“What happened?” she asks. “Is anyone hurt?”
“They … they put it in the lobby,” he says. He’s stuttering in agitation, and his fists are clenched. His self-control apparently goes only so far. “We don’t know who. One of our groups maybe. Or one of the others.
Canaille
.” Is French the international language of curse and condemnation?
“It’s probably the others,” she says, speaking with difficulty. She regrets the phrase as soon as it is uttered.
“At a concert too,” he bursts out, shaking his head, as if he
couldn’t help making this obvious observation. “I mean … why do they attack this? Music. They have no … respect. No respect for anything.”
“No,” she says, with a grim certainty. “At least not for … this.” She means not for us; but she cannot bring herself to say it.
“Who are they,” he asks, rhetorically. “What do they want. From us. From you. What do these … people want.”
“Has anyone been … hurt?” she repeats, her teeth beginning to chatter again.
“I do not think so,” he says. “I need please to excuse myself to find out what is happening. Will you be all right?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m fine. Will you please let me know … what has happened?”
“I will, I will do this,” he says, and then she’s alone, and lets herself shiver violently, thinking, maybe this is a time for prayer. For I want somebody to make sure that no one has been hurt, even though it is too late, even though it has already happened, whatever it is.
Soldano comes back a few minutes later and closes the door behind him softly. She looks up at him anxiously, and he shakes his head no. “No one has been hurt. Very fortunately,” he says.
She feels immeasurably grateful to him, as if he were personally responsible for this news. Kiss the messenger. “Oh, thank God,” she says. “Thank heaven.”
“One person is in trauma,” he informs her. “But maybe it is not so bad. She is just shocked. She is taken to a hospital.” Isabel nods. That much can be accepted.
“The lobby is destroyed,” he adds drily. “It will take us a long time to repair it. We will have to cancel the rest of the season.”
He looks bleak and pauses before asking the next question. “The police want to … want to talk to you,” he says. “Can I ask them to come in?” He’s looking at her with a concern, but also a more neutral curiosity.
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. I mean, I see why they need to talk to me. But can I … can this wait till tomorrow?” She would give anything to postpone this conversation. She is feeling, she now notices, shattered with a deep fatigue. The stuffing has been knocked out of her with the thud back there; with that one comprehensive sound.
“I do not think so,” Soldano says, in a voice that is suddenly very firm. “I think they will probably insist on speaking with you now. They are right here. Can I please ask them to come in?”
“Yes,” she says, a lurch of anxiety twisting her stomach. “Of course. Please ask them to come in.”
One of them is black-haired and black-eyed, the other short with a reddish moustache. They are very young, and she feels a wave of sympathy for them. They’ve been out there, looking for bodies, although, thank God, no bodies have been found.
“We are sorry to disturb you,” the tall one says. “We are also sorry for our English.”
“No, please,” she says. “I wish I could speak Spanish. I knew some as a child, but haven’t spoken it for many years.” If she could only extend the chit-chat. She is wondering what on earth she will say to them when the questions come, and feels a sudden, sickening sense of wrongness. She is in the wrong, even though she has not done anything wrong, as in dreams in which she is guilty of murder, even though no murder has been committed. Dreams in which Kolya hovers abstractly in the background, and from which she has woken up sweaty with unspecified dread.
The short one takes over. “We need to ask you a few things. To help us in what we are doing. To see if you have any, how do you say, clues. We’ll try not to take too long.”
They ask her the predictable questions, about whether she knows anyone who might have a grudge against her, perhaps someone wanting revenge for something, a jealous pianist who is
less successful—anything is possible. She keeps saying no, thinking she will stick to the facts, even though the facts are not exactly the truth. Surely she has that right, after all those years with Peter she is perfectly aware of defendants’ rights. The thought of Peter, the very possibility of his calm rationality, induces a rise of longing, and also of shame. She has failed on grounds of rationality, has wandered into a morass where nothing clear can be made out. She’s responsible for something vague and awful, even though she never intended to hurt anybody. Do her intentions count, can she be reprieved on grounds of good intentions?
