by André Aciman
We all tasted, swayed approbation on our faces. Inky’s grandfather was staring at me. He suspects they’ve broken up already. He’s trying to feel her out before seeing if he can patch things up between them. I’m now definitely the one-too-many in this crowd. I should have called a cab. I’d be in the station and far away by now.
“I think both wines are wonderful,” I said, “but I’m such a boor when it comes to wines that I very often can’t tell one from the other.”
“Oh, just ignore him, he’s just being his usual Printz Oskár.” She was speaking to them, but seemed to be winking at me, or neither winking at them nor at me. Just winking, or maybe not at all.
She is far too clever for me, I thought. Too, too clever. How she shifts and beckons and rebuffs and then switches, and just when you’re about to give up and head for the first train back to the city, she’ll throw you a Printz Oskár for you to chew on, and dangle it way over your head to see if you’ll try to yap and jump, yap and jump.
“Has she said why she’s here?” he finally asked me.
“No, I didn’t,” she interrupted.
“Well, prepare yourself. You’ve come for Leo Czernowicz, Czernowicz playing the Bach-Siloti. Then we’ll hear him doing the Handel. And then we’ll be in heaven, and we’ll have soup and wine, and, if we’re truly, truly lucky, one of Margo’s salads with these strange mushrooms she’ll use to shut me up for good if one more bawdy comment comes out of my mouth.”
“Sit,” he said. I looked around at the many chairs and armchairs in the living room. “No, not over there—here!”
He opened the pianola and began fiddling with it before inserting the head of what turned out to be a long, unfolded strip of something like perforated yellowed parchment.
“Is he familiar with the Bach?” he asked.
I looked at her and nodded.
She was made to sit right next to me on a narrow love seat. I’d wait for the music, and then I would just let my hand rest on her shoulder, that shoulder which now, more than ever, seemed to know and to second and to want me to know it knew everything I was thinking.
“Well, even if he knows the prelude, this is something you’ve never heard in your life. Never. Nor will you ever hear it played this way. First you’ll hear him play the Bach prelude on the pianola and then Siloti’s transposition of that Bach prelude. Then you’ll hear it as I’ve had two students from one of the colleges nearby remaster it. And if you behave, and you don’t interrupt too many times, and eat your soup, I’ll let you listen to Leo’s Handel. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Leo Czernowicz, just a few years before the Germans found him and took him away and didn’t know what to do with him, so they killed him.
And there it was. At first a very faint drone, then the sound of a gasp, like air sputtering and hissing its way through a congested windpipe, and then it came, the prelude I’d heard who knows how many times before, but never once like this: hasty, tentative, and ever so deliberate. Then we heard the Siloti.
“The prelude is too solemn,” said Clara, “too somber, too slow perhaps.” She had to find something wrong with it. Why wasn’t I surprised?
“Not to worry, we’ve had to speed it up, of course, because those of us who heard Leo play remember he was very fast, too fast. But it doesn’t matter. Art is about one thing: speaking directly to God in God’s language and hoping He listens. The rest is pipi caca.”
He put on the CD, and sure enough, I finally saw why we’d traveled for two hours on this freezing day to get to this house.
“Shall I play it again?”
Clara and I glanced at each other. Sure.
“Then I’ll go and look after the lunch,” said Margo.
Without hesitating or even waiting for our response, he proceeded to play the Bach-Siloti a second time.
Deftness and dexterity, something so easy, lambent, and yet ever so contemplative in the face of what lay in store for the likes of Czernowicz, who was, so many, many decades later, still speaking to God. I kept thinking of his playing this piece as the piano cut holes into the very piece of cardboard in front of us—how could he not have known that in a few years he’d drink of the black milk of dawn? The more I listened, the more it seemed to become more about him than about Siloti, more about Jews like Max who outlived the Holocaust but would never live out its sentence, more about the fugue of death than about Bach’s prelude and fugue. I knew that this would never be undone, that from this too there was no turning back, no coming back, just as I knew that without Max and this old house, without winter on the Hudson, without Clara and our three days together, the prelude would remain the glistening empty shell it had always been for me until now. It needed the Shoah for it to come alive, it needed Clara’s voice in my intercom, Clara’s laughter as she waved obscene gestures in her car, it needed our being here like this in Edy’s warm corner by the lurching bull, and her admonitions forbidding so many things; it even needed my inability to focus on the music, as though not focusing on the music while thinking of reaching out to her would end up being part of how the music needed to be heeded, registered, remembered. If art were nothing more than a way of figuring out the design of random things, then the love of art must come from nothing less random. Art may be nothing more than the invention of cadence, a reasoning with chaos. It will use anything, just anything, to loop itself around us, and around us again, and around us once more till it finds its way in.
