“I hope nothing … awful happened,” Isabel says. Monika seems very young, and is biting her lip childishly.
“No, because I called my mum on my mobile phone, and she called our embassy and they did something about it. But it was interesting, you know? A real adventure. It’s all in my diary.”
“And the others …” Isabel begins, but Monika’s attention has been diverted by something outside the window. “Jan!” she calls out, waving energetically toward a tall, long-haired young man passing on the street. He waves back lazily, and makes his way desultorily into the café.
“He is a friend,” Monika announces to Isabel in an undertone, but with some excitement. “He’s nice. We met in Barcelona. That was also an adventure.”
The boy puts down his backpack, and lowers himself into a chair in the spirit of defeated impassivity. His left leg begins jiggling very fast, his knee lifting quite high.
“Jan is going to Africa,” Monika informs Isabel proudly. “He is going to do some work in the refugee camps. In Egypt. They’ve lots of people from Liberia there. I might go too, after I do some college. I’d like to do something good, you know? To help. Things are really terrible there, like the worst. You tell her, Jan.”
The boy proceeds to tell her, at first lazily, then with increasing seriousness, about the wars in Liberia, the maimings, the killings, the child soldiers and the refugees who have fled from there, and with whom he wants to work. His leg stops jiggling, and his sentences begin to emerge in unwilled grammatical entirety. Isabel asks why he has chosen refugees in Egypt out of all the possible horror-riddled places. That seems to be the wrong question, though, because his face falls back into its bored
affectlessness, and the knee begins its autistic movement. “Because I googled it first,” he says.
Isabel begins to get up, but Monika, in an effort to detain her, wants to know what she’s doing in Prague. Isabel hesitates, then tells her she’s giving a concert.
“Wow,” Monika responds wholeheartedly. “What kind of concert?”
“A piano recital,” Isabel says, wondering whether they have reached the limit of common vocabulary.
“You mean, like classical?” Monika asks, incredulously.
Isabel nods.
“Wow, that’s like so … romantic.”
Isabel laughs at the incongruity of the word; the word which will not die. On an impulse, she asks her entirely accidental acquaintances if they’d like to come and hear her. She could leave tickets for them. She isn’t quite sure why she’s proposing this; perhaps it’s some youth-improving impulse, her form of the missionary urge.
“Oh, that would be so cool,” Monika says enthusiastically. “Don’t you think it would be cool, Jan?”
Jan stops jiggling his knee and looks at Isabel with a perfectly sensible, polite expression which seems to emerge from another personality, another kind of life. “That’s very nice of you,” he says, in his compacted, gutturally accented English. He’s told her he is Danish. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Schnabel lately. We would very much like to come.”
… the acme point of fun. They think by doing this, they will at last experience the moment to the full. Poor young brutes. Do they not know that such a feat takes nothing less than Belief? That in order to experience any one moment, you need to understand the meaning of Time itself? Try to hear a note, or a chord, outside the edifice of structure. Try to compose a succession of notes, without having some idea about the ends to which they are used.
That is our difficulty, at the present time. We need to know our ends, before we can invent the means. Otherwise, we will only produce groping, meaningless sounds, as these youths produce their strained, jarring noises.
No liberty but in structure—even if the aim of structure is the abolition of structure. But we have tried that too. We have come to the end even of abolitions. Where, then, can we go next? Through what forms can we begin to liberate sounds that will express new meanings? That, in essence, is our great problem. Or perhaps my problem. My thorny dilemma, my sting of nettles, my bloody battle on the blank death-riddled ground. And she’d have me live “more in the moment.”
In the Green Room, she hums to herself. She’s feeling quite relaxed. Maybe it’s because she won’t be able to read the reviews, which will come out in Czech. Or maybe because, in this musical city, making music seems like a natural activity. As Jane would wish it. She’s just going to sow some musical beauty among the audience; she trusts them to recognize it and absorb it without strain.
