The Music Inside

She finds me anywhere, easily, then stays with me for a little while before she's gone again. It's never sad when she goes, because it's certain she'll be back. There's just no predicting when or where. But when she comes, it's almost invariably to say something like, "you see, you like this, you always have, maybe you've just forgotten a little, but it's in you, you feel it, this beautiful thing." And I do, whatever the "beautiful thing" she points to with a smile might be at any given moment; I feel it welling from somewhere deep, with the force of not just my life but hers, and perhaps many other lives running in parallels for a moment. The "beautiful thing" can be absolutely anything, but it's often music, and it's not difficult to understand why. I don't remember this because she stopped playing music before my memory solidified into retrievable units peopled with recognizable characters and events, but the amoebic, gelatinous deep core of it knows for a fact that she used to sing to me, play to me, dance with me (there's at least one yellowed photo to prove it, too). My body remembers, because some music sometimes sends the fine hairs I imagine at the edge of my nerves into a pulsating choreography which can only be coming from my beginnings, and she was there, at all my beginnings.

This is what happened tonight.

I was not the only Montrealer who, somewhat discouraged by a new foray of wet snow after the first few spring-announcing days this year, decided to shake the never-ending-winter blues by warming up at St James the Apostle Church to the notes of Gypsy music cooked up into a real treat and served with panache by Sergiu Popa and his orchestra. I've known Sergiu, a Moldavian accordionist, and his wife, Jessica, a violinist with Hungarian roots, for several years but I hadn't heard them play in a long while. The church was packed full, everyone ready to be transported elsewhere, perhaps to their former homeland, perhaps simply to a different place -- and these musicians knew how to do it. From the first notes of the accordion, the violin, the kenoun, the drums, the darbouka and the singer's guttural Gypsy voice, they swept us away across the Atlantic, over the western edge of Europe, and in a continuous sweeping motion, took us through the plains and hills of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Morroco, where Gypsies and others knew how to dig into you, and pull out, thread by thread, the fine lining of your soul, and unfold it in front of your eyes, so you can see it and admire it.We listened to Sergiu kick the stuffing out of his accordion and hit the note you didn't think even existed, and quickly, triumphantly, with nonchalant ease run a scalefull of other notes in some minor tonality that should never go together but did, and did so well that we wanted him to linger on them, stay where it hurt, sweetly, but he never did. He went on and on, to surprise us, to awake a hunger for a rhythm of the body, which some timidly indulged in by swaying slightly in their chairs. When they played the last piece, the thunder of applause reverberated in the hall, we shot up to our feet, and no one was even remembering the snow any more: we demanded, and got, an encore.

That's when they played "Caje Sukarije."

My mother was something of a star in her youth, on a small-scale, provincial level. She was Audrey-Hepburn thin and feminine, with her hair often coiffed into a tight bun according to the 60s fashion, with thickly eyelined eyes, and a graciously long neck (so remarkable, that my father -- who always bemoaned his own extremely short neck -- often made a point of it, teasingly, by asking her and everyone else where she got such a long neck). At the time when she looked like that (and before I was in the picture), she was often on the stage - she didn't have much of a choice in this, actually, having been born into a family of peasants who were also folk musicians, from a couple of villages in Eastern Serbia. I don't know if my grandparents were more peasants or more musicians; they worked hard in both professions, mostly because they were poor and needed to find any additional ways of making money. Life in the post-war world was tough. My grandfather was the lead musician, who felt a genuine passion for music from an early age, and then herded all the others in his family into a band. He played the accordion, and later taught himself the violin too; he got my grandmother to play the drums (which, apparently, without any formal training she took to naturally), my mother to play the piano and the accordion, and to sing, and my uncle -- the youngest in the family -- to play the clarinet and the guitar. As the children grew, the band became quite a local sensation; they played in restaurants, at weddings, and festivities, in their own and several neighbouring towns, with many regular gigs. Grandmother told me once that they would often finish playing, packing and gathering their equipment at the small hours of the night, and then she had to get up an hour or two later, at dawn, to get ready for field-work.

My mother, I think (because she never talked about it later), was in love with the piano, and was enjoying the singing part too. She'd practice the accordion at home since they bought her one, but she had to go to her high-school in order to practice the piano. And she did, year after year, and even when she was ultimately forced by her parents to go to Medical School in Belgrade (which she hated and dropped after a year, then switched to Pharmacology which she hated too and took ten years to finish), she continued for several years to perform with the family, especially in the summers when they went on mini-tours. The other parts of the year, while she was studying, she was also preparing the new material for the next music season. This meant that she was devotedly listening to the radio, taking notes of any songs that caught her ear and that were popular at the time. And she had a good ear. One of the very few things she did tell me about that part of her life was how proud she was of discovering this one song on the radio, "Caje Sukarije." The song was made popular by the Macedonian Gypsy singer Esma Redzepova, who sings it in Romani, so it took an enormous amount of effort for my mother to write down the words she'd need to sing. (In fact, I'm not even sure how she did it since she heard it on the radio; she must have had some recording device, and listened to it over and over again). That summer, after the family band had rehearsed the song to perfection, it became their greatest cover-hit ever. They even made it into the local newspaper.

All of this music, all of these thoughts of her, of them, of those years, came doubly alive in some inside place I had forgotten about, as Sergiu and his musicians struck the first chords of "Caje Sukarije" this snowy evening in Montreal, some 50 years down the road. The audience went wild, and some even stood up and started dancing. And it was beautiful.

By the time the band crashed the song to a halt, all grinning with happiness, she was gone again, but I didn't miss her. She'll be back; in fact, even when she's gone, she's here. That's something I'd like to learn: how to leave someone the music inside.