Isabel feels slightly disconcerted by the advent of Jane in the pages of Wolfe’s
Journal
. Absurd, really … But Jane is a rival for his attention, even retrospectively. A worthy rival, too, with her gift for happiness, her gift for ease. Enviable ease, even if Isabel didn’t entirely admire it … She smiles at the thought of Jane’s first encounter with Wolfe, looks through the plane’s window into the gray nothingness outside, prepares for the descent.
Rotterdam
At the hotel, she opens a window—it’s an old-fashioned window, which can actually be opened—and looks out at the street below. A clean, broad avenue, lined with solid mid-century buildings and sturdy, large-leaved plane trees. Comfort and quietness. From the rooftops, from somewhere, she can hear the gentle, vacuous sound of doves cooing; the pan-European sound. She freshens up for the interview, effects a slight shift inside, to a more sociable posture, a more alert pitch of mind for the simulated conversation awaiting her.
The interviewer is a young woman with wispy zigzags of dark hair framing a full face, and a sleek briefcase, from which she pulls out her notebook and tape recorder. She too has a sleek leather briefcase, Isabel notes. Her name is Mariella, and after the obligatory fussing with her equipment, she assumes a look of efficient competence, and proceeds to ask Isabel the usual run of questions: biography, studies, her preferred composers, the influence of Ernst Wolfe on her style. Rather impressively, Mariella seems to know all about Wolfe. Then she looks at her notes, and bites her lip worriedly before posing the next question: Does Isabel think that romantic, nineteenth-century music which forms such a large part of her repertory is still
relevant to our times? And doesn’t that imply a rather conservative, even a retrograde position? “What I’m asking,” she emphasizes, “is whether it isn’t arrogant to believe that this very particular manifestation of European culture expresses some timeless or universal values?” The young woman, with her porcelain skin and blackly outlined eyes, looks at Isabel intently. The question is apparently of some import to her, and she’s waiting for the answer with heightened and somewhat sceptical interest.
“Why should it be retrograde, if people all over the world want to listen to it?” Isabel retorts rather defensively. “If people everywhere love it? If people play it, as if it were their own?” Mariella’s question strikes her as being itself arrogant in some way, and she adds, “I’m not sure that music, of all things, follows our local ideas of what is progressive and what is not.”
“Right,” the young woman says, writing busily. The tape has come to the end of side one, and she doesn’t bother to change it over.
Isabel lets her annoyance pass. “Perhaps we love this music because it speaks to us of desires which we all have,” she says, more simply. “And which don’t seem to change that much over time. Desires don’t follow political lines, after all.”
“Oh no?” Mariella intercedes sharply.
“We still recognize them, don’t we,” Isabel says. “The things that Chopin or Schumann speak of. Even if we no longer speak about them in the same way. We still seem to
want
to experience what these composers bring us. The shape of the emotions. The passions, even. This … beautiful vocabulary of the soul. I mean, where else do we find it? That is why we listen to this supposedly retrograde music. Because it speaks of what we are, any time, any place. Something essential about us. Or maybe outside us, too.”
“Is that on the record?” Mariella asks oddly. Perhaps Isabel has spoken too seriously, or at least too nakedly. She has let some private perception puncture the buffer zone of media speech.
“Yes, if you like,” Isabel says, and Mariella flips the tape over. She consults her notes again, and looks up with a quizzical, an almost whimsical expression.
“Do you think music is fiction or nonfiction?” she asks, and then stops, as if the brevity of the question were part of the joke. Isabel gives a little surprised laugh.
“That’s an interesting question,” she says, and then stops. She has no idea how she’ll answer it. “The problem is,” she begins, “that music doesn’t refer to anything. Except itself. So it doesn’t tell you anything. It doesn’t explain anything and it is … illumination.” The word has slipped out, unwittingly. Mariella’s lusciously lipsticked mouth opens slightly with the small shock of the word. “I don’t mean anything … smarmy by it,” Isabel hastens to assure her. “I mean that music reveals rather than tells …” Mariella looks confounded again, and Isabel tries to clarify. “Or maybe the word is evokes rather than reveals … But it either does this, or it is nothing. Just a bunch of sounds.” She pauses to gather her thoughts together. “But the one thing music cannot do is lie … The way some fiction can. And nonfiction too.” Mariella nods, uncertainly.