… hah, listen, it’s kind of neat, thinks Monika, Row P, Seat 13, and I know her, I know the artist! / what is she playing,
Davidsbündlertänze
, crazy title, but it’s kind of sexy / mmhmm, close your eyes, it’s soft like being caressed / like when Mother took care of me / before all her stupid boyfriends / tender, tender / Isabel, great name, so glamorous, she must have lovers / close your eyes, yes, candlelight, he holds her hand, so handsome
/ Jan, so handsome / I would like to / but he doesn’t / maybe he’s shy / me too, I’m actually sort of shy // … ah, that’s lovely, thinks Jan, not like Schnabel, more tender, intimate, she’s a woman / ah, but she’s good / how does she get to be that good, must be lots of practice like carpentry / my music lessons / I wish I’d done more / must take CDs to Africa, in case / in case / don’t want to be maimed tortured—no! / don’t mind dying, but no pain / Dad said I’m too valuable / too valuable for what? / why am I valuable? / ah, listen, that music curling, uncurling / like singing, softest voice / jerk wanker like wanking off fuck fuck fuck who’re you kidding, who’re you kidding, I’m so afraid / but that piece, her up there onstage, so calm / I’ll remember this // … ah, listen, the tenderness, poetry, the distillation, thinks Sunil Patel / pure lyricism, no dross / how to do that in my novel, writing so
prosaic
that’s the problem / no lift-off, oh God why can’t it lift off like music, into pure motion / listen, new section, ah,
interesting
, short sections maybe that’s the answer / why spell everything out stupid words, stupid story business, this happened then that happened, plod plod plod / Aahh!! What, what was that, why did it grab me seize me, was it the sudden drop? / wow / contrast, yes, must remember, more contrast, light and dark chiaroscuro / bravura, brava, bravery / courage you need courage / and look, she’s beautiful, the lips just slightly opened St. Teresa head thrown back / St. Teresa … orgasmic, yes, ecstasy, yes, except she’s doing something, controlling the piano / ah, listen, that melody meandering weaving not making a point, just suggesting / the way we meander inside our lives our thought not knowing / ah, the leaping chords God it must be difficult / to say everything at once, yes, more courage more nakedness say what you mean / dare to say it / naked truth, raw truth / how express it // … and she is mine, thinks Anzor, I’ve held her fucked her had her / ah, but listen, look, that glow up there, she has it, Isabel / I know how she loves, I’ve loved her / they wouldn’t believe,
none of them would, would throw me out of here, the savage / ah, listen, the line, sinuous, like her body when she turns toward me, the curve of her hip the thigh lifting / yes I know where the music comes from, know exactly, all the places / her hands so strong, so sensitive / ah, the quiet, tender quiet, how does she do it / she has truth in her, a kind of truth except / she doesn’t understand none of them understand, they’re stupid, they do not understand the hatred our hatred the passions which burn / they think they are safe superior good / ah, it makes me sick, their goodness their niceness, my people are smarter faster, they know more, they’ve lived more, they deserve their country we will kill for it whoever it takes, it is kill or be killed / these cow-like soft slow unsuspicious people / so good / honestly, I could strangle their goodness, their time is over, they do not deserve what they have / ah, but listen that line, she grabs me again, twists my heart, Schumann knew passion, he must have known, you can hear it / her hands I know them, touched them, they have touched me, tonight her body it will bend as she is bending now …
Stockholm
This time, Anzor is coming to meet her in her hotel room, late at night. It’s a new intimacy, this nocturnal arrival. She imagines an aerial map of the routes they’ve traveled, the traceless trajectories along which he has followed her. He’s probably getting off the plane right now, moving swiftly through the always moving crowd. She thinks about Monika and Jan, who might be anywhere at all. Peculiar nomads, with no tribe to accompany them, no song lines to follow. But now she waits, in this northern city, jeweled lights warming up the windows across the street.
Anzor is agitated when he comes in, and paces around the room, picking up objects aimlessly, and putting them down again unseeingly. He removes a small bottle of Scotch from the minibar, and drinks it in a large, rude gulp. He tells her the conflict in his country is escalating. One of his friends has been killed. One—and this is much worse, he says, pouring himself another slug of whisky from another miniature bottle—has been caught by the Russians. The thugs. He will be tortured; he will be humiliated.
“How awful,” she says.
“It is going to get worse,” he says grimly. “I am a worse traitor every day I stay away.”
“Anzor,” she begins, carefully, “what is this conflict really about. I mean, is there no peace possible, must it go on like that?”
