Dawn Potter: Mr. Kowalski

1

In last night’s dream I was preparing myself

to travel over the Tappan Zee Bridge on a moped

at midnight in the sluicing rain.

.

I would have to steer by means of a contraption

that was, more or less, a shoelace,

and the bridge was not, as during my lucid hours,

.

a long cantilever span over a broad river

but a viperish snarl of tarmac and iron grates,

twisting, coiling,

.

exits merging into on-ramps,

cars caroming from the left, from the right,

howling like an onslaught of wasps.

.

I filled my tank with gasoline

and imagined home, wherever it might be,

imagined my narrow tires—

.

how they would grip hopelessly at the metal road,

slide from lane to lane among the furious wasps

as I wielded my impotent steering-thread.

.

But I knew I had no choice: I had to cross this bridge

because my mother was watching me fill the gas tank

and I could not let her know I was afraid.

.

2

Awake now, I am embarrassed by my own transparency.

In the barn I load a feeder with hay

as the goat snorts, flitting her elven ears

.

and pointedly glaring at the grain bin.

Hay is not what she wants, though it’s what’s good for her—

what keeps her four busy stomachs

.

in churning, belching, clockwork order.

Grain is what makes her fat,

but her greed is shameless and irresistible,

.

so I dole out a handful of sweet feed,

letting the sticky collation of oats, pellets, cracked corn

slide through the fingers of my glove

.

onto her charging, grasping, prehensile tongue.

I wonder how it feels to delight in voracity

instead of coaxing it into harness, year in, year out—

.

don’t drink one more glass, don’t eat one more bowl,

don’t reread one more novel, don’t say

I’ll open that violin case on some rosier morning—

.

never wondering how two people invent a necessity

or why a simple litany of breaths and exhalations

becomes fear instead of sleep.

.

3

If I say,

I want to talk about the nature of fear,

you might assume that I have something precise to say.

.

But I have nothing precise to say.

I think that fear is not precise.

It is a weight, a stench, a twinge in the bowels that will not be vanquished.

.

Yet though fear may not be precise, it is very simple.

I am afraid to drive over bridges so I dream of driving over them.

I am afraid of showing my fear to my mother

.

so I dream of showing her my fear.

I was afraid of Mr. Kowalski, and when, on a January night,

his wife telephoned our house to tell me he had died,

.

I was appalled at my relief.

Never again would I have to sit on the bench

under the dingy quilted window shade

.

in that house smelling of cabbage and my own weary dismay,

waiting for him to appear from some distant recess,

wearing his shorts and brown socks and plastic sandals,

.

ready to thrust me a few steps further

toward the future he had laid out for me.

I was his last violin student; I was his only choice.

.

He didn’t seem to notice that I was the wrong choice,

or, perhaps, like me, he was afraid to admit that I was.

That’s how fear works, after all.

.

4

Let me tell you about Mr. Kowalski.

By the age of ten—a black-haired gnome, dour as a judge—

he was soloing with the Warsaw Philharmonic;

.

he was playing Paganini. Imagine it: Paganini!

If I had been his teacher, watching his fingers

scramble knowingly among the accidentals,

.

I would have felt, sitting on my crimson chair

in the hushed room, as if I had fed him

Machiavelli instead of music.

.

Such devilment in the small grip of a child:

of course it was egregious, but prodigies,

like pinheads, sell tickets. The year was 1921.

.

Soon he traveled to Paris to study under the great Thibaud.

Events transpired. By the year 1982 it did not occur to me

to imagine Mr. Kowalski as a prodigy.

.

As a young man,

he was a popular performer on Polskie Radio.

Listeners from all over eastern Europe

.

sat next to their radiograms, knitting or smoking,

enthralled by the echo of something magnificent

yet fleeting, phrases too tender, too brief to explain.

.

Because his father had been a regimental conductor,

so Mr. Kowalski understood the rules of advancement.

In his spare time he composed popular songs

.

and plotted his career.

