Best European Fiction 2013 (15 page)

– And can you identify individual instruments in this inner music, as you describe it? Or, would you say that this “music” is played on instruments hitherto unknown?

– Not really, Doctor. As soon as I mentally label an instrument I hear—an Arabic flute, a Japanese koto, a medieval lute, a Scottish bagpipe, an Algerian reihab, an Indian sitar, uileann pipes — then the music itself contemptuously rejects that label. As if it was mocking my feeble efforts to reduce its incredible novelty to known human terms. And although the same basic tune is being played continually by this orchestra, or band, the infinite variations it plays on this theme, sometimes makes the latter well nigh unrecognisable …

As I listen to this long spiel from the mouth of Mr. X, I detect a classic case of schizophrenia encased in that conventional gray suit that faces me from the other side of my desk. Experience tells me clearly that the voices and mysterious messages that patients of his ilk report are in the same category as his strange “music.” But other practitioners of my profession will be certain to take a keen interest in my description of the unusual symptomatology of X’s neurosis. I continue to make rough notes in my jotter as Mr. X gives free rein to his stream of consciousness:

schizophrenia—interesting and unusual case
music instead of voices in his head
great paper for the next convention will make my name

Mentally composing the first paragraph of this putative paper, I ask X, somewhat diffidently:

– And do you detect the influence of the great composers on this “music?” a question to keep Mr. X feeding data into my recorder.

– As I‘ve told you, Doctor, this music is unlike anything that you or I have ever heard. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. For I’ve listened to the music of all the great composers: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Delibes, Rimsky-Korsakov … all the way down to the moderns, like Philip Glass. I have researched the Ceòl Mór, the Great Music of the Scottish pipes, the classical ragas of India, the various musical traditions of Africa and their influence on the music of the Caribbean and the Americas. Trying frantically to gauge the origin of this music in my bones, I ransacked every musical tradition beneath the sun. From the Sean Nós of Connemara to the gríhe of the Berbers. From the rocks of Cape Verde to the deserts of Mongolia, I have listened to the traditional voice of seldom-heard peoples. From Joe Heaney to Benny Moré to Victor Jara to Lightnin’ Hopkins. And I know how to separate the grain from the chaff, the true voice from that of the phoney, Woodie Guthrie from Bob Dylan, for example. You would hardly believe, Doctor, the long nights I have spent till the dawn listening to recordings of every type of music on this planet. And this obsessive cosmopolitanism is nearly driving my wife out of her mind.

– Not surprisingly! And all of this study brought you no nearer to the root of your condition?

– My effort was all in vain, Doctor. For no music that I heard from whatever tradition came even close to the ethereal music that my orchestra plays … An eminent Professor in our National School of Music suggested to me that I learn musical notation. Knowing this musical alphabet, he said, I would be able to transcribe my music into a written form. And thus be in a position, maybe, to make a startling new innovation in world music. However, I discovered before long that the form of musical notation that is perfectly adequate to a description of classical European music, say, has no relevance whatsoever to the music that only I can hear. The pre-classical pentatonic scale is, likewise, unable to describe the music of my soul … But all of that was before I realised that I was a conductor, not a creator …

– What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. X?

– Well, one day as I was walking on a beach near my home, I was confronted with something totally unexpected. And the word “unexpected” puts it mildly, indeed …

Mr. X’s last revelations have the effect of suddenly awakening me from a pleasant reverie, in which Mrs. X, the scent of whose perfume is still faintly—but tantalisingly—perceptible in the consultation room, was playing a central role.

– How interesting, I said. Now, please tell me what you mean by “totally unexpected”!

– Well, as I was walking along, listening to my music, I started to imitate the gestures of musical conductors up there on the podium facing their orchestras. And then I suddenly realised that I was able in fact, with the help of the movements of my arms, to conduct the music being played by my internal orchestra.

– Or, rather, you were able to adjust the nature of your arm movements to the music to which you were listening.

