Zany!. Jim Gold

       1

      WHAT MAKES A LUNA TICK?

      MARTHA WAS PREPARING COFFEE and baked doughnuts of the Austrian variety for the violinist Dr. Zoltan Zany.

      The legendary concert artist sat in his living room armchair facing the window. Outside, in the garden, sparrows chirped a morning fugue, and a bee hovered above a red rose, buzzing in B-flat.

      Martha stood before the kitchen stove. “Hot and fresh,” she called. “Doctor, are you ready?”

      A sonorous grunt of affirmation sounded from the living room. Martha carried her serving tray across the Turkish rug, placed it next to the master, and rearranged the Viennese delicacies. She poured coffee into the doctor’s favorite Herendware cup, purchased six years before in Hungary after his performance of Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol with the Budapest Philharmonic.

      Zany sniffed the aroma, dipped his pinky in the dark Columbian brew, stirred thoroughly, lifted the cup to his lips, closed his eyes, and sipped slowly.

      “Aah,” he sighed, “those Columbians know what they’re doing. Delicious! Koszonom szepen, danke shoen, and aufwiedersehen. Martha, when your culinary creations fill my stomach, my heart beats faster, my brain improves, my fingers fill with blood, then fly in a ‘Moto Perpetuo’ of Paganini madness. Caffeine, my friend, you are my Paganini ‘Caprice.’ Niccolo, how I remember our good times together. Were you really possessed by the devil?”

      Zany bit into a doughnut flank. Munching vigorously, his white, bushy handlebar mustache trembled. As the sugar entered his veins, visions of yodeling Tyrolean cows and Alpine trumpets filled his imagination. He drifted from Switzerland to the Eurasian steppes and rode his horse through the high grass on the Hungarian Hortobagy Plain in his ancestral homeland. Another doughnut, and he lay, languid, lazy, and stuffed, on a Lake Balaton beach, gazing at a blue magyar sky.

      “Mein Doktor, look outside,” Martha cried. “Clouds have fled. The sun is shining. Plant nutrients sing in happy comfort. It’s a new day!”

      Dr. Zany leaned back his armchair. He picked up the New York Times lying on the floor to his right, turned to the weather section, closed his eyes, and fell asleep again.

      He’d been sitting in that arm chair almost a year.

      Martha nudged him. He blinked. Consciousness returned. He opened his eyes, pushed himself forward in his seat, and said with resignation, “My favorite and only servant, sunbeams cannot dispel my confusion. Is today tomorrow? Is it the day before yesterday? Or the morning after the night before yesterday? I consulted my ankle. It didn’t know.”

      Martha stepped away, picked up a napkin from Zany’s tray, and began dusting the furniture. The doctor’s voice followed her from living room to kitchen and back. “Tell me about your mother again,” she called out.

      Zany curled the white ends of his mustache. “Should I blame Mama Zany for my present state?” he asked. “Her goulash helped promote my concert career. But now, after months of sitting at home, my retreat has descended into existential nothingness. Mama said such visits from the Weltanschauung powers of misery would occur. Yet the blues and greens hit me all at once. Retirement may not be my way. True, I luxuriate in this armchair, but nevertheless, with such a sedentary existence and spirit sinking so close to lower Hades, will it ever rise again? The great Paganini himself claimed, before writing his D major Violin Concerto, that depression precedes creation. Yet sadly, although I’ve been near bottom during these past months, I’ve created nothing.”

      Hoping to stimulate his tired brain, Zany shook his head vigorously. A few stale ideas fell out. Somewhat cleansed, he felt better. Turning to the wall, he said to one board in particular, “I can find no reason to rise!

      “Ah, but what a career I had! Concertizing in 113 countries and on six continents. Or was it seven? Even Antarctica! My agent, Sammy Blickenstein, was too cheap to hire an orchestra on that freezing day, so I played the Brahms violin concerto on an ice floe with no accompaniment. After a short intermission, I followed it with the Bach “Chaconne.” Penguins loved it. Ice floes clapped, and moonbeams seemed to coo, creating a lunar symphony I’d never before heard. ‘Well,’ I said, as my boat left for Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, ‘the hell with Sammy! Those arctic birds were polite. They paid full price, too.’ ”

      Zany cleared his throat. He shifted in his armchair, coughed into his napkin, and took another sip of coffee. “My travels frightened Mama Magyar. She never approved of them. Growing up in the Hungarian-Serbian town of Szentendre, she lived in the artistic shadow of the potter Margaret Mezokoszonemnagyonszeppen Kovacs; this created early childhood traumas that haunted her after the transmigration of her soul and immigration of her lithe body to the Bronx. She suffered from agrophobia, claustrophbia, phlebitis of the gastrointestinal porceloid track, and utcaphobia—a fear of Hungarian streets. No doctor could cure or even find her diseases. Nevertheless, she blamed all her ailments on my travels.” Zany sighed, spat a whomp of phlegm across the room in disgust, and gnashed his teeth; his long white hair fluttered. “Am I lost now in my retirement chair because of her? Or has the guilt over forgetting my father’s corpse at the funeral parlor not been assuaged?”

      Zany’s face reddened as memories returned; emerging rage seared his forehead. Those had not been happy years.

      “Martha, does Zoltan mean ‘Sultan’? Mother named me that, but I don’t know why. Was her brain soft?”

      Martha began dusting his head sympathetically. “Do not worry,” she counseled. “The road ahead is full of light. Unknown post-armchair glory awaits you.”

      Zany raised his powerful right bowing arm, opened his right hand, and looked straight into his