Chapter 1

Boston, Massachusetts

Clara Mentsov -- or Mentsova as her forbears would have said -- strode onto the stage of the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall for the first half of tonight’s Rachmaninov Special Concert. It was to be two concerti -- a rare event. Typically concerts were one concerto and some other orchestral pieces either before or after, because of the enormous physical difficulty of doing two or more in one concert. Tonight was to be two concerti sandwiched around an intermission; not a problem for Clara, she could easily handle the “extra” strain on her stamina.

Clara was playing the 3^rd Concerto in D Minor first -- this was her favorite among the four Rachmaninov concerti -- and finishing up with the 2^nd in C Minor -- the audience’s favorite. Of course, she didn’t know this particular audience but the 2^nd was always the audience’s favorite. She took a brief bow to their loud applause, shook hands with Anna Twaid, the Boston Philharmonic’s concert mistress and first violinist, and then Marcus Ren, the conductor. She glanced at the first few rows of the audience, was disappointed at seeing the empty seat next to Georg, and sat down at the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, borrowed for this occasion from the Robert Mossbacher Foundation. Clara gave a fleeting thought to the great pianist Artur Rubenstein’s comment about this moment: “I come out dressed like an undertaker. I sit at this long, black box; it’s like a coffin, you know? And everyone applauds. Is that not strange?” With a final look at Antonin’s empty seat she nodded to the conductor, and it began.

She was grateful that Rocky 3 (as almost everyone in the U.S. called it) began with a pianissimo, a very simple, quiet statement of the theme that would grow and develop into a strong proclamation of what Sergei Rachmaninov was going to do to the poor pianist who would attempt to play this piece. Clara was distracted but could play this section without thinking. “Where is he? Georg is holding a bouquet of white roses. Antonin is NOT going to be here at all. This is the second performance in a row he missed.” Georg (pronounced GAY-org) was her major domo. She shook her head and looked at Ren. He was giving her concerned glances, so she must have missed something. She gave him a little head nod and concentrated on the music.

She reached the end of the next page of music and concentrated even more. Naturally, there was no “page of music” for the soloist -- there never was. But she had an eidetic memory and just “turned” the page in her mind. She didn’t really need it; she’d played the 3^rd in scores of concerts and hundreds of times in practice. Clara floated through the first part of the movement until she got to the Ossia cadenza -- the longer and harder of the two that Rachmaninov wrote for the first movement. The cadenza was a sort of ‘show off’ for the soloist, a concession to the days when a soloist would improvise in the middle of a concerto. She “turned off” the mental page turning and simply reveled in the music. She could barely stretch her hands to reach the chords -- Rachmaninov had enormous hands -- and she cheated on some of them, rolling the notes but she “rolled” them at such a speed that they seemed to the ear as if played simultaneously. Why she had this ability had always been something of a mystery to her -- she just did it.

The concerto moved on and sometimes – especiallyin the fast passages -- she could feel Rachmaninov urging her to go even faster. She could, she knew, play even faster than the composer’s recorded versions -- something that very few could do. But she didn’t exceed her self-imposed speed limit.

It was somethinghe always did -- set limits that were just a little bit faster than other people. Or higher than they could jump. Or kick a futbol (soccer) ball a little farther than they could. She could have set all sorts of records, especially in swimming, with her ability to windmill her arms and kick. But she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Her mother always warned her not to, and it was even more important now that they might be involved. Of course, they hadn’t called her -- ever – but it was clear what they wanted: to live a normal life. That was what Antonin had said: ‘Until they called on her.’

...

Clara had been born in the Ukraine, and her family moved soon after to Israel. “Family” ... hah. It was just her and her mother. They set up housekeeping in Ashdod, a small city some 35 km south of Tel Aviv, on the Israeli coast. She’d lived a simple uncomplicated life -- for a girl with unusual capabilities. She went to school and did very well -- with her eidetic memory, how could she not? -- played futbol, swam, took piano lessons. About three months before her eleventh birthday, her mother took ill. She was dead of pancreatic cancer sixty-two days later.

There was nothing that could have been done, the doctors assured her. Alicia, her mother, was fatally poisoned in 1986, it seemed, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant blew up, or burned itself down -- whatever. Her neighbor, Antonin Sternmann, took over Clara’s care. It seemed natural that he do so: he was a friend of her mother, although later Clara came to understand that he was much more than a platonic friend. She stayed in the same apartment she grew up in; he lived in his own. But they each had keys to the other’s place. He was some twelve years older than Clara, and about the same amount younger than Clara’s mother.

Among Alicia’s papers were some letters to Clara that cleared up some of the mystery that Clara had always wondered about. First of all: what about her father? That was still not clear. He was a man who had responded to the nuclear accident; not Russian or Ukrainian but still foreign. She was a young woman in her twentieth year. Alicia didn’t know his name, only that he was very handsome. She had lain with him, slept with him ... but she had not had sex with him. On that point Alicia was exceedingly clear. Only some kissing and manual stimulation. Nevertheless, she became pregnant. An impossibility, Clara knew. Alicia was still a virgin, she claimed, and could not explain -- to the satisfaction of her parents or the local rabbi -- how she became pregnant and still be a virgin. Her parents evicted her from their lives. She turned to the rabbi for advice; he turned his back to her. So Alicia followed a long and convoluted path that led to the Kiev Medical Hospital where Clara was born -- some six months later. There was no explanation of the foreshortened gestation period. Then the path continued to twist until the two wound up in a small apartment in Ashdod. There her mother made “friends” with Antonin, who lived just one floor up.