A Greater Music (11 page)

Contrary to Joachim's insistence, M wasn't rich. To Joachim, born into a working-class family, someone like M who managed to get by without full-time employment must surely have some vast source of private wealth. This assumption was cemented by the fact that M frequently attended pricey music recitals and didn't begrudge spending money on books or records, but all the same it wasn't correct. The house she lived in was owned by her mother, so she only had to pay a nominal amount of rent, and while it was true that she wasn't employed full-time she worked in the research room at the language institute three days a week, and occasionally, under a pen name, had essays on twentieth-century music published in magazines. M had something of an inferiority complex
when it came to those who did manual labor. Whenever she experienced financial difficulties, such as during university when her application for a government grant was rejected because of her parents' assets, M envied those around her who could self-fund by taking on some kind of physical work. To me, M's lifestyle actually seemed very frugal, given that she didn't go out unless she had to and never spent money on makeup or jewelry. Rather than a conscious effort to economize, M's attitude toward spending money seemed more like the result of long habit. In fact, considering she relied on my tuition fees—hardly substantial—to cover her living costs, there was really no reason for Joachim to think of her as rich. Just because someone says they would happily spend ten day's income, no, more than that even, to hear the Budapest Strings Chamber Orchestra perform Bartók's string quartets, that doesn't necessarily make them “rich.” You can't simply assume that attending a visiting professor's lectures on linguistics, during which the blackboard gets covered with a prosodic structure chain every bit as incomprehensible as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, an incomprehensibility further compounded by the said professor's relentless chatter, is an extravagant pleasure, the preserve of those social classes for whom money is no object, especially when the person involved has entirely relinquished hotel stays, a car, and expensive clothes, or else was already entirely indifferent to such things. I wandered here and there through the halls of memory, searching for proof that M was neither rich nor a member of the leisure classes. What I really wanted was to bring M into stark relief as a discrete, specific entity, to establish our innocence; I couldn't bring myself to acknowledge that our relationship was purely the product of chance, of one human being's indiscriminate—or worse: prejudiced—use of their free will. I didn't matter what Joachim thought. M wasn't rich—she couldn't be. In rummaging through
old memories, I was trying to rid myself of the suspicion that M had only deigned to notice me because she was rich and unconstrained, the holder of a linguistics degree, easily taken up by whatever was novel, a voracious reader and culture obsessive who'd become unconsciously influenced by Asian mysticism, which had led her to adopt an air of tranquility, stripping her words and gestures of all superfluity, and maintaining a fairly limited social circle, and because of all this taken together was after a partner whose intellectual soil would provide her with continuous stimulation. Joachim could load a single sentence with all of these implications.

“I mean, rich people like M are naturally after a certain type, and you just happened to be it, that's all.”

Plagued with doubts, love slowly lost its vitality, became an enfeebled shadow of its former self. Fear of opening my mouth, fear of certain questions being asked, fear of suspicions becoming reality, fear of revealing too much of myself without this being reciprocated. And so yes, there was a time, only a brief period, when I'd wanted to take a good, objective look at the two of us, something that would only be possible if we took a break from our relationship. After I'd finished rubbing M's feet dry, I sat on the floor, leaned my head against her chest and listened to the beating of her heart. My hair was damp with rain; M held me tightly to her. How long did we remain like this, was it a huge stretch of time or no more than an instant, were we inside that time or watching it sweep past us; held by each other's gaze, had the “memory us” managed to resist this passage of time, the headaches and slight fevers that mark the coming of old age, the slow yet inexorable weathering of our once-distinct outlines, or had we grown further apart, a slow descent into lethargy, watching each other from opposite sides of a window, our fists thudding dull against the glass? My fingers glided over M's breasts, those ribs whose stubborn elegance
called to mind that of a stag, her smooth, feverish stomach and goose-pimpled arms. Tender, tender M. It seems I will endure and you cannot, until, finally, those positions are reversed.

