by Simon Avery
It began: Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city… She read an account of her tryst with József; the steam and heat of the coffee house, the squalor of his apartment, Krisztina waking to find József standing on the balcony’s edge, the song that his life gave her.
The girl came out onto the balcony where Krisztina was shivering, watching the snow flake out of the pale sky… Krisztina was meeting Alice again at the record company’s release party for her first record; their brief time together was sympathetically described until events led to the accident in Batthyány Square and the resultant days in the hospital. It had been the beginning of the end of Krisztina’s first life.
In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one… And the beginning of the next.
“I can’t play it all,” Krisztina said. “I don’t hear the whole song.” She paused, stumbling on the next words. They were too hard to say, to admit to. “I think I have to wait until you’re gone.”
Alice’s song, and the ballerina’s, the woman on the run from an abusive husband, and the man who lived on the edge of a lake with a house full of clocks; the boy on the streets reducing to selling his body for money; the old man who might have been a refugee from the Cold War…
And then the torch singer: But it had been taken; taken by the fugitive stranger. Krisztina read it. Re-read it. Rebeka Stróbl, describing Krisztina’s life in prose, describing her encounter with the author of the prose. She felt a rush of vertigo. She flipped through the pages to see how it finished. How your life finishes, she thought, and had to sit down.
Someone knew… was where the text ended. There, Krisztina had begun to receive the news clippings from whom she was certain was Rebeka Stróbl. It ended before the song began, before she began to uncover information on Stróbl and Lejeune. What it meant, Krisztina assumed, was that both parties were at the same point on their creative paths. The song and the story were both unfinished. Lejeune had told her to leave the city, to escape before his psychotic wife came for her story. But how could she now her life was starting again? Finally she was moving away from the loss of Alice, making reparations in her relationship with her father, making a record again, moving on… How could she simply walk away?
She returned to the balcony and stared down into the Danube. How could she simply walk away?
11
Krisztina picked Klub Vittula in Central Pest for the live show. The record company rep came and sniffed around one night with her and wrinkled his nose at the narrow steps that led down to the basement of an old house in Kertész Street, at the bare bricks and the artsy punk feel of the place. He told her it was too Underground, too cramped. He couldn’t imagine the other PR people standing shoulder to shoulder with the kind of clientele that the Klub Vittula attracted. Krisztina ignored him. If they wanted her to play live, then it was her way or the highway. They acquiesced finally.
She agreed to a week of rehearsals and then they would play that one night at the Klub Vittula. Any longer and she was sure that her nerve wouldn’t hold.
She used the session musicians that had come in to record the album. They rehearsed the five new songs that were performable, and six of the songs from her first record. When she was satisfied that the set was as tight as it was ever going to be, she called her father and asked him if he would come to the city to oversee the sound mixing on the night. He agreed immediately. She realised when she put the phone down that asking him to be there in a professional capacity was no more than a ruse. She simply wanted her father there on the night. She wanted someone to perform to.
***
Krisztina watched them arrive at Klub Vittula that night from a café across the street. A ragged queue had formed in the snow, shivering in T-shirts. She tried to study their faces; to see what it was that had brought them here to see her. But there was nothing to see: couples wrapped their arms around each other; older men with pot bellies and faded T-shirts stood staring straight ahead; younger kids that were all bony wrists and elbows played with their phones to stave off the cold. These were her people apparently.
She sat with her father and they drank bitter coffee and she tried not to notice that he seemed thinner than when she had last seen him. There was something both hard and hopeless about him. There had been another veneer of awkwardness to navigate initially too; isolated from his pretty little home in Badacsony made him seem more vulnerable and subsequently on his guard. But they had spent the afternoon in the venue, taking their time over the sound check to ensure she could hear her voice and the piano and the other instruments; by the time they were both satisfied, the ice had thawed again. She could still hear his song but it remained distant. Beautiful and atonal but mercifully remote. She could live with that. It was reassuring for the moment.
He watched her watching the assembled fans. “You’ll have to get used to this, Krissy,” he said. “You’ll have to give up that romantic obscurity you’ve been hiding behind.”
She could hear her heart rattling in her chest. Her hands wouldn’t sit still. Her thoughts were flying away from her like startled birds. She wanted it to be happening, to be in the midst of it, to disappear into the music she’d made; perhaps then, this would all make a sort of sense to her. Finally her father closed a hand over hers and said: “Krissy. It will be OK.”
He smiled. “Listen to your father, yeah?”
***
Her hands trembled on the keys as the three other musicians stood close by, waiting for her to begin. It was a cramped little stage with shabby curtains on either side. Krisztina glanced up from the piano and out into the audience, standing no more than four feet away from her, and she wondered if she would ever be able to start. They were too loud, she thought. They weren’t even listening. But then she closed her eyes and began to play the first notes of The Teardrop Method, and the world suddenly fell away from her. These notes had followed her around the city, had called out to her. They were Alice. She saw her face in her mind, held onto it, tight and fierce, started to play. It took her from that little hospital room flooded with sunlight, and out into the world.
