I had been looking forward to this Friday for several months. As it approached I felt a steadily mounting anticipation. I had never been to a concert performance of The Rite of Spring, or seen the ballet, but I knew the music well from listening to recordings over the years. I have always been completely entranced by the way Stravinsky used two different keys simultaneously—its bitonality. The dissonance was sublime. He did the same thing with the meter, having duple and triple time signatures run at once. It created a mood of tension and frenzied energy that still sounded modern, especially those pounding chords. Whenever they occurred I tried to count them out and was always flummoxed. When it was first performed in 1913 it caused a riot. 
 
I had a ticket for the New York Philharmonic’s performance of The Rite at the Lincoln Center. I was excited about it.
 
Then on the Wednesday before the concert, I learned that the principal violinist had shut her fingers in a car door. Her understudy had meningitis. Accident and illness. The concert was cancelled. My money would be refunded. The thing is, I didn’t want the money. I wanted to see The Rite of Spring. 
 
I plucked a Village Voice from the dispenser on the street corner, and to ward off my morose thoughts I scanned through the music section.
 
Nothing really caught my fancy until I noticed a strange entry. The Philharmonic Orchestra of Nutley would be playing a concert at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair on Friday night. The idea of there being an orchestra in Nutley, New Jersey was definitely intriguing. The program for the night would include arrangements of Beatles songs by Mantovani. This was not The Rite of Spring but it had an eerie attraction and my mood began to improve. 
 
Then I noticed the name Jan Dubček. He was listed as the guest cellist with the orchestra. This was a name I recognized. I once saw him play Schnittke’s First Cello Concerto, and I spoke to him briefly outside Carnegie Hall, when he was sneaking out for a cigarette. He had also managed to sneak out from behind the Iron Curtain sometime in the 1970s, and spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent. He was a highly trained musician and when he first came to America he’d had glowing recommendations from the likes of Leonard Bernstein. That’s what he told me. I noticed at the time that he had a way of dropping the definite article. When he referred to the cello, he simply said “cello”. He struck me as charming but neurotic, though his musical talent was undeniable. After that I never heard anymore about him until I saw him on the bill with the Nutley Philharmonic. I made up my mind to go to Montclair on Friday. Dubček and Mantovani. Why not?
 
I arrived at the Wellmont Theater just in time, before the doors closed. I grabbed my program and rushed to find my seat in the third row. The auditorium was surprisingly full. Within minutes the orchestra began to tune up. As I listened I glanced at the program and saw Dubček’s name among others I didn’t recognize. The conductor was listed as “Creighton”—just one name. I didn’t know if it was his first or last and it struck me as unusual, so I read his blurb. Apparently he was not only a conductor but a performance artist of some repute, though I had never heard of him before. He was mentioned as having been the creator of an installation called ‘Ghost Instruments’ at the New Amsterdam Theater, which had been specially reopened for the occasion. It made me wonder if this show at the Wellmont had some further artistic intent beyond just Mantovani arrangements of Beatles songs for an audience of middle class suburbanites.
 
By this time Creighton had come on to the stage and conversation among the audience fell to a murmur. He was an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered with a shock of unkempt white hair. The baton looked incongruous in his massive hands, the kind of hands you might expect on the arms of a stevedore or butcher, not on a conductor, but as he raised them I could see that he had a surprising sensitivity.
 
He tapped the baton on his music stand and the room fell silent. That moment of time between when the conductor raises his baton and the orchestra starts to play is when certain members of the audience start to cough. That is indeed what I heard—one bout followed by two more in quick succession. Then the music began.
 
It was a rendition of the song And I love her. The sound was full of percussive plonks on the vibraphone and sugary strings. Anything good about the original pop song had been replaced with pure schmaltz. Considered that way, it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and yet... that very ridiculousness could be an act of genius, something to rival the power of The Rite, but coming at it from a completely different direction. It really depended on the intention of the conductor, which was not something I’d ever be likely to know.
 
I could see Dubček up there on the stage, lolling back in his chair, his cello leaning against one knee. It was not the posture one would expect from a professional musician. His cello gleamed white in the stage lights.
 
“Rubbish.”
 
“Shut up and sit down!”
 
