Summer Lies (22 page)

The concert began at five. When they parked at four thirty in front of the castle in which the concert was taking place in the great hall, most of the parking spots were empty. He suggested they use the time before the concert began to take a walk in the castle gardens. But his father was insistent, so they sat down in the front row of the empty hall and waited.

“It’s the first time Ruegen has organized a Bach festival.”

“People need time to get used to everything. At first they had to get used to Bach’s music too. You know it was Mendelssohn who discovered him and reintroduced him in the nineteenth century?” His father talked about Bach and Mendelssohn, about the evolution of the Suite as an assemblage of dances in the sixteenth century, about the appearance of the name Partita alongside Suite in the seventeenth century, about Bach’s suites and partitas as the works in which he emphasized lightness, about the early drafts of some of the suites in the
Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach
, about the origin of the French Suites, the English Suites, and the Partitas between 1720 and 1730, about the three French Suites in minor keys and the three in major keys, and their various movements. He talked animatedly, enjoying his own knowledge and his son’s attentiveness, and stressed how much he looked forward to the concert.

A young pianist whom neither father nor son had ever heard of played with cold precision, as if the tones were numbers and as if the suites were calculations. His bow to the small audience at the end of his performance was just as cold.

“Would he have played with more heart in front of a larger audience?”

“No, he thinks that’s how Bach is to be played. He thinks the way we like hearing Bach is sentimental. But isn’t it splendid? No interpretation can harm Bach, not even this one. Not even being used as a ringtone—I’m sitting in the tram, I hear a cell phone, and it’s still Bach and it’s still good.” The father was talking warmly. On their way to the hotel he compared Richter’s and Schiff’s and Fellner’s and Gould’s and Jarrett’s interpretations of the French Suites and the son was as impressed by his father’s knowledge as he was alienated by the sheer flow of words that kept pouring on and on—uninterruptedly, obliviously,
impervious to any question or comment. It was like his father was talking to himself.

Over dinner it just went on. The father turned from the interpretation of the French Suites to that of the masses, oratorios, and passions. When the son finally returned from a long visit to the toilet, the flood of words had ceased, but the father’s animation, his joy and warmth, had vanished along with it. The son ordered a second bottle of red wine and was prepared to get a comment from the father about extravagance and gluttony. But the father accepted another glass gladly.

“Where do you get your love for Bach?”

“What a question!”

The son didn’t give up. “There are reasons why one person loves Mozart and another loves Beethoven and the third one loves Brahms. What interests me is why you love Bach.”

Once again the father sat upright, one leg crossed over the other, arms on the chair arms and the hands dangling down, head bent, and the hint of a smile. He was staring into the blue. The son observed the father’s face, the high forehead under a still-full head of gray hair, the deep grooves above the nose and running from the nose to the corners of the mouth, the pronounced cheekbones and flabby cheeks, the thin lips, the tired mouth and strong chin. It was a good face, the son could see that, but he didn’t see what lay behind it, which worries had carved the furrows in the forehead, which ones had made the mouth weary, why the gaze was empty.

“Bach made me …” He shook his head and started again. “Your grandmother was a sparkling, capricious woman, and your grandfather a conscientious bureaucrat, not devoid of …”

Again he stopped. The son had visited the grandmother in a home with his father several times; she sat in a wheelchair, didn’t speak, and from a conversation between father and doctor
he gleaned an impression that she was depressed in her old age. He hadn’t ever consciously known his grandfather. Why couldn’t the father talk about his parents? “Bach reconciles opposites. The light and the dark, the strong and the weak, the past …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it was just that with Bach I learned to play the piano. For two years I was allowed to play nothing but études, and after that the
Little Notebook
was a gift from heaven.”

“You played the piano? Why don’t you play anymore? When did you stop?”

“I wanted to take lessons again when I retired, but it didn’t happen.” He stood up. “Shall we take a walk along the beach after breakfast tomorrow? I think Mama packed me a suitable pair of pants.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder for a moment. “Good night, my boy.”

When he thought back later about the trip with his father, the Saturday was all blue sky and blue sea, sand and cliffs, beach and pine woods, fields and music.

They set off after breakfast, he in jeans and a shirt again with his sneakers over his shoulder; his father in pale linen trousers, a sweater around his hips, and sandals in his hand. When the sand came to an end, they put on their shoes. They made good progress and after several hours they reached the Cape. They didn’t talk. When he asked his father if he’d really like to keep going or would rather turn back, his father only shook his head.

At the Cape they rested, again without talking, called a taxi to take them home, sat silently in it, and looked out at
the landscape. In the hotel they relaxed until it was time to go to the concert in town. The school hall was full, and father and son were united wordlessly in their pleasure at the energy that the players brought to the music. “I’m glad they’re playing the Fourth Brandenburg with flutes, not recorders,” was his father’s only comment.

In the hotel they ate a light, late supper, hoped for good weather the next day, planned an expedition to the chalk cliffs after breakfast, and wished each other a good night.

He took the half-full bottle of wine to his room with him and sat out on the balcony. His shared time with his father had been as wordless as the father’s and daughter’s work together at the end of the movie. But it had felt more like a silent truce than wordless intimacy; his father didn’t want to be pressured again, he wanted to be left in peace, and he had left him in peace. Why did his questions pressure his father? Because he didn’t want to turn his insides out, particularly in front of his son? Because his insides, where the doors and windows had never been opened, were all shriveled and dead, and he didn’t know what his son wanted of him? Because he’d grown up before psychoanalysis and psychotherapy had made revelations a daily occurrence and he had no language to communicate his inner feelings? Because whatever he’d done and whatever happened to him, from his two marriages to his professional obligations before and after 1945, he saw in it such a continuity that it was in fact the same and there was nothing to say about it?

