The Soloist (32 page)

From the mountains or from a plane the smog has distinct boundaries and real substance to it. It’s toxic and depressing, but all the same there’s something cozy about the way it looks. It’s like a soft brown comforter draped over the city.

I wanted to sit on the ground at the edge of the turnout,
but at first I couldn’t bring myself to do it in my good pants. I’d still not forgotten to dress up for lessons. But then I thought, What do I care, no one’s going to see me up here. So I sat down. It felt so funny that I laughed aloud. It must have been twenty years since I’d sat on the ground.

The city spread out in all directions, a huge basin of stucco buildings, parking lots and swimming pools, with a tight cluster of high rises stranded in the middle. Suddenly those downtown buildings reminded me of the Rodin sculpture “The Burghers of Calais”: five or six figures standing close together, with horrible expressions on their faces because they’re about to be executed. The high rises aren’t ugly in themselves, but hemmed in by all of that crap surrounding them it was easy to imagine that they were leaning toward one another in despair.

The white dome of the observatory behind me made me think of one winter afternoon in Ederstausee, just after my eleventh birthday, when von Kempen asked my mother and me to stay on for a while after the lesson to see what he called “a celestial performance.” When the grandfather clock upstairs in his music room struck five o’clock, the three of us looked out the bay windows over his garden and saw the full moon, newly risen over the reservoir, glowing a dull, copperish red.

“
Mondfinsternis
,” he said reverently—a lunar eclipse.

I asked what this meant and he explained that the sun, the earth and the moon were now perfectly aligned so that the moon was now entirely in the earth’s shadow; it could receive no direct light from the sun.

“So why can we still see it?” I asked.

The old master looked genuinely puzzled and limped over to his desk, where he picked up a newspaper, held it under
a light and, using a huge magnifying glass, read what was apparently a brief article about the eclipse.

“Ah, yes. Dear boy—such a fine, inquiring mind!—the paper tells us that the moon receives a bit of indirect sunlight thanks to our own earth’s atmosphere, which deflects the light and sends some of it toward the moon.”

In spite of the moon’s diminished brightness, I could see details on its surface more clearly than I ever had before, perhaps for the same reason that distant trees and mountains look sharper when seen through darkened glasses. Von Kempen returned to the window to admire the scene further, then chuckled to himself. “I just thought of something,” he said, opening a fresh can of blended tobacco. “The moon and I, we have something in common. Can you guess what it is?”

“No, Herr Professor.”

“Oh, come! Take a guess, at least.”

I could never think quickly when put on the spot. My mind went blank, but to satisfy my expectant teacher I blurted out, “You both have reddish faces?”

The old cellist laughed out loud, but my mother was horrified. “What a thing to say!” she said loudly in English.

Thankfully, von Kempen leaped to my defense before she could scold me any further. “Not at all,
meine liebe Frau Sundheimer
. The young maestro is quite right. But I was thinking of something else.” He lit his pipe, puffed at it dreamily, and then laughed quietly once again. “I am still visible because of you—that is why I am like the moon. How fortunate I am that you play the cello.”

Nearly a quarter century later I understood all too well what he meant. I heard myself think, My old life is done now—it’s over. I didn’t know whether to be afraid, delighted
or worried. It was such an unexpected thought that I didn’t know how to feel at all. At that moment, I finally ceased to be a concert cellist. I felt detached from myself, if that makes any sense, but at the same time I was all there. Who else, after all, was this man sitting on the ground in his good pants?

I suppose I’d always thought of myself as a good man, a talented man, a professional musician with the right ideas about important matters, one who would never do anything really wrong. I’ve always simply assumed this; I could make small mistakes of judgment, I could have little accidents, but I would always make great music and never willfully do anything really foolish or bad. Sitting on the edge of the turnout, though, I began to suspect that maybe I wasn’t that man after all. I felt that now I could see my life from several different perspectives, giving me views of myself that were not all flattering. My failed career, the way I’d avoided my parents since leaving home, the way I’d resented my students’ successes, my clumsiness with women. I did not become upset, however; it didn’t hurt to think about these things. I just sat there and observed, completely enthralled. It was like that television program where the fat critic and the skinny one argue about movies. Except that here it was many critics, and the movie was me.

On that day I began to have a different idea about why I couldn’t play onstage anymore. I’d always assumed it had to do with my sense of pitch, because that was certainly what I’d noticed had changed. I couldn’t hold on to the dead center of notes anymore because my pitch had become too sensitive; my fingers couldn’t keep the notes pure enough. It felt like trying to split hairs with a butter knife. But now I started to think that maybe the problem had nothing to do with my ears.

When I was a child performer I could do no wrong. Anything I did pleased an audience; I had no fear at all of making mistakes. There was also no question that I was going to get even better; everyone told me so, it was promised to me. When I was sent to von Kempen, I was going to become the next von Kempen. I was even going to surpass him; he himself predicted that, joyfully. But what had once been limitless expression for me suddenly acquired boundaries. I was the unfinished version of some greater perfection. I had no choice but to try to search deeper and deeper until I found that perfection and brought it to the surface. So I tried; I searched, I went deeper, but I felt like a diver jumping into the deepest part of the ocean without equipment and trying to find a sunken galleon. No matter how deep I went, there was not only no treasure, but no bottom. And that was when von Kempen died, just at the crucial time. When I needed him most he was taken away from me, and that made it much worse. With him gone, the expectation that I would bring his music to life in all its glory, to restore his honor and incomparable voice and at the same time establish my own, grew much stronger. It came from all sides—my parents, critics, music patrons and, most of all, me.

