Uncle Rudolf
Paul Bailey

For Norman and Cella Manea

Epigraph

‘A wand’ring minstrel I,

A thing of shreds and patches…’

Sung by Nanki-Poo in The Mikado. Words by W.S. Gilbert

‘I hate operetta’

György Ligeti, in a radio interview

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Uncle Rudolf

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Uncle Rudolf

I woke up yesterday morning with the old words on my tongue. There they were again, for the third time this year. In those first moments of consciousness, I could hear myself talking of blood and snow and storks on chimney tops in the language I put behind me. The disconnected phrases made no sense at all, but I understood their meaning.

—Shut up, I said aloud, in English. Go back where you belong.

Where do they belong? In my earliest childhood, I suppose, when I had a mother and a father. I spoke them as a little boy, whose name was Andrei, in the country I left at the age of seven. I babbled them, rather, the way children babble. Yes, I have a memory of babbling about the snow as it fell and then settled, turning – I imagined – the whole world white.

—There is no snow in India and Africa, my father corrected me. Except high up on the mountains. The Indians and Africans who live on the ground never see it.

I was sorry for the Indians and Africans who lived on the ground, because I loved to watch the snowflakes falling from heaven, making that beautiful carpet.

The young dentist who examined me this afternoon commented on the remarkable condition of my teeth. He was surprised that a man of seventy should have a mouth so free from decay. My gums had receded, of course, which was only natural, and there was a small amount of plaque, but otherwise, dentally speaking, I was in splendid shape. He showed me my healthy molars on a closed circuit television screen as proof.

—You have taken good care of yourself, Mr Peters.

I did not tell him, or his wife, the hygienist who disposed of the plaque, that I had to thank Uncle Rudolf for my strong teeth. The story would have struck them as absurd. It is true, even so.

—Andrew, said my uncle (Andrei had become Andrew on the platform at Victoria Station, on the evening of the twenty-third of February 1937, minutes after my arrival.) Andrew, he said to me over breakfast the next day, that is burnt toast you are staring at. Cover it with jam by all means, or spread some butter on it, but eat it, if you please. I want to hear you crunching on it.

—Yes, Uncle, I responded dutifully, although I was mystified. My father had advised me to obey Uncle Rudolf’s every command.

I crunched on the blackened toast.

—Bravo, Andrew. Keep crunching.

I wondered if, perhaps, he was mad. I was only seven years old, but I knew something about madness already. There was a man who often stood outside the courthouse where my father worked as the chief clerk shouting that there was no justice but God’s. Human justice was a mirage, a phantom, he proclaimed. This man, who had a beard that went down to his knees – ‘To conceal eternal shame’ – was regarded as a harmless lunatic. He had nothing dangerous in his nature, my father reassured me. I was to pity him. I was to pity all those like him.

Would I have to pity Uncle Rudolf? He was smiling at me as I kept on crunching, and his smile was not that of a madman, I decided. No, he was not one of the unhappy souls my father had alerted me to.

—I was introduced to burnt toast, Andrew, by a Negro with a gleaming smile in a funny place called Hollywood. I expressed admiration for the dazzling whiteness of his teeth, and he told me his secret was burnt toast. He had been eating it all his life, like his parents before him.

Where was this funny place? I asked my uncle.

—You must be the one boy on the planet not to know where Hollywood is. It is in America, Andrew. In California, to be exact. It is the home of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It is where motion pictures are made. I was there a couple of years ago, playing – and singing – the part of Barinkay in The Gypsy Baron. The movie was never completed. I was paid my wages and I came home to Europe, a sadder and a richer man. You are looking bewildered and your tea is getting cold.

I was aware that Uncle Rudolf was a famous singer – the whole town knew of his fame – but this talk of Hollywood was beyond my understanding.

—Have you never seen a motion picture, Andrew?

—No, I confessed. Mama says I must be protected from the cinema until I am older.

—Does she? She is strict in her faith, if I remember.

—Yes, Uncle.

—I will take you to the pictures today, if you eat up your toast and drink your tea. You deserve a treat after your long journey.

I crunched with a purpose and drained my cup.

—Where is she, Uncle? Can you tell me?

—No, to be honest. I wish I could. Your mother is safe somewhere, that much I can tell you.

Safe. Somewhere. On Uncle Rudolf’s lips, the words were comforting. The old words, of course.

Am I attempting to stave off the prospect of my second childhood? Why else, I ask myself, should I now be writing about my life with Rudolf Peterson, who was born Rudi Petrescu? Walking the five miles back from the dentist’s today, at my usual brisk pace, in light rain, I realized that I had said goodbye to his receptionist in Romanian. La revedere: these were my last words to my father, spoken with a sob as the train drew out of the Gare du Nord in Paris, on the morning of the twenty-third of February, 1937. I went on waving to him until he and I were out of each other’s sight. Although I was sad to be parted from him, I was also happily innocent of his impending plan to disappear.

—Your uncle will take care of you, Andrei. For the time being – weeks, maybe months. No longer, dear one, I promise. This will be a holiday for you. Rudi is an amusing man. He will make you laugh. He has stories at his fingertips.

