Middle C (57 page)

Skizzen really had no room or time or inclination to record the assaults of man upon his environment, as deadly as his pacifications. How busy we are with our days: felling forests, shaving hills, overgrazing, overfishing, setting fires, and causing floods, drilling, mining, bringing fresh infestation to local flora and native fauna, polluting the earth and air with fire and water; and how deserved will our pain be when our host rebels, and we do return to dust or slide into the sea. The professor would sometimes crumple a helpless strip of such reportage into a pill of futile rage. I will enjoy it. I must. Justice at last … in the form of rust.

I am
your
judge, he would believe during rarer moments, you are not mine—not mine—not mine—and with his inquisition scheduled he needed to collect righteousness like provisions for a voyage; for what would happen to him when they tossed him out, homeless and poor, into the very cruel and soiling world he had tried so valiantly to avoid?

1915–1923. It is estimated that roughly 1,500,000 children, women, and men were deported to their death by the Ottoman Empire. Those missed by the first sweep were later kicked out of their houses. The Turks claimed the Armenians started it. Young Turks took advantage of the First World War to massacre 275,000 Assyrian-Chaldeans and hundreds of thousand of Greeks. In 1938–39 Turkification was completed with the removal of 65,000 Kurds and a scattering of Jews.

1932–1933. As if stealing a page from the Brits vis-á-vis the Irish, the Russian government confiscated an entire harvest in the Ukraine causing 7 million to die nationwide. I especially like the name for this solution: the Holodomor. Ukrainian fields were borrowed by the NKVD in 1940 as sites for the murder of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn (in the same fashion that the
Germans were exhibiting elsewhere). Chechens often enjoyed the attention of Russian executioners. Future archaeologists will be able to find bones almost anywhere they shove a shovel.

Skizzen had recently read that a famous fellow named Bertrand had confessed: “Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist. It is easy to see man as dark and cruel, as an embodiment of diabolic power, and as a blot upon the fair face of the universe.” No, Russell. Russell, it turns out, is unable to persevere in this judgment.

GERM WARFARE. Japanese Unit 731, operating between 1932 and 1945. The germ inflicts people with rotting-leg disease—ulcerous sores that killed between ten and twelve thousand of Chinese prisoners, and later three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand civilians. I have labeled it rare and little known in modern times, but one of the triumphs of my researches.

These days. Backed by the USA, the Pakistan army, according to a customarily conservative scholarly estimate, killed, during 1971 alone, one and a half million Bengali citizens of Bangladesh, who happened to have an unpopular religion. Elites were the favored target. Germans also picked on Polish intellectuals and after killing both of them (the joke ran) turned their attention to washerwomen. The wounded are never counted as carefully as the dead, but it has often turned out that being wounded was the worse affliction.

On many cards, Skizzen had entered no more than a place-name and a date, intending to get back to those notes later with the estimated sum of each subtraction and to pencil in his personal comments. The work was routine but numbing. On the back of a card, he would occasionally
paste a photograph of corpses looking like heaps of laundry, piles of skulls with their wide black eyes, or vaguely located mass graves and other places from which human consciousness has fled. Bodies that have been left out in the rain appear especially soggy and therefore more lifeless, as are the limbs, wet hair, and cotton blouses when examined separately. In winter one doesn’t need to hurry with any interment. If, on the other hand, graves are not dug deeply enough, the ground is likely to heave as the bodies rot.

Skizzen repeatedly fingered through the cards, pulling one out and then, after a glance, pushing it back in place again as if looking for a specific entry; but his fingers had a case of the nerves, and his eyes were possessed by a series of startled blinks, while moisture had begun dampening his goatee. Might he be jailed? Would they dare do that? Or would they be satisfied if he quietly disappeared. A flick, a wave, begone, strangely beset man. Isn’t that what you say when, after the play, you find a ghost still mooning about on the stage? He saw his mother’s few belongings swept into the back of a truck … to be delivered where? at whose expense? There, too, was his mother, squatting among her pots and trowels, scowling at the sky, bidding bye-bye to her … well … life’s work … Suddenly, to be forced to leave her palace of petals, as she was fond of describing it, and, most mornings, her so lovingly cultivated pearl-wet leaves … It was too painful. What moment of realization might finally overcome her, so that her tears could extinguish her anger?

