“Here, darling, come in and show me what you’ve done,” Mme Hortesz would say, pushing her gently toward the piano. “I always like hearing you, you’ve such a nice little talent …” Then she’d pick up her large, lazy angora cat and place it in her lap, where she stroked it as she listened to Isabel play.
Isabel doesn’t know whether Mme Hortesz discerned talent, or whether she took her on because she knew Lena, had been part of the same “milieu,” as she called it in her soft Hungarian accent. Even then, Isabel half understood that she was a recipient of benevolence, rather than a properly paying student; but still, the half-hour lessons were a charmed interval. Afterward, there would be tea with
confitures
and a little chat, which was probably the real point of the visits.
“How’s your mamma?” Mme Hortesz would ask, looking at her not so much with concern as a sort of alert inquisitiveness; and Isabel would say in a very small voice that her mother was fine, “except she had to stay in bed a lot.”
“Ah, don’t worry about her so much, little one,” Mme Hortesz would say, inclining her large head with a bird-like sharpness, as if she wanted to gauge from Isabel’s face or tone of voice exactly how bad things were. “Don’t worry, she’ll recover soon enough, poor thing.” Isabel remembers how Mme Hortesz ran her hand over her hair, firmly and soothingly, though she was probably inspecting it for lice at the same time. “And if anything is wrong, just come to me, yes?” she would conclude. “Just come over and tell me what’s going on.”
Isabel in the meantime was listening for undertones as well, trying to gather from Mme Hortesz’s voice whether her mother was very ill, whether she would be soon orphaned, or had
been orphaned already; whether she should think of herself as motherless. Then her mother’s belly began to swell, and then there was Kolya. She walks, through some unconscious mnemonics, toward a small café—yes it is still there—where Gyorgi, Mme Hortesz’s husband, started bringing her shortly after Kolya’s birth, to conduct his lessons in general humanism over small cups of coffee, and with many cigarette butts squashed into the ashtray while he discoursed on pictures he had sent her to see in the Louvre, or the ethical ideas of Aristotle. There was a wonderfully illustrated book about Greek myths, and she remembers being impressed and worried by the free and ruthless behavior of the Greek gods. She had shyly asked Gyorgi whether Athena was a good goddess; whether she was nice. “Perhaps niceness isn’t the point of a goddess,” Gyorgi answered. “Perhaps it isn’t even the most important thing in the world.” He contemplated her with a sort of whimsical affection. “If I were you, I would try not to be too excessively nice when you grow up,” he said. “It’s bound to get you in trouble.” His lips made a
put put put
sound on his cigarette. “But the great thing about the Greek gods,” he went on, clearly for his own benefit as much as for hers, “is that there are so many. Not just one god, who decides everything for everyone; but lots of gods, hashing it out among themselves. Fighting it out, because they love and hate. Because they have passions. Just remember,” he said, raising his index finger to notify her he was going to say something important, “a power struggle is always better than absolute power.”
And she does remember. She can see Gyorgi’s impish look when he was pleased with one of his bons mots, and the precision with which he stubbed out a cigarette, as if to underline that he’d hit the nail on the head, and herself smiling up at him to show she appreciated his cleverness, even if she didn’t really understand, and the way she leapt up from her chair, as he said, “Come on, let’s take a little walk.” Then their stroll back to
the flat, Gyorgi talking all the way; and the cluttered, dusky room with the piano and Mme Hortesz, large and soft, stroking her large, fluffy cat. The wholeness of the past. That’s where it started, really, where it all began to matter: the music, the glimpses of grown-up play; and her trembling keenness to extend herself beyond her own small frame.
The fortuitousness of the present. Marcel comes to pick her up punctually at six, and strolls into her room as if they’d only parted this morning. “Ah, Isabel,” he says, and gives her a casual peck on both cheeks, “it has been too long.”
“But whose fault is it?” she states, adjusting easily to their accustomed banter. She feels instantly amused at seeing his well-chiseled, habitually amused face, the unforced nonchalance of his movements, as if he’s already told a joke. The lightness of Marcel.
He inspects the room, with its long white curtains and imitation antique desk, appraisingly. “But you’ve clearly been doing well, yes?” he concludes. “Career graph going up?”
