A Book of Memories (91 page)

In his struggle with matter, the artist touched secret layers of his own being he didn't know existed; the revelation might be shameful, he'd much rather hide it from curious eyes; but if art was not an act of initiation into the most searing secrets, it wasn't worth a damn; he often yelled, almost going out of his mind, that he and his pupil were marking time in the antechamber of art, implying there was a certain place, like a great hall, they should eventually enter.

He couldn't say he liked this man, though he was attracted to him, yet for all his attraction he remained suspicious, at the same time reproaching himself for being suspicious; nevertheless he felt he saw something, knew something about him no one else did: he saw that the man was corrupt to the core, a liar, a cynic, an infinitely bitter man; yet he believed the man wished him well, and he not only did not dare reject this kindness but tried very hard to measure up to it, be worthy of it, while all along his ears kept telling him that all that talk about the antechamber and the halls of art was false, it had to be, if only because the man himself never gained admission, never got anywhere; he was full of longing, yes, and in this pathetic longing there was enough bitterness, and the credibility of sadness and despair, to make the things he said not complete nonsense, although Melchior also felt that this longing was not for music, not even for a career, the man had given up on that long ago, he didn't really know what he longed for, maybe just wanted to sound profound, mysterious, satanic, disturbing, and at the same time benevolent, decent, wise, and understanding, and in the end Melchior became the object of this longing, of this painful and pitiful struggle.

After each lesson he fled his teacher's house in complete defeat; during the four years he was his student, the demon of art, metaphorically speaking, inhabited his soul; he grew gaunt, he looked wasted, which didn't seem unusual, because in those years everybody was hungry and looked harried and worn-out.

He became humble and stubborn, he practiced compulsively and learned many things on his own for which he was grateful to his teacher, everything that was good had to originate with him; he was developing nicely, realizing his artistic potential, as people like to say, and his teacher acknowledged this, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes with furious emotional outbursts, which Melchior dreaded more than the annihilating criticism; now and then the teacher allowed him to perform in public, indeed organized some of the appearances himself, introduced Melchior to musical notables, had him perform before select audiences, and the result each time was overwhelming success; they simply loved him, they ate him up, he brought tears to their eyes, even though in those postwar years people were very reluctant to give way to tears.

But even at such moments, in the midst of the warmest ovation, his teacher let him know that while all this was well and good, we shall put it behind us, not dwell on it or let ourselves be carried away; and when they were left alone he proceeded to dissect the performance so mercilessly that Melchior was forced to concede that he couldn't make it, didn't know what heights he was supposed to reach but was sure he couldn't reach them, and his teacher was almost always right, about almost everything, and the only reason he was suspicious and ungrateful, the reason he could never be worthy of all that goodness, was that deep down he felt he didn't have the least bit of talent.

When alone with these feelings he was racked by anxiety attacks; for days he would huddle in a corner, stay home from school, and keep thinking that one day his complete lack of talent would be discovered; he thought he couldn't hide it anymore, everyone would see that he had no talent at all, and then his teacher would mercilessly give him the boot.

Sometimes he found himself hoping to see that day, though his mother would be very disappointed.

Maybe the reason he wasn't completely destroyed by all this, why he kept hoping his teacher might still be wrong, was that in the final analysis one is incapable of total self-annihilation, either mental or physical, not even after having taken cyanide, for even then it's the poison, or the rope, or the water, or the bullet that does the job; oh, how he would have loved to jump into the river, how he longed for the current swirling around the exposed pillars of that collapsed bridge! but then, even doing away with oneself came down to making an everyday decision: to pick the means to do the job for you; and mental suicide always left a little back door open: the sky is still blue, life can go on, and what is that if not hope?

The reason he thought of cyanide was that a few years later
—he was already at the university—this poor man got hold of a dose large enough to kill a horse; it was summertime, no performances at the theater, no one looked for him in the evenings, a very hot summer it was, and then the neighbors were alarmed by this frightful, sickening smell coming from his apartment.

