Appassionata (27 page)

In the afternoon, she tries to take a walk, toward the sea. The sunset is reputed to be beautiful. But Anzor has infiltrated even the sunset, his rage is like an ultrasound she hears within the quiet. The jagged high-rises, the laden coastline, the gigantic ships: why does it not explode from sheer compression, from the collision of so many lives, the crossing of so many purposes … Legitimate and illegitimate. She feels the city hurtling, vibrating, pressing against its borders, and she thinks, why doesn’t it erupt, and what bitter lava would it release if it did.

In the evenings, she watches the news. Addictively, compulsively. She used to watch the news in order to find out more or less what was going on, out of some vague obligation to know. Isn’t she, after all, one of the educated, the responsible, the well-intentioned classes? Now she watches for some other reason, more obscure, more twisted and twisting. The way we live now, she thinks. That’s what she wants to understand. When she can’t bear to see the repetition of the same item on CNN, she
switches to BBC World or France 2. There, she hears with slight variations what she has already heard; but this doesn’t slake her thirst for more. More what? More rage, more outrage, that’s what, she thinks; a kind of unholy excitement. Images of famine, child soldiers with machetes, babies dying of AIDS, and bombs going off. Always the bombs going off, and the splintered, cut, maimed, mutilated bodies. The politicians with their sound bites and the journalists with their predictable biting questions: the rage she feels at each stage of this spectacle is violent, virulent, viscous. There seems to be more and more of it each evening, it is unstoppable. The world is contaminated, wrong, despoiled by madness. She wants someone to declare its entire bankruptcy. There is no resting place. In what, in whom can she rest, where could she find the frame to contain her, the enclosure for her own life … Her Own Life: she finds the idea risible, worthy of Mrs. Brownley. She has seen the surface of the world rent and cracked, and she knows she doesn’t count. How could she ever have thought she did? The personal is over. The earth has been seamed through with violence and it will swallow them all, it cannot bear that much humanity. Her fury rises tidally, explosively. What borders will it burst? Only her own, only her own.

The anchor is interviewing an African strongman about a possible link between his militia—the footage shows a helter-skelter band of young men in fatigues, waving an array of guns triumphantly in the air—and a massacre in a small village.

“We have no connection with that unfortunate incident and we resent the insinuations directed at us so eagerly by the Western media,” the strongman says in a confident, Americanized accent. Where did he do his studies? Indiana? Milwaukee? He is broad and rather handsome and impeccably dressed, in a well-cut jacket and tie. He fills the TV screen impressively. “Our government does not condone acts of random violence.”

“And yet, your soldiers were recently reported to have committed
other massacres in which many hundreds of civilians died. We have had reports of mass rapes,” the anchor asserts, his voice registering a quaver of disapproval.

“Those events were widely misreported in the Western press,” the strongman states calmly. “Our troops were engaged in acts of self-defense. I repeat, we resent the suggestions linking us to terrorist acts.”

“And yet,” the anchor persists, cutting in quickly, “we have had strong indications from reliable sources that yesterday’s incident was committed by people linked to your militia.” Clearly, he knows something, and clearly, he has no evidence with which to confront his interlocutor.

“Those allegations are entirely unproven,” the strongman responds readily.

“Witnesses have come forth—” the anchor tries again.

“They are our enemies. They are entirely unreliable.”

“Sorry, we have to stop there,” the anchor says. “Thank you for being with us.” Isabel thinks she sees the hint of a self-satisfied smile on the strongman’s face. He’s done well.

She turns off the television, and thinks no, this is impossible, you cannot say “Sorry” in a polite voice to a person known to have committed massacres. You cannot say “Thank you for being with us” to someone proclaiming murderous lies in your face. You cannot do this without some basic order being overturned. She feels nausea threatening again as she brushes her teeth, as she looks at her own pale face in the mirror. The interviewer should have raised his voice on her behalf. On everyone’s behalf. He should have shouted with rage, banged his fist on the table. He should have called the strongman a bastard and a criminal, to his face, so she could see it crumple. She is being childish, she knows. She’s misunderstanding something again: the rules. The rules of civilized discourse, for which she should be grateful. And yet, she thinks, you cannot remain civil to mass
murderers on TV without something breaking down. Without uprightness yielding, integrity dissolving into hollowness. Without all honor being lost. Yes, honor, she repeats in her mind, throwing the word bitterly back at Anzor. In bed, she tosses and turns, unable to find a resolution, a resting place.

