The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (15 page)

“Besides,” he chided, “you must practice. You are disappointing me, relying too much on natural ability. How many hours a day are you doing, aside from orchestra rehearsal?”

“Three. All morning.”

His eyes reproached. “This is not enough. If you are going to be famous, and I have decided that you will be, you must be perfect. You must start earlier in the morning. And three hours more tonight. You will promise?”

In New York a month ago, someone (Liam? Jeff?) had said: “Three hours a day! What monumental self-indulgence! Meanwhile villages are being bombed and children are dying.”

“Three more hours,” she promised meekly.

He kissed her hand in farewell. “Tomorrow I will notice a difference in the playing.” And he kissed her forehead.

Perhaps this is what he does, she thought sadly, watching the receding car from her window. Perhaps when Sasha said “duly noted” he meant that I had been singled out for hard labour and celibacy, for twelve hours of practice a day and a tilt at the golden ring.

Music is my best investment.

He was, after all, simply an impresario, avuncular and intransigent. Practise, practise, practise.
I have decided you will be famous.

Abandoned, she was tempted to curl up in bed and weep. Never before, as she resigned her bow, had she thought of her violin as a rival, more desirable than she.

She practiced with an intensity designed to numb her want — and to please him, to dazzle him, to have him say “much improved”, to seduce him with music. Just to have him touch her eyelids, kiss her forehead again. When she dragged herself to bed she went to sleep with a pillow hugged between her legs and dreamed Sergei was undressing her.

For breakfast she had coffee and a Bartok score. He wanted her to work on it “for one of our little chamber concerts”. Under the sardonic eye of the empress Anna she would have to perform gymnastics with fingers and bow. Like a court jester. And will they all know? Is it always like this — a family joke?

Don't come crying
…

She worked at the Bartok with savage concentration. When she paused after two hours she felt better. Like a long-distance runner who extends herself beyond pain, tapping the second wind. I am getting it, I will show them, even Anna will lower her eyes and applaud.

Languidly she stretched, flexing her cramped fingers. She would shower and do three more hours before lunch. Virtue filled her like cinnamon-scented black coffee, making the world vibrant, everything sensuous and full of promise. She opened the window to a brisk rush of October air, lay on the rug and lifted her arms and legs ten times, touching fingers to toes. If I'm going to be famous, I have to be perfect — and then Sergei one night would simply say “May I come in?”, parting her yearning thighs. Under the shower she sang and shampooed her hair, towelled herself lightly, put on a soft bathrobe, still singing.

In her mind's eye she observed herself: taking from a pine sideboard a blue and white china plate and a pearl-handled knife, selecting an orange from the bowl, sitting by the window, a lucent spiral of rind falling like a bracelet from the fruit.
Young Woman Peeling Orange in Sunlight
— a Dutch interior.
Young Woman Waiting for a Phone Call.

When the doorbell rang she was not surprised, feeling only a
frisson
of satisfaction for her wet curls and bathrobe. Now he will reward me. The bell rang again and again, shrilly, in a frenzy of dammed-up desire. Bathrobe flying, she released the lock.

It was Sasha who catapulted in. He slammed the door behind him and locked it, stood leaning against it, his face buried in his hands.

“Sasha, my god, what is it? What's happened to him?”

“Who knows? Jail, concentration camp, the worlds gone mad. No warrants, no charges, nothing!”

“My god, Sasha, explain,
explainl
” Cat-like, claws out, she shook him as though he were a sparrow. “Where is Sergei?”

“My
fatherl”
He stared at her through his fingers and gave a shout of derisive laughter. “Oh, I assure you, no harm can come to my father.” He began pacing up and down her living room, wringing his hands. “No, no. He is probably conferring with the government, slipping money for law and order.”

“What is it then? What's happened?”

“Hundreds of people. Practically anyone who looks poor and speaks French.”