“Music is truth, truth music,” Isabel sums up, rather pleased with the proposition. “That’s all we know and all we need to know.”
“Are you quoting something?”
Isabel is about to explain, but there’s an energetic knock on the door. It’s the photographer, coming in with his importantly bulky equipment and an ebullient hello. A moment later, he’s rearranging the furniture, making approving noises as he creates his little stage set. Why are photographers always so pleased with themselves? Isabel has noted this before. It is as if the habit of looking at others through the merciless lens boosted their narcissism, a cheerful sense of their own inviolability.
His eyes narrow to a focus as he appraises Isabel. A different
focus from Anzor’s. These are the ineffables, and yet she cannot help but notice them.
“Why don’t we try you there?” the photographer says, pointing to a plump chair. She sits down, drapes her hand over the armrest, and tries to pour some kind of energy into her smile, as the clicking begins. Another simulated scenario; but she knows that the camera is a ruthless register of karma. If she withholds herself, the photograph will mysteriously lack a sense of life, of a living presence.
“How much longer?” Mariella asks, and then the phone rings again. Isabel picks it up, hears an agitated voice speaking in Dutch, and hands the receiver to Mariella, who looks troubled as she listens. She says something in Dutch to the photographer, who turns his attention abruptly away from Isabel. “
Zeker, zeker
,” he says briskly and begins to fold his equipment.
“There’s been some sort of … accident near here,” Mariella explains to Isabel, in a changed voice. “Some … violence. It’s my editor. He says we should go there. We should know what it is about. To find out.”
“Violence?” Isabel asks.
“A bomb, perhaps. Or an explosion. Most probably.” Mariella is speaking with a sort of embarrassment. “Someone has been killed. Or maybe a few.”
The photographer gathers his equipment hastily. “I’m sorry,” Isabel says. “How terrible.” She hesitates, uncertain what to do, then decides to go with them. She has some inchoate sense that it would seem callous if she didn’t. Maybe she should know what it is about too.
Whatever it is that has taken place, has happened just minutes away from the hotel, on a quiet side street. By the time they get there, the scene consists mostly of policemen and photographers. Policemen to provide a belated semblance of protection; photographers to provide images suggesting the lack of
any protective power. The two groups form a small cordon sanitaire, in the middle of which something—something hideous, something that should not be looked at—is going on. The photographer pushes his way through the outer circle, clicking all the way. She follows, and looks. By now, whatever had happened here has been to some extent managed, covered. Bodies—people?—are blanketed in mercifully opaque plastic. The pools of blood have dried. Nothing virtual about that. Nothing simulated. Whatever has happened here has absolute reality. It doesn’t belong in this comfortable, cushioned city, this quiet street. Some medics are bent over one of the camouflaged forms; Isabel sees that they’re cutting delicately at bits of substance hanging out of the plastic covering, where the arm should lie. With an upwelling of nausea, she realizes that the covered object next to the injured woman’s body is probably the rest of the limb. The familiar thought flickers through her mind that if this happened to her, she wouldn’t want to go on living. She couldn’t, actually. The real begins and ends here, in the flesh. The combination of relief and empathy—it isn’t even pity, she just feels a twitch in her arms, her chest—makes her dizzy. She lowers her head, so that she won’t see. Then she looks again. She must look. She mustn’t. Both gestures are obscene. Given that this is none of her business, that she doesn’t know whom she’s looking at, who is suffering, whose life has been taken away or is being destroyed, that she shouldn’t have seen this in the first place.
She shouldn’t have come out of the hotel. Now that she has … a thought of Anzor brushes against her mind. But he is in Brussels, she knows that. He told her he had to stay on to meet with the British ambassador there. The British seem to have better understanding than the Americans of their situation, their cause. “Your cause,” she repeated, disconcerted yet again by the forthrightness of his rhetoric, its unabashed simplicity. The photographers are still clicking, with an incessant, monotonous
rhythm that spells a certain kind of excitement. Media excitement, she thinks with sudden anger. Paparazzi. The world is ill. She must get away from here, must think about the concert tonight. She cannot play in this nauseous state.