My father entrusted me to the care of a guard, with whom he communicated in French and a few, telling signs. The man nodded his understanding of the task ahead of him, muttering Oui, Monsieur and Je comprends and, finally, Merci beaucoup, Monsieur when he accepted the francs my father offered him. He was to deliver me, petit Andrei – Andrei, Andrei, my father repeated – into the hands of Maestro Rudolf Peterson, who would be waiting for his nephew on the station platform in London. Then my father produced from the inside pocket of his best overcoat a photograph of my uncle dressed, I think, as a pirate, with a bandanna on his head, large rings in his ears and a cutlass in his belt. My father entreated the guard to study the maestro’s face, and nothing else. The man did so, and smiled. The maestro, my father insisted, would be wearing ordinary clothes. Not très ordinaire, but ordinaire. No earrings; no sword. The man nodded vigorously, still smiling.

—La revedere, Tata, I managed to say, although I was choking with fear and anticipation. I did not want this holiday. I wanted to be with my mother and father, from whom I had never been separated. Yet I also wanted to meet my famous Uncle Rudolf – to listen to the stories he had at his fingertips; to have him sing for me.

I have Jewish blood in my veins, but I can’t ascertain how much. Does it constitute a third, a quarter, a half of me? A sixteenth, perhaps, or less? Will it ever be possible to quantify a person’s blood – to say, with conviction, that those drops are Norse, those Gallic, those Latin, those Tatar? Mine has yet to be quantified, but what is certain is that some of it is Jewish.

My mother’s father was a Jew. He was known in the town, even after his death – which happened before I was born – as the Debt Collector. My maternal grandmother enraged and upset her parents when she declared her love for him. She was stubborn, and had her way, against all their modest hopes and wishes for her. She stated, quite calmly, that she would end her life if she could not marry him. And he, in turn, angered his own family by saying that no other girl but Doina would ever make him happy.

They were married in a nearby city, to escape the gossip in the town. It was said that he renounced his faith, but he had no faith to renounce. He was a freethinker, an atheist, and might have been a professor or a scholar if his father had not died suddenly. He became a reluctant middleman instead, collecting money from the peasants who lived and toiled on the Haşdeu estate. It was necessary for him to earn a living, and – like a fool, he said afterwards – he allowed himself to continue the family tradition. The eldest son – and he was an only child – was expected to be the next intermediary, doing the landowner’s nasty work for him. And that is what my grandfather did, with much sorrow and anguish, my mother told me.

He was already dead when, in 1935, the saviour of the Romanian people, the Pied Piper who would lead them to a Balkan paradise, stood on the steps of the courthouse and exhorted his disciples to free themselves from the Jewish yoke. My mother and father were among the crowd who listened to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as he recounted how he had stood before an icon of the Archangel Michael in the chapel of the prison at Vacareşti and received immediate and lasting inspiration. The tall, dark Codreanu had the blazing eyes, the trumpet-like voice of a prophet, my father revealed to me later. His kind of prophet was best left in the wilderness, talking to stones and trees and passing birds, but alas Codreanu was not in the wilderness, my father complained. He was here, there and everywhere, in the very heart of the country.

Thinking of the Pied Piper and what he represented, I am driven to set down a scene from childhood – my only childhood, I hope. It is a Thursday morning in early September. The year is 1936. I am with my mother at the market in the town square. The weather has turned chilly. She has a scarf on her head and a shawl about her shoulders, and I am sweltering inside the lamb’s wool jacket she has forced me to wear. She is bartering with the stallholder who sells cabbages, as is the custom. She wants the firmest, greenest cabbage he has, at a price she can afford. Cabbage soup is her husband’s favourite dish, she tells the stallholder, who remarks that without cabbage soup he would have no business. My mother brings out her purse; she haggles a little more; the stallholder observes, as he observes to all the women on every market day, that she will make a pauper of him, and then her lip is trembling, and her hands are shaking, and I am suddenly afraid for her. She has just heard a woman behind her say:

—That’s the Debt Collector’s daughter, damn her, striking a hard bargain.

My mother gives the stallholder the coins and rushes off. I pick up the purse she has dropped, and take the cabbage she has bought, and look at the woman who caused my mother to shake and tremble and run away. She is fat and red-faced and she is gloating – yes, that is the word I can use of her now, but did not know then – she is gloating with pride at the harm she has done. I stare at her. Do I want her to call me the Debt Collector’s grandson? I wait. I want her to give me a reason to spit at her. Her gaze shifts to the stallholder, and I hear her telling him his cabbages are too costly, in almost the same words my mother had spoken a minute earlier.

My mother was devoutly Orthodox. My father would joke that there weren’t enough saints’ days in the year to satisfy her. On the day of the cabbage she came home and prayed to the icon of the Virgin and Child for what seemed hours. I heard her implore the Holy Mother to forgive the woman who had insulted her and her dear father’s memory, and to cleanse the minds and hearts of all those in the town who thought the same.

Our dinner that evening was, naturally, cabbage soup, into which my mother stirred a generous dollop of soured cream, to please my father. I kept my promise and did not mention the woman in the market. We ate contentedly. Many years later, I saw a picture in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, by one of the minor Dutch masters, that might have captured the three of us – a happy trinity – at table. There was the tureen; there were the bowls, and there were the father, the mother and the greedy little boy, whose own empty bowl would soon, he hoped, be filled again. They were bathed in a light that reflected their beatific state, while the room behind them was in darkness. A warm darkness, I thought, into which you could steal with safety.