In any case, it was in such circumstances that he began to notice the girl in the window across the street; they were preparing for a very important competition; it was spring, he recalled, all the windows in the teacher's apartment were open; the stakes were high, the top three finalists would be automatically admitted to the conservatory; in his teacher's judgment the competition would be stiff, and he mentioned some of his colleagues and their capable students; but the difference between a talented and an untalented person, he went on, was that the talented one is inspired by his rivals, and since Melchior's rivals were very strong, his chances were very good.

He placed the music stand in front of the window so that each time he looked up, which he would make seem accidental, he could see the girl.

His teacher sat in a commodious armchair in the dark depths of the room, whence he issued his occasional instructions.

Interestingly enough, the tension thus created did not distract him from his work; it meant added pressure, of course, but the odd feeling that he was doing a balancing act with his violin on the borderline of two glances issuing from two very different, contrasting, and possibly even antagonistic individuals, that he was moving between a delicious secret and a dark betrayal, increased his concentration to an intensity he had never experienced before.

He wasn't trying to impress the girl or his teacher or himself; he was there, at once inside all three of them and outside the entire event; in a word, he was playing the violin.

Whenever it was raining or cold and the window had to be closed, the girl resorted to crazy stunts; with outstretched arms she'd lean so far out the window it really looked as if she might fall, or she would close the window and act very annoyed, pressing her nose, her mouth, and her tongue to the glass, making idiotic faces and mimicking him sawing away on his violin, or she would breathe on the glass and write letters in the mist, spelling out "I love you," would thumb her nose at him, tear at her blouse over her breast, implying that if she couldn't listen to that sweet music she'd go mad, stick out her tongue and blow tiny kisses from her palm; but if they ran into each other at school, they both pretended that none of that had meant anything, that none of that had ever even happened.

His teacher responded to the sudden qualitative improvement with pleasant self-satisfaction; he didn't praise him, but from the dim depths of the room he was radiating love, guiding his playing with angry, enthusiastic, and emotional interjections; and Melchior was overjoyed that after four years of hopeless suffering he had finally managed to deceive this seemingly wise and all-knowing man.

The game went on for about two weeks before the teacher got wise to them, though true to his cruel self he did not let on even then, slyly letting their story unfold and expand so that at the right moment he could pounce on them and wipe them away like so much snot; Melchior sensed this cruel anticipation, knew a catastrophe was imminent; but there was also the girl, who had no inkling of the impending disaster, who went on with her antics, swinging out the window, and he couldn't help watching and even laughing out loud at times, while keeping up his guard; he wanted both to protect himself and to annoy his teacher, and that
—looking back now he was quite sure—made him even more seductive in the teacher's eye.

And in the meantime, he had to listen to long parables, colorfully told, spiced with exciting illustrations, all of them dripping with kindness, about the virtues of an ascetic way of life, about the psychological engine of aesthetics, the drawbacks of hedonism, the brakes, gears, and pistons of the human soul, and about those practical safety valves through which excess steam may and should be released from the body's power plant; the tales were filled with metaphors, figures, and verbal flourishes, yet when it became clear that these hints and allusions had no effect, Melchior had to pick himself up and with his music stand move deep into the room while his teacher took his place by the window.

The story might have ended there, because Melchior raised no objections: on the contrary, deep down he approved, he understood his teacher or thought he did, and considered the simple, physical regulation of human weaknesses to be the best, most helpful solution to the problem; he was innocent to the point of idiocy, an imbecile couldn't have been more innocent; not only did he have not the slightest notion of how babies were born, but he was also ignorant of the difference between the sexes, or more correctly, everything he was preoccupied with then moved in such a different dimension that even the things he did know he didn't truly grasp.

But the girl wouldn't give up so easily; she'd wait for him downstairs, and at that point all the clowning and mimicking came to an end, and a terrific struggle began among the three of them, a struggle in which Melchior could take part only with his senses
—no, not even that, with his instincts—not realizing that it was a struggle, and that he was struggling for life.

