Appassionata (21 page)

A hand goes up in the small audience, and a woman speaks. “Do you think this degree of … violence is necessary for art?” she asks.

“Art must take us closer to the edge,” the artist answers, in an explanatory tone. “The edge of where we are. Because the edge is
where
we are. That is what I as an artist believe.” He looks wan suddenly, less certain. “That is my credo, you see,” he declares again, as if he wanted to persuade his interlocutor, or perhaps himself. “We must dare to go beyond where we are. Otherwise, we have nowhere to go.”

The woman nods, without looking convinced. The artist clicks his PowerPoint to more images. A muscular arm, incised with Xs and Os, as in a child’s game; a woman’s face, with a flap of skin peeled open, perhaps in plastic surgery. A painting of a man’s upright body, surrounded by large penises.

“The death of the human,” the artist repeats, pointing to the images with a sort of resignation. “That is the precipice for us. The new abyss.”

Anzor turns to Isabel, and points his thumb toward the door. She nods in agreement, and they get up, with the artist pausing briefly as they exit.

“I’m sorry, there’s only so much I can take,” Anzor brings out, once the door is shut behind them. He’s walking fast through the gallery, without looking at her.

“Yes,” she says, in a mollifying tone. “That wasn’t … great, I agree.”

“I suppose he thinks this is
transgression
,” Anzor picks up, as they walk out on the street, his voice rigid with scorn. “This … triviality. This … pretend danger. He should come to my country, if he wants to experience danger. This stuff … it’s safe, ugly and safe!” He has gripped Isabel’s wrist, and she edges it out of his grasp, careful not to do it irritably.

“It’s probably
subsidized
,” Anzor continues, infusing the phrase with all his contempt. “I know the Dutch, they subsidize this kind of thing with lots of money. The more … vile the better. They can’t stand how safe their lives are, so they have this … subsidized transgression. So they can thumb their noses at … anything that matters and not pay for it. They get paid for it instead. He probably got some nice vacations in Dubrovnik out of that … rubbish. They love coming to Dubrovnik, the Dutch.”

“Yes,” Isabel repeats, in a conciliatory tone. “It’s quite appalling, I agree.”

But Anzor won’t be interrupted. “You have this puny idea of freedom,” he continues, in full furious flow. “You think that if you mock things that matter, then you’re
free.
You think … urinating all over a few religious symbols is freedom. Or having more … bloody options. You think you can give human beings what they need by giving them
options
. Or letting them play these games. These ‘I can do whatever I bloody want to’ games. And you expect the rest of the world won’t find this … ridiculous. You expect people not to choke!”

“I agree,” she says, baffled yet again by the escalation of Anzor’s anger. “Please notice that I agree.”

The expression he turns on her makes her recoil. “You agree, but it doesn’t matter to you,” he says, coldly. “You don’t see … the implications.”

“What are the implications?” she asks. “This was just … an
art exhibition. What possible consequences can it have? I mean, what on earth would you like to do about it?”

“I would like to blow it up,” Anzor says. His voice is strangled. “The exhibition and the whole rotten show. Then start over again.” Well, she has had similar thoughts, in strange streets, in the becalmed cities. Smash it all up and start from the beginning, from the ground up, from the smithy of the soul.

“And what would you do then,” she asks, and this time she wants to know the answer. “What would you put in its place?”

“Some natural human dignity,” he answers instantly, and hurls on, his passion hardly spent. “Some respect for … what matters. Because you can’t have anything … beautiful, or good, without respect. No matter what these … types think. They’re not serious. They have no … honor. If anyone
remembers
”—his voice is acrid with bitterness—“what that is.”

“Please,” she says. “At whom are you so furious?” They’re walking down a narrow street, lined with enchanting houses, their windows sparkling in the clear northern sun.

He makes an effort to calm himself. “Not you,” he says. “Not at you.”

“Shall we go into a café?” she suggests, and they do. They sit silently for a while, and then he takes her hands in his. She sees that he is looking for a way to backtrack from his fury.

“It’s probably what’s happening in my country,” he finally brings out, although it clearly costs him an effort to say this. “That’s why I can’t stand … these stupid games.”