“Well, you know how it is with those graphs,” she replies. “They seem to zigzag and wobble rather a lot.”
“I’m a good reader of graphs,” he assures her suavely, “and believe me, yours is showing a nice, steady upward movement. Nothing too violent,” he expands, “but we wouldn’t want that. Rapid rise too often precedes …” He shifts gears and looks at her appraisingly in turn. His eyes, behind the camouflage of irony, hold a deeper, tougher intelligence.
“It’s good to see you, you know,” he says, putting some seriousness into his words this time. “So much has happened … in the meantime.” She knows he means Peter. She doesn’t know how much he knows.
In the taxi, he tells her that the reception is in honor of some new legislation on the European currency. “It’s the kind of event
I must attend these days,” he says, shrugging expressively. “You know, in my work.” As far as she can tell, he works for some European agency which regulates flows of currency, or its exchanges, or comparative quantities. She’s never been able to grasp more than that. She imagines a somnolent gray bureaucracy, although she knows Marcel would never lend himself to something entirely unglamorous.
It’s glamour that reigns in the crowded reception room. A glittering setting, sparkling chandeliers, the flickering interest of elegantly clad figures, of faces she’ll never see again. She adjusts the silk shawl around her shoulders. “You look fine,” Marcel murmurs reassuringly. “You look great.” A few years earlier, she would have felt impressed to find herself in such a room; now she’s used to being a nomad of the social scale, moving up and down its reaches, though always slightly on the outside. Somewhere between the Artist and a traveling artiste. Marcel looks around, raises his hand to a figure he spots across the room, squeezes her shoulder slightly to signal he’ll be back soon, but is detained by someone approaching them, smiling jovially. It’s the man from the plane. He is accompanied this time by a tall woman in a long satin dress, with bouncy black hair, and a bright, open smile.
“Hello, old fellow,” the man says, extending his hand to Marcel and shaking it vigorously. “Well done, you got her to come.”
Isabel blinks, in an effort to jog the automatic association mechanism into place; then it clicks.
“So you’re the friend whom Marcel mentioned,” she says. His name is McElvoy, she remembers now.
“Didn’t Marcel tell you?” he asks, rather baffled in turn. He is dressed in a black-tie suit, and huffing a little; beads of sweat are showing around the collar. He looks at Marcel reproachfully. Marcel spreads his hands in a half-apologetic gesture, and gives an unapologetic shrug.
“Excuse me,” he says with a suddenly absent look. “I’ll be
right back.” She watches him move across the room with deliberation; then making his movements more casual as he nears his goal. A person who clearly matters to him.
McElvoy introduces his companion as Margarita Peters, a dear friend from Washington.
“You have no idea how excited he was about that concert you gave,” Margarita tells her cheerfully. She speaks with a genial Southern drawl. “He listens to music all the time, you know, he knows the whole piano repertory. Recognizes all the pieces, it’s amazing. And he’s just nuts about you.”
McElvoy looks at his companion half gratefully, half reproachfully. “But it was so much better to hear you live,” he says, “especially after meeting you like that—” He interrupts himself to greet a short, plump woman who has approached them in the meantime.
“
Zdrastvuyte
,” McElvoy pronounces heartily, half bowing from his portly chest. “I thought you might be here.” He introduces the woman as Katrina Marinskaya, and says in a gallant tone that she works at the Russian Embassy, but is really a poetess.
“Ah, poetess,” Katrina repeats, pronouncing the word with a prolonging lilt. She has large blue eyes which remain disconcertingly wide open as she talks, and an aureole of blond hair framing her round, porcelain-skinned face. “I’m not sure I like that word. In Russian you can say it and not sound like you’re a lady writer in the nineteenth century. In English I believe you cannot.” Her soft Russian accent is nicely spiked by the droll intonations.
“What do you prefer to be called?” Isabel asks.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really care what I’m called,” Katrina answers. “I prefer to be read. But that is of course too much to ask, for a … poetess.”
McElvoy raises his index finger to hush them. A discreet clink
of a glass summoning the guests to silence is produced from the small podium. The minister is about to speak. She has noticed him before, has followed the darting glances leading, always, to him. He seems, from this distance, perfectly quiet, perfectly composed, as only the powerful can be composed. He isn’t even trying to give the impression of geniality; he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to do anything. Others in the room are scattered, half their attention directed toward him. He seems to gather their attention like a magnet gathering scattered filings. She can sense the condensation of energy within his stocky, not very tall body. In a way, she understands this state, recognizes it. He too, after all, is on a stage.
