All the men of our circle: brokers, shopkeepers, employees of banks and shipping companies, had their children take music lessons. It was a regular mania. Our fathers in their impotent longing for success had invented a lottery pool. But this gamble had children for its stakes. More than other cities, Odessa had been afflicted with the craze. In the course of a dozen years, our city had supplied the concert halls of the entire world with child prodigies. Both Mischa Elman and Gabrilovitch came from Odessa, and it was there that Jascha Heifetz made his debut.

As soon as a boy reached the age of four or five, his mother would take the puny creature to see Zagoursky. Zagoursky had started a factory of child prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent leather shoes. He dragged them from the bedbug-infested hovels of the Moldavanka, out of the stinking yards of the Old Market. Zagoursky taught them the elements of music. Then they were shipped to Professor Auer in Petersburg.

A powerful harmony vibrated in the souls of these agonized brats with blue, puffed heads. They were to become famous virtuosos! And so my father, too, decided to run after Heifetz and Mischa Elman. I was almost fourteen and had already outstripped the age of child prodigies, but I was so small and delicate that I might easily pass for eight years old. And in that lay all our hope.

I was taken to see Zagoursky. As a favor to my grandmother, he agreed to charge the small sum of one rouble a lesson. My grandfather Levi-Yitzhak was the town's laughingstock and pride. Attired in a top hat and a pair of long woollen drawers, he used to meander through the streets and dissolve doubts about the most obscure problems. He was asked why the Jacobins betrayed Robespierre, how artificial silk is manufactured, the nature of a goblin, and the meaning of a Caesarian operation. My grandfather was a match for all these questions. So out of respect for his wisdom and madness, Zagoursky charged us only a rouble a lesson. And it was only out of fear of grandfather that he took pains with me, for there was nothing to take pains about. The sounds that crawled from my violin grated like iron filings. I was the first to have my heart lacerated by those sounds—but my father refused to give up his idea. At home they could think only of Mischa Elman, whom the Czar himself had exempted from military service, and of Gabrilovitch, who had been presented to the king of England and had played at Buckingham Palace. Gabrilovitch's parents had purchased two mansions in Petersburg. The child prodigies brought fortune to their families. My father would have put up with poverty, but he yearned for glory.

Poor people who ate at our table spurred him on. “It's impossible,” they whispered in his ear, “it's impossible that the grandchild of such a grandfather shouldn't. . . .”

But I had other ideas. While practicing, I used to put a volume of Dumas or Turgenev on the music stand, and while scraping God knows what, I devoured page after page. In the daytime I would tell the kids of the quarter fanciful stories, and during the night I spent my time writing. Authorship was hereditary in our family. When Levi-Yitzhak approached old age, he began a story entitled “The Headless Man,” and worked On it all through his remaining days. I continued on his path.

Three times a week I would drag myself, loaded down with my violin case and music books, to Witte Street, formerly the Street of the Nobles, where Zagoursky had his apartment. There, lined up along the walls, stood hysterically inflamed Jewish women. To their feeble knees they hugged violins, much larger than their children, destined to be heard in Buckingham Palace.

The door of the professor's sanctum would open. Big-headed, freckled children would come staggering out of Zagoursky's study; they had necks as slender as flower stalks and a flush of stupor on their cheeks. The door would shut again, swallowing the next gnome. Behind the partition, the professor, with a ribbon tied in a bow in his reddish locks, skipped around, sang, and waved his baton with a great display of energy. Promoter of a monstrous sweepstakes, he had fits of inspiration and peopled the Moldavanka and the back-alleys of the Old Market with the ghosts of pizzicati and cantilenas. These melodies, later on, were polished to a diabolical sparkle by the hands of Professor Auer.

I felt out of place in the midst of this sect. A dwarf among dwarfs, I had heard another note in the voice of my ancestors.

It was some time before I took the first step to freedom. But one day I left home with my violin case, music, and a dozen roubles, the monthly cost of my lessons. I went down Nejinskaya Street. To reach Zagoursky's, I ought to have turned into the Street of the Nobles; instead, I mounted the Tirapolskaya and found myself at the waterfront. From that time on, my study hours were wafted away at those docks. Zagoursky's studio never saw me again. My pal Nemanov and I fell into the habit of going aboard the steamer “Kensington” to visit an old sailor, Mr. Trottibum. Nemanov was my junior by twelve months, but ever since the age of eight he had devoted himself to a kaleidoscopically wonderful trade. He had a genius for business and eventually realized his promise. He is now a New York millionaire and an executive of General Motors. Nemanov took me along because I always gave in to his wishes. He used to buy contraband pipes from Mr. Trottiburn. These pipes were made in Lincoln by the old sailor's brother.