I looked around to see where the disturbance was coming from and then I noticed that Dubček was standing up, a little unsteadily, with one hand on his chair and the other fumbling with his belt buckle. And then the unthinkable happened. He dropped his trousers and underpants and bent over, exposing himself to the conductor and the audience. His cello lay on the ground at his feet.
 
Pandemonium broke out. A large number of the audience had risen from their seats, screaming and yelling. I saw rippling motions through the crowd and realized that people were fighting. It all happened so quickly. By this time projectiles were being hurled at the stage. The orchestra kept playing. Dubček had straightened himself and was grasping his cello by the neck. He took a few stumbling steps, his trousers still around his ankles, and then fell backwards off the stage.
 
I got up from my seat and rushed to the front. I knew I ought to help him. The crowd was dense and I had to push and shove to get through. Blows rained down on my shoulders but I scarcely felt them. When I reached Dubček, he was lying on his back groaning and clutching his cello.
 
“My career… my career she is over.”
 
I knelt down beside him.
 
“Just stay still. I’ll get you help.”
 
He was mumbling something. I leaned in closer to listen, but couldn’t make sense of it.
 
There was a strong smell of alcohol on his breath.
 
“I’ll get you an ambulance. You’re going to be okay. Just try not to move.”
 
I was worried that he had broken his back but my fears were slightly allayed when he covered his face with his hands. That was a good sign.
 
“My career, my career.”
 
Up until then, I had been so focused on Dubček that I had been unaware of what had been going on around me, but now I saw that there were several other people huddled around him. One of them was a thin, sallow man with glasses. He reached past me for the cello. 
 
Dubček took his hands from his face and grasped the instrument firmly to his chest. I thought I detected a hint of fear in his rheumy eyes.
 
“No. Fuck you. Fuck you! 
 
The sallow man drew back, looking irritated.
 
“But I have to save the cello.”
 
The man reached out and put his hands on the instrument but Dubček showed no sign of relinquishing it. I was on my knees beside him. He was obviously in considerable pain and turning his head towards me spoke through his clenched teeth.
 
“You take her. Keep cello from conductor. Go now. One day you find me and give her back.”
 
He had released his grip and I found myself holding the broken instrument.
 
This was an insane situation—a drunk musician, naked from the waist down, with possibly a broken back, telling me to take his cello and go. I felt that I should stay and help him but he seemed to imply that I would help him best by leaving.
 
“You should do what he says.”
 
It was the jaundiced man next to me.
 
“You think so?”
 
“Yes. The police are here. They’ll get him an ambulance. There’s nothing much you can do. There’s a side exit quite near us. We should go.” 
 
I followed him out. By this time the orchestra had stopped playing. I saw Creighton punch somebody in the face with his meaty fist. His tail jacket was ripped. What I had thought to be his shock of white Einsteinian hair turned out to be a wig. It had fallen off in the mêlée, revealing a bald pate shining in the lights.
 
Then we were outside on the street, which felt very peaceful. The strange man was sizing me up.
 
“What are you going to do with that cello?”
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“I could take it if you like.”
 
“Thanks but I’ll hang on to it. That’s what Dubček wants.”
 
The man was giving me his card.
 
“This instrument needs to be fixed. I’m a luthier. Call me, or better still come by my shop and we’ll talk about it.”
 
“Okay.”
 
It didn’t seem such a bad idea to get the cello fixed while it was in my safekeeping. I would present it whole and functional to Dubček when I found him. It would be a way to erase this crazy night and to make up for having abandoned him in his time of need.
 
I hailed a cab and stuffed the cello into the back seat and got in the front. I certainly wasn’t going to take the train back to the city. 
 
It was a relief to get away.

 

***

 

It was painful, watching him, sawing away—the tortured Pernambuco bow coming apart in the backlight—Mongolian horsehair shredded without care. It was an embarrassment. The man playing appeared to be drunk—sitting like a slob, his left leg pivoting upon the ball of his foot like a rockabilly guitar player singing about a hound dog. All of the beauty of the instrument wasted.
 
I have been pursuing this cello for a decade, and to discover it in the hands of this philistine was beyond disappointing, it physically pained me. 
 