—What is so special about Mr De Witt’s picture, Andrew? There are hundreds like it here.

—It appeals to me, Uncle. It speaks to me, as you say. I find it rather moving.

—If you find that moving, you will be overwhelmed by the Rembrandts, should we ever get to them, you young slowcoach. I can confidently predict that your emotional floodgates will open and burst. Leave those humble folk to their soup, Andrew. Come along.

I could not tell him that the picture had sent me drifting back to the peaceful evening of the cabbage soup and the terrible day of the cabbage which preceded it. That’s the Debt Collector’s daughter, damn her, striking a hard bargain – the woman’s voice was in my head as I walked beside Uncle Rudolf, who was impatient to show me real masterpieces. Those persons for ever unknown made off with the Debt Collector’s daughter, not my devout and innocent mother.

I squeezed my protector’s arm, very gently, when we came to a stop in front of The Night Watch, in unsaid gratitude for his protection.

The sky was black when we set off on our long journey. The snow was so hard that it didn’t crackle under our feet. My father lifted me on to Mircea the woodman’s cart and then jumped up and lay beside me. He covered us, quickly, with a rough blanket.

—Lie still, Andrei, he whispered. Lie very still.

—I want to sneeze. There’s dust in my nose.

—And in mine.

—Are we hiding from people, Tata?

—Bogies. Lots of them. We must be silent, Andrei dear.

I was proud of myself for not having sneezed when my father lowered me to the ground. I looked about me for bogies, but there were none to be seen. Mircea’s old horse neighed loudly, and I told him to be quiet, whereupon he opened his huge mouth, which was yellow inside, and yawned. I noticed in amazement that the woodman was crying.

—Wickedness, said Mircea. Wickedness. Wickedness.

—My good friend. You are my good friend.

—Wickedness. Mircea wiped away the tears from his cheeks with the back of his gloved hand. Wickedness.

—Say goodbye and thank you to Mircea, Andrei.

But before I could speak, the grizzled woodman (it occurs to me now that Mircea’s face was definitely grizzled) was pressing me to him with such force that I found it hard to breathe. He bent down and kissed me and I felt his grey stubble pricking my skin.

—The train will soon be here, said my father. He took some notes from his pocket, but Mircea refused them with an offended snort. Do not wait with us, my friend. Return to your bed.

Mircea was reluctant to leave us, I remember. It was only the horse’s restlessness – he was neighing again, and stamping his hooves – that persuaded him to go. There was a final embrace, and then he climbed into the driver’s seat. The horse needed no encouragement to move.

We were left alone. We were alone together for an eternity. How often, in reveries and dreams, has our lonely vigil come back to me – the two of us, disheartened father and apprehensive son, cuddling each other closely, for warmth as much as reassurance, on the tiny station’s solitary bench, and waiting, waiting.

—We must be careful not to fall asleep, Andrei. The train will only stop if we wave it down.

—Yes, Tata.

—There’s been a snowstorm, I expect, further up the line.

It was almost dawn before the train arrived. Its distant chugging awakened startled crows and sparrows. We stood up and shook our limbs. My father put out his arm as the train drew slowly into the tiny station and then passed through it, only stopping to leave us a choice between the last three carriages. It was the middle one we settled for, because it was empty.

—You can sleep now, if you wish, Andrei. You can spread yourself out and sleep.

—Tell me some more about Uncle Rudolf, Tata. Will I like him?

—Oh, yes. Have no fear. Unless you are a very dull and stupid boy, which I know you are not, you will certainly like him. You could not be going to a better uncle.

From the window, for mile upon mile, we saw nothing but snow and dun-coloured sky. We passed a village, where the peasants’ huts had been transformed into igloos.

—Igloos, Tata, I said, pointing at the huts that no longer seemed to be made of wood. My father had taught me how Eskimos live, snug inside their ice-houses. He was pleased that I hadn’t forgotten the lesson. It was his ambition, as a lover of geography, to travel the world – all of it, hot and cold – and study the customs of other peoples. In the meantime, he joked, I have been everywhere in my head, tapping it to ensure that I understood what he was saying. He had read about the Eskimos, and the many tribes of Africa, and the Grand Canyon, and the Sahara Desert in the French edition of National Geographic, the magazine he had begun to collect. There were several copies of it on our bookshelf, next to my story books, the Bible, and Family Medicine, which my mother consulted when my father or I caught a cold or came down with a fever. Family Medicine had a simple cure for every ordinary illness. It was more reliable than the doctor she once called in to look at me, whose hands were shaky from drink.

The train stopped abruptly – at another tiny country station – and a man got into the carriage we had hoped would be ours alone. He had the look of a soldier, in his heavy greatcoat and shiny boots.

—It is bitter out there, he told us, slamming the door behind him and slapping his sides. Where are you heading for?

—The capital, my father answered.

—On business?

—Yes, that is right. On business.

—What business would that be?

—Legal business. I work for lawyers.

—Honest lawyers?

—I have no reason to believe they are dishonest.

—Watch them closely, nevertheless. They are not always to be trusted.

—I thank you for your advice. My father was being (I understand now) sarcastic.

—Is this handsome young fellow yours? The man smiled at me. I think I tried to smile back.

—He is, yes. His name is Andrei.

