Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

to play for just a little, and the next thing he knew, his father would be poking his head in at the door, saying wearily, with red-rimmed eyes, “Buddy, it’s after midnight.” Also he was a fool, and a dangerous one. He once walked five miles with his closest school friend, completely forgetting that the boy had a heart condition. The following day the friend nearly died.

Buddy Orrick’s faults hounded him, or when he slept rushed over him as nightmares. At times he would abruptly stop brooding on them and, instead, would struggle for oblivion. To avoid the nightmares, he learned to get by on less and less sleep; in school he became a troublemaker, a tiresome smart aleck; at home, when not working for his father, he learned to concentrate so intensely on his horn playing, alone in his room, or his writing, or composing at the piano in the livingroom, that nothing at all could break in on him, from within or without—except that picture, the replay of the accident. He would be known, years later, as one of the most prolific “serious” writers of his time, despite a heavy schedule as professor, scholarly editor, and public reader. His secret was that he had learned all too well, during those painful years, to concentrate totally, dropping out of ordinary reality as a ghost sinks down through the stones of a castle floor. Lying beside him, racked with pain, Joan would never cease to be amazed by how, the moment his head touched the pillow, he was fast asleep.

He had various means of avoiding painful feeling at this time, his early adolescence. He would do endless trigonometric identities, mindlessly driving on like a circling atom, using up great swatches of butcher paper; he began at this period to write poems and stories, to draw and paint in oils, and to compose music; but his chief means of escape was playing the French horn.

It was odd that he should be at all good at it. Though he’d taken piano lessons for seven years, he’d never gotten past the John Thompson fourth book, could play a Bach two-part invention only stumblingly, and had an idiotic and infuriating habit (in Joan’s opinion) of holding the pedal down. But on the horn, luckily, he turned out to be less inept. He was soon studying on Saturday mornings with a man who was at that time one of the best French horn teachers in the world, Arcady Yegudkin—“the General”—at the Eastman School of Music; and owing to a scarcity of decent French horn players in the area at that period—and owing, too, to Yegudkin’s influence—he was soon sitting in at concert time with small civic orchestras throughout western New York and southern Ontario.

There are no such French horn players left as was Arcady Yegudkin. He had played principal horn in the orchestra of Czar Nikolai, and at the time of the Revolution had escaped, with his wife—dramatically. At the time of their purge of Kerenskyites and supposed sympathizers with the older order, the Bolsheviks loaded Yegudkin and his wife, along with hundreds of others, onto flatcars, reportedly to carry them away to imprisonment. The Bolsheviks’ intention was of course somewhat darker. In a desolate place, a forest hundreds of miles from the nearest city of any size, machine guns opened fire on the people on the flatcars; then soldiers pushed the bodies off into a ravine and the train moved on. The soldiers were not careful to see that everyone was dead—they believed in the Revolution, but they were not to the last man bloodthirsty maniacs and did not relish their work; besides, they believed that in a place so remote, a man or woman only wounded, not yet dead, would have no chance against the cold and the wolves—and so they cleared the flatcars, averting their eyes from the fellow Russians who stirred or groaned or whimpered for mercy, washed away most of the blood from the flatcars, and fled. Arcady Yegudkin and his wife were among the very few who survived, he virtually unmarked, she horribly crippled. Peasants who hated even politics ostensibly undertaken in their behalf, and who were outraged that any government anywhere should raise its monstrous, idiot hand against poets and musicians (four famous poets were killed in the massacre) nursed the Yegudkins back to something like health and smuggled them to what had been, until lately, St. Petersburg, and thence into Europe. There Yegudkin played horn with all the great orchestras, all the great conductors, and received such praise as no other master of the French horn has ever been given with the possible exception of Dennis Brain, who was at least approaching Yegudkin’s power when his car crashed in 1957.

He was, this Yegudkin, a big-bellied, solidly muscular man who, for all his age when Buddy Orrick knew him, still had black hair and a black moustache, with a few bits of silver and touches of white, especially where it grew, with majestic indifference to the narrow-minded taste and opinion of the common herd, from his nose and ears. The sides of his moustache were carefully curled, in the fashion favored by nineteenth-century European dandies, and he was probably the last man in Rochester, New York, to wear spats. He wore black suits, a huge black overcoat, and a black hat, and his wife, who came with him and sat on the long maple bench outside his office door, never reading or knitting or doing anything at all except that, sometimes, she would try to speak to his waiting students—mumbling questions and remarks in what the student could not even recognize, at first, as broken English—Yegudkin’s wife, shrivelled and twisted, though according to Yegudkin she had once been the most beautiful woman in the world, wore long black dresses and black gloves. They would come, early on a Saturday morning, down the long marble hallway of the second floor of the Eastman School of Music, the General as