Authors: Christopher Priest
Jacj’s drafting into the army was a terrible matter for my parents to bear, because it was known that conditions on the southern continent were harsh and dangerous. There were already many stories of young people who had not returned. The only consolation my parents had was that the battalions were normally demobilized in numerical order, so that they would eventually be able to work out when Jacj would come home. Around this time the 236th Battalion was said to be returning from duty, so we knew there was going to be a long wait.
We three remained at home. My parents were still both having to work as freelance music teachers, but as the conditions of the half-peace took hold they were hopeful of finding more permanent employment. There was talk of the possibility that the Industrial Palace would be rebuilt, although this would of course take several years to complete. My father said there were already moves to re-form the Philharmonia Orchestra.
I was wrapped up in my own worries, aware that it would be only a matter of time before I too was drafted, even though there were still four years before the problem became actual. I was desperate not to have to follow Jacj into the army. A full-time course at the conservatoire in Glaund City would defer the draft for two years, but even that postponement was not a possibility for me – the main building had been damaged in a raid and student places were few.
When I left school at the age of sixteen I had to look around for a job, and by a stroke of good fortune managed to obtain a lowly position as a trainee cost clerk with an electronics company in Errest. They had a contract to supply missile guidance systems, so although I was an insignificant member of the staff, without technical skill, their role as an arms supplier meant they were a safe haven for me.
The work I did was administrative and dull, but it gave me an adequate income while allowing me to develop as a composer in my spare time. So long as they went on selling their weapons systems to the junta I would be spared the army.
With a regular income I was eventually able to leave home. I rented an apartment with three good-sized rooms in a tall house not far from the sea. The area had been badly bombed, so rents were low. Music became my obsession and commitment once more – I spent most of what was left from my wages on gramophone records and printed scores. It was the period when long-playing vinyl records were available at affordable prices. I slowly built up a collection of the works I most loved. I borrowed books on composition from the local library, and read biographies of the great composers. I listened, I played, I wrote. Music rang through my head.
The cease-fire continued to hold. Many people were nervous that without a formal armistice the violence could break out again, but even so life was returning to what it had been before the raids. I managed my job so that I had as much spare time as possible, attending almost every concert I could find, sometimes having to travel a long way.
One summer I took a week’s holiday and stayed alone in a small hotel in Glaund City, which was about an hour’s train journey along the coast from Errest. By this time the worst damage to the centre of the capital had been repaired, so that public concerts were once again taking place. Live music was at last emerging from behind the alarms and from inside the shelters where we had all been forced to hide. It was a thrilling time. I used up most of my savings during this one week, but afterwards regarded it as an important period. It confirmed to me what I had been reading in music magazines, and had heard from a few other musicians, that although the traditional repertoire was as popular as ever modernist music was once again being composed and performed.
The music I was writing soon started to make a mark, albeit a small one. Through my father, and other contacts, I arranged local performances of some of my pieces. One was a song cycle based on the verse of the Glaundian poet Goerg Skynn, another was a suite for piano and flute, my most complex work at this time was a piano sonata and when I was twenty-seven I mounted an impressionistic piece for piano and violin at a recital in Errest Town Hall. It celebrated Memorial Day and it was called
Breath
.
Breath
was a composition inspired by and depicting moorland scenes on the hills I could see in the distance from the windows of my apartment. I made several solitary trips to the moors, soaking in the feelings and sounds. I went the first time because I wanted to breathe unpolluted air, and I guessed that the altitude of the moors would be above the layer of airborne muck that we normally had to take in, but once I was there I began to appreciate the greater subtleties of the area. Much of the landscape evoked silence: the spaces in the music represented the absence of sound when a bird or an animal sprang away from me as I trudged over the tussocks and along the paths. Wind flowing through the coarse grasses was suggested in the background. Windless days created a quietness I had never known before. The sounds of steeply flowing streams wound their way through my melodies.
For this recital I played the piano myself, with a young woman called Alynna Rosson taking the violin part. I had met Alynna at one of the concerts I went to in Glaund City, and we had become friends.
Neither of us had played in front of an audience, even one so small as ours that night, and it was an emotional experience for both of us. Afterwards, in the bare room behind the platform, where Alynna had left her violin case, we were both crying. For me it was partly the relief of having completed the performance without obvious mistakes, but also I had been living again the emotions I felt while conceiving and writing the piece. Imagining she must be undergoing the same feelings of release I tried to comfort Alynna by putting my hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged me away.
‘I felt I was alone up there,’ she said, and her voice was low, but not because she was crying. I realized only then that she was angry with me. ‘I could not hear you playing,’ she said, and her voice broke up.
‘The score has many silences. I was with you, but it was the same for me.’
‘When we rehearsed—’
‘A rehearsal is never the same,’ I said. ‘You played perfectly tonight. I found it very moving to hear you playing like that.’
‘I was only following the score.’
‘That is how it should have been. The score is the shape of the music. You are still shaking.’ Once more I tried to console her with a hand on her arm, but again she pulled away from me. People were passing and the door opened and closed a couple of times. The lights in the corridor outside went out. The staff wanted to close the building. ‘You are upset,’ I said stupidly, wishing I knew how to make things better for both of us.
‘It was those silences,’ she said. ‘I could not hear them properly and I was trying to count the bars. I was terrified of missing them.’
‘The notes were written to go around the pauses. They describe and define the spaces. It is only in silence that music is pure.’
She was staring at me, frowning, not comprehending. I wished neither of us had said anything.
‘I saw the silences on the score. I didn’t know you were going to mark them with red ink.’
