The Gradual
Page 12
While the applause continued I raised the stave so that the wooden rod rested lightly against the fingers of my other hand, and I felt again the sensation of contact being made, of an awareness that was beyond the moment.
The next morning I was on the quayside at Questiur to watch their ship depart, to wave them away, to wish them well. I stood there on the cold concrete wharf long after the ship had disengaged from the quay and headed out into the bay. I remained there long after most of the relatives and friends had dispersed. I watched the ship while it steamed across the bay until all sight of it had been consumed by the chill sea-mist that obscured the Glaundian coastline in the morning hours.
Most of my thoughts were guilty ones, wishing that I had had the strength to try to warn them while I had the chance the evening before, but there was still a part of me, a substantial part, that deeply envied them. I did want to be on the ship with them.
How profoundly I wished to return to the sea! To the islands, to the dreams they contained, perhaps to vanish forever into the vague tides of distorted time, days and weeks gained, or days and weeks forever lost.
The fourteen-week orchestral tour of the Dream Archipelago returned to Glaund City exactly fourteen weeks and one day later. I had not been expecting them. I was not there to greet them when their ship docked.
29
Five years passed – I had reached the age of, what? Did I count the two years I had lost? Were they to be added to or subtracted from my calendar? All that was certain was that I was somewhere around fifty.
I felt myself to be in my prime, if not physically then certainly creatively. After I discovered that the people who took part in the second Archipelagian concert tour had returned exactly when expected, with no apparent trauma of lost time, I was drained emotionally by the news.
I was confused: was their experience the same, subjectively, as mine had been, subjectively? Or had they somehow avoided the time paradox? Or, worst of all, had I imagined the whole thing? These thoughts confounded and scared me for a long time.
But the deep store of music I had imagined while I sailed between the islands became something I could explore at last.
I calmed myself, I turned my mind away from my troubles, I thought about my experiences in the islands. Memories poured in, vague and precise and allusive. Finally, I settled down to work. Those two years following the return of the second tour became one of my most fecund periods. I composed two short symphonies, a suite of piano sonatas, two dozen songs, five concerti, a volume of trio and chamber pieces – one followed the other.
The critical reception was positive but the popular audience left me with mixed feelings. I believed my work was under-appreciated by audiences. At worst I assumed I was misunderstood, or at best that my music was taken for granted.
How should one read the response of a live audience at the end of a concert? I sampled many such evening events, where my work was performed. Applause followed invariably, often there were cheers, sometimes flowers were thrown appreciatively on to the platform, but I always left the concert hall with an inexplicable feeling of anticlimax.
My record sales increased steadily, though. My new work received good reviews, it sold well in the shops and my back catalogue was often re-released. I found these apparent contradictions confusing.
And Ante returned unexpectedly into my life. One morning I received an email from a record dealer in Glaund City, saying he understood that in the past I had shown an interest in the work of the ‘progressive jazz/rock fusion musician And Ante’ – was I aware that Ante had recently released a new record? The dealer said he had imported a small stock, and would be pleased to receive an order from me.
The disc arrived in the mail a week later. I did not open it straight away, feeling unexpectedly fearful of it. What had Ante done with my music this time? How would I react? From the size and shape of the outer packaging I could tell that what was inside was a digital record – at this time digital records were still something of a novelty and I had not expected the technology to be available in a remote place like Temmil. However, I had already bought a player for myself, so I had no excuse not to play it.
I was astonished by what I heard. Ante had taken nothing away from me: none of my melodies or themes, none of my harmonic progressions, no signature tempo changes, nothing. I would never like the kind of vaguely jazzy music Ante was writing and playing now, but at least he appeared to be working with original ideas. I played his record three times, listening closely to each track, but finally I was satisfied, pleased even, that I had nothing to worry about.
Only the following day did I think to look more closely at the printed sleeve notes. The plastic case included the usual inlay card, but I had skipped it at first because of the small print. I put on my recently acquired reading glasses and read what was there. Although the notes were written by someone who was an admirer of Ante’s work, and therefore totally uncritical, it was possible to see beyond the praise to understand some of the traditions Ante was drawing on, who his influences were, what he aspired to. He was quoted directly a few times. Answering a question he listed the musicians and composers who had most influenced his work, singling out two or three of them for special praise. I knew all the composers he mentioned, of course, but also could not help noticing that my own name was not among them.
Not long after this, And Ante released two more records in short order. Astonished that he was so prolific, I ordered copies from the same dealer. Once again I was pleased to discover that Ante’s career as a plagiarist had apparently come to an end, perhaps for good. He had moved on in another way – his interest in jazz/rock fusion had evidently soon passed and he was now experimenting with more ambitious music. One album was a film soundtrack, with a full orchestra, Ante conducting. The other was a suite of jazz-influenced tracks, with a five-piece band. I noted with surprise that my friend, Denn Mytrie, was listed as playing the piano on every track.
