“I wanted to kill my father,” Anzor resumes. “Or to run away. Aslan … he calmed me down.”
“How?” she asks again.
“He understood how I felt,” Anzor answers, speaking as if to himself, into some inner distance. “But also how my father felt. He had a great sense of justice. That’s why I could trust him.”
“What did he say?”
“He thought my father did what he had to do. By his own rules. His own code of honor.” Anzor’s eyes are now intense to the point of being clouded; he’s certainly not seeing her, he’s looking at something else.
“It seems cruel,” she says, not bothering to conceal her dismay. “What sort of code of honor can you apply to animals?”
Anzor turns toward her, as if he has been singed. “You mustn’t judge him by your standards.” His tone is sharp, cutting. “The code of honor applied to me, not to the dog. My father was acting as he thought he should. He was trying to teach me a lesson.”
“Isn’t that a … horrible lesson?” Isabel brings out. “An inhumane lesson.” She feels suddenly that she must have the right to say what she means.
To her surprise, Anzor responds calmly. “No, I suppose it wasn’t humane in your sense,” he says thoughtfully. “My father didn’t care about that kind of … niceness. He didn’t think you should forgive someone who did something wrong. He would have thought that was even more wrong. Do you understand?” he inquires, and Isabel shakes her head stubbornly to indicate she doesn’t.
“He thought I
deserved
punishment,” Anzor rephrases. A beautiful, shiny-furred spaniel has run up to them, panting; and Anzor bends down and throws a stick for the dog to run after. This is undoubtedly why he’s remembering the awful story … Even dogs are not everywhere the same; even dogs meet different fates.
“Truth to tell,” Anzor says, after straightening out, “I hated him after the dog died.” His voice is matt with old anger, and he pauses briefly. “And yet … I loved him too. I could see who he was. Just himself. Straight and solid, all the way through. He had no … side. He didn’t pretend. He believed what he believed. That was his … integrity. He couldn’t be anything except what he was. That was the real lesson, the one I will never forget.”
His voice has grown impassioned, and she looks at him inquiringly. He is speaking out of some old fire, from close to the core; and she wonders how he spans the distances within himself between here and there, and which man it is she knows.
“I suppose you can’t really hate your own father,” she finally says.
“No,” he says. “Not unless you’re some spoiled … stupid brat.” She knows he’s substituted “stupid” for “Western” this time; it is a concession of sorts.
She nods, and they remain silent for a while, contemplating the mild expanse of the hill, with its gentle activity. She feels him returning to her, in their wordlessness. Silently, he takes her hand, and they walk back down, into the low houses and the pastel-colored quiet of a prosperous London street.
The parenthesis is coming to an end, but she doesn’t know it yet. In the morning, she practices intensely, putting Anzor aside in her mind, knowing that she will see him later. She dives into the Rachmaninov Prelude she’ll play that evening with an abandon, surfaces as if through a thick buoyant element an hour later. Wigmore Hall is her favorite place to play, containing in its size and shape. On the way out, she says a few words to the technician who will work on the piano before the concert; some of the middle keys are too tightly tuned; they are in danger of sticking. She must visit Mrs. Brownley, she has promised. Anyway, she has fond memories of Mrs. Brownley, who was her landlady one summer when she studied at the Royal Academy. She takes the tube to Willesden, walks down a small side street, lined with identical, decent small houses. Mrs. Brownley’s house still has pots of red begonias arranged on the exterior stairs, as they were all those years ago.