Oh, good heavens, he’d forgotten. He had Debbie to deal with. Debbie lived nearby. Surely Debbie would take her mother in … She’d enjoy having her mother near. They could both watch Debbie’s pebble grow beyond rock to boulder. Perhaps Miriam could take up a little gardening at the farm. At the farm they grow potatoes underground like so many of the dead. Though potatoes’ eyes are multiple and small, their skins do resemble a mummified head.

What a stupid thing to think. Debbie might enjoy her mother’s company now and then, watching her make goo-goo eyes at the tot, and Miriam might like to hoist the kid up into her hug, proud she can do it, proud she is a grandma, proud of her kin; but not, no not, as a regular thing, like every morning before breakfast, before five in the bloody morning when these folks were inclined to get up, outrising the sun, no not as a daily, hourly occasion, moment-by-moment event, like tick
begets tock, until a hungry growth on Grammy’s arm appears, one you can see swell when her heart beats blood through the swelling.

Skizzen admonished—he cautioned—he lectured himself. Skizzen, he advised, should concentrate on the good years he had enjoyed. Skizzen, he realized, had finally become comfortable in the classroom. Skizzen, he confessed with some pride, had improved the record collection. There were now two versions of Béla Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra
. The college no longer used the mimeograph. While he lived, Carfagno treated him like royalty. Skizzen had his own office, he admitted, with a window that framed a view of the chapel and the quad, pretty as a postcard: all this from a building made of limestone scrap and healthy ivy. Skizzen, the professor, no longer scorned the rituals of conferring degrees or laughed at the happiness that graduation brought to parents. Skizzen, he had to draw the conclusion, was A-OK.

Fate had it in for him. It would grin—to suggest “not yet”; it would wink—falsely to promise “coming soon”; it would lead him to suppose success was as slow to release its sweet as a caramel in his mouth, he had but to wait—not yet—coming soon—only to find his sweet turn tacky each touch of his tongue; to find each succeeding moment rough. Although his first weeks at the High Note had been a bit awkward, he had adjusted finally, absorbed his duties, and had begun to enjoy the store’s piano. He was swimming in music; he heard glorious voices; he saw melody in the movement of the light. Then the carrothead had set him up, Joey was certain. Castle Cairfill had plotted a plot and made Mr. Kazan suspicious. Cairfill’s musical tastes were deplorable. Joey was free of blame, although his taste, then, rose no higher than the “Moonlight Sonata.” Despite his superiority in every particular, his opponent had won that round. There hadn’t been another, had there?

But wait. What an imbecile he was! Skizzen struck his brow a blow that he’d seen first in the movies. He should mark and measure his head, think like a yardstick. Yes, what an imbecile, Joey was. Professor Skizzen could count on the cowardice of these people. Oh yes. They would do anything to avoid scandal. He could threaten
them
with exposure. Oh yes, oh yes! He was in the driver’s seat. He smacked both cheeks tenderly. Oh … oh dear. No, he wasn’t. Yes, he was.

Miriam might find shelter at the farm. Nor did he think he’d be turned away, but would he be welcome? What could he do there, hoe
beans? buy a banjo to play while setting fire to the hay? Her high school sweater would not rise up to cheer him, and in the stony glare of her husband’s eyes he would merely be seen as an impediment to the plow: a rock to be turned over and tossed from the field. He had come to love his position at the school. He enjoyed his nice April walks across the quad, exchanging nods with the friendlier students, Professor Skizzen as dignified yet as interestingly odd as his station demanded, yellow daffs arranged in applauding rows along the path, tulips turning to watch him pass, a brisk wind asking the treetops to prance. What was left now but a life of crime? by setting the flypaper danglers afire! casually watching the cuttings curl up in the flame.
HUMAN CRUELTIES, IN A PANTOMIME OF HELL, CONSUMED BY OVERLY DRY ATTIC AIR
, reports the
Woodbine Times
. He and his mother had flown solo through life. It had never mattered to him that he had no friends. Nevertheless, he must try to die with decency. He’d be marched to jail in manacles. What did they call it? the perp walk—not the name of a dance step. It had actually come—that fearful moment. Friendless. Motherless. Fatherless too. He began to cry.