“Gentlemen,” Mr. Trottiburn would address us, “remember my words: every man must take pleasure in making his own children. . . . To smoke a machine-made pipe is as bad as sucking an enema. . . . Have you heard of Benvenuto Cellini? . . . He was a craftsman, a master. My brother, who lives at Lincoln, could tell you the story of Cellini. My brother sticks to his trade. He has only one conviction, and that is that every man ought to make his own children. . . .”

Nemanov sold Trottiburn's pipes to bankers, foreign consuls, and rich Greeks. He made a good profit.

The pipes of the Lincoln craftsman had a breath of poetry about them. There was in each of them an idea, a drop of eternity. In their stems a little yellow eye glowed; their cases were lined with satin. I often tried to imagine the life that Matthew Trottiburn, the last of the pipe artists and rebel against the tide of events, led in old England.

“Impossible, gentlemen, to refute the fact that every man ought to make his own children. . . .”

_____________

The heavy waves near the jetty bore me farther and farther away from my home, heavy with the odor of onions and Jewish fate. I left the docks and made the beach beyond the jetty my new stamping-ground. There the urchins of Primorskaya Street spent their days on a tiny shelf of sand. From morning till night they strolled about naked, diving under the wharfs and stealing coconuts for their dinner while waiting for the better days when the barges of Kherson and Kamenka would come, loaded with watermelons which could be split open against the mooring-posts.

The dream of learning how to swim obsessed me. I was ashamed to confess to those bronzed children that, born in Odessa, I had not seen the sea until the age of ten, and that at fourteen I still did not know how to swim.

How late in life to learn such essential things! My childhood had been spent nailed to the Talmud, and I had lived the life of a sage. But while growing up, I began to climb trees.

I couldn't possibly learn how to swim. The hydrophobia of my ancestors, Spanish rabbis and Frankfort brokers, dragged me to the bottom of the sea. The water did not bear me up in the least. Completely exhausted and saturated with salt water, I used to stagger out of the sea toward my violin and music.

I had become welded to the symbols of my crime and always lugged them around with me. The contest between the rabbis and the sea continued until the moment the local Neptune, Efim Nikititch Smolitch, a proofreader of the Odessa News, took pity on me. His athletic chest harbored tender feelings for us Jewish boys. Nikititch reigned over a horde of rachitic, twisted waifs. He picked them up in the Moldavanka slums, led them to the seashore, dug them into the sand, made them do gymnastic exercises, dived with them, taught them songs, and, while they were being grilled in the perpendicular rays of the sun, told them stories of fishes and animals. To grown-ups, Nikititch would explain that he was a natural philosopher. Listening to his talk, the Jewish kids would burst sides laughing—they squealed and rubbed against his side like puppies. The sun sprinkled them with evanescent, lizard-like stains.

Nikititch had silently observed my duel with the sea. As soon as he understood that there was no hope left and that I was never to learn how to swim, he gathered me into his flock of protégés. His gay heart, free of all greed, of all anguish, was entirely given to us. . . . This man with copper-colored shoulders, with the head of an aging gladiator, and bronzed, slightly bandy legs, would lie there on the sands beyond the jetty, like the king of those waters, iridescent with gasoline and watermelons, looming among us children, ultimate sprouts of a tribe that cannot learn how to die.

For Nikititch I felt a love such as only a boy suffering from headaches and hysteria might feel for an athlete. I did not leave his side for an instant and was always on the alert to do him every possible favor.

He said to me: “Don't get excited. Strengthen your nerves. Swimming will come later, of itself. . . . What's this story of yours about the waves not holding you up? And why shouldn't they hold you up?”

_____________

Nikititch felt how I was drawn to him, and he made a favorite of me. He invited me to his attic. It was large and clean and covered with rugs, and he showed me his dogs, his pigeons, his hedgehog, and his tortoise. In return for these marvels, I presented him with the tragedy of my literary cravings.

