by Simon Avery
“So I came to Hungary and I married your mother and I kept drinking and thought I could forget who I’d been.
“But the past gets a hold on you, Krissy, and it’s possessive; it doesn’t need anyone or anything else to feed it. It gets to be poison in your bloodstream and you can never get it all out. So I ended up pissing the future away too. They were all my failings. All of them.”
He’d seemed to evaporate into the dark shadows that had fallen around the room. Krisztina couldn’t see his face anymore. “Forty years is too long to waste,” he said.
***
Later, the rain cleared and they walked up the hill to the restaurant. The trees dripped with rain. The silence seemed vast. She could hear ice cracking on the lake, and out there, her father’s song: that lonely aria, those angry sounds from The Bleed that she realised were the past; John Merriwether’s past, hammering at the door and rattling the windows, always wanting to get in.
I will slip in under your heart
And rattle your ribs
I have come
To hear your confession
It was the sickness in him too; a metaphor that had come alive in his blood and would take him away from the world soon, just as it had ignited the creativity that had burned in him in the sixties. She’d seen the notepads in his recording room, overflowing with words that disturbed and thrilled her with equal measure. The songs were a river of darkness that you could all too easily drown in; but he’d made a boat out of the regrets and failings of his past, the anger and powerlessness of the sickness, and found a way to sail it. She thought of something her father had said in the Wire interview, a line from The Bleed: Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself. She wondered if there would be time for another record.
There was something sad about the empty restaurant, the surfeit of young waiters standing stiffly to attention outside, and the way the owner cleaned the bar in a desultory fashion as Krisztina and her father arrived out the mist. The colourful awning was dripping with rain after one of the waiters had pushed at its underside with a broom. There were tables laid outside but it was too cold. There was an old recording of Edith Piaf on the stereo behind the bar, candles flickering on the tables, wine bottles covered in melted wax. The waiters made a fuss of her father; they knew what he liked to drink and delivered the Scotch as soon as he seated himself. Krisztina picked one of the local bottles of Pinot Gris, and they sat together, glancing out of the window, strangely relieved when a couple of other villagers arrived to dine too.
Halfway through her Töltött paprika, Krisztina set down her knife and fork and said: “These songs that I’ve written…” She paused for a moment, and then continued. “I didn’t so much write them as they came to me, fully formed.”
Her father shrugged. “Sometimes they come like that. It works in different ways for different people.”
Krisztina shook her head. “No. I mean all of them. I heard them and I followed them and found they belonged to people in the city as they were about to die. They were the stories of their lives… When they died, I collected their song like it was their soul, and came home to record it. They were fully formed. I only had to listen for them.”
Her father studied her for a moment, sat back, ran a hand over the stubble of hair on his skull. She wanted him to know; she wanted to share it with someone. She wanted someone to make sense of it for her. After playing him the songs, there had been the nagging feeling that she hadn’t really worked for them in the way her father had for The Bleed. That she was in some way a fraud.
She explained it from the start. The first time she had heard the music in the hospital and the realisation that the music belonged to Alice. She told him about the words like tears all over town and then about the rest of them: these people with their beautiful and brilliant and sad and lonely lives; how she’d heard them, and how their last moments on Earth communicated the final complete song.
Krisztina couldn’t decide if her father believed her or not. He simply nodded as she spoke then took out his cigarettes, lit one, sat back in his seat. He was already ahead of her. “Do you hear mine?” he asked. “My song?”
Krisztina hesitated for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally.
“And is it close?” he asked. “The end, I mean.”
She studied his eyes. His brow was furrowed. He made to close a hand over hers, but he refrained from it. She did it for him. “No,” she said. “I hear it in the distance. As if it’s coming from across the lake. It’s faint.”
“So I still have a little time?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t be sure.”
He smiled. “The doctors told me to take it easy. They said I shouldn’t exert myself. That I should quit drinking and smoking, but really, what’s the point? I’ve realised that there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it in. And I know I’ve only myself to blame for that. But I’m not willing to throw in the towel yet.”
Krisztina gripped his hand tightly. “So don’t.”
“Listen,” he said. “On the day the doctor gave me my diagnosis, and I drove home, I found everything in the world was still in its place, but I couldn’t recognise any of it. My existence had vanished and I felt like a ghost in my own life. I sat in the car and listened to the engine running and the radio playing. Then I drove home and still nothing seemed real. The unmade bed, the dirty plates in the kitchen, the ticking clocks, and the book I’d left with a page folded over to mark my place…
“Whereas once I imagined there was nothing in my life, now there really was nothing. Just that fucking sickness and the certainty of death. But then I went into the room with my old guitars and picked one up, plugged it in and I started to play. It sounded angry, urgent, desperate. Halfway through I started to record what was coming out of the amplifier. I called it ‘Darkness’ and it became the first song on The Bleed.
