“Objectively best for whom?” he retorts sharply. “It’s not so simple anymore. If it ever was. Somebody always loses, no matter what. Though they don’t lose very much, that’s how things are different now. We’re good at lowering the stakes, it’s our specialty. Of course, nobody ever seems to win,” he continues, gaining steam on the momentum of his own logic. “But that’s all right. At least nobody goes to war over it. Nobody gets killed. Not over interest rates. Not in Europe. That’s our great improvement.” He looks at her directly. “But in the meantime,”
he says, “I would like to get my promotion. Soon.”
“Aren’t you making yourself out to be even more of a cad than you really are?” she says, half jokingly. She thinks, everyone wants power after all. There must have been fierce tension in that room, had she only known how to read it.
“Ah, no, that’s exactly how much of a cad I am,” he replies, idly. His eyes, looking at her over his brandy, are acute and cool. She knows he’s basically uninsultable; that was part of his charm when he was at Columbia, his distinctiveness. His moral dispassion was so confident, that it made him almost equally indifferent to praise and opprobrium.
“What would you like to do, then?” she asks.
“What I’d really like is to
run
something, for God’s sake,” he says with surprising vehemence. “Something large and international. It’s about time … And I would be good at it, too. I am already good at it. Negotiating different interests, playing them off against each other till they fit. I just want to do it on a larger scale.”
“No matter what.”
“No matter what.” He looks ill-humored again. “I don’t care which organization I run. As long as it’s important or big. Or both, preferably. Very preferably.”
“Is there nothing you really care about?” she asks, feeling horribly earnest again.
“My dear Isabel,” he responds, “I’m a worker in the, how to explain it, the
superstructure.
” The precision of his pronunciation makes the word sound almost sexy. “It is not our business to care. It is to see the whole picture. To have the overview.”
He continues, in answer to her unspoken objections. “All right, I am a bureaucrat. I don’t mind being called that. That’s what we need these days, the best bureaucrats possible. People who are objective. Who don’t get all gooey or sentimental about some … small precious nation. Or some desperately important
issue
du jour
. People who care so much about one bloody thing as to unbalance the whole … structure.” He raises an amused eyebrow. “That’s why we need a strong superstructure,” he concludes with satisfaction.
“So there’s nothing really … important in all of this,” she says, uncertainly.
“Ah, you and your meaning bug,” he says, looking at her amiably again. “You’ve always had it. You’re such an innocent, really. Dear Isabel.”
As he escorts her to the elevator, he places his hand on the back of her neck lightly, but with unmistakable intention. Without turning round, she shakes her head no. “Is it Peter?” he asks, and she shakes her head again. “Ah, well, then I’m even more disappointed,” he says, as if offering a gallantry.
“By the way,” she asks, as they wait for the elevator to come down, “who was that Russian woman?”
“You mean the poetess?” He shrugs, as if it didn’t much matter. “She’s worked at the Russian Embassy for a long time. Pre-perestroika, which is unusual. Mostly, they’ve revised their personnel fairly thoroughly since then. Which means she must be doing something right. Or wrong.”
The elevator door opens, and Isabel turns to him to say good-bye. “I hope you get that position you want,” she says, with sincerity. “Whatever it is, exactly.”
“Ah, yes,” he says. “Whatever. Isn’t that how you say it nowadays? Whatever.” He kisses her on the cheek, and holds the elevator door open for her as she gets in.
In Between
The long corridors of Charles de Gaulle, the soundless escalators,
the indecipherable human figures erased as soon as they are seen, the strange blank comfort of a space which demands nothing, in which everything is deleted as soon as it happens. She thinks, I’m free as a bird, and I skim against the surfaces of the world. Surfaces and episodes. On the plane, she takes out her schedule, tries to fix Sofia on the mental map. She no longer remembers why she agreed to go there, what trace of scruple, or curiosity moved her to say yes, she would make this absurd detour and play for a funny fee in Sofia’s main concert hall. She has a vague sense that Bulgaria has been through hard times, has been brave about it, was struggling still. Sometimes, in her hard, indulged life, she likes to feel that she’s doing something for a good cause. Something Good. It may have been this that prompted her hand to sign the contract which Anders had routinely faxed through for her approval.
