Pavel’s body was warm next to hers, and she curled in close to him. The morning light made a sand dune of his shoulder; his shallow breathing the sound of waves. Through the window she watched steam rise up through the building’s airshaft. From neighbouring apartments came the muffled sound of TVs and radios.
What happened the night before felt as unreal as her dream, and almost as unsettling. How long was it since she had taken someone home with her? That in itself made the night unusual, a change from her routine. But more than this, there was something familiar about the way he touched her and the way he responded to her touch. It felt as if they had known one another for months, years, the intimacy between them was wordless, instant.
She left Pavel sleeping and went to the kitchen. The books they’d borrowed were there, on the rickety chrome dining table with its matching rickety chairs. She drank orange juice and flipped through one of the books, pausing on the picture taken at the Kirov. Ronald Bernard and the man Pavel said was his grandfather. There was a likeness; no denying that.
Pavel appeared in the doorway a little after eight. He saw that she was looking at the picture and sat next to her, his chair wobbling on its uneven legs.
“It is him, you know,” he said, tapping the page.
They kissed. If he didn’t go immediately she would never want him to leave, and so she told him she had things to do. Not entirely untrue. She had to call her friend, the one who would help them. What else? Other stuff. Better to avoid too much detail, in case she forgot any of it. He left the apartment, pausing on the stairs to wave goodbye. She stepped out into the hall to see him just a fraction of a second longer.
**
She and Carol Sorenson had met during Natalie’s final semester at NYU. There was a recital at the Lincoln Center and then a party. They had a mutual friend in one of the violinists. Natalie wasn’t sure how or why they’d gelled. Shared tastes, perhaps. Or maybe it was Carol’s tendency to monologue. She could talk for hours, and Natalie was happy to listen, to take it all in.
Carol was one of the Effortlessly Smart. One of those people who never seem to have taken a wrong turn or made the wrong decision. She had everything – tenure, her next publishing deal – mapped out before her. The apartment where she lived with Louise was in one of the more recently gentrified stretches of Harlem and took up a whole floor of their building. It even had a small, unkempt garden out the back. Louise played viola in a successful string quartet. Whenever Natalie and Carol met, Carol had invariably been somewhere or done something exciting, while – work aside – Natalie had barely left the East Village.
It was unusual to see Carol twice in the same week, but these last few weeks had been anything but usual. Each Monday since September had been loaded with meaning. Remembering the banality of September 10th, going to bed clueless of what the next day would bring. Even that get-together, only a few days ago, seemed more purposeful than just a dinner party.
Natalie had prepared for it by stopping at a bar on 110th Street. It was just about the only way she could face walking into a room full of people, all desperately pretending they were happy. Just happy. No reason. And all that conversation. Even before September Natalie had always struggled to make small talk. She was happier as a wallflower. But September changed all that. Being a wallflower was no longer an option. Everyone wanted to speak to you, ask how you were. Everyone had an opinion and wanted to know yours. She told herself she would only have one drink, but one drink turned into four. She was drunk by the time she got there. No wonder she’d made such a bloody fool of herself.
She contemplated beginning her phone call with an extensive apology, trying to find the right words while she listened to the dial tone. Carol answered.
“Bonjour?”
“It’s me. Natalie.”
“Ah, Natalie. Notre bon vivant!”
Natalie winced. Carol sounded cheerful rather than angry. Any apology might only make things worse.
“I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”
“Anything, Natalie. Anything.”
“I’m looking into something for a friend.”
“Anyone I know?”
“He’s from Russia. His grandfather was a composer, and he wants information on a ballet that was performed at the Kirov.”
“What was his grandfather’s name?”
“Sergey Grekov.”
“Hmm.”
If she’d known right away who Grekov was, Carol would have said something, perhaps named a work of his.
“And this ballet?”
“Based on A Hero of Our Time. The novel by –”
“Lermontov, yes.”
A pause. From the other end of the line, the sound of Carol tapping at her teeth with a pen.
“We should meet,” she said. “Brunch?”
“Great. Where?”
“You know Amy Ruth’s, on 116th?”
It would take two hours, give or take, for her to walk from East Village to Harlem. No cab, no bus, no subway. Definitely no subway. Not that she’d tell Carol any of this. No-one knew that she was walking everywhere. She didn’t want anyone to think she was weird.
“Could we maybe meet somewhere closer to the Park?”
“How about Tavern on the Green? I’ve not been there in a while.”
“Perfect.”
She called Pavel and told him how she and her friend were meeting the next day. She still hadn’t mentioned Carol’s name.
“It looks promising,” she said.
She could hear him smiling. He suggested they meet up, get some food, a few drinks. If she saw him again, she would want to see him another time, and another. A familiar force, like gravity, pulling her away from herself. From everything.
Chapter 22:
NEW YORK, APRIL 1951
Your mother wore a fox fur stole that night, and an embroidered black cloche. It made her look old fashioned, though you’d never say so. She was wearing her very best while you wore the suit bought recently for your bar mitzvah. It was your first time at Carnegie Hall. You rode the subway. The train was crowded, standing room only, the two of you pressed in among Wall Street men heading to Uptown and gasworks crews and secretaries going home to Queens. Why couldn’t you get a cab? Wouldn’t that have been a more dignified way to arrive, right outside the concert hall? Not jostling your way up out of the 57th Street subway.
