Читать книгу Zany! - Jim Gold - Страница 7

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE for breakfast, mein Doktor?” Martha asked. Rays of cascading sunlight had brightened the kitchen.

Raising his bedtime sunglasses, Zany pondered the question. He leaned hard on his thinking leg while his right thumb, calloused from years of violin bowing, slowly stroked his magyar nose.

Martha waited impatiently, tapping an Austrian waltz on her frying pan.

“What do you need?”

“A dream. A big one!”

Zany lifted a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped a tear from his eye. “A land without dreams is worse than a desert.”

“Then dream!” Martha declared. “Indeed, life without dreams is unbearable. So is death. But life, especially for you, my doktor, is a dream. Dreaming is part of your shamanic tradition and Hungarian heritage.”

Zoltan’s shoulders sagged in resignation. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead as thoughts of his recent concert tour of Jordan rose in his mind. He remembered the Nabatean ruins of Petra, where he had performed the Camel Violin Concerto by the Ma’anian oud virtuoso Ahmad Al Aswara before ten thousand swaying fans. Wiping off the sweat, he sighed, “Where did I lose my dream? How do I find another? Shall I invent one? Are dreams born of the same Void from which the Music Master created the world?”

He continued his inner journey along the twisted wadis of his dried- up past. “Once, my concert performances excited me. But now they have reached their apotheosis. I sit here faded and finished. Where are my new challenges? Can one weave new cloth from old wool?”

“Yes, your skills have been perfected,” Martha remarked. “You’ve gone as far as you can go. Sleeping in the old life is healthy during transitions. But this somnambulance is temporary. New worlds lie ahead.”

Zany considered his struggle. The face of discouragement rose before him. Opposites clashed: an internal battleground soaked in bloody choices of absence or nothingness.

Yet hope glimmered: “It means working harder, sinking deeper into what I’ve got,” Zany declared. “Give up the horizontal. Pursue the vertical. Depth instead of width. To regain my freshness, I need not fondle the same old tit. On to new breasts! But where? When Captain Marvel said, ‘Shazzam!’ did he mean me? Perhaps I’ll write a new Zany composition.”

“What would you compose?” asked Martha.

Indeed, what sperm cells was the Music Master carrying on His silver tray today? Would notes and majestic sound even be part of the doctor’s future? Only a rooster could tell.

A rooster! Zany turned to face his garden. Bees and gnats flew in all directions.