Uncle Rudolf

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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