30
One day while I was listening to the news on the radio I heard a short item that electrified me. The Ministry of National Defence – a government department which served as a source of instructions, warnings and propaganda on behalf of the ruling military junta – announced that the 286th Battalion had completed its war duties and that the troops would be returning to a heroes’ welcome in Glaund City. They were already aboard their troop carrier and heading for home. The item was over within seconds and spoken by the presenter in a monotone, immediately followed by a story about a dispute between two business corporations which would be going to court for an adjudicated hearing.
But I had caught what was said. I noted down the day that had been announced when the troops were expected to arrive home, and as soon as I could afterwards I made enquiries about them.
Throughout my life, as the years passed, the unexplained absence of my brother Jacj had been like a background droning sound of depression, worry and sadness. I had never given up hope about him but it had become more an act of faith than a genuine expectation. It was decades since I had seen him. Jacj’s battalion was the 289th – three away in the numbered sequence. Two or three battalions were recruited and sent south to the ice-bound battlefields every year. The numbering sequence was closely followed – the troops were demobilized in the same order as the one in which they had been drafted.
A nation at war is a secretive place. The war that was being fought against our enemy, the Faiandland Alliance, was managed and contained within a structure of secrecy. Once the fighting was moved to Sudmaieure, the unpopulated southern continent, the deception that normal life could continue was enabled. That was what they intended and after a few months that was how we learned to act.
It was sometimes easy to overlook the fact that we were at war. So much was held back from the ordinary people – national security was invoked in many different guises. All my adult life I had been encouraged to believe, along with everybody else, that the war did not endanger me, nor even inconvenience me.
Letters, emails and personal approaches to the Ministry, to my elected parliamentary deputy, and to various other authorities, were all nullified either by a lack of response, or by bland stonewalling. The fact that I had become by default Jacj’s only living relative made no difference at all.
Meanwhile, the day of the arrival of the 286th Battalion came closer.
I reasoned that if the return of one of the battalions could be reported on the radio, then similar information must be discoverable in newspaper archives. One day I went to the Central Library, asked to see the archive of the Glaundian Times, and was taken to a computer terminal by a helpful librarian. She showed me how to access the software and how to search the archive, and also how to narrow my search to find and focus on the material I wanted to read.
If these notices had been published in the newspaper on the days I was reading it, I would have missed them. They were certainly there, made publicly available, but the release was a technical one. They were not printed or displayed prominently. Whenever the software located one of the announcements by a data search it was invariably written in a short paragraph, usually without a headline, and almost always placed on a page of classified advertisements and government directives, buried among planning applications, declarations of bankruptcy, statutory information, and so on.
However, I had soon identified and downloaded all the announcements of battalion returns from the last two or three years.
The information was not clear and it was often ambiguous. It appeared true that a battalion arrived back in Glaund City, or more accurately in the Questiur docks, about once every three or four months. The troops arrived in roughly the same order as the numbering sequence of the battalions themselves. Much else was left unsaid.
In the period I was searching, the 276th, 280th, 279th, 282nd and even the 288th had all reached home, but they had arrived in that order, not according to the battalion numbers. Two of them had docked more or less simultaneously. One, the 277th, appeared to be entirely missing – I found a vague note about ‘redeployment’, which revealed nothing. As I already knew, the 286th Battalion was expected next, but I could find no information about any of the others. My brother Jacj’s battalion, the 289th, was mentioned nowhere.
A second visit to the library, using slightly different search terms, established that battalions were occasionally merged on the battlefield into fighting divisions under a different numbering sequence, and in other cases were broken up and divided into smaller operating companies, again with another numbering sequence.
I also came across a government notice announcing the creation of an email helpline, so that if troops had changed battalion identification it should be possible for relatives to trace them.
I therefore immediately emailed the helpline, asking for information about Jacj. No reply came. I followed it up with a letter sent by mail and I also made several more phone calls. As before, all these attempts were without response. I was terrified the answer would be that Jacj had been posted as missing or dead, but even that reply never came. Hope remained alive, but the feeling of dread was larger.
Then the day arrived when the troopship carrying the 286th Battalion was expected. I travelled down to Glaund City, intending to be there when it berthed in Questiur.
31
When I stepped off the train I was already concerned about being late. We had been delayed at a small station halfway along, one the trains rarely called at, and I had seen several armed police officers boarding. They walked through the carriages, regarding everyone, but saying nothing. Finally, the train had moved on. Half an hour had gone by.
At the central station in Glaund City three male army officers were standing on the platform, precisely in front of the door I was about to step out of. They looked young to me, but by their insignia and medal sashes they were clearly high ranking. I glanced at them, then away. I moved rapidly past them.