– No, you’ve got it wrong, Doctor. It was the other way around. Because what I found out was that my arms were capable of determining exciting new variations on the basic theme of the music to which I was listening. And to direct the musicians within me, so to speak, to obey my personal diktat, as expressed through the movements of my arms.

– I understand, Mr. X, that this “discovery” changed your life. And not only your life? And not necessarily for the better?

As I slowly enunciate those words, I simultaneously scribble the following words into my jotter:

emergency case
admit X immediately
under no circumstance must he be allowed to leave the building

– Well, it certainly did change things, Doctor, continues Mr. X. From the ground up, so to speak! Every time my orchestra visits me—and this happens three or four times a day lately—they expect me to conduct them in playing new variations on their basic theme. This is both an intense pleasure and an enduring challenge. For there is no limit to the variations I can create by concentrating exclusively on the movements of my arms. Nor is there any boundary to the beauty I can now bring into being. By paying not the slightest heed to the rules and regulations, so to speak, that determine what is and what is not music as defined by the times in which we live …

X spends a period of three months with us in the clinic. But no medication or therapy, nor combination of both in the various treatments we try, manage to silence his internal orchestra, as he calls it. For said orchestra now appears to be in permanent residence in his bones. Things have gone from bad to worse, as he now spends all his waking hours, from morning to night, “conducting” his phantom “musicians.” Nobody but X can hear their “music,” of course. But there they are, he insists, playing away inside him. The other patients derive great amusement from observing him conduct a ghostly orchestra playing his Great Symphony of Total Silence on the lawn behind the clinic. Not surprisingly, they call him Tchaikovsky …

I am in a deep sleep late at night—at three
A.M
. to be exact—when the most beautiful music that ears have ever heard wakes me suddenly. I sit up in bed and think instantly of Mr. X. Is it from his room, just over mine, on the floor above, that this music is coming? He will wake up all the other patients in the clinic unless his music is stopped immediately. I wonder why the damned night nurses haven’t suppressed it already. I turn on the light switch, dress hastily, open my door, and step out into the corridor. The decibels are even higher out here.

A night nurse passes me on the stairs as I climb them on my way to Mr X’s room.

– From which room do you think that strange music is coming? I ask her.

– Are you having me on? she answers, with a tired smile. But to be honest with you, Doctor, this place could do with a bit of music to liven it up. It’s as quiet as a graveyard here tonight.

Is this night nurse as deaf as a post, I ask myself, while this unearthly music pours down on us like silver rain.

As I place my hand on the doorknob of X’s room, the music rises to a crescendo. Hundreds, if not thousands, of orchestras address themselves simultaneously to the same theme. Now I know where this music is coming from, with absolute certainty. As I open the door, the volume of the crescendo doubles. I place my hands over my ears. To no avail.

Mr. X is nowhere to be seen. It is as if he has never been here. His bed seems as if it has never been slept in. Then I open his wardrobe, and I detect again the fragrance of the perfume of the woman in the black dress in my nostrils. There is no sign of X’s clothes or suitcase. Anywhere. Did he ever exist? Just then, I get the greatest shock of my life. For hanging there is the black dress of Mrs. X. My clinician’s white coat, my gray suit, and my striped shirt hang beside it, where X’s clothes should be.

The music is welling up inside me now.

Mr. X was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

For, with an imaginary conductor’s baton in my hand, I extract whatever music I will from this unearthly orchestra within.

T
RANSLATED FROM
I
RISH BY THE
A
UTHOR

[FINLAND]

TIINA RAEVAARA

My Creator, My Creation

Sticks his finger into me and adjusts something, tok-tok, fiddles with some tiny part inside me and gets me moving better—last evening I had apparently been shaking. Chuckles, stares with water in his eyes. His own hands shake, because he can’t control his extremities. Discipline essential, both in oneself and in others.

