Appassionata (18 page)

“Shall we have a listen, then?” he asks. He stretches his arms and crosses them behind his neck; the concentration of their task has been intense. They follow the completed version in silence. When they come to a singing bel canto passage, he gives her a small, approving nod. The startling, pure sounds. Is it still Beethoven, she wonders. Is it still she who is playing? But it is. It is. She sighs, in a release of tension, and lets the music enter her more impartially. From the distance created by the recording and the high-tech console, she is stirred as if it were anybody playing. She’s just an instrument. She thinks, but this is beautiful. Or maybe she is moved by this strange process, the decomposition of meaning into subparticles of mere sound, and then its unaccountable, its utterly convincing return. The gluing together of what has been taken apart, so that the aural molecules fill up with sap and flow, so that they add up to this Sonata,
this verisimilitude of the human soul. Which is the illusion, which truth …? But that’s how it is with meaning, she thinks. Or that’s how it is these days. She thinks of Anzor, and her dis-allowable, archaic emotions, her atavistic yearnings. Too late for that, too late. And yet, they return, the same desires, as if they had not been decoded into hundreds of particles and stories. She takes in Beethoven’s sudden shifts of feeling, and she thinks yes, it returns, as if encoded in something, maybe in some microscopic DNA sequences, activated by switch genes, like the console with its on/off buttons. Now you see it, now you don’t … It’s the ultimate trick, and she’s moved by it, the unraveling of meaning into sonic neutrons and electrons, and then their conversion back into music. Music, which itself is nothing, and which is everything, in which we recognize ourselves as if reading some deep-encrypted information from an old manual of longings, for love, truth, beauty.

The cubicle is blank with silence when the movement is finished. “Ready for the next one?” the technician asks, and she girds herself for the second movement.

Anzor arrives in Budapest just in time to join her for dinner with her friends. Sheila and Larry are spending a year at an international institute of scholarship in Budapest, released briefly from their own university in Minnesota, whereto they feel themselves to have been unjustly expelled from their native Manhattan. Isabel has asked if she can bring Anzor, and as she changes from her concert dress to slacks and a loose shirt, she feels oddly jittery about the outing, and then embarrassed about her nervousness. It’s not as if this is a performance, she admonishes herself; not as if Anzor is going to be on show. And yet, she cannot deny a certain sense of risk at this breakout from their privacy. Who exactly is Anzor, outside their erotic cocoon? How will he be seen when he is exposed to the normalizing judgment of her friends,
the appraisal which comes with being seen from any distance, outside of interlocked eyes and entangled flesh? She will know what the judgment is, even if it is not spoken.

So it is with some stiffness that she tells Anzor about her friends on the way to their apartment; about their longstanding habit of having Sunday brunch as a threesome (she suppresses the thought that it was a foursome, not too long ago), and afterward, a leisurely walk through Central Park. Sheila and Larry practically wept from nostalgia when they returned to New York the first time, after being exiled to bleak and unnatural Minnesota. Anzor looks at her quite sharply at the word “exiled,” and she’s instantly aware of its falseness. Then why did they go? he asks, reasonably enough. With a dutiful loyalty to her friends, she tries to explain that academic jobs are hard to come by, especially for a couple in disparate fields. Larry is in cultural history; Sheila in psychology. It’s a second marriage for them both, so they didn’t want to be apart too much. “I see,” Anzor says tersely, and without much interest; and Isabel says no more, conscious that she is describing the rarefied difficulties of the privileged.

“It’s so great to see you!” Sheila exclaims in her effusive, wide-open voice, as she lets them in. She embraces Isabel heartily and examines Anzor with frank curiosity. “Welcome,” she says enthusiastically. “Anzor, from Chechnya, right? I’m very happy you could come.”

Isabel feels Anzor tense up behind her, though whether it’s at Sheila’s greeting, or the penetrating cheeriness of her voice, or the grand apartment they are now entering, she doesn’t know. Larry greets them heartily in turn, and shows them around their Budapest quarters. He’s wearing a striped shirt with several top buttons open, and his compact body exudes a sort of adrenaline-enhanced confidence. “Can you believe this?” he asks, pointing to a Rembrandt drawing. “An original. Made it through the war and everything after.” He is clearly in his element in this dark-wooded
apartment, with its authentic art and heavy furniture, and its suggestions of a complex history. Isabel notes that Anzor is observing him closely, from under hooded eyes; she senses some determination on his part not to be charmed, or to charm his hosts too willingly; too easily.

