The private life of Shura Cherkassky

 

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act.
It is but a habit.”

Aristotle

By Carol Miller

During another of our summers in Greece, once again in front of Helena Moussou’s travel desk in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne in Athens, we noticed her making signs of desperation.

“You see that little man over there?” she asked us, visibly disturbed, while she nodded toward a rumpled figure, almost completely bald, obediently waiting like an anxious child who had been reprimanded and ordered to stand in the corner.

He was not only short but also notably tiny, a miniature man of modest manners, his head nearly bowed; yet I could see a twinkle in his eyes. He was like a naughty gnome. His hands, however, were the most interesting thing about him. They were small, a doll’s hands, but obviously strong as steel and furthermore, they were covered by thick and curly dark hair.

“What about him?” I queried Helena. “Other than the strange hands.  Is he a spy, is he from Interpol, do you owe him money?”  We were good friends, both born in early November, we had what in Spanish is called confianza, nonetheless, she was not amused.

“He’s driving me crazy,” she sighed, and then grew desperate again, throwing up her hands.  With her mixture of native Greek, her husband’s Rumanian, her clients’ French, Italian, English or German, she had trouble getting the words out. “He demands all my attention.  He’s oblivious to the fact that I have other people, and the telephone, and drivers coming in and out. But he has no idea of what he wants to do, or where he wants to go. Do something with him. Please. Convince him to go somewhere so he’ll leave me alone.”

“But, who is he?” asked, Tomás, my husband.

“Oh, he’s a famous pianist. My son got to know him from the conservatory where he once formed part of an acceptance committee for a scholarship award. Actually, my son won the scholarship, so I am indebted to him. But he drives me out of my mind. He wants special treatment, he needs a piano in his room so he can practice, he’s always cold so I have to have the heat turned up. He’s very demanding.”

“How can he be a pianist?” asked Tomás.  “See how small his hands are!  My cousin was a concert pianist, but she had hands like that when she was still a child.”

“No, really. He’s very good. And extremely well-known. His name is Shura Cherkassky. The critics call him ‘The Last of the Romantics’. But he’s a pain. Why don’t you take him to Cap Sounion, to see the sunset?”

We had no choice but to agree, and were so intrigued we were eager to do so.  But first we had to convince the odd little man that he did, indeed, care to join us, that he would find the temple in Cap Sounion attractive, and that he would be delighted to pass his afternoon with strangers.

Meantime, confident of his approval, Helena ordered around the Mercedes. While we waited for it to wend its way through downtown Athens traffic, and more than anything else to make conversation, we invited the little man to join us in the lobby lounge for “something to drink”, which he misinterpreted.  I meant refreshments, but he became adamant about “absolutely no alcohol”.

Then he repeated. “I never touch alcohol.” With this we had to assume he was either Muslim or an alcoholic. As it turned out, he was neither, but he had fixed ideas on a number of things. He eventually agreed to a “Bitter Lemon,” more than anything else because when I introduced him to my family his curiosity was aroused. My daughter’s name is Alexandra, but only Tomás calls her that; she has always been known as “Dushka”.

“Why Dushka?” asked the little man. “That is a Russian word, not even a name, except in Yugoslavia; it’s a term of endearment.”

He told us his name was “Shura,” a nickname for Alexander Isaakovich, and that he had been born near Odessa.  I explained that my grandmother and her parents, my great-grandparents, had come from a “village” outside Kiev in the Ukraine.   At least I thought it was a village.  When I mentioned Kremenchug, referred to only in passing in War and Peace, and as far as I was concerned, so unimportant that on a trip to the Ukraine in 1965 I never even asked our guide if she had heard of it, in actual fact it turns out to be a rather large city on the Dnieper River.  He was enthralled by this. He practically jumped up and down with excitement. And when I explained that I called my daughter “Dushka” because a Russian friend in Mexico had always called me that, he was more insistent than before.  He was almost jubilant.

“What was her name?” he asked. He was beside himself and complacent at the same time. He knew what I was going to say. The now-departed Tamara Garina, an actress and dancer, had originally arrived in Mexico with Pavlova, and simply stayed on after the ballet troupe left the country.  She taught aerobics classes and when possible appeared in films, including a memorable scene in Alexander Jodorovsky’s La montaña sagrada where she has to walk, completely nude, through Mexico City’s rough and rowdy Merced market.  Even at eighty, filmed from the back, she gave the appearance and had the walk of a young girl.  The cast and crew, in fact the entire market, were breathless. I wrote an article about her for a magazine in Mexico City and we remained friends until her death.