—He is the image of his father. He has something of your fine nose already. Good day to you, Andrei.

—Good day, sir.

The man gave his name, which was Constantin Florescu. It has lodged in my memory for sixty-three years.

My father introduced himself, accepting a cigarette from the gold case Constantin Florescu opened with a flick.

—And is Andrei destined for the law?

—It is too early to say. He is a bright child. Shut your ears, Andrei, while I pay you compliments. He has curiosity and imagination. Perhaps a little too much imagination.

—That will pass. Childhood is the time to be imaginative. After which, sense prevails. In some cases, he added with a sneer. You will learn, Andrei Petrescu, that some men are more sensible than others. As for women, they are divinely blessed. They have no need of sense. Do not make too much money when you grow up. Women will spend it for you.

—I trust my son will not involve himself with such women. I hope he will find a woman with his mother’s character.

—And where is that good lady? At home?

My father hesitated.

—At home. Of course.

—I shall marry one day, Constantin Florescu announced. He stroked his thick moustache. I shall pick my wife with care. If it is God’s wish, as it is mine, she will give me sons.

—Ah, yes, said my father. God’s wish. Andrei is going to England. For a month or so.

—England? Why not Germany?

—We have a relative in England.

—A Romanian relative?

—Naturally.

—The English are not good to us. The English are playing games with us. They were our allies a few years ago. But now they are suspicious of our plans to build a greater, stronger country, said Constantin Florescu, undoing the buttons on his overcoat, revealing a green shirt.

—You are a Guardist, my father remarked, calmly.

—Indeed I am.

—So you put your faith in the prophet Codreanu, with his vision of a pure Romania.

—I do. As do all true patriots.

The train was nearing Bucharest. There were no more igloos. I saw tall buildings and tramcars and men and women walking along the pavements. The town of my birth dwindled as I stared out at the bustling city.

We said goodbye to our companion when we reached the ticket barrier.

—I am fighting on your behalf, Andrei Petrescu. Remind your father of that. What a very small suitcase you are taking with you to England.

I am writing in one of the leather-bound ledgers in which – like Teddy Grubb before me – I used to enter my uncle’s earnings. I think I am writing to reclaim my own life – my sheltered protected life – as much as his, Uncle Rudolf’s, because the compulsion to bring the past into the present will not be stilled. I can barely sleep, so urgent is the task I have set myself. Healthy as I am, ridiculously young as I might appear, I am nevertheless conscious that death could forestall me.

The benevolent Saint Nicholas is above the desk, smiling a just-detectable half-smile. The wonder-worker is blessing me with his right hand.

—If anything bad ever happens to God, we have always got Saint Nicholas. My uncle was fond of the old Russian saying, and often quoted it whenever he stopped to look at his beloved icon.

—Nobody knows who painted him, Andrew. The artist was without worldly ambition. He had his gift and his faith, and the two came together when he picked up his brush. You will care for my precious icon when I am dead, won’t you?

—Yes, Uncle, I answered, not wanting to imagine a life beyond his.

—You promise me?

—Yes, Uncle. I promise.

He embraced me then, and ruffled my hair, and said that the impossible country of Moldania beckoned. He would be exiled for three silly hours, during which distracted time he would inspire the peasants to revolt in a friendly manner – No bloodshed, I implore you! – before discovering he was their long-lost king.

—Oh, Andrew, will I never be freed from this nonsense?

Muraturi was the old word on my lips this morning. Why was I thinking of pickled vegetables – of cauliflower and carrots; of green and red peppers; of radishes and red cabbage? I hadn’t eaten the dish in a lifetime, not since…and then, with an involuntary cry of anguish, I pictured a lake, and clear blue sky, and saw my mother and me tickling my father, who is pretending to be asleep on the grass. The vegetables are glistening on little plates on that summer afternoon in 1936.

Why has this scene – of the kind so many English poets call sylvan – never come to me in dreams?

—I will have my revenge, you scamp, says my father, waking with a start, as if from a nightmare.

His revenge, his sweet revenge, is to tickle his son’s tummy, until the happy boy is weak with giggling.

I did not know you could kill hours until that afternoon in Bucharest.

—We have hours to kill, Andrei. We must think of something to do. Are you hungry?

—A little bit. How do you kill hours, Tata?

—By keeping busy. You kill time by forgetting about it. You pretend it doesn’t exist. Let’s see if Cina is open.

I have a memory of crossing a huge square in order to reach my uncle’s favourite restaurant. I see again a fat, bald waiter greeting my father as we enter Cina, stamping the snow from our boots. The waiter knows my father’s brother from the time he broke the hearts of every woman in the city. There was never a Danilo more wickedly handsome.

—How is the great Rudolf?

—He is well, Sandu. This young man is his nephew. Andrei is going to London to live with him for a while.

Sandu brings us the dishes the great Rudolf Peterson most enjoys and we eat as much as we can. My father drinks the red wine his brother loves and soon the hours we needed to kill have gone by, only to recur in vivid snatches, a whole lifetime later, in the dreams that beset an Englishman named Andrew Peters. The beaming Sandu is shaking my hand and saying:

—Tell your uncle, the moment you meet him, that he must come back to his country. Tell him that is Sandu’s command. We do not have many heroes, Andrei, but Rudolf Peterson is one of them. Remind him that he is a national hero.

