Uncle Rudolf

I promised to pass on the message and did so, on the twenty-third of February, 1937, on the platform at Victoria Station. It was something to say to the man who had lifted me up in his arms till my face was level with his. Uncle Rudolf laughed, and kissed me on both cheeks.

—I am no hero, Andrew. I am a hero on the stage, but nowhere else.

The final part of my last, week-long journey with my father took three days. We crossed the Hungarian plains in darkness, with only the black shapes of trees visible from the window. Then there were the mountains of Austria and Switzerland to marvel at. The French countryside, which I would visit with Uncle Rudolf in the autumn of 1950, when he was intent on educating me in matters of the spirit, seemed dull by contrast.

The train stopped at each border. Soldiers carrying guns came aboard and examined everybody’s papers. I remember that one of them, an Austrian or perhaps a German, pulled a frightened face in mockery of my own. His feigned look of terror made me smile, but it angered my father, who muttered words the man understood, for he instantly reassumed his stern expression.

I wasn’t scared of the guns, in truth. It was the future, of which I had been unaware before, that caused me to be fearful. I knew this solely from the gnawing pain in my stomach, which spoke of things unknown. A similar gnawing pain would afflict me years later, with the recognition of a love that could neither be mentioned nor properly gratified – a love, paradoxically, that has sustained me for twenty-five years of solitude.

Here I was, in London, safely delivered by the French guard – who gained a small fortune in English money from my smiling uncle – looking about me, bewildered.

—You will be Andrew, Andrei. Andrew. For all the time you are in my care.

I was still in his arms. He was bearing me out of the station and into the chauffeur-driven car that was waiting for us.

—This is my nephew, he said to the driver in the new language I would soon be learning.

—Welcome to England, Andrew. My uncle translated Charlie’s greeting, and instructed me to say thank you, which I somehow did.

—Thank you. My first new words on that first evening.

I had never been in a lift, because we had no such modern thing in our town, but here I was, with my uncle’s hand on my shoulder, going up and up to his apartment on the top floor of Nightingale Mansions. That lift would become a golden cage in which I was happy to be imprisoned. I loved the way it clanked to a stop. In summer, when most of the Nightingale’s residents were on holiday in the south of France, I lived in my cage whenever I was free to play, working the magic handle that set it in motion, jumping in and out of it as the mood took me.

I heard the clanking sound for the first time that evening, and then here I was entering my uncle Rudolf’s London home. I was hugged and kissed by Annie, his housekeeper, who smelt of a soap I would discover was called carbolic, and who whispered Andrew, Andrew, over and over again, into my ear.

—You poor, lovely boy, she was saying, you poor, lovely boy. I heard affection in her voice, but with no knowledge of what she was really telling me. Annie would say to me later, as she poured porridge into my special bowl, that I was her poor, lovely boy from the moment she saw me on that cold February night. I was her clever boy, too, for speaking English so well.

My uncle’s flat was sumptuous. The word was unknown to me in 1937, for I had not been raised in anything like luxury. My parents had had no cause to use it, ever. Somptuos. Our house in the small country town – the house I was expecting to live in again – was humble, and humbly furnished. But Uncle Rudolf’s furniture was of a kind I could not even dream of, and had no words to describe until I became the English nephew he wanted me to be. Although I was tired and confused, my eyes took in the vast sofa, the shining mahogany table, the chaise longue, the grand piano, the chandelier, and the paintings and drawings that covered every wall. I gawped. I gawped in wonder, in utter astonishment.

I slept alongside my uncle that night. He sang me to sleep with a lullaby.

—Annie burns the toast to perfection, said Uncle Rudolf in the old language. I have trained her well.

It was at breakfast, on my third day in England, that he announced he had to visit Paris. Urgent business. A chance to sing, perhaps, at the Opéra. He wished he could take me with him, but it would not be fun for me, waiting in some lonely hotel room for an uncle who was engaged elsewhere. Annie and Teddy would keep me amused, and Charlie would drive me around London, showing me all of the sights, and he would call me on the telephone, speaking the words we both understood. I was not to be worried or upset. He would be back with me by Friday, at the very latest. I was in safe hands.