She makes her way out of the circle, tapping the photographer on the shoulder to let him know she’s leaving. He turns to her, and must see something on her face, because he looks at her with a startling, naked directness, the way you’re not allowed to look at someone who’s not your intimate. Except through the camera. She doesn’t know what he sees, but he grasps her shoulders as if to bolster her. “I’m sorry we got, how do you say, interrupted,” he says. “But I think I have some good photos. Of you, I mean.”
She’ll have to figure out later why the remark adds to her revulsion. Outside the immediate cluster, Mariella is talking intently to a policeman and taking notes. She turns to Isabel, and must see something as well, because her face furrows with concern. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I mean, that this happened in our city …”
“What does he say?” Isabel asks, pointing to the policeman.
Mariella looks embarrassed again. “Nobody knows what it’s about,” she says. “There’ve been some secret negotiations with a group from Kosovo somewhere near here, so probably … You know, the Serbians … But nobody knows. He says it doesn’t look like a Middle Eastern job. It is the wrong kind of explosive.”
Her face has a slackened, washed-out look. This is not the kind of crisis, Isabel thinks, which makes people rally. Not that she has experience of crises, but she feels the desuetude of the few people left, her own urge to skulk away. Whatever has happened here has demagnetized everything within its radius; nobody will go to a bar together after this, to talk over the meaning of the event.
“I’d better get back,” she says to Mariella. She’s beginning to
shiver. “But thank you … for your interesting questions.” The incongruity instantly strikes her as indecent. “I mean earlier,” she adds, and shakes her head helplessly. That’s not what she means either.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Mariella says again, indicating the ambulance, and the medics carrying a body into a stretcher. “When you’re here to do something so … good.”
“Yes,” Isabel says. “It’s just so … awful.”
Back in her room, she gets into the large bed, and curls into herself till the shivering stops. She tries to locate what she’s just seen, what has happened, what has happened to her. She feels shame. Not for the wrecked bodies, but for that naked stare the photographer gave her. And which she returned. What did he see? A widened eye, like his own. An open lens. Don’t be so hard on yourself, she directs herself, primly. The homily for murky occasions. Don’t be so hard on yourself, don’t judge yourself, don’t judge … The mantras of her generation. Don’t judge, try to understand. She wishes Anzor were with her, or Peter, or even the photographer. It’s the truth, she’d take anything, anyone, to slake the ambiguous, the pornographic excitement. The camera, that’s the problem. That’s what is making everyone into voyeurs. Then she thinks of the guillotine, the public hangings. They came to see death in action up close and intimate, more naked than she has seen it today. They wanted full exposure. They flocked from the outer boroughs, to see the wretches hang. She just happened to be in the proximity. It has always been with us, she thinks, this … obscenity. Just because she has never come close to it before … This is just an accident that follows from her life. Her accidental life. None of her business, really. It’s not a part of my life, she thinks. It doesn’t count.
On the way to the concert hall, the image of the torn arm jabs at her chest like a sharp object. She thinks about Peter,
whom she has hurt, of Kolya, whom she could not save. But no, she’s not ready to think about Kolya … In the taxi, she doubles over and inwardly keens. She must pull herself together. She doesn’t know how she’ll get through this evening; she only hopes there’ll be no overt fiascos.
And yet, when the moment comes, she plays as confidently, as fluently, as she has ever played. She summons the poetry of Chopin’s last Ballade, so shot through with anger and anguish, as if it could heal death and all sorrow. As if it could repair what she’d seen this afternoon. As if, after they’ve been broken and injured, things could be made whole. As if violence held no dominion over beauty. She feels, with the great arpeggios and chords of the Ballade, a vast spaciousness open up inside her. She feels held in the heart of meaning, safe as if she could never fall out. She feels, only this counts. Only this.
But in her room afterward, images from the Incident float up again, shards of music. A sound-trace of camera clicking, the photographer in his denim jacket, leaning forward into the covered, fleshly pottage with his knee bent, and she suddenly realizes: the photographs he took of her in the hotel room will be next to those of the incident. Someone developing the second roll will go from her oh-so-smoothly posed, her utterly intact body, to the chaos of bloodied limbs and plastic coverings. Her agitation increases, a fibrillation close to pain. Chaos, that’s what produces those jagged internal oscillations, that’s why she can’t find a position in which to rest. No position, no vantage point … The photos of the incident won’t have focus or structure. The splotches of blood won’t direct the viewer’s eye toward a border or center.