The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (11 page)

Muss es sein? muss es sein?

Es muss sein!

For years, the man walking along the Weisse Elster River was a secret in the violinist’s heart. He told no one as he obsessively pursued Beethoven’s notoriously difficult sixteenth string quartet, completed only months before the composer’s death. If he could, the violinist would play it all day and all night; he would never stop. It is all he thinks about and all he ever wants to think about. It is not mere mastery he is after. He wants to play the way that man walked; even as he was walking, it was as if he had arrived.

“Do you think I worry about your lousy fiddle when the spirit moves me?” Beethoven once said to a violinist who complained of the difficulty of the final movement, the one he titled “The Difficult Decision.”
Res severa est verum.
True pleasure is serious business. Seneca’s words engraved in the Gewandhaus, the first concert hall in Leipzig. True pleasure has made the violinist’s fingers bleed; it has given him a permanent ache in his back; it has marked him with a raw spot under his chin that will never heal. What the violinist has learned is that true pleasure is always just up ahead on the horizon. He will never achieve his desire. The truth about true pleasure is that it’s not all that pleasurable. He doesn’t care. There is something in the effort—like the walking man, not quite there and yet still arriving—and so the violinist will keep trying.

Must it be? Must it be?

It must be!

Chapter 7

“But you were
there
,” Marian says, holding the metal watering can to her chest like a shield. “In the billiard room,
with
him. You have nothing to offer?”

It’s true, the veteran
was
there in the billiard room with the new patient, but now he is here, digging and digging and digging. He would prefer to be left alone where he is, in the present. He doesn’t like to live backward. He is trying to break that habit altogether; it leads him into deep holes, as deep as the one he is digging. He is a terrific digger.
I am a terrific digger.
He says this to himself, in his head, to fend off other thoughts. Digging is the task the Director has assigned him in this vegetable garden planted in the corner of the courtyard where it will get the proper sun, and digging is the task the veteran is keeping at the forefront of his mind. Since the Director entrusted him with the trowel, the veteran has not had one violent thought, not one moment of wanting to point the trowel at Marian, to poke at her watering can, to slip the trowel behind the watering can and cut her just a little because she will not stop asking him to think in the wrong direction.
I am a terrific digger
.
I am a terrific digger. I am digging, I am digging. I am digging. Terrifically.

Thick clouds obliterate the sun, and Marian sheds her hat and veil. She feels not just optimistic but
triumphant
in the security of her organs, which, this morning at least, are all accounted for. “Mist,” Marian declares, “is my favorite weather.”

“Make sure to water evenly,” the Director calls over from where he squats to examine a carrot, sniffing the dirt-clumped roots. “Very good!” he calls to the veteran. “Very good.”

The veteran digs and digs and digs. It causes a steady ache in his arm that matches the one in his back as he bends. The aching helps him not to think about the fact that he is thinking.
I am not thinking. I am digging.
He is not thinking, for example:
If I dug a hole deep enough I could crawl inside. I could tunnel into the earth
. If only he could disappear along with the image that surges up in him when he is
not
not
thinking hard enough
of his brother’s chest rising and falling behind him on the battlefield as he ran until his brother’s chest didn’t rise and fall anymore, until his brother was swallowed by the earth. The veteran is not thinking, for example,
Why am I here now and my brother is not?
He is not thinking,
My brother is in the ground where I am digging and digging.
Three yellow birds hop along a nearby bench, chirping,
Brother, brother
, and he would like to shoot them with a gun that isn’t fucking imaginary.

“Step gently,” the Director cautions Marian as she weaves through the rows of kale and lettuce, dribbling water here and there as she approaches the veteran on his knees next to a row of triumphant beans. Even the beans are triumphant this morning!

The small vegetable garden has been a success this year. “Amazing,” the Director says, “that it dies and then comes alive again. Over and over.” He said this last year too, and last year it hadn’t come alive at all. But this year the garden pushes up out of the rich horse manure delivered by the owner of a nearby stable, a man whose brother was once a patient at the asylum.

“Well?” says Marian, standing next to the veteran. With her toe she nudges dirt back into the hole he has made.

“Marian,” the Director says sternly, “leave it alone.” Thinking the Director means him, Walter stops squeezing a not-quite-ripe tomato on the trellis.

The veteran looks up at Marian but—
Brother, brother
, chirp the demon birds done up in bright yellow as if nothing is wrong. He must return to his digging.

Marian is only trying to get the veteran to help the expectant shimmer, in the air since the new patient’s arrival last night, to take shape. Nurse Anne claims the man is sleeping, that he needs his rest, but this morning Marian saw it. A phantom figure out of the corner of her eye as she sat on her bench underneath the stained-glass Jesus glittering red, blue, and yellow. She has lived for too long surrounded by the unknown—room after room of it; there is no more room for it in her world. There is such a thing as too much unknown. That someone is here among them, unknown to her, makes her restless.

Since the arrival of the new patient, the universe has shifted slightly. The simple vase of the asylum is not so simple after all. The arrival of someone new, and suddenly everyone is sloshing over its edges.

