Appassionata (11 page)

Isabel tries to follow the curlicues of suggestion in what Katrina is saying. Is she warning her off her own territory, her own lover? Somehow, the tone is wrong for that. She’s beginning to feel light-headed from all the placeless chatter. She’s been moving through thin air. But a woman standing nearby picks up on Katrina’s little speech.

“Well, we
need
ideas,” she says. “Or rather, we need an Idea, which is something quite different.”

“An idea for what? Another conference?” Katrina asks rather sharply.

“For Europe, if you must know,” the woman answers. “Of Europe.” She speaks with an enchanting accent, syncopated and soft. She’s from Budapest.

Katrina’s eyebrows go up above her large blue eyes, but the woman continues earnestly. “I mean, we need an idea for Europe that would include us. I mean, us the marginals. I mean, really include. An idea of Europe which would appreciate us. Take on board what we have to offer.”

“Ah, now you’re really asking too much,” Katrina drawls. “Appreciate? We don’t even appreciate ourselves.”

“But without us they’re lost,” the woman says in her soft voice. “We’re the last ones to believe in Europe.”

“Well, yes, I’m sure they would be thrilled if they realized that,” Katrina lilts merrily. “Ah, Anzorichka. Here you are. We’re just talking about what’s good for Europe. Got any ideas to contribute? I mean, from your very own marginal vantage point?”

“Honestly, Katrina, you’re impossible,” Anzor says drily, and shoots her a look in which Isabel thinks she discerns real hostility. Katrina cocks her head slightly, and narrows her eyes, as if to diagnose what on earth might have annoyed him.

Isabel feels Anzor’s touch on her back. “Come,” he says, “I want to show you something. You don’t get to see it very often.”

He steers her away, and she feels, at the touch of his palm at her back, something like a drop into a different register, thicker, heavier, closer to herself. The room he leads her into is oblong and light, with another wall of windows giving out on to the urban nightscape, and a curved desk of impressive length at its center. “The President’s office,” Anzor announces. “The heart of the heart.” He observes her for her reaction; but she’s surprised more by the lack of pomp in this new nerve center than at finding herself there. No
gloire
or grandeur here, she notes. The world seems to be getting lighter, and more transparent. Anzor puts his hand on the small of her back again, to turn her round. “See?” he says. He’s pointing at a large mural, painted in bright, cheerful colors above the doorway. “There you have Katrina’s
Europe. There it is.” The mural is painted in a style not so much satirical as saucy; but the images belong to the great pan-European iconography. At the top, sunny Apollo surrounded by whimsical, leaping horses; below, sexy Europa insouciantly riding the bull which is about to rape her; on the left, Adam and Eve exiting from Paradise with slightly abashed expressions of adolescents who had stayed out too long at a disco club.

“It is so light-hearted—” she says.

“Exactly,” he cuts in, as if she’s made his point for him. “Nobody takes this idea of Europe seriously. Not even here.” He indicates the President’s desk. “This could be a gentlemen’s club. They all think it’s a sort of … enjoyable game.”

“Is that good or bad?” she asks.

He smiles at her question, then looks at her appraisingly, as if to see what can be said to her, or how much she can understand. “It is fine if you can afford it,” he says, and despite his effort at casualness, she thinks she hears a catch of resentment in his voice. “If you are very safe. In my country, we can’t afford to play … games. When you’re really getting raped … Then you take power seriously. You don’t make light-hearted jokes about it.”

His voice has filled with feeling, and she turns toward him, to see what is thickening it. But the door to the President’s room opens, and the compact man in the herringbone suit enters. He pauses when he realizes he’s not alone, and takes in the situation with an expressionless look. She sees now that he has a thick, tough face. “Excuse me,” he says, addressing himself to Anzor without any change in his expression, “but you should know that only very few people are permitted to come into this room.”

Anzor speaks in a light, civil tone. “I thought that as a participant in the conference …” he begins, and stops, as if the sentence surely didn’t need to be completed. The other man gives
him no help. She senses Anzor’s breath come faster. “Anyway, the door was open,” he picks up, still affecting a sociable carelessness. “After all, we’re all colleagues here.”

