Klara climbed off the bed that she shared with Esther, and slid beneath it. It was cooler under there, and quieter. When she had begun hiding there, a thick pelt of dust covered the floor, flurrying when she sneezed. She’d swept it away, first greying the underside of her forearm, then using a dustpan and broom she’d found in the kitchen. Klara laid her cheek against the floorboards and closed her eyes. If she was lucky, she would hear the music.

  She didn’t know how to explain it. Through the thicket of voices, the Goldbergs and their noisy children, their tired yelling mother, was the sound her father used to make. The cello. Mostly she didn’t recognise the piece, but sometimes it was familiar: ‘The Swan’ from The Carnival of the Animals, which Papa had taken her to. Songs without Words, that Papa had said was by Mendelssohn. They were just fragments, but that was all she needed to put together the rest. Then she could remember Papa and Mama swinging her under the linden trees on the way to the concert. She could remember Papa’s cigars, the tiny portraits of white-haired ladies on the label, the way his lips crimped around the butt. Papa said they were rolled on a Cuban virgin’s thigh, and Mama scolded him when Esther asked he
r what a virgin was.

  Klara could remember the smell of rosin, the dust that rose as Papa pulled his horse-hair bow across the strings of his cello. Thinking about the horses, their plucked tails. She remembered asking Papa, ‘Please, may I learn the cello?’ but he told her that she needed to be bigger first.

  And she was bigger. Her skirt, which had once reached her shins, was now above her knees. Her shirt was tight against her back and she thought she heard the seams on her shoulders tearing slightly as she reached into the cupboards before dinner for the plates. She wondered how this music came to her: was there a pipe that ran under the Atlantic that her father was posting music down? Or was that the sound of him coming towards her?

  ‘Don’t be stupid, it’s not Papa,’ Esther had said when she’d discovered Klara under the bed. ‘That’s Herr Weiss in the basement.’

  But it couldn’t be, because Herr Weiss was old and only had one leg. You needed two legs to play the cello. She sometimes met Herr Weiss on the stairs but if she did, she was too scared to say hello. She would run instead, upstairs or down, sticking to the sides where the steps weren’t valleyed by feet, too panicked to feel the flowers of the pressed tin walls. She was scared because he might want her leg for himself, reaching out to snap it off like a twig. Herr Weiss always said hello to her, but she pretended that she didn’t hear him, that perhaps he was a ghost. She didn’t like to go into the streets, where there were men with burnt faces, tadpole-legged children in carts. Once, in Chinatown, she had seen two boys fused at the cheek. They ran down the sidewalk as if they were whispering to each other, their necks at odd angles. People made way for them, stopping to ogle; others were used to them, not looking up from their buckets of frogs and live crabs, claws tied shut so they wouldn’t tear each other to bits. Klara had wanted to scrub the image of the two boys out of her eyes, but she couldn’t.