Split

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 10: Split

Her father's name was Marko. Marko Kovac. The name was Croatian, the name of a man born in 1963 in the city of Split, the city on the Dalmatian coast where the Adriatic is the color of the blue in a gas flame, the blue that is not the blue of depth but the blue of clarity, the water so clear that the stones on the bottom are visible at three meters, the stones smooth, the stones worn by the sea the way the treads of Giovanni's stairs were worn by feet, the wearing the record of time's passage, and time had passed for Marko Kovac, had passed from Split to Minneapolis, from the Adriatic to the Mississippi, from the country of his birth to the country of his daughter's birth, the passage not a metaphor but a journey, the journey made in 1991 when Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia and the war began and Marko Kovac, twenty-eight years old, a carpenter, a man whose hands were his livelihood, decided that his hands would be safer building houses in Minnesota than building anything in a country that was being dismantled by artillery.

Nadia called him on a Sunday evening in November. The call was made from her room above the workshop, the room with the desk and the window and the bed and the small lamp, the room that was her private space in the building that was otherwise Giovanni's, the building that was the workshop below and the apartments above and the attic above that, the building that was the vertical world she inhabited, and she called her father from this vertical world and the call traveled from the phone in her hand to a satellite and from the satellite to a tower and from the tower to a phone in a house in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis, the house that Marko Kovac had bought in 1998 with the money he had earned building other people's houses, the house that he had renovated himself, room by room, over the years, the renovation the carpenter's version of the luthier's craft, the building and the rebuilding, the shaping of wood into habitable space.

He answered on the third ring. His voice was the voice she knew, the voice that carried the accent of Croatian beneath the accent of Minnesota, the two accents layered, the Croatian the deeper layer, the Minnesota the surface, the surface acquired over thirty years of living in the upper Midwest, the deeper layer ineradicable, the deeper layer the origin, the origin audible in the vowels that were rounder than American vowels and the consonants that were harder than American consonants, the voice of a man who had learned English at twenty-eight and who spoke it fluently and grammatically and with the permanent mark of the language he had spoken first, the language of Split, the language of the sea and the stone and the mountains.

Tata, she said. The Croatian word for father, the word she had always used, the word that her mother, born in St. Paul to Norwegian parents, had learned and accepted and never replaced with daddy or dad, the word Tata being the word that Nadia used and that her brother Petar used and that the family used, the word the family's Croatian inheritance, the inheritance of language that survived the emigration, the word that connected the house in Minneapolis to the city on the Adriatic.

Nadia, he said. The name carrying the weight of the father's love, the weight audible in the way he said the three syllables, Na-di-a, the stress on the first syllable, the Croatian stress, the name a common name in Croatia, the name he had chosen, the choosing the father's first act of authorship, the naming of the child the first shaping, the first cut, the first irreversible act of creation.

She told him about the workshop. She told him in English, because English was the language they spoke together, the language of the household, the language of the country where she had grown up, and the English carried the Italian that she was learning, the Italian words entering her English the way the Croatian words entered her father's English, the languages layering, the layers the life, the life lived in multiple languages being the life of the emigrant and the child of the emigrant, the life that Nadia was now living in a third country, the third language, the Italian that was becoming her workshop language, the language of the tools and the wood and the craft.

She told him about the spruce. She told him about the grain and the drying and the tapping and the ringing, and as she told him she heard the telling change, heard the words take on a quality they did not usually have, the quality of recognition, because she was describing wood to a man who had spent his life working with wood, describing grain to a man who read grain the way musicians read scores, describing the material to a man for whom the material was the medium, the medium of his work, and the work was carpentry, and carpentry was wood, and wood was what they shared now, what connected the luthier's workshop in Cremona to the carpenter's workshop in Minneapolis, the connection the material, the material the wood.

Marko listened. He listened the way he did everything, with the quiet attention of a man who had been trained by the work to attend, the work of the carpenter being a work of attention, the saw requiring attention, the chisel requiring attention, the level requiring attention, the joint requiring attention, every element of the work requiring the focused presence that Marko brought to it, and the listening was the same attention applied to the voice of his daughter, the daughter who had gone to Italy to learn to make violins, the daughter whose left hand no longer played but whose left hand held wood, and the holding was the connection, the holding of wood, the thing that both the father and the daughter did with their hands.