“Sasha, please. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Oh, Emily, Emily!” he was distraught, waving his arms as though trying to tear away a nightmare that clung like a cobweb. He seized her and held her against himself so that she could scarcely breathe, but it had nothing to do with desire. In the vibrato of his limbs, in the desperate clench of his hands, she sensed that he held her as a man drowning might grasp at a lifeguard; as a child who has seen unspeakable horrors in the night might cling to his mother.

“Sasha,
tell
me! What is it?”

“People herded up like cattle!” He could not keep still. It occurred to her that he was hallucinating. (A party? Drugs?) He kept rubbing his forehead and temples. “One grows up with such myths. Especially
here.
The dreams of two cultures:
liberté, égalifé, fraternité;
government of the people by the people for the people. Beautiful, beautiful. And one day you wake up and see the real face of power — a stink hole crawling with maggots.”

“Please
explain
, Sasha. I haven't seen the news, I've been practising all morning.”

“They've invoked the War Measures Act. They don't need warrants or reasons. They can break in anywhere, arrest anyone they want. They got Gilles and Sylvie at five o'clock this morning, the animals.”

He leapt up and began pacing again.
“French
policemen too. How is it possible? With liberty and justice for all.” He pounded on the wall with his fists. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The babies left crying in their cribs?”

“Babies?”

“If the parents are dangerous, we can't be worried about details like their babies, can we? Sylvie had two minutes to tell a neighbour. The neighbour called me.”

“All this is because of Cross?”

“And Laporte.”

“Laporte?”

“Don't you live in the real world, Emily? Laporte was kidnapped six days ago.”

As in New York, as with Sergei last night, she grieved for her congenital triviality.

“It has to be someone like Gilles, of course. Mediocrity can get by, but anyone brilliant and compassionate … to be an intellectual is proof of guilt.” He was talking more calmly now, her ignorance sobering him. “And poor. That's a dreadful crime.”

“What have they done, this Gilles and Sylvie?”

“Oh well,” his voice was heavy with bitterness. “Sylvie helped organise a day-care centre.
That's
certainly subversive. And Gilles is known to hold separatist views. Due process doesn't apply.”

She let him pace, fascinated by his rage as by something inaccessible to her.

“They were dragged out of bed this morning. No knocking. Just police in the bedroom. No calls to a lawyer allowed. No reasons given. Just come with us. As a special concession you can tell a neighbour to look in on the children.”

“That's horrible. I can't believe it.”

“When I went there the two-year-old was crying and vomiting with fright. I took him to a clinic then home to my mother. My father has to have some use. The other one, the baby, is with the neighbour.”

“Are you in danger?”

“Ha! What do you think, Emily? I live in Westmount. My father donates to Bourassa's campaigns.”

He picked up the orange she had peeled and began to eat it. The fire of his outrage had slackened, he looked haggard, he slumped at her table.

“I just needed to tell someone. I wanted to see if there were still human beings who would be shocked. I'm sorry, Emily I've interfered with your practice.”

If criticism was implied, it could not be detected in his tone of voice.

“I'll go now,” he said.

And left.

That afternoon, a Friday, Sergei was not at rehearsal.

It is the child, she thought. Their lives have become complicated, implicated. She could not decide which was the more indulgent: to listen to the radio all evening or to practice with single-minded zeal. Trying both, trying to quash the shameful fantasies of her body, she toyed ineffectually with Bartok, ricocheted from news bulletins to hovering by the telephone. (Should I call? under pretext of asking for Sasha, asking how is the child?)

She thought how fortunate she had been when he simply sat in the empty auditorium watching her. An embarrassment of riches. Through greed she had upset some delicate ecology of the emotions and lost him.

The phone rang and she flew to it, but it was Jim from New York.

“How on earth did you get my phone number?”

“From the CIA,” he joked.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, what could be simpler? I called the secretary of the Montreal Symphony. And I'm sure the CIA did the same.”

“It's terrible here. Like an apocalypse. Are we on the news there?”

“Of course. Fascism unmasked: the true face of the propertied classes revealed. Who is surprised?”