I promised to pass on the message and did so, on the twenty-third of February, 1937, on the platform at Victoria Station. It was something to say to the man who had lifted me up in his arms till my face was level with his. Uncle Rudolf laughed, and kissed me on both cheeks.

—I am no hero, Andrew. I am a hero on the stage, but nowhere else.

The final part of my last, week-long journey with my father took three days. We crossed the Hungarian plains in darkness, with only the black shapes of trees visible from the window. Then there were the mountains of Austria and Switzerland to marvel at. The French countryside, which I would visit with Uncle Rudolf in the autumn of 1950, when he was intent on educating me in matters of the spirit, seemed dull by contrast.

The train stopped at each border. Soldiers carrying guns came aboard and examined everybody’s papers. I remember that one of them, an Austrian or perhaps a German, pulled a frightened face in mockery of my own. His feigned look of terror made me smile, but it angered my father, who muttered words the man understood, for he instantly reassumed his stern expression.

I wasn’t scared of the guns, in truth. It was the future, of which I had been unaware before, that caused me to be fearful. I knew this solely from the gnawing pain in my stomach, which spoke of things unknown. A similar gnawing pain would afflict me years later, with the recognition of a love that could neither be mentioned nor properly gratified – a love, paradoxically, that has sustained me for twenty-five years of solitude.

Here I was, in London, safely delivered by the French guard – who gained a small fortune in English money from my smiling uncle – looking about me, bewildered.

—You will be Andrew, Andrei. Andrew. For all the time you are in my care.

I was still in his arms. He was bearing me out of the station and into the chauffeur-driven car that was waiting for us.

—This is my nephew, he said to the driver in the new language I would soon be learning.

—Welcome to England, Andrew. My uncle translated Charlie’s greeting, and instructed me to say thank you, which I somehow did.

—Thank you. My first new words on that first evening.

I had never been in a lift, because we had no such modern thing in our town, but here I was, with my uncle’s hand on my shoulder, going up and up to his apartment on the top floor of Nightingale Mansions. That lift would become a golden cage in which I was happy to be imprisoned. I loved the way it clanked to a stop. In summer, when most of the Nightingale’s residents were on holiday in the south of France, I lived in my cage whenever I was free to play, working the magic handle that set it in motion, jumping in and out of it as the mood took me.

I heard the clanking sound for the first time that evening, and then here I was entering my uncle Rudolf’s London home. I was hugged and kissed by Annie, his housekeeper, who smelt of a soap I would discover was called carbolic, and who whispered Andrew, Andrew, over and over again, into my ear.

—You poor, lovely boy, she was saying, you poor, lovely boy. I heard affection in her voice, but with no knowledge of what she was really telling me. Annie would say to me later, as she poured porridge into my special bowl, that I was her poor, lovely boy from the moment she saw me on that cold February night. I was her clever boy, too, for speaking English so well.

My uncle’s flat was sumptuous. The word was unknown to me in 1937, for I had not been raised in anything like luxury. My parents had had no cause to use it, ever. Somptuos. Our house in the small country town – the house I was expecting to live in again – was humble, and humbly furnished. But Uncle Rudolf’s furniture was of a kind I could not even dream of, and had no words to describe until I became the English nephew he wanted me to be. Although I was tired and confused, my eyes took in the vast sofa, the shining mahogany table, the chaise longue, the grand piano, the chandelier, and the paintings and drawings that covered every wall. I gawped. I gawped in wonder, in utter astonishment.

I slept alongside my uncle that night. He sang me to sleep with a lullaby.

—Annie burns the toast to perfection, said Uncle Rudolf in the old language. I have trained her well.

It was at breakfast, on my third day in England, that he announced he had to visit Paris. Urgent business. A chance to sing, perhaps, at the Opéra. He wished he could take me with him, but it would not be fun for me, waiting in some lonely hotel room for an uncle who was engaged elsewhere. Annie and Teddy would keep me amused, and Charlie would drive me around London, showing me all of the sights, and he would call me on the telephone, speaking the words we both understood. I was not to be worried or upset. He would be back with me by Friday, at the very latest. I was in safe hands.

Those safe hands were Annie’s, Teddy’s and Charlie’s – my uncle’s doting servants. I sat in the kitchen with the perspiring Annie, watching as she prepared the food that was so different from anything Mama had cooked for me; and I walked with Teddy Grubb to the bank that was proud to have Rudolf Peterson’s custom, and where I was given a freshly minted pound note by the cashier, and then I was Charlie’s happy passenger for an entire rainy afternoon, seeing nothing of the promised sights but revelling in the fact – the unlikely fact – that I was in a car the like of which the people in our town would not have believed existed.

I rode in state that day, I realize, and innumerable times after. The Debt Collector’s grandson might have been a prince, to look at him.

What I remember – what I cannot fail to remember in the light of what I was to learn – of that first telephone conversation with my uncle is that he did not tell me the truth. It was part of his deceitful plan to save me for as long as possible from griefs I was too young to bear. He sounded buoyant as he told me he had been in the company of a beautiful woman. Paris was the place for beautiful women.

He brought me back a souvenir. It was a model of the Eiffel Tower, from the top of which, thirteen years later, he and I would survey the city he had arrived in thirty years earlier with the intention of becoming the finest lyric tenor in the world.