He asked about the tools. He asked in the way that a craftsman asks about another craftsman's tools, the way that reveals the asker's relationship to his own tools, the relationship of intimacy and respect that the manual worker develops with the instruments of the work, and Nadia described Giovanni's pialletto and Giovanni's gouges and Giovanni's knives and as she described them she heard her father hearing them, hearing the tools through the description, hearing the kinship between Giovanni's tools and his own, the kinship of function, the kinship of the hand holding the shaped object that shapes the material, the hand and the tool and the material in the relationship that is the craft, and the craft was the kinship, and the kinship was the call, the call connecting the two workshops, the workshop in Cremona and the workshop in Minneapolis, the two workshops connected by the daughter who worked in one and who had grown up in the other, the other being the basement of the house on East 38th Street.

The basement workshop. Nadia remembered it. The basement of the house in Longfellow, the workshop that Marko had built in the first year of owning the house, the workshop that occupied the east half of the basement, the workshop that was organized with the same functional precision that Giovanni's workshop was organized with, the tools on the wall, the bench in the center, the wood stored against the far wall, the floor swept, the light provided by fluorescent tubes that hummed at a pitch that Nadia's four-year-old ear had registered as approximately F-sharp, the pitch the same pitch every day, the pitch the sound of the workshop, the sound of the father's work.

He had taught her to hold a chisel. She was five. He had placed the chisel in her right hand and he had placed her left hand on the piece of pine that she would cut, the left hand holding the wood while the right hand drove the chisel, and the holding and the driving were the first lesson, the lesson that preceded the violin by six months, the chisel before the bow, the wood before the string, the carpenter's daughter before the violinist, and the order was the history, the personal history that connected the craft of the father to the craft of the daughter, the connection that the focal dystonia had revealed by taking the violin and leaving the wood, by ending the performing life and clearing the ground for the making life, by disrupting the left hand's fine motor control and preserving the left hand's grip, the grip that held the chisel at five and that held the practice plate at twenty-six, the grip the constant, the grip the father's gift.

He had taught her to plane. She was seven. He had set up a small bench in the basement workshop, a bench at her height, and he had given her a block plane and a piece of poplar and he had shown her how to set the blade and how to hold the plane and how to push the plane across the surface of the wood, the pushing smooth, the pushing even, the shaving curling from the blade, the shaving thin, and the thinness was the measure, the measure of the skill, and the skill was the father's skill transferred to the daughter's hands, the transfer that is the oldest form of education, the transfer by demonstration, the transfer by doing, the transfer that does not require language because the hands speak their own language and the language of the hands is universal, is the same in Minneapolis and in Cremona, is the same in the basement workshop and in Giovanni's workshop, the language of the tool on the wood, the language of the shaving curling from the blade.

She told her father this. She told him on the phone on a Sunday evening in November, she told him that Giovanni's pialletto reminded her of the block plane in the basement, she told him that the curling of the shaving was the same, that the smell of the wood was the same, that the holding and the pushing and the cutting and the smoothing were the same, and the sameness was the discovery, the discovery that the new life was not entirely new, that the new craft was not entirely unfamiliar, that the hands that held Giovanni's tools had held Marko's tools first, and the first-holding was the preparation, the preparation that she had not recognized as preparation at the time, the preparation that had been disguised as childhood, as play, as a Saturday morning in the basement with her father while her mother read upstairs and the Minnesota winter pressed against the windows and the fluorescent lights hummed their F-sharp and the shavings curled from the blade and the wood yielded and the yielding was the lesson and the lesson was the hands.

Marko was quiet for a moment. The quiet was the Croatian quiet, the quiet of a man from a culture that does not fill every silence with speech, the quiet that is not awkward but full, full of the things that the quiet contains, the things that do not need to be said because the not-saying is the saying, and the not-saying said: I hear you, I hear the connection you are making, I hear the wood in your voice, I hear the workshop, I hear the tools, I hear the craft that you are learning and I hear the craft that I taught you and I hear the sameness and the sameness is the thing, the thing that connects us, the thing that has always connected us, the wood, the tools, the hands.

He told her about Split. He did not often tell her about Split. The telling was rare, was reserved for moments when the connection between the past and the present was strong enough to support the weight of the telling, and this moment was strong, this Sunday evening in November with the workshop below and the attic above and the phone carrying his daughter's voice from the city where violins were made to the city where he had made a life, this moment was strong enough, and he told her.

He told her about his father's workshop. His father, Nadia's grandfather, Josip Kovac, a carpenter in Split, a man who built boats and furniture and doors and window frames, a man whose workshop was on a street called Ulica Marka Marulica near the harbor, the street named for the father of Croatian literature, the workshop a small room with a stone floor and a wooden ceiling and a window that looked out onto the street and through the street to the harbor and through the harbor to the sea, the sea that was the Adriatic, the Adriatic that was blue, the blue that was the color of clarity.

