Don’t come crying …
She worked at the Bartok with savage concentration. When she paused after two hours she felt better. Like a long-distance runner who extends herself beyond pain, tapping the second wind. I am getting it, I will show them, even Anna will lower her eyes and applaud.
Languidly she stretched, flexing her cramped fingers. She would shower and do three more hours before lunch. Virtue filled her like cinnamon-scented black coffee, making the world vibrant, everything sensuous and full of promise. She opened the window to a brisk rush of October air, lay on the rug and lifted her arms and legs ten times, touching fingers to toes. If I’m going to be famous, I have to be perfect — and then Sergei one night would simply say “May I come in?”, parting her yearning thighs. Under the shower she sang and shampooed her hair, towelled herself lightly, put on a soft bathrobe, still singing.
In her mind’s eye she observed herself: taking from a pine sideboard a blue and white china plate and a pearl-handled knife, selecting an orange from the bowl, sitting by the window, a lucent spiral of rind falling like a bracelet from the fruit. Young Woman Peeling Orange in Sunlight — a Dutch interior. Young Woman Waiting for a Phone Call.
When the doorbell rang she was not surprised, feeling only a frisson of satisfaction for her wet curls and bathrobe. Now he will reward me. The bell rang again and again, shrilly, in a frenzy of dammed-up desire. Bathrobe flying, she released the lock.
It was Sasha who catapulted in. He slammed the door behind him and locked it, stood leaning against it, his face buried in his hands.
“Sasha, my god, what is it? What’s happened to him?”
“Who knows? Jail, concentration camp, the worlds gone mad. No warrants, no charges, nothing!”
“My god, Sasha, explain, explainl” Cat-like, claws out, she shook him as though he were a sparrow. “Where is Sergei?”
“My fatherl” He stared at her through his fingers and gave a shout of derisive laughter. “Oh, I assure you, no harm can come to my father.” He began pacing up and down her living room, wringing his hands. “No, no. He is probably conferring with the government, slipping money for law and order.”
“What is it then? What’s happened?”
“Hundreds of people. Practically anyone who looks poor and speaks French.”
“Sasha, please. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, Emily, Emily!” he was distraught, waving his arms as though trying to tear away a nightmare that clung like a cobweb. He seized her and held her against himself so that she could scarcely breathe, but it had nothing to do with desire. In the vibrato of his limbs, in the desperate clench of his hands, she sensed that he held her as a man drowning might grasp at a lifeguard; as a child who has seen unspeakable horrors in the night might cling to his mother.
“Sasha, tell me! What is it?”
“People herded up like cattle!” He could not keep still. It occurred to her that he was hallucinating. (A party? Drugs?) He kept rubbing his forehead and temples. “One grows up with such myths. Especially here. The dreams of two cultures: liberté, égalifé, fraternité; government of the people by the people for the people. Beautiful, beautiful. And one day you wake up and see the real face of power — a stink hole crawling with maggots.”
“Please explain, Sasha. I haven’t seen the news, I’ve been practising all morning.”
“They’ve invoked the War Measures Act. They don’t need warrants or reasons. They can break in anywhere, arrest anyone they want. They got Gilles and Sylvie at five o’clock this morning, the animals.”
He leapt up and began pacing again. “French policemen too. How is it possible? With liberty and justice for all.” He pounded on the wall with his fists. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The babies left crying in their cribs?”
“Babies?”
“If the parents are dangerous, we can’t be worried about details like their babies, can we? Sylvie had two minutes to tell a neighbour. The neighbour called me.”
“All this is because of Cross?”
“And Laporte.”
“Laporte?”
“Don’t you live in the real world, Emily? Laporte was kidnapped six days ago.”
As in New York, as with Sergei last night, she grieved for her congenital triviality.
“It has to be someone like Gilles, of course. Mediocrity can get by, but anyone brilliant and compassionate … to be an intellectual is proof of guilt.” He was talking more calmly now, her ignorance sobering him. “And poor. That’s a dreadful crime.”
“What have they done, this Gilles and Sylvie?”
“Oh well,” his voice was heavy with bitterness. “Sylvie helped organise a day-care centre. That’s certainly subversive. And Gilles is known to hold separatist views. Due process doesn’t apply.”
