Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  The van’s engine cut out, the body-bruising waves ceased, and the parking lot reeled under the sudden evacuation. A close-cropped, thirtyish man in work shirt, chinos, and huaraches got out, peering at a shopping list as he headed into the supermarket. He looked like one of the stalwart patrons of those extravaganzas in abandoned SoHo sweat shops that Els had helped mastermind decades ago.

  The dashboard clock jerked Els back. At that moment, eight people with four feet in the grave were convening in the Shade Arbors main common room, notepads in hand, waiting for their teacher to come run their ninth music appreciation class of the season. Twentieth Century Landmarks. God knew he had an excuse to miss. Were his students to die in their sleep tonight without this week’s lecture on classical music and the Second World War, they would still pass the final exam.

  A gutted phone booth, dead these last few years, sat in the strip mall parkway. All the nation’s public phones had vanished. He considered bumming a cell phone off of someone in the supermarket. It didn’t seem advisable, given his morning.

  He had to get to a lawyer. He needed to prepare an explanation, something to justify those few casual experiments that now seemed criminal, even to him.

  He started the car and pointed it toward the gated retirement community. If someone there heard the news already and called the police, then that’s how the piece would play out. He, at least, would have hit all his marks, met all his obligations, and followed the printed score.

  Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t yet destroyed.

  Els stood in the coral foyer of Shade Arbors in front of the curving reception desk. His pulse was presto and he felt as furtive as a walking mug shot, as if he were wearing a bandolier of yellow police tape draped across his chest. But the receptionist greeted him like an old friend.

  He cut through the reception area, flinching each time a logo-emblazoned staffer passed. A woman shaped like the letter f walking into a stiff headwind cut across his bow. Another skipped alongside him, toting a mini-oxygen cylinder in a crocheted sling. The place had the air of an Ensor carnival, and Els was just another mummer in the monstrous parade. Flesh kneaded loose by gravity, vessel-popped limbs pushing tartan-wrapped aluminum walkers, liver-spot continents that floated on oceans of pallid face, spoon-wide gaps in smiles, necks thinned out to tendons above colorful golf-shirt collars, heads crowned in bony domes: each of them as awed by age as children by their first snowfall.

  Els’s students waited for him in the main common room. Two sat in wing chairs by the fake fireplace, testing their memory with a deck of famous-painting flash cards and cursing like Sicilian dockworkers. Six others sat on the couches flanking the kidney-shaped central table, deep in an argument about whether trees pollute. They dressed in bright tracksuits and knockoff cross trainers—games day on a landlocked cruise ship. The Q-tips, they called themselves. White at both ends, with a stick in the middle.

  The group brightened at Els’s entrance. You’re late, someone said. Culture’s waiting. Someone else said, So what train wreck are we listening to this week?

  Els leaned against the river-stone wall, breathing hard. The too-warm room stank of floral-scented hand sanitizer. Triclosan: antibacterial in a hundred consumer products, probable carcinogen, breeder of bacterial super-races. But no one was closing down that lab.

  What happened to you? Lisa Keane asked.

  Els shrugged, still in his painter pants and waffle shirt. They’d never seen him more casual than oxford button-down. Forgive me. My morning has been a little . . . avant-garde.

  They waved off his apologies. No one seemed to have heard a thing. On a flat-screen TV behind the couches, a famous ideologue adulterer embezzler with his own nationally distributed brand was sticking pins into the groin of a presidential voodoo doll for the entertainment of thirty million people. The next local news came on at noon. Els had until then.

  Could we . . . ? He waved at the screen and twisted an imaginary knob, though no TV in the Northern Hemisphere had used knobs for years. William Bock, erstwhile ceramic engineer, jumped up from the love seat and doused the set.

  Els looked out the big bay window onto a stand of pines. He had the distinct impression of having disappeared into one of those Central European allegorical novels that Clara always urged on him, years ago. Those books had always filled him with a dread hope, a feeling between falling in love and dying. He looked around the room at his companions in decrepitude, on their last-minute search for cultural burial swag. Some finish-line respite from the present’s endless entertainment.

  It’s been a hell of a morning. I locked myself out of the house. And I’m afraid I locked my notes in. Can we reschedule?

