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The Singing Lesson

© 2004 by Chris Lydgate

The sign was a dull brass plaque, about the size of an envelope, bolted to the door of a shabby apartment building in the cobblestone district of Riga. "Singing Lessons," it declared. "Mr. Janis Ritmanis. Inquire within."

I walked past that sign every day on my way to the office. It was one of those familiar if subliminal landmarks, like the cobbler's shop and the Number 6 trolley car and the mossy statue of the famous poet, that formed a comforting insulation against the strangeness of a new city and a new land.

Then, one bleak afternoon a few days before Christmas, I had a few hours to kill. Technically, I was on a gift-shopping mission, but the truth was that I didn't have too many gifts to worry about. Driven more by habit than inspiration, I found myself meandering along the route I took to work. And for the first time, I read the sign the way it was intended-- as an invitation, rather than a passing curiosity.

I scanned the street for potential witnesses. Down the block, a red-faced farmer had pulled an old Soviet flatbed truck into a vacant lot and was doing a brisk trade in Christmas trees. The little trees had been stuck into tiny plastic pots. The wind kept blowing them over and the farmer's teenage sons kept propping them back up again. No one cared about an American wrestling with his embarrassment. I opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

In America, a 38-year-old white guy who can't carry a tune basically represents 99% of his demographic. But in Latvia, singing is a way of life. Latvians can sing for hours without running short of tunes. Six-year-old girls will happily prattle on about chord structure and a Latvian house party is considered a flop unless the guests break out in three-part harmony. In fact, a favorite party game involves picking on some poor sap and throwing down this challenge:

Dear Jani, sing a song, sing a song, sing a song.
Dear Jani, sing a song, sing a song, yeah!
Jani's head is full of straw, full of straw, full of straw…
Jani's trying to think of one, think of one, think of one…
It's inside but won't come out, won't come out, won't come out…

The only way to stop this humiliation is for the victim to belt out a few verses of a genuine Latvian folksong, loud and clear, or be branded a dead-end loser who can't hold his liquor.

In fact, I had witnessed just such an occasion two weeks before, at a party thrown by a gang of British-Latvian expatriates in a swank apartment on Elizabetes iela over by the Japanese embassy. By midnight the singing was going full tilt, and the revelers had already singled out several likely dupes, all of whom managed to stave off disgrace. Until they turned on me.

"That's not fair," I protested. "I don't know any Latvian folksongs!"

"Give us an American one, then," said the blonde girl from the Foreign Affairs office. "Woody Guthrie. Howling Wolf. We'll even take Bob Dylan."

"I can't," I said, my ears burning. "I don't know how to sing."

A look flitted across her face that was one part vodka and two parts contempt. Then the chorus started up again, and the folksongs thundered on. They were still going strong when I let myself out of the apartment an hour later.

Besides me, the only person in Latvia who can't sing is my roommate, Monty. Monty moved to Riga back in the fall of 1996, a few years after the Communist regime collapsed. He didn't have any family connections to the country-he just thought it would be a great place to start an internet business. And he was bored of living in Cleveland.

"I'm telling you, man, the Baltic is the place to be," he told me over vodka tonics one summer night. "It's going to explode. Fifty years of pent-up demand. Plus, the women are gorgeous and the men are short."

Monty had a thing about height. He was barely two inches shorter than average, but he fretted about it constantly. He wore special shoes with extra-thick soles and refused to be photographed standing alongside other guys-- he always maneuvered himself so that he was sitting down, or leaning against a tree, or something. He had gotten hold of some chart from the World Health Organization, and was delighted to discover that Baltic men were, on average, a full two inches shorter than American men.

"Take my word for it," he declared with the conviction of a man who's seen the future. "The future belongs to the Baltic."

"What are you talking about?" I harrumphed. "You haven't even been there."

But there was no persuading him. Monty was so wrapped up in the romance of the post-Soviet states that he even invented a cocktail named the Baltic Crackdown, consisting of an indomitable Latvian liquor and an overwhelming force of vodka, topped with crushed ice and garnished with a toy soldier. It tasted like cough syrup.

He flew to Riga that September and set up shop as an internet consultant. He beamed back glowing reports every couple of weeks on the endless business opportunities, the fabulous apartments, the tycoons, the parties, the women. The only sour note concerned the height of the adult Latvian male. It turned out the difference was measured in centimeters, not inches. "I got gypped," he grumbled on his cellphone. "These guys are as short as the LA Lakers."

Despite this anthropometric disappointment, Monty seemed to thrive. Business was good-- so good that he was desperately short of programmers. "You ought to fly out here," he'd tell me on his late-night phone calls. "I could put you to work tomorrow."