He was talking on his mobile phone when she woke up; and she now asks, carefully, whether there was something in the conversation to upset him. He hesitates, then says tonelessly that a friend, who was badly wounded a few days ago, is dead. Aslan, he adds, as if not naming him were indecent. They had known each other since elementary school.

A shadow has entered the Stockholm café, and she senses it,
like a brush of darkness, an ominous dark wing. She thinks, this is more reality than I’ve bargained for. The violence of the world has penetrated the quiet interior, with its marble-topped tables and gleaming mirrors, and she wants to fend it off, protest that it has nothing to do with her. She feels small; vulnerable. Too small even to try to understand. She’s here to give a concert, that is her mission.

“How terrible,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“He will not go unavenged,” Anzor states, and the word, too, jars, like a small explosion. “This is what the Russians don’t understand. Because they’re fighting without faith. Just for oil. For power. We’re fighting for our survival. Our freedom. Yes,” he says, as if to counter her objections. “Freedom. As that …
artist
would never understand it. As none of … them”—he makes an inclusive gesture toward the street and passersby—“would understand. Because you can only understand what it means to be free if you have been … a slave.”

His voice is choked with fury, and she imagines it expand till it covers the café they are in and the city; till it covers everything. It seems that limitless. She wants to flee to her practice room; to her music, in which violence and rage are already transmuted into beauty.

“It must be awful to lose a friend … this way,” she finally says, in a muted voice.

“Yes,” he cuts in, icily. “It is. But it is not only about one friend. It is about much more.”

“I mean, I understand how this … must affect you.” She sees a flicker of annoyance on his face, and rephrases again: “I mean, how much is at stake. I think … I understand.”

He says, “Good.” The word is menacing, like a well-aimed bullet.

“It’s just your rage …” she starts again, and then stops. She’s floundering.

“So being angry is not nice, is that the idea?” Anzor is looking at her evenly, and his voice is compacted to solid ice. “I know this idea. About how you should be nice to everybody. No matter what they’ve done to you.” She feels hurt, as she knows she’s meant to, but he doesn’t let up. He fixes his eyes on her, to make sure she’s following. “I know this idea and I find it … contemptible. I know your nice men. They don’t care. They don’t give a damn. That’s why they can pretend to be
fair
to everybody, even if somebody wants to kill them. Because actually nobody has done anything to them. That’s why they can be so
nice
.” Anzor stops briefly, and then continues, as if carried on the wind of his argument. “People whom I … love have been hurt. They have been killed. It would be … ignoble of me not to avenge them. Not to hate those who have killed them. If you lose your rage, you lose … your self-respect. And then you begin to live … like this.” He indicates the street again, with a comprehensive gesture. “Dishonorably. For nothing at all.”

But that evening, they fall into hungry closeness again, with a ferocity that is almost impersonal. What do Anzor’s words matter, the overlay of stiff clumsy assertions … In the abandon of the lovemaking, it doesn’t matter what he stands for, or who she is. She is body, mind, a conduit for experience, part of the human chain on the Charles Bridge. As she is a conduit for the music in the concert hall, music they all exchange like a substance which binds them together … Her consciousness, wide-open and impersonal, enters Anzor’s, and senses his shame at being here, in this safe place, senses the call of his comrades, the high emotion of battle, fear and trembling transmogrifying among the warm bodies and burning eyes till they rise to a self-forgetful exaltation … till death does not matter. Yes, she can sense it with all its dread, its awe. Anzor is talking, from some great dreamy distance, he is telling her about Kazakhstan where
he went as a child, the empty majestic desert and a tent where he stayed with the muzhiks. The horses, Anzor is saying, the horses were so wild and beautiful, that was what I wanted to tell you about, and the muzhiks had such grace as they rode without saddles, and Isabel isn’t sure whether she has seen the horses herself, galloping across a reddish plane, they seem to arise out of her mind, dreamlike and wild, with a rider raising his long whip and squeezing the animal’s haunches in a shared fierce dance. Perhaps she knows this from Glinka and Mussorgsky, this wild ballet, the steppe, wild and spacious. Then he’d stride into the tent and get dead drunk, Anzor is saying about the muzhik, it was so stifling and smelly in that tent, and the whip was always with him, and sometimes he’d pick it up and turn it on his wife and children. “How horrible,” she says, beginning to come out of her trance, but Anzor is saying, and yet the horsemen were beautiful, I rode with them once and I thought I was made of that earth and the wind … Bellum, bello, bel canto.