One evening, there is a report from Chechnya. Columns of refugees, carrying their bundles with mulish patience. Open trucks carrying loads of young soldiers. Then she sees him, on one of the trucks, or thinks she sees him: the man in the headdress. It’s a nanosecond of footage, but she’s pretty sure she has recognized him, and instantly recognized his calm pose as that of a leader. Behind him, in camouflage fatigues, a man who might or might not be Anzor. She is almost sure it’s him, though the man’s face, in the brief image passing across the screen is gaunt and unshaven. She feels a brief pang of sympathy, then disgust at her own reflex. She must hate, must keep up her resolve to hate. As it is right to hate. As it is indecent not to. That much Anzor would understand.

The reporter refers to the men in the convoy as resistance fighters, but a Russian ambassador invited to comment on the situation, makes strong objection to the term. The men are terrorists, he says, pure and simple, and their tactics are getting more vicious by the day. “We have to defeat them entirely,” he says, his vowels broad and sing-song, like Katrina’s. “Or I’m afraid we will see more atrocities like the recent explosion in Moscow, in which hundreds of innocent people died.” He sounds and looks the confident politician, not a leader, not a chieftain. This man is used to holding power rather than battling to the death for it, he is used to leather chairs and good clothing rather than rattling trucks and caves in the mountains. She doesn’t know whom she should loathe more, him or the sheikh, which one has the true power or if it is power itself she
should hate. She has let some of Anzor’s vision seep into her mind, she knows what the Russians have done; but now it is Anzor who is holding them all hostage to his humiliations, he and his calm fanatic leader. Hostage to their violent whims, to their real and supposed slights. Who has the advantage over whom? Anzor’s honor will not let him stop, she wants to tell the Russian politician. You might as well be prepared for long and bloody carnage. She knows Anzor’s feelings on that score are punctilious.

She feels a vertigo of confusion again, and suddenly knows why: it is that Anzor will now always be with her. It is he who now holds center stage, not she, not her antique, precise art. It is he who is the coming man, the norm and the point of interest. Why didn’t she understand earlier that she too is part of the grand historical museum? While he’s the manifest present, present incarnate. He is the one who holds the world hostage and in thrall. His hurt honor can explode a thousand bodies, that is how much force it has. She can measure the force of hate, now that she knows what it feels like. She knows what it can do, if it’s accompanied by the right instruments. Accompanied, augmented. The guns, the explosive devices, the bombs: fury squared. Her own instrument, her precious struggles to make it yield beauty … rendered null and void. One thudding sound has canceled them all. Beauty, where is thy sting. She paces up and down her white-carpeted room, as the lights in the apartment buildings come on, bringing into relief squares of windows, in their hundreds and thousands. Lives going on, as if they mattered. In her own space capsule, she knows she has ceased to matter. The worm of time is working its way through her body, her days, her microscopic portion of mortality. And that’s all. And that’s all.

*

And then, she’s an item on the news herself. Not much of one, just a brief bulletin, a flicker of footage, noting the mysterious disappearance of Isabel Merton, a well-known pianist last seen in Barcelona, after the concert made famous for a bomb going off. Murder or kidnapping cannot be excluded, though there’s been speculation about a mental breakdown. Of course, Isabel thinks, they would jump to that conclusion, there is a long history of breakdowns among pianists, a roll call of the oversensitive, or the exhausted, or the disenchanted. Statistically, women pianists don’t come off well, and she wonders what demon lovers were responsible for their despondency. Vladimir Horowitz, on the other hand, came up with the most perfect symptoms. In his distress, he became convinced that his fingers were made of glass, and would shatter if they touched the piano’s keys. Love turning dangerous, perfection bringing him to breaking point. The newsman briskly advises that anyone who has any information as to her whereabouts should notify the police. She wonders briefly if Anzor might watch such a program in his mountainous wilderness. She hopes not. He would understand that her disappearance has something to do with him; that she has been affected. She doesn’t want him to have the satisfaction, she thinks furiously, and suddenly realizes that she hates him with the hatred of still fresh love. Personally, specifically, within all her vast, oceanic, indiscriminate rage. Him, with his intense eyes and delicate hands. With his turn of the torso, like a sculptured Greek boy throwing a javelin in a beautiful elongated line, and his willingness to throw the grenade, undoubtedly with the same gesture. His will indiscriminately to kill.