Sofia
She is oddly cheered, though, by Sofia’s quaint little airport, the juddering Lada which takes her to her hotel, bouncing insouciantly over the deep and numerous potholes, the general uncombed shabbiness of the streets. She checks into the hotel, goes out for a walk. A fresh breeze, sound of doves cooing through the plane trees, the unhurried steps of the passersby, the low-built streets, the pungent smells … Europe eddying into something else, somewhere else, something earlier, an elsewhere. A muezzin’s cry pierces the subsiding light from a slim, barely visible minaret. She stops to listen to the sinuous musical line, weaving itself through the dusk and slow air. She falls into a slower tempo in response, feels a sloughing off of her habitual tension. No need to be on the qui vive here.
In the evening, she goes to hear the Bulgarian women sing. They’ve become famous recently, after having done some recordings in the West. They come out in their folk costumes, a colorful group. Then the music begins, and she sits up because she feels she is in the Presence. It is music, but hardly yet music. What emanates from the women’s throats is closer to unmediated emanations, raw whoops, fierce shouts. Wild calls, so piercing that she wants to call in response. It’s close to sounds wolves might make, or powerfully throated birds … A sort of pre-music, in which violence is not yet distinguished from pleasure, or aggression from wild love … Is that what the libido is like, she wonders, this pure, unmediated vitality. The voices go through her body like whipping winds, and she’s almost frightened by her pure response. If she were in a circle of Bacchantes, making these sounds, who knows what frenzy she might be capable of, what orgiastic dancing or tearing of flesh.
July 9, 1982
A lesson with Isabel Merton. She played the “Waldstein” quite convincingly. She is learning about discipline, about grasping the structure of the whole, so that each passage can fall into the right proportions within it. So that the form can reveal the meaning. I talked to her about the architectural exfoliation of Beethoven’s sonatas, and she listened with full absorption. She has that sort of love, the art-hunger. I felt as though my mind, my ideas, were pouring into hers. Sometimes I am full of wonder that this business of musical transmission still continues. An ancient knowledge, passed from mind to mind, hand to hand.
She played the first movement again, and looked up at me with her transparent eyes when she finished. I felt an urge to reach toward her cheek and caress it. My hand could have almost done it on its own. I didn’t, of course. Of course, I did not. Instead, I told her she was improving. There must have been something in my voice, however, because she gave me a startled, enquiring look. There was a silence between us; then she broke into a sudden, almost capricious, utterly feminine smile. She is, after all, a very young woman who doesn’t seem to comb her hair, and wears blue jeans. But when I speak to her, she seems to understand. Her receptivity is almost disturbing. It is a form of innocence, but also of knowing. She seems to take everything in through her senses, and to absorb it like some heliotropic plant. I wonder if she has the strength to become an artist. The terrible, ruthless dedication. She would need to unwoman herself, to become harder. I wonder if anyone should wish such a fate on her.
Unwoman … What a strange word. Lying back against the fluffy pillow in her hotel room, she sees Wolfe’s gaunt figure striding across the Retreat, his sensitive face with deeply set grey eyes, his chest receding into a concave arc in some ineffable act of withdrawal. They called him the Great Refuser, the snarky young who came each summer, secretly to worship him, and among themselves, to mock him. No late-night carousing, no joking, no drink, seemingly no sex. Practically no possessions, as far as anyone could see. So much refusal, in greedy prosperous counter-cultural America, was practically exotic; and it added to his cult status, his austere glamour. He was an enigma, in the face of which they tried to maintain their ironic cool. And anyway, how could they guess what he was refusing; where his steely rigors came from. She could not, herself … Very little was known about him, except the rumors: that he had been an almost Major
Figure in his native Germany; and that he left, in some obscure act of flight. Perhaps he had committed a crime, or was running away from a broken love affair … Although none of them could imagine Wolfe in love. She sees him striding into his whitewashed cottage at the end of the day, and into his complete, his uncompromising solitude. A riddling icon, incongruous in the pristine Appalachian setting, like some Easter Island statue found improbably in a South American jungle. She wishes she could have come up to him at the end of that lesson and put her hand on his shoulder, looked directly into his eyes … That she could have broken through his solitude. But that was what he chose: the art monk, art sacrifice. Unwomaned, entirely. Was he right to wonder if she had the kidney for it, the necessary strength.
She sighs. Sometimes she feels like a half-blind creature, groping her way through the maze of her own self … She checks the next day’s schedule, gets ready for bed. The Bulgarian women’s singing comes back to her, with its raw erotic calls; desire without shame, asserted as fiercest strength.
