The Woman from Hamburg (21 page)

You played this same composition differently each time—sometimes with feeling, at other times with cold deliberation. You might disrupt the tempo of your playing with rubato in order to draw attention to a fragment that struck you as especially beautiful that day. You communicated not the work but your own spiritual state.
However, is there really an objective truth of a musical composition?

Today, people play differently than in those days: more quickly and without mistakes. It sounds good on compact discs. It is by no means certain that you would have sounded as good. Compact discs don’t register the magnetic forces that pulse from the stage.

More about fears …

You were tormented by bad dreams.

(That was the next question in the New York questionnaire: “Do you have nightmares? Do you dream that someone is approaching your hiding place and is going to find you at any moment?”)

Did someone approach your hiding place? Did you know that the door to the wardrobe would open in a minute and he would notice you, squeezed into a corner, soaked with urine, using the chamber pot to conceal, unsuccessfully, your hair that was growing out dark?

You took sleeping pills. You took too many pills: for sleeping, for waking up, for your nerves, for your stomach, for headaches …

From the New York questionnaire:

“Do you get upset about things out of proportion to their significance?”

You worried about everything.

“What do you think, should I start practicing today at eleven or at eleven thirty?” you would ask your friends.

“It’s eleven thirty already, and lunch is in an hour. Maybe I should start after lunch?”

“What do you think, should I go at four? Or would six be better?”

And so forth.

Occasionally, you would allow yourself to perform wild improvisations.

At the request of the director of a traveling circus whose pianist had fallen ill, wearing a bizarre circus hat on your head you played music that not a single lion or elephant could dance to.

“Can’t you see that the animals don’t want to dance to your music?” the director screamed, ushering you away from the piano.

“It’s because they are listening intently,” you replied with dignity as you left the tent.

You agreed to play the Ravel piano concerto in Norway, although you didn’t know the music. You had two weeks to learn it. You spent a week with a friend who showed up unexpectedly; at his manager’s request you substituted for a sick colleague in the provinces. Only two days were left. You decided to travel by train and learn the notes en route. In your compartment, you reached
for your suitcase. You realized that the score was still on your piano.

The director, in despair, greeted you at the station. “A terrible story: the harpist poisoned himself; we can’t play the Ravel.”

“Mozart,” you proposed, resignedly. “Whatever. I play everything.”

In fact, you had one concerto “in your fingers” then—the twenty-fifth.

Flipping through scores in the library, you said, “This one’s too short, this one’s too easy; oh, this is what we’ll play!”

You played magnificently. There was a banquet after the concert. You raised a toast to the orchestra, to whom you wished to confess something.

“In the first place,” you said, “I have never in my life played the Ravel concerto. In the second place, I remembered only one Mozart concerto, the twenty-fifth. And in the third place …” You paused. “It was I who poisoned your harpist.”

No one laughed; it’s not clear why.

You enjoyed telling your friends similar stories. Despite your dreams and agitation, you liked having a good time. You were “an inexhaustible source of jokes”; people grew accustomed to the quick-witted jester’s
emploi
, they idolized “your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar.” (These words
are about Yorick, the king’s jester, but why should I bother mentioning this?—you knew all of
Hamlet
by heart.)

It began to torment you. You complained that you were a monkey who has to put on a show. You confessed to a woman whom you met in South Africa, “On stage and in conversations I acted like an artist and like a clown.” (The woman in South Africa has to be, naturally, the daughter of Mrs. Slosberg, who sent you parcels and money after the war. Unfortunately, I don’t know her name. There will be no punch line.)

From Stefan Askenase, pianist, professor at the Brussels and Bonn conservatories, to David Ferré (recorded on tape):

“I am old, I am almost ninety. I still play and give concerts. Rubinstein played until he was ninety-two.

“I met Andrzej at the Chopin Competition; I was on the jury. He had a marvelous talent and an unusual personality. He became my student. He was not a student who consents to everything, oh no, but he accepted most of my advice. He became more of a friend than a student.