Whenever she saw me her voice softened.  Dushka,” she purred. “Dushka, daaaahling, how happy I am to see you!”

After hearing the word a number of times, finally one day I asked her what it meant. And she explained: “Dushka, doushka, doushenka,” she slurred it, she caressed it, she made it dissolve on her tongue like a lump of chocolate, “it is ‘my little soul’ in Russian.”

I would like to say this had an atavistic effect, perhaps echoing something my grandmother might have called me. For whatever reason it was somehow sweet and loving. It became almost an obsession. So, when my daughter was born, and was brought to me wrapped in a soft cloth, when I could only see the tiny face and the long, graceful hands, and I was overcome with tenderness, the first words I uttered were, “Dushka! Dushka! My little soul!”

Tamara was joined in Mexico by a sister, Karola, who before had been living in the States. It seems Shura had been taken from Russia as a child prodigy by his mother, his first teacher.  He then studied with Josef Hoffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but his mother heard of someone who would be good for him, living in Arkansas, or Alabama (I seem to have forgotten which) where Karola was also living.  After Shura grew up, made his first concert tour of Europe and moved to London after the Second World War, they remained in contact.  He had even gone a number of times to visit her in Mexico.

The sisters, in fact, had an illustrious past. Their father had been the engineer who designed and built the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway, both infamous and celebrated, that hurtled across the Inner Asian steppes and along the borders of Mongolia and Manchuria, creating a permanent resentment against the “foreign devils” who, as author Peter Mathiessen describes it (The Birds of Heaven, 2001), were intent on helping themselves to East Asian ports, “commandeering commerce, and causing fires, flood and drought by upsetting the natural harmonies of life”.

I still have the Cyrillic bible that Tamara gave me, with an ivory cameo on a wine-red velvet cover, now very worn, that her father had carried with him throughout his life. But the Revolution came, and with it, changing fortunes.  By the time Shura was seven, thanks to his mother’s devotion, he was an accomplished pianist and already performing on the concert circuit. In 1928 he made his first concert tour of Australia and South Africa, but long before that he had made recordings. Years later Dushka and I happened to be traveling together in Europe. We had arranged to meet Shura in Nice, to go with him for his annual visit to his mother’s grave. Somehow I forgot how she came to end her life in the south of France, but Shura had never once missed the opportunity to take flowers, and to shed a tear, no matter what else he might be doing, where he might be playing or vacationing, though I never heard him speak of his father.

°°°

That afternoon in Athens became a legend, to be told and retold to anyone who cared to listen, while Shura regaled his audience, and embellished the details. I had to fill in, each time as if it were the first, by describing the trip out to Cap Sounion in Helena’s dark blue Mercedes, the wonderful sunset, the ruins of Poseidon’s temple silhouetted against a russet sky, and our return to Athens, our tea in the hotel lobby, how we were chatting about Tamara and Mexico when Tomás sat straight up, very alert, on guard, at the same time lowering his voice. “Greta Garbo just walked in,” he whispered.

“Where, where?” asked Shura, jumping to his feet.

“Try to be discreet,” cautioned Tomás. “She just walked in with three friends. They went into the ‘GB Corner’ (the hotel’s informal ground floor restaurant) just across the lobby.”

“But, are you sure it’s really Greta Garbo?” I insisted.

“How could I possibly be mistaken? I saw her. I’m telling you, it’s her.”

Shura was beside himself. We tiptoed, he and I, toward the restaurant, imagining we were making a show of indifference. “Be discreet!” Tomás called after us.

We walked right up to her table. But discreetly, as we told the story later. We stared at the tall, slim, slightly bent woman in the gray flannel slacks, simple gray cashmere sweater with round neck and long sleeves, the single strand of pearls around her neck, a scarf over her head that failed to conceal the wisps of graying blonde hair. It was tied under her chin. She wore dark glasses and no make-up.

“Could it be?” Shura and I asked each other, staring unrelentingly.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“I’m sure of it,” he said, breathing hard. “It is Greta Garbo!”

During all this time the four diners stared back at us, but said nothing. Only the mysterious woman lowered her head. It was as much a gesture of modesty as of privacy, of the quest for anonymity that characterized her last years. Assuming it really was Greta Garbo.

Was it, or was it not?

°°°

We never found out, but the fact of this encounter became part of our complicity. It was commented on countless occasions, and repeated to people who were not in the least interested, not just as a conversational ploy or an ice-breaker but because Shura loved gossip. In the telling and retelling there was no longer any doubt, and Shura never got over the fact that he had been with us, and that we had been instrumental in his “meeting” with Greta Garbo.