‘Sir, we believe you to be Msr Alesandro Sussken.’
Astonished, but also alarmed, I turned my head incautiously, clearly acknowledging I was who they thought I was. The one who had spoken to me remained where he was, facing me, but the other two stepped sharply forward, each of them at my side. They took my upper arms.
‘You will come with us now, sir.’
They began marching me away.
‘Are you arresting me?’ I said as loudly as I could, a wild hope that someone around us would hear, perhaps help me.
‘Not at all, sir. You are free to go about your business if you wish.’
They swept me through the ticket barrier, briefly held open by a station worker to allow us through. I was being supported so that I would not fall, but I could barely keep to my feet. If I stumbled they immediately slowed their pace, allowing me to recover. Some of the passers-by did stare at what was happening to me but they looked away again quickly. I was dragged swiftly across the concourse, swerving neatly through the crowds, then up the flight of steps to street level, a scene familiar to me from so many past visits to town. It was raining.
I was pushed hard but not roughly into the rear seat of a large, black-painted car. It had been waiting for us, the door already open and the engine running. Two of the officers sat one on each side of me, while the third sat in the front next to the driver. He immediately turned in his seat so that he was facing back towards me. None of them responded to my demands, but politely requested me to remain calm until we arrived at the place where they were taking me.
‘Where is that?’ I shouted.
No reply.
The car was a heavy, powerful machine and it was driven fast. The windows were darkened thick glass. From the thudding sound the doors made as they closed I guessed they were armoured, bulletproof. There were never many cars in the centre of Glaund City but the drivers of the ones that were there obviously saw us coming and moved swiftly to the side.
We did not travel far: a short distance down the street outside the station, a fast dash across the open ceremonial square called Republic Plaza, then a dive into the wide boulevard that led down towards the river. All this was familiar to me. I often walked along much of the same route, heading for the recording studio, whenever I arrived by train for session work.
The rain was sweeping heavily across Republic Plaza and spattered on the windshield as we accelerated along the boulevard. Then the car turned sharply off the road into a narrow access lane between two huge buildings and braked to a halt beside a side door. The rain suddenly intensified, hammering down on the metal roof and bodywork. I saw pellets of ice dancing on the hood and the narrow roadway.
The car door was opened by a man who moved swiftly out from inside the building. He was holding an immense black umbrella. First one officer scrambled out of the car, then I was pushed from behind by the other. For a few seconds I was outside in the freezing cold air, the darts of the ice storm rattling on the taut fabric of the umbrella. The sharp wind made ice water swirl along the sidewalk. Three steps through all this, then I was ushered quickly through the door.
We emerged into a large corridor, high and wide – windows to the lane outside ran along that wall, and a number of closed doors were opposite. I had barely time to look around. I glimpsed repair work going on – I saw some workers on stepladders, protective sheets draped over furniture, there was a smell of paint or plaster and the screech of power drills or sanding machines, or both. While I stood there for a few seconds, getting my bearings, while the three officers were still coming in from outside, brushing their uniform jackets with their hands where the intensive rain had struck them, a group of at least fifteen or twenty civilians appeared at the far end of the hallway. They were being conducted by two women wearing military uniforms, who led them in complete silence through one of the side doors.
I was propelled, less rough
ly, towards an elevator, which was standing with the doors wide open.
The doors closed against us and the elevator began to rise.
‘Msr Sussken, would you care to tidy your appearance?’
‘Before what?’ I said disagreeably.
If my appearance needed tidying it was only because of the way I had been manhandled. My hair was untidy after the dash from the car, but I usually wore it informally so that did not matter to me.
‘Before you attend your meeting, sir,’ the officer said.
I started to protest. I knew of no meeting. I had clearly been arrested for some reason. You heard of such things happening: the armed police or soldiers who arrived at your address in the dead of night, the army trucks that came and went, the disappearance of a neighbour no one would discuss, the rumours of internment or punishment camps in the mountains, the harsh treatment, the terror of the unknown. When you knew what was happening to the people around you there was always the fear that one day it would be your own turn – but I led a life of such inconsequence, wrapped up in my own concerns, enthusiasms too, that I never took it too seriously. I had no business with politics and thought the reverse was true.
As I watched the elevator’s floor indicator light climbing steadily up the array I suddenly thought: this must be something to do with Jacj!
I had spent a great deal of time recently trying to locate him, calling government departments, generally making a nuisance of myself, as one of the officials put it. I had broken a self-imposed rule, instinctively developed throughout my adult life: keep out of sight, don’t become known for anything except what you do, and therefore what you have some control over.
‘We think you should tidy your appearance, sir. There is a cloakroom available to you.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘This is about Jacj, isn’t it? Do you have news of him?’