Could one ever listen to the Bach after the Siloti?
No one answered.
I asked if I could hear it once more.
He looked pleased. I was hooked, he thought.
Then, when the glorious beginning swept over us again, he excused himself to go help Margo out with lunch.
Left alone with her, I began to feel a sense of total discomfort. All of these empty chairs around us, and yet here we were, Clara and I, squeezed tight together on this narrow love seat. I wanted to find an excuse to move away, perhaps by making a show of wanting to get closer to the music. But I stayed put, did not breathe, did not budge, didn’t even show I had thought of budging. She too must have felt awkward before noticing my own discomfort. But she masked it better than I, for she didn’t even stir. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed anything, and my reading of her discomfort, as my reading of the Siloti prelude, or of what she meant by Printz Oskár each time she used the words, or of our awkward love seat arrangement right now, was nothing more than another misreading, my startled gaze to the world looking back at me. Was there any way for her to know what I was feeling, thinking? Or hadn’t it even crossed her mind? She was so distracted by the music that she hadn’t even noticed that her thigh was touching mine, from hip to knee, hip to knee, which is to say, almost 20 percent of our bodies. What if I told her that while the prelude was streaming over us, my thoughts were focused on the hip-to-knee, joined at the hip, you and I, Clara, for we’re of one kidney too, and all we need is a slight tilt in our seating, and it could just as easily be my hips against your hips, me inside you, as we listen to this music, again and again, the smell of you on my skin, everywhere on my skin, because I want to be bathed in your smell, rub it on my back, your wetness on my neck and everywhere on my body, you and I, Clara.
I knew that the slightest stir in my body, even moving a finger, would suddenly rouse her from her own thoughts and tell her that our bodies were touching, hip to knee. So I didn’t move a thing; even swallowing became difficult, as I grew conscious of my own breathing, whose pace I tried to steady to a monotonous rhythm, and finally, if I could, to a halt.
But then another thought rushed through me: Why not tell her what was happening to me, what I felt, why not move, stir, budge, and show at least that I liked being glued together on this love seat and that all I had to do was touch her knee, part her knees, and just place my hand there, and, as in so many paintings of the Renaissance, let her slip a leg in between mine in a posture that speaks legends, like Lot’s with his daughters’? Was she with me? Or was she elsewhere? Or was she one
with the music, her mind in the stars, mine in the gutter?
With all these feelings tussling within me, I knew I would never dare anything, especially now that we were alone together. Gone was my resolve, my wish to put an arm on that shoulder, as we listened to the music, and let a hand land ever so lightly and caress her there, and then bring my mouth where it ached to be, not to kiss, or even lick, but to bite.
I sensed her tense up. She knew.
Any moment now, Clara will stand up to help in the kitchen. Or should I be the first to stand now, to show that I wasn’t committed to this love seat arrangement, that I wasn’t trying to feel her up, that I couldn’t really care?
“Do you want to hear it again?”
I stared at her. Should I tell her now once and for all, just tell her and let the chips fall where they will?
“The music—do you want to hear it, or have you had enough?”
“Let’s hear it one more time,” I finally said.
“One more time it is.”
She stood up and pressed the play button, then after standing by the CD player came back and resumed her seat right next to me.
Do we touch hands, or what?
Just be natural, a voice said.
Which is what?
Be yourself.
Meaning?
Being myself was like asking a mask to mimic a face that’s never been without masks. How do you play the part of someone trying not to play parts?