My pen is darting across these pages, yet I fear he will elude me, the last and most substantial of my three dear ghosts. ‘My pen’; ‘these pages’ – how quaint I must seem, how moribund, in this age of spectacularly advanced technology. But the pen and pages are appropriate since I am writing of the Rudolf Peterson his public would not have understood, or even applauded, in those vanished years of his immense fame. The music he sang deals only fleetingly with sorrow, but sorrow was of my uncle’s essence, and it encompassed more than his own fierce melancholy, as I came to understand. To begin with, I noticed that sorrow only in glimpses. I would enter a room – in London, or in Sussex – and he would be unaware of my silent presence. He was often staring ahead of him, contemplating something painful, I guessed, to judge by the look of blankness on his normally lively features. Then, seeing me, he would lose the discontented expression in an instant and start chatting to his beloved nephew of everyday concerns, such as the surprise dish he had asked Annie to prepare for supper. With Andrew to entertain and interest, it seemed, there was no call for sadness.

The voice you can hear today on the Golden Age label gives just a hint of what he was about. It is bright and confident, as befits a reckless vagabond; a prince who believes he is a simple gypsy fiddler; a champagne-guzzling gambler who plays roulette with no thought of a ruinous tomorrow. These were the kind of improbable men Uncle Rudolf impersonated, giving them – for as long as he could bear to – angelic expression. But the angel wanted to sing of other matters; of other, more serious, concerns, and he had already left it too late to do so by the time I arrived in his life.

—You are my mascot, my lucky charm, my uncle said as I watched his face in the dressing-room mirror being transformed into that of Zoltan Kassák, the brigand with whom the Crown Princess Zelda falls at first hopelessly, and then triumphantly, in love. Zoltan has a duelling scar on his left cheek, which Uncle Rudolf created each night with a strip of blood-red plasticine stuck on with theatrical glue.

—It mustn’t look too livid, he told me as he dabbed it with powder. Zelda has to find it irresistible.

As Zoltan, my uncle wore immensely baggy trousers that billowed above his leather boots. His brigand’s clothes also included an embroidered shirt and a cap from which protruded an eagle’s feather. The sword and dagger hanging from his belt proclaimed him to be a man who would fight his enemies to the death, should it be necessary. I can remember, now, watching from the side of the stage as he roused his fellow brigands into action with the song ‘What fear we of the foe?’ and marvelling that I was there, on that summer evening, to bring him luck. I stood, entranced, throughout the first performance of Magyar Maytime, though I was confused by the story, and still am, if I think about it. In the last scene, Zoltan is discovered to have noble blood, and this means that Zelda, who is forbidden to marry a commoner, can become his bride. My uncle loathed the coy badinage – ‘You are my lovely, my wonderful Zelly’; ‘You are my handsome Zolly, who is so brave and strong’ – that preceded the duet in which they declare eternal love for one another. His leading lady was equally embarrassed at having to call him Zolly, and sometimes he substituted ‘smelly’ or ‘belly’ or ‘jelly’, and she ‘folly’ or ‘dolly’ or ‘Molly’, and then they would giggle, and the angry conductor in the pit would be forced to wait for them to stop before raising his baton.

—It is a silly life I lead, Andrew. Yours will be more sensible I hope. And happier.

My mother was with me briefly today – speaking the only words she knew – in those moments between sleeping and waking. She said what was true, that she had never left me, although we had been parted.

—No parting, Andrei, was more terrible than ours. Her ghost’s voice was as light and soft as the voice that had soothed and comforted and teased me in my earliest years. She told me that her God was the same kind and merciful God she had taught me to believe in but whom I have since abandoned, and then the voice was gone, and the blurred vision of her young face, and I was on the verge of talking to her when I realized that I was awake and alone and shivering in the warmth of the afternoon.

—I have a confession to make, Andrew. Your father and I were rivals for your mother’s affections. Irina preferred Roman. If she had chosen me, I would not be enjoying my nephew’s company. On balance, I suppose I should be glad she threw me over.

—Were you in love with Mama, Uncle?

—Very much. She was so serious and shy. She wasn’t – as they say here – forward.

I knew by then, though I had been given no reason why, that I would not, could not, see her again. I was fifteen by now, and the war with Germany was almost over. My uncle looked older, with white hairs on his temples he made no attempt to disguise. He was in a melancholy mood, a mood to which I was already happily accustomed.

—I try not to dwell on the past, Andrew. It’s over, I remind myself. What’s done cannot be undone. The present is all that matters. Remember that, if you can. As for me these days, I tend to forget it. Irina decided wisely when she picked Roman. I offered them money, my Vienna money, to get out of that beastly country – our beastly country, Andrew – but they refused to accept it. I should have gone to Botoşani and bullied them into leaving.

I asked him why.

I was trapped in his fierce brown stare for a moment.

—Oh, it was no place for good people. He added, mysteriously: But you are my future, Andrew. That’s why. Whatever happens, I shall always be at your side when you need me. Yes, you are my future, for the time being.

Perhaps he had considered telling me the real reason why on that April day in 1945, and had then – in the course of staring at me – persuaded himself that a boy of fifteen was too raw for such knowledge. Perhaps.