I had a safe job in Cleveland doing database work for a health management company. Then the internet bubble burst and the company went bankrupt. I was out of work and Latvia sounded better and better. I sold my apartment in Shaker Heights, boxed up my possessions in a friend's basement, and bought a ticket to Riga.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that Monty's reports were a trifle overstated. His office, which had once boasted twenty employees, had dwindled to a staff of two-- Monty plus a receptionist. The fabulous apartment was up four flights of stairs and was heated by firewood which had to be hauled up from the shed every night. The tycoons were jumped-up mobsters brandishing cell phones and pinkie rings. The women-- at least, the women that Monty hung out with-- were Russian call-girls.

I didn't really mind. It was more interesting than Cleveland. Or it was, at least, until I found out about the singing.

No one seems to know where this cantillating mania comes from. Monty says it goes back to Latvia's small-nation complex.

"Look, for centuries, Latvia was pushed around by her neighbors," he explained over pelmeni at a little café near the train station. "Germany. Sweden. Russia. Christ, even the Poles took a swing at her-- fearsome Poland, who sent men on horseback to stop Hitler's tank divisions. In World War II alone, Latvia was invaded three times! First Stalin, then Hitler, then Stalin again. And what was the only thing none of these invaders could steal?"

"The weather?" I asked. I hated Monty's rhetorical questions.

"No, you idiot, their music. Their songs. Do you know the Latvian tradition includes more than two hundred thousand folksongs? The invaders never understood Latvia. You can burn their cities. Raid their treasury. Round up their intellectuals, collectivize their farms, teach their kids to recite lies in history class. Do whatever you want-- you'll never stop them from singing."

"Yes, but why do they have to pick on me?" I asked. "They're independent now. Stalin's dead. They've got their own central bank. Surely they can tolerate a few tuneless Yanks."

"Oh, sure, they can tolerate it," he grinned as he pushed the check over to my side of the table. "They're very tolerant. They just think you're a loser."

Monty's words were still ringing in my ear as I climbed the creaky wooden staircase to the studio. The hall was freezing and stank of cigarette smoke. In the background I could hear someone playing Chopin on the piano. I tapped on the glass door and the piano broke off abruptly.

The door swung open and I found myself face to face with a guy whose bulk might have made even Stalin quail. He stood six-foot-four and looked like Drago, the robotic Soviet boxer from Rocky IV, about thirty years after retirement.

"Ja?"

"Runa angliski?" I begged. Do you speak English?

"Yes," he said. "How I can help you?"

"I'm interested in the singing lessons."

His eyes lit up. "Ah! Guhd! Come!"

The studio was spartan. A wood-burning stove and a neat stack of logs. Cracked windows. A couple chairs. Music books piled on a rickety table. A grand piano perched on ragged scraps of carpet.

"I study in Academy under Kriss Petrovskis," Mr. Ritmanis declared, stubbing out his cigarette. "I teach there 23 years. I teach Latvia's best singers. You want lesson now?"

"Uh, sure," I said. It was all happening rather quickly. "How much do you charge?"

"Ten lati for lesson. You want ten lessons, you pay just eighty lati."

I made a quick mental calculation Ten lati is about eighteen bucks. I handed him the bills, which he counted one by one and placed carefully in his wallet.

The first objective was to determine my range. Mr. Ritmanis scooted the bench up to the piano, hit the C below middle C, stretched out his right arm, palm up, and proceeded to sing a four-note scale, rising up an octave and falling back down again.

"Ah-ah-ah-AH-ah-ah-aahh!" he boomed.

To describe Mr. Ritmanis' voice as simply "deep" would be somewhat misleading. His voice was deep like a ninety-yard pass, deep like 40 below, deep like the Grand Canyon. He sounded like a didgeridoo in a subway tunnel. When he sang, I could actually feel my shoes vibrating through the floor.

He nodded. My turn. I gulped a quick breath and aimed for the moon.

"Agh-agh-hagh-HAGH-hagh-hagh-haghh!"

Ouch. The initial volley wasn't exactly promising. I knew I wasn't a good singer, but I didn't realize I was a bad one. I sounded like an asthmatic chimpanzee choking on its own vomit.

Mr. Ritmanis jumped to his feet. "Breaz awl ze vay to diaphragm!" he snaps.

I arched my back and pumped up my chest, discreetly trying to suck in my bulging pot belly.

Mr. Ritmanis was not impressed. "No. Muscles locked. No guhd." Looming over me, he clapped his outsized hands either side of my belly-button. "Here-- root of ze voice," he explained. "Root of ze man!"

As I stupidly pondered the inner significance of this statement, Mr. Ritmanis took my hands and slapped them around his belly-button.

