In search of Viv — how Facebook helped reunite me with my violin

You won’t catch me singing the praises of Meta on an ordinary day. I’ve spent years of my life researching, writing and making films about the evils of Big Tech (and, let’s be honest, many more years battling an addiction to their platforms. Dopamine, amirite?)

But last Sunday was no ordinary day. I had to begrudgingly give Facebook its flowers for – of all things – a reminder that amazing and good and kind things happen, even in the darkest of times (fascism, amirite?). A reminder that being human and living in a society that functions, however non-functionally, is a privilege and a profundity that we should never take for granted.

Let me explain.

Just more than 12 years ago, at the tail end of a torrid year, I created a Facebook page appealing for help in tracking down several stolen violins. They had been cleaned out, along with my worldly possessions, during a break-in at a house I was staying in, following a traumatic break-up that left me temporarily homeless.

Four were stolen, but one – a now roughly 135-year-old French masterpiece my father had gifted me as a teenager, as my violin-for-life, my Viv – was beyond gut-wrenching to lose. It’s hard to describe how an object can come to feel as though it’s part of your body. Perhaps holding it gently between chin and palm, sometimes hours a day for years, building muscle memory, posture and scars that never leave you, designates a musical instrument a quasi-limb. Or an aide. Or a Portkey (millennials, amirite?) granting you access to places and stages you could never have got to without it.

Viv and I played Beethoven’s Ninth with a massed choir at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan and The Devil Went Down to Georgia at the Barnyard Theatre in Cresta, wearing denim hot pants and a cowboy hat (me, not Viv). Viv got me through eisteddfods and art school and auditions and symphonies, and 1,000 wedding performances of Pachelbel’s-effing-Canon. Viv gave me a community and paid my way through university. The one possession I truly valued. The thing that made me me.

It (she? She.) had been bought from and beautifully restored by Mr Wozny, a brilliant violinist, violist, conductor and pedagogue, who played first desk in the then National Symphony Orchestra during the week, and on weekends taught five-year-old me how to make adults cry. My first violin was so small you could hang it on a Christmas tree, but the sounds, nay, the emissions it produced were mighty. Mr Wozny (his first name is Bernard, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to call him that), taught me patiently, for the most part, for years. His favourite thing to say, in his rich Polish accent, his bright blues shining in total earnestness, was, “keep one eye on the strings, one eye on the bow, and one eye on the music”.

Children don’t tend to stick to the violin. It takes years to stop sounding like a crime is being committed in the next room, and discipline and daily practice to master (which is why strict parents are the real arbiters of classical music careers). I don’t have any discipline, but I stuck to the violin. Perhaps, after a decade together, that’s why I came to love Mr Wozny and he came to love me, if not my playing. I knew he did when he framed a picture of me and my siblings busking at the mall during our December holidays, and hung it in his classroom. I knew I did when he sold me Viv.

Mr Wozny made his own bridges – those delicate, ornately carved pieces of soft wood that stretch the strings tight over the fingerboard – and signed them with his name. I made sure to add that detail and many others to my Facebook page appealing for information at the end of 2013, and waited in hope for some kind of intel or sign or lucky break.

One year passed, then five, then a decade.

In darker moments, I wondered if Viv had simply been turfed in the garbage, the delicate gold details on her pegs and button scavenged off and melted down for a pittance. I moved on. I bought another instrument with the insurance money, changed genre, joined a wonderful band, played at festivals and parties and swanky and not-so-swanky events around the world. But something more than just my instrument had been taken. I never came to terms with the new violin’s sound or how it felt to play. It was always a chore. I never practised. The case stayed closed between shows. As much as I loved to make music with others, I always felt that my playing fell short, my bandmates shortchanged. The enjoyment was tainted by what I now realise was a sense of loss.

Last Friday night, I was telling my nieces the story of my violins at dinner. The youngest, Suzanna, has just started learning to play, and I was lamenting not being able to hand down to her my junior instrument, which had also been stolen.

Then, things got spooky. Not 18 hours later, I received a polite text from a man called Kyle.

“According to some research I have been doing on my inventory of instruments and music memorabilia, it has come to my attention that, about four or so years ago, I purchased a lovely piece from a collector in my suburb,” Kyle wrote.

(This is the part where I started yelling.)

“Amongst a small fortune of instruments I purchased, I discovered I have in my possession one 4/4 H. Clotelle violin in pristine condition for its age… [with] markings on the bridge piece which read, B. Wozny.”