The little parlor is unchanged too, though time has marked Mrs. Brownley, whose broad, once pink face has become paler and pastier; the skin around the jowls looser. She moves more carefully in her chunky frame, as she brings her tray into the room she calls her parlor. The same sturdy tray, Isabel notices, as she brought then, when she used to call Isabel down each afternoon for scones and tea and a half-hour of gentle conversation. Isabel feels a sort of amazement in the familiarity, as if she’d stumbled into a lost corner of the known world. Traveling along her virtual loop, she sometimes forgets that lives like Mrs. Brownley’s go on in millions of uneventful side streets, as they
have for decades and more, in some quiet zone always bypassed by more turbulent currents. She briefly wonders how Mrs. Brownley bears it, the sameness, the size of her life circumscribed by borders as visible as the lines on the palm of her hand. But then, she remembers from the past, Mrs. Brownley doesn’t compare herself to anyone else; she’s innocent of the thought that her life is taking place on some larger stage, or that she is observed by an external eye. Blessed relief … Mrs. Brownley lives within the frame of her own life, and what happens there seems to her sufficient. Isabel butters her scone, and feels she could sink into the ordinariness of this parlor as into a comforting warm quilt. “You’ve been traveling such a lot, haven’t you?” Mrs. Brownley notes. “My son has told me. He found out on that thing called Google, he looked you up.” Yes, Isabel says, she moves around a lot, although sometimes it seems as if she is forever going to the same place. “Still, it must be very exciting for you,” Mrs. Brownley says soothingly, maternally. Isabel promises to leave her a ticket at the box office for the evening’s concert, and Mrs. Brownley says she will be sure to come, if only her old bones permit it.
… ah, look at her, thinks Mrs. Brownley, all different up there, might as well be a different person / so elegant / what is this tune, too bad I know nothing about it / hmm, look at her how she moves, head thrown back almost not proper / but it is art / the little ones, maybe they should have lessons they could afford it, not like when I grew up in the village we never saw heard anything like it / listen all those notes all pearly coming out from under her fingers, like little jewels / I just wish Keith were still with me / I miss him, never a rough word / sitting together in the parlor in the evenings, nice and quiet / tears in my eyes, haven’t cried in ages I’m not that sort / must be the music, so sweet and goosey // … ah, the tenderness, thinks Norman
Lawrence, I have never had it, listen, this murmur, not even with Jenny when she comes, maybe such tenderness doesn’t exist in the world, but how can that be, has it disappeared, no more tenderness, or is it just me who doesn’t know it? / how awful if somewhere it exists for the reaching and I have never known it / my whole life, without it, can I bear it, can I bear it? / ah, what happened there, that alteration major to minor, maybe only music only music // … ah, here it comes, thinks Anzor, the build-up, the chords, ranged, arranged, like a cathedral, mountains, elements / larger than us, in excess of what we are / that is what she said, and I said yes I understand I understand / in excess, I feel it, my hate my love building up / my country, larger than me / must do whatever it takes, more machine guns, yes, more power, the power of it, the passion, Lenin loved the “‘Appassionata” // … ah, Schumann, thinks Marjorie Lempinsky, lovely, tender, Clara and Schumann, great love, so romantic, then he went mad / why did he? / listen, you should listen, follow / get that skirt fixed, the flower pattern feminine, will he notice? / would you like to have dinner tonight? / don’t get carried away, only that nod in the elevator that time / get a new skirt, one of those skimpy ones, cunty skirt yeah a bit of tease / ah, that passage, so sad listen / don’t be pathetic no new skirt but I want … I want // … Lenin loved the “Appassionata,” monster, bastard, even so, he knew / must have will, total will, no hesitation / but Isabel / but I must, whatever it takes, no hesitations none / can’t make an omelette without … without breaking / must break // … listen, thinks Lydia Marvis, the susurrus, the murmur pianissimo, like Proust, like that stream in the forest / pure movement seamless, she’s good so delicate, head thrown back / tomorrow, they’re all coming, how shall I seat them, complicated, who will talk to whom / but oh, I am suffused, the music enters, it is in me, so beautiful as if I were playing / a sort of gift // … breaking eggs, breaking bones, full justice nothing