Erich came over, slung an arm around each of our shoulders, and studied our faces in turn. His lip twitched, almost a sneer, but perhaps just a spasm. He seemed about to say something, though I had no idea what. He'd been drinking, that much was certain, but you couldn't really say he was drunk. He wasn't the kind of person who would drink to excess. There'd clearly been something he wanted to say when he came over, but now he'd changed his mind, making do with a nod to M and the announcement that my last homework piece had been “really great.”

“Oh, really? What was it about?” M asked.

“Oh, just, internal feelings . . . something about poetry . . . and music, you know. I thought I knew you from somewhere; d'you mean we've never met? If she keeps at it, there's no reason she couldn't get something published here, just like Yoko Tawada. No? But then,” he turned to me, “I'm not sure why Yoko Tawada feels she has to write in German, so I don't really understand about you, either.”

M placed her hand lightly on Erich's arm and spoke to him as if to a child.

“Language, Erich, that is not mere art, but mind, is far more universal than you think. It transcends racial differences, even those between individuals—” But Erich seemed to think M was joking.

“Even if I accepted your idealism, it still doesn't explain what this ‘wandering in search of a universal mind' is all for. Is it really just something you've plucked out of Schubert's songs?”

No matter what view you hold regarding his sexual inclinations, August von Platen left behind some truly passionate, sorrowful poetry. At the close of his poem “From Tristan and Isolde” he writes:

           
What he desired never came to pass

           
And the hours, spinning out the thread of life,

           
Are only murderers, set to kill him:

           
What he longs for, he will never obtain,

           
What he desired never came to pass.

Schubert set two volumes of von Platen's poems to music; from those two, he clearly thought Platen's poetry very well suited to the theme of winter. In fact, these songs seem to preempt “Winter Journey.” One of them is called “You Do Not Love Me.” It begins like this:

           
My heart is torn to pieces, you do not love me!

Those who accord biography a privileged position in interpreting a writer's work might give the following reading: the poet had a lover, the darling of his heart whom none could ever replace, but this love was unrequited, and so the poet, having been forced to tear himself away from his personal Narcissus, and feeling as though his heart was truly being torn apart, is singing of his grief and loneliness. Certain people would even insist that in the final stanza—“Wherefore do the narcissus flowers bloom? You do not love me!”—the narcissus, being the flower which most reveals the sublime beauty of young masculinity, symbolizes the gender of the poet's lover.

Later on, at a private recital hosted by a passionate Schubert fan, I had the opportunity to hear that song sung exactly as it should be. The Belgian singer stood by a chair, made sure she had the right note with the aid of the piano, then produced a deep, low-pitched tone as the very first syllable of the song. My heart, at first those were the only words I heard. When she articulated the phrase, her hands, which she'd been holding near her waist, moved upward as if pulled by the rising pitch of her voice; this happened repeatedly throughout the performance. I was sitting very near to the singer, so was able to catch all the subtle modulations of her voice. And Erich had begun in exactly the same way, my heart. He must have been remembering the Schubert song that I'd used in my composition.

“My heart, my heart is torn to pieces, you do not love me. You said to me, you do not love me. Although I beg, implore, entreat your love, you do not love me . . .”

Erich stopped there, leaving me with the odd sense of having been insulted, a feeling which chilled me to the core. I couldn't say for sure whether that had been Erich's intention, but that was certainly how it felt. But why? Because he'd been drinking? Because, given I knew full well his opinion of her, his mention of Yoko Tawada as another Asian writer who chose to write in German couldn't help but come across as barbed? He'd cited her example a couple times in class, while discussing an article called “Escaping Asians” with the Chinese students. His opinion was actually quite neutral, and mildly expressed, but it was still clear that he didn't think highly of her writing. “So I don't really understand about you, either,” he'd said. Was that mockery? Did I feel insulted because he'd read aloud, quite calmly and in front of M, the Schubert song I'd used? Erich had always thought of me as weak. He'd never said it in so many words, but his attitude allowed me to make an educated guess. The universality of interior language was a
matter of perfect indifference to him. I was a student learning a language, and given the inferior mental world that is all such a thing, “a student learning a language,” is able to spread open and present to the world, I was weak. In the Schubert song Erich saw an analogy to my relationship with M. But that wasn't what had made me feel insulted. He was entitled to his conjectures, it wasn't rude, and he hadn't insulted me by conceiving of it. I'd written the piece, he'd corrected it, and there was nothing I could do about it. Erich was a passionate, indefatigable teacher of English and German, and of all the teachers I'd known he was both the strictest and the most effective. That was just the way he was.