One must attract the attention

of an arrogant master

.

and then a greater arrogant master,

and again a greater, and again a greater,

until one becomes the arrogant master oneself.

.

In person Mr. Kowalski favored the Leopold Auer stance

so popular in Russian imperial orchestras

during the 1880s—left arm stiffly, nobly poised,

.

like a stop-motion ballerina’s,

fingers arching rigidly over fingerboard and bow.

He was accustomed to the routine

.

of bloody fingertips and dusty dinner jackets,

of second-class rail travel and creaking stage floors,

of dismal audition rooms and vaporous reviews.

.

For all I know, he looked forward to retiring to America

and becoming a short old man in brown socks.

But perhaps the crackle and hiss of the transmission

.

softened the formal tension; perhaps his radio listeners

imagined a young man in soft shoes,

in a birch forest, in a patch of sunlight after rain.

.

5

I don’t know.

I never heard Mr. Kowalski play anything on the violin

except for snatches of études and scale exercises.

.

His tone was harsh and thick,

as if it were climbing slowly, hand over hand,

up through the muddy dregs of an abandoned well.

.

Lest you conclude that there was something erotic

about studying the violin:

there was not.

.

Yet when he put his shaking hands on me

to correct my posture, yanking my left elbow and wrist

into imperious formation, crunching my fingers

.

into archways, I understood the protocols

of obedience. In that darkened house,

I threw back my head and dropped my eyes.

.

6

In 1939 the Germans arrested Mr. Kowalski

in Węgrów. He managed to escape.

His wife told me this is how it happened:

.

An admirer said,

You are too great an artist to die.

I will take your place.

.

On the run, clutching his violin case,

Mr. Kowalski forged his way to Brest-Litovsk,

where he met the Russian violinist Miron Polyakin.

.

Great violinists were everywhere in those days.

I have seen the photograph

of Polyakin’s letter to the Moscow Conservatory

.

recommending Mr. Kowalski’s admittance.

It is brown and tattered and seems to have been written

on graph paper.

.

So Mr. Kowalski went to Moscow.

In the meantime

the art lovers of Węgrów were exterminated.

.

7

Playing the violin saved my life

could be a bumper sticker.

One night I may glimpse it on a passing car

.

while dream-driving a moped over the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Not that it applies to me.

In Mr. Kowalski’s place, I would have died.

.

That’s what happens to talented children

who don’t practice their scales.

If one is not greedy about art,

.

one is nothing.

I used to sit in Mr. Kowalski’s foyer

imagining that our lesson was already over,

.

that I was stepping back into the sunlight

as it gleamed on the tidy sidewalks

and his neighbors’ little square garden plots

.

overflowing with grape hyacinths and pink narcissi.

My mother would be reading Virginia Woolf in the park,

and I would announce, I had a good lesson today!

.

We would idle on the bench like best friends; we would chatter

about prom dresses and cats and nineteenth-century novels.

The violin would wait in the car.

.

8

Muscle memory is what wakes me up at midnight—

I find my left hand arched around my right wrist,

fingers held high and wide, fingertips pressed squarely

.

into the docile tendons, tapping out,

with exactitude, the opening of a Bach partita.

Underneath strains my left thumb,

.

poised for the subtle shift to second position, then back to first.

Muscle memory is what drove my boyfriend crazy

because every time we held hands I accidentally started

.

fingering arpeggios into his palm;

I didn’t even notice; he had to yank his hand away

before I understood I had one more thing to apologize for.

.

Muscle memory is the habit of performance.

The body refuses to dismount from its high wire.

Even after the Nazis invaded Soviet-held Poland,

.

Mr. Kowalski was traveling through the provinces—

rosining his bow, tuning his strings, donning his dinner jacket.

Why didn’t he stay in Moscow,

.

ensconced behind the conservatory walls?

When the Gestapo arrested him in Lvov,

they’d had just about enough of such behavior.

.

But en route to execution, he attacked his guard and escaped.

Did he strangle the man

with his strong, flexible, obedient hands?

.