“Will you drink a glass of sherry with me?

“Have you ever heard Andrzej’s Inventions? I have a recording of it by the BBC. I also have his Piano Concerto. Radu Lupu performed it in London; it’s very lovely.

“A couple of months before his death Andrzej conducted a master class in Mainz. He visited us in Bonn. We spent the whole day together; he took the last train back to Mainz. He didn’t feel well in the train; he was in terrible pain. He was operated on the next day.… He had bank loans to pay and immediately after the operation he had to perform. He wept into the phone, saying that he would lose his home if he didn’t pay off his debts. He played splendidly, but he got sick again.… They took him back to England.

“I have the recordings upstairs; please come with me. Oh, here’s the Inventions.

“We forgot to take the sherry! Would you go back and get our glasses?

“Someone asked Rubinstein why Czajkowski didn’t have a great career. ‘Because he didn’t work at it,’ Rubinstein said. That book of Rubinstein’s is good, only there’s too much caviar, champagne and crabs in it, and there’s not a word about Andrzej. Andrzej once played Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata for Rubinstein seven times in a row. Rubinstein was impressed only by those pieces that he himself had not played.

“Would you believe that I was personally acquainted with Alban Berg? A charming, exquisite man. He fell in love with my first wife. She was very young and very beautiful. When she went to have her hair done before the premiere of
Wozzeck
in Brussels in 1932, Berg waited a whole hour for her. She wrote him a letter afterward:
‘Listening to
Wozzeck
I knew which parts you composed when Schönberg was in Vienna, and which you composed during his absence.’ That’s what she wrote to him; that wife of mine was not shy. He answered her that she had touched upon a matter that was the burden of his life.… He was not better than Schönberg, no, but he was different. My friend played his wonderful violin concerto, with Paul Klecki; Klecki was the conductor in Dallas then, but he left a year later. I asked him why. He said that it’s impossible to live in a city without sidewalks. In Dallas there wasn’t a single sidewalk because everyone rode in cars.

“The greatest composer of the century was Bartók. Naturally, there was also Stravinsky, and others as well, but Bartók is Bartók.

“I heard Andrzej play several of his Inventions in Lisbon. I told him that they were as good as Prokofiev’s
Visions Fugitives
. I once heard Prokofiev himself play them.

“I’ll play the Inventions for you.

“Wonderful. It’s true; not since Bartók has anyone written such a beautiful piece for the piano.

“I’ll put on his
Shakespeare Sonnets
for you. They’re beautiful, though a trifle monotonous.

“And what about
The Merchant of Venice
? He said that he tried to interest the English Opera in it, but they didn’t want it.”

And so forth.

I read this with genuine envy.

I wish that you could have spun similar stories at age ninety: a young and beautiful wife, music, a glass of sherry. This is exactly how an elderly artist ought to natter away on a pleasant afternoon.

From your diaries:

Jerusalem, 3 December 1980

“I’ve just woken up from a dream in which … I had been handling buried radioactive material. As a result, the skin on my hands was already peeling and I was showing them to the woman concerned (whom I cannot identify).… For once I think I can explain the dream. The buried dangerous stuff is my Ghetto past; for the past two weeks I have been delving in it, with increasing horror and revulsion; I’ve made myself read the Ringelblum Ghetto archives, which appalled me, and Wojdowski’s novel on the subject, which I cannot bring myself to continue. I now realize how little I knew, how sheltered I had really been. And how egocentric.”

Cumnor, 14 January 1981

“Only now am I experiencing … some shadowy sense of kinship with the dead—all of them, not only my mother. They seem that much less dead to me, and I less alive. And
now that I see myself as one of them, my fate strikes me as incredibly lucky, almost indecently so, as if I had stolen my survival.”