What was it that was so strange about my shaking? He himself quivers over me, strokes my case, and finally locks me, until the morning comes and I’m on again, I make myself follow all day and filter everything into myself, in the evening I make myself shut down and in the morning I’m found in bed again. Between evening and morning is a black space, unconsciousness, wham—dark comes and clicks into light, light is good, keeps my black moment short. He has forbidden me it: for you there’s no night. Simply orders me into a continuum of morning to evening, evening to morning, again and again. But in the mornings I know I’ve been switched off. I won’t tell about it. Besides, why does he exclude me from the night? I don’t ask, but I still call the darkness night. There is night and day, evening and morning will come.

Today is a visiting day. A collecting day, an exhibition day, a walking-around day, a following day. He goes, and I follow, clop, I pound the floor but don’t feel comfortable, I would prefer to be at home doing my things, following my settings, being directed. I am intended for the home, for one space, elsewhere I am surplus, unnecessary. Of course, there are others intended for elsewhere, to each his own.

The exhibition space is too cold, the temperature eighteen point three Celsius, to be accurate. I do not generally mind cold or heat, nevertheless I feel stiff and creaky—but is the temperature the cause? Maybe not. Maybe I actually feel something. “I’m so pissed off my head is splitting,” he once said, at the beginning of time, and since then I too have sought in myself something of the kind, the union of emotion and body, this my one and only. Stiffness is a new thing, and is that a sensation of mind or body? Hard for me to understand such distinctions, the division between mind and body, mental sensations and bodily sensations are certainly quite different, although rarely in my case.

Bumps into me as he stops, I let myself be bumped into a little bit on purpose, because here he hasn’t yet said a word to me. Doesn’t say anything now either, looks pensive. Rests one hand on his temples and scratches his head. I would dearly like him to speak, but of course orders can’t come from me.

What have I learned lately? It is one of the great purposes, learning—development.

He taught me to read, it wasn’t even difficult. Closed me for a moment so that I was on a black break again, whamm, like a quick night, a click, then he appeared in the middle of light, the new morning was quickly over, he said he’d updated me, and so I had learned. “This will increase your value,” he said and passed me a book. The shelf is groaning with them, side by side, flat, formerly unnecessary to me, although unpleasant because they gather dust. Now they are full of words, maybe he wrote them while I was in the night. The one that he passed to me was thick indeed, a total of 1,108 gram-units, I opened it—he directed me a little—I read aloud from the point that first hit my visual sensors:

In presence of that light one such becomes
That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect
It is impossible he e’er consent …

He laughed so much that he doubled up in the armchair. He: no name from my innards, for I am not allowed to address him by name. Any kind of title, I tried once, but then too he began to shake, eyelids wrinkled. Stroked me more eagerly for a while, it’s true. But when I said it again, he slapped me so hard that my side element was dented. Slap! I straightened it myself later on. “Let’s not get too close,” he said as the reason for this new practice.

So, about the exhibition: We are in a giant room, huge, we have been here before—that much I’ve managed to extract from myself—but that was a while ago. I do not consider these things important enough to record very accurately in my memory, even I have my limits, you have to prioritise. I walk behind him. Now and again gives me glances although he’s been pretending not to notice me all day, his posture is straighter than usual, quite splendid, and his expression I would call proud. From time to time he makes me stop, goes a bit farther away but keeps an eye on me, I would recognize his eye among a thousand, I am confident of that. Speaks with a few people, males, I do not recognize them even though I have seen them before, I am certain. Many of them inspect me, one winks and looks me over slowly, first my feet and then upward. What do I care, clop clop I go on pounding the floor. An ugly floor here.

We have arrived early: The exhibition hasn’t begun yet, men adjust their creations, as yet not a wholesome multitude of people around me. We are just looking, I am not going to be shown today, we circulate, and every now and then he tells me to wait and I don’t hear what he says to the others. Once a man who almost passes me by, older and with more facial hair than average, touches my back. I smile, I am now programmatically, exemplarily friendly.