by Noel Hynd
“No,” the ghost answered. “I will never go. I will haunt you forever.”
“You will be in my thoughts and my musicianship,” Geiger said. “But you are in my past, not my future. You will never again haunt me.”
“I will!”
“You are dead. I am alive!”
“No!”
Geiger’s eyes found two cellists, a man and a woman, who were watching him curiously. They knew he was in dialogue with…with…something. He winked at the cellists, astonishing them. Their eyes shot back to their music.
He moved toward completion.
The ghost was silent now.
Rabinowitz stood by the piano, holding on to every note, listening to Geiger’s hands bring forth the intense morbid rhapsody within the piece. But the ghost knew he had lost. Geiger had brought himself to the Dance of Death. Not Rabinowitz. And he had brought the entire audience within Covent Garden with him.
“Are you Catholic, my boy?” insinuated the old man. “I hate Catholic boys.”
“You’re finished, Maestro,” Geiger whispered, wondering if any front row audience members could read lips.
“You will fail here, and you will fail at life,” the old man said. It was a final desperate effort to sabotage the performance.
“No, no, no,” Geiger calmly whispered back. “I will conquer both. Unlike you, I will conquer life, love, and music!”
“Bastard!” the ghost roared.
But all his screams, threats, and shouts were ineffectual. Geiger had passed him by.
“You are no longer in my mind,” Geiger whispered. “You are but a memory. And it’s time for you to go.”
The old man howled profanely. But he was mortally wounded in spirit. His foul image receded before Geiger’s eyes. At first Rabinowitz had been substantial and imposing. But as Geiger kicked into the final bars, and as waves of excitement pulsated through the theater, Rabinowitz—in all his grandeur, with all his accomplishment—was suddenly reduced to something small and mean.
Rabinowitz raised his eyes to Geiger and kept them yellow and hollow upon the young man. But this, as an intended distraction, also failed.
Geiger concluded the piece masterfully, bringing to it a flourish worthy of a bullfighter with flying cape and plunging sword. He started to sweat, but then stopped. He was in control. He hit the final phrases and sent a knockout blow toward the audience.
The ghost was gone. Words came to Geiger that would ring forever.
Rabinowitz’s fading, faltering voice:
“You couldn’t have done it without me.”
Geiger’s hands thundered down upon the final chords. He brought the Dance of Death to its frenzied conclusion.
“At first, no, Isador,” he said softly but aloud. But now, yes. Without you.”
Then, like a magician, Rolf pulled his hands from the keys to show that he was mortal, there were no tricks, that his hands were his own and that this inspired pianism had been the work of one young man who had worked so hard to refine and define his skills.
His hands and his soul. No one else’s.
The hall exploded with applause. Then Geiger was on his feet. And so was the entire audience within Covent Garden. Even the smattering of lords and knights in the stalls rose to acclaim the young American virtuoso.
Geiger stood onstage as flowers were hurled. A phalanx of female spectators surged toward the stage but could not get past the security people who formed a short human cordon at the ring of the stage. Vast bouquets of flowers cascaded downward from high up in the grand circle, and individual roses and lilies fluttered downward. Two dozen bouquets from the stalls landed near Geiger’s feet. The applause was so overwhelming, that Rolf almost tried to hide, turning and applauding himself for the orchestra, for Heinrich von Sauer and for various sections of the orchestra.
Twice Geiger tried to leave and twice the audience brought him back. He eventually settled in for a short encore and did the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata, as planned.
Another sixteen minutes of applause followed.
He returned to the stage once with Von Sauer and then a final time, dragging with him an involuntary female partner in a scarf and black gown. The audience roared its final approval for the night, then reluctantly, the audience finally let him.
As he left the theater, he looked everywhere for Isador Rabinowitz. But he saw no sign of the old man. Nor did he expect to ever see him again.
Forty-one
Two days later, half an hour after takeoff from Heathrow, Rolf Geiger peered out the side window of the first-class compartment of his New York-bound British Airways jet. The aircraft passed over the west country of England and found its proper highway in the sky, the flight pattern that would take Rolf back to New York for ten days.
After Labor Day, he and Diana would return to Europe. Dates in Paris, Rome, Munich, Bremen, Copenhagen, and Stockholm would follow within the next three weeks. The audiences would be knowledgeable and demanding. Geiger looked forward to the new challenges.
The sky was blue and bright outside the jet. The seat next to him was empty. Diana had gone back to the washroom. Geiger was alone with a multitude of thoughts.
Rolf had a remarkable sense of fulfillment, even though only one concert date had been completed and twenty-nine remained. The previous morning’s press in London had been unanimous and euphoric. Geiger had triumphed at Covent Garden.
“Welcome to the new master!”
—the Daily Telegraph
“Three great pieces, one paralleled performer.”
—the Guardian
“Rolf Geiger has mastered Beethoven, Liszt, London, himself and the world of classical music all on one dazzling evening at Covent Garden.”
—the Times of London
“Bravo, Mr. Geiger and welcome back! You, sir, may be the finest who ever sat down to play!”