If a thirty-year-old man were to play exactly the way I did at fifteen, no one would have insisted that he become better. No one would have said, “I can’t wait to hear you when you’re forty!” Now I think I know what happened to me. Since musically I couldn’t see how to improve, any more than one can willfully improve one’s capacity for hunger or joy, I turned my attention to the only aspect I could control, which was intonation. I knew that, for example, musicians can become used to minor thirds that are too large. I became obsessed with locating any such habits in my own playing,
and for all practical purposes forgot that absolute intonation does not exist. As my mind focused on the impossible goal of achieving pure intonation, I became unable to feel the music. It was the same problem as what happened when I was staring at Maria-Teresa’s family pictures and trying to make love to her at the same time.

When you play music well, you are transported. However, my experience has been that you cannot make great music happen; you can only
prepare
yourself for it to happen. To a degree, your preparation determines what will happen, but once it starts happening you have to surrender yourself to it. Once you do so you are free, except that you are free only within the boundaries you created through your preparation. When, at eighteen, I started trying to force great music to happen I ended up making awful music; in fact, it wasn’t even music anymore.

It seemed as if that boy who killed his Zen teacher also wanted to achieve an impossible sort of purity. Before the incident during the retreat, he apparently hoped that Zen would help him transcend his imperfect life all at once, in a flash; he wanted to become somebody else, somebody whose wisdom allowed him to experience perfect freedom. Maybe he did experience a kind of freedom when he lost his mind, but from any point of view other than his own it was a lousy kind of freedom.

I thought of the trial the year before, and wondered if my brief sense of detachment sitting under the observatory was anything like what that young man had felt, a perspective that allowed him to know he had committed murder, yet have no sense of guilt or anger about it. Maybe that was why he refused to let his father hire an expensive lawyer; maybe he really didn’t care what happened to him.

After half an hour or so my epiphany dimmed until it was only a subtle glow, a light, refreshing feeling; it was as if I had just shed a suit of chain mail. On the drive home every breath seemed luxurious, I swayed with every turn in the road. With utterly unwarranted conviction, I felt that even the commuters around me, expressionless in their cars in the heavy traffic, were all on the verge of laughter.

I had not become the heir to von Kempen’s musical tradition, but I hadn’t betrayed his legacy completely. I had done something that I believed was right even though it might have been a futile gesture. Perhaps if von Kempen were alive he would say that by doing what I did, I validated his work with me. He was always saying that there should be no separation between one’s musical life and one’s spiritual, social or political life. Those little speeches about unifying one’s life with one’s art, about animating one’s life with one’s art and making one’s very life art—those were the speeches that used to make me think he was getting senile. I’d forgotten all of that for many years, but now I remember. I don’t feel that my apprenticeship is incomplete anymore; I tell myself now that my experience during the trial was my graduate recital.

One improvement in my life since that day has been the acquisition of a pet. Knowing how badly Kyung-hee wanted a cat, I thought I might as well get one for him to play with when he came for lessons. Also I’d always heard that cats were the easiest pets to keep. At first I planned to go to a pet store and buy one, but when I mentioned this to Martin he advised me to choose one from the pound instead. He gave me an informative lecture about the animal overpopulation in our city and why adoption from the pound was more socially responsible than buying one in a store. He also said that many of the cats in commercial pet stores were raised in miserable kitty farms under harsh conditions, and that they encourage the propagation of exotic, specialized breeds, which tend to suffer from cruel birth defects as a result of all the inbreeding. He had even memorized statistics, although I don’t recall what they referred to. Most convincingly from my point of view, he told me that by bringing a cat home from the pound I would almost certainly be saving it from being put to sleep. Furthermore, at the pound I could select an older cat, so that if it turned out I
didn’t enjoy having it, I wouldn’t have to take care of it for very long.

The pound in my neighborhood had separate areas for cats and dogs. To get to the cat house, I had to walk down a long aisle past cage after cage with dogs in them barking and whining piteously. I tried not to look directly at any of them because I felt terrible passing them by.

There were twenty or thirty cats. Some of them were obviously feral, crouching as far back in their cages as possible and hissing at whoever entered the room. Little cards under their cages identified them as strays and offered such comments as “Not very tame,” “Needs lots of patience” or, simply, “Aggressive.” But most of them seemed tame and affectionate. Several of them mewed to get my attention and rubbed their sides against the bars of their cages when I looked at them. Still, the enthusiastic ones were almost all very young. I looked at a few older cats and had nearly settled on a fat tabby named Mango when a volunteer attendant, a teenaged boy with a baseball cap worn backward, pointed out that there were a few more cages just around the corner. In one of these I saw a small, ink-black cat with long fur and green eyes. Her name was Smoky and the card under her cage said, “Ten years old. Owner passed away. Spayed, declawed. Very gentle pet.” I felt particularly sorry for her. Knowing that she had once been owned and loved by someone, that she had experienced a comfortable life as someone’s companion but was now suddenly alone, made her seem more pitiful than the cats that had known life only on the street. Also I couldn’t help finding an unfortunate parallel between Smoky’s change of status and mine as a failed prodigy. The attendant, who was changing the water bowls in the cages,
paused to stand next to me for a minute and glanced at the date written at the bottom of Smoky’s card. “Today’s her last day,” he said matter-of-factly. I asked what he meant, and he explained that spring was kitten season, and that because of the overwhelming number of cats coming into the pound, each one had only three days to be adopted before being put down. I checked Mango’s card and saw that he still had a day to go, so I adopted Smoky.