"See? See? Muscles not locked. Free!" he exclaimed, and polished off a window-shattering round of ah-ah-ahs. My ears rang but sure enough, I could feel his muscles phasing in and out.

Satisfied that I'd gazed at his navel long enough, Mr. Ritmanis marched back to the piano and hit the next key, one note higher. Time to mount a fresh assault on the octave.

"Argh-argh-hargh-HARGH-hargh-ggharhh!"

Well, that was certainly different. The chimpanzee had vanished into thin air, magically transformed into a rabid poodle whining for a chunk of flesh.

Mr. Ritmanis was on his feet again. "OK, eez better!" he lied. "Better. But you must relax jaw and smile. Alvays smile."

At this point I would rather have paddled the Baltic Sea, but somehow I pasted on a grin as Mr. Ritmanis hit the next note.

"Argh-argh-hargh-HARGH-hargh-ggharhh!"

A slight improvement-- the poodle no longer sounded psychotic, just maladjusted. Mr. Ritmanis bounded to his feet again.

"OK, eez better! Now you must leeft-- how you say…" He pointed to his gaping mouth.

"Lift the mouth?" I suggested.

"No! Inside!"

"Lift the tongue?"

"No! Back! Ze leetle one!" He wiggled his finger like he was stirring a martini.

"The uvula?"

"Yes! Zis one! Leeft him up!"

Lift the uvula? He might as well have asked me to flex my pancreas. Nonetheless, I peered into the tarnished mirror on the brick wall of the studio and experimented with contorting muscles in my neck, throat, forehead, shoulders-- nothing seemed to work.

"It's impossible." I whined. "I can't do it."

Mr. Ritmanis snorted. "Ha! Zis is difference betveen Latvia and America! In Latvia, ve leeft him up. Zis how ve sing. Is simple."

He opened his mouth wide and pointed his finger up to the ceiling, where the paint was peeling off in flakes. Sure enough, his uvula retracted into the back of his throat like a pink snail curling into its shell. Then he gestured to the floor, and his uvula bobbed back down.

"That's great," I said. "But I still can't do it."

"Breaz awl ze vay to diaphragm," Mr. Ritmanis commanded. I took a deep breath and, lo and behold, my uvula retracted. Unfortunately, it bobbed down again as soon as I let my breath out. I considered this a problem, because you can't sing without breathing out, but Mr. Ritmanis believed that any motion of my uvula, however fleeting, was a harbinger of great things to come.

The next few minutes were long ones. Slowly, painfully, we climbed the scale, one key at a time. It felt like crawling on hands and knees through broken glass.

Mr. Ritmanis' smile began to wear thin, but it did not crack. He gallantly hit the final key, stretched his arm out, and bid me reach deep inside for the note within.

"Argh-hgr-hgr… HGR! hgr-hgr-hgrhhh." The top note came out sounding like a cross between a strangled balloon and a turkey being stretched out on the butcher's block.

The room fell strangely quiet.

"Guhd," Mr. Ritmanis declared, with the air of a man looking forward to the weekend. "You are baritone."

I got to know Mr. Ritmanis a little better over the next couple of months. In Soviet times, he'd been a music instructor at the Academy-- a good job, with perks like a big apartment and annual trips to Poland, Hungary, and Finland. Then he ran afoul of a powerful apparatchik over the state choir's Easter concert. Mr. Ritmanis wanted to include some Latvian songs, but his boss-- the chairman of the department-- insisted that all the songs be Russian. The Soviet Minister of Culture was slated to be the guest of honor, and the chairman wanted the evening to sound a patriotic theme.

Mr. Ritmanis obediently printed up a program consisting exclusively of Russian songs, which was well-received. But when the choir walked back on stage for an encore, they sang their final tune in Latvian. The crowd went wild-- right in front of the Minister-- and Mr. Ritmanis lost his job. For several years after that he worked in a mothball factory.

After independence, the factory shut down and Mr. Ritmanis reapplied for his old post, but the capitalists now running the Academy were more concerned with computer engineering than choral music. Besides, he was 55 and associated with the old regime. So he eked out a living through private lessons and helping out with his brother's business selling vitamin supplements over the Internet.

Our lessons were always the same: Monday afternoon, ten lati, warm-up exercises, then the dreaded scales, followed by me butchering whatever song I had been practicing that week. We'd go over it for about half an hour. Then Mr. Ritmanis would show me a new song. Afterwards, he'd brew up a pot of tea and sometimes-- when he was in a particularly generous mood-- he'd break out a package of cepumi, shortbread dipped in cheap Lithuanian chocolate.