He suggested that we take a walk in the fields. There was no danger any more from German planes. The lord of the manor, as he mockingly described himself, would inspect the estate with his heir apparent.

We ate an omelette that evening, cooked with the fresh eggs his hens had laid.

—What luxury. What a simple luxury, said my – smiling uncle. We are very fortunate.

I was to receive the real reason why, the real answer to my question, when I was eighteen.

—You are mature for your age, Andrew. I will pour you a large brandy before I say what I have to say. I certainly need one.

What he told me on the tenth of August, 1948, caused me to shiver today.

I remember that I needed a second large brandy after I had read my father’s last letter to my uncle, written in the old words I no longer spoke.

The words that are ashes in my mouth when I catch myself speaking them now.

—We shall have an English Christmas, not an Orthodox one. Santa Claus will come down the chimney with your presents. He’s like Saint Nicholas only different, as they say here. You must sleep tight, my dear, because Santa doesn’t want you to see him being kind. Do you promise me you won’t try to look at him?

—I promise, Uncle.

It was December 1937, and I was still in England, on holiday. We were at Uncle Rudolf’s Elizabethan house in the Sussex countryside, with his devoted entourage – Annie, Teddy and Charlie – whom he now instructed me not to call his servants.

—They are my friends, Andrew darling. They work for me, yes, but on the best of terms. They are our equals, not inferiors.

(Yet the girls Annie ruled over with a steely eye for any slipshod cleaning or polishing or bed-making were obviously there as unobtrusive servants, fulfilling necessary chores.)

Annie, Teddy and Charlie were a privileged trio, and they basked in that privilege. The widowed Annie, the divorced Teddy and Charlie, the dedicated ‘bit of a skirt-chaser’ – a phrase I learned from Charlie’s lips even before my English lessons began in earnest – regarded their friendly employer as a very paragon.

I kept my promise to sleep tight. Uncle Rudolf had ensured that I would, by having dinner served late on Christmas Eve. It might have been the sherry in the trifle and the half-glass of champagne I was advised to sip that made me drowsy, but I was definitely ‘on the way to the Land of Nod’ – as Annie often joked – when my uncle carried me upstairs to bed. And what delights awaited me that Christmas morning, delivered to my little room with such amazing stealth: a train set, complete with signals and stations, with miniature porters and passengers and a beaming driver at the helm; a huge wooden jigsaw puzzle of the Houses of Parliament; sheets of drawing paper, with coloured pencils and crayons; Babar the Elephant in French, and an English dictionary, my first and most beloved, that would, as Uncle Rudolf predicted, bring me not only a new language but a whole new world. These are the gifts, the precious gifts, I remember today, but I think there were others to unwrap beneath my uncle’s adoring gaze.

My playmate, if the term is appropriate, that Christmas was Maurice, the ten-year-old son of Charlie and a skirt he had chased successfully. Maurice was bored and morose in my company, though I did reduce him to jeering laughter whenever I attempted to speak a snatch or two of English.

—You sound funny. Your uncle doesn’t, but you do. You don’t know how funny you sound.

But otherwise Maurice glowered at me – yes, glowered is right – during our playtime. I suppose, now, that he felt too grown-up in my childish presence, too preoccupied with the fact that his parents, Charlie and Edith, were not united in either love or marriage. He had no family, as I had. That may be my old man’s fancy, set down with all the confidence of hindsight, but Maurice, coming home on leave from Malta would try, and fail, to kill his mother ten years later. The young sailor had found her with a stranger, naked on the kitchen table. The man, a respected doctor, dressed in haste while Maurice glowered at him, I imagine, as he had once glowered at me. Alone with Edith, who was offering excuses for her behaviour, Maurice picked up a knife and stabbed her in the arm, the shoulder and, most dangerously, the chest. It was the contrite Maurice who summoned the police. His mother survived, after an emergency operation that lasted several hours. Maurice stood trial, in 1948, for attempted murder, and was found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. The defending counsel depicted Edith as the loosest type of loose woman, and a Sunday newspaper named her the Finchley Jezebel. Maurice was sent to prison, where he shortly died.

Maurice’s laughter as he scorned my feeble English wasn’t happily full-throated. I know that I sensed the strain in it. We were always uneasy together, and grateful when Annie or Charlie or Uncle Rudolf appeared with cake and jellies and chocolate. We both needed those cheerful adults to be with us, and for subtly different reasons, it occurs to me. I can express today what I couldn’t then, even in the old words – that, seeing a few snowflakes fall, my heart was suddenly in my throat. As the flakes fell and almost instantly evaporated, I had a vision of the wonderful carpet I had walked on the previous December, hand-in-hand with Tata. I thought, too, of Mama ordering me away from the window, to eat – what was it I ate? – the pie she had baked with caşcavel cheese, which comes from ewe’s milk, and mushrooms.

My uncle hosted a supper party that Christmas evening. I wore a tailored suit with short trousers, a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie.

—Andrew is the guest of honour, he announced as each of his guests arrived. My nephew, my darling nipote.

Uncle Rudolf raised me aloft to shake hands with a famous actor, a famous prima donna (who kissed me on both cheeks), a famous theatrical designer, another famous actor and his famous actress wife, a famous cabaret singer, a famous playwright and a pianist who wasn’t as famous as he deserved to be. Among all these famous or not-so-famous people, I was the guest of honour, my uncle insisted. He sat me next to him, at the head of the dining table.

