The Art of Living by John Gardner

student—Yegudkin’s wife, shriveled and twisted, watched him as if worshipfully, hanging on his words. She looked at least twice the old man’s age. Her hair was snow white and she wore lumpy black shoes and long black shapeless dresses. The two of them would come, every Saturday morning, down the long marble hallway of the second floor of Killburn Hall, the General erect and imperious, like some sharp-eyed old Slavonic king, moving slowly, waiting for the old woman who crept beside him, gray claws on his coat sleeve, and seeing Jack Hawthorne seated on the bench, his books and French horn in its tattered black case on the floor beside him, the General would extend his left arm and boom, “Goot mworning!”
    Jack, rising, would say, “Morning, sir.”
    â€œYou have met my wife?” the old man would say then, bowing and taking the cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Saturday.
    â€œYes, sir. How do you do?”
    The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. “What’s the difference?” he said. “Every symphony in America, they got Yegudkins. I have teach them all. Who teach you this? The General! ” He would smile, chin lifted, triumphant, and salute the ceiling.
    He would sit in the chair beside Jack’s and would sing, with violent gestures and a great upward leap of the belly to knock out the high B’s and C’s— Tee! Tee! —as Jack read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to give Jack’s lip a rest, the General would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and his beloved Russia that he would nevermore see. The world was at that time filled with Russophobes. Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so enraged he could barely contain himself. “In all my age,” he often said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, “if the Russians would come to this country of America, I would take up a rifle and shot at them— boof! But the newspapers telling you lies, all lies! You think them dumb fools, these Russians? You think they are big, fat bush-overs?” He spoke of mile-long parades of weaponry, spoke of Russian cunning, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. Jack agreed with a nod to whatever the General said. Nevertheless, the old man roared on, taking great pleasure in his rage, it seemed, sometimes talking like a rabid communist, sometimes like a fascist, sometimes like a citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces, vast, idiot herds. The truth was, he hated both Russians and Americans about equally, cared only for music, his students and, possibly, his wife. In his pockets, in scorn of the opinions of fools, he carried condoms, dirty pictures, and grimy, wadded-up dollar bills.
    One day a new horn he’d ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office—a horn he’d gotten for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and assembled it, the graduate student looking on—a shy young man, blond, in a limp gray sweater—and the glint in the General’s eye was like madness or at any rate lust, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, his tools for the cleaning and repair of French horns, his cigars, photographs, and medals from the Czar, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. It contained perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes and materials, from raw brass to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly—the horn seemed now as much a part of him as his arm or leg—clicked the shining keys to get the feel of them, then played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, a creature from some other universe had appeared, some realm where feelings become birds and dark sky,