“As I remember, you are not a full participant in the conference,” the broad man states curtly. “Only an observer.” There’s no suggestion of courtesy in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Anzor says. “It was a misunderstanding. Please excuse us.”

She hears the agitation of his breathing as he guides her out of the room, and out on to a quiet balcony, overlooking another part of the city. He doesn’t look at her for a while. “I’m sorry,” he finally says. “That man was very rude.”

She senses how much effort it costs him to say this, and begins to say something to dispel the unpleasantness of the small incident. But he puts his hand on hers, interrupting her. “Ah, Isabel,” he says, pronouncing her name softly. “Never mind that … man. It is not why I invited you this evening. I wanted to … see you again.” He is looking at her with unqualified seriousness, with sheer assertion. She feels the return of gravity. It is the heaviness of desire, of being held by his desire; his certainty. Grounded, as if an electric current had been run into the earth. Something has passed between them that is more than the sum of the words they have exchanged. She has glimpsed the quickness of his moods, the urgency of his feelings. She doesn’t know where they come from, but she senses that something matters to him, matters hard. And she can sense him sensing her … Seeking for her, for what is within. As he puts his hands on her shoulders and draws her to him, she looks into his face and, with a kind of relief, as if coming to rest, nods her assent.

In retrospect, this will be in parentheses, an intermezzo. But she doesn’t know that yet. For now, it is all-encompassing, without
limits or outlines. She trusts the music of it, what else is she to trust? She thinks she’s well attuned to it, the tempo of Anzor’s gestures as he moves his hands over her body (adagio, sostenuto), as he draws her to himself; the way their limbs and lips travel over each other (accelerando), until the borders between their two bodies vanish, and they each both possess themselves and each other in common. She is porous, that is her weakness and her advantage, and now her consciousness has become a perfect open space, into which she takes his dark eyes, as her skin takes in his long fingers, his lean graceful body. Somehow, his gaze has entered her, and now she has no choice but to keep taking it in, absorbing it more deeply. She gives herself over to the tenor of his movements, a fierceness of need which releases her till she is perfectly present and perfectly lost to herself. Another consciousness awakens, wide and bright.

Anzor’s eyes, in the half-dark, look into hers very steadily. “You’re so beautiful,” he says softly, running his finger over her cheek. “This was so beautiful … A beautiful death, isn’t that what the poets called it?”

“Not exactly,” she says, taken aback. “A small death, surely. Something like that.”

“No, not small,” he says. He lies on his back, and seems to peer at something in the half-dark. “It’s large. Larger than this room. Larger than what is outside. You know, when I was a child,” he continues, “I felt this big beauty everywhere. In the mountains. In the streams. In the songs that people sang there. They were wild songs. Raw. They seemed always to come from over the mountain, from far away. Even if people sang them right there. Sometimes I do not know how I can be without it.”

She is perplexed by the turn his thoughts have taken. “But don’t you find it everywhere?” she asks. “I mean … beauty?”

“Not here,” he answers calmly. “Not in these crowded cities. You know, this sensation of beauty … it needs space. Great
space. Where something can breathe. Maybe a kind of spirit. Where you can feel it, moving through the spaces.”

She thinks of the spaciousness of Chopin, of Mozart. The breathing of beauty between the sounds, or through them. The motion of something so much vaster than the notes themselves. Is that what Anzor means, what he is trying to speak of in the awkward medium of words …

“You miss your country very much, don’t you?” she says.

He doesn’t answer directly, but she can feel his chest rising and falling. “Did you see how that man treated me?” he blurts out.

She knows what he’s alluding to. “I suppose he’s some kind of functionary,” she says, trying to be soothing. “You know, one of those who follow the rules.”

“He is an … apparatchik. A bureaucratic
despot
,” Anzor says. He pronounces the last word contemptuously, with a Russian inflection. “One of your … chilly men.” His voice has darkened and tightened. “He invites me to his bloody conference, because he has to. But he thinks I’m … primitive. A savage.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he comes back quickly, sharply. “You’ve never been treated … like an inferior.”

She’s hurt, even though it’s too early to be hurt.

“You’re probably right,” she says, and her voice comes out muffled and small.

