"On the fiddle."
"On the fiddle?" he repeated. "Can you pay two and a half 'roubles' a month? Or are you as unfortunate as I am?"
"So far as that goes, I can manage it," I said. "But what then? Neither my father nor my mother, nor my teacher must know that I am learning to play the fiddle."
"The Lord keep us from telling it!" he cried. "Whose business is it to drum the news through the town? Maybe you have on you a cigar end, or a cigarette? No? You don't smoke? Then lend me a 'kopek' and I will buy cigarettes for myself. But you must tell no one, because my father must not know that I smoke. And if my mother finds that I have money, she will take it from me and buy rolls for supper. Come into the house. What are we standing here for?"
. . . . .
With great fear, with a palpitating heart and trembling limbs, I crossed the threshold of the house that was to me a little Garden of Eden.
My friend Pinna introduced me to his father.
"Shalom—Nahum Veviks—a rich man's boy. He wants to learn to play the fiddle."
Naphtali "Bezborodka" twirled his earlocks, straightened his collar, buttoned up his coat, and started a long conversation with me, all about music and musical instruments in general and the fiddle in particular. He gave me to understand that the fiddle was the best and most beautiful of all instruments. There was none older and none more wonderful in the world than the fiddle. To prove this to me, he went on to tell me that the fiddle was always the leading instrument of any orchestra, and not the trumpet or the flute. And this was simply because the fiddle was the mother of all musical instruments.
And so it came about that Naphtali "Bezborodka" gave me a whole lecture on music. Whilst he was speaking he gesticulated with his hands and moved his nose, and I stood staring right into his mouth. I looked at his black teeth and swallowed, yes, positively swallowed, every word that he said.