  Disappointment rippled through the room. Piccolo and pizzicato violins.

  You don’t love us anymore?

  Locked yourself out? Time to book a room with us.

  We’re all here, Lisa Keane said. Let’s listen anyway. We don’t really need the lecture.

  They didn’t really need the music. Yet the pattern was as old as dying. A sudden turn in the aging body after the back straightaway, a need for more serious sound. Els had seen it in every uptown concert he’d ever attended: everyone in the audience, old. Auditoriums a whitecapped sea. For years he’d thought that these incurables were the survivors of another time, the children of early radio’s doomed project of cultural uplift. But the years passed, the old died away, and more old people came to replace them. Did something happen to the fading brain, some change in meter that made it turn away from the three-minute song? Did old people think that classical held the key to deathbed solace, an eleventh-hour pardon?

  I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t bring a single disc. They’re sitting in a stack in the living room, on top of my lecture notes.

  Klaudia Kohlmann, the retired clinical therapist who’d talked Els into this teaching gig, tipped herself out of her overstuffed chair, crossed to where he stood, and drew a small black slab out of her Incan shoulder bag. She held out the weapon as if she meant to phaser him. He took it and flipped it on, watched by the eight people who’d come for their next installment in the further adventures of an endlessly dying art.

  Els gazed at the tiny black rectangle. Like a detonator in an action film, it possessed one button. He pressed it, and the screen filled with a white-shrouded figure in a small rowboat near a rocky outcrop covered with cypresses.

  He fingered the miracle again. All of recorded music—a millennium of it—nestled in his hand. Els looked out across the sleeper cell of ancient pupils who waited for their payoff. It crossed his mind to tell them that the Joint Security Task Force wanted him and he really must be going. He glanced back down and flicked at the screen. Two more menus flashed by, leaving him with a patient prompt and a tiny thumb keyboard.

  Although he no longer believed it told a coherent story, Els had given the group the last century’s major milestones in rough chronological order. He’d led them from Debussy to Mahler, from Mahler to Schoenberg, revealing the parent’s genes still hiding out in the child. He described the riots at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. He played them Pierrot Lunaire, those whispers on the edge of a moonlit abyss. He took them down into the Great War. He raced them through the frantic twenties and thirties, Futurism and free dissonance, Ives and Varèse, polytonality and tone clusters, and the scattered attempts to return to a home key that had been forever blown away. And still, each week, his clutch of core listeners kept coming back for more.

  The group followed his account like it was an old Saturday serial—The Perils of Pauline—a footrace between triumph and disaster forever coming down to the wire. And as the sessions unfolded, Els found himself cheating, stacking the deck. He cherry-picked the evidence, the way NASA had done when they sent their golden record billions of light-years through space and wanted to make a good first impression on the neighbors.

  In this way, he’d taken his eight pupils up to the year of his birth.
And today, he’d wanted to give them a piece that proved how catastrophe might be luckier than anyone supposed.

  Kohlmann handed him a cable to the room’s speaker dock. Come on. Don’t leave us hanging.

  Els pecked into the search box: F-O-R.

  A drop-down list leapt ahead of each keystroke, predicting his desire. The top of the list had the most likely suspects: Howlin’ for You. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. For All We Know. The bottom of the list: there was no bottom.

  He fed in more letters: T-H-E. The thinned list was still infinite. Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked. Sing for the Moment. For the First Time.

  Els typed on: E-N-D. The planet-sized catalog zeroed in on several dozen suspects. For the End. Waiting for the End. Ready for the End of the World. Two more letters—O-F—and there it was, in the middle of the drop-down list, in a dozen different performances: Quartet for the End of Time.

  All my music ever wanted was to tunnel into forever through the wall of Now.

  The last day of spring 1940. The Nazis pour into France. Just past the crumbling Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht captures three musicians fleeing through the woods. Henri Akoka, an Algerian-born Trotskyite Jew, is caught clutching his clarinet. Étienne Pasquier, acclaimed cellist and former child prodigy, surrenders without a struggle. The third, organist-composer Olivier Messiaen, a weak-eyed birder and religious mystic who hears in color, has saved nothing in his satchel but a few essentials: pocket scores of Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, and Bach.