He turns to her in a passion of apology. “I’m sorry,” he says, putting his hand softly on her breast. “Sometimes … these things come out. But men like him … You do not see it, but I know how they see me. How they
think
of me.”

She would like to go back to the silence, the wordless language of gaze and moving limbs through which everything can seemingly be said. But Anzor continues, his voice now quiet and even, as if he were not so much talking to her, as looking at
something within himself, in his mind.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like a traitor. I should be over
there
. I should not have left. I’m a traitor there … and a barbarian here.”

“But you are working for your country,” she says. “You have told me so.”

“Working,” he says acerbically. “Sure. I do this job. I go around with a begging bowl. I’m lucky if someone throws me a bone. But it has no risk. They are the ones who are taking risks. Who are willing to face … the real danger. To sacrifice themselves. I should be with them.” His voice breaks a little on the last sentence.

She is as disoriented as if the bed had been turning on its axis, and for a moment, very lonely. It is the stark simplicity of Anzor’s words that she cannot grasp. What sort of border has she crossed without noticing … She shivers a little.

“It must be so awful,” she finally says. “To be at war.”

His breathing comes harder. “You see, under the Soviets, nobody could even imagine freedom. Nobody could resist. But this … resistance has restored our dignity. You should see how strong people are, strong and alive. They’re willing to die, and it gives them a kind of … beauty. Yes, beauty.”

“Do you have any relatives?”

“They are all relatives,” he says almost brusquely. “You may not understand this … but we are all together in this. That’s what gives us strength. When I think of them, I feel such … longing.”

His voice has wandered into a far distance, and now she tries to follow its trajectory, to imagine what he is seeing as he speaks, what awful extremity. She thinks, I was not meant for this … And yet, a sort of tenderness for Anzor breaks upon her. Why should she doubt the reality of his words. People are dying in his austere country, fighting and dying; and in his voice, she can
hear the fierceness of it, and a kind of passion.

“Perhaps I should not speak to you about these things,” Anzor says, as if sensing her ambivalence. “But it is what I think about. What is on my mind. If we are going to be … like this … I want you to know me.”

She shivers again, and he pulls the blanket up over her solicitously. Images of the ruined city float through her mind, slow phalanxes of refugees, women with scarves on their heads and bundles on their backs, and fatalistic faces. She turns toward him, and peers into his face through the deepening dark; then embraces him closely, as if to fathom the heft and weight of this world through his body. “I want to know you too,” she says, quietly. He gazes at her wordlessly; and they subside into a longer silence.

In Between

July 18, 1982

“My personal feeling is that music conveys a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves. And it is because of this message that music appeals to men of all races and cultures.”—Arnold Schoenberg, “Criteria for the Evaluation of Music,” 1946.

How I envy him, with his twelve-tone system, his form into which to pour his Belief. Or his hope. Even at that improbable date. He had something to reduce, something to distil, something to think against. To feel against. It is too late for me. I have studied systems, the twelve-tone and the Marxist, and I know where they end. I have also studied death. I come after. After That. I must begin with that condensed pre-sound I dreamt. With the shifting of bones and inaudible underworld murmurs. I was the child who ate death for breakfast. Only that ground is true, all the rest is ornament. Whatever sounds of pity and praise I find must rise up, however improbably, out of that.

July 20, 1982

A lesson with the cellist today. Jane Robbins. Admit it, old man, these young women pose a challenge to you. They vex your critical criteria. This one is particularly provoking. She burst into the studio almost rudely, with a wide white-toothed smile. Her breasts were bouncing freely underneath her blouse. There is something aggravating about the way she picks up her bow, as if it were a baseball bat. When I pointed this out, she informed me that she is “a very physical person,” and has played not only baseball but basketball and girls’ hockey in high school. She would have gone on without any self-consciousness, had I not interrupted. As far as I can tell, she has no inhibitions. She is like a big happy child who hasn’t yet learned it may not be allowed to do everything it wants. She hurtled through the first movement of the Dvorák as if on a roller coaster, from one burst of excitement to another. Of course, it is an old warhorse and there was undeniable energy in her playing. But nothing else. No restraint, no tension, no wistfulness. Just this unrestrained … enthusiasm. I suppose she is another kind of After. She plays as if milking an ever-compliant cow. It’s very strange.