Appassionata (9 page)

She thinks she sees him again in west Berlin, in a bar she haphazardly walks into, to slake her thirst. The place is again badly lit, and crowded. She begins to look for a table, then realizes there are only men there. Men of all ages and colors and manner of dress, though leather jackets predominate. They look at her not with hostility, and not even with surprise—other women before her must have made this mistake—but she understands from those looks that she shouldn’t be there. She stops short in the crowded space, uncertain what to do next, and as she looks across the room—she doesn’t want to appear unnerved, or hounded out—she thinks she sees Anzor in the back of the bar. He’s engaged in what is clearly a very private conversation with a short, leather-jacketed man, of Middle Eastern appearance. They stand close to each other, and the short man gesticulates angrily, his index finger jabbing out at his interlocutor. His Adam’s apple, even from this distance, seems to be bobbing. The taller man shrugs contemptuously, in a gesture she thinks she recognizes. But again, she thinks she must have made a mistake. The man is not facing her, and in this dusky interior, with her embarrassment about having walked into the wrong place, everything blurs and her vision turns anxiously hazy.

There’s a sense of a déjà vu about the whole scene, though maybe that is because she’s seen something like that in the movies, or has stepped into such a place before. She walks out of the bar quickly, trying to shake off a slight eeriness. She knows this sensation from childhood, a ghostly tingle at the back of her neck, as if something hidden within the real were about to make its appearance.

Outside, a stolid street, ordinary light. Wolfe’s betraying city, Europe’s euphoric site. The Wall goes up, the Wall comes down. She’s seen the images, exalted, collective, of people dancing on the gloomy old barrier. Now there is nothing but the concrete day, the stodgy suited men hurrying along with their suitcases,
the prosperous shops, the banal business beat of a Central European city. But why is she having these Anzor phantasms all the time? Though this is also something that happens in her kind of life, the sudden emergence of an uncannily familiar face, fragment of a smile, gesture, or turn of mouth, emerging from the crowd, and disappearing again. We’re all each other’s morphs.

Or is she, somewhere beneath consciousness, imagining a Pursuit, the man hurrying after her, to seize her, lift her up, vanquish her resistance? Ludicrous old images, rising up from some cinematic trove, some obsolescent basement of the imagination. It’s her itinerant life, that’s the problem; she might as well be moving along some sort of endlessly running, endlessly reiterating Philip Glass loop. Perhaps she should go back to the bar; ascertain whether it was or was not Anzor. Get a grip. She stops in her tracks, doesn’t know which way to turn. A brief vertigo of disorientation; she can’t get her coordinates straight.

Then she remembers the task awaiting her in the evening and starts walking back to her hotel. She must prepare, must compose herself. Must step into the really real of her life.

She plays Mozart’s No. 24 with the Berlin Philharmonic that evening; and afterward, stays to hear Beethoven’s Ninth—a rare event. The conductor is a young Englishman with a cherubic face and an aureole of curly white hair, who guides the orchestra with his baton as if he were both lightning rod and magus. From her observation point behind the stage entrance, she is close enough to see the detail of his hands, which are a da Vinci drawing come to mobile life. Or Michelangelo’s hands, igniting the orchestra with a pointed finger, and being reignited by the life thus awakened in turn. God and Adam, all in one. The music surges in power like a great engine churning, like an airplane gathering speed. More than human power; and she wonders how one mind could have summoned it, one man’s
frame contained it. She thinks of Beethoven, hurling himself down on the ground, thrashing about in paroxysms of rage. He thought his deafness was brought on by such a tantrum, his eardrum broken, perhaps, by a force of fury in excess of what the blood vessels could bear. The music grows through its symmetrical progressions, surely the way plants grow, as well as cathedrals, the way great oak trees make their way up through accumulating sequences, up and out from the tiny motif of the acorn. The force of the music accumulates till she feels almost endangered by its massed power, and the simultaneous knowledge that she can never sustain such a vision, can never live within it. Only intimations, only glimpses. Of what? Is it nature’s force, or human libido increased to its nth power; or the impersonal whirling of particles and spheres, generating the world through their patterns? Or is this human desire, intuiting more than it can attain? Desire seeks eternity: Friedrich Nietzsche. The majestic lines and great chordal combinations gather toward each other and vastly intertwine, in terraced orders, in tiers of ascending harmonies which demand that she ascend with them or be torn in twain. Oh, so beyond the border of the possible, beyond the grasp. The conductor’s hands rise up to the choir, striking it to life. The music grows in beauty till beauty itself becomes a more than human force. She thinks, I live in paltry arbitrariness, and yet I live in this. The music breaks through its own urgency and ascends to a dimension where all is calm; and Isabel, without knowing why, and without worrying about the guard standing nearby and observing her closely, cries.

