Lanceheim (4 page)

No one said a word. Up in our closet we hardly dared breathe. Before me in the darkness I saw the image of Eva Whippoorwill in the willow tree, and how she abruptly stopped singing.

“But what kind of thing is it?” Hans Beaver finally asked. “I mean, it is naturally as you say, Anders, that things of value that are found have to be turned in.”

“So it is,” confirmed Anders.

“But it seems to me that in this case we don't know the value,” Hans continued, “because we don't know what it is. And so we can't put it back either.”

“It's something that's alive,” my father declared.

“It's a kind of animal,” said Anders.

After that, silence again fell around the table. Up in the closet we realized why, and we held our breath in excitement. The forest guard who looked after the forest animals, and had the deepest insights into the subject, was Sven himself. It was easy to imagine that all gazes now rested on him.

“It is a prayer that's been answered,” he said at last. “That's exactly what it is. A prayer that has been accepted, and a cub has been granted to us.”

“But, Sven—” Anders began.

“Sven, listen—” said my father in the same breath.

“We know how you feel, Sven, but—” interrupted Hans.

“We have rules to follow,” Jonas almost whispered.

Silence again. Then we could all hear the scraping of a chair being pulled out from the table.

“Dear friends and colleagues,” said Sven Beaver with a certain authority, and in the closet we understood that he had stood up, “I ask you, let me handle this in my own way. Just as you would let me treat an injured deer, or an eagle chick that fell from its nest. I promise you, I am not going to break any of the rules, I will follow every paragraph of the law that we forest guards have to follow.”

The silence that ensued was solid.

“It's about trust,” Sven added in a somewhat lower voice. “By granting your consent, you show that you rely on me. And we forest guards have to rely on each other.”

“Sven,” said my father at last, “don't do anything stupid.”

I recognized the tone of voice; I knew that Father had just given his assent.

Without any further words we heard steps across the floor and then the door being shut. There was no doubt that it was Sven Beaver who had left the deliberation.

“If only we don't come to regret this,” said Jonas Beaver quietly.

No one answered him.

 

During the months that
followed, Eva Whippoorwill and Sven Beaver would adopt the little bundle that we all came to call Maximilian, just as Eva had said we should. The adoption occurred after a series of processes of both a moral and legal nature. Sven reported his find to the police, and was first forced to await the court's decision that no one
else had a claim on Maximilian. Subsequently they went through the meticulous adoption process, where one of the more surprising problems had been to define Maximilian's type. That the bundle was not an ordinary stuffed animal was easy to ascertain; it was only necessary to take a look at him. Despite the fact that he had eyes, nose, and mouth, he was different in an—remember, I was only ten years old at the occasion in question—unpleasant way. Above all it had to do with the structure of his light beige fabric: like silk without the sheen, and the seams could scarcely be seen.

Eva and Sven had first sent in the papers without filling in the information about Maximilian's attributes, but they were rebuffed. Then they had to write “imaginary animal” instead, without specifying that further. Most of the imaginary animals in Mollisan Town could be categorized as “dragons,” “prehistoric animals,” or “fairy-tale animals.” But some, a very few, were impossible to trace to a breed or a category, and it was among those that Maximilian was counted. The Ministry of Finance finally sent a dog out to Das Vorschutz, who with his own eyes could ascertain that the lack of a category was correct. The dog stared down into the crib and saw there a bundle, as small as a cricket bat, but with highly peculiar ears and without any similarity whatsoever to any of the known types of stuffed animals.

When the adoption went through, the commotion around Maximilian subsided somewhat. I will not go so far as to maintain that everything returned to normal, but it was well on its way. During the weeks that followed my love paled, and Eva Whippoorwill was transformed: in my eyes she became Maximilian's mother. The mystical shimmer around her remained, however. Again and again I saw in my inward eye how she interrupted her morning ritual by the lake that morning. As if she had known. She must have known.

How was that possible?

R
euben Walrus sat down in row 15, seat 354, in the middle of the orchestra. He had little use for superstition. At the very most he might accept that faith was a balancing factor during a long life. Yet he always picked the same seat on the parquet when he rehearsed with the Lanceheim Philharmonic. He pretended that it had something to do with the acoustics. In an empty concert hall it was easy to mistake the tonal colors. The gilded, arched box seats along both edges of the stage gaped like greedy mouths above each other. True, the red velvet on the hundreds of chair seats and backs in the parquet did dampen the sound, but not in the same way as when the hall was filled with the cloth bodies of many hundreds of stuffed animals. This seat, in the middle of the parquet, was, for lack of a better, the most representative, Walrus reasoned. Here the tone remained intact.

The fact that he had sat in seat 354 when he directed his Piano Concerto in D Major, which got an exuberant reception ten years ago, had nothing to do with it. The fact that he had sat in seat 354 when he rehearsed the successful
one-act opera
Sarcophagus
, which had been playing on one of the city's stages without interruption for at least fifteen years, had equally slight significance. And it was of no interest that out of sheer cussedness he had refrained from sitting on seat 354 when he suffered the fiasco with the Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord five years ago.