Next morning, she practices Chopin’s Second Scherzo, which she hasn’t played for a while. The enigmatic opening rolls out from under her fingers elastically, followed by the grand proud chords, which leap into the shape of a martial mazurka, as if they were always within her hand. She feels an uninhibited, almost wild joy as the piece opens out into its expansive melody, emerging from her fingers with a fluent, lyrical motion. Like the movement of fleeting thought … Then the alteration to another mini-mazurka, ineffable in its melancholy … The miraculous capriciousness of Chopin’s motifs, turned into a miraculous necessity. How does this happen, she wonders yet again, how did he convert his mercurial fancies into seeming absoluteness? She thinks of Chopin’s house which she’d seen once in Warsaw, and
the romantic park with sloping lawns and low dreamy horizon, a dark pond and weeping willows, and the puffy clouds moving overhead with a fluent motion of their own. All of it in the music … Chopin standing outside peasant cottages in the evenings, listening to raw, wistful songs. In the music too, transformed it into the most exquisite elegance … Through the weaving lines of the Scherzo, she remembers a childhood moment, in another landscape. Ah yes, she can almost feel the sun on her neck and shoulders back then, as she stepped out of the hacienda and on to the pampas, with its expanse of ruffled grasses, and a gentle breeze lifting her little white nightie and bending the grass like a great breath, in a sweeping melodious motion … Her father coming out behind her and stroking her hair, and before her, the play of light and shadow, and the intimation of a harmonious motion, the inward music of things … She continues with the Scherzo, not quite knowing any longer whether she is summoning the music from under her fingers, or whether it is guiding her hand through its musings, just beyond the horizon of her thoughts, her longings.
Longing and loneliness. Back in her hotel room, the longing, left on its own, gapes, gasps, wells, surges. I have chosen this, she thinks, somehow I have chosen it. It always comes upon her before a concert, this visitor, this pure news from herself. Let it ride, let it ride, this horse of the Apocalypse. She has her routines for this too, she knows she has to let It do with her as it will, let it have its way with her. She handles herself carefully, since she is almost in physical pain. She lies down on the bed, waiting for it to course through her. She is an athlete who can’t count on dying young; she has to treat herself with professional care. It’s nothing, she thinks, nothing, a mood, a vapor. It’s nothing, you’re nothing, this doesn’t matter. This too shall pass. The throb of silence, and then the throb of her own self. She can feel
the beast removing its claws, lifting, leaving. The Female Beast is how she thinks of it, the Saint Teresa syndrome in its other aspect. She doubts that Rothman is prone to such states. And yet, as she gets up and composes herself for the task ahead, she feels that this danger is close to the source, the source of strength; that there, her soul recharges its being.
She plays with a fine, unforced elan that evening; and the audience responds with enthusiastic warmth. A reception afterward at the American Embassy. The ambassadress, a handsome woman in a four-square suit, expounds energetically and amiably on the country to which she is an emissary, on the nature, the very character of Bulgaria. Countries seem to have acquired personalities these days, Isabel has noticed, complete with characteristic features, virtues and vices. More character than most people are given credit for. But the ambassadress extols the virtues: the vivacity of the people, their generosity and cleverness. Does Isabel know about the Bulgarian computer geniuses? She’s doing her best to entertain the visiting artist, not to let a blank, uncivilized silence fall; and Isabel tries to go along, to keep alert and interested. There is something, in fact, that intrigues her about the country where she happens to have found herself; something she has sensed in the singing of the women, the rhythms of the streets, in the air. The economy though, the ambassadress continues, is a disappointment. She had thought Bulgaria would take well to free enterprise, but it hasn’t, it is lagging behind some of its neighbors … She stops, turning toward a man who has come up to them, and is making a small bow. Isabel has seen him before, she knows that, though she remembers not so much him, as the gesture he has just made, the small, rather courtly bow; and also, something oddly intense about his expression. Then she realizes: it’s the man from Paris, the one who came to the Green Room with McElvoy. Didn’t McElvoy
say something about his being in Sofia? Or that woman did, at the reception. The man is looking at her out of his long, narrow face, with the same puzzling intentness which had thrown her off guard before. The ambassadress introduces him as Anzor Islikhanov. This time she catches the name.