22
“Dr. North?”
“Yes.” Kristian opened the door to his office, and stood back to let the young woman pass by him. She had a leather portfolio under her arm, and a recorder and microphone in a jumble in her hands. She stood uncertainly in the center of the room, looking about her at the crowded room with its baby grand piano, small sofa and stuffed chair, floor lamps, and a vintage cherrywood desk piled high with books and music. It was the classic picture of a professor's office, and it had only taken him three months to make it look that way.
“You must be Emma. Have a seat.” He pointed to the chair opposite the desk, then went around and sat down behind it. He pushed his computer and an empty coffee cup out of the way, and propped his elbows on the wood.
“Thanks for your time this morning,” she said. She gingerly set the recorder on the edge of the desk, and held the mike up as if asking a blessing. “Do you mind this?”
“Nope.” He smiled at her. “It's probably just as well. Then we can't dispute what either of us said.”
Her cheeks flamed, and she shook her wispy mop of brown hair. “Oh, no, Dr. North! I would never dispute . . . that is, I only want to write whatâ” She stopped, biting her lower lip.
“I was kidding,” he said. “You can relax, really. Go ahead, turn the thing on, and ask away.”
When he saw that her hand shook a little as she reached for the recorder, he said, “Really, Emma, you can take it easy. It's just an interview. Writing the article is the hard part.”
She dropped her hand to her lap, but she gave him a shy smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I'm so new at this.”
“I know. That's why I thought you'd be the right person.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You did?”
He laughed. “Sure. Why not? Your magazine wants an article, and I would imagine you could use a break.”
“I do, I'm afraid. I didn't know being a reporter would be so hard. Not the writing part, but the interviewsâ” She broke off, blushing again.
“All the good jobs are hard, Emma.”
“I thought everyone would love talking to a reporter,” she said. “Get their name in print, a bit of publicity. It turns out it's only people who haven't done anythingâoh, that sounds wrong. I mean, famous people don't need to talk to me, soâ”
He chuckled. “I'm hardly famous.”
“Oh, but you are, Dr. North! All the journals want this interview.”
“It's nice of you to say that. I thought it was time to answer some questions. It's been long enough now, and the university seemed to think it was a good idea.”
“They're thrilled to have you here, I bet.”
He shrugged. “This is a good school. And it's going to get even better. The administration is investing a lot in the future of musicology.”
She smiled. “That's kind of funny, isn't it? Sort of aâ”
Kristian grinned. “A paradox. Yeah. I like it.”
She clicked on the recorder, then pushed it to one side. “So, can you tell me, Dr. Northâwhat does it feel like to know you're the last person allowed to do remote research?”
He laughed. “Is that your slant?”
She nodded. “That's what my editor suggested,” she said. “Now that the Remote Research Foundation is shut down. Actually, I'm an amateur musician myself, and I'm more interested in what it was like to see Brahms, to hear him play the piano. I'd love to write a whole article about that.”
“It wasn't a piano, actually,” Kristian said. “It was a fortepiano, very old-fashioned even for the time. Although I only heard him plunk a couple of notes, so it hardly matters.”
“Did he look like you expected?”
“Very like the photographs of him when he was young. Perhaps not as tall as I thought he would be, and more slender.”
“Clara Schumann wrote that his eyes were an unusual blue.”
“Are you a Schumann scholar, Emma?”
“Not a scholar exactly.” She leaned forward a little. “But she was so fascinating, wasn't she? I mean, a woman of that time, and all she accomplishedâher music is beautiful. If only there were more of it.”
“It was hard for her, I think. She had a lot of kids, and a long concert career.”
“I know.” Emma smiled. “If I were going to transfer, I think I'd like to meet someone like Clara Schumann.”
“Really,” Kristian said.
“Sure! Or maybe George Eliot.”
“Ah. A feminist.”
She flushed again. “You think feminism is outdated, maybe.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “My original dissertation topic was âFeminism in the Songs of Clara Schumann.' My advisers were the ones who thought that was outdated.”
She had a pen in her hand and a notebook on her lap, but she hadn't written any notes. “That's stupid,” she said bluntly.
He laughed again. “Well, âP Dolce in the Works of Brahms' did well enough for me.”
She was nodding, playing with the pen. “Yes, I read it, Dr. North. I didn't really understand, though.”
“What instrument do you play?”
“Piano. A bit of organ.”
“But the description didn't make sense?” She shook her head. He stood, and crooked a finger. “Come on. I'll show you.”
She followed him to the piano, and stood behind him as he sat down on the bench and opened the score of the Quartet in A Major. He turned the pages until he came to the marking,
p dolce
. He demonstrated, playing through the passage once, then again. It was a subtle difference, that interpretation he had absorbed from the Master's mind, but it was as clear to him as if he had heard Brahms play it himself. Clearer, perhaps. He had spent no more than an hour
with
the Master, but it had been enough. He shaded the phrase so that it was both soft and sweet, but with an underlying strength, a meaning that no mere marking could convey.
When he lifted his fingers from the keys, she breathed, “You play so beautifully! You could have had a concert career.”
“Oh, I don't think so,” he said.
