The Music . . . Oh, the Music

By Francesca Noumoff

This is the story in prose of the discarded. Those who have, after living their lives in its full richness, are treated as shivering ghosts, so lacking in self-awareness as to be truly tragic.

As the eloquent conveyor of graciousness, the old woman beckoned me. Hers was the elegance, not as an ornament but as an essence, as she whispered in that wonderful soft voice that once silenced all, Come here . . . sit down. Who are you? How could she forget me?

I am the history of sand, the weightless walk that comes from the wings of music. I am the witness who discovered her a decade ago after the Second World War. That unparalleled musical world which collapsed under the Nazi butchers, under Goethe, Schiller, and the final march of Wagner. Who am I? I too was music, I too had dreams, I too survived the unthinkable, born out of the Satanic tempest. I gazed at the old woman, not believing that her life could end like this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479706082

Francesca Noumoff

About the Author The author, Francesca Noumoff, previously published works that include I am Yesterday, published in India and a bilingual English-Chinese edition published in China as well as an abbreviated version of this volume recently in Beyond Borders, an Indian literary journal.

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The Music … 

 Oh, the Music

Francesca Noumoff

Copyright © 2012 by Francesca Noumoff.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Oblivion

Dreams

The Satanic Tempest

Elonora

The Tiger’s Nest

The Nightmare Brigade

The Music

Knots

Hades

New World

Go, Said the Nazi

And Up Came the Blind Iron Ant

The Puppeteer

The New World Order

Journey

Time

The Dance of Death

A Swallow That Died

We Are All Mad

Don Juan

The Mop

Coffins

As If Nothing Had Happened

From Destiny’s Journey; the Bag Lady

The Sex Pistol Punks of the U.K. -

Reach for the Stars

Janis, the Legionnaire

Endless Time

The Flames Reached the Sky

Terrace of the Night

Perhaps the Dead Will Hear

The Nightmare of Reason

Damned Earth

Moon Gods

Bridge of Dreams

This is the story in prose and poetry of the discarded. Those who have, after living their lives in its full richness, are treated as shivering ghosts, so lacking in self-awareness as to be truly tragic. The lack has become a mere emblem of their capacity to exhibit transcendence in the face of banishment, death with neither resentment nor regret they search through the haze of the past.

The voice is that of a Russian gentlewoman, a celebrated violinist, herself a product of the great intellectual and artistic tradition of the twentieth century. She lived through war and revolution, and escaped the Nazi gas chamber in Europe, only to be taken prisoner by the Japanese, with her husband, in Cambodia. This too she survived. After the war, she and her family left the old world and sought some cloister of refuge in the cosmopolitanism of Montreal. It was here she was to die a slow death in the prison for the old. The asylum of an old people’s home—unknown, unrecognized, unloved, and banished by her family who had grown weary of her shrinking frame, to be punished for growing old. And so she is deposited.

There is an endless line of the voiceless, the nameless, and faceless, who, in their own delirium, float in and out of her little cell as if it was at the intersection of dread and reality, a dissonant chorus of single voices. Here we encounter the dark reminders of impermanence, frozen in time, with neither present nor future, a kind of suspension of the robots. The ugly refuse of a fragmented society, marginalized, now decaying. These are now the burdens, the embarrassment, so say their relations, while the keepers scornfully address the inhabitants of the home in a vocabulary normally reserved for uncomprehending infants. Here they marinate.

The prose form is used to give expression to the inner life of these inhabitants, and offers a language in the search for the re-appropriation of their humanity.

Introduction

What follows is a journey, one that reveals, through the life of one woman a portrait in creation the twentieth century. This is the century, almost more than any of its predecessors, which posed the question, why? Why the senseless brutality? Why the illusions? Why the utter marginalization of the survivors?

The lens through which the journey is viewed is that of one of its survivors, who found herself displaced and ejected to the circle of society. From Russia to Paris to a Japanese prison in Cambodia to a hollow refuge in Montréal, she came to know the meaning of what is important: her music and her world of dreams. It is in the final stages of her life that reality and illusion transmute, as she finds herself deposited, after her husband’s death, in a municipal home for the aged. It is here that reality and illusion become one.

Before we begin this journey of prose, poetry, and music, we must set the scene. We must come to know how she was formed and who formed her.

But, come, I am to take you on a journey of this Russian woman, Elonora, with all her glitter and elegance, and that music which was so much a part of her. She came, as did her sister, from a world of intrigue, extravagance, and grandeur. French was the language of culture and diplomacy, from the days of Peter the Great and his dream of Europeanizing Russia—the most exquisite tastes of the Paris salons were cultivated. Yet for the rest of Europe, Russia was at best regarded as Eurasians and, at worst, as merely Asians.

Russian history is one of intrigue and revolution. Russia was three times larger than any country of Europe. Russia, under Katherine, included Estonia, Livonia, part of Finland, European Russia, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia, with half of the land owned by one hundred thousand nobles. Moscow alone had one hundred palaces, where the stairways were illuminated by hundreds of chandeliers. Some rooms were panelled with plaques of amber. Orthodox mysticism was powerful, poverty immense. The peasants lived in a supernatural world inhabited by angels, the devil, and the fear of hell. Skepticism was confined to the upper classes, who were tutored in French. Petersburg contained a Francophile aristocracy. The women were better educated than the men, and were known for their rage, but as well they ennobled revolutions with their heroism. A landlord’s wealth was measured by the number of serfs he owned. Some owned upward of one hundred and forty thousand. Ten percent of the population were peasants, and over 50 percent were serfs. The almost-one-million serfs of the Orthodox Church gave it special privilege, surpassed only by the virtually three who tilled the land of the Crown. The nobles had judicial rights over their serfs, including the right of banishment. An untold number of serfs deserted, vanishing into Poland, the Urals, or the Caucasus, after which they were hunted down by the army like animals. When the peasants rose in revolt, they were always defeated. Nobles shaved, commoners were bearded, nobles wore fur-lined boots, the peasants wore woollen bands. French influence dominated Russian art. Operas were imported from Italy and France. Musical education was fully supported by the court and produced musical genius. Singers were nowhere equalled. Tea and silk came from China up the Silk Route; caravans moved to China via Siberia or the Caspian routes. Every language of the world was spoken from Dutch to Italian to the languages of Asia. Moscow was the hub of commerce and religion, half-Oriental, with a jealous Slavic patriotism, tearing the nation in two. "The tense complexity that became the terror and arbiter of Europe which seemed to be the most civilized world was becoming a jungle. God turns to ashes… Carpe diem . . . Rejoice today for tomorrow you may die, said the serfs. When man invokes God, there is often the devil to pay, and triumphant Messiahs come ridding on scapegoats," said the peasants.

Among the lesser nobles was a family whose complexity reflected the times. They were cruel and generous, cultured and naïve, melancholic and ever dreaming. The patriarch was never to be challenged, under whose silk-gloved iron fist the family was ruled, for each man of this class considered himself the absolute master of his dwelling.

The father was the descendant of those with vast holdings of land for centuries, of exceptional wealth and exceptional egoism, aggressive, brilliant, and cruel. His build magisterial, with straight coal black hair, high well-shaped forehead; his eyes, steel grey, enormous and dreamy. He fascinated everyone. All this and his great good-humoured countenance merely masked his complexity. To himself, he was a man of the highest breeding, impenetrable, detached, held together by his self-indulgence.

Like most aristocrats, he was raised by foreign tutors. He had an extraordinary flair for languages, and his favourite diversions were music and philosophy. He constantly travelled from Paris to London to Rome and Asia, for he had time, time for everything. He