“Or do you personally know anyone who might be involved in something like this, some kind of group?” the tall one asks, looking at her very attentively. He is young, but his face has the lines of habitual skepticism, the expression of someone who knows he should expect the worst of everyone. “Sometimes you may not realize what your friends are involved in, but please think hard. You meet so many people. Was there anyone suspicious? Anyone who asked you strange questions? You never know. Someone might have wanted to use you. People like that have very, how shall I say, very strange purposes. Perverse purposes, one might say. Or is it perverted?” His English is really excellent.
She turns away for a moment, to make her decision. “Yes,” she says, facing them again. She has decided to tell them whatever she knows. And in a flash, she has understood that she knows more than she has wanted to acknowledge.
They listen, carefully, and take notes, even though the tape recorder is on. Just another kind of interview, she thinks, with low irony. Though this one has rather more real implications than her usual interrogations. The real, once again baring its sharp teeth. The policeman asks her about Anzor’s London base, and a wave of sickliness makes her stop mid-sentence. Is she committing some awful act again, some literally murderous
betrayal; or is she doing the right thing? Once again, she tells them what she knows.
They thank her. They say she has been very helpful. They write down some things, lingering at the table, consulting with each other about what else they need to do.
“What will happen now?” she asks. She has gone beyond fatigue, she is feeling dusty and gray, made of ashes.
“We don’t know,” the red-haired one says. “These people are very hard to track down. But we’ll try. Believe me, we’ll try.”
She feels nauseous with ambivalence, or perhaps with the effects of the questioning. They may not find Anzor. She may not be responsible for his incarceration, or torture, or whatever awaits him if they tracked him down. She doesn’t want to think of his flesh being tortured … But if they don’t find him. The flesh of others. She has seen, in Rotterdam, what a bomb can do. She reminds herself that it is he who has been traitorous. He and his comrades. Their contempt apparently extends to her, and everything she stands for. Her and all the others, the people who came to hear her.
The red-haired policeman looks at her carefully. “Please do not feel bad about this,” he says, with real kindness. “You are a musician. You did not do anything bad. You do not have anything to blame yourself for.” She looks at him with gratitude, as if the thread of redemption were hanging on his words.
“I agree with my colleague,” the tall one adds warmly. “I agree with him very much. I know how you feel. We have some experience of this. Often the victims feel the worst. It’s very disturbing, very unjust. You shouldn’t … feel guilty. You didn’t set off this bomb, right?” She nods, trying to absorb what he’s saying, its impeccable logic. “I hope you have some friends in Barcelona,” the policeman concludes. “To have dinner with them. Perhaps a good, how do you say, stiff drink.”
Another question occurs to her. “Do you think they might try again …?”
“I do not think so,” he says. “We cannot guarantee anything, of course, but this looks like a one-off, for these people. Very strange, actually. They do not usually do this kind of thing. If we are thinking of the right people. Of course, your friend is probably back in Chechnya, where we cannot reach him. Outside of our sphere of influence, you could say.”
She is queasy again at the word “friend.” On some level, she knows, she cannot be absolved as easily as the policeman suggests; but she is glad of any absolution she can get, any reasoning which extracts her from the obscure murk of guilt and shame. Under her eyelids, she feels the burning of incipient tears.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you very much.”
Then the cops leave, and Soldano takes her out through the stage door to his car. As they round the corner, she sees police cars in front of the concert hall, and bright lights illuminating a pile of broken stone and glass, a hard mess, wreckage. She begins to feel the onset of a different anger, turning on Anzor, with a bitter sense of betrayal. She must expel his body from her body, where it has taken residence; must reject his words from her mind. She begins to shiver again, this time with the agitation of her wrath. She is against him, utterly against him. She must take sides, it is indecent not to. She must hate as it is right to hate.