“It just came out. I was afraid; afraid of the illness, of my mortality, of the way I’d made a mess of my life and my relationships. And then this purging noise came out because it had to. Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself.”
Her father stopped and stubbed out the cigarette. “Do you understand what I’m saying here? The same applies to you.”
***
At 5 a.m., Krisztina woke. The silence and the strange bed disturbed her. She discovered that she couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, she rose, and with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, went to the balcony, stared out at the perfectly still lake. The snow had returned in the night; it dusted the treetops and the peaks of the mountains. She heard her father’s song again. Even when it was so indistinct, she realised that it would always be too complex for her to interpret: that aria drifting through the trees; the sudden shriek of violins; the metallic rhythms; the febrile throb. There was something else now though and she strained her ears to hear it. There was a thread of unity rising through the music, bringing the disparate elements together. She heard it reach its zenith and suddenly it was beautiful and perfect, and she understood it all.
And then it was gone and she was alone again, shivering on the balcony. She closed the door and went back inside.
7
When she returned to Budapest, Krisztina made the call to Peter Wright. He’d worked on her first record as well as The Bleed. She wanted to harness some of her father’s creative energy during the recording of her album; she’d returned somehow re-energised by his zeal for the music. With some reluctance, she also made the call to her record company to ascertain if they were interested in new music from the reclusive Krisztina Ligeti. After they had listened to the demos that she had recorded, everyone was in agreement about the quality of the music. Krisztina was surprised at their confidence in the material, but remained cautious about her optimism. She called her father and began casting the net for the session musicians he’d used for his songs on The Bleed. There was tentative talk of dipping her toe in
the water of some low-key live performances, showcasing the new material. She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no.
Gradually the quality of Krisztina’s days changed. She couldn’t deny it. She was a part of the world again. The songs that she’d toiled over in her makeshift studio now had an audience, and within several weeks she was back in the same studio she’d recorded her first album in. The songs were dissected then put back together again until gradually they assumed the shape of the music she’d followed across the city. Outside, the winter took hold of Budapest. A car collected her in the morning and the days held purpose and promise again. She had to learn how to speak to these strangers, how to follow their methods, how to listen to the record company executives when they came to discuss internet presence, promotion and meets and greets. She accepted it reluctantly and she missed Alice every step of the way.
***
And then she began to receive the news clippings. They arrived at her door in thin Manila envelopes bearing no stamps, no address. Inside were newspaper reports and printouts from the internet. The first was a small clipping detailing Alice’s death after being hit by a car in Batthyány Square, reported in a local magazine purely because she was the alleged partner of cult singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligeti. It was a brief, disconcertingly cold piece and Krisztina didn’t linger for long over it before leaving for the studio. Then, two days later, another arrived. A clipping from the Magyar Nemzet, the Hungarian national newspaper, reporting on the death of Mariaka Kallós, the prima ballerina who had danced with Nureyev.
After that they arrived at two or three day intervals; a report of the death that had inspired the songs that Krisztina was toiling over in the Origo recording studio in Kecskemét. She regarded them with a grim kind of fascination.
Someone knew.
8
A new song began. It took several days for Krisztina to recognise it for what it was; she was so immersed in the recording of the songs that would make up The Teardrop Method, and preparations for one low-key show with three other musicians to showcase the new music, that it eluded her for a time. But it grew louder. It began to cloud her concentration as she sat behind the mixing desk as they recorded guitar overdubs for the song ‘Yellow Jack’.
Finally she went outside into the snow and tugged her coat close to her throat, then made her way slowly to a bar where she drank two fruit vodkas and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. It was there, scratching at the back of her mind, like something she’d forgotten, like lost keys or a name on the tip of her tongue. She had thought she was done; that the gift had given and then moved on. The songs had diminished. The dying had stopped calling out to her. But now?
On the way back to the studio the song grew more insistent. It refused to be ignored, so she let it guide her to whatever revelation it had for her. It led her to a bookshop, which she hadn’t expected. She stepped inside, stamping the snow from her boots. The carpet was threadbare and damp around the door. An old man glanced up at her from half-moon spectacles, and then returned to scratching something in a ledger. She studied him for a moment and then listened. It wasn’t his song that she heard. Satisfied, Krisztina instead moved slowly through the dusty labyrinth of tall shelves. Once she found the fiction section, she ran her fingers past the book spines until the song reached its zenith. She stopped.
There was only one Rebeka Stróbl book on the shelves but it called to her; a dog-eared paperback that had clearly known several owners. Krisztina took All the Pretty Children to the counter and paid for it, then returned to the recording studio and forgot about it until she got home that night. For a while the fledgling song in her head had diminished.
When Krisztina took it out of the paper bag later and turned it over she noticed the small author photograph for the first time. She studied it closely until she was convinced. It was the woman she had encountered on the night she’d followed the song to the torch singer’s dressing room. The woman who had stolen the story of the singer’s life from her.