—BBC-2
It was heady and impressive stuff. Big wet kisses in the daily British press and across the internet. Even the critics who had been so quick to trash him two years earlier now proclaimed him as the world’s greatest living pianist. And the irony was, to Rolf, it no longer mattered.
Brian Greenstone had faxed him a number of reviews that had appeared around the world following the London concert, even a rave from crusty old William Baumann at the New York Times. Rolf, while not ungrateful, had been dismissive of the accolades.
Greatness was too vague a term, Rolf had decided. And maybe too heavy a burden for any one man. Similarly, it was fleeting as a breeze. He had seen many athletes, many performers, playing long after their prime. Geiger would do his tour, do it with the highest standards of precision of which he was capable and then go on. Laurels withered, he knew. Other things were more important.
But, moreover, Rolf enjoyed the sense of finally having seen his mentor Rabinowitz in his entirety. He had the sense of having finally broken free of him and his oppressive spirit.
Geiger gazed continually out the window. As the airplane climbed into the sky, Geiger wondered about many things, just as he would always wonder about the worlds around him.
Had Rabinowitz’s ghost really been there? Or had the vision been in Geiger’s head?
Had Rabinowitz really pushed Geiger to a higher more spectacular realm of musicianship? Or had this just been Geiger’s psyche playing with itself, rationalizing and agonizing, dealing with the parallel memories of a loveless father and a loveless mentor?
Had there really been a ghost there to move Geiger’s thoughts and his musicianship along? Or had Rolf found love, peace, his future, and the salvation of his soul through the scores of long-dead composers?
After all, no one else had seen Rabinowitz since the day the old maestro died. Not even Diana, though she felt that she, too, had sensed something and had suffered her own share of bedeviling dreams.
But for that matter, didn’t a pianist raise a spirit every time he newly interpreted a score? Geiger thought back to the recordings of Raoul Pugno, those creaking t
apes from ninety years ago, and thought he knew the answer.
But what of Rabinowitz personally? And what of his music, the ethereal playing, the forceful melodies, the exalted rhythms which had propelled him to the position of the greatest pianist of his age, until the young pretender had lifted the mantle from his shoulder?
What was all that? What had been his genius? Had it been a gift? A talent? A curse? Or—taking the matter further—had it all been a pernicious mask, something to cover a malevolent spirit that had never surfaced?
Geiger had the impression of having seen Rabinowitz in his lifetime the way some men see a piece of great music. Some look at the larger movements of the score, but fail to note the underlying themes, the leitmotifs upon which the melody was pegged. They play the music. They touch all the correct notes. But they don’t understand the emotion of the symphony.
The airplane climbed.
A thousand questions besieged him. A dozen answers suggested themselves to each and each answer in turn suggested a dozen new questions. Sometimes, when thinking about Rabinowitz, Geiger felt as if he were locked in a wilderness of mirrors, with each mirror held up to the next, curving, bending and reflecting onward to infinity.
Then, as the airliner leveled off eight miles in the sky, he had a quixotic, generous notion.
Rabinowitz, his personal evil aside, had been a man after all, Rolf concluded. He had had something to say, had had his place the world, and had made his statement. Undoubtedly, Rabinowitz had purchased his greatness with his humanity. But he would be remembered as one of the finest musicians ever.
But the more Rolf examined the contradictions of his mentor’s life, the more he puzzled over it. At first he tried to make his interpretation in romantic sympathetic terms, seeing the artist who had fled the gas chambers and horrors of Central Europe. Music had offered Rabinowitz’s life a symmetry he told himself, an opportunity to put events in order. Those parameters had allowed Rabinowitz’s genius to emerge.
Then Geiger rejected this. He saw that definition as too sparse and not taking enough into account, particularly the malice and viciousness with which the homicidal artist had conducted his private life. So, in the end, Rolf was left with a complex score with many elements, some aggressively attacking the others, which would emerge differently with every interpretation. He could see Rabinowitz’s spirit as something petulant: a man who could not stand the thought that someone younger could be better. So he set out to stop the younger man, even from the grave. Then again, what was the ghost doing other than defending the man’s life’s work?
Finally, Geiger thought back to the incident on Whitlowe Street, when he, Rolf, had wandered the London night on the lonely restless eve of his greatest performance. Subsequently, he had used a map to find that location again before leaving London. He had gone there on foot and alone and, to no surprise, found the house he had “visited” a few nights earlier.
The building no longer looked as it had when Rolf had visited. It had been modernized and refurbished several times over the last few decades. A young West Indian couple now lived on the second floor. The only thing that gave Rolf a further start was the round blue sign on the front of the building, noting that the great artist, Isador Rabinowitz had lived at this location from 1940 to 1945.
Geiger’s attention turned to the present. He had his own life to live, his own ears to fill. So Rolf settled for an image of Rabinowitz receding in his mind, until the image became something very small and very large at the same time. In the image, the great man himself was seated at an upright, again much like Pugno alone in a studio years earlier.
The man. The person. His music.
He would recede more as the years went by—much like the image of an angry possessed man going through the door, slamming it, and leaving for a final time.
Geiger turned his attention back within the airplane and examined a final question.
What was the burden of excellence? Of genius? Of being the best in the world at anything for a lifetime?