And what had they done to his violin?

What had they done

to his hands?

.

No doubt muscle memory kept Mr. Kowalski awake

during the twenty months he lived under a Ukrainian pigsty.

Great violinists were everywhere in those days.

.

9

In the course of my life I have mucked out sheep sheds

and stanchion gutters and dog yards and loose stalls

and maternity pens and calf hutches and litter boxes

.

and buck barns and henhouses and pigsties.

Each genus of manure has its own particular stench;

and, when well mixed with fresh air, some varieties—

.

horse droppings, say—can trigger a farmhand nostalgia.

But pig manure is foul, whether fresh or aged,

though, given time, even mild-mannered goat pellets

.

will transform into a choking miasma

of dust, sodden rot, maggots, and ammonia.

Therefore, today, after much procrastinating,

.

I fear I must break down and clean my goat barn.

By “much procrastinating”

I mean one month. By “goat barn”

.

I mean the droppings of one goat

mingled with a quantity of dry hay.

By “fear” I mean nothing comparable

.

to the state of mind of a thirty-year-old strangler of Nazis

who spent six hundred days under a Ukrainian pigsty

without a violin.

.

10

Imagine the rest of his life

as the plaintive, fragile, vaguely muddled coda

which a genius composer’s kindhearted but mediocre executor

.

decides to append to the maestro’s gargantuan final symphony.

As a reporter for the Jerusalem Post sighed,

“Today, thin spread are the God-gifted Jewish violinists

.

who formerly grew like mushrooms from the soil.

With Kowalski, eastern Europe, once an inexhaustible reservoir,

has delivered to us one of the last pearls.”

.

Somehow he acquired another violin,

managed to stride across an Austrian stage,

bow to the darkened audience,

.

bring his instrument to his throat,

arch his steel-sprung fingers,

and play not one but two nearly impossible concertos.

.

11

So did I hate playing the violin?

No.

It was one of the sounds of my body.

.

The hands aligned; the clock struck;

at that instant I was fluent

in music and words.

.

I was swift. I was facile. I was vain.

Fear grew inside me, imperceptibly.

Practice became the loneliest hole in the day.

.

My automaton fingers plugged invisible dikes—

G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp—

three octaves up, three octaves down,

.

now the melodic minor, now the harmonic minor,

now in chromatics, and by thirds, and by minor thirds . . .

and the automaton fingers marched on and onward.

.

What endured was pure intonation:

I could not abide a slovenly pitch.

Though I knew I was not the angel,

.

I always heard the angel’s voice.

In this

Mr. Kowalski and I were very much alike.

.

12

The body refuses to dismount from its high wire.

Perched on a piano bench, small and square-kneed

in his shorts and plastic sandals,

.

Mr. Kowalski sipped at his glass of hot tea and announced,

When you grow up,

we will drink cognac together,

.

and you will marry my son,

and you will play the concertos.

He said this not once but once a week.

.

At the music stand I opened a Beethoven romance.

The year was 1982. Lifting a violin to my throat,

I threw back my head and dropped my eyes.

.

13

A weight, a stench, a twinge in the bowels—

a dream, a reproach—

an obligation—

.

a dynasty unclaimed—

a muddle—

What did they do to his hands?

.

And what of the peasants who fed the pigs?

What of the mushrooms that grew from the soil,

the listeners resting beside their radiograms,

.

the young man in soft shoes in a birch forest,

the woman in the park, reading Virginia Woolf?—

a dream, a reproach, an obligation,

.

a greed that will not be vanquished,

a viperish snarl of tarmac and iron grates—

and meanwhile this hunger that must be fed.

.

An admirer said,

You are too great an artist to die.

I will take your place.

.

You will marry my arrogance,

we will drink cognac together,

as if I had fed you music

.

instead of dust, sodden rot, maggots, and ammonia.

The stars shriek, a sharp bow lacerates the dark.

You must cross this bridge you are afraid to cross.

—

Previously published in the Beloit Poetry Journal. Reprinted by permission of the author.