We ate by candlelight. No, they ate by candlelight, while I nibbled, nothing more, at the strange food that was set in front of me. The meal was served by the always-perspiring Annie with the aid of two girls from the village, who mumbled ‘Beg pardon, sir’ and ‘Beg pardon, madam’ until Uncle Rudolf ordered them, politely, to stop. It was Annie who noticed my reluctance to touch the dark meat on my plate, and it was she who removed the partridge breast and the pear stewed in red wine, scolding Mr Rudolf for expecting her poor, lovely boy to eat such a rich dish. I was given some Brussels sprouts and a roast potato, cut into small pieces, and felt less discomfort.

The wines were poured by Teddy Grubb, who was said to ‘have a nose’ for them. In later years, my uncle would tease me for saying ‘Mr Grubb has a nose’ before I had even mastered the alphabet. The faces of the famous became redder and livelier as the supper progressed. They cheered when Annie brought in the Christmas pudding, which Uncle Rudolf doused in brandy. Someone shouted ‘Whoosh’ when he put a match to it, sending flames rising. I was afraid the flames would spread and that we would all be burnt, but they soon subsided, to everyone’s applause.

—Clap your hands, Andrew. It’s the custom.

Everyone clapped again when I discovered a bright new shilling in my slice of pudding. I had to lick it clean of custard to appreciate its brightness.

—That’s a sign you’ll be wealthy one day. As you will be, I promise.

My uncle stood up and asked for silence. Conversation and laughter slowly drifted away.

—I should like us to drink a toast to absent friends.

He patted me on the head as the famous guests rose and said, almost in unison:

—Absent friends.

Did I realize that I was the object of pitying looks? I think I must have done, for the eyes of everybody in the dining room were suddenly focused on me.

—To all our dear ones.

—To all our dear ones.

—To those who are with us.

—To those who are with us.

—And to those who have been taken from us.

There was a hush. No one responded to this toast, as they had responded to the others. I waited to hear them repeat ‘And to those who have been taken from us’ but the hush prevailed. Uncle Rudolf told me, some years on, that I wriggled in my chair and blushed with embarrassment, to have so many kind and thoughtful eyes fixed upon me that night.

—Now let’s be happy again.

After the ladies had ‘powdered their noses’ and the gentlemen had smoked their cigarettes and cigars, the Christmas party took place in the drawing room. I sat on the famous prima donna’s knee and watched the adults play charades. I was, of course, mystified. Maurice, who had not eaten supper with us, was invited to join in. One of his few boasts would be that for three Christmasses he had acted with two of the most famous actors in the theatre, thanks to the fact that his dad was Rudolf Peterson’s personal driver.

It is the not-so-famous pianist I remember best, simply because he was my uncle’s regular accompanist. His name was Ivan, but he wasn’t Russian. Uncle Rudolf called him Ivan the Terrible whenever he hit a wrong note or was out of time. The prima donna refused to sing that first Christmas and the cabaret artist was so drunk that he forgot his words, to everyone’s amusement, and so it was that my uncle, who was not sober, beckoned Ivan Morris over to the piano.

—You must forget Danilo, and the Gypsy Baron, and the Vagabond King, and that bloody idiot of a brigand Zoltan, and all the other halfwits in my repertoire.

My uncle cleared his throat, signalled to Ivan that he was ready to begin, and then sang the aria from Handel’s Jephtha in which the anguished father offers up his only child for sacrifice:

Waft her, angels, through the skies,

Far above yon azure plain;

Glorious there, like you, to rise,

There, like you, for ever reign.

I was unaware of Jephtha’s plight, and I had never heard Handel’s music before, but I did understand, at the age of seven, that I had just listened to something radiantly beautiful.

On a fine morning in November 1919, my uncle went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looked down on the city.

—It wasn’t only Paris I was seeing, Andrew. I had the world in my sights. I was young and glowing with confidence. I really believed what my teacher in Botoşani had told me – that my voice was a gift from God. When you have God as your benefactor, my darling, you don’t have any doubts.

Uncle Rudolf walked the streets of Paris for most of that day, speaking French whenever he could. He stopped for lunch at bistro, where he ate cassoulet and drank, such was the state of excitement he was in, an entire bottle of claret. When he boarded the night train for Nice, he was in a mood to sleep, but his by now highly-charged nerves would allow him no rest. Towards the end of the eighteen-hour journey – tired, and with dust in his eyes and throat – he began to wonder if God, who had been his inspiration and ally in Botoşani and at the Conservatoire in Bucharest, might now be abandoning him, relegating him to the ranks of mere mortals. It was an anxious Rudi Petrescu who stood on the platform at Nice, wondering for a terrified moment if he should return to Paris, and thence to the country in which God had not deserted him. But some hope, a residue of the confidence he had enjoyed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, spurred him on, pushed him – so to speak – in the direction of the little pension where he had a room reserved indefinitely. The pension’s owner, Mme Barrière, inspected him through pince-nez, and let out a noise indicative of her approval of his looks. She was fifty, perhaps, and gone to fat, but he was seduced, quite literally, by her charm. They made love in his room – quickly, passionately – for the one and only time. From then on, he was her ‘pretty Romanian boy’; her fils

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