He told the story one evening after a sensational concert in Carnegie Hall (that earned him the praise of The New Yorker music critic, and the epithet “A National Treasure” that later appeared on his albums and posters), when all of his friends — those of us who had come from all over the world to share a special box for the occasion —went later to have dinner at the Café Luxembourg.

He told the story twice again, once to a collection of my relatives who had gathered for his Royce Hall recital at UCLA in Los Angeles, and for a second time to friends and critics who had pushed into his dressing room at the Huntington Auditorium in Pasadena, while his frac was still soaked with perspiration from the exuberant performance.

Then we had to tell it again after a concert in St. Louis, in Cleveland, in Chicago. Usually the story went down well.  It invariably earned the indulgence of the people gathered around us, as every time the late Harold Shaw, then Shura’s U.S. representative, gave a cocktail party in his honor in Shaw’s magnificent penthouse in a New York landmark building on Broadway and 79th, though once, during a Thanksgiving dinner, also in New York but in an East Side co-op, his friend Constance Keene was more eager to have him listen to her Korean piano students than for chit-chat from an encounter in Athens long, long before. She was less than subtle about it.

Shura’s home in New York was invariably Room 738 at the Hotel Pierre, where he had a piano in his room and the heat turned to full volume. Tomás and I were in New York twice a year in those days, every May and November to attend the Latin American art sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, so we not only attended Shura’s recitals and concerts but were also able to have tea with him in his room. Sometimes he would wrap a muffler around his suit collar and take the elevator down to the lobby but usually he preferred that we go upstairs.  He lost less practice time that way. And if friends were around they could hear the Greta Garbo story while we sipped our tea, and perspired. Shura was never warm enough.

He told the Greta Garbo story again for the benefit of a friend of Dushka’s. My daughter had been studying in France but never missed the opportunity to travel around Europe on weekends or holidays, often with classmates from her high school in Mexico City. Somehow at least a dozen of them had managed to convince their parents that a year learning French before going on to university would be a good thing.

On this particular occasion Dushka, on a weekend in Germany, found herself in Dachau in a driving rainstorm, but managed to see an affiche on a poster pillar just in time to notice a recital by Shura. She dragged her friend through the puddles and arrived at the concert hall, but the box office had just closed. Always resourceful, impervious to “no,” she went to the stage door, and without speaking any German convinced the doorman to loan her a scrap of paper and a pen. Then she sent him to Shura’s dressing room. Shura told me later that he saw her name on the paper. “Had she sent a note in a sealed envelope I would have ignored it, as I was due onstage in just a few moments, but I saw ‘Dushka’ and sent for her immediately.”

Shura ordered two seats in the front row for Dushka and her companion. She eventually described her elation in a long letter, their bedraggled appearance, the puddles they left on the floor under their seats, the disapproving stares of the well-dressed concert goers around them, “but Mother,” she wrote, “he’s so fabulous! We were bewitched, transported to another dimension. We never felt cold or wet until afterwards!”

An usher led them, after the concert, to Shura’s dressing room. There a perspiring Shura, still in his white tie and tails, sat them in a corner until he had finished with the more conventional well-wishers. Then he took them downstairs to the waiting limousine and had them accompany him back to Munich, for a bite of supper. As soon as they parted company he phoned me, oblivious of the time difference. “I told them the story of our meeting with Greta Garbo,” he panted, forgetting that Dushka, on that afternoon in Athens, was ten years old.  With her brother, seven at the time, she had been with us, though it’s always possible that the children had gotten bored with our tea and had gone upstairs to the room.  Shura was nevertheless ecstatic, breathless with excitement. “She and her friend were such wonderful company!” he gushed.  “I never have anyone to talk with after a concert. There I am, in my sweaty frac, surrounded by applause, and compliments, and handshakes, but then all the people leave to go back to their families, and I have no one to share my performance with. I have to go alone to an empty hotel room. I hate to eat alone. I usually end up practicing.”

°°°

Shura often phoned, from wherever his concert dates had taken him. He always called to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano in his room, or on his travel keyboard. He sent post cards everywhere he went on holiday, always warm places, usually Bangkok or Bali, but once he went to Madagascar (“Paradise on Earth, but very primitive”). When he was back home in London he would find messages or letters from me, especially around the time of his birthday at the beginning of October, and he would reply at length, in a cribbed little hand, from his apartment — his “flat”— in The White House on Regent’s Park.  He was invariably alone, though he had a neighbor, an elderly lady, who often looked in on him, to get him to eat something.