I had followed a tip from a stagehand that the white cello had been spotted at the Wellmont—a quiet word was out that I was looking for it. So many times, I had arrived at a concert hall only to find that I had been led astray—proudly shown a white, carbon fiber case. But there it was, the white cello, the very one, up on stage again. The instrument wasn't silent, as when I had first laid eyes on it, but this was it.
 
I stood in the back of the theater listening to the orchestra perform pop songs. Oh how I wished the cello were silent again. I stood there clutching my chest, my hand on my heart—the way I had held it when I had first seen this cello on a stage.
 
Years ago, the artist known as Creighton was showing an orchestra of ghost instruments.  White instruments—ghost instruments—on view for three days and nights—twenty-four hours a day—at the shuttered New Amsterdam Theater—accompanied by an original score. Percussion, wind and strings brushed white with latex paint—and crudely so. A coarse brush the tool of choice, the bows in ready position, held by impossibly thin wire.  
 
The New Amsterdam was crumbling. There was a steel net over the seats to catch the falling debris. The renovation efforts had been abandoned. The piece was on view for seventy-two hours straight. The house was filled with whores and junkies. People were living under the stage and sleeping on the roof deck. There was a slip road entrance off of 41st street—a step ladder up onto the loading dock. It was a scene after the clubs let out—jammed between 4 am and sun up.
 
The work was entitled ‘Ghost Instruments'. It was met with mixed reviews, but the crowd was enthusiastic.
 
Most of the instruments in the piece were for students—clearly mass produced—but the cello, the white cello, was something to behold. I believed this instrument to be a masterwork, and I set to pursuing her—a rare gem, held captive by an ogre.
 
It burns me up, of course, but the hack Creighton wrote a piece of music to accompany the ghost instruments that was brilliant—a score that captured the spirit and sound of an orchestra readying to play. The music played on an endless loop that never resolved.
 
The artist, and I hesitate to call him that, had bolted a reel to reel tape machine to the stage behind the white instruments. A loop of magnetic recording tape ran through the heads and through a series of reels and idler pulleys. The tape ran up to the ceiling, across the stage, through another set of pulleys, and back down to the playback heads. There were powerful amplifiers and a wall of speakers. Creighton's score played at great volume with incredible fidelity—the sounds of an orchestra readying to play.  It became a game of sorts for the downtown art crowd in attendance to guess when the tape loop came to an end and the piece started over. There appeared to be several splices in the giant floor to ceiling loop—a visual clue wasn't helpful. The music ended—no doubt exactly on the elusive splice—on the third day, as the conductor—Creighton himself in tails—held his hands aloft.
 
The instruments were ingeniously rigged to explode—spring loaded. And they did explode—on the sound of a baton tap at the end of the music. Only the white cello didn't detonate. There was the sickening sound of splintering wood—a cartoon spring was hanging from a shattered violin. Split oboes and punctured drums littered the stage. A few thousand people had viewed ‘Ghost Instruments' over the three-day theater showing. I was there. I saw the whole thing.
 
It wasn't the first time Creighton had created a work with a tenuous life span. He had sculpted violins in clear ice and showed them in a freezer case—one circuit interruption away from a puddle of water. He had once come into my shop to find models for his frozen instruments. His talents were best suited for a cruise ship, carving swans of ice displayed next to the melon balls at brunch. He cared so little for the instruments that I couldn't bring myself to give him a single thing on loan. How he came to possess this cello, I don't know. But there it was on stage, still covered in white latex paint.
 
The performance of Beatles songs at The Wellmont was cloying. I glanced at the program. The Nutley Philharmonic? This had to be a joke. 
 
I was physically ill. My lower back tightened. My heart missing the beat—I started screaming at the stage. I lost my mind. I don't know what came over me. "Rubbish!" I was yelling.
 
Soon, everyone was screaming. All discipline was lost. The World's finest cello was up there, and it was being played like a fiddle at the state fair.
 
The theater erupted into a donnybrook. On stage, the cellist dropped his pants. The orchestra continued to play. I watched in horror as the white cello—the object of my affection—hit the floor with a splintering sound last heard at The New Amsterdam Theater. Exploding ghost instruments flooded my mind. The cello was being destroyed. I screamed and rushed toward the stage, elbowing my way down the aisle—an aisle filled with pushing and shoving.
 
