And so it went. Week
after week, I made the trip down the hill to the conservatory for my cello
lessons with Misha. He sat facing me,
knee to knee, while I played open strings; we weren't moving on to actual notes until my bow and my strings formed a perfect 90
degree angle, and I released my crazy death grip on the frog. Sometimes he would hold my bowing hand and
the tip and move the bow back and forth across the strings with me. For an hour. Misha
gave me an old exercise book to take home, the bottom of which said in Cyrillic
“Soviet Music Publishing.” That figured. Only a Soviet could have come
up with exercises this fantastically boring. While I understood the importance of
practicing good technique, I was starting to feel a little mutinous. As I lugged my cello up the hill to my house
and then up five flights of stairs, I wondered is this really how you achieve
excellence on a stringed instrument?
Maybe Misha was secretly torturing me, hoping I would just give up and
go away. It didn't help much that Christopher took mild
delight in my aggravation. Every
Saturday I would drag myself breathless and sweating through our front door, and
he would sort of smirk “Did you get any notes this week?” No, I would mutter darkly, cursing all males
and everything they stood for. My
initial vow to do whatever Misha said was starting to run a little thin.
One afternoon at school, I was whining about the monotony of
my lessons to my new friend Natasha, a
beautiful but slightly flinty Russian
blonde who took vast amounts of pride in her heritage. She gave me absolutely no sympathy
whatsoever, and lectured me sternly on the grave importance of exact, precise, staggeringly PERFECT technique. “Russians only do things ONE way- whatever it
is, whatever skill is required, we master the technique before we move on to
anything else. Why do you think all
Russians have exactly the same handwriting?
There is only ONE WAY to hold a pencil.
Why do you think Russia has produced the very best athletes, musicians, artists,
writers, and scientists? Because we
perfect everything technically. People
who cannot master technique go on to find other work to do.” Oh
yeah? I wanted to retort. Well,
I’ll see your Rostropovich and raise you a Yo-Yo Ma. It
occurred to me that if Natasha hadn't been raised in Moscow, she would have
made a fabulous New Yorker.
I would never admit this to any Georgian I knew, but ever
since I read Anna Karenina back in the 1980’s, I have been deeply, hopelessly
fascinated with Russia. Dark, snowy
winters, enchanted swans, the Winter Palace, Czar Nicholas and his tragic
family, the colorful language- all of it struck me as wonderfully
magical. I frequently wondered what it
would have been like to BE a Russian, to have some crazy Party apparatchik
stick an instrument in my hands when I was a child and say, “You will play this
all day long, forever.” Of course, with
my luck, I probably would have ended up the wife of a potato farmer, distilling
vodka till my cirrhotic liver planted me in a frozen grave, but who knows? In my fanciful Russian daydreams, maybe
someone would have given me a cello and by now, I would be as good as all the
people I envied so much. With Natasha’s help, I was attempting to revive my long lost
Russian language skills so that Misha and I could communicate better. On a whim, I bought a book called “Dirty
Russian” which was basically how to curse in Russian, but included some
hysterical expressions I could only ever use in a bar fight in
Moscow. It felt really good though, when
frustration with open strings reached a boiling point, to scream some horribly
graphic expletive in Russian. But then I
got back to my open strings and continued sawing away.
My Russian Guru, Natasha
Later, with the assistance of a cool glass of Bagrationi
champagne, I realized that Misha was
doing me a giant favor with his nit-picky insistence on perfect technique. I would never, ever play even remotely good
without the basic skills he was trying to get me to master. In a roundabout way, he was also paying me a
compliment by taking me this seriously.
Georgia had no culture of “adult beginners” and while my cello playing
proclivities had been delightfully “quaint” in Yemen, they made me a total
oddball in a culture where, if you hadn't mastered an instrument by the time
the amniotic fluid dried, you gave it up for dead. So, I redoubled my effort, moved my cello into my bedroom and practiced
in front of a mirror until my bow was straight and my hand was so relaxed I
feared I was slipping into a coma.
After a few weeks of this, my patience was finally
rewarded. I moved on to scales, and
Misha gave me a very simple song to practice, called “March.” Now that my left hand was finally called into
action, we had still more work ahead of us, because my fingering was fairly
awful, too. But I had a song! A real song!
I played it to death and I felt such an incredible sense of
accomplishment when one Saturday, I played it in perfect time with Misha
accompanying me on the piano. We finally retired “March” after about a
month, and he gave it to me to keep, “for the memory.” I still have it, mostly as a reminder of how
at this moment, I had moved microscopically closer to mastering “The Russian
Way.”
Marianne Ide is an international schoolteacher and
amateur cellist currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. When not playing her Artist cello, she
teaches government and economics