She couldn’t hear the music as well as during the sound check – the PA system needed updating and there was a limit to what her father could get out of it – but it didn’t matter. She heard the other musicians begin to play. She felt the security of their proximity to her. They’d recorded with her on the new album and she’d grown accustomed to them. They were aware that she’d never played live; they closed in and buoyed her up when she faltered. They were good, tight players. They were on the good ship Teardrop, Krisztina thought deliriously as the songs slipped by, and they hadn’t yet sprung a leak. The crowd was quiet, appreciative, and attentive. She breezed through ‘Clocks’, then a stripped down version of ‘Assoluta’, and ‘In from the Cold’. Alice was there in her head; she was there closing her hands over Krisztina’s on the keys; encircling her with the warmth of her love. When she became jittery and played too fast, she felt her there, counting the beat out to her, slowing her down. Krisztina disappeared into the songs, left her body behind to perform. The people who’d inspired these songs were waiting for her; she could see them all, their faces, their lives, the way they’d let go and given her their stories. She felt them, jostling through the crowds to surround her; guide her on through the uncertainty.
It was close to the end of the set when she heard the song. She faltered for a moment as she played, then continued. She opened her eyes, glanced out into the audience, slightly surprised at their continued presence. She saw Stróbl first; she was weaving slowly through the crowd, her attention fixed on Krisztina. Her face came and went, bobbed like a balloon on an uncertain wind. Krisztina blinked, returned her attention to the keys, glanced out again and then saw the featureless porcelain mask rise out of the faces and then submerge again. She watched them from the corner of her eye: moving, prowling, swimming; the author and the broken model. She felt the walls closing in around her suddenly. S
he hesitated, sensed her band falter for a moment, hoping she’d pick up the beat, keep going. The good ship Teardrop was sinking. She was reluctant to let it go down, but her hands were beginning to shake; her mind was becoming empty with fear. She wished her father was closer, and not at the back of the room at the sound desk. She wanted his protection for the first time in their lives.
Krisztina stopped. She rose and stared out at the sea of faces, listened to the sudden silence. All those faces, some of them that she’d seen outside while she’d sat in the café. Her people.
And then she turned and ran.
***
She heard their song all the way back to her home. She knew they were following her, that they were at her heels. The snow was removing signs and landmarks, making masks out of the buildings towering over her. Dark, empty windows like the eyes of Felipe Lejeune; they were staring at her, studying her progress across the city. Only the empty cold of the river could guide her back to the hotel. Krisztina could hear the arrangement of the song falling into place: the empty piano, the throbbing bass prowling through the fractured strings. She heard herself in the recording booth, stepping close to the microphone and singing:
I loved you once, I love you now
The coldest hands will leave no trace
I saw you then. I see you now
I see beyond your broken face.
The hotel didn’t feel like a refuge. She ran through the empty foyer while the concierge dozed in a corner and pulled open the iron grate of the elevator, pulled it shut behind her, jabbed at the button and listened to her heart throbbing like an urgent bass line as the elevator jerked upward. She rose through the darkened hotel and peeled back the iron grate when she reached the top floor, flung herself down the corridor to her apartments, fumbled with the keys at her door. She dropped them twice, and glanced back down the corridor each time she reached down for them. She could still hear the song, constructing itself in her head, keeping little details from her as they always did. She thought of the characters in Rebeka Stróbl’s unfinished manuscript and wondered how many she’d had to kill to construct such a complex tapestry of fiction. She thought of them both following their own respective muses across the city, crisscrossing the ancient river from Buda to Pest, listening and looking for the signs that guided them from death to death, murder to murder. And if there were two of them with this gift, then how many others could there be? In other cities across the world: painters and poets and photographers, directors and dancers, architects and astronomers; all touched with this gift, all perhaps flawed, stymied or damaged by life. And all of them following the signs – the words, the music, the steps, the rhythms, the perfect shot, the perfect light, the perfect place. And how many of them were moved by mortality, how many by a stronger urge, the urge to take, to kill?
Krisztina realised that she’d never know for sure. It was like understanding God, or seeing the Wizard behind the curtain; it was not for her to comprehend but to take what had been given on faith. But now it was taking back: was that how it worked?
She entered her rooms and closed the door behind her, locked and bolted it. She moved from room to room, drawing the drapes and turning on lights and lamps. When she was done, she crossed to the balcony and opened the doors, leaned out and looked across the river to the bridges, at the people moving slowly, heavily through the snow. It was bitterly cold. There was no one to see. The song had diminished. Perhaps she’d been impetuous, leaving that way. She closed the balcony doors and stood in the drawing room, listening to the silence. The song was gone. She heard herself breathing heavily, heard the breaths turn to sobs. She had disappointed everyone. Perhaps the record company had anticipated as much. She knew she’d never much inspired the confidence that Alice had always had in her.
