Zither Lives

Mrs. Cruickshank was a mist of a person. Her skin was soft, her hair was soft, her eyes were softer than all of her put together. She may never have had a first name. That was Lydia’s theory. Somebody had forgotten to name her when she was born and just started calling her Mrs. Cruickshank, like Mrs. was a name and not a form of address for a married woman. Lydia wasn’t well-informed yet on things like marriage, Miss, Mrs., or Mr. Later, she would understand.

Mrs. Cruickshank was a will-o’-the-wisp in her living room. By that it doesn’t mean she was a spook-light or a ghost-light or fool’s fire. It just means she was pale as as a dying candle end and illuminated the shadows around her about that much. Lydia knows now that the somber living room reminded her of one of Bruegel’s paintings with all the faint figures melted onto the canvas. Back then, she had never heard of Bruegel, so at that moment she couldn’t compare the soft old lady to something from the sixteenth century, like “Dulle Griet.” 

It was the idea of walking up the street, which was Main Street, from number 433 to number 415, all by herself. Number 415 was the last house before the corner restaurant that was really a big house and had no parking, so didn’t bother the neighborhood. It just meant the elderly woman’s house did not have much access to sunlight to the left of the front door as you went in. There was a narrow lane separating the lovely old restaurant and worn old brick house, but it was too narrow to help much. It was paved randomly with bricks that looked like they must have come from the same batch as the house, which was probably built at the end of the eighteenth century. This block of Main Street had a lot of old brick houses. Lydia’s house was made of brick, too, but it was not red any more. It had been painted yellow for some reason. Yellow bricks with the red peeping through. Dorothy on the road to OZ did not have more yellow bricks on her road than Lydia in her big old house.

Lydia has indelible images of how she would walk slowly, one small foot in front of the other, edging up the short slate walk, to Mrs. Cruickshank’s door. Then she would be stepping on the two steps and knocking on the door with a screen so old the rust had turned black. Peering inside to see if she should wait or let herself in, she thought how much she liked visiting the woman who had become her friend when neither of them was expecting it. The screen door rattled when the small hand knocked on it, but it let the resident of the house know she had visitors. The doorbell didn’t work, or maybe Lydia thought it had a rude sound and might frighten her friend.

Nothing else remains in Lydia’s memory. Well, nothing else except three steps to the living room, so soft that it seemed covered in velvet, dark velvet. Except the small table in the middle with the elongated form laid on top. There are no memories of tea or milk, none of specific colors or patterns in the living room. Just softness and darkness. Lydia didn’t ask herself then how the owner managed to get upstairs to her bedroom. She definitely would now. Maybe she always sat in her barely-lit living room and strummed the object on the tiny table. Maybe she never needed to sleep.

Lydia had gone to 415 once with her mother. On that occasion, Mrs. Cruickshank had played the instrument that was the form on the table. It was a zither. It was the first zither the girl had ever seen, and she didn’t know at the time that it would probably be the last, unless you count pictures you can find on the internet. Nobody plays the zither in this country, really.

The little girl had been so taken in by the music produced by the instrument, that the soft lady in the soft room said she was welcome to come back any time. Lydia was small, but her neighborhood was perfectly safe, and her mother knew she would never run into the street. She was told she could go whenever she wanted by both her mother and Mrs. Cruickshank too, and so the story started, even if only a few tiny filaments are left of it now.

When she visited, she peeked in the door window. Lydia could catch a glimpse of the interior of the house and would always make she she wasn’t disturbing the rhythm of the resident. Not that the elderly woman had much of a routine or rhythm, so she almost always looked up with a smile made out of cotton, her hair matching the smile, cottony and combed into a bun at the back of her neck. It was likely that the zither never left its small perch in the center of everything - the heavy curtains, the heavy carpet on the floor, the heavy afghan on the back of the sofa. 

The curved metal things that fit over the thumb, which for playing the instrument is called the first finger. The fifth, or baby finger, is not counted and crooks oddly toward the palm when a person is moving the hands over the strings. Lydia only saw the shiny metal arcs on Mrs. Cruickshank’s hands. She knew nothing then about the numbers assigned to each finger. She saw, however, the manner in which the little fingers laid crookedly in front of both of them as the two friends sat in the soft, dark living room of the much-older one. The shine that fascinated her was called, simply enough, a zither ring, but it moved with the fingers like the gleam on a small wave along the shore of a large river. The hands, withered and so soft, were like that. They flowed.

Mrs. Cruickshank did most of the talking, perhaps. Lydia visited her because she wanted to hear the music, but it soon became clear to them that the little girl also craved the words. Some of the words wafted up from the musical box, but others poured softly from the mouth of the elderly speaker. They weren’t the words to the songs she was playing on the strings in her lap, those words. No. They were the words of a life, longer in years than Lydia could count, and once they started to come out, there was a chain of words like islands of daisies, white, misted, indeterminate. How could the girl not feel their invitation to hold that light in her ears? 