“I suspected you of scribbling,” said Nikititch. “One can see it in your eyes. . . . Most of the time you don't look at anything. . . .”

He read my manuscript, shrugged his shoulders, passed his hand over his gray, tufted hair, and paced the attic.

“Can't escape it,” he said, drawling his syllables and with a pause between each word. “There's a divine spark in you. . . .”

We came out into the street. Nikititch stopped, struck the sidewalk violently with his cane, and looked straight at me.

“What is it you lack? . . . It's not being young that's a misfortune—you'll get over that with age. . . . What you lack is a feeling for nature. . . .”

He pointed with his cane to a tree with a reddish trunk and low spreading foliage.

“What's the name of that tree?”

I had no idea.

“What grows on this shrub?”

I did not know that either.

We were crossing the Alexandrovsky Square. Nikititch pointed out all the trees with his stick, caught hold of my shoulder when a bird flew by and forced me to listen to its call.

“What bird is that singing?”

I could not answer. I did not know the names of the trees, where the birds migrate to, where the sun rises, nor the hour when the dew falls.

“And you dare to write! One who has not lived with nature like a stone or an animal can't compose even two lines of any value in his lifetime. Your landscapes remind me of a description of a stage setting. What the devil were your parents dreaming of these fourteen years?”

What had they dreamt of? . . . Of unpaid notes, Mischa Elman's elegant mansion. . . . But I didn't tell this to Nikititch.

_____________

At Home I wasn't able to eat my dinner. . . . A feeling for nature. My God, why had I never thought of it? . . . Where could I find a man to explain to me the calls of the birds and the names of the trees? What did I know about it? . . . I could recognize lilac, and that only when in flower. Lilac and acacia. The Derebasovskaya and Gretcheskaya Streets were planted with acacias.

During the meal my father told still another story about Jascha Heifetz. On his way to see Robine, he had met Mendelsohn, Jascha's uncle. Just think, the boy earned eight hundred roubles a night. Calculate how much that would make at the rate of fifteen concerts a month.

I calculated: twelve thousand roubles a month. As I was going through the multiplication and was carrying four, I glanced out the window. Across the small courtyard, Mr. Zagoursky, my professor of music, advanced majestically leaning on a cane. He wore a gently flowing cloak, and his reddish locks stuck out like a fringe beneath his soft felt hat.

He had taken a long time to find me out. Over three months had passed since the day I had deposited my violin on the sand beyond the jetty. . . .

Zagoursky strode to the entrance door. I made a dash for the rear door, but the day before it had been nailed down as a protection against thieves. No escape. I shut myself in the toilet. Half an hour later, the whole family had gathered in front of the toilet door. The women were weeping. My aunt Bobka rubbed her fat shoulders against the doorframe and groaned. My father kept silent. Then he began speaking in a voice that was low and more distinct than ever before in his life:

I am an officer,” he said. “I have an estate. I hunt. The peasants pay me rent. I have placed my son in the cadet corps. I have no further trouble with my son. . . .

He grew silent. The women whined. Then a terrific blow shook the toilet door, my father was pounding it with his whole body, taking a run each time to ram it down.

“I am an officer,” he howled. “I hunt. . . . I'll kill him. . . . It's the end. . . .”

The hook gave way, the door was now held by a slide-bolt fixed by a single nail. The women were rolling on the ground, screaming, clutching at my father's feet. Half-mad, he tried to free himself. His mother, an old woman, hobbled up, attracted by the noise.

“My child,” she said to him in Yiddish. “Great is our sorrow. It has no bounds. Only blood is lacking in our house. I do not wish to see blood in our house. . . .”

My father groaned. I heard him walk away with dragging steps. The slide-bolt hung by a single nail.

I stayed in my fortress till late at night. When everybody had gone to bed, my aunt Bobka led me off to my grandmother's. It was a long walk. The moonlight fell in petrified designs on the unknown shrubs and the nameless trees. An invisible bird whistled, then stopped or perhaps fell asleep. . . . What bird was it? What was it called? . . . Does the dew fall in the evening? . . . Where is the Big Dipper? Where does the sun rise?

We were skirting Potchtovaya Street. Bobka gripped my hand tightly to prevent my running away. She was right. I was thinking of flight.