Then Anzor says, “Isabel!” emphatically, and she feels instantly brought back, summoned by his call, the pressure of his demand on her.

He rolls over on his back, and says, “Ah, I need those spaces; the mountains, the stones, the stone towers. I cannot breathe free when my country does not breathe free.”

She says, coming into ordinary consciousness now, “But isn’t that a sort of … fantasy?” and he rears up above her as if he could hit her. She quivers slightly, and says defensively, “I mean, you could live here too. You would be fine here.”

“What would you have me do,” he asks, sarcastically. “Take some academic job, like your friends? Anyway, what job could I get, except some low-paid junk? You think I am a candidate for anything but … crumbs?” He half turns away from her, and she puts a soothing hand on his chest.

“I would rather have a real purpose,” he says, in a deeper
voice. “That is more than your friends have, with their great Midwestern jobs and their great
theories
. At least, I can have my fate.”

“Those are very big words,” she says, partly out of loyalty to Sheila and Larry.

“They are not just words,” Anzor says stubbornly. “They are how I live.”

She sighs and thinks, if this were only in the music. She thinks of Chopin, frail and ill in Paris, conjuring up out of his instrument the grandeur of his country’s revolution as if it held the essence of human beauty. His tears for the revolution’s failure. His music, in which everything is contained at once: fierceness and tenderness, violence and love, triumph and the most wistful sadness. She thinks, if this were in the past, I would be waving good-bye to my freedom-fighter sweetheart, I would raise flags to the passing soldiers, would sew mourning shrouds. Too late for that, surely. Too late. But there is the living man beside her, his chest rising and falling, filled with his Cause, his fate. Is there something she does not recognize when it’s near; which she understands only when it’s shaped into music, or into the past?

After a while, the lovely duet which ends in blending takes them over again. But some tension has entered into their dealings with each other, making her body more taut, attuning her to the darker undertones in his intensities. She tries to remember, memorize them, so she can decode them later. For now, she wants to yield to this, to be lost to herself so she can be wholly herself, as though she were infused by some vital essence, molding her body into unerring motions, lines of longing, lines of beauty. Wholly herself, if only for those moments.

*

In Between

She straps herself in for the short flight with a sense of relief. In no-place, there is nothing she must conclude or decide. She can weave in and out of her thoughts; her conversation with Wolfe.

August 10, 1982

Lesson with I.M. She was playing parts of the
Kreisleriana
. For some reason, she was having a hard time with that piece. Suddenly, she stopped, without even coming to the end of the section. Her head was lowered so that at first I did not understand what was going on. Then I saw. She was crying. She was wincing from her effort to stop, but she couldn’t. There was a steady trickle of tears. What is wrong? I asked. Has anything happened? I was worried that something I said had bruised her. For all the strength of her playing, she is a delicate creature. But that was not the case. When she calmed down, she told me that the
Kreisleriana
brought back her brother. She had to gasp and wince before being able to say the next thing. He was a younger brother who died in tragic circumstances. The
Kreisleriana
had been one of his favorite pieces. They’d listened to it together shortly before he died.

I looked at her more closely than ever before. I did not want so much to calm her down, as to assure her that what she was feeling could be borne. That it even had a kind of beauty. I said, “Death has always been the great source.” She turned her face up with her sudden, transparent curiosity. “A source of what?” she asked. “Of music,” I said. “Of art.” She looked at me more calmly. “I’d rather have my brother back,” she said. “You cannot,” I said. “But you have your grief. It is a very human feeling.” She seemed to be absorbing what I said with her wide eyes. Then she sighed as if she had been relieved of something and, with a great simplicity, said, “Thank you.” I asked her if she wanted to continue the lesson, and she said yes. She insisted on going back to the
Kreisleriana
, and this time, played it with such limpid simplicity that there was no need for me to make any comment.