*

In Between

July 10, 1982

It must have been the silence at the end of the lesson that brought back, like an increase in air pressure, those five days in Warsaw, so many years ago. Five days in that simple room, with its own silence and its dense atmosphere. Oh that silence, in which everything was contained. The speaking pause. And Renata. I still do not know why she summoned me to that room, and why I followed. The festival was called Warsaw Autumn, and everything in Poland seemed autumnal, all grays and shabby clothing and the muted gold of the fallen leaves. And the still fresh ruins. The Poles were beginning to compose in their expressive post-war vein. They had the right to the tragic mood. As I did not. I hardly felt I had the right to make music. I spent my days there walking around with a bowed head. So when she summoned me … Of course I followed. I was almost crazed with wanting to compensate for something, to show one human being that I was not like that. A German, but not like that. Though I was of course also following
her
. Her lovely face with the high cheekbones, the hair uncompromisingly tied back, the unswerving eyes. There was nothing she seemed to want from me, except the transportation of those documents to the West. But that was at the beginning, she didn’t need to invite me to her apartment once I agreed, night after night, day after day. Perhaps she wanted to confront me in some way. Or to deposit her sadness with me, to show me how much she had been hurt. By us. The Germans. Perhaps she wanted to touch a man who stood for men who had visited destruction on her country. There were only those five wordless days. She knew only a few phrases of German, and I none of Polish. Oh, how it comes back. The way we stood at the window of her apartment, looking down at the melancholy street below. I want to write it down, yes, I want to know that it actually happened. That I have had that experience. We ran our hands over each other’s bodies, again and again, slowly and meticulously, as if learning a new terrain. Mapping it, molding it, molding ourselves into the other’s body. There was nothing else, just time and us, the barely furnished room and us. A sort of eternity. At the end, I asked her to come with me. Because by that time, I—yes, I loved her. I did not see how I would live without her. But that was not what she wanted. I did not see how I could leave, how I could pull away. I was crazed with pain. By the end, we were part of each other; we had exchanged everything. But I had to go back, of course. I knew I had just lived through the happiest—no, the fullest—no, the most profoundly meaningful—days of my life. And that they would have to last me forever. I would not find anything like love again. I did not deserve it, and therefore I would have to refuse it. At least I owed her that act of contrition, that penance.

Strapped into her seat, Isabel feels herself bending forward, as if to reach the Warsaw room, plunging into its scene of silent passion as into a well. Wolfe’s Passion. Is such intensity possible only in the past, in its chiaroscuro depth; its compelling wholeness?

*

Brussels

The flatness of the present. Touchdown, airport; a drive into the city, through the no-man’s-land, everywhere the same, everywhere a nowhere. In Brussels, a drizzle again, falling differently than in Paris, onto the more stolid stone. The hotel clerks, the waiters and bellboys avoid her gaze. One could begin to feel despondent from so many averted, lightless eyes. In the hotel room, comfort and meaninglessness. To think “how nice,” to think anything at all, is to raise the decibel of meaninglessness still higher. Once, in Cincinnati, she came into such a room, in which someone had left a large bowl of fruit for her, and she thought “how nice,” and smiled into the room, as if someone were watching, and then felt she could leap out of her skin, or had leapt out already. For who was she smiling at, who was watching, who providing the commentary? Now she knows how to ward off such thoughts. She retrieves her newly pressed gown from the concierge, gives herself over to an interval of concentration. She’s playing at the Beaux Arts this time, a step up from the smaller halls where she’s performed before; and she’s pleased and nervous.