  Days before, all three Frenchmen were playing in a military orchestra at the citadel at Verdun. Now their captors march them at gunpoint, with hundreds of others, to a holding pen near Nancy. They walk for days without food or drink. Several times, Pasquier faints from hunger. Akoka, a big-hearted, hardheaded man, pulls the cellist up and keeps him going.

  At last, the prisoners arrive at a courtyard where the Germans distribute water. Fights break out among the captives. Packs of desperate men battle each other for a few swigs. The clarinetist finds Messiaen seated far from the fray, reading a score from his pack.

  Look, the composer says. They’re fighting over a drop of water.

  Akoka is a pragmatist. We just need to get some containers so they can distribute it.

  The Germans round up their prisoners and force them on. At last the column arrives at a barbed-wire enclosure in an open field. The three musicians mill about with hundreds of others in the summer rain. Their country is lost. The entire French Army is routed, captured, or dead.

  The rain stops. A day passes, then another. There’s nothing to do but wait under an indifferent sky. The composer produces a solo for clarinetist, saved from the captured citadel. Akoka sight-reads it, standing in a field full of prisoners. Pasquier, the cellist, serves as human music stand. The piece, “Abyss of the Birds,” grew from Messiaen’s dawn military watches, when the day’s first chirps would turn into a morning orchestra. It passes the captive time.

  Henri Akoka is a good-natured joker, who likes to say, I’m going to go practice now, when he’s off to take a nap. But this music disconcerts him. Impossibly long crescendos, tumults of free rhythm: it resembles no music he has ever heard. Six years before, Akoka took the premier prix at the Paris Conservatory. He has played for years in the Orchestre National de la Radio. But this piece is the hardest solo he has ever seen.

  “I’ll never be able to play it,” Akoka grumbles.

  “Yes, yes, you will,” Messiaen tells him. “You’ll see.”

  FRANCE FALLS WHILE they rehearse. Giant swastikas drape from the Arc de Triomphe. Hitler hops out of a Mercedes and trots up the great stairway of the Palais Garnier, the first stop on his private Paris tour.

  THE MUSICIANS LIVE for three weeks under the stars in the enclosed field. After the disgrace of the armistice, they’re shipped to Stalag VIII-A—a camp on a five-hectare lot outside the town of Görlitz-Moys, in Silesia. There, the trio is stripped and processed, along with thirty thousand other prisoners. A soldier with a submachine gun tries to confiscate the composer’s satchel. The naked Messiaen fights him off.

  The speed of France’s defeat surprises the Germans. Stalag VIII-A can hold only a fraction of the tens of thousands who pour in. Most live in tents; the lucky trio find space in the barracks, which at least have toilets and earthen stoves. Food is scarce: ersatz coffee for breakfast, a bowl of watery soup for lunch, and for dinner a slice of black bread with a lump of grease. The cellist Pasquier gets a job in the kitchen, where he takes to stealing scraps to share with his comrades. The man who works next to him is killed for stealing three potatoes.

  Messiaen goes to bed at night faint and famished. Starvation brings rainbow visions filled with pulsing colors: great bursts of blue-orange lava, flares from another planet. He wakes to the gray of meaningless work, hunger, and monotony.

  Another prisoner lands in Akoka’s bunk: a grim pacifist named Jean Le Boulaire. He was on the front in May when the French Army panicked and dissolved. He made his way to Dunkirk, where a fishing boat evacuated him to England. From there, Le Boulaire returned to Paris, just in time to suffer another, final rout. Akoka instructs his new bunkmate in camp life and introduces the violinist to his friends. Le Boulaire remembers Messiaen from his days in the Paris Conservatory. And so the trio becomes a quartet.

  The tens of thousands of prisoners in Stalag VIII-A pool their books into a small library. They form a jazz band and a tiny orchestra. They start a newspaper called Le Lumignon—The Candle. Every story is censored to shreds, but writing holds at bay the crushing boredom of days.