“Drinks, anyone?” Larry asks, and he tells them about the institute and how great it is to have books brought to you from practically any library in the world, by well-dressed assistants.

“He really approves of the local fashion sense,” Sheila says, deadpanning cheerfully. “You should hear him carry on about those assistants.”

“The fashion sense is impeccable,” Larry agrees, “but the impressive thing is the quality of service. Such politeness, and they find anything I ask for, no matter how obscure. Music scores too. I do a lot of listening these days,” he informs Isabel. “I’m doing the German Romantics, you know, and their influence on modernism, and there are all these lieder. Nonsense, most of them, of course. But informative nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” Isabel repeats. “Do you mean the music?”

“Oh no no,” he assures her affably. “I mean those slushy sentimental lyrics. Swooning maidens and dying swains. Trust the Germans. Always overwrought.”

“But there is the music,” Isabel says. As it happens, she agrees about the poetry. She tries to ignore it whenever she listens to the songs, to the modulated subtleties of Schubert and Schumann.

“Yeah, but as a matter of fact, the lyrics give you clues to the music,” Larry says energetically. “I mean, to the tropes from which these things are constructed. With which the Romantics worked. Lots of swooning in the music, too.”

“Tropes?” Anzor asks sharply. She suspects he knows what the word means.

“Conventions,” Larry genially explains. “Units of phrasing, which have certain associations and trigger certain emotions.”

“You make it sound like some behaviorist experiment, testing reactions in mice,” Isabel protests.

“Well, what do you think, that we are moved by the Holy Spirit when we listen to Schubert?” Larry asks briskly.

“We are moved by something …” Isabel begins, and as usual, when she tries to speak on such topics, doesn’t know how to end. “Aren’t we?”

“Ah, you’ve always had these mystical tendencies,” Larry says dismissively. “Or should I say, mystifying.”

“Surely, you don’t need to be mystical in order to believe that a Schubert piece is driven by something … more than the sum of its parts,” Isabel retorts. “That there is some … unifying principle which makes us feel a sense of its wholeness.” She has meant it to come out lightly, but a note of defensiveness has stolen into her voice. It’s odd how much this matters to her, how much is at stake.

“Ah, those are very bad words!” Sheila throws in. “Don’t let him get started on unifying, or wholeness, or principle. He thinks the idea of unifying principles has been responsible for our decline. I mean, the decline of Western civilization.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for
that
,” Isabel responds, this time with a more successful insouciance.

“Honestly, you play these things,” Larry persists, impatiently. “You know that these pieces are made. Constructed. Composed. That the impression of unity is an illusion. The whole notion of a work of art is an illusion.”

“Then analyze the illusion!” she bursts out. “I mean, why we’re entranced by it, why we feel it captures something … essential. How does Schubert achieve it. Or Beethoven.”

“Ah, there you go, with your idea of the Artist. I thought we’ve done away with it a long time ago … The Great Artist. The Genius. The grand unified agent. I mean, Schubert was a bloody syphilitic drunk and Chopin was a bloodied consumptive.
Beethoven was barking mad, as far as I can tell.”

“But, somehow, they created beauty.”

“Oh come on.”

“Then what would you call it, exactly?”

“You just don’t get it, do you,” Larry says curtly.

“Leave her alone,” Sheila orders her husband. “She’s a performer, not a theoretician. It would probably screw up her playing if she thought like you.”

“OK, Bel, you can retain your innocence if you want. Your theoretical virginity.” He has used her younger nickname to soften his sarcasm, summoning her back to their long friendship.

“Given the rites of initiation, maybe I will,” Isabel says, and wonders if he is right; if she wants to retain a certain innocence, or even ignorance. Then she thinks of her recording session, the coagulation of meaning from its separate units, like the exfoliation of a plant; the rising of bread. She doesn’t think Larry’s skepticism would survive the test of such a session; of what the computer graphs can and cannot tell you.