Nothing like Clara's
. “I got my start much too late. And really, musicology is what I love. Always loved.” He closed the score and stood up, but instead of going back to his desk he went to the window to look out over the campus. He had only been here at the University of the Pacific for a short time, but already he felt proprietary about it. The Conservatory building stood at the edge of the campus, traditional brick with ivy drooping over the windows and climbing up the walls. The lawns of the campus were littered with damp red and gold leaves now, and the December sunshine gave them a festive glitter. The term was almost over. The Christmas holiday wasn't far off.
Beyond the campus was his apartment building, where he lived alone in a one-bedroom. He had asked Erika to move with him, but she had preferred to stay in Boston. It was probably just as well. She wouldn't like his solitary life. And she had met someone.
“Do you mind answering the other question?” Emma asked. She repositioned the mike, and she poised her pen over her notebook.
“You mean, what it feels like to be the last remote researcher?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “You know, Emma, I think it's the wrong question. The real question should be how we feel about remote research, whether one tragedy should be enough to stop the whole program.”
“Frederica Bannister has been in a coma for nearly two years now.”
“Yes. Think, though, about all the others who went before her. Twelve, fifteen? We learned a lot from them. The real question is whether we should ever do this again.”
“One of those researchers never recovered from the effects of time lag, I read. The one who went to seventeenth-century France. Did you have difficulty with that? You transferred four times.”
“I did. I got over it.”
Mostly
.
“Do you feel bad about Miss Bannister?” Emma's young face was innocent and hopeful as she waited for his response.
Kristian had to look away for a moment. “I feel terrible. Her motherâI should say, her parentsâwere devastated.”
“They won the lawsuit, though.”
“Hardly compensation for losing their daughter.”
“If you could, Dr. North, would you go back again?”
He schooled his features carefully before he looked back at her. “No. I had my chance, and I'm grateful. But I wouldn't do it again.”
“Do you oppose further remote research?”
“On principle, no. In practice, yes.”
She tapped her chin with the pen. “You think they might be right then. About changing the time line.”
It was the question he had been afraid of answering, all this time. The dangerous question. He had planned his answer with caution, and with no reference to the song neither he nor Erika had been able to remember, nor the vague impression he had that the biography of Brahms had something odd about it. He put his back to the window, and faced the little recorder. He wanted to make sure this was clear.
“Until we know what happened to Frederica Bannister,” he said, “I think Congress is right to put a hold on remote research. Whatever it was that went wrong”â
Poor Clara!
â“it could happen again. We have to know how to prevent it.”
She thanked him, asked for a couple of minor details, then gathered up her recorder and microphone and left his office. He glanced at his watch, and gathered his notes for his next lecture. The interview had gone well, he thought. That was good, because he wouldn't be doing another. He had already published his dissertation, and he was contracted to write three articles on Brahms. When he finished those, he intended a series on Clara Schumann. It was enough. It would have to be enough.
He tried not to think of his empty apartment, his solitary weekends, the long quiet evenings. There were concerts, of course. Recitals. Cocktail parties. Still, in moments of honesty, he admitted to himself that he was lonely.
A ghost made very poor company.
Â
He had seen Clara Schumann several times since that night in the apartment in Boston. It was safer to think of her as a ghost than as an effect of time lag, but sometimes it seemed to him he had never fully returned to his own century. The months he had spent working on his dissertation had been marked by unnerving moments when Brahms's youthful face swam before his eyes, when the dusty air of his carrel filled with the scent of roses. He often dreamed of that brief moment when he held the real Clara in arms that were also real. They had not belonged to him, those arms, but the sensations were vivid in his memory just the same.
At Juilliard he had been lucky to get a dorm room on the ninth floor of the Rose Building. He shared it with a theater student who seemed to more or less live full-time with his girlfriend in Soho. Kristian liked being alone, as he spent all his spare time on the dissertation. One day, when he had been struggling to describe Brahms's feeling about
p dolce
for hours, he pushed away his computer. He turned off all the lights in the room, and went to lie on the floor in front of his CD player. He put in a CD of the A-Major Quartet, and tucked a pillow under his head. He closed his burning eyes, and tried to let the darkness and the strains of the music soothe him.
As the music played, he couldn't help remembering Clara at the fortepiano in Casa Agosto, her slender fingers flashing as she played through the score. His heart twisted with longing for that little salon, for the picture the two of them made together. He knew Erika was right and that he had to accept that Clara, however ideal she might have been, had been gone for a very long time. It wasn't right to feel that the women he saw around him were somehow pale and dull in comparison.
The problem was thatâfor himâClara was right there. She lived and breathed, just on the other side of the veil. It seemed if he could reach out, find an opening, a window through time, she would smile at him again, hold him in her slender arms, kiss his cheek once more.
He thought of trying to find the other researcher who suffered from time lag, to learn if he had the same experience. Did he imagine he was back in Versailles, long to see the Hall of Mirrors, yearn to listen to the French of the seventeenth century?
Kristian wondered if Frederica had lost herself this way, trying to hold on to the wrong century, then unable to find her way back to her own. It wasn't scientific. It wasn't even logical. Still, Kristian couldn't banish the feeling that he had one foot in 1861 and the other in the twenty-first century. Despite his assurances to Erika, he didn't know if it would ever pass.
The quartet came to an end. Reluctantly, Kristian opened his eyes and sat up.