Beza had been elected as DOP – rather against his wish, we gathered – by a remote community in the Transylvanian highlands.
To see Beza during the day, sitting miserable and round-shouldered at the Mars Bar or a cafe table, wearing his floppy off-white tunic, you would wonder what such a poor old fellow was doing on Mars. But when he took up his violin and began to play – bashavav, to play the fiddle – his real stature became apparent.
His dark eyes gleamed through his lank grey hair, his stance was that of a youngster, and the music he played – well, I can only say that it was magic, and so compelling that men ceased their conversation with women to listen. Guenz sometimes took up his fiddle too and played counterpoint.
With the fiddle at his chin and his bow dancing, Beza could play all night. His music was drawn from a deep well of the past, like wine flowing from centuries of slavery and wandering, rising from the pit of the brain, from the fibres of the body. These tunes were what is meant when music is said to be the first of all human arts.
A time dawned when Guenz’s theory that this was the true music of Mars became real to me. I wondered how it had come into being before Mars had ever been thought of as a place for habitation.
After I had listened to Beza I would lie in bed, wide awake, trying to recreate his music in my head. It always eluded me. A slow sad lassu, with its notes long drawn out, would be followed by a sprightly friss, light and airy as a stroll along an avenue, which then broke into the wild exhilaration of the czardas. Then, quite suddenly, sorrow again, driving into the heart.
I must admit I learned these foreign terms from Guenz, or from Beza himself. But Beza was a silent man. His fiddle spoke for him.
Beza’s music was so popular that it became subject to plagiarism. In a small classical quintet was an ambitious Nigerian, Dayo Obantuji. He played the violin adequately, and the quintet was a success, perhaps because Dayo was something of a show-off. He liked to leap to his feet to play solos and generally appear energetic.
The quintet became less popular while Beza’s music was still the rage.
Dayo was also a composer. He introduced a piece, a rather elegant sonata in B flat major, which he christened ‘The Musician’.
After ‘The Musician’ had been played several times, Guenz became suspicious. He made a public denunciation of the fact that much of the sonata, transposed into another key and with altered tempo, was based on a piece that Beza played.
Dayo strongly denied the accusation.
When Beza was brought into an improvised court as a witness in this case of plagarism, he would only laugh and say, ‘Let the boy take this theme. It is not mine. It hangs in the air. Let him play with it – he can only make it worse.’
There the matter was dropped. But ‘The Musician’ was not played again.
Instead Dayo came to me and complained that he was the victim of racism. Why had this unfair charge been brought, if not because he was black? I pointed out that although Beza was himself of a minority – indeed a minority of one – he was almost the most popular man in Mars City. I said I felt strongly that racism had no place on the planet. We were all Martians now. Dayo must be mistaken.
Angrily, Dayo asserted that I was denying what was obvious. He had been disgraced by the accusation. His name had not been properly cleared. He was the victim of injustice.
A long argument ensued. Finally Guenz was brought in. He also denied prejudice. He had found an echo of Beza’s music in Dayo’s piece. It was hardly surprising, but there it was. However, he had been convinced that the similarity was accidental, so powerful was Beza’s influence. He was content to believe that Dayo’s name had been cleared. And he apologised graciously, if rather playfully, for having made the charge in the first place.