Josip's hands. Marko described his father's hands the way Nadia would later describe Giovanni's hands, with the specificity of a person who has studied them, who has watched them work, who has learned from them. Josip's hands were large, were calloused, were stained with the wood and the varnish and the oils of the boats he built, the staining permanent, the staining the badge, and the badge was the mark of the craft written on the body, and the mark was the same mark that was on Marko's hands and that was beginning to appear on Nadia's hands, the mark inherited not genetically but through practice, the practice of holding tools, the practice of working wood, the practice that marked the body the way the practice of the violin marked the body, the calluses in different places but the marking the same, the body shaped by the work.

Josip taught Marko to hold a chisel. The teaching happened in the workshop on Ulica Marka Marulica, the teaching happened when Marko was five, the same age at which Marko would later teach Nadia, the age repeated, the repetition not planned but natural, the natural age at which a child's hands are strong enough to hold a chisel and coordinated enough to direct it, the age at which the craft can begin, and the beginning was the same beginning, the chisel in the hand, the wood on the bench, the father's hand guiding the child's hand, the guiding the teaching, the teaching the tradition, the tradition passing from Josip to Marko in Split and from Marko to Nadia in Minneapolis, the passing the inheritance, the inheritance not of property but of skill, not of wealth but of knowledge, the knowledge of the hands.

The war. Marko told her about the war the way he always told her about the war, which was briefly, which was factually, which was with the minimum of elaboration that the subject required. The year 1991. The declaration of independence. The Yugoslav People's Army shelling Croatian cities. Split was not shelled the way Dubrovnik was shelled, Split was spared the worst, but the war was there, the war was in the streets and in the faces and in the economy and in the future, the future suddenly uncertain, the certainty that a young carpenter might have felt about his prospects in a peaceful city replaced by the uncertainty that the war introduced, the uncertainty that was the war's gift, the gift that no one wanted, the gift that changed everything.

Marko left. He left Split in September 1991. He left with a suitcase and his tools. He packed his chisels and his planes and his saws and his measuring instruments in a canvas bag that he carried on the plane from Split to Frankfurt to Minneapolis, the bag heavier than his suitcase, the tools heavier than his clothes, the tools the thing he could not leave behind, the tools the connection to Josip and to the workshop on Ulica Marka Marulica and to the craft that was his livelihood and his identity and his inheritance, the tools the portable workshop, the workshop that could travel, the workshop that he carried with him the way a musician carries an instrument, the tools in the canvas bag the way the violin is in the case.

Minneapolis. He arrived in September, the Minnesota September that was warm and golden and that would become the Minnesota October that was cold and that would become the Minnesota winter that was a kind of cold that Marko Kovac, born on the Adriatic, had never experienced, the cold that entered the bones, the cold that made the hands stiff, the cold that was the opposite of Split, the opposite of the sea, the opposite of everything he had known, and the opposite was the new life, and the new life required the hands, and the hands adapted, the hands learned the cold, the hands learned to work in the cold, the hands that had built boats on the Adriatic learned to build houses on the prairie, the adaptation the survival, the survival the craft.

He found work. He found work because he could work, because his hands could do the things that the construction industry in Minneapolis required, the framing and the finishing and the trim and the cabinetry, the skills transferable from the Adriatic to the prairie because wood is wood and the chisel is the chisel and the plane is the plane and the joint is the joint, the skills universal in the way that music is universal, the skills not belonging to a language or a culture or a geography but belonging to the hands, the hands that speak the language of the material, the language that is the same in Split and in Minneapolis and in Cremona.

He married Nadia's mother in 1995. Karen Lindquist, born in St. Paul, of Norwegian descent, a woman who taught elementary school and who loved music and who took her daughter to Orchestra Hall on a winter evening when the daughter was four and the daughter heard the violin and the hearing was the event, the event that redirected the daughter's life, the event that led to the lessons and the practicing and the conservatory and the orchestra and the injury and the loss and the workshop in Cremona, the chain of events that began with Karen Lindquist taking her daughter to a concert and that led, through twenty-two years of links, to this phone call on a Sunday evening in November.

Marko listened to Nadia describe Giovanni's workshop and Marko heard his father's workshop. He heard the workshop on Ulica Marka Marulica in the workshop on Via Palazzo. He heard the tools on the wall in Split in the tools on the wall in Cremona. He heard the spruce in the attic in the wood in the storeroom. He heard the craft, the same craft, the craft of the hands, the craft that connected Josip to Marko to Nadia, the three generations, the three workshops, the three cities, Split and Minneapolis and Cremona, the triangle of places connected by the wood and the tools and the hands, the triangle that was the family, the family's inheritance, the inheritance of the craft.