And he could scarcely have had any idea of the agonies this man had to endure, the terrible struggle he had to wage with himself, yet he did know, for he was blackmailing the man all along.

He knew because on several occasions he overheard vague and embarrassed whispers about his teacher being a returnee from one of the concentration camps, Sachsenhausen perhaps, he didn't remember exactly, and about how in the camp his teacher wore not a yellow, not even a red, but a pink triangle, which meant he had to be queer; but as often happens, another story was also making the rounds, according to which he had to wear the pink triangle because of his liberal views
—that charge was serious enough to have the accuser land in jail after the war—but what seemed to contradict this theory was the rumor that the teacher was in fact an outspoken member of the Nazi Party and had been active in the de-Judaization of German music; whatever the real story was, for Melchior it was all a bunch of empty words, they stuck in his mind, but he didn't connect them to anything, at most he concluded that for the grownups the war apparently hadn't been enough, they kept on squabbling even now, or that society had always viewed the artist as the carrier of some contagion, but sensible people paid no heed.

Nevertheless, his mother should have known better.

Melchior talked uninterruptedly until dawn, and this was the only moment when the cool, steady stream of his narrative was stemmed by an impassable emotional barrier.

His chest rose, and his gaze, still holding my eyes, turned inward and seemed to say, No, no more, the rest he couldn't let go.

His eyes filled with tears, he choked up, he seemed about to break into sobs or into loud accusations.

But laughing through his tears he yelled that I shouldn't take this seriously, nothing should be taken seriously.

Then, more quietly, almost finding his way back to his earlier tones, he said that every whore and every faggot had a mother and a soul-stirring story.

It was all sentimental junk, he said.

And several days later it was this story I continued telling Thea as we drove on that dark highway toward the city.

It's true, I did make a few unavoidable alterations: the mental state of a child prodigy was meant as a kind of introduction, a framework, and also, I tried to speak in impersonal tones, as if talking about a person neither of us knew.

But the impersonal tone and the attempted objective approach conjured up an abstract element in the story, one that allows us to weave the strands of personal causal relations into a larger and more general chronology which we tend to label
—because of its impersonality and immutability—a historical process or the force of destiny, or even divine predestination; by insisting on this unalterable and impersonal viewpoint, which of course is an emotional rather than intellectual device, I tried to cover up my shameless betrayal of Melchior; I was retelling his story as if it were but a trivial episode in a larger history that, with its relentless flow of repetitions, kept extinguishing and giving birth to itself.

It was as if I had a bird's-eye view of a city; in it I could see an attractive young woman and a violin; I could see the cracks and empty spaces that history had cut out for itself and, using its own materials, would ultimately have to patch up and fill in; I could see a pretty little theater and inside the theater an orchestra pit and musicians in the pit, but at the same time I could also see a far-off pit, a trench somewhere near Stalingrad; in one pit I could see the vacant seat of the first violinist, and in the other pit a soldier wrapped in rags just about to freeze to death.

And looking down like this, from the bird's-eye view of impassive history, I would consider it a matter of little consequence that a few musicians disappeared from the orchestra pit and others vanished from the family bed and some people were hauled off to concentration camps and others to the front; details were beside the point, for history or fate or Providence ordered all this with one curt command: fill the empty space, music must be made in the orchestra pit, and in the trenches there must be shooting, and other pits and trenches were there for burials; someone has to fill in for the first violinist, no seat must remain empty, and the replacement must play the same music, wear the same historical disguise of white tie and tails, to make the changeable look permanent; and it must be made to appear negligible, barely worth mentioning, that French POWs from the neighboring camp have been ordered to occupy the chairs left vacant in the orchestra pit, and if, as a reward for ensuring unbreakable continuity, the guards should take these prisoners over to the Golden Horn Inn, this should not happen as if by accident, as if out of compassionate human concern dictated by fate or Providence or history, but for the sole reason that for a brief hour the new first violinist could slip into the innkeeper's second-floor apartment
—the innkeeper himself was breathing his last on the snowy steppes of Stalingrad—and believe that it was for his sake that history skipped a beat.