Second Fiddle

Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry

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Authors: Rosanne Parry
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become of me if not for you?”
    “You would have done it for me,” I said. “If some American soldier was in trouble in your town, you would help him, right?”
    “Rescue an American? I cannot imagine this. Americans never need to be rescued.”
    I asked him about his nights under the bridge, and he told me about watching the stars and the stray dog that visited him twice. He finished the bread and butter, and I wished I had more to give him.
    “Are you still hungry?”
    I could just make out his smile in the dim light. “Good company and plain bread is better than a feast all alone,” he said. He brushed crumbs from his lap and shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor. “In the army I was always alone.”
    “It must have been lonely to be the only Estonian in your unit.”
    Arvo nodded.
    “Didn’t you have any friends at all?”
    “Not one man I could trust.”
    “Wow. That would be hard.”
    I thought of myself next fall in a new school looking for someone to eat lunch with and not a single girl I could trust.
    “I don’t need a thousand friends,” I said, more to myself than him. “I just need …” I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my head on them, glad it was too dim for Arvo to read my face. I just needed to make time stop, so that I would never have to move away from Germany.
    “You just need your quick-witted Vivian and your fearsome Giselle,” Arvo said.
    “Yeah. The army is moving us. After this weekend, I’ll never see them again. When I was little, I didn’t mind the moving so much.”
    “These friends are more dear?”
    “Mm-hm.” I bit at the corner of my lip. I was not going to cry. I hated crying.
    “Musical friends are the very best kind,” Arvo said.
    “Musical friends?”
    “When I was eight, I joined a choir in my town, an allboy choir. That was very important to me at the time—no girls allowed.” He chuckled quietly, and I had to smile thinking of him only a little older than my brothers.
    “Later I did not mind the girls so much, but sometimes boys only is a very good thing. When I got homesick in thearmy, I sang to myself and in my thoughts I could hear my friends sing with me—Jüri and Jaan and Anton and little Mati, our tenor. I left my town and the choir seven years ago, but my friends’ voices have never left me, even on my darkest day.”
    “Was it a church choir? I was in a church choir once.” I was seven, so it must have been Missouri.
    “No, people only go to church secretly in the Soviet Union. It was a town choir. Almost every town has one, for children and for adults, too. It is a very Estonian thing, to sing together.”
    “What did you sing?”
    “The Young Pioneers made us sing all the patriotic Soviet songs.” He sang a few lines of a song, sitting up straighter and moving his arms as if he were marching. I didn’t speak a word of Russian, but I could tell it was a stupid song.
    “Russian songs with no words are not so bad,” he said. “Tchaikovsky and all those pretty ballet tunes,
The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty
—everyone likes those. But starting when I was your age, I learned songs in secret, songs in my own language.” He put his hand over his heart and tapped a tempo with his fingertips, and then he began to sing a soft, slow song:
“Mu isamaa on minu arm.”
He closed his eyes as he sang. The song came back to the same phrase many times.
    “Gosh, that’s pretty,” I said when he’d finished. “What does it mean?”
    “ ‘Land of my fathers, land that I love.’ It is the Estonian anthem. We have been forbidden to sing it for fifty years. A person could go to jail. Two years ago at our song festival grounds the audience sang it. There were three hundred thousand of us singing in our own language. My little sister wrote me about it. I’ve never heard her sound so excited—so proud of her country.”
    “Tell me about your sister.”
    Arvo reached into his pocket and took out a tattered photograph and

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