You didn’t know it, but there was no way your mother could have afforded a cab that night. She and your father spent every penny buying those two tickets, and they were far from the best seats in the house. You were up in the nosebleeds and had to climb a hundred steps just to get there.
Down on the conductor’s platform, Toscanini; a tiny black speck with an even tinier shock of grey hair. You’d learned about the speed of sound and wondered how many fractions of a second it would take for the music to travel from the orchestra all the way up to the top tier.
Tonight you’ll stand in the same place Toscanini stood eighteen years ago, but there’ll be no subway ride. Your hotel is only a few blocks from Carnegie Hall, a distance you’d have walked easily as a kid, but a car – rather than a cab – will pick you up and take you from one door to the next.
It’s still two hours till the concert begins, but you pace the room restlessly. For half an hour or more you fiddle with your bowtie, and you’re still not wearing any pants.
“It’s straight,” says Angie, attaching the second of her pearl earrings at the dressing table.
“No. It’s off. See?”
Her reflected eyes meet yours. “It’s going to be fine,” she says. “Trust me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I was at the rehearsal, remember? It sounded great.”
You adjust your tie again, if anything only making it worse. Angie stands behind you, resting her chin on your shoulder. She squints at the tie for a moment and then, reaching around with both hands, fixes it in an instant.
“There,” s
he says. “Done. Now don’t touch it.”
She’s been in New York a week; you’ve been here almost a month. An unpaid sabbatical from Capitol. She brought with her a sense of order and calm, not to mention company. Before she got here you spent a few evenings at the Village Vanguard, had several dinners with Margaret Bernard and her friends and some of the orchestra stalwarts, but you’ve led an otherwise monastic life, divided between this hotel and the rehearsal rooms.
Not long after your arrival you took a 6 Train to the Upper East Side, and walked around its streets, looking for the home of Dr Lowe, but it was no use. You’d forgotten the house number, and the markers you might have used to find it have all since gone. There’s something about that part of town that makes your heart ache, more so than anywhere on the Lower East Side. You thought you would be living in a place like that by now, before you ever dreamt of going to the Coast. Fame and fortune were just around the corner. They are always just around the corner.
So what is tonight, if not a symbol of fame and fortune? The concert was mentioned in the New Yorker and Musical America. You’ve had letters wishing you good luck from those who knew Ron personally and those who admired him. You even got a brief note (“Best wishes for Carnegie Hall”) from Leonard Bernstein. Isn’t that fame? And Ron’s estate and the New York Philharmonic helped keep the wolf from the door while you’ve been away from Capitol. Not a fortune, but you’re hardly the starving artist in his garret. Why should some house you can’t find on a street you’ve half-forgotten even matter to you?
You’re trying to distract yourself. That’s all this is. When the concert is finished you’ll be travelling not to LA, at least not immediately, but to Washington DC. There’ll be no chauffeur-driven car, and the hotel room is one you’ll pay for yourself.
The pink slip arrived two months ago. A subpoena to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, either in Los Angeles or DC. The dates were so close to the concert, you decided DC would be more convenient. And maybe there was a safety in keeping it all at arm’s length, in some city which means nothing to you.
You could ask why you were selected to appear. You have no affiliations. You’ve never been a member of any society or club. Politics is a game for those who have everything or those who have nothing, and you were dealt a half-decent hand. The problem is, you’re caught in a crossfire of associations; with Ron, with Mary. And there’s one more thing they might have on you, if they were thorough.
If you were a card-carrying Red you might ask what power they have over a man’s thoughts, because that’s what this amounts to. By deciding that one kind of thought – not action, but thought – is dangerous, toxic, harmful, are they saying such thoughts can be removed by the weight of the law? A thought isn’t tactile, something physical. A thought hangs in the silence between moments. A thought can be anything, about anything. Trying to stamp it out, to punish it, is about as futile as waging a war against memories and dreams.
Angie tells you it’s just a hearing, you’re not on trial, but that’s what everyone’s wife or husband says. You stopped seeing the Buick and the men in the snap-brim hats as soon as you received that slip.
Chapter 23:
LENINGRAD, APRIL 1938
The Princess swoons into Pechorin’s arms, her death accompanied by a sustained A from the strings, a vertiginous glissando from the horns and a final, thunderous roll of timpani. The lights become a cold and deathly shade of blue shifting to a bloody red, and the stage falls into darkness.
From the wings, in what little light is left, Sergey sees the conductor, Feldt, lowering his baton. In the absence of the orchestra’s roar and the glare of the spotlights the world becomes dark. Only when the lights come back, the dancers standing side by side, arms linked, ready to take their first bow, does he hear the applause.