She feels fragile as she comes out onstage, fragile and lonely in the grand elegant space. Can she fill this palace of art with her presence? She tries; but as she faces her audience after the first half to take her bow, she thinks she sees people in the front rows coming out of a doze. She is thrown. Had she been that dull?

In the second half, propelled by a sort of vengefulness, she plays with mellifluous facility. Liszt’s
Transcendental Études
emerge in all their gorgeous richness, bravura passages ascending and descending in seemingly effortless cascades. Whatever adrenaline is coursing through her seems to fuel her technique to a fine fluency, and she navigates the keyboard with a kind of I’ll-show-you insouciance. At the end, the “Jeux d’eau” slides off
her fingers like butter; like water. The applause is quite convincing; quite satisfactory.

At the sponsors’ reception, a blonde, perfectly coiffed woman comes up to her, with a polite smile. She is wearing an Armani suit, pale pink and smooth as chocolate.

“We always love it when you come to Brussels,” she declares. “We are so pleased to have booked you into the Beaux Arts this time.”

“Thank you.”

“We don’t have enough … real culture,” the woman continues in a sincere voice. “Especially where I live. You know, I came in just for the concert.”

“Did you really?”

“Well, you know, I’m on the board of trustees of an arts fund … I feel it is so important to support this kind of thing.”

Isabel smiles and says that’s wonderful, the arts would not survive without people like her, classical music would not survive. She knows this is true; feels some proper gratitude. But later, when she is alone in her room at last, she wonders why on earth it’s important to the perfectly dressed woman to come to yet another recital, why it’s important for anyone. It’s the post-concert ghost coming upon her again. She stops herself from calling Peter. It’s not fair; she needs to find ways to cheer herself up without him.

The ghost is still there when she wakes up the next morning, pitching her into a state of irritable disaffection. What can culture mean, she wonders as she sets out on her morning walk, in a city where it is so ubiquitous. We’re fat with culture, she thinks, like bees overfed with pollen. Fat and lethargic. No
Rite of Spring
to awaken us into astonishment. She wanders through the old Austrian quarter, her steps slowing from a sort of tourist boredom. It’s an ordinary old quarter of a big European city, with grand architecture and wide avenues, and a surround of
concert halls and museums. Does anything
happen
anymore … No horizon, nothing beyond the epidermis of stone. Things are what they are, it’s no use trying to peer beyond the ostensible. She is walking through a disenchanted world. She enters the grand national museum, feels stifled, turns right back to go out on the street. The city is museum enough, becalmed and perfectly maintained, perfectly finished and glossed. Almost asking for destruction, an upheaval, an overturning; for what else could happen next?

In her restlessness, a susurrus of music tugs at her from within, and she remembers a crowded train in Russia, years ago, taking her to Odessa from some proximate city. A heated compartment filled with sweaty Russian youths, disheveled, sloppy, rowdy … She was a bit afraid. Then they took up their guitars and harmonicas, and started singing songs from the steppes. Music which was nothing but shaped yearning, fierceness, lament, praise, lust. Blood, sweat and tears. They passed a bottle of vodka from one to the next, and to her as well, and poured it down their throats without ceasing to play. She loved them for that hour or so, the disheveled boys, traveled on the pure raw lines of their songs as if she were at one with them. The guitarist threw his head back, and his pale, pasty face opened up to the music as to a fresh large wind across a large sky. The others joined in as if they were carried on the same vast, gusty breezes, the same galloping horses, the same rolling, spacious melody.

She continues to wander through the placid streets without particular aim, finds herself somehow in another old quarter where men with linked arms walk along the echoing cobblestones, their expressions hardening slightly as they pass her. Women with covered faces appear in high windows, only their eyes visible, and unreadable. Quiet, it is very quiet here; a veiled, puzzling hush, different from the calm of Brussels’s burgher heart. She begins to feel nervous. She is the alien here, she
cannot read any of the signals; and she retraces her steps to get back to the more familiar regions.