Who was Anzor, what turns of feeling have led him to the sheikh, to his truck … Then she realizes it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he is, what he feels, what exquisite tremors of love or anger have brought him to where he is. It is the instruments he uses, and the bloody convictions powering
them that matter. The personal is over. It doesn’t matter if Anzor disappears, if any of them disappear; there’ll be others, powered by simple crude Ideas, just as it doesn’t matter whom precisely they kill … The unique person is over. She paces up and down her room, groaning with anger. She wants him here in this white room, so that she can lash out at him, shake him, wreak violence upon him. Well, he’ll probably see to that himself, she thinks, and then feels the inadequacy of anything that she could do to him. It is not violence she wants, no, not to destroy his body. She wants him to take back the power he has come to have over her, the power to skew the world with his injured pride and his horrifying certainties. She wants him to admit, again and again, that he is in the wrong. That he is wrongness itself. Otherwise, the world won’t be righted. But of course it won’t be, the world will never straighten itself out on its axis again.

Her fingers drum unconsciously on the café table. They’re moving through a Chopin Nocturne of their own will. She notices and tries to stop, but the melody, winding and elongating itself into an elegant, elegiac line, is too deeply encoded in her to be halted. It seems to follow some furrow in her mind that has been laid down through countless repetitions, a physical incorporation. It is in her body,
in corpore
. She knows it by heart, that’s what it used to be called, it is in her and cannot be easily extracted. Undoubtedly, the pathways of her brain have been altered by this somehow. The nocturne’s gesture of wistful tenderness has attached itself to her inner cells. How utterly unsuited to everything around her, she thinks harshly, how redolent of parlors and young girls with heads bent over the keyboard, while a suitor lingers nearby admiringly, hopefully. Redolent, yes, that’s the word, even her vocabulary is ridiculous. Parlors and suitors, and later, the concert. The heroic artist. The hushed hall, the reverend audiences, the moist-eyed, moistlipped
fans. Sublimity and transport, a hysteria of transport. You can be ruined by sublimity just as much as by kitsch. How could she have fallen for it, when what’s going on outside is screaming pain and violence? Screams, redolent of blood. That’s the sound the world makes now. No longer armies clashing in the night, no longer rows of soldiers ranged in their terrible beauty, to declare their intention before proceeding to the business of killing. No terrible beauty at all, just the pure hatred, yes, pure, unmodified, made potent by its impotence, moving from rage directly to the act, the bloody act. Between the intention and the act, there falls no shadow. There falls no thought or pity. Beauty, where is thy power?

She nearly brings her fist down on the small table, then recoils out of instinct. The hand apparently still wants to protect itself. She gave herself over to the music in perfect faith, threw herself at beauty as at a sacrificial pyre, in which she could burn and become incandescent. She wanted to be consumed, because not to be consumed was to be only herself. Or to be less than herself. Some ancient instinct of self-sacrifice working its way in her, the need to burn so as to fully live. Isn’t that how sacrifice is supposed to work, to take you up into Something Greater, isn’t that what Anzor wanted as well, why he left her to ride on his thuggish truck, to hold his brutish gun, to throw himself at his sacrificial pyre? Except he is going to die, and take others with him … Carelessly, wantonly, with no thought for the forever mangled bodies or the scrambled limbs. Nothing personal. Nothing personal at all. She feels ill again, gut-sick, soul-sick, in some way she can’t pinpoint or define. Fear, nausea, heartbreak, all intermixed. One could probably make a pharmacy of feelings, if one knew enough. One day, probably we will know enough, we’ll take feeling pills in homeopathic doses. The business of simple humanity cannot go on much longer, it has done too much harm. But now she knows only that she feels ill, that the
homeopathic dose she has taken in through Anzor has been of something perilous. A sickness unto death. Her fingers on the table are moving through a Bach Partita. She cuts the phrase off midway in her mind and calls the waiter over for the bill.