The Kirov audience is on its feet and cheering, but he’s drawn to the box on the first level. There they sit; the “old men” (none of them any older than fifty) of the Union of Soviet Composers. Standing and clapping; not with too much enthusiasm, but Remizov looks pleased. Next to him: Klepov. Stony faced as ever. Rarely smiles, rarely frowns. Next to him, Ilyin, Kozlov, Yenin and Khromov. All clapping. Ilyin and Kozlov exchange words. Ilyin nods, then Kozlov. Still clapping. Yenin says something to Khromov, and Khromov laughs, but it’s a warm kind of laughter, nothing callous.
Everything is good.
Sergey turns now to the front row of the first tier. The guests from America and England. They look funny to him; different, somehow. The way they dress, perhaps. Trying to look austere, less colourful than they might back in New York or London, but still like peacocks; so colourful, so bright. All of them beaming down at him and clapping.
Feldt is away from the podium and at Sergey’s side, and he hooks arms with him.
“Come on,” he says. “They’re clapping for you, you know.”
They step out into the spotlights and someone in the stalls cries “Bravo! Bravo!”, and the rest of the audience follows his lead.
“Bravo!”
“Bravo!”
“Bravo!”
Chapter 24:
NEW YORK, APRIL 1951
This is it. Hallowed ground. You wish you could remember just how many names you’ve seen standing where you are right now. Men who occupied the same space. Breathed the same air. The auditorium at Carnegie Hall is the closest thing to a grand synagogue, temple, or cathedral that you’ll ever know.
She joins you on the stage, announced by her footsteps on the wooden boards.
“Mrs Bernard.”
“Mr Conrad.”
“Nervous?”
“A little.”
“You shouldn’t be. Tonight will be marvellous. I’m certain of it. Will your family be in the audience?”
“My family?”
“You’re a New Yorker. I assumed you would have family here.”
An invitation was sent to Mr and Mrs Yitzhak Cohen of 26 Clinton Street, but they never replied. You imagine they’ll spend the night in their apartment listening to your father’s old radio, and not NBC (who are broadcasting the concert live), but one of the Yiddish stations based over in Brooklyn and Queens.
Angie suggested you visit them – she still has an eye on moving here one day – but you made excuses, as if Manhattan was simply too vast and your schedule too busy, and she seemed to understand the finality of your answer.
In much the same tone, you tell Margaret you won’t have any family in the audience, other than your wife.
“Ah, yes. Another composer, I’m told.”
“That’s right.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“Illinois, originally, but we met on the Coast.”
“And is she aware of your… I hesitate to call it a ‘lifestyle’…”
“She is not.”
“Good. Knowing one’s husband is so inclined can be a burden.”
“You could have divorced him.”
They are words you’ve wanted to say for many years, but Margaret simply laughs.
“Good lord, no. I wouldn’t have dreamt of it. Oh, if he’d run off with some pretty young slip of a girl, then yes. I’d have divorced him, and I’d have had the sympathy of every woman and most of the men in Manhattan. But our situation was very different. Were it known that our marriage had been… let’s say ‘compromised’… by a boy… Well. How would that have reflected on me?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Vulgar as it may seem, Mr Conrad, when a woman’s husband leaves her for another man people assume the source of his corruption is the marital bed. Leave a man unsatisfied there and there’s no telling what he’ll get up to. Do you follow? No. I wouldn’t have pressed for divorce on those grounds.”
She pauses, once again peering out across the dim red gloom of the stalls, her hand held to her brow like a visor.
“Are you happy now, with Giudecca?” she asks.
Typical of her to ask this twenty minutes befor
e the house opens, as if she had to plant a seed of doubt. You tell her you’re very happy, and that you’re glad she talked you into including it.
For the first time since joining you on the stage, Margaret faces you, and the two of you exchange a smile that’s neither warm nor hostile, but something mysteriously in between.
**
The auditorium falls silent. Someone, perhaps a hundred feet above and behind you, clears his throat. One of the cellists shifts in his seat and the stage beneath him creaks. You breathe in deeply, close your eyes. And you begin.
This isn’t, of course, the first time you’ve heard it; it’s not even the first time you’ve heard it today. Even so, the sound of the choir causes you to lose focus, if only for a second, and the flesh along your arms and shoulders becomes taut with gooseflesh.
You can feel the paper of that first draft score as you turned its pages. You can see Ron’s expression, looking at you from across the desk, waiting for your verdict and your understanding.
“It’s incredible,” you said. “Simply incredible.”
The first performance in Boston. Outside the concert hall, the rain fell in silver pinstripes and the puddles were inches deep. By the time you took to your seat in the front row you were drenched. Margaret Bernard was there – this was long before the separation – placed as far from you as possible. She didn’t notice those moments when her husband, sitting beside her, glanced across at you and smiled.
The choir sings Dante’s words and the orchestra plays Ron’s music. This is what the absence of genius feels like, and how it will always feel. Ron was the one who could write music fit for Dante. For you, such confidence was impossible, until you saw the sky burst into flames above the scrublands of southern Nevada.
Ron’s music, written after the obliteration of cities and the liberation of the death camps, was never concerned solely with a medieval Hell. It was as much about the Hell we make for ourselves and others here on Earth; the Hell of wars and massacres, the Hell of jealousies and betrayals.
A Simple Scale Page 18
