Dabo

Before Dabo ever touched a violin he heard music. He heard it in the sound of his father’s shoes scraping against the apartment stairs coming home each night. He heard it in his mother’s worried eyes when she was sure his midwinter wheeze was pneumonia and in the click of the radiator when the salvation of warmth finally forced its way up the pipes. At his window in the early morning he heard it in the echo of horse hooves and the clink of milkmen’s glass bottles as they rocked over the cobblestones of Jewish Warsaw. All of it sang to Michelska Gabriel Dabowsky before he ever played a note. A phantom sound that played in the back of him. But it waited far beneath his ears rising only in his dreams before receding with each day. It was always some whisper of a melody, sad but sweet too. And timid, as though it knew it could exist only in the shadows. The first time Dabo heard a bow on a string he felt a larger part of himself, an unheard part, suddenly speaking. When he was 16 a gypsy fiddler moved in with the widow that lived one floor down. Each night, after the last words of the day were spoken, the gypsy would sit alone and draw the bow across his fiddle. Dabo, half awake in bed, would hear the resin pulling against the strings, trying to free something hidden there. Listening, the boy would hear the whisper of the violin’s voice grow from a moan to a plea, and finally a full throated cry before descending again into the quiet. As twilight deepened, the boy would listen to the sound, dragging each note up from the dark, bending the shadow of it and slowly changing it into a kind of light. Each night Dabo would slide out of bed and put his ear to the floor. Lying on the oak, he tried to feel the vibration, and beneath it, the man summoning this silent thing to life. With his ear pressed to the hardwood Dabo tried to get nearer to the music in himself in the only way he could imagine, by listening for that voice that in the dark, rose all around him. And every dawn his mother would find him asleep on the cold floor, hands outstretched, his ear craned against the quiet. She would drape a blanket over him, then sit in the corner watching the boy sleep, praying to God that she might understand the right thing to protect him. One day she took him by the hand and walked down a flight. Together they quietly knocked on the door. The widow, half deaf, finally answered and stood staring at them. “Excuse me Mrs,” Dabo’s mother began. “My son…” “Yes…yes what about him?” Beyond her in the kitchen the sound started. The strings, low and dark, a growl fighting against the bow’s insistence. It pulled again and again, searching the dark in the strings. Finally they relented and let go a voice…something incandescent hidden in the shadows. The voice rose at first like a howl from a wound then began to sing, until the dark in it gave itself up breaking apart leaving only light. Dabo let go of his mother’s hand, and drawn by the sound pushed past the old woman. The gypsy, a vagabond marked by a lifetime of wandering, ignored him and leaned into the fiddle. He was nearly 50 but seemed much older in the way that suffering and loneliness can age a man. Dabo stood listening, enveloped by the sound, then slowly crumpled and fell to his knees. There was a whisper of a storm in the strings and above it a sound like lightning finally freed. He put his ear to the floor to feel the thunder of it roll through him. The fiddler finished and seeing the boy at his feet was moved and began to weep. It was a soundless cry, a voiceless thing, moved by the boy’s reverence for what he had drawn from himself. Dabo’s mother stepped forward. “My son,” she touched his shoulder, “has a great and silent heart. Could you teach it sir…teach it to sing?” The gypsy set the fiddle down, took the boy’s hands in his own, looked into his face, and seeing him clearly was touched. For a moment he too wanted to fall to his knees but instead stood and turned away. Then looking back to the boy he murmured, “I can teach you. And I can show you how to free it… and how to let it sing in you." "But young master, you should know. Once you do you will never be able to unhear it.” The fiddler looked away. He paused than ran his fingers across the bottle of port. “It’s a sorrowful thing, and like all sorrowful things, also a thing of great beauty. You cannot touch just one…only both. And that will change you. And once it begins to sing in you, it will forever.” His hands shook with a sudden tremor and he tried to steady them. “It is a great gift, but all great things demand a price. It will wound you. Deepen and stain you, being so close to it." Then running his hands through his gray and thinning hair he whispered, “And some nights you will wish you had never heard it.” The boy looked from the fiddler to his mother, then took her hand and whispered, “Please mama, it is what I am for.” And his mother in tears, proud but suddenly afraid too, nodded. So they began.