Despite the fact that the evidence was overwhelming, Reuben stubbornly refused to see himself as a victim of superstition. He had reached a mature age, he was en route to his sixty-fifth birthday at a furious pace, and yet he was still struggling with his self-image. Every morning he got up and wished that it were a different face that met him in the bathroom mirror. Someone whose forehead was not as high, whose eyebrows were not quite as grandly white and bushy, someone whose nose was less moist and who did not have mustaches that were quite so long and dense. He hated his large, heavy body, and he suffered from being nearsighted, even if he refused to wear eyeglasses in public. His egocentricity had made him a miserable spouse and a blind parent, and his friends had abandoned him long ago, because he always prioritized his work. He had unintentionally become something of a recluse, a type he despised, but he could not decide what he should sacrifice to become part of the community. The only thing he appreciated in his mirror image on certain mornings were the large, glossy eyes whose luster revealed talented melancholy. Reuben Walrus's vanity—for this was a matter of vanity and nothing else—was only one of many signs of his unfathomable need for acknowledgment. The maturity he had reached with the years meant that nowadays he knew that this need for acknowledgment would never be satisfied. But he also knew that it could never be ignored.

Walrus was latently dissatisfied, but also with dissatisfaction itself, which saved him from being impossible. Instead
the surrounding world often seemed to appreciate his blunt cynicism and cutting irony, which in nine cases out of ten was aimed at himself.

 

The words that Dr.
Margot Swan had spoken refused to become comprehensible during the afternoon. Reuben Walrus pretended as if nothing had happened. He positioned himself up in row 15, clapped his hands, and the musicians returned from their long break. Patiently he let them slowly take their seats, and then it was time. They started playing again, and Reuben concentrated on the music, closing out everything else…then he heard it again.

Seven minutes into the first movement of the symphony was a passage where the cellos along with the violins should build up to a successive, violent crescendo. It didn't work. It didn't work at all. Instead of creating interest in the variation on the theme that awaited in the following movement, it led the insistent cellos up to an anticlimax. It hesitated too long. The theme had to return sooner. Perhaps not completely, but in some form. The dissonances and chromatic changes that Reuben usually exploited were not enough in this passage.

Reuben stood up and waved deprecatingly. Frustration was pounding in his temples. When no one saw him, he began jumping up and down in the row of seats, waving his fins and shouting. The chastened philharmonic stopped playing.

“Damn!” shouted Walrus, but he knew that Malitte, the lord of evil, could not help him. “Damn, damn, damn.”

He made his way out along the empty row of seats, hurried along the middle aisle of the concert hall, and ascended the stage via the short staircase on the right side. He ran past the violinists over to the cellists and grabbed hold of the score. He held it up in the air, staring at the notes and closing his eyes.

He listened.

This was the second day of rehearsals. Except for the timpanist, a blue elephant with a name no one could pronounce, everyone in the orchestra had worked with Walrus before. They knew what this meant. Therefore, when the timpanist with a superior smile on his lips—as if to say, “Is this pretentious or what?”—turned to the flutes, he got no response. Seeing Walrus standing on the edge of the stage with closed eyes, fanning the air, might perhaps be a sorrowful sight if you thought that the composer had fallen victim to his own myth. Later, however, someone—perhaps one of the sweet violas or one of the oboists, generally considered the most social section in the philharmonic—would let the blue elephant know what he had witnessed.

This is what Reuben Walrus's creative process looked like. He apparently heard melodies and harmonies within himself, silences and dissonances, orchestrations and parts. The philharmonic in Lanceheim had witnessed this several times—how Walrus stood among them, yet in his own world, and with closed eyes directed his inner orchestra, the one that never played a wrong note, neither hesitated nor questioned.

After a few long minutes the composer finally opened his eyes and turned over the music paper he was holding in his right fin. With his scratching ink pen he frenetically wrote down five, ten, and finally fifteen different parts that he had just “heard.” Not once did he hesitate.

“I'll write out new ones for everyone,” he mumbled, “just now it's only the cellos I want to hear. Only cellos.”

And then he set back the score in front of the cellists.

“Play,” he nodded and closed his eyes.

The cellos were heard again, the violins picked up where they felt comfortable, and Walrus nodded without opening his eyes.

Better.

 

The Music Academy was
celebrating its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary, and Reuben Walrus had been invited to write the piece that would inaugurate a week bulging with musical festivities. The invitation had arrived almost two years ago, and Reuben, after a year of hesitation, had accepted the commission. Even if he could not maintain that he had exclusively agonized over this Symphony in A Minor since then, he had devoted much effort to it. Whatever conflicts he may have had with the Music Academy over the years—and they were numerous, despite the fact that he could not recall any of them in detail—the invitation was a major official recognition. He had been asked due to past qualifications, but those past qualifications would not bring him through this in one piece if this symphony did not live up to what his reputation promised.