Was all this too much for any one man to bear? Is that what Geiger had tried to throw off, the soul-clutching aspects of that burden? Was that what he had evaded for all those years when he filtered Billy Joel into Stravinsky? And, if Rabinowitz’s ghost had driven him to escape that, could the old master have been seen as malevolent after all?
“You couldn’t have done it without me?”
Those words would replay forever in Rolf Geiger’s heart. Once again, there were wide-open areas for differing interpretations.
A woman appeared beside Geiger and slid into the seat next to him. He turned to speak, expecting Diana. He was surprised when it wasn’t she.
“Hello,” said the woman. Geiger had seen the face before.
“Hi,” he said. He wasn’t sure who this was.
“I know there was a lovely lady sitting next to you,” the visitor said. “Your fiancée, I’m sure. Well, I’m sitting two rows behind you on the left. I just came over to say hello. It seems this is the only place we ever meet.”
She was in her fifties, dark hair and American. Nicely dressed. A Donna Karan suit.
“Do you remember me?” she asked.
For a moment, he didn’t. Then he had it.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Yes, of course. Air France. Paris to New York. Last March.”
“That’s correct. With all the fans you meet, what a fabulous memory!”
“We had a fireball rolling down the aisle,” he recalled. “Not that we needed one.”
She nodded and smiled.
“I guess I’m your Fireball Lady,” she said cheerfully.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Do for me?” the Fireball Lady asked. “Nothing. I just…Oh, I went to your concert the other evening. Covent Garden. Sat right in the stalls. Fifth row! You were just…just…” She shook her head, searching for the right accolade. “Just tremendous!” she finally said. “That Liszt! That Beethoven! You knocked me out!”
“Thank you.”
“And that part about ghosts that you mentioned in regard to the Liszt music? She said. “Dance of Death Was that it?”
“That was it.”
“Do you actually believe in ghosts?” she asked. “You know, whether they exist or not?”
He sighed, smiled and shook his head.
“I’ve had some experiences,” he said. “Too complicated to mention.” She nodded. “Well, look,” she said. “I don’t want to intrude. But there’s just one thing…”
Once again, he knew exactly what was coming.
“I have a niece named Barbi Ann,” his fan said. “She lives up in Scarsdale, New York, and loves that piano sketch and autograph you did for me last March. Remember it? I promised her that if I ever ran into you again—and I really didn’t think I would!—that I’d see if maybe…”
“I don’t mind at all,” he said gently. “I’d be honored. Do you have a pen?”
“Oh, wonderful.”
She found another thick note card and her Mont Blanc pen. He signed.
To Barbi Ann,
Much Love,
and drew another piano. Life did have a funny way of repeating itself.
He looked at his signature. It hadn’t changed much since March, and yet he felt so different.
Rolf Geiger
He handed the card back to her.
“Thanks so much,” she said, savoring the fresh souvenir. Then in her usual conspiratorial whisper,
“Clear skies today. No lighting. No turbulence, let’s hope”
“Let’s hope,” he agreed.
She excused herself and went back to the row two behind him. The seat next to him was vacant again. He reached to his luggage and found a small box from the jeweler on South Molton Street, the one that the ghost of Laura Aufieri seemed to have led him to. He placed the box on his lap under a newspaper. He looked around.
He remembered the fireball that had ripped down the aisle of his Air France jet six months
earlier. A man now given to new insights and superstitions about the world around him, he wondered about the provenance of the lightning.
There were rational scientific explanations, and they would satisfy most people. Electricity in the atmosphere. Moisture in the clouds. Thunder. Lightning. Manifestations of a physical rational world.
But Geiger wondered if rational reasoning could explain everything. If a ghost could take various quasi-human forms—its own form at different ages, a nightmare man-wolf figure, and a watcher—could it also have taken the form of the fireball?
As a warning perhaps?
As a bit of ghostly pyrotechnics?
There was a movement near him. He looked up. Diana was back.
“Hey,” she said, sliding back into her set.
“Hey,” he said. He gave her hand a squeeze.
“What’s going on back there?”
“An Israeli film director tried to pick me up. Then a French guy who claims he’s a Rothschild. Next time I go with you.”
“It’s a deal,” he said. He thought for a moment. “How’d you get rid of them?” he asked.
A sly smile crossed her face.
“I told them I was engaged.” He laughed.
“What made you tell him that?”
“It sounded good,” she said. “And I figured it would work.”
“What a coincidence,” he said. He pulled the box out from under the newspaper.
“I was going to have trouble getting this through customs, anyway. So I needed to give it to you now.”
Astonished, hesitating slightly, she stared at the box.
“See, the thing is,” he said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t have gotten through the past few months without you. I wouldn’t have buried the ghost of Rabinowitz, I wouldn’t have played as well in London, and I wouldn’t have learned how to love again.” He paused. “Sometimes life is very simple.”
She took the box in her hand.
“So open it,” he said.
Her eyes found his.
She pulled away the blue ribbon and lifted the lid. There was a small jewelry case within. It was brilliant red velvet. She opened it and they both looked at the ring. A beautiful diamond was surrounded by small rubies in antique gold filigree.