Mr. Ritmanis loved to talk about his famous students over the years, many of whom had progressed to dizzying heights in the enormously complex and bureaucratic Soviet musical hierarchy. At first I found this subject somewhat uncomfortable-- it underlined the ugly contrast between the lofty musical heights he once inhabited and the odium of teaching an American to sing "The Little Drummer Boy." But he seemed to enjoy reminiscing, so I didn't worry about it.

"Practice!" he would say at the end of each lesson. "Only practice make better!"

In fact, one of my biggest problems was finding a place to practice. The walls of the apartment were thin and I didn't want Monty to overhear. I tried singing in the shower, but there was seldom more than a few minutes' worth of hot water. Sometimes I would sing under my breath on my way back from work, but the results sounded timid and thin.

"I don't know why you bother," Monty told me one morning after he caught me singing on my way down to the woodpile. "You're beating a dead horse. These people come out of the womb with a song on their lips. For you, it's too late."

"But you were the one who told me that Latvians think a guy who can't sing is a social leper," I protested.

"I know. They do. But there's no point in trying to change it. You may as well live with it-- I do."

At my next lesson, after handing over the ten lati, I asked Mr. Ritmanis if I was making progress.

"Progress!?" He thundered, peering at me with his watery blue eyes. "Vy ask me? Ask yourself! You zhink you make progress? Or no?"

"Well, I think I'm making progress," I stammered. "I just wanted a second opinion."

"Vhat wrong wiz first opinion?" he demanded, getting up from the piano. "First opinion enough! Americans always wanting too much. In Latvia, no need two opinion."

"What I meant was, I want you to tell me what you really think."

There was an awkward pause. "Zhink about your singing?" Mr. Ritmanis asked.

"Yes."

He walked toward the window and stared down at the street below. Most of the snow had melted, apart from a few gritty mounds clinging to the weeds in the empty lot across the street. He muttered something to himself, then turned to face me.

"You want zhe truzh? Or vhat you pay me to hear?"

"I pay you for the truth," I said.

"No!" he boomed. "You pay me for singing lesson. Truzh I tell for nozhing. You sing better. But you do not practice. Your muscles locked. You do not smile. And you do not leeft ze… ze…"

"Uvula?"

"Yes! You do not leeft him up."

"I can't lift my goddamn uvula without choking!" I exploded. "No one can. I looked it up at the library. The uvula is like the heart, or the iris, or the intestines. Beyond conscious control. Why don't you ask me to clench my lymph glands?"

I hadn't looked anything up. I was just mad.

"At first, you make progress," Mr. Ritmanis smiled. "But zhen you stop. Like flat heell."

"A plateau?"

"Sure. Now you must break zhrough to next level."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" I shouted. But a look around the room told me the answer. The boxes of vitamin pills. The rolled-up sleeping bag. The white keys of the piano, which had been stripped of their ivory and were all tinged a grubby gray.

"You just flatter me because you want me to keep coming back!" I continued. "Ten lati a week! You need the money and you can't afford to lose me!"

Mr. Ritmanis threw back his head and laughed, rattling the windows. "No. You not understand. Yes, of course, I need money. But I teach you for somezhing else, because--"

"Don't tell me it's because you love teaching."

"No, is like… when you see beggar in street. You feel to help."

"You mean I'm a charity case?"

"Ja! I feel to help you."

"Because I'm so bad."

"Ees not bad! Your voice fine. Can be better, but is fine. Zhe problem not your voice. Is you. Like beggar. Need help. Need confidence."

"In other words, I'm paying you ten lati a week for confidence lessons?"

Mr. Ritmanis shrugged. "For you, zhis all I can give."

I grabbed my coat and stormed out of the studio.

"What happened to the singing project?" Monty asked me a few days later. "Did you get tired of the dead horse?"

"The guy was milking me for all I was worth," I growled. "A total scam artist."

But as I said it, I felt a pang of guilt. The truth was that Mr. Ritmanis was right. Ever since I had started taking lessons, I had been joining in with my Latvian friends at their drunken party rituals. No one objected. Plus, I began to listen to them more closely, and I realized that some of them didn't sing so hot. Confidence was 99% of the game; the rest you could fake.

A few months later, on my way back from work, I noticed a light patch of paint on the front door of Mr. Ritmanis' building. Someone had taken down the brass plaque. I walked up the creaky old stairs and rapped on the door of the studio. No answer. I asked at the room down the hall, which was occupied by a Russian ballet instructor. In fractured English, she told me that Mr. Ritmanis had moved out a few weeks before.

"He happy," she said. "He teach his last student."

Chris Lydgate recently completed a Knight-Wallace Fellowship for journalism at the University of Michigan. He has won numerous awards for journalism during his tenure at Portland's Willamette Week and is the the author of Lee's Law: How Singapore Crushes Dissent, a biography of dissident J. B. Jeyaretnam. This is his first work of fiction.