March 16, 1968. My Lai Massacre. Nearly five hundred people in the Vietnam villages of My Lai and My Khe were murdered by members of Charlie Company. The Americans demonstrated their skill in such matters (although for some it was their first time) by dropping many victims, like a line of cardboard targets at a carnival, into a handy drainage ditch. Babies were dispatched by gun and grenade, animals and women as well. There were no plants in pots or they’d have been shot. This riot of killing was observed by helicopters. The helicopters snitched.

42

I shall assume that you have each listened with full attention to Béla Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra
. Anyone like it? Hands. That’s nice. Several. We are blessed. This concerto is one of the major musical achievements of the twentieth century. Bartók was ill with leukemia and low on funds. His friends passed the hat behind his back in order to offer him their charity in the guise of a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Koussevitzky was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. You may have heard the results of his direction on some of your recordings. [… um …] This support enabled the composer to spend the summer of August 1943 at the spa at Saranac Lake—that’s in New York State—a spa is a health resort—where his illness momentarily improved. [……] Apologies. His illness did not improve, he did. His illness weakened. [……] The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also died of luke. Lots of people do. Lots. It is cancer of the blood, cancer of the marrow of the bones. It should be the disease of duchesses and counts, but it isn’t. Of blue bloods, you see. But it isn’t.

The concerto had its first performance, naturally under Koussevitzky’s leadership, in Boston during the winter of the following year. The audience’s reception was “tumultuous.” Critics were less excited, but performers liked the many opportunities the music gave them to blow their own horn and excel. Listeners were warm. Why shouldn’t they be? It was a wonderfully romantic nineteenth-century piece, with swelling strings, pounded drums, and plenty of trumpets. With a climax worthy of the movies. You can hear the music running into the arms of happiness.

Koussevitzky was a faithful and genuine supporter of the music of his own time, an almost reckless thing to be, especially if you were the conductor of a significant American orchestra, because patrons were customarily twenty-five years off the clock and, like the busy noses of the bees, went for nectar and its sweetness, not newness however savory. For further information on the numbskullish nature of audiences and the even greater tin eardrum of critics, try to remember my earlier lectures. [……]
Das Lied von der Erde
may have opened the door for Bartók and Schoenberg—it took some pushing and shoving to hear who
would get through first—but it was melancholy—a downer, do you say? [… ya? …] We did “Das Lied” two weeks ago. Remember? “The Song of the Earth.” Maa … ler. He died of a sore throat. I find it interesting that Mahler, Bartók, and Schoenberg changed their religion, not quite the way we change clothes, but as the occasion dictated nevertheless. Something for you to file away. Surprise the mind on a cloudy day.

All right, class, we return to our sheep: who is—Koussevitzky—did I call him: commissioner? [……] I call him the Commissioner because he suggested and funded compositions from contemporary composers: for instance he asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Listeners have forgotten that it was originally scored for the piano. For most folks only the full orchestra version answers to the name. Ravel’s version is a wonderful piece to test your loudspeakers with. Sorry. It is a good piece with which to test your speakers. [… um …] As colorful as Joseph’s coat. [… um …] A few good musical jokes about Jews. Listeners have forgotten about them, too.

You have to drive these gentlemen—Mussorgsky—Ravel—Koussevitzky—into the same corral, get them used to the smell of one another. Koussevitzky, Ravel, Mussorgsky. Up hands! Come on, don’t you remember the Great Gate? Cymbal crash! [……] Palms aplenty? Well, several. We are blessed.
Mein Gott
.

The Commissioner badgered work from Ravel—a piano concerto, not just the aforementioned orchestration. He encouraged a couple of operas: Douglas Moore’s
The Ballad of Baby Doe
, and Benjamin Britten’s
Peter Grimes
; then squeezed from Copeland, let’s see, Symphony no. 3. Next, what? [… um …] He gave Olivier Messiaen’s T-S symphony a push into the light of day, as well as Bartók’s
Concerto
. [……] No, it doesn’t mean what you gigglers think. [……] TS to you, too. It stands for
Turangalîla-Symphonie
. I shall write the title on the board. It is not easily spelled. [……] The news about Koussevitzky is not all positive. He led the Boston boys in one of the earlier recordings of Ravel’s
Boléro
. [……] I’m disappointed none of you groaned. Orchestras in those days were largely made up of scowling old men. Normally they didn’t like to learn, rehearse, or play new pieces, but the
Concerto for Orchestra
was bait too appealing to refuse.