We were back to hip-to-knee. But it felt mechanical, heartless, cold. I’d take that moment last night anytime, when she stopped before crossing the park and told me about Czernowicz as our arms kept touching, inadvertently.
This was all in my head, wasn’t it?
Suddenly I caught myself thinking of wanting to come back here again—if only to touch this moment again: the cluttered room, the frost, the dead pianist, she and I seated unusually together in this snow-globe cabin of our invention, and all this stuff around us, the soup, Inky’s brother, last night’s Rohmer, the snow on Manhattan and on Clermont-Ferrand, and the fact that if Czernowicz never knew what awaited him after playing the Siloti here, he’d never have guessed that, two nights after staring out to his world in prewar Europe, we’d be sitting in this room like the oldest and closest of friends, listening to a pianist that my grandfather and Clara’s grandfather might easily have heard in their youth, never once suspecting that their grandchildren . . .
When the music stopped, I said I wanted to step outside for a few minutes. I didn’t ask her. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Where are you two going?” asked Margo, when she saw us leave through the kitchen door.
“To show him the river.”
•
The ground underfoot was hard, with patches of brown earth under the snow. Clara cleared away a tricycle that she said belonged to one of the grandchildren. Miles was his name. “Secret agent?”
“Secret agent,” I said, accepting a cigarette.
“Let me light it for you.”
She lit my cigarette, then took it back before I could even draw my first puff in ages.
“Not on my watch!”
So I wasn’t going to be allowed to smoke.
“What do you think they’re talking about now? Me? You?” I asked.
“Us, most likely.”
I liked our being called us.
In the summer, she said, Hudson County was lush, and people simply sat around here and whiled away entire weekend hours on lounge chairs, while food and drinks kept coming. She loved sunsets in the summer here. She was, I could see, describing Inkytimes in Inkyland.
We ambled through a narrow alley flanked by tall birch trees. White was everywhere. Even the bushes were a pallid, pewter gray, except for the stonework around the house and for the wall lining the length of the wood, verdigris bordering on livid gray. I imagined a carriage stopping here a century ago. As we walked, we began to near what seemed a dirty wooden fence that led to a wooden gangway and farther off to a withered stairway. “The boat basin is down there. Come.”
They had cleaned the Hudson years ago. Now, if you didn’t mind the undertow and the eels, you could swim. Still more trees, bare bushes, more sloping walls lining the property.
Then we spotted the river and, beyond it, the opposite bank, all white and misty, an Impressionist’s winterscape.
It made me think of Beethoven’s late quartets. I asked if she’d ever heard the Busch Quartet play. Maybe as a child at her parents’, she said.
As we approached the river, we began to hear crackling sounds that became louder and louder, clanking away like iron rods being hammered on an anvil. Crick, crack, crack. The ice on the river was breaking, clacking and clattering away, one floe knocking into the other, wrecking that neat white sheet of ice we had been seeing from the distance of the house, block after block of iced Hudson whacking its way downstream, with dark, dirty, glutinous black water underneath. Perhaps the Hudson was giving us its own version of the Siloti—crick, crack, crack, crack.
“I could listen to this for hours,” I said. What I meant was: I could be with you for hours—I could be with you forever, Clara. Everyone else has been make-believe, and maybe you are too, but right now, as I hear our music served on ice, my heart isn’t on ice, as I know yours isn’t either. Why is it that with you, for all your stingers and thistles, I feel so much at home?
“I could listen to this all day,” I repeated.
I had forgotten that in Clara’s world one didn’t rhapsodize about nature, sunsets, rivers, or songs in the shower. One didn’t hold hands either, I supposed.
“You don’t like this?” I asked.
“I like this fine.”
“Oh, just tell me you like it, then.”
She turned toward me, then looked at the ground. “I like it, then,” she said. A mini-concession no sooner made than instantly withdrawn.
How long would lying low last?
And then I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked her: “How long will all this lying low last?”
She must have seen this coming, or had been thinking about it herself, perhaps wondering at that very moment how long before I’d say something like this. Which is perhaps why she didn’t ask why I was asking.