He would talk to his father again tomorrow. Wordless intimacy had been too much to hope for. Nor could he hope for loquacious intimacy. But he wanted to reach him. After his death he wanted to have more of him than a photograph on the desk and memories he could have done without.

He recalled his father’s awkward, impatient attempts to teach him to swim, the boring, joyless walks he took with him and his brother after church twice a year on Sunday, the inquisitions about his achievements at school and university, the tortuous political arguments, his father’s anger when he got divorced, the first divorce in the family. He did not find a single cheering event he could remember.

There was nothing between him and his father, nothing. And the nothing made him so sad that his chest felt tight and his eyes were damp. But the tears didn’t come.

Only when they were in sight of the chalk cliffs did his father tell him he’d already been on Ruegen before. The first time on his honeymoon with his first wife, the second time on his honeymoon with his second. The goal on both honeymoons had been to reach Hiddensee, and the detour to the chalk cliffs both times had been too long. He was happy he was seeing them at last.

At lunch he asked, “Which motets are they singing this afternoon?”

The son got up and fetched the program: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee” (Isaiah 41:10); “the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities” (Romans 8:26); “Jesu My Joy,” “Sing Unto the Lord a New Song.”

“Do you know the texts?”

“The texts of the motets? Do you?”

“Yes.”

“All the motets? And the cantatas?”

“There are hundreds of cantatas and very few motets. I sang
them in choir when I was a student. ‘Fear thou not, for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.’ A fine text for a law student.”

“I know you go to church every Sunday. Out of habit or because you really believe?” He knew he was asking a difficult question. His father had been deeply saddened to realize that his three children rejected church from an early age, but he allowed this to be known only by the troubled expression on his face as he stood up from the breakfast table on Sunday mornings and set off for church without them. He had never spoken to them about religion.

His father leaned back. “Faith is a habit.”

“It becomes that, but it doesn’t begin as a habit. How did you start to become a believer?” That was an even more difficult question. His mother had once mentioned that his father, who had grown up without religion, had experienced a conversion as a student. But how the conversion had occurred was something she didn’t say, and his father had also never even spoken about it as a fact.

He leaned even further back and his hands gripped the ends of the chair arms. “I … I always hoped …” He looked into the blue. Then he slowly shook his head. “You have to experience it yourself. If you don’t have it yourself …”

“Talk to me. Mother once mentioned that you underwent a conversion when you were a student. It must have been the most important thing that ever happened to you—how can you not tell your own children about it? Don’t you want us to know you? And know what’s important to you, and why? Don’t you notice what a distance there is between us? Do you think it was just their jobs that sent your daughter to San Francisco and your elder son to Geneva? How much longer do you want
to wait before you talk to me?” He was getting more and more agitated. “Don’t you realize that children want more from their father than measured behavior and silent distance and the occasional argument about politics that’s forgotten by morning? You’re eighty-two and one day you’ll be dead, and the only thing I’ll have of you is the desk I’ve liked since I was a child and which my brother and sister have always said I could have. And one day I’ll catch myself sitting exactly the way you’re sitting now, because I’ll want as little to do with the person sitting opposite me as you want with me now.” He wished he could just get up and leave.

A scene from his childhood flashed into his mind. He must have been ten when he brought home a little black cat that the brother of a playmate was supposed to drown in the river along with the rest of the litter. He looked after the cat, taught it to keep itself clean, fed it, played with it, and loved it; his father, who didn’t like the animal, tolerated it. But when the family were having supper one evening and the cat jumped onto the grand piano, his father stood up and swiped it away with an urgent gesture, as if banishing dust. He felt as if his father had wiped him away too, and was so upset and undone that he jumped up, seized the cat, and left the apartment. But where could he go? After three hours out in the cold, he came back home, his father opened the door to him silently, and having to face him was as bad as being wiped away by him. After a few weeks the cat gave him asthma and was given away.

His father looked at him. “I think you know me. It wasn’t like being the young Martin Luther and lightning striking the tree right next to him. You mustn’t think I’ve been holding back something dramatic from you.” Then he looked at his watch. “I should have a little rest. When do we have to leave?”

He knew he shared his father’s love for Bach, but had only ever been interested in secular music. His Bach was the Bach of the Goldberg Variations, the Suites and Partitas, the Musical Offering, and the concertos. As a child he had gone with his parents to the St. Matthew Passion and the Christmas Oratorio and had been bored, which had led him to the belief that Bach’s religious music was not for him. If they hadn’t fit into the program for his trip with his father, he would never have thought of listening to the motets.

But when he was sitting in the church listening to the music, it took hold of him. He didn’t understand the texts, and because he didn’t want to distract himself from the music by reading the words, he didn’t follow along in the program, either. He wanted to savor the sweetness of the music. Sweetness was something he had never associated with Bach, nor in his view should it be. But what he was experiencing was sweetness, sometimes painful, sometimes soulful, profoundly at peace in the chorales. He remembered his father’s answer to his question about why he loved Bach.

During the interval they stepped outside the church and watched the bustle of a summer Sunday afternoon. Tourists wound their way across the square or sat at tables outside cafés and restaurants, children ran around the fountain, smells of frying sausages and a general babble of voices filled the air. The world inside the church and the world outside it couldn’t have been more of a contrast. But this didn’t irritate him. He made his peace with it too.

Again they didn’t talk, not during the interval, and not on the
drive back to the hotel. Over dinner his father became expansive, and lectured about Bach’s motets, their role in weddings and funerals, their performance originally with an orchestra, but since the nineteenth century unaccompanied, and their place in the repertoire of the Thomas Church choir. After dinner his father suggested a walk along the beach, and they went out into the dusk and returned in full darkness.