That idiot stumbling with his pants around his ankles was destroying the cello.
 
I needed to handle this instrument carefully, as though it were unexploded ordinance discovered on a forgotten battlefield. But the war was still raging. There was fighting all around. Violins and woodwinds were being smashed like chairs in a saloon fight. I stepped over a man in obvious pain to get to the cello. 
 
The fallen cellist was cursing and flopping around like a hooked flounder in the bottom of a boat.
 
I put my hands on the cello. Even damaged and coated in paint, the instrument was exquisite.  
 
"Fuck you!" He yelled in my face.
 
He pushed the cello into the hands of a man who didn't appear to be interested in receiving it. 
 
Things were spiraling out of control. There was the sound of approaching sirens. I convinced the man with his hands on the cello to take it and go. It wasn't safe for any of us. The police were coming.
 
I scanned the area for pieces that may have come from the cello. I bent down to pick up a couple of splinters. I noticed blood on the tail spike. This fool had impaled himself as well. A puncture wound—that could be dangerous if it went undetected. Fuck him. We spirited the instrument out the stage door.
 
There was some strange allegiance between this man and the cellist. He handled the instrument with a degree of care, but he clearly didn't register its value. He insisted on taking it home. I suggested bringing it to my shop in the morning. I gave him my card.
 
He laid the cello into the back of a taxi and negotiated a fare. I flagged down a car of my own and said, "Follow that cab."
 
I was pleased when we went through the Holland Tunnel and across to the lower east side. His cab stopped not far from my shop. He took the cello and dutifully carried it into his apartment building. 
 
The police had ignored the cellist's injuries and thrown the cuffs on him—indecent exposure, inciting a riot. I had caught a glimpse of him in the backseat of the cruiser. He was weeping like a schoolgirl.
 
Most disturbing, is that I swear I had seen Creighton's cue ball head bopping up and down in the crowd as we left. He was punching someone repetitively like a farm machine.  

 

***

 

About a week after the ill-fated concert I saw Dubček sitting in a Checker cab, stopped at a light. He must have seen me too but gave no sign of recognition. He looked pale and haggard through the glass of the window, hunched in the back seat, alone and detached. I tried to get his attention by raising my arm and calling his name but the light changed and he was gone. 
 
I had done nothing with his cello since I brought it home. Every day it had become harder to relinquish. It was not that I wanted to keep it—I had always intended to get it fixed and give it back to him. That was still my intention, but I felt a growing resistance to taking any action and instead just moved it around to avoid looking at it.
 
The first night I laid it alongside my bed, but waking to see this broken instrument next to me reminded me of a large flightless bird. It was a tight fit in my bedroom and I was worried about stepping on it, so I moved it into the living room. But there it only drew my attention and I moved it again; this time putting it in the bathtub and drawing the shower curtain to hide it. For some obscure reason, this cello was psychologically corrosive. It had to go. I would throw it out. 
 
But I didn’t.
 
The sight of Dubček in the cab was a catalyst. I went straight to my apartment, seized the cello from the bathtub, plunged it into a large, black plastic bag and bound it tightly with packing tape.
 
I still had the luthier’s card in my wallet and pulled it out: Karl Deinsler, luthier. Instrument repair and sales. 363 Broome Street, New York, New York 10013. 
 
That night in Montclair, outside the theater, he had told me to call or visit but I could not find a phone number on the card. I turned it over. On the back were the stylized images of the Ancient Greek dramatic masks of tragedy and comedy, but no number. I would just have to take the thing over to Soho on the off-chance that he was there.
 
I took the subway, struggling to get on and off the train, heaving the cello up the stairs and trying to find the best way to carry it. No wonder cellists were such oddities—lugging this thing around constantly would obviously change one’s perception of the world, and the world would no doubt reciprocate. All around me I could sense the invisible, bisecting lines of fate that had reduced me so quickly to a state of nervous exhaustion—the hand in the car door, the meningitis, the tumultuous concert, the bewigged conductor, my reacquaintance with Dubček and the ever more disturbing possession of his instrument. And now the luthier. All I had wanted was to see The Rite at Lincoln Center—a simple enough desire that had now devolved beyond my control into a sinister spider’s web dangling from the edge of chaos.
 