She let him pace, fascinated by his rage as by something inaccessible to her.
“They were dragged out of bed this morning. No knocking. Just police in the bedroom. No calls to a lawyer allowed. No reasons given. Just come with us. As a special concession you can tell a neighbour to look in on the children.”
“That’s horrible. I can’t believe it.”
“When I went there the two-year-old was crying and vomiting with fright. I took him to a clinic then home to my mother. My father has to have some use. The other one, the baby, is with the neighbour.”
“Are you in danger?”
“Ha! What do you think, Emily? I live in Westmount. My father donates to Bourassa’s campaigns.”
He picked up the orange she had peeled and began to eat it. The fire of his outrage had slackened, he looked haggard, he slumped at her table.
“I just needed to tell someone. I wanted to see if there were still human beings who would be shocked. I’m sorry, Emily I’ve interfered with your practice.”
If criticism was implied, it could not be detected in his tone of voice.
“I’ll go now,” he said.
And left.
That afternoon, a Friday, Sergei was not at rehearsal.
It is the child, she thought. Their lives have become complicated, implicated. She could not decide which was the more indulgent: to listen to the radio all evening or to practice with single-minded zeal. Trying both, trying to quash the shameful fantasies of her body, she toyed ineffectually with Bartok, ricocheted from news bulletins to hovering by the telephone. (Should I call? under pretext of asking for Sasha, asking how is the child?)
She thought how fortunate she had been when he simply sat in the empty auditorium watching her. An embarrassment of riches. Through greed she had upset some delicate ecology of the emotions and lost him.
The phone rang and she flew to it, but it was Jim from New York.
“How on earth did you get my phone number?”
“From the CIA,” he joked.
“Seriously.”
“Seriously, what could be simpler? I called the secretary of the Montreal Symphony. And I’m sure the CIA did the same.”
“It’s terrible here. Like an apocalypse. Are we on the news there?”
“Of course. Fascism unmasked: the true face of the propertied classes revealed. Who is surprised?”
“I am surprised.”
“You would be. I called to see if you were caught in the tangle in any way, though I felt reasonably confident you’d be engaged with your violin.”
“That’s right,” she said wearily. “I think I’ll go now, Jim. I’m keeping Bartok waiting.”
“Have you any idea what’s happening in Vietnam right now? You need someone to keep you in touch with reality, Emily.”
As she lowered the receiver, she could hear him crying: “Don’t you care about justice? Don’t you care what you’re doing to me?”
On the route of Sasha’s distress, she paced her apartment. She turned on the radio. “… safe conduct out of Canada,” Bourassa was promising, “in exchange for the safe return of Mr Cross and Mr Laporte. But there will be no negotiation … �
� She turned it off. Where was there safety from guilt? And from self-disgust? And from yearning? If rice paddies burned while she fiddled, if a child whimpered in Westmount for its mother while she longed only and obsessively for Sergei, what hope lay in music, however exalted? She felt unclean, she showered again, and douched.
As sin-wracked medieval penitents found peace only in hair shirts and excess, she practiced for five hours without sitting, without dinner, without pause. She practiced until one a.m. when someone from another apartment thumped on her door and demanded to know when she was going to let mere mortals sleep.
When she looked across the table at him she kept saying to herself Sergei, Sergei, afraid he would disappear. It was already dark when he came, late on Saturday. After dinner chez Anna. After, for Emily, a day of fitful sleep and hallucination and manic bursts of practising.
She reached out to touch him and he took her hand in both of his. He had not spoken since saying at the door: “Emily.”
Powerless to feel irritated, she thought: he assumes that my time, my apartment, are at his disposal. My rhythms must match his whims.
And it was so.
Surely her desire must be apparent as an aureole, a visible halo of want. If he leaned an inch closer he would be swallowed up in the magnetic field of her body. When he took her hand she felt a physical displacement, a seeping of herself on to her chair. Soon she would simply flow around him so that he, an undefended island, would be bathed in her warm compelling sea.
Sergei sat without moving, without speaking, seemingly unaware of her presence in spite of the hand clasped in his.
She said softly: “Does the child in your house upset you?”
And he stirred like someone trying to shake off the effects of a sleeping pill.