Once he happened to be in New York on the occasion of a lecture I was giving at the Americas’ Society on Park and 68th. He was good enough to attend, but fell sound asleep. His representative, Richard, from Harold Shaw’s office, who had gone with him, was most apologetic.

“You know,” he said, “Shura is not exactly an intellectual. But did he ever tell you about the time he met Greta Garbo? Now that kept him awake!”

Occasionally we would see each other in Mexico. He visited a number of times, alone or with a friend, but usually when he was on holiday. And even so, not very often. “Mexico is not hot enough for me,” he would say. He rarely played in Mexico, though he did once give a concert in the Sala Netzahualcoyotl, at the National University.  “The acoustics are superb,” he told me, “but they can’t afford to pay me any money.” He also played the International Festival Cervantino, an annual event in the Spanish colonial hill town of Guanajuato, but at that time, in the late seventies and early eighties, Mexico was prosperous, rich on oil, so could afford top talent.

°°°

When an aunt of Tomás’ died in Veracruz, Tomás inherited the baby grand that had been abandoned for several decades in a corner of the living room. It needed extensive repair, partly because it had been neglected but also because the climate in the Gulf of Mexico — despite Shura’s complaints extremely hot, and also very humid, given as well to violent sand and rainstorms called nortes —is terrible.

I had the vague, and arrogant, notion that if I had a piano Shura would play for me in my house. I could have people over for dinner and unobtrusively suggest he run his fingers up and down the keyboard. And if I could have him stay with us, of course he would have a piano on which to practice. The piano, furthermore, was one of only five in the whole world, specially created by Buettner of Germany for people with small hands. It had a short octave.

This highly specialized piano had been purchased for the youngest of Tomás’ cousins, a girl — small of stature and with exceptionally tiny hands— who was destined, she thought, to be a concert pianist, but instead she died very young of leukemia.

Shura immediately recognized the piano. But he never played it. We spent a fortune having it reconstructed, though the expert and highly recommended craftsman, who was to rebuild the outer box, had to rebuild the bridge as well. His work was perhaps faulty, or maybe he used green wood. The fact is, the bridge bent and became crooked, so that the strings resonated against each other, causing a hideous, tinny sound. We only discovered this after having the piano tuned a number of times, and asking other, more indulgent, friends to play. They were always horrified, not only by the sound but by the unyielding touch as well. The famous piano became an item of décor in a corner of the dining room. I used it to display many of the exotic objects, “a few of my favorite things,” brought from around the world.  In time the tinny sound took on a baroque effect and effectively mimicked a clavichord.  By that time a grand-niece of Tomás’ announced she was taking piano lessons so we had her mother send a specialized vehicle and crew to take the thing away.  At least it remained in the family.

Shura, as a matter of fact, never needed a specially designed piano. He always played a Steinway concert grand. He had learned at an early age to compensate for his small hands. He managed to “jump” the octave, hitting a key with his thumb and then, in an almost imperceptible fraction of a second, land with his last finger on the appropriate companion key. Perhaps this contributed to his singular sound, his energetic style, his almost overwhelming strength and his impassioned romanticism.  He was, indeed, “A National Treasure”, and mine as well.

There came a time, however, when I failed to receive any more letters. There had been no postcards, either. My birthday had come and gone without my phone call.  It got to be Christmas and I telephoned London, but no one answered.  And then Tomás picked up the Cultural Section of Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper, and saw a small notice that he had died, age 86, in his flat.  Probably alone.

*
Carol Miller, born in Los Angeles, is a writer, journalist, foreign correspondent, translator, researcher into world cultures, with an interest in comparative religion and mythology, as well as the Maya, the ancient Near East, Central Asia, the era of African exploration, among other topics.   She is co-author of The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl, written with Guadalupe Rivera, daughter of Mexico’s great Diego Rivera.  When the venerable Teddy Kolleck was head of the Israeli Tourist Ministry he hired her to travel through Israel to describe points of interest for the Mexico City News and the Jewish colony in Mexico.  She is also a renowned sculptress with a half-century’s  professional career to her credit, exhibits in galleries, museums, and auctions and work in private collections across the globe.  She has lived the past 60-some years in Mexico City, has traveled the world, and has 30 book titles to her credit.  Recent publications include “Alma de mi alma, el México de los extranjeros,” forthcoming is “Coincidencias, la relación entre china y los mayas.”  The current contribution to San Diego Jewish World describes an incident shared with her beloved Shura Cherkassky, the late Russian-Jewish concert pianist, her close friend during the last decades of his life.