But Larry now turns the full blast of his keen-eyed, thick-browed attention on Anzor. “This must be boring for you,” he says unapologetically. “You must have more urgent things on your mind.”

“You mean politics,” Anzor says, carelessly. “The savage politics of my country.” His manner has become positively languid, and he’s contemplating his whisky glass pensively.

“Well, we can’t help but wonder …” Larry says, uncharacteristically failing to finish his sentence. “I mean, we know terrible things are going on in your country, but we don’t know much.”

“That’s all you need to know,” Anzor says politely. “Terrible things are going on.” Isabel tenses, and wishes she could say something apologetic, or conciliatory; or move the conversation away from this mined area altogether.

“Was it very hard before?” Sheila cuts into the brief silence,
in her eager voice. “I mean, growing up over there. I mean, your country has always been … sort of repressed, right?”

To Isabel’s relief, Anzor looks up from his whisky glass with something like a friendly expression. “Believe it or not, one could have a happy childhood in Chechnya,” he says, this time making Sheila a partner to his irony. “Of course, I was lucky to be born after the return.”

“The return?” Sheila asks, and Anzor explains, about the great deportation, and how the entire Chechen population—“All of them?” Larry asks with some skepticism, as she did the first time she heard the story—were herded into refugee camps. And how, after eleven years, there was a change of policy in the Politburo, and the Chechens, all one and a half million of them, were reunited with Chechnya. He has his tropes too, Isabel thinks; but Anzor would never put it that way. These refrains throb with too much meaning for him, too much reality.

“Extraordinary,” Larry says, and again falls uncharacteristically silent. His authority, in the face of such disclosures, recedes. Persecutions, totalitarianisms, the Gulag: History, the real thing.

“But you said your childhood was …” Sheila interjects, almost pleadingly.

“I had the sheer good luck to grow up after,” Anzor says. “A kind of golden time, as long as you didn’t realize what kind of world you were living in. It only got unpleasant later.”

“What do you mean?” Sheila’s voice has turned less bright.

“I mean it’s not pleasant when your friend is beaten up by official thugs or taken off to a labor camp from which he may never return.” Anzor’s tone is very even and without a trace of pleasantry. “Or when he has stopped talking to you because he is afraid you’ll inform on him.”

“I guess they were really awful, the Soviets,” Larry says, in a tone which suggests that he’s making a concession.

With a sudden roughness, Anzor gets up and goes over to a
side cabinet, where he unceremoniously pours a large amount of whisky into his glass. Larry and Sheila follow this not entirely proper initiative in riveted silence. Anzor’s presence in the room is suddenly very large.

“As a matter of fact,” Anzor says, as he sits back down, “the gulag was a very good school for learning about the unified agent.” He stops, as if not deigning to explain further.

“What do you mean?” Larry asks, after considering this briefly. He doesn’t like to be in the interrogative position.

“I mean,” Anzor says, with a sudden passion, “that when you’re being beaten or tortured, you don’t doubt there’s someone doing it to you. An actual person. Or bastard. A real unified agent. You don’t have to worry if what’s happening to you is a whole experience. No need for analysis. None.” His voice has stiffened, this time unmistakably with anger. Larry raises his eyebrows, in a sign that he is not entirely convinced; but says nothing.

“Did you have personal … experience of … any of this?” Sheila asks.

“No,” Anzor answers, with an abruptness just short of rude. A brief silence falls upon them again.

“Why don’t you tell them about your friend?” Isabel intervenes. She wants to defuse the growing tension; to bring him back on board.

Anzor considers her as if he’d forgotten that she was there. “I don’t think anyone is interested,” he says finally, making a sort of concession in turn. He’s only trying to be properly sociable.

“Oh but we are!” Sheila protests and Anzor tells them about his friend, who grew up in a religious Muslim family in a village near his grandparents, and ended up in the Gulag for attending secret prayers. Anzor had visited him in his village over several summers; then one summer the friend was no longer there. The people in the village, once they got over their secretiveness, told Anzor that he had been badly beaten because he wouldn’t give
away names of his co-conspirators. His fellow Chechens in the camp tried to take care of him; Chechen solidarity held strong in the camps. But the beatings got worse and worse. “That was probably how he died.” Anzor’s voice catches and he stops.