Because Mrs. Cruickshank was so much older than her young friend, she had lots more things to tell. She also had the place to tell those things. (Her living room was, and felt like, a cocoon.) What she didn’t have a lot of was time. She wanted to make the best of what she did have. She thought Lydia was the perfect recipient of that remaining handful of time and the little girl did not disappoint her. The two friends met every week, usually in the waning hours of the afternoon. Songs of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth were played by one, but soon sung by both, as the girl quickly learned the lyrics. Lydia didn’t think to ask then if there were songs originally composed for the zither, and maybe it was irrelevant anyway because the important thing was that the zither musician be able to play the songs, adapted or not. She does remember liking “Danny Boy,” “Greensleeves,” and “Wayfaring Stranger” the best and thought she would have loved to hear “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but Mrs. Cruickshank was long gone by the time that became popular.

The music of the zither is like the music of the bagpipe or maybe the violin. Whichever instrument reaches deepest inside us is one that will follow us to and beyond the grave, and the woman who was facing hers with gentility, patience, and softness gave her gift to Lydia while both were still alive. It was the gift of time and its relationship to melody, continuity, depth. 

This was part of the reason why Mrs. Cruickshank wanted to include some more recent songs when she played. She didn’t want to be remembered as a maker of sadness. That was why one day she moved her fingers over the zither and something with a walking cadence, a decisive step, a dark, determined optimism, left Lydia hoping it would go on for a long time. In her house nobody knew music like that. They never watched noir movies (that neither Lydia nor her parents knew were called noir) because they showed sleazy places and people. Her mother and father were more the square dancing type.

Besides playing the new song every time they met, Mrs. Cruickshank told Lydia the story about the movie and how a man goes to post-war Vienna because friend has told him he’s gotten him a job. Neither of the two friends knew the film would be called the greatest British film of all time. Neither knew anything about British writer Graham Greene, who wrote the novella that is the basis for The Third Man. Lydia never asked her friend if she had seen the movie in The Strand Theatre uptown. She wished she had. She had also never danced when her friend played, but she had wanted to very badly.

At the time, Lydia didn’t know that particular song had streams of Portugal, Greece, maybe Italy, flowing through it. She didn’t know she would some day go to those places and a will’-o’the-wisp went with her to accompany the soft strains of the melancholy fado.

Thus little girl of about six and older woman of around ninety become good friends, in the simplest way possible: with sound, words, notes, vibration, dim echoes. It should have lasted an eternity or at least a century, but five years later, Mrs. Cruickshank was gone. Needless to say, it was a surprise to Lydia, who hadn’t thought her gentle friend could just be extinguished like that. Her pale light gone.

Mrs Cruickshank may or may not have had children or other heirs, or maybe she had nothing in the world to bequeath to anybody, but she left three items clearly indicated in her will. The older people who read the will explained to Lydia that Mrs. Cruickshank, dear woman, had wanted her to have the zither. Lydia broke down completely then, because she knew that her friend had given her the big task of carrying on whatever she had found of value over the many hours of their visits. She would not be able to receive the other half of what had been left to her until she turned eighteen.

The day of her eighteenth birthday, Lydia withdrew the sealed envelope, now seven years old, from its place beneath the instrument that had also fallen silent. It had been a feat of sheer will on her part to wait, but she had to respect her friend’s last wishes. She knew it would hurt to read the elderly woman’s words even now, but she stiffened her back, breathed slowly and deeply, and opened the envelope. It held a brief note, an explanation of what she was supposed to do with the rest of the envelope’s contents. 

The envelope was full of large bills. Lydia was to use the money to go to Vienna like Holly Martin (played by Joseph Cotten) in the film The Third Man did on the insistence of his friend Harry Lime She was to see everything possible in the three weeks she would be there. She was to take very good notes and also some pictures if possible. She wasn’t required to ride on the Wiener Riesenrad, the famous ferris wheel where Holly and Harry meet, if she didn’t care to. (Some people really fear heights.) She also didn’t have to go into the sewers like Harry (Orson Welles) had done in order to escape. (Well, Orson might have begged off and some poor double had to do the sewer scenes.) When Lydia came back, she would have to tell Mrs. Cruickshank all about the trip, and taking as long as necessary to tell about the trip. 

Lydia had no idea how to go about narrating her experience to a person who wasn’t 

alive. She might not do a good job of it. Also, she had kept the journals she’d been required to keep, recording her time in Vienna. She assumed that would do the trick as far as documentation. The journals proved how she’d followed the requests on the list of places to visit that accompanied the money for the trip. She’d gone to every museum required of her. She had bought and read the foremost history of Vienna. She had attended art exhibits, notably one on Expressionismus. She had gone to concerts. She had learned about post-war Europe and photo montage, but it was the voice of cotton and dark brocade that had spoken the loudest throughout the trip.

And so the zither rings continued to work their spell on the little girl when she was no longer little, glistening and punctuating strings no longer visible. Strindberg, Whitman, Munch, Schiele cast shadows on trees and walls. Dr. Caligari and his cabinet gave her nightmares, but she persisted. Brecht, Beckett, Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Sheila Watson, Edith Södergran… there was an immense parade of names, plays, paintings, songs, films, poetry, even dances, all urging her to find her own Expressionismus. 

Lydia found it, because there are friendships that last a lifetime. Or two. She too learned to play the misty, pale strings of the zither. She too had stories to tell, thanks to Mrs. Cruickshank.