  The musicians lose weight and hair and teeth. Messiaen’s fingers swell with chilblains. Fed up, Akoka decides to escape. He devises a way to slip past the guards. He stockpiles provisions and acquires a compass. He tells the composer that everything is set for a break-out the next day.

  No, Messiaen says. I’m staying. God wants me here. Demoralized, Akoka abandons the plan.

  The Germans send Pasquier to work in the Strzegom quarries. But a camp administrator recognizes the cellist from the famous Trio Pasquier and commutes his assignment. The other musicians, too, get a little more food, a little lighter work. War is war, but for Germans, music is music.

  One of the camp captains, Karl-Albert Brüll, now and then smuggles Messiaen extra bread. Hauptmann Brüll hunts down fresh music paper: pages lined with pristine staves, rescued from the war’s bedlam. He gives Messiaen the sheets, along with pencils and erasers. Who knows his reasons? Guilt, compassion, curiosity. He wants to hear the unborn music of his enemy. He wants to know what kind of sounds a man like Messiaen might bring into so damned a place.

  Brüll takes Messiaen off of all duties and places him in solitary. He posts a guard at the barrack entrance to prevent disturbance. And Messiaen, who thought he’d never compose again in this life, slips back into the spell of patterned sounds. He needs nothing else—only notes, added pitch by pitch toward some obscure whole. As summer dies and fall follows it into extinction, something begins to fill the empty pages: a quartet from beyond all seasons.

  Sounds swirl from out of Messiaen’s malnourished dreams. He works through the fall of France, the Nazi triumph, the horror of camp existence. An eight-part vision takes shape—a glimpse of the Apocalypse for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, freed of imprisoning meter and full of rainbows.

  Messiaen reworks from memory two pieces that he wrote in another life, before the war. To these he adds sounds from a remembered future. Here in this camp, in the middle of a wasted Europe, the notes come out of him like the creature of light revealed to John:

  And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun . . . And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, th
at there should be time no longer . . .

  Akoka’s clarinet is the one decent instrument in the camp. The commandants scrounge up a cheap violin and a collapsing upright piano whose keys go down but don’t always rise again. Hundreds of prisoners pass the hat and collect sixty-five marks for Pasquier to buy a cello. Two armed guards take him to a shop in the center of Görlitz, where he finds a battered cello and bow. When Pasquier brings it back to camp that evening, the prisoners assail him. He plays them solo Bach, the “Swan” from Carnival of the Animals, Les mignons d’Arlequin—everything he can remember. Prisoners who care nothing about music make him play all night.

  The quartet rehearses in the camp lavatories. Every evening at six, they leave their jobs and huddle together for four hours. Winter sets in, animal and effective; temperatures plummet to minus twenty-five Celsius. Prisoners die of exhaustion, malnutrition, and cold. But the Germans give the quartet wood to make a fire and warm their fingers.

  Messiaen coaches the others through the world he has made. The piece is too hard for them; even the virtuoso Pasquier struggles. Messiaen demonstrates from the piano, but the players fall into a thicket of rhythms. The music is Messiaen’s escape from the grip of meter, from the plodding thump of heartbeats and the ticking of clocks. His jagged lines struggle to defeat the present and put an end to time.

  The tools for this escape come from everywhere: Greek metrical feet—amphimacer and antibacchius. North Indian . Rhythmic palindromes that read the same forward and backward. The jerky syncopations of Stravinsky. Medieval isorhythms—huge metrical cycles within cycles. At times, meter drops away altogether and demands the freedom of birds.

  But flight eludes the players. Raised on their tame regular beats, they stumble in the chaos of liberty. The rapid unisons, those wild swells, trip them up. Hold the note until you can’t blow anymore, Messiaen says. Enlarge the sound. He demands absurdly high pitches and brutal, scattering runs. He marks the score with commands like infiniment lent, extatique—infinitely slow, ecstatic. He wants a sound softer than a bow can make. He wants every color that can be teased out of the wood, from chill shouts to fierce silence, and he insists that every manic rhythm be perfect. The shabby violin, the sixty-five-mark cello, the out-of-tune piano with the sticky keys, the clarinet melted by resting against a hot stove: together, they must produce the angel and all the shimmer of the Celestial City.