Those safe hands were Annie’s, Teddy’s and Charlie’s – my uncle’s doting servants. I sat in the kitchen with the perspiring Annie, watching as she prepared the food that was so different from anything Mama had cooked for me; and I walked with Teddy Grubb to the bank that was proud to have Rudolf Peterson’s custom, and where I was given a freshly minted pound note by the cashier, and then I was Charlie’s happy passenger for an entire rainy afternoon, seeing nothing of the promised sights but revelling in the fact – the unlikely fact – that I was in a car the like of which the people in our town would not have believed existed.

I rode in state that day, I realize, and innumerable times after. The Debt Collector’s grandson might have been a prince, to look at him.

What I remember – what I cannot fail to remember in the light of what I was to learn – of that first telephone conversation with my uncle is that he did not tell me the truth. It was part of his deceitful plan to save me for as long as possible from griefs I was too young to bear. He sounded buoyant as he told me he had been in the company of a beautiful woman. Paris was the place for beautiful women.

He brought me back a souvenir. It was a model of the Eiffel Tower, from the top of which, thirteen years later, he and I would survey the city he had arrived in thirty years earlier with the intention of becoming the finest lyric tenor in the world.

My pen is darting across these pages, yet I fear he will elude me, the last and most substantial of my three dear ghosts. ‘My pen’; ‘these pages’ – how quaint I must seem, how moribund, in this age of spectacularly advanced technology. But the pen and pages are appropriate since I am writing of the Rudolf Peterson his public would not have understood, or even applauded, in those vanished years of his immense fame. The music he sang deals only fleetingly with sorrow, but sorrow was of my uncle’s essence, and it encompassed more than his own fierce melancholy, as I came to understand. To begin with, I noticed that sorrow only in glimpses. I would enter a room – in London, or in Sussex – and he would be unaware of my silent presence. He was often staring ahead of him, contemplating something painful, I guessed, to judge by the look of blankness on his normally lively features. Then, seeing me, he would lose the discontented expression in an instant and start chatting to his beloved nephew of everyday concerns, such as the surprise dish he had asked Annie to prepare for supper. With Andrew to entertain and interest, it seemed, there was no call for sadness.

The voice you can hear today on the Golden Age label gives just a hint of what he was about. It is bright and confident, as befits a reckless vagabond; a prince who believes he is a simple gypsy fiddler; a champagne-guzzling gambler who plays roulette with no thought of a ruinous tomorrow. These were the kind of improbable men Uncle Rudolf impersonated, giving them – for as long as he could bear to – angelic expression. But the angel wanted to sing of other matters; of other, more serious, concerns, and he had already left it too late to do so by the time I arrived in his life.

—You are my mascot, my lucky charm, my uncle said as I watched his face in the dressing-room mirror being transformed into that of Zoltan Kassák, the brigand with whom the Crown Princess Zelda falls at first hopelessly, and then triumphantly, in love. Zoltan has a duelling scar on his left cheek, which Uncle Rudolf created each night with a strip of blood-red plasticine stuck on with theatrical glue.

—It mustn’t look too livid, he told me as he dabbed it with powder. Zelda has to find it irresistible.