“I have provided generously. There’s a man, one of my printers at the newspaper, a good family, French. Until all this is over.”
“Sasha?” she ventured.
“It’s not a fault, idealism in the young.” He raked his fingers through his hair, troubled by uncertainty, a novel emotion. “Inevitably there are excesses with the police. It was badly done.” He toyed with her fingers as though with worry beads. “Sasha did the right thing. For his sake I got word through to the parents. I assured them the children would be cared for.”
How simple power is, she thought. Compassionate power.
She saw tears in his eyes and felt insanely jealous of Sasha.
“But so naive,” he sighed, shaking his head. “So hopelessly romantic.”
Again he retreated to silent abstraction. With anguish she thought: he will leave abruptly, as Sasha did. I can never intrude on that family. They are obsessed, they think constantly of each other.
She willed herself to absolute stillness. If he would just sit there all night, holding her hand, it would be enough.
He stood suddenly and her heart keeled over like a torpedoed ship. Pacing, on a route now well worn, he talked partly to her, partly to himself. As if it is new to me, social injustice … Why should he think …? We arrived here penniless, doesn’t he consider …? Is it not as universal as air? Is anything possible without power? Why does he think I have surrounded him with wealth and safety?
She was not required to comment. She was afraid to offer tea or solace for fear of what she might precipitate. He turned on the radio and she hated the third presence in the room. Mercifully there was mostly music while Sergei paced or stared moodily from her window. But then the voice of an announcer would intrude like a handful of gravel. She longed, but did not dare, to turn it off. Recorded in London on the Vanguard label, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting … More music. Then the voice again, a voyeur obscenely sharing her vigil. Chicago under Sir Georg Solti … And more music. We interrupt for a bulletin.…
Sergei stopped pacing, waited like a bow pulled taut.
Following directions found in a note left at Théâtre
Port-Royal, police have found the body of Pierre Laporte.
The text of the note reads as follows:
“Faced with the arrogance of the federal government and its valet Bourassa, faced with obvious bad faith, the FLQ has decided to act. Pierre Laporte, Minister of Unemployment and Assimilation, was executed at 6:18 tonight by the Dieppe Cell (Royal 22nd). You will find the body in the trunk of the green Chevrolet 9J-2420 at the St Hubert Base. Nous vaincrom. FLQ.”
“Mon Dieu!” Sergei cried. “And that is the nobility of the revolutionaries! That is the new order of justice. Animals, mere animals!”
“Horrible.” Emily could barely whisper. “Horrible.”
Now he will go, she thought with inner panic. Now that the world is turning savage he will leave me and go to Sasha, to restrain him, to reason with him, to comfort him. She began to cry helplessly, propping her face in her hand, her elbow resting on the table, her hair falling in a curtain so that he would not notice.
“Emily, are you crying?” He took her in his arms. “Civilisation has survived worse. One has to believe.”
He began kissing her forehead, her eyelids, her lips, he buried his face in her hair and with his fingertips explored her face, the curve of her throat, her breasts.
“Oh Sergei, Sergei.” She was practically sobbing with relief, tearing at her clothes, when he lifted her up as lightly as though she were the child abandoned at dawn, and carried her into her own bedroom.
In Emily’s mind the next two and a half years passed like a blink of her eyelid. For such a passionate time, her days were strangely celibate. She might have been a novice in some order dedicated to excellence: the solitary arduous mornings of practice, the afternoon rehearsals, the evenings again with only violin and hard work for company.
There were countless lunches, but never dinners, with Sergei. He would not disappoint Anna, he considered Emily’s practising inviolable. Around eleven each night he would arrive — from whatever corporate affairs or social engagements involved him — bearing usually a rose or a bunch of narcissus or daffodils. They would sip wine and talk and listen to music and make love. Somewhere between two and three in the morning he would go home to Anna.
At first Emily would beg: “Don’t leave me.” But she came to accept the pattern of their love. She felt married.
At the not-so-little chamber concerts, she dazzled. Always Anna commented on her progress, her piercing eyes approving and mocking, her wide mobile mouth, it seemed to Emily intimating words other than those spoken. Once she said cryptically: “You are almost ready to graduate.”