Caracas, 11 February 1981

“(I heard in a dream) a middle-aged German voice (perhaps that of the amiable old German whose daughter let me practise on her piano, and who can be seen both around the house and on a photograph standing on the same piano):

“ ‘Du, da war
noch
etwas!’

“And suddenly, in that split-second before the shock woke me up, I was about to see, I actually caught the first glimpse of what the German had seen …: the ovens, the lot.

“I am afraid.

“My first reaction to the dream was to jump out of my bed, drop on my knees and pray to God to preserve my soul.…

“I am playing the K.488 here on Sunday, with the first rehearsal tomorrow, so now is just the time to take Valium.…

“… But I am frightened of the 5-day holiday in Miami on the way back. What will befall me there at night, alone with my subconscious in an hotel room? …

“BOŻE, BĄDŹ WOLA TWOJA. [LORD, THY WILL BE DONE.]

“I’m afraid.”

16 February 1981

“The K.488 went very well yesterday! I love the work and it shows. Somehow the sustained peacefulness of the first movement lends its calm to my own attitude … so that I can attend to each detail without haste or panic. I see it as a Madonna, with the Andante as a Pietà.…”

“I hereby bequeath my body, or any part thereof, to be used for medical purposes in conformity with the regulations of the Law on Human Tissue, and request that the Institution which receives my body should have it cremated afterward, with the exception of my skull, which the Institution is to donate to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performances.

“Signed by the testator in our presence, and then by us in his presence …”

You signed it as A. Czajkowski. For the first time since Hurok.

Would you like to know how IT is done?

The head is cut off and macerated.

“Macerate” is a professional term used in anatomy. In the nineteenth century the job was entrusted to ants, which are the best at this work. The head was placed in an ants’ nest and a week later in the springtime, or four days later in the summer (in the summer ants are more industrious), a skull was removed, clean as clean can be.

Nowadays, after soft tissue like the eyes and lips are removed, the head is heated in a pot of water to no higher than forty degrees Celsius. In order to avoid damaging the delicate bones, among which the most delicate is the lachrymal bone, the head must not be boiled. The lachrymal bone is located near the inner corner of the eye and contains a narrow groove through which the tears flow. Gasoline is used to remove the fat from the bones. Since the synovial capsules and ligaments are destroyed, the jaw is connected to the rest of the skull with fine wire.

That is how it is done in Poland. In the modern world, electric vessels are used. The Warsaw Institute of Legal Anatomy has just received a brochure from a Swiss firm. They are offering a macerator made of nickel-chromium-molybdenum steel, with a two-year guarantee, for one hundred thousand francs. The Institute of Anatomy can’t afford that, so you were fortunate that you arranged the matter in England.

Your skull was offered to the Shakespeare theater. First they kept it in the sun so that it would dry out thoroughly and be nicely bleached, and then they performed
Hamlet
with it. After a couple of performances it turned out to be fragile, so they placed it in a carton and put it away in the props warehouse. But before that, they photographed it. Hamlet was holding your skull with both hands, looking into its empty eye sockets. As everyone knows, he was thinking about Yorick, the king’s jester, his gibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment.

The photograph was enlarged and made into posters.

Do you know that the inmates in a Polish prison wrote and staged a
Hamlet
—in prison argot?

The actor addressed the skull with this monologue:

You like it, right?

I can see you laughing joyously at the thought of your skull in the hands of a criminal who is serving a fifteen-year sentence. You should have left it to the Division of Prisons in Opole instead of the theater in Stratford.

“Nobody loved that Hamlet, and the dude didn’t care about nothing else,” the recidivist actor in Opole explained to his fellow prisoners. The perceptiveness and simplicity of this ought to impress you.

The green-eyed pianist said that in the matter of the skull you were being completely yourself: inventive, audacious, filled with art, and yearning to live on in art.

He assumed that you had thought this all up in your youth.

In old age a man begins to think about what comes AFTER and, just in case, prefers to be buried with everything accounted for.