‘The score has to show the pauses as well as the notes. I am giving another recital next month,’ I said. ‘Would you like to be there with me?’
‘After what just happened?’
‘Please, Alynna.’
For me, what had just happened had been a transcending experience, with a purity of note and expression from her violin that made me shake inside. Her sensitive playing made me want to wave my arms with excitement. Her negative response was really confusing to me.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, putting away her violin.
Soon after this Alynna left without saying goodbye. I was in turmoil. My constant need to be writing and playing meant that I had never formed proper relationships with anyone of the opposite sex. The events of that evening reminded me painfully of my inexperience. Alynna made me think I had failed her, frightened her, and because I was blundering I had actually damaged whatever it was that had seemed sensual and intimate when we were playing together. In those few minutes of playing
Breath
she had come to seem beautiful to me. I had a lot to learn.
Outside, as I left the hall, a few members of the audience were waiting in the cold darkness to greet me, to congratulate me. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to me before, and I was unprepared. I tried to respond graciously to the polite compliments but as soon as I could I retreated to the yard at the back of the town hall, found my bicycle where I had left it and pedalled home through the chill fog.
My route led me for part of the way along the shore, a narrow road close to the edge of a cliff. As always I glanced to the south, across the sea, towards those islands that had so briefly enchanted me in childhood. I could see nothing of them in the murky darkness, no hint of lights, not even a sense of their bulking shapes. I had stared at them so often, though, that I knew their dark outlines, their silent mysteries. I hummed a fragment of music, imagining myself walking on the hills of one of the islands.
When I was thirty years old I made the breakthrough I had been hoping for. An independent record label based in a small town a long way from Errest, on the far side of Glaund City, approached me. They specialized in commissioning recordings by new or emerging musicians and featured small orchestras. They packaged their records well, priced them reasonably and for a small label managed to have most of their catalogue distributed through the shops. They had decided to release a long-playing record to showcase contemporary Glaundian music.
As soon as I heard about it I submitted several recent pieces. The first scores I sent in were returned to me, often without comment, but at least two of them were described as unsuitable. They gave no reasons. I kept trying, and finally they accepted a short piece I had written the year before. It was called
Dianme
.
Dianme
is a single-movement quartet for piano, flute, violin and viola. It was inspired by the island of the same name, which was one of the islands in the bay offshore from Errest.
Using the name
Dianme
was my way of revealing a personal discovery of the island, but a few people remarked, sometimes in print, that it was a political act too. I was politically naïve, so when I went on a quest to find out what the island was called I accidentally discovered the Glaundian government’s deliberate attempt to control what information could be allowed to the public.
I established the island’s name only after much searching around, using old directories, atlases, charts and so on. I had assumed that such a search would be routine. In reality I discovered there was a cloud of obfuscation about all the islands in the region. A librarian told me in confidence that a directive had been issued by the military junta several years before to the effect that all reference books and maps about the islands must be surrendered to the government. Quite apart from covering up what the islands’ names were, the secrecy extended to photographs and drawings, descriptions, even encyclopaedia entries about population statistics, agriculture, trade, and everything else. It was as if the islands had been declared not to exist at all.
Most contemporary maps naturally had to include our shoreline, but nothing was depicted in detail of the sea itself. Some of the maps marked the ocean as the ‘Midway Sea’, and in much smaller type the words ‘Dream Archipelago’ appeared, sometimes in parentheses. I had heard the name somewhere – perhaps it was mentioned at school? – but I knew nothing at all about where or what the Archipelago might be. No islands were ever depicted on maps.
One day in a second-hand shop I came across a dusty old book about the Glaundian shoreline. A footnote about a tidal surge mentioned the three islands in a factual way, and named them. The smallest of the three was called Dianme, named after a benign goddess of mythology, alleged to have stirred up a warm wind from the south-east. This usually brought the spring early to our coast.
Charmed by the discovery, I wrote my quartet. I was happy to have the name at last.
The other two islands, larger and further away from the shore, were called Chlam and Herrin, again named after mythological events. I mentally stored them for future use.
Physical details of the islands were still difficult to make out, even when magnified by the bird-watching field glasses that used to belong to my father. The glasses were not strong enough to clarify much, but the images I saw through the instrument gave me a sense of compressed space, a feeling that time was being shortened by this view.
The normal hometown sounds I heard as I stood on the coastal road, staring out to sea through the binoculars, became in my mind a rhythmic counterpoint to the calm, static islands, apparently locked out there in distance and time. The flute and violin reproduce the homely sounds of birdsong, children’s chatter, while the viola and piano suggest the distance, the boom of waves, the gasp of the warm wind from the south-east. Dianme, the closest of the three as well as being the smallest, particularly charged my gentle, harmless fantasies.
Facts about the Dream Archipelago were hard to come by and fragmentary, but I was slowly piecing together what I could. I knew, for instance, that as a citizen of the Glaund Republic I would be forever forbidden from crossing to any of those islands. Indeed, the entire Archipelago, which I learned circled the world, was a closed and prohibited zone. Officially, it did not exist. However, the islands were in fact there, were neutral territory in the terms of the war Glaund was involved in, and their neutrality was fiercely protected by their local laws and customs. For them, Glaund was still a belligerent country, as was, I assumed, Faiandland. A real or lasting armistice with Faiandland and its satellite states was as far away as ever, and only a complex network of diplomatic compromises kept the fighting away from our homes. This clearly did not mean peace. The Dream Archipelago was the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands, but it was closed to warmongers.