When I arrived at the address on the card, I didn’t see a luthier’s shop. I was standing outside Bob and Kenn’s Broome Street Bar. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. After a minute or two of stasis, I walked a little way down Broome Street and found a door with the matching number. I scanned the buzzers. There it was: K. Deinsler—apartment three. I pressed the button. The intercom didn’t seem to be working. There was no sound. Perhaps it wasn’t even connected. I waited a few minutes, thinking about what to do next. I certainly wasn’t going to take the cello back to my apartment. I’d leave it on the curb for the Sanitation Department.
 
I was about to turn away when the door to the freight elevator opened. The luthier stood looking down at me. He was tall and thin, his head slightly cocked to one side, giving him an avian demeanor. His lips twisted into an unpleasant smile.

 

***

 

Immediately after seeing the damaged cello get dragged into that apartment building, I watched the apartment—the cello's current address—all night from the street. Lights went on and off at odd hours, and there was the blue flicker of a television late.
 
The man in possession of the cello emerged from the apartment well after the sun was up. He was still struggling into a blue jean jacket as he came through the door onto the street. He picked up a couple of free papers from the boxes on the corner, and bought The Post, The Times, and The Daily News in a bodega that was new to the neighborhood—there were tiered shelves filled with cut flowers on the sidewalk—the only color on the block.
 
He went into a coffee shop and sat at the counter. He drank what appeared to be sixty cups of coffee, and when he wasn't reading the papers, he stared blankly at a photograph of The Acropolis on the wall. He ate scrambled eggs and dry toast.
 
I wanted to confront him or feign a chance meeting—“Hey! How's the cello?”—That sort of thing. But I caught my own reflection in the glass, and decided against it. He left the coffee shop and went back to his apartment.
 
I thought about following him up and killing him. I ran through a thousand scenarios in my racing mind—all of them ended with witnesses seeing me hauling a white cello out of his building and the authorities finding my business card in the dead man's shirt pocket.
 
He couldn't possibly keep the cello upstairs in his room for long. He would bring it to me. I watched his comings and goings for a week. I slept wide-awake, grinding my molars.
 
In my shop I cleared a bench—readying it like a hospital bed awaiting the airlifted arrival of a patient from a distant disaster.
 
The cellist from the concert at The Wellmont was dead. I saw it in the trade papers. In the articles, he was made out to be a musician of some renown, though I find that difficult to believe. Maybe they were being deferential because he was dead. The man I saw was a menace—better suited to sawing wood in a Gulag. 
 
Alongside one of the stories in the paper, there was a photograph of the stage at The Wellmont. The theater was littered with broken instruments. 
 
There was no mention of the white cello in any of the papers—her very existence a vapor, her provenance unknown. But I knew. I knew her future at least—her destination, her destiny with me. There she was—in a vision—lying in a bath exposed to water, moisture, and neglect—her smooth neck awaiting my caress. 
 
She would be delivered to me in one day's time.
 
The bell rang as I had anticipated. I climbed into the lift and pulled the metal gate closed. I eased the worn operator's handle to the left—a single bare bulb illuminating the freight car. On the street side, I pushed open the steel doors.  My first sight was the torso of a man holding a huge garbage bag. 
 
I had never considered this, but this was good. The cello was wrapped up like so much garbage. I ushered the man into the lift.
 
"Welcome." 
 
“Thank you, I’ve brought you the cello from the Wellmont.”
 
“Yes, I've been expecting you. You’re an Englander. I hadn't noticed that at first.  You didn’t say much when we first met. Watch your step there.”
 
“Englander?  Who says that? Are you a Nazi?”
 
“It's something my father would say. He was an Austrian—Andreas Deinsler.
 
“So he was a Nazi then.”
 
“Ha! No, quite the opposite, he came to New York to get away from all that.”
 
“A deserter.”
 
“Well, he certainly saw where things were going. He became an American citizen. In fact, he served in the American army. He was recruited by the allies—as an artist., stationed in England for a few years—building decoys for the Germans to photograph from the air. An army of mock-ups—aircraft and artillery made of wood and cloth.”
 