And it had been a while since he had tackled something of this scope. With the years and their successes, many other things made demands on Reuben's time. The actual composing he did was confined to simpler things. Last year he had squeezed out a couple of string quartets, but not more. The year before that, a few arias and ten sonnets was all he managed. To be quite honest, none of these compositions were more than deft elaborations on the sort of thing he had done previously, and for the sonnets in particular only neglect awaited. Since the Piano Concerto in D Major had been performed for the first time exactly nine years, eight months, and…a few days ago, there had been nothing other than trifles.

But the years passed. His time went to conducting or at least sanctioning recordings of previous works that musicians, orchestras, and smaller ensembles from the various corners of the city asked for. Reuben Walrus had been pro
ductive when young, inconceivably and inexcusably productive, he might think; a few things were best buried in the compost heap of time. Devoting yourself to the past entailed making revisions. He reorchestrated pieces for new sets of instruments or transcribed symphonies to keys better suited to tonal colors that had not been available when he wrote them. The development of technique had opened unexpected paths for contemporary composers, and Reuben was fascinated by the possibilities that he had never had.

His daily routines also included managing the financial aspects of his own musical activity. As he found these tasks inconceivably boring, they took him a disproportionately long time. Many, not least his ex-wife, had again and again suggested that he ought to let someone take care of bookkeeping, invoicing, and investing, but he would not. Some called this stinginess; others emphasized his certified need for integrity. Reuben himself answered, pressed and disagreeable, that it was certainly a little of both.

Finally, Reuben's private life in recent years had been equally hectic and turbulent. Not only due to his companion, Denise, although she clearly demanded the kind of attention that only a young, spoiled, and beautiful animal had the right to demand.

The invitation from the Music Academy scared him to death. But at the same time it was his salvation.

 

While the philharmonic continued
into the grandiose madness of the symphony, Reuben Walrus stepped down from the stage.

Three weeks was all he had before it was time to play the symphony for an audience, and the last third was still left to write. He had been noncommittal with the philharmonic. They had asked of course for the last pages of the score. He thought that when rehearsals got going, he would find inspiration more easily. Well, that remained to be seen.

 

When the Afternoon Sky
had reached its most saturated blueness, Reuben Walrus again clapped his hands, but in a different way, a way they all recognized. Rehearsals were over for the day. The musicians set down their instruments. A couple of them, old friends, intended to exchange a few words with the great composer, but Reuben quickly fled the concert hall, with his coat over one fin and the score under the other. He was still holding Dr. Swan in check. Her words were encapsulated in the darkest corner of his brain, and they could only remain there if he avoided talking with anyone. Out on the sidewalk he turned right, and went north as fast as he could.

This was his block. The street where he lived, sea blue Knobeldorfstrasse, was no more than a stone's throw from the concert hall. Over the past few years the neighborhood from Dieterstrasse up to Rosdahl had gained a reputation as being pretentious and expensive, but the pendulum always swung back. When Reuben bought his four-room apartment ten years ago, the area had been exciting and slightly dangerous. The price of the large apartment was lower than that of some studios he had looked at farther south. And once they had carried the grand piano up the six flights of stairs, Reuben swore never to move away.

He loved Knobeldorfstrasse. He loved the old rooms—their musty odor that he had made his own, the yellowed wallpaper that reminded him of times past, and the creaking floorboards that responded to his steps like old acquaintances. The water in the sink remained cloudy until it ran for a minute or two. The bathroom was too cramped for a washing machine, and for that reason he could take his clothes to the dry cleaners with a good conscience. The obligatory drying cabinet—where stuffed animals sat if they happened to end up by mistake in one of the day's
rain showers—was of an old, obsolete model, and it smelled burnt in a manner that caused him to feel hungry.

He loved the view from the bedroom toward the shady inner courtyard and the rusty bicycles that no one seemed to own and that could stand in peace year after year. And the contrast on the other side, facing Knobeldorfstrasse, where the pulse beat faster every day and the formerly abandoned apartments had been transformed in recent years to trendy cafés and boutiques that constantly changed ownership.

The sixth floor, the apartment under Walrus, stood empty. It had always been that way. The low rent level in the building allowed the tenant one floor down, a fairly successful milliner with stores in both Lanceheim and Tourquai, to use the apartment as a storeroom. This meant that Reuben could play his piano as much as he wanted, any time of day whatsoever. This was perhaps Knobeldorfstrasse's best quality.

Reuben Walrus managed to make it the whole way home without Dr. Swan's words penetrating his defenses, but once he was inside the door his powers of resistance ran out, and he collapsed on the carpet. It could not be true, he thought. It could not be true.

Three weeks.