In the tram on the way home M asked if I was angry at Erich. No, I said, I wasn't. Yes, he'd slighted my composition, but I myself knew there was nothing wrong with it, and I had no desire to keep on criticizing him. M seemed to hesitate for a moment, then said that though Erich could come across as extremely cold, he'd always known how to deal with students fairly and objectively, so I shouldn't judge him too severely. She was clearly trying to defend him, but also, perhaps unconsciously, herself. We both turned to look out of the window for a while. M had pulled her scarf all the way up to her mouth, to protect her from the intense cold of the unheated tram. So when she finally added that, purely out of basic physical curiosity, an act which held absolutely no significance whatsoever, she had slept with Erich, her words were so muffled I could barely make them out.

After the recital was over, the Schubert devotee addressed the gathering.

“It's a well-known fact that Franz Schubert lived a short and unhappy life, even in comparison with the lives of other artists. He remained obscure and impoverished all his life, and the worst
thing of all was that he was short and fat. If you look at the portraits we have of him, rather than simply admitting that he was not a handsome man, one could even go so far as to say that he looks somehow ponderous; ludicrous, almost. His fingers, we are told, were ‘short and thick,' quite unbefitting a pianist; he'd always been severely shortsighted, and he became even more unattractive with age, developing the bloated physique of a gourmand. It goes without saying that he had absolutely no luck with women. We even have it on record that he was admitted to the hospital with venereal disease. The song ‘Winter Journey' was dismissed even when it was first given a name, but Schubert himself maintained that he loved this work more than any other, and that one day the critics would come around to his point of view. He'd always been accustomed to being slighted, and he never did succeed in securing a patron, though perhaps he didn't want to, perhaps the kind of life where one's only legacy is some shabby old clothes and a quilt was the only life that was really right for him. He was an inveterate reader and a sensitive, repressed romanticist. All that comes across in the records is a short, fat, shy myopic, a penniless youth who, when pierced through by the passion of music, didn't know how to express it and trembled like someone trying and failing to suppress laughter, someone whose weak eyesight meant he was constantly flinching. But, as Hölderlin said, we are nothing ourselves, that which we pursue is our all, and Schubert's music, some of which we have just heard, was his all, just as it is for myself and all who love it; a pleasure that speaks with the whole soul, both Genesis and Revelations, the beginning and end of this world.”

The Schubert devotee continued with her address. Eight years ago after discovering Schubert's music, this thing she loved above all else, it was as though the scales had finally fallen from her eyes,
the previously baffling vagaries of the heart resolved into a sublime symphony, and Nijinsky in his costume of yellow silk became the stars, frozen in the heavens above time's vista, and when she first encountered that starlight shining in the sky, she drifted away along with the light, into the fine-grained matter of the distant universe, where nobody would ever find her.

8)
There was still a bit of time left before I had to leave the country, but I decided to break it off with M there and then. While she was at the university doing some research I packed all my things into two bags, and whatever wouldn't fit I threw into the trash. It would be a lie if I said that I hadn't been frightened at the prospect of returning to Korea alone. But I had no choice. In no sense am I proud of how I behaved back then: I hesitated, vacillated, decided to cut myself a bit of slack, tried to predict other people's actions, weighed up the pros and cons of every decision. When I first arrived in Germany I'd taken out a one-year rental contract for a room in a shared house; the place had been gathering dust since I'd moved in with M, but at least it meant I had somewhere of my own to go back to. The next day I decided to go straight to the airport and reserve a seat on a flight to Korea. It felt as though I'd gone full circle, returning to the same situation I'd been in when I first arrived in Germany. I didn't know M, in fact I'd never even met her. I found myself truly sickened by this city, these streets, by every aspect of the outside world, which seemed to be constantly importuning me, and once back home I planned to pick up the thread of my old life, a life spent reading and listening to music.