less / my rage, it will lift me will tear me, those Soviet punks, mocking father / here, different but I can see it in their eyes, the contempt, they’re good at hiding, their eyes go blank, pale neutral words, but I know / supercilious, pursed lips / those friends of hers, slow-minded, they don’t care, don’t need to care don’t need to feel, sluggish with money power, oh I could pour the acid of contempt on them, their time is up / their time is up // … absolutely beautiful, thinks Frances Manning, a kind of nobility / the chords, forte fortissimo, the march … why does it speak like that, to me? / directly to the heart / Richard … oh my darling, when you look at me like that / and you spoke so well tonight / I was proud of him / ah, listen, the finale, a kind of pride too, pride and tenderness all intertwined // … the logic of history, thinks Anzor, no doubt, no regret / no way back, it is my fate I am meeting my fate / ah, but the sadness / am I frightened? / I am frightened / could have been a scholar, quiet study, beauty of thought, logic / Isabel, bending her head like that / for me / it’s the music it is undoing me / No! / gather my forces, act, the absolute act! / must be prepared braced for anything mustn’t flinch no FEAR / listen, that line of music, line of beauty / pure, so pure / the comrades brothers long nights in the mountains, the stone towers, severe, beautiful / violence tenderness all intertwined / I wanted to embrace the world, shout, love the flame within, leaping / look at her hands, her face she is an instrument, receiving the music, so malleable her body, her wide eyes her strange eyes, when they fill up / No. No music. Ruthlessness. My task. / no doubt, no fear / my rage will lift me up make me fly / I can feel it the exaltation I am filled with it, violence love contempt overbrimming, it must spill must explode, must be expelled, the excess the rage / let it explode, let it burn whoever is in sight it doesn’t matter they do not matter, I am an instrument / must sacrifice myself let it be / let it end, let it all end, let something else begin …
*
Anzor collects her after the concert, and as they walk into her hotel, she sees a man in a long black robe and a kaffiyeh across the lobby. She peers at him out of her post-concert fog, the still coursing adrenaline, as if he were not clearly visible; but as he moves toward them, there is no doubt, this is the man she has seen before, the man from Anzor’s room, the man whom in her mind she has dubbed the sheikh. She is startled. How does he know where to meet them, or that Anzor is with her? His figure, in his black robe, is more expansive in this larger space; he moves toward them with a sort of flowing gravity, but when he comes closer he does not even glance at her. He is being deliberately rude, and she wants to make a gesture to show him up; but as he and Anzor exchange silent signals, she understands that she would not have Anzor on her side. A signal from her own innards tells her she should be frightened. The sheikh lowers his head minutely in her direction, indicating he wants her to leave. “How does he know—” she brings out, but Anzor grips her forearm and presses it, decisively, to get her out of the way. She steps aside, but stays; she’s going to stand her ground. The two men talk with low-voiced absorption. Now that they’re standing close to each other, she sees that the sheikh, for all his compacted energy, is shorter than Anzor; and when he raises his finger toward Anzor’s chest, as if to make an important point, the gesture grazes her mind with its familiarity. A déjà vu, perhaps, or a fragment of somebody else’s gesture she’s seen in a crowd … Then it comes back to her: the bar in Berlin, a man in a leather jacket talking in the dim interior to a man who may or may not have been Anzor. A man who may or may not have been the one standing here, in a kaffiyeh and a flowing robe. Who seems to know where she’s been staying. Who knows what else? She must find out, she must pin Anzor down. She has been much too willing not to know, not to imagine the
concreteness of his actions. She’s been too willing to leave the world inexact. She is beginning to feel awkward in her pointless pose, and takes a step toward them. The sheikh makes a dismissive turn of his head in her direction, as if to remind Anzor of something. His expression is chilling; it says she is entirely dispensable.
Anzor looks at her with an absent gaze, then comes up to her and spreads his hands, as if to say he cannot help what he is about to do.
“Anzor,” she says urgently, and the syllable of his name is suddenly like a small explosion, “were you in Berlin recently, did I see you with that man?”
He looks at her in puzzlement, then shakes his head impatiently, as if to say this is an irrelevance with which he really cannot be bothered now. “I do not know what you’re asking of me,” he says, his locutions, as always under stress, becoming more formal. “But I must tell you … I must inform you … that I cannot be present for a while.”
“That’s a bizarre way to put it,” she says, finding her anger at last. “When did you suddenly become a complete stranger?” His forehead furrows, as if he were trying to make out what she wants of him.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I will have to go away for a while.”
“You’re going … there, aren’t you? You’re going to fight in that … awful war. To … kill people.” She’s surprised by the calm with which the sentence comes out. She has been crossing over to Anzor’s zone, Anzor’s element, for a while now. His eyes are suddenly very hard, and his face falls into the odd angles it assumes when it’s filled with acute emotion.
“Do not insult me,” he says, and his words are an implicit challenge. A glove has been thrown, and he is no longer on her side. “I will do whatever I need to help my country. Whatever is required of me. Even if it doesn’t please you. Even
if you don’t understand … very much.”