He bends his head backward and pours whisky into his throat like a peasant, like the Russian boys she saw on the train a long time ago. Then he looks at her from narrowed eyes, with a sort of brazenness, a nearly open hostility.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, just controlling contempt. “If we compromised now, all that we have done would be meaningless. The death of my uncle. My father’s only brother. The deaths of my friends.”
“But the violence …” she says.
“We will do anything it takes,” he says. “They’ve done … everything to us.” His eyes are filmed now with some excess of emotion that gives him a half-blind, an entranced look.
“I hate them so much,” he says. “My hate is complete.”
“You frighten me,” she says, and hears her own voice deepen into a more complete seriousness.
“I hate,” he repeats, evenly. “But in my hate is my love. That is what you must understand. I hate because of everything I love. Because of how … strongly I love.”
He looks at her directly, a straight gaze; and she can feel her
own eyes going still as she looks back at him.
“Please,” she says nevertheless, trying to rein in the quickening dark currents of excitement between them, the escalation of her pulse, “I don’t recognize you when you talk like that.”
“I tell you the truth,” he says quietly. “It is … who I am. I do not want to lose my rage. It is the fuel I burn with. And as long as my country is burning—”
“You’re frightening me,” she repeats.
“There’s no love without hate,” he says, as if stating a QED. His QED. “And no dignity. You must know when your enemies wish you ill. And you must answer them.” He looks at her almost threateningly. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she says, in a kind of submission.
He reaches out his arm and pulls her toward himself, speaking to her more directly.
“I love my country,” he says. “I want to defend it with whatever I’ve got. It is what I stand for.”
“But what is that, what is it you stand for?” she half whispers, out of her own, hypnotized state. “Aside from your anger …”
“Can you not understand,” he says, as if she were a student slow to learn her lesson, “that there is justice involved? Something more than myself? That our cause is just?”
An announcement of a theme, a clarion call. His credo. From her proximity, she sees raw emotion working its way into Anzor’s eyes, the muscles of his mouth. She is riveted by the naked simplicity of it, the dense disturbing force of his conviction. She gets up, and walks across the room, trying to regain her composure, to reclaim herself. She begins to formulate a question about what it is he does, exactly; but some civilized impulse stops her from doing so. She’s not used to not believing people. Or perhaps she doesn’t want, exactly, to know.
Later, she stares up at the ceiling in the dark, thinking, what does it mean to stand for something, what is it she should understand
… Standing for something: is that what gives Anzor his upright spine, his straight direct gaze? She imagines the mountainous vistas that for him have the spaciousness of beauty, and wonders what it is that matters to him in that distant landscape, as only the nearest things matter to her, only what enters and lives inside her till it is transmogrified into inner music, her cells, her skin.
Next day, in a morning mood, Anzor suggests they go to an exhibition of new Euro artists he has read about in an English-language paper. “I still have some resident … no, residual interest in this kind of thing,” he says, sounding again like his urbane daytime self. “And anyway, I want to forget … other things for a while.”
The gallery is in a low, industrial-looking building, and the spaces inside are airy and white. In one, a Dutch artist, a tall man with close-cropped blond hair, is beginning a talk about his work. “This is my sculpture from a few years ago,” he says, pointing to an object in the corner of the room. As far as Isabel can tell, the artefact is a chunk of dry wood, with some indefinable feathery material and bits of shiny metal affixed to it in a seemingly random way. “That incrustation,” the artist says, “is a trace of a once-living creature, a bird that died against the tree. But there are also chemicals on the wood which have pervaded the forest.” He pauses to give his audience time to absorb this. “I wanted to make a reflection on this. On natural and unnatural decay. On the way we are killing nature so it is disappearing. Nature dies anyway, but we are contributing to its dying.” He turns on his PowerPoint and an image comes up, which causes some sounds of discreetly suppressed dismay to emanate from the small audience. The image shows a man—he looks like the artist, though his face is obscured by some impasto effects—undergoing multiple torments,
or humiliations. His arms are tied in front and marked with reddish cuts. From the back, a knife held by an anonymous hand approaches his sternum; from the front, something like a baseball bat is lifted against his groin. “This is the work I am doing now,” the artist says. “Because I believe today we also need to reflect on the death of man. Of the human.” His voice is soft and tinged with compassion, as if to suggest that it gives him pain to inflict this pain on the audience; but it must be done.