As Zoltan, my uncle wore immensely baggy trousers that billowed above his leather boots. His brigand’s clothes also included an embroidered shirt and a cap from which protruded an eagle’s feather. The sword and dagger hanging from his belt proclaimed him to be a man who would fight his enemies to the death, should it be necessary. I can remember, now, watching from the side of the stage as he roused his fellow brigands into action with the song ‘What fear we of the foe?’ and marvelling that I was there, on that summer evening, to bring him luck. I stood, entranced, throughout the first performance of Magyar Maytime, though I was confused by the story, and still am, if I think about it. In the last scene, Zoltan is discovered to have noble blood, and this means that Zelda, who is forbidden to marry a commoner, can become his bride. My uncle loathed the coy badinage – ‘You are my lovely, my wonderful Zelly’; ‘You are my handsome Zolly, who is so brave and strong’ – that preceded the duet in which they declare eternal love for one another. His leading lady was equally embarrassed at having to call him Zolly, and sometimes he substituted ‘smelly’ or ‘belly’ or ‘jelly’, and she ‘folly’ or ‘dolly’ or ‘Molly’, and then they would giggle, and the angry conductor in the pit would be forced to wait for them to stop before raising his baton.

—It is a silly life I lead, Andrew. Yours will be more sensible I hope. And happier.

My mother was with me briefly today – speaking the only words she knew – in those moments between sleeping and waking. She said what was true, that she had never left me, although we had been parted.

—No parting, Andrei, was more terrible than ours. Her ghost’s voice was as light and soft as the voice that had soothed and comforted and teased me in my earliest years. She told me that her God was the same kind and merciful God she had taught me to believe in but whom I have since abandoned, and then the voice was gone, and the blurred vision of her young face, and I was on the verge of talking to her when I realized that I was awake and alone and shivering in the warmth of the afternoon.

—I have a confession to make, Andrew. Your father and I were rivals for your mother’s affections. Irina preferred Roman. If she had chosen me, I would not be enjoying my nephew’s company. On balance, I suppose I should be glad she threw me over.

—Were you in love with Mama, Uncle?

—Very much. She was so serious and shy. She wasn’t – as they say here – forward.

I knew by then, though I had been given no reason why, that I would not, could not, see her again. I was fifteen by now, and the war with Germany was almost over. My uncle looked older, with white hairs on his temples he made no attempt to disguise. He was in a melancholy mood, a mood to which I was already happily accustomed.

—I try not to dwell on the past, Andrew. It’s over, I remind myself. What’s done cannot be undone. The present is all that matters. Remember that, if you can. As for me these days, I tend to forget it. Irina decided wisely when she picked Roman. I offered them money, my Vienna money, to get out of that beastly country – our beastly country, Andrew – but they refused to accept it. I should have gone to Botoşani and bullied them into leaving.

I asked him why.

I was trapped in his fierce brown stare for a moment.

—Oh, it was no place for good people. He added, mysteriously: But you are my future, Andrew. That’s why. Whatever happens, I shall always be at your side when you need me. Yes, you are my future, for the time being.

Perhaps he had considered telling me the real reason why on that April day in 1945, and had then – in the course of staring at me – persuaded himself that a boy of fifteen was too raw for such knowledge. Perhaps.

He suggested that we take a walk in the fields. There was no danger any more from German planes. The lord of the manor, as he mockingly described himself, would inspect the estate with his heir apparent.

We ate an omelette that evening, cooked with the fresh eggs his hens had laid.

—What luxury. What a simple luxury, said my – smiling uncle. We are very fortunate.

I was to receive the real reason why, the real answer to my question, when I was eighteen.

—You are mature for your age, Andrew. I will pour you a large brandy before I say what I have to say. I certainly need one.

What he told me on the tenth of August, 1948, caused me to shiver today.

I remember that I needed a second large brandy after I had read my father’s last letter to my uncle, written in the old words I no longer spoke.

The words that are ashes in my mouth when I catch myself speaking them now.

—We shall have an English Christmas, not an Orthodox one. Santa Claus will come down the chimney with your presents. He’s like Saint Nicholas only different, as they say here. You must sleep tight, my dear, because Santa doesn’t want you to see him being kind. Do you promise me you won’t try to look at him?

—I promise, Uncle.

It was December 1937, and I was still in England, on holiday. We were at Uncle Rudolf’s Elizabethan house in the Sussex countryside, with his devoted entourage – Annie, Teddy and Charlie – whom he now instructed me not to call his servants.