After a moment she pulled out her phone and called her father to apologise, and to get an assessment of what damage was done. It wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. Her sudden departure had only piqued interest amongst the journalists and the fans; at least she had been close to the end of the set, so no one had felt shortchanged by her curtailing the show. He sounded concerned, and she told him that nothing was wrong. Somewhat reassured, Krisztina promised to see him at the recording studio tomorrow. Perhaps the night hadn’t been entirely ruined.
She realised now that it mattered to her. All of it: her career, her future; how things evolved from this moment. She wanted to play live again. No matter what had happened tonight, she had taken pleasure in the process. She had enjoyed being lost in the songs she had created, enjoyed being close to the people that had inspired them. She wanted to take control of it all; to be involved in the production and mixing, conceiving the artwork and participating in the publicity drive when the record was released. She regretted the monosyllabic interviews she’d given for the first record, but now she realised that she wanted to speak about the people that had inspired these songs; she was their spokesperson now. These songs were their elegies, these songs were their lives. She was a speaker for the dead.
Krisztina went from room to room, turning off lights, readying for bed. Tomorrow, to pacify the record company, she’d agree to tour the record. Tonight had been better than she’d anticipated; perhaps she could learn to love it.
***
The song seemed to go from mono to stereo. From dream to waking, it all changed. The sun had been shining in her dream. Budapest was washed clean by a morning rain, and now it was beautiful and ancient and alive. She’d been walking hand in hand with someone whose face she couldn’t see; the sun was in Krisztina’s eyes. It wasn’t Alice she realised suddenly. Her song was wrong. She pulled her hand away, smile fading, stepping away from the stranger with the sun where her face should have been.
She heard her breath release as she woke; as her eyes opened, she saw it mist in the air above her. It was still dark; she had only been asleep for an hour or so. It took her a moment to realise that the song had followed her from the dream. It had escaped into the dark rooms; it was prowling in the shadows and the corners, taunting her. Krisztina didn’t move for a moment. She felt like a child, afraid of the dark; if she didn’t move a muscle, then surely she’d be unharmed by whatever was moving slowly through her home.
She could hear the city too: the sound of traffic, of emergency vehicles sliding across the streets, their sirens whining through the dark; the rush of the river below her. The balcony door was open.
As she grew accustomed to the dark, Krisztina finally shifted in the bed, slid from one side to the other and slipped away from the covers and against the wall, taking hold of her mobile phone as she went. The song was growing insistent; it was a miasma in her head. She couldn’t shake it; it was clouding her mind. She moved slowly against the wall and past the window, hesitated at the rectangle of light pooling across the room. It would throw her shadow out across the hall, alerting the interlopers of her presence. Instead she scrambled back towards the bed and knelt down behind it. She tried to thumb in the number of the emergency service, but her head was spinning out of control. All she could hear was the song, urgent and insistent. The phone slipped out of her hand finally and tumbled away from her beneath the bed. She left it there and pulled herself up against the bed, stumbled towards the doorway.
Rebeka Stróbl was waiting for her on the other side of the door. As Krisztina stepped over the threshold, she felt the hand take hold of the back of her hair and yank her head backwards. She cried out, losing balance. The world tilted away but then Stróbl took her weight in her arms like a lover. She pulled her close until their faces were almost touching. She closed her mouth over Krisztina’s, ran her tongue along her lips. “Krisztina,” she said. “Darling.” Then she plunged the knife into Krisztina’s belly and let her body fall to the floor.
***
She must have lost consciousness for a while. When Krisztina stirred, Rebeka Stróbl was standing in front of the balcony doors with the knife in her hand and the light in her face, as if she’d slid out of t
he dream and into the world. It’s sent her quite mad, she heard Felipe Lejeune telling her in the snow. Every story in the city, chipping away at whatever remained of her sanity.
Krisztina tried to move. There was a hollow in her now, the cold filling her up, saturating her body. When she raised her hands she saw the blood on them. She lifted her head and saw the wound in her belly, the blood soaking through her nightdress. The world shifted away from her for a moment, tilted on its axis. Soon it would leave her entirely. Soon there would be no escape.
“I hear your song,” Krisztina said, hoping it might deter Stróbl for a moment. “It’s loud. I can almost hear all of it. It’s yours and it’s Felipe’s too.”
Rebeka Stróbl shook her head. “You’ll never hear it all, sweet Krisztina.” She waved the knife out in front of her. She seemed intoxicated with the promise of spilling blood. But perhaps it wasn’t the bloodletting but the guarantee of another life, another story to tell. Intoxicating.
Krisztina was lying in the doorway. She tried to move away slowly, intending to turn and crawl to the door and the elevator when the moment was right. But as she glanced down the hall, she heard the elevator grinding into life, rising up out of the sleeping silence of the hotel. If it held Stróbl’s husband, then Krisztina’s options were slim. Perhaps he might try to save her, or perhaps not. The past has a hold on us… The staircase was past the elevator doors. She should have listened to him when he’d given her the manuscript. To leave before it was too late.