“Did I find out this may be the very piece you have been missing for some time? I found the Facebook page and it listed this as the contact number.”

***

When we met the next day at – where else? – the local Woolies, me waiting in a state of near Yorkshire terrier levels of anxiety at the thought that this might be some elaborate and crushing scam, Kyle walked through the door in a backwards cap and a Nirvana shirt, with my violin case in his hand, his eyes, like mine, a little bit watery.

Kyle is, for all intents and purposes, a hoarder. An obsessive, with a deep passion for music in all its forms. He told me proudly about his collection of rare Gibsons and iconic first pressings and crate-loads of old sheet music, one piece of it signed by Wagner.

“Without music, I should surely die, Kyle said, again and again. “I’d rather go blind than deaf, for if I cannot hear music, my soul will surely die.”

He told me he and his friend had found Viv at the Hyde Park Cash Converters in January 2014, near where the break-in happened. It would’ve been just days after I had stopped calling pawn shops and antique stores city-wide asking for information, because I had had to move to Cape Town. They thought she looked like a special piece, so his buddy paid the R1,200 sticker price. He promptly packed Viv away with the rest of his massive music instrument collection, before selling her and a load of other tchotchkes and memorabilia to Kyle, when he emigrated in 2021.

Kyle didn't expect me to make him whole for what he says he paid for Viv. But we agreed to an amount that didn’t feel like it detracted from the meaning of his gesture.

He has lived less than a kilometre away from my parents and a handful from me for most of the past decade. Among his voluble collection are the works of Wanda Arletti, a Johannesburg-based singer in the Sixties and Seventies who went by the name of Bobbie McGee. He has been trying to track her down for years, to give her her memorabilia before she passes, he told me.

It turns out – and this is wild – Mr Wozny was good friends with Wanda’s father, Ali Arletowicz. They played music together in the Polish community back in the day. He’s known Wanda all her life.

No matter how hard Western culture tries to algorithmically manipulate us into believing that individualism is the key to success and moral happiness, the truth is that our lives are grey and meaningless without community. Without Mr Woznys to form orchestras and teach children to experience music with all three eyes; or Kyles to help us find parts of ourselves we didn’t know how much we were missing, our souls, like Kyle says, would be silent.

Aside from bringing Viv home and playing some Stéphane Grappelli on her immediately – she is in remarkably good shape for a 135-year-old gal who went walkabout for 12 years (and smells like cats) – I have spent the past few days trying to put all these dots of data together. Trying to wrap my head around how much information, manmade and otherwise, has been uploaded to Facebook – to the whole goshdarn enshittified internet – between 1 December 2013 and 24 January 2025.

How improbable it is that a handful of search terms typed out in the right order somehow pulled up a page I deactivated in 2023, into the probably antithetical algorithm of a total stranger who loves Iron Maiden and Halloween pranks and whose music-filled house I could walk to right now. How, if Mr Wozny hadn’t stamped his name on that violin bridge 25 years ago, Kyle would never have found me. Even if we passed each other in the mall a dozen times.

I loathe – and I mean loathe – Mark Zuckerberg and his band of wax-faced, ketamine-infused sociopaths and everything they and their products stand for. But the truth is, despite his best efforts, he has never been able to keep Facebook from being what its users have made it: a community. I am so grateful to get to experience the joy of a connection created via this digital portal, carved through many years and billions of ones and zeroes between me and a stranger with a good heart called Kyle Fenton, who has made me whole again in a way that feels profound and life-affirming and so very human.

POSTSCRIPT: In January 2020, Mr Wozny was also the victim of a home invasion in Johannesburg, in which seven historically important violins he had lovingly restored were stolen, along with his personal viola. It was made for him by a Polish master luthier in the Seventies. After a lifetime of collecting, rebuilding and personalising these treasures, their sudden and violent loss broke him.

He is 83 now, and recently suffered a debilitating stroke. This story makes me hopeful his instruments could turn up again, and make him whole, too. Kyle’s kind act has also brought us back into contact after several years. I took Viv to see him after I left the Woolies. Although he has lost the use of his right side and has sold all his luthier tools, he’s agreed to oversee me attempt to clean up and service Viv in his stead. I may just go through a couple of Cash Converters on the way over. You never know! Kyle has agreed to try to help me track down his instruments. DM