Krisztina booted up her laptop and typed Rebeka Stróbl’s name into Google. The news articles were what piqued her interest first. She clicked on one.
French Model and Author Wife in Auto Accident
Male model Felipe Lejeune and Hungarian author Rebeka Stróbl were seriously injured in an automobile accident in central Paris yesterday. The crash occurred at midnight after the couple left the Ritz hotel, where they were believed to be staying after marrying and honeymooning on the Riviera.
Lejeune began modelling in 2004 and rose to prominence as the star of Calvin Klein’s Desire campaign. He was the first male model to sign a six-figure deal to represent Calvin Klein exclusively. Stróbl has published several pieces of short fiction and a novel, All the Pretty Children, in her native Hungary. The couple met in the South of France.
While Stróbl suffered a fractured skull and a shattered pelvis, Lejeune reportedly suffered extensive facial injuries, a collapsed lung and broken limbs after being thrown through the windscreen of the couple’s rental car.
There was more than enough further information on Stróbl and her husband Felipe Lejeune spread across the internet. There were Wikipedia pages for both of them, multiple archived news articles covering both their careers and the accident in Paris that had spelled the end of Lejeune’s modelling career. Lejeune had been one of the most photographed men of the previous decade and indeed his face was as perfect as any man Krisztina had ever seen. But despite rumours and several blurred Paparazzi shots from a distance, there were no photographs of the model after going through the windscreen of his car in Paris. Following months in hospital and reportedly multiple plastic surgeries, the once perfect couple had retired from the limelight to Stróbl’s native Hungary. There was one subsequent news item, dated from earlier in the year, reporting on the rumour that Lejeune had moved out of the marital home and taken residence alone in an apartment in the Castle District.
Krisztina thought of the man in the porcelain mask that she had seen in the past few months. Was that Lejeune? And if so, why had she now crossed paths with both husband and wife?
9
“Is that Krisztina Ligeti?”
The call had stirred her in the middle of the night. She’d leaned over to turn on her lamp, knocking the Rebeka Stróbl paperback to the floor. She couldn’t decide what it was that disturbed her so about the voice that asked her name. It was muffled, lisping; every word was a slowly enunciated struggle. Krisztina had read that in the crash, Felipe Lejeune had bitten most of his tongue off.
“You’ve been following me.”
“I have.”
She was surprised that he admitted the fact so readily.
“Why?”
“For your own good.”
“Am I in danger?”
There was a pause.
She heard him begin to speak and then he seemed to gag. She wondered if he was wearing a mask when he spoke to her.
“Of course you are,” he said finally. “My wife is quite insane.”
She considered this for a moment. She rose from the bed and went to her window, the sheets wrapped around her. She felt the chill of the rooms on her skin. Outside, the city went on as it always did; the drunks and the tourists and the whores, the living and the lost. She imagined Felipe Lejeune in a phone booth with the mask on his face, making his clandestine call.
“Do you know what she can do?” she asked the silence. “What we can do?”
“I do,” he said. His voice was sounding more ragged by the minute. “You hear the dying. You hear the song that is their life.”
“And your wife has the same—” She hesitated to call it a gift.
“No,” Lejeune said firmly. “My wife can see everyone’s story. Every person on every street is a potential tale to tell. She can see the words of a hundred or more lives in between the newspaper print, in every advertisement, in the words of other books. Every life. Every story. It’s a cacophony in her head. So many stories. She doesn’t sleep a
nymore; there is no rest for her. She writes all day and then at night she goes out in search of new stories.”
“But she kills for them,” Krisztina felt compelled to insist. She remembered her in the singer’s dressing room; a spider of a woman. Furtive, quick, empty. “I don’t kill anyone.”
“Yes, that is correct. Where you wait for the story to come at the end of their lives, Rebeka cuts it from the body. Like a crude surgery of the soul.”
Krisztina held her breath. She’d not considered it in such a blunt manner.
“She is dangerous now,” Lejeune said. “She has your story and she wants to tell it all.”
“Which means killing me.”
“It does.”
“You’re her husband. Stop her.”
She thought she heard him snort with laughter. “If only it were that simple.”
“Are you afraid of her?”
She heard him pull away from the phone and exhale loudly.
His voice, when it returned was cracked, harder than ever to understand. “I’m terrified.”
“Then call the police and tell them.”
“I can’t,” he said.
Krisztina thought he was sobbing now, but it was hard to tell. Sobbing or laughing. The notion made her step away from the window. “Why not?” she asked.
“The past,” he began. “It has a hold on us.”
She’d heard something similar from her father. The past gets a hold on you and it’s possessive; it doesn’t need anyone or anything else to feed it. It gets to be poison in your bloodstream and you can never get it all out.