Even his footfall is unfamiliar. It is not Walter’s shuffle, or Rachel’s skitter-step. It is certainly not the whoosh of Nurse Anne. This strange new footfall—deliberate, even—walking through the world of their familiar asylum is a reminder of another faraway life, a life whose loss at first was an unbearable sadness—how were they expected to survive such sadness?—but which they have not only managed but had succeeded in forgetting until the unfamiliar came along to remind them of that other world. The new patient’s footsteps cause an excruciating loneliness; as if someone is walking across a wound they forgot was ever there. Elizabeth swore she heard the new patient’s voice in the night though the common room separates the women’s ward from the men’s ward. Marian is so desperate for information she even let Elizabeth get to the end of her sentence before interrupting. “His voice is like your
brother’s
? How would any of us know your brother’s voice?”

In fact, Elizabeth’s brother has been dead for years but maybe this new patient is the divine miracle of him, maybe her brother has been returned to her the way her mother said would happen when they all went to heaven. But Elizabeth doesn’t want to wait that long. Besides, her mother was a wretched liar who left Elizabeth here all alone, who went to be with her brother in heaven, so who cares about her anyway? She plucks all the feathers she’s just finished pasting onto the wing the Director allowed her to bring back from the creek path; when she looks up, she is surrounded by forlorn feathers.

These feathers, in combination with the earlier event—Rachel taking off her shoes and promptly stepping on a bee—and the veteran understands he has willed some dark thing up from the bowels of the earth with all his digging. He realizes it is his fault and that the dark thing might claim him too.
I am only digging
, he thinks, so as not to think about the impending disaster he has surely caused.

Rachel went inside after she was stung by the bee and now Brahms’s—
The buzz of the bee is in his name, darling
, the frog explains—G minor rhapsody swirls out into the courtyard, the restless motion of the music making Marian dizzy, even dizzier than when the sun scrapes away her insides, even dizzier than the prospect of a stranger somewhere inside the asylum, plotting with the sun to steal her sense of triumph.

Watching Marian begin to sway, the veteran worries that the dark thing he has dug up from the earth has set its sights on her too, so he sits back on his heels and stops digging. This is his battle. No one else should be sacrificed.
I am not digging
. The demon birds have flown away—
Brother, brother
—with the sound of Samuel’s humming.
I am not thinking of my brother’s rising and falling chest
, and he resolves to be vigilant because the darkness is surely on its way to him. “He is a peculiar fellow,” he says to distract the darkness.
I am not thinking of myself; I am answering Marian’s question
. “The new man.”

“Peculiar?” Marian stops swaying.

“Where is Nurse Anne?” Samuel asks. He has been lurking behind the Director, who is examining the frayed edges of the lettuce—whatever it was that wrecked the garden of last year has been nibbling again.

“Shh,” Marian says. “She is probably looking in on the new man who does nothing but sleep. The veteran is going to finally tell us one thing about him.” She stamps her foot at the veteran’s vagueness. Peculiar how? Peculiar what? But he has gone silent again.

“I’d like to give her some of the vegetables to take home to where she lives,” Samuel says. He likes to imagine Nurse Anne, who frightens him with her stern floating. He likes to imagine her on her way home, floating sternly down the street, but that’s as far as he gets in his imaginings because he is afraid. He dares only look through the window, where he sees a blurry man and the blurry children he once heard Nurse Anne speak of to the Doctor when Samuel was standing so quietly nearby he feared it had finally come true, he had vanished from the earth. He imagines the blurry man and the blurry children wait for her with a pot of hot tea. “How nice!” he says, remembering the tea.

“What is nice?” Elizabeth says, looking up from where she squats over her wing, which is now a bone wishing for feathers.

“Nothing,” Marian says. “Go on,” she says to the veteran.

“He has an enormous fucking head,” the veteran says. It is not working. It doesn’t matter how much he digs.
Brother, brother, oh, my brother.

The Director looks over.

“He
does
,” says the veteran.

“I cannot allow such language,” the Director says apologetically. Discipline is not his strong suit; it is not his suit at all. “Once more, and . . .”

“An enormous head and what else?” Marian asks. She doesn’t like the shape the shimmer is taking and now the sun is poking through the clouds. She retrieves her hat and veil from the bench, securing them once again to her head. She pulls the watering can close, exhausted by her own fear. “Never mind. I’m going inside.”

“He is a man like any other,” the veteran says, trying to concentrate on the hole.
Come here
, he thinks.
I will lure the darkness back into the hole.
He never wanted it to hurt anyone else. “What else do you need to know? He is a man like any other, thinking things he wishes he weren’t thinking.”

The whistle of a train in the distance collides with the notes of the piano; it whistles Marian right out of the courtyard. Samuel gathers his coat around him to keep from dissolving into the sound; it whistles through Elizabeth, who hears in it her brother’s whistle and so digs her hands more deeply into the earth to take hold of the sound and keep it near. It whistles through Walter, dislodging from the sedimentary layer of that faraway life a fragment he had been grateful to forget but there it is, a trip, touring with his wife who no longer visits. He stands at the edge of the garden, helpless and rearranged. Flung into the past, he is in a museum with his wife looking at a portrait she loves by a Dutch artist. They have searched the museum and they have found it at last. The woman in the painting looks suspiciously like Walter’s wife and he begins to wonder if this is why his wife likes the painting and then he begins to suspect, looking from the woman in the painting to his wife and then back again, that both of these women are seeing inside him to his confusion. Each set of eyes looks with such intensity, filling him with something like immortality, and yet he is confused. Is the painting more real than the woman standing beside him? And then his wife takes his hand and leads him back into the world and he cannot explain though the feeling lingers of a world wholly concocted; it has lingered ever since. And then the train is whistling his wife away, his wife who has not visited in a year, who told the Director she would not be returning, but how could that be true?