He sang. He did not announce that he was going to sing. He simply began, the way he had always begun, without preamble, without introduction, the singing arriving the way the shaving arrives from the plane, naturally, inevitably, the product of the motion, and the motion was the conversation, the conversation about the wood and the tools and the workshop and the father and the grandfather, the conversation that led to the singing the way a path leads to a clearing, and the singing was the clearing, and the clearing was the folk song.

The tamburica song. The song of the tamburica, the string instrument of the Croatian folk tradition, the instrument that is to Croatian music what the violin is to Italian music, the instrument that the men of the Dalmatian coast played in the taverns and the homes and the piazzas, the instrument that Josip played and that Marko did not play but whose songs Marko sang, the songs inherited not through the instrument but through the voice, the voice the other instrument, the instrument that does not require manufacture, the instrument that the body provides, and the body was Marko's body, and Marko's voice sang the tamburica song into the phone.

The song was about the sea. The song was always about the sea, or about the boats on the sea, or about the fishermen in the boats on the sea, or about the women waiting for the fishermen, the songs of the coast, the songs of a people who lived between the mountains and the water and who made their songs from the space between, the songs in a minor key, the songs with a melody that moved stepwise, the melody that did not leap but walked, the walking the pace of the song, the pace of the coast, the pace of the fisherman's day.

Nadia listened. She listened to her father sing and the listening was the receiving, the receiving of the song that she had heard since childhood, the song that was part of the fabric of her life, the song that her father sang while he worked in the basement workshop, the song that accompanied the planing and the sawing and the chiseling, the song that was the soundtrack of the craft, the soundtrack of the hands, and the song was in her ears now, in the room above the workshop in Cremona, and the song connected the room to the basement, the workshop to the workshop, the daughter to the father, the apprentice to the carpenter.

The song was the same song she had played on Giovanni's violin. The song she had played on a Sunday morning in October, the folk song that used the first three fingers in first position, the song that did not require the fourth finger, the song that her damaged hand could play, the song that was simple and beautiful and enough. The song was this song, her father's song, the song from Split, the song from the coast, the song from the sea, the song that traveled from Josip to Marko to Nadia, from the tamburica to the voice to the violin, from Split to Minneapolis to Cremona, the song the inheritance, the inheritance the craft, the craft the hands, the hands the connection.

Marko finished the song. The last note hung in the phone the way the last note of a violin hangs in a concert hall, sustained not by the instrument but by the memory, the memory of the listener, the listener who hears the note after the note has ended, who carries the note inside the ear, the note the ghost, the ghost the music.

Nadia said nothing.

The nothing was the right thing to say.

The nothing was the Croatian silence, the silence that her father had taught her the way Giovanni's silence had taught her, the silence that was not empty but full, full of the song and the workshop and the wood and the hands and the father and the grandfather and the craft, and the fullness was the communication, and the communication was the call, and the call was the Sunday evening, and the Sunday evening was November, and November was Cremona.

Buonanotte, Tata, she said.

Laku noc, he said. Good night in Croatian. The Croatian good night, the words from Split, the words from the sea, the words from the coast where the Adriatic is the color of clarity and the fishermen sing and the boats come home.

She set the phone on the desk. She sat in the room above the workshop. She held her left hand in her right hand and the holding was the holding, the evening holding, the holding that was the reckoning and the comfort and the ritual, but tonight the holding was different, tonight the holding was not only the holding of the injured hand but the holding of the carpenter's hand, the holding of the hand that Marko had placed a chisel in at five, the holding of the hand that had learned to grip before it learned to finger, the holding of the hand that was her father's inheritance, the inheritance of the wood.

The hand that held the chisel before the bow.

The hand that gripped before it played.

The hand that was the carpenter's before it was the violinist's.

The hand that was the carpenter's again.

And the again was not a return but a deepening, the deepening of the connection, the connection between the hands and the wood, the connection that was the family, the family that was Josip and Marko and Nadia, the three carpenters, the three cities, the three workshops, the tradition not of luthiery but of wood, the tradition of the hands on the material, the tradition that was older than the violin and older than the tamburica and older than any instrument, the tradition of the human hand shaping the wood, the hand and the wood, the oldest collaboration, the first craft.

And the first craft was the inheritance.

And the inheritance was the hands.

And the hands were her father's.

And her father's hands were her own.