He begins to speak, with an unapologetic seriousness. He asserts that this is a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity for Europe. Perhaps for the world. Of course, there are problems. There is Kosovo, where the embers are still dying down from the fires of war. We must make sure they do not flame up again. Still, he continues after the briefest caesura, we are deeply convinced that we can preserve the stability which has been so hard won in the second half of this century—and the legislation we are celebrating is going to ensure that it lasts well into the next.
He goes on to explain the legislation, in intricate detail. She cannot follow, strains to hear some modulations in his uninflected sentences, a rise of rhetoric to eloquence, or drama. But the minister sticks unswervingly to his muzak plainness. What is at stake here, what is it that matters … The others look at the speaker with rapt attentiveness. What is it she is missing, is it the music … or is this the famous dullness of democracy, which according to Peter, she should relish? He used to hold forth about it; but her eyes glazed over when he did. She wonders, vaguely, if Wolfe’s Angel of History is present anywhere in the glittering room; if so, it is surely hovering somewhere in a corner, with becalmed, folded wings. She stops
trying to follow; her fingers move against her wine glass over phrases of a Brahms Intermezzo.
The speech comes to its end; light bulbs flash. There’s applause and raised glasses. Marcel reappears, and says, “Our undertaker. The one presiding over our slow embalming.”
“But he has such … gravitas,” McElvoy protests.
“Oh honestly, Louis, you’re such a sucker for authority,” Margarita scolds him unexpectedly.
“Better an embalming than a burning,” Katrina pronounces rather cryptically.
McElvoy looks at her disapprovingly, and asks Isabel where she’s going next on her tour. “Sofia,” she says. “Another flight.”
“Ah, you poor thing,” he says. “I could tell you don’t like being on an airplane.”
But Margarita suddenly exclaims, “Isn’t Anzor going to be there? Wouldn’t he just love to see her?”
“Yes, I think so,” McElvoy says uncertainly. “He’s the man who came with me to your concert,” he explains.
“He’s a great guy,” Margarita says enthusiastically. “And you’ll be all by yourself … It must get lonely … We’ll let him know to come to your concert, won’t we, Louis? You’d enjoy seeing him, I’m sure of it. He’s just so … cultured.”
Isabel notices that Katrina’s eyebrows go up a fraction.
“I’m sure I would …” she says vaguely. She doesn’t really remember the man who came with McElvoy, except for some ambivalent after-image, a trace of an expression or gesture.
“Please excuse us,” Marcel says, taking her by the elbow, “I have an early meeting tomorrow …” He has ascertained through a silent query that she doesn’t mind leaving.
“Well, that was interesting,” she says neutrally, as they walk down the curved staircase.
“Was it?” he asks sharply. He doesn’t seem to be in a good mood.
“Who is that man, exactly?” Isabel asks, about McElvoy.
“Ah, exactly,” Marcel repeats. “Nobody is anything exactly these days.” He gives a small shrug. “He’s a retired diplomat. Knows everyone in Washington. One of those.” Something did not go well for Marcel at the grand reception. He shrugs again, and speaks less irritably. “Well, maybe not retired. He ran around Yugoslavia a lot, trying to make everyone talk to each other. Not a bad man. He has good intentions. Though how he can approve of that dull apparatchik or his trivial policies …”
“You didn’t like the speech.”
“Ah, I’m sorry, Isabel,” he says, “I’m not a very good, how do you say, companion this evening. But this is actually a moment of crisis for me.”
At the bar of her hotel, where they sit down for a drink, he explains that the crisis has something to do with the shared economic infrastructure for the new members of the European Union, which in turn follows from the legislation approved by the maddening undertaker. “If I advocate lower interest rates, the French will be pissed,” Marcel says. “And if I don’t, the Germans will veto my promotion.” He raises his eyebrows in a kind of sardonic QED. “I don’t know which is worse.”
“Shouldn’t you think about what’s best objectively?” Isabel asks, feeling sanctimonious even as she poses the question.