In Between
See her there, walking through the airport in her jeans and leather jacket, her hair, tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes are still wide and pale, but her gaze is less inturned, directed at her surroundings with a different alertness.
In the airplane, she opens Wolfe’s
Journal
, but the composition interferes. It’s always with her now, its emerging patterns demanding her attention, a silent effort. For a while, she watches a documentary about nature preservation on her tiny screen. A young man, resembling a replicant in his miniaturized size, dives into a tropical seabed and then swims alongside stretches of coral reef, which have been damaged in the latest Very Big Disaster. Later, he is interviewed on a small boat. Palm trees in the background; traces of cataclysmic damage for the moment gone. He looks relaxed, pleased with himself. A few bits of the coral reef have been saved by his team. The heads of young people bob up out of the water, cheerful, healthy, earnest faces. They’re doing something Good. The larger futility … it seems not to matter. Suddenly, she is almost moved. This is the world she happens to live in, of mediated images, meretricious motives and these touching, inadequate good intentions. This also is the current version of the human lot. It is hers to accept, to swim in. No other sea but this, for her lifetime, no matter what she can imagine, no matter what she wants. No matter how hard she wants it.
The long swoop of Long Island Sound, the pointillistic glow
of Manhattan’s jeweled lights, like the glittering points of a hard-drive disk in her computer. Or is it the other way round. She’s coming home; touching base. She has called Anders, and has told him she will be ready to take up her responsibilities soon. He growled at her at first, for the sake of form, but called back in triumph to tell her he rescheduled all the concerts she’s missed for the next fall. In a few months, she’s going to go to China and Japan. And onwards, almost all the way back, to Europe. If “back” is the appropriate word. In her kind of life, directionality no longer follows simple laws. She must get used to that too. She thinks of a Chinese pianist she heard in New York a while ago, absurdly young, and extravagantly flamboyant in technique and persona. A synthesis of Liszt, punk rocker, and all-purpose poet, with a flat body, turbulent hair and a long velvet jacket. Not even Jane could manage such an image, but then Jane is nearly two decades older than this virtuosic child. He makes MTV shorts in Hong Kong, apparently; and Isabel wonders why he doesn’t do the obvious and play in a heavy metal band, or whatever it is that has replaced it since she last looked. But then, for sheer sexiness, Chopin still packs a punch. And in addition he is—romantic. The young pianist’s “Spianato” and “Grand Polonaise” at Carnegie Hall was all ferocious elegance and pyrotechnic speed; and at the final gesture—that grand, abandoned sweep of the arm, as if he were giving himself over to triumphal ecstasy—the young Chinese girls who were there in flocks, got up and screamed in high voices, as if he were one of the Beatles. Or Franz Liszt himself. So she’s curious about China, and about all the variations on her familiar art it can deliver. First, though, she will finish her composition, will pull it out of the roiling, unsorted sounds, the multilayered condensed information that is pressing upon her, from within and without.
The plane is descending now, and she braces herself for the shock of landing. She feels the overpowering speed of the downward
glide, and then the force of the plane braking. She listens to the machine’s whistling hum, which she knows contains superhuman power, and her arms instinctively hold on to the arms of her chair as they hit ground. Hit earth. She thinks that Peter is probably parking his car at this very moment, and prepares for the trek through immigration, luggage, customs. The next stage.
Copyright © 2008 Eva Hoffman
First published as
Illuminations
by Harvill Secker in the UK in 2008
Other Press edition 2009
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved.
For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site:
www.otherpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Eva, 1945-
[Illuminations]
Appassionata / Eva Hoffman.
p. cm.
Previously published as: Illuminations.
eISBN 978-1-59051-351-4
1. Women pianists–Fiction. 2. Political refugees–
Fiction. 3. Arts and society–Fiction. I. Title.
PR6108.O34I45 2009
823′.92–dc22
2008042015
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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