Marseilles
It is upon her again, the death of meaning. She walks around her white-carpeted apartment without sound or thought. She feels right in this geometric capsule suspended high up above the ground, on the peripheries of a strange city. No reason to be here,
except that the train which was ready to pull out of the station when she got there, had Marseilles as its final destination. It made as much sense as anywhere else. It is causeless, neutral, utterly arbitrary. It suits her fine. She thinks, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life here. Why not here. Why anywhere. She does not deserve the protection of a home. When she looks out the window, she sees other rectangular tower blocks, their glassy exteriors shimmering in the sun. She is on the thirty-ninth floor, and she feels groundless, gravity-less. A monk’s cell, a rehabilitation cell, an isolation chamber. Here, the randomness of her life, her superfluous freedom, has come home to roost. The anonymous whiteness of the room reflects perfectly her condition. And anyway, aren’t there millions like her, cutting across the globe without ever touching ground? Who has a whole life, any more, coherent and unbroken? Isn’t she, in living like this, joining the common lot?
She tries, out of habit, to practice in the mornings, in a dingy studio she has rented for this purpose. After a few days, she realizes there is no point. How could she ever do it, hit one note after another, as if it mattered? As if it added up to something? She contemplates the black and white keys as if they were levers of some antique machine, the once malevolent teeth of an extinct animal. Her fingers still know how to run through an arpeggio or a melody, but the notes do not link up to make a melodic line, do not gel into sense or shape. Why is she sitting in front of that strange cumbersome piece of furniture, how could she ever think she could conjure up significance out of a piece of wood? After repeating a passage several times in the hope of discerning some meaning within it, she begins to feel that she is engaged in an activity from a Dadaist manual. The old upright, with its yellowed keys, bespeaks stale, shabby paltriness. The instrument of the petit bourgeoisie, which she used to think held the cosmos in its innards. She has been
living in some kind of illusion, layers and layers of illusion, like layers of a dream from which you think you have awakened, only to realize you are still in it. Now she has been jolted out of it, that’s for sure. Out of her misty longings and into some more naked reality. This is what Anzor did, this is what the explosion did: it has exposed some possibility in the world that makes the activity of stringing musical notes together absurd. The ugly thud, the broken chandeliers, the rubble-strewn sidewalk outside the concert hall: in the scheme of things, it is not a large event; but it means that she cannot make separate notes of the Chopin Ballade add up to music. I have fallen into despair, she thinks, isn’t that supposed to be the greatest sin? Rose, thou art sick. She feels she is sickening from the inside. The worm of disenchantment has made its way into her innards, twisting, filling her with a contaminated leadenness. When the contamination reaches her arms, she looks briefly at the yellowing chipped teeth, and shuts the piano’s lid.
Once a day, she descends in the soundless elevator to do her shopping and sit in a café. She takes her cart through the
supermarché
and then sits for an hour at a glass-topped table under a linen umbrella. She seems to have no need to eat these days, her body has stopped giving her those signals; but she consumes food out of some obligation to herself, some remnant hope, or rather inference, that some day she may actually want to eat again, that she might feel hunger, or appetite, or desire. On the street, the usual polyglot mix: blue jeans and turbans, gorgeous African prints and Muslim headscarves. Among the colorful costumes, the tanned Frenchwomen in their brilliant-white shirts and narrow pants look oddly old-fashioned. Creatures of another era, she thinks, passé, done for. Or at least done with, no longer the problem. No longer the subject. They have been dissected and described, their desires and affairs, their frustrations and
their marriages. They have all read
Madame Bovary
. It is the others who look serious, who walk with gravitas, who are not completely knowable because they have a fate to accept or fight against, something to struggle for or figure out, about their condition. Or so Isabel conjectures. She suspects their lives have conditions, and choices and costs attached; and this gives them the vividness, the edge of tension and of interest. Though the Frenchwoman she’s observing at a nearby table looks erotically confident and elegant in her soft sports pants and shirt, knees raised languidly on a chair as she talks briskly on her cell phone. This is not a place of misery, after all, just an ordinary neighborhood in Europe, where everything has been done to enhance the well-being of the inhabitants, to make the surfaces of life clement and comfortable. The people wearing the turbans and the headscarves shop at the
supermarché
too, though they rarely sit at the café.