“I am surprised.”

“You would be. I called to see if you were caught in the tangle in any way, though I felt reasonably confident you'd be engaged with your violin.”

“That's right,” she said wearily. “I think I'll go now, Jim. I'm keeping Bartok waiting.”

“Have you any idea what's happening in Vietnam right now? You need someone to keep you in touch with reality, Emily.”

As she lowered the receiver, she could hear him crying: “Don't you care about justice? Don't you care what you're doing to me?”

On the route of Sasha's distress, she paced her apartment. She turned on the radio. “… safe conduct out of Canada,” Bourassa was promising, “in exchange for the safe return of Mr Cross and Mr Laporte. But there will be no negotiation … ' She turned it off. Where was there safety from guilt? And from self-disgust? And from yearning? If rice paddies burned while she fiddled, if a child whimpered in Westmount for its mother while she longed only and obsessively for Sergei, what hope lay in music, however exalted? She felt unclean, she showered again, and douched.

As sin-wracked medieval penitents found peace only in hair shirts and excess, she practiced for five hours without sitting, without dinner, without pause. She practiced until one a.m. when someone from another apartment thumped on her door and demanded to know when she was going to let mere mortals sleep.

When she looked across the table at him she kept saying to herself
Sergei, Sergei
, afraid he would disappear. It was already dark when he came, late on Saturday. After dinner
chez
Anna. After, for Emily, a day of fitful sleep and hallucination and manic bursts of practising.

She reached out to touch him and he took her hand in both of his. He had not spoken since saying at the door: “Emily.”

Powerless to feel irritated, she thought: he assumes that my time, my apartment, are at his disposal. My rhythms must match his whims.

And it was so.

Surely her desire must be apparent as an aureole, a visible halo of want. If he leaned an inch closer he would be swallowed up in the magnetic field of her body. When he took her hand she felt a physical displacement, a seeping of herself on to her chair. Soon she would simply flow around him so that he, an undefended island, would be bathed in her warm compelling sea.

Sergei sat without moving, without speaking, seemingly unaware of her presence in spite of the hand clasped in his.

She said softly: “Does the child in your house upset you?”

And he stirred like someone trying to shake off the effects of a sleeping pill.

“I have provided generously. There's a man, one of my printers at the newspaper, a good family, French. Until all this is over.”

“Sasha?” she ventured.

“It's not a fault, idealism in the young.” He raked his fingers through his hair, troubled by uncertainty, a novel emotion. “Inevitably there are excesses with the police. It was badly done.” He toyed with her fingers as though with worry beads. “Sasha did the right thing. For his sake I got word through to the parents. I assured them the children would be cared for.”

How simple power is, she thought. Compassionate power.

She saw tears in his eyes and felt insanely jealous of Sasha.

“But so naive,” he sighed, shaking his head. “So hopelessly romantic.”

Again he retreated to silent abstraction. With anguish she thought: he will leave abruptly, as Sasha did. I can never intrude on that family. They are obsessed, they think constantly of each other.

She willed herself to absolute stillness. If he would just sit there all night, holding her hand, it would be enough.

He stood suddenly and her heart keeled over like a torpedoed ship. Pacing, on a route now well worn, he talked partly to her, partly to himself. As if it is new to me, social injustice … Why should he think …? We arrived here penniless, doesn't he consider …? Is it not as universal as air? Is anything possible without power? Why does he think I have surrounded him with wealth and safety?

She was not required to comment. She was afraid to offer tea or solace for fear of what she might precipitate. He turned on the radio and she hated the third presence in the room. Mercifully there was mostly music while Sergei paced or stared moodily from her window. But then the voice of an announcer would intrude like a handful of gravel. She longed, but did not dare, to turn it off. Recorded in London on the Vanguard label, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting … More music. Then the voice again, a voyeur obscenely sharing her vigil. Chicago under Sir Georg Solti … And more music. We interrupt for a bulletin.…