“All winter, for all I know.”
“That long?”
She picked up a stone and hurled it far into the river. I picked one up too and did the same, aiming mine as far as I could. “Bellagio is a stone’s throw away,” I said. “And yet.”
She said she loved the sound of stones striking the ice, especially the heavier ones. She threw another. I lobbed another and another. We stood and watched where they landed.
“Maybe I need time.”
She didn’t quite finish her sentence. But I knew right away.
“You’re an amazing woman, Clara,” I said, “just amazing.”
She didn’t say anything.
“It’s good to hear someone say this.” Then having heard her sentence, she couldn’t help it. “It’s good to hear someone say this.” She parodied her own words.
“Amazing all the same.”
We threw more stones at the ice floes and listened to the ice bark back as though there were penguins who’d hopped up on the floes to forage for their young and thought we had thrown them bread, and what we threw was ice and stones.
On our way back, I held out my hand to her. I hadn’t even thought of it. She gave me hers as we went up the wooden stairs that led to the gangway. Then she let go, or I let go, or we both did.
When we returned, the soup was ready. Margo liked to add cream to the thick golden brew. So did Clara. It was a soup for cold weather, said Margo. A rustic, rectangular table had been set up, Max sitting at the head, Margo to his left, Clara to his immediate right, and I next to her. “I would have wanted Clara at my left,” said Margo, who seemed to be in a happy, chatty mood, “but I didn’t want to separate you.”
What on earth were they think
ing? What had they been told?
I tried to give Clara an inquisitive look, but she must have anticipated this and was focusing intently on her soup, trying to show she hadn’t heard the comment I knew she couldn’t have missed. She raved about the soup and, better yet, about the crème fraîche, raved about the curry. “I believe in sixty-minute-not-a-second-more cooking. And that includes dessert,” said Margo. “And I,” interjected Max, “believe that a good wine will rescue anything you dish out with your sixty-minute chow even raccoons won’t touch.”
“Be grateful I’m around to feed your rotting gums.”
“And I to down what we’ll call food in front of our guests.”
Clara was the first to laugh, then Margo and Max, then me.
This was family business as usual, I guessed.
I am sitting where Inky sits, I thought.
The soup and the bread and the cream and the wine, which kept coming, were extraordinary, and soon enough we were being regaled with Max’s latest complaint. His knees. He’d been on archaeological digs in his youth and was now, in his nineties, paying the price for his follies near Ekbatana. “With most people my age, it’s the mind that goes. Mine is intact. But the body’s checking out.”
“How do you know your mind is so intact, old man?” said Clara.
“Do you want me to tell you how?”
“Please.”
“I warn you, it will be obscene, I know him,” cut in Margo.
“Well, about a month ago, because of these damned knees—which incidentally are about to be replaced, so this is the last time they’ll be seeing you—I had to get an MRI. They asked me of course if I wanted to be sedated and if I suffered from claustrophobia. So I laughed in their faces. I survived the Second World War without so much as taking aspirin, now I’m to be sedated simply because they’ll put me in a box with a hole in it? Not me. So in I go. But no sooner am I in there than I realize this is what death must be like. The machine starts such a ghoulish pounding and gonging that I want to ask for sedation. Problem is, I’m not supposed to move; if I do, they cancel the procedure. So I decide to brace myself and go on with it. Except I know my heart is racing like mad, and I can’t think of a single thing but the noise, which, more than ever now, reminds me of the hellish pounding of the dead statue in Don Giovanni: dong, dong, dong! I try to make myself think of the Don, but all I can think of is hell. This is death. I need to think of something quiet and soothing. But quiet and soothing images fail to come. This is when memory rescued me: I decided to count and name every woman I’d slept with, year by year, including those who brought me so little pleasure in bed that I’ve often wondered why they parted the Red Sea if they had no manna to give and certainly wanted none of mine. This, to say nothing of those who wouldn’t take off their clothes, or would do this but certainly not that, or who always had engine trouble, so in the end, though you might have been in bed together, and even fallen asleep, it was never clear whether you had scaled the summit. In any event, I counted them and they added up to—”
