Rike

Rike was a musician, bony and stooping, with clever scarred fingers, who said almost nothing unless somebody asked him about instruments and was nearly always repairing one that did not belong to him. He was one of the regulars at the curtained room above a side street where Zarina, as Sera, spent her first free nights in the city. When a smoking iron stove was dragged into the room one winter he climbed on a chair without a word to anybody and fixed the flue, and never mentioned it.

To Zarina he gave one thing, and it was larger than it looked. One evening he handed her an old six-stringed instrument, its neck mended with glue and twine, and asked whether she wanted to learn to tune it, and then taught her, moving her fingers on the neck with his own and saying nothing but the names of the notes. Nobody praised her or watched. For a woman whose every accomplishment had been turned into a little story for her father by dinner, it was the first thing she had ever learned purely for herself, and her fingertips were scored red afterwards, and she liked that too.

He had never in his life volunteered a fact about himself, and he did not ask for any. He went on restringing other people’s fiddles at the old table whether Sera came or not.

“Again,” was all he said, when she found something close to the note. She did it again for nearly an hour.