“Are you all right?  You seem a little nervous.”
 
“Sorry, I'm a little wound up. Careful there. Welcome to my shop. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
 
“Thanks but I never touch the stuff.  Your father…"
 
“Yes! This was his shop. He was a master craftsman—a luthier. During the war, they were scabbing together aircraft decoys with a lot of junk lumber, or they were milling whole trees that were delivered to the site. Every now and again, a piece of wood came through that spoke to him—something that would make a beautiful neck or a fine grain top. He somehow managed to ship a number of pieces back here to New York.”
 
“Indeed.”
 
“My father said that he could hear the complete instrument resting his cheek upon a fallen tree. Each piece would play its own unique song for him. Some made him weep as he held them.”
 
“Really?”
 
“Yes.  And when the instrument was finished, he would play the song that he had heard buried deep at the heart of the tree—A story of sun and wind and rain, of insects and ice and broken limbs, of good fortune and open sky, the sharpness of the ax, the scatter of birds, the sound of the wolf.”
 
“Jesus Christ.”
 
“Am I talking too much? Sorry, Would you like a drink?”
 
“It's 11 O'clock in the morning.”
 
“Perfect, I'll mix two doubles. Elevenses!” 
 
“What did these songs sound like when your father played them?”
 
“You know that midsummer feeling? The trees in full leaf—a strong wind welling up in the forest? The energy of moving treetops before there is any sound, and sound before there is any movement. A rush of anticipation. A single instrument putting forth the sounds of an orchestra readying to play the music of the spheres.” 
 
“Hmm…”
 
“Cheers!”
 
"As I started to say earlier, I have brought you the cello from the Wellmont. I want  to have the instrument repaired and return it to Dubček. But I don’t know if I can afford it.”
 
“There is no reason to worry about that. Dubček is no longer with us. He's dead.”
 
“But I just saw him uptown in a cab. Though he didn't look so well.”
 
“Perhaps you have seen a ghost. His purgatory: a concert at Lincoln Center that he is never able to attend, the cab passing the concert hall for all eternity, a series of events keeping him away.”
 
“I’m not sure I believe in ghosts.”
 
“There is an obituary of sorts in this paper. The riot at the Wellmont was likened to that associated with The Rite. It's in one of the articles. There are a couple of photographs.  Look here. Now that drink is welcome. Hah!  Prost! Now let’s have a look at the cello… packing tape and plastic…”
 
“It's what I had…"
 
“What you did is fine. The damage is not terrible. I'm going to remove the strings... would you assist me?”
 
“Of course.”
 
“I'm afraid this instrument has been violated by Creighton—a demon seed.”
 
“Creighton? The conductor?”
 
“Hah. Whatever he is. Yes. We must take great care not to be fooled or complacent.”
 
“This whole thing is madness.”
 
“Hold her there for a moment… This instrument is more beautiful than I anticipated—where the paint has chipped, she appears vinaceous, with flashes of rose and the colors of summer fruit.”
 
“Very poetic.”
 
“Where's my drink?  Ah, yes. Thanks. Where was I?”
 
“You were just…”
 
“Yes. Some of the purfling has been damaged by the mishandling of this instrument, but the split appears to be along the seam. Let's have a look inside. I can run this knife around and we should be able to remove the back. Hand me that hammer will you? No, the small ball peen. Thanks. It just needs a little tap where the blocks are. Here we go.”
 
“My God. There's some kind of explosive device attached to the top. Look at all those batteries!  It’s a bomb… I had this in my apartment for a week? Wait, there’s a hand painted note in there —Andreas Deinsler, Stratford-upon-Avon 1943, New York 1946.”
 
"Hah! This is it. My father's masterpiece! She had disappeared, been stolen away.  He spoke of her in hushed tones, he wept.  Now she is home. I'll fix us another drink."
 
“There's another note… in marker. I don't think you are going to like this—Creighton was here 1977.”
 
"Yes, this is his handiwork. Grab those wire cutters, will you? If we play this right, we'll one day enjoy her beauty in Musikverein Vienna! That's it. Clip the red wire just there.  Shield your face as it may whip up. That's it. Now the others.  No!  Not that one.
 
 

© Tom Newton and Jon Montgomery 2021