Authors: Christopher Priest
‘I never forgot you, but I had to devote myself to the orchestra and the other musicians I met on the way. That was what I was there to do. You knew all that. You encouraged me to go on the tour. There’s a problem with time and I don’t know how to explain it to you.’
I had no money. Just the cash you left when you went away, and what I could earn. The cash started to run out. It would have been enough if you had come home when you said you would, but you never came back. At first your parents said they would help but your father died soon after that and then your mother was ill. There was another war scare and the economy nose-dived. Some of the banks seized people’s accounts. Your account was locked for a few days, but then it opened again. It made no difference – I couldn’t get at the money that was there. Almost all my students stopped coming here for tuition and because of the emergency I could find no new ones. All abandoned me except Pyotr, who came every week and then every day.
‘Pyotr? Is that his name?’
For a while Pyotr had nowhere to live so he came in here with me, for company, to save money, nothing more than that. I was so frightened, so lonely! We shared expenses, but after a few months we couldn’t afford the rent on this place, even together. Pyotr was offered a small flat in Errest. The rent was much lower. He moved to it and at first I stayed on here. I was still waiting for you, but more than a year had passed and I didn’t know what to do. Pyotr said he wanted to live with me again, so I went back to Errest. We are together now and we want to stay together. I’m in love with him. I’m not coming back to you, Sandro. You abandoned me. It’s too late to put things back where they were. Why aren’t you saying anything?
‘There’s a problem with time and I don’t know how to explain it to you.’
I don’t see what that has to do with anything.
‘That’s what I can’t explain,’ I said. ‘It’s a problem and I don’t understand it myself.’
After she had left, a quiet departure when it was clear there was nothing more we could say, I opened the second bottle of beer. I stood at the window and watched her walking away along the road, under the street lamps. At the turn of the street I noticed the indistinct figure of a man waiting for her. They met, then went out of sight together. The moon glinted on the sea beyond where she had walked. I stared out towards the islands. I drank the full bottle of beer in one draught. I was not thirsty and I did not want to get drunk, but in the silence she had left behind her there was nothing else I could think of doing.
The next morning the first of my postcards was delivered in the mail.
Dear Alynna, I am on an island called Wesler, but I’m not exactly sure where it is, or how far we have travelled. This evening we are putting on the first of our concerts, and tomorrow I am going to be running a masterclass at one of the colleges here. I love you and I am missing you, and I promise I shall be home very soon, much sooner than you think. With love, Sandro.
(By the way, the watch you gave me years ago seems to have gone wrong.)
That was what I wrote to her. Back then, when the mysteries of time could still be explained. Or if not understood then guessed at.
As I began slowly to dig myself out of the trough of misery I knew I should have to work again. As far as composing was concerned I felt silent inside, but I could still play and session work was available. I began regular trips to Glaund City and naturally I saw again some of my colleagues from the tour.
I immediately discovered something I should have realized. I was not the only one suffering from lost, or possibly gained, time. Everyone had experienced the same as me, and their lives were as blighted as mine.
We had a lot in common, I found. We shared our stories, did what we could to reassure each other. It was a way of explaining, of asking, of venting some of the feelings of anger or frustration or loss. Some of the stories I heard were horrifying. One of the principal violinists on the tour, a young woman of immense artistic promise whom I had known well, had committed suicide. She split up with her fiancé when she returned, or she found the fiancé had not waited for her – no one was sure what had actually happened. A week later she was dead of an overdose of painkillers. My own loss was not unlike hers, but still the news shocked me. Others were said to be drinking hard, or had given up playing music professionally – one of the four cellists on the tour had been sent to prison, although it wasn’t certain what he was said to have done.
There were many other stories of broken relationships, lost homes, alienated children, violent disputes, claims for money, betrayals, desertions.
I listened, tried to make sense of it, as we all did. Many of us had devised theories to explain the phenomenon, but they did not help. Nothing helped. On the evenings when these meetings took place I would usually stay overnight in a hotel in Glaund City, because it was better sitting around in a bar with fellow sufferers late into the evening than returning to another lonely night in my apartment. The hotel was as lonely, but it was at least free of unwelcome reminders.
The first few of these meetings were casual – some of us would get together after a recording session – but gradually other people who had been on the tour heard about us and they turned up too. It was not an answer, but there was a feeling of safety in numbers, a common cause of grief. One evening, nearly two-thirds of all the people who had been on the tour turned up, and after that we decided to make the meetings semi-formal. We knew of a restaurant with an upstairs function room, so we met there one night of every week.
After several of these occasional gatherings I was beginning to come to terms with what had happened when I read in one of the specialist musical magazines that my distant nemesis And Ante had released another record. As before it was available only through a specialist importer. I tried to ignore it.
Things had changed, though, since Ante’s first theft of my property. My work was better known, many more people had listened to it, and several of my compositions had been discussed in the most serious critical terms. While I tried to ignore Msr Ante, other people were listening to his record, and it was not long before new similarities to my music were being identified. At one of our informal self-help meetings, one of my colleagues showed me a page of reviews in a recent magazine. He held it across towards me, and asked me if I knew about it.
‘It mentions you,’ he said.
I took it from him, looked more closely. Who could blame me for doing so? Every instinct warned me to ignore Ante, told me not to interest myself in what he might be doing, but curiosity did get the better of me.
My colleague said, ‘Do you know this guy? Did you meet him while we were out there?’
It was actually the picture that first gained my interest: next to the printed review was a colour reproduction of the sleeve of Ante’s new album. The photograph depicted a scene achingly familiar to me: it was the view from Hakerline Promise across the shallow strait towards the island of Temmil. The great conical mound of the Gronner was silhouetted black against a red and gold sunset sky. A plume of grey smoke or steam, illuminated in many shades of yellow, orange and pink by the lowering sun behind it, drifted serenely away from the high crater, gradually dispersing in the calm evening air. White-painted boats rode the sea. The tiny town of Temmil Waterside could be made out, a cluster of colourful buildings set between the sea and the foot of the coastal hills.
Ante’s name was blazoned across the top, blocked white letters with red outlines.
The magazine had printed another photograph of Ante lower down the page: it had been reproduced in black and white and he was standing with his face lowered and half turned away.
I glimpsed words, lines, phrases in the review. I saw my name several times, Ante’s name, a reference to one of my piano sonatas, my orchestral suite
Breaking Waves
. I turned away from the magazine and handed it back.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I do know about that.’
Whatever obscure threat Ante’s activities might once have seemed to be, I felt myself no longer vulnerable.
‘They say here that he’s stealing your music.’
‘Let them. Let him.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you?’
‘Not now. It did once, but he’s young and foolish. He’ll grow up and regret it one day.’
Part of this was bravado, part of it was denial. But in truth I felt that after what had happened to my life at the end of the tour I had more to worry about than a young rock guitarist copying my work.
A few more weeks went by. Our self-help group continued, but after the first flurry of activity our numbers gradually reduced, as we should have known they would, to a core of regulars. There were soon only at most fifteen of us who went along for a meal in the restaurant and then some drinks afterwards in the private bar upstairs. The others drifted away. I was aware the meetings were futile, but they were all we had.
I had never been particularly friendly with the cellist Ganner, who in a different era of my life, as it felt, had first made me notice the time slippage when we were aboard ships, but one evening he and I were sitting at a table together in the upstairs bar. On that occasion I had brought with me my stave. For some reason I had kept it. After I returned to the chaos of my wrecked life I had put it away in a closet with most of the other stuff I acquired during the trip. There it had remained while I tried to make sense of what had happened. That day, knowing we would be having our regular meeting in the evening, I had come across it and taken it with me.
I was not entirely sure why – perhaps it was an unconscious indication that I was coming at last to the end of the first stage of recovery, a closure, a step towards whatever came next.
I took the stave out of my music case, and laid it on the table between us.
‘You’ve kept yours, then?’ Ganner said immediately.
‘Have you?’
‘I wasn’t sure what to do with it.’
‘But you didn’t throw it away.’
‘I like the way it looks. The way it feels in your hand.’
‘Did you ever find out what it was for?’ I said.
‘No.’
I picked it up and held it in the fashion I had seen it handled by all those border guards, Shelterate officials, whatever they were properly called. I held the metal handle in one hand, and rotated it while the fingers of my other hand lightly touched the smooth surface. The sensation was close to how you might expect a rod of finely sanded softwood would feel if you rotated it lightly in your fingers – but there was something else. Not quite a sensation of static electricity, not a vibration, nor any physical response at all, but a feeling of
contact
, of a new
awareness
. I had felt this every time I had done it. At first I assumed it was the finely grained surface rubbing against my fingers but later I noticed that the same feeling was detectable if my fingers never actually touched the rotating surface but were a millimetre or two away. Any further away than that and the sensation disappeared. It made me wonder if the thing was emitting or radiating something other than friction.
I performed this familiar action while Ganner watched. Then I described the feeling.
He shook his head. ‘I have never felt that.’
He took the stave from me, held it the way I had done, and turned the rod against his fingertips.
Then he put it back down on the table.
‘Nothing?’ I said.
‘No. It’s just a piece of wood that’s been smoothed,’ Ganner said. ‘But that’s probably what I like about it. You know how long instrument makers have to polish the bodies of cellos, and the other string instruments. How they achieve that superb finish. Not the varnish but the fine texture of the belly’s inner surface. Whoever made the staves was an instrument maker, and he or she did the same with them.’
‘So maybe it’s a musical instrument?’ That in fact had not occurred to me before.
‘I don’t think so,’ Ganner said.
‘Then there’s this.’ I picked up the stave again, and held the handle so that Ganner could see it. I rested my thumbnail beneath the words deeply and perfectly engraved into the metal. I couldn’t pronounce them, but they were
Istifade mehdudiyyet bir sexs – doxsan gün
. ‘Have you any idea what that means?’
‘Have you?’
‘I’ve deciphered what the words say, but I’m still at a bit of a loss.’
While I had been in Temmil Waterside I noticed a shop selling tourist maps and books, and I had seen a basic introduction to the written form of the patois used throughout the Ruller Islands. During my travels I learned that nearly all the patois forms spoken in various parts of the Archipelago were vernacular, purely oral, but that some of the island seigniories, particularly in the island groups most visited by tourists, made attempts to produce a written form, even if only as a primer, a rudimentary lexicon. The Rullers were one such island group.
During an idle hour on the voyage home, I had used this book to try to interpret the words on the stave. It was only a rough translation, and probably unreliable, but as far as I could tell the inscription said:
Unlimited use of one person – ninety days
.
I told Ganner this.
‘So what do you say that means?’ he said.
‘I think it means what it says. The stave is usable by one person only, on an unlimited basis, but only for ninety days. It’s like an expiry date.’ Ganner was looking uninterested, so I said, ‘The point is they wouldn’t put information like that on the stave if the stave didn’t have a function.’
‘But you don’t know what.’
‘I don’t think any of us did.’
I remembered the often repeated ritual in the Shelterate buildings, with the officials running their fingers over the staves, then mysteriously inserting them into the scanner and handing them back without comment. Clearly they knew what the use was – it would tell them something their job required them to know, and at the end of the process the thing was handed back to the one person who had unlimited use of it for ninety days.