The Soloist (21 page)

“Old-fashioned,” he explained, pointing at the top hats. “Then this part came.” He flipped through the book humming the agitated theme of the second movement, Gnomus, which Moussorgsky composed based on Hartmann’s painting of a misshapen dwarf. “This one,” Kyung-hee announced, pointing to his choice of a photograph of storm clouds brewing in the sky above Nevada. Then he returned to the picture of Central Park. “This again,” he said, correctly identifying the resumption of the Promenade theme.

The next movement, depicting troubadours performing in front of an old castle, has a mournful, Oriental-sounding theme carried mostly by the winds, particularly the oboes. Kyung-hee jumped to a photograph of a camel fair in India, saying, “They have to go on a long trip through the sand.

They can make snakes come out of baskets!” Without stopping to look up from the book to see my reaction, he went through all fifteen movements in perfect sequence, able to hum their melodies from memory. Later he explained that he could find the corresponding photographs quickly because he had memorized the page numbers.

His choices, though they did not correspond exactly to the images that Moussorgsky based his compositions upon, all fit the mood of each piece beautifully, proving that he was responding on an emotional level to the music. Perhaps most exciting was that he was able to relate those musical emotions to visual images; the difference between truly great musicians and skillful musical technicians, I believe, is that the musician is able to bring more than just the sense of hearing to his interpretations. When he plays or listens to music, he sees it, feels it, tastes it, and is able to season his performance with memories and fantasies of his own that may have nothing to do with strictly aural harmony.

“Kyung-hee,” I asked at the end of our lesson, “have you ever gone to a concert? In a concert hall?”

He shook his head. A few minutes later, as he was maneuvering his rented cello into its threadbare cloth case, his mother returned from shopping in Koreatown. I asked her if she and her family would like to come into the city on Saturday night and be my guests at a performance by the Philharmonic. I reminded her of the international success of groups like the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, and said that it would be good for Kyung-hee to hear this type of music performed live. She seemed taken aback by my offer and delivered a long speech in Korean, at the end of which she nudged Kyung-hee and gestured in my direction with her
chin. This was her usual signal for him to translate something into English. He didn’t, however; instead he simply said, “My mom’s embarrassed.”

“Why?”

“You’re the teacher!” he said, looking up at me and blinking. “We have to invite you to things. So she invited you over for dinner.”

“Tell her that’s very nice, and I’d love to do that soon, but what about the concert on Saturday? Can you come?”

“No, no!” Mrs. Kim answered directly, smiling nervously and waving her hand. “Mr. Sunhai too polite!”

When I assured her that my offer was genuine, that I wanted Kyung-hee to hear fine performances for his art’s sake, and that I could get the tickets free (which wasn’t true, but I thought it might help), she reminded me that the whole family worked at the cleaners on weekend nights. She hesitated, wringing her chapped hands and glancing at her son, then said, “But if you say important for Kyung-hee, maybe Kyung-hee go. I talk to Mr. Kim.”

I was dumbfounded; it would have been absolutely unthinkable for my mother to let someone take me, at the age of nine, in a car to another city for dinner and a concert. Von Kempen seemed to have sensed this from the beginning, because he never made the mistake of inviting me anywhere without first inviting my mother. A less perceptive conductor in New York had once asked me to join him for lunch before our first rehearsal. I think he was nervous about working with such a young soloist and felt he should spend some time getting to know me before we worked together. I didn’t need any special treatment; in fact, I preferred not having to socialize with conductors and orchestra musicians because I almost always sensed that they felt uncomfortable about having
to treat a child as a colleague. Instead of speaking to us directly about it, this conductor had left a message for me at the hotel desk, which my mother received and read as we checked in. The note did not mention my mother at all. She called the conductor as soon as we got to our room and informed him coldly that
we
already had plans for lunch, and that in the future he might do
us
the favor of allowing more than an hour’s notice for appointments.

“But how Kyung-hee get here?” Mrs. Kim asked. “Mr. Kim and me working Saturday.”

Not wanting to let the opportunity pass, I offered to pick Kyung-hee up in the afternoon, take him to dinner and bring him back home right after the concert. Mrs. Kim went through the motions of being embarrassed again, protesting that I was being too polite and that the teacher shouldn’t do favors for a student, but I persisted and eventually she said that if her husband approved, it would be all right.

Ms. Doppelt’s next witness, Professor Grant Stribling, taught a course in comparative religions at Los Angeles Community College, looked close to retirement age and suffered badly from allergies. The gist of his testimony was that Zen is an iconoclastic sect of Buddhism that encourages impulsive, spontaneous behavior. Between bouts of sneezing (“It’s the dust, not the smog,” he kept saying, “same as in classrooms!”) he told us that Zen was a nihilistic philosophy which teaches that everything is an illusion, and that all value judgments like good or bad, right or wrong, are meaningless. He said that Zen has no concept of sin, that the only reality is what is in your mind. If you do something bad and you recognize it as bad, you create bad “karma,” which I understood to mean painful memories that burden you. If you do something without any idea of doing wrong, no bad karma is created; you don’t have any regrets, in other words.

“So,” Ms. Doppelt asked, letting just a bit too much excitement show through in her voice, “according to Zen, you could do anything and get away with it as long as you
think it’s OK? Even murder is not wrong if it’s done with a clear mind?”

The professor rubbed at one of his eyes that was already raw from being irritated. “Right,” he answered. “If you look at the samurais, your warrior class in old Japan, they had the ideal of being able to go into battle, or even to kill themselves, without any doubts or fear. Even in recent times, the kamikaze pilots during the Second World War used Zen philosophy to calm their minds before their suicide missions.”

Ms. Doppelt nodded and, looking at us, said, “That leads to my last question, Professor. That puzzle about killing the Buddha in the road—are you familiar with it?”

“I’ve heard of it, yes.”

“Can you tell us what it means?”

Mr. Stribling sneezed loudly again. “I’m sorry.… The koan about killing the Buddha, yes. Zen people like to insist that you can’t explain koans in words, but I think that the general idea is that even if the Buddha himself appeared in front of you, in theory you ought to be able to cut him down without any second thoughts. It would be the extreme test of your calm state of mind. Like regular Buddhism, Zen puts a lot of emphasis on detachment.”

It sounded to me like a kind of anesthesia. Why would anyone want to achieve such detachment? If you don’t want to have any feelings or attachments to anything, it would seem that the easiest way to attain your goal would be to commit suicide. The impression I got from the professor was that Zen was an excruciatingly slow and difficult sort of psychological suicide. Why keep the body alive?

Yet I wondered, If Philip Weber wanted so badly to
achieve this state of detached bliss, who’s to say that he hadn’t? Maybe he really did attain his “enlightenment.” If, as the professor said, Zen has no moral code, I couldn’t see how killing the Zen master went against any of the principles of that religion. Presumably Ms. Doppelt called this witness to show us how vigorously amoral and bizarre the Zen cult was in order to support her claim that Philip Weber had been driven insane that day. It was a two-edged sword, however, because it also raised a question: What if Weber was just an exceptionally good Zen student? What if his psychological problems were, from the Zen church’s point of view, actually valuable assets that helped push him toward a glorious enlightenment? Would he have been considered a great master if he had lived in Japan two hundred years ago?

During the cross-examination we learned that Professor Stribling’s academic degree came from a seminary rather than a university, and that his degree was in theology rather than comparative religion. What he knew about Asian religions came from independent reading and research, and qualified him only to teach an introductory course called Religions of the World. Only one week of that course, it turned out, was devoted to all of Buddhism, including Zen. Mr. Graham stopped well short of calling the witness a fraud, but he did carry out an exercise that undermined the professor’s testimony. Mr. Graham asked the professor a series of questions about Christianity, allowing the professor to give only yes or no answers.

Was it true that in some churches a service is performed where believers are invited to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their God? Yes. Doesn’t the Bible tell us that God punished Lot’s wife—for merely looking backward—by killing
her and turning her into a pillar of salt? Yes. “Didn’t Christ once say, Professor, that He had come into the world to set a man against his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law?”

The professor sneezed and shook his head angrily. “You’re taking those quotations out of context, sir.”

Mr. Graham freely admitted that he had, and apologized if he seemed to have insulted Christianity or the witness. “But, Professor, with all due respect, I must say that quite a bit of your testimony suffers from the same defect. For example, you made the point earlier that the kamikaze pilots used Zen to prepare themselves for battle. Your point, I assume, was intended to show us what can happen when people practice Zen. Need I remind you that Christianity was abused in precisely the same way during the Crusades and the Inquisition? What does that tell us about Christianity?”

Mr. Graham pointed out that Professor Stribling was a specialist not in the field of comparative religions but rather in Christian theology. I noticed that Mr. Graham’s charisma only grew stronger as the trial wore on; his age, his slightly unkempt appearance, his paunch and gracious Southern manner all gave him a fine burnish, a warmth that made you trust him. Although she was obviously bright and well-spoken, Ms. Doppelt seemed too fresh and rough around the edges. Even when she made a good point, I found myself wondering if she wasn’t manipulating us. She let her technique show; I could hear in her voice when she was setting a trap, which distracted me from the testimony itself.

During one of the breaks that day I followed Maria-Teresa out to the common room, where she was allowed to smoke. My strategy of reading during the breaks had gradually ceased
to discourage Gary. He would sit down next to me, look over my shoulder at the pages and ask, “So how’s the book going?” I complained to Maria-Teresa that I couldn’t understand why he had latched onto me, considering that I’d never encouraged him, and had tried to seem lukewarm whenever he talked to me. Maria-Teresa said it was because I was the only person in there polite enough to pay any attention to him at all.

“Listen, I have to be around guys like that all day at work, so I learned not to bother being nice anymore. You always think they’ve gotta know, right? They’ve gotta know that they’re boring, that they ought to work out a little, that they ought to brush their teeth more often. Let me tell you, and I know what I’m talking about, they don’t have a clue, but that doesn’t stop ’em from glomming all over you. Hell, no! Try being a woman sometime; it’s a hundred times worse.”

She puffed away, trying to get as much out of the cigarette as she could, then asked me where I had gone to high school. There it was, another question from her distant planet. I never saw the inside of a high school; I’d been tutored privately from the third grade on. Maria-Teresa was amazed by this and kept saying that it must have been an incredible way to grow up, that I must have felt like the Prince of the World when I was a kid.

Every child, it seems to me, thinks it would be more fun to be somebody else. I used to think it would be fun—the way most kids think it would be fun to live forever in a hotel—to go to a school and have lots of friends my own age whom I would know for years and years. My tutor in Germany, Andrew Halpern, was the closest thing I had to a playmate for several years, and he was a restless American in his twenties making some money while he pursued his main
interests, which were dating European women, discussing the merits of existentialism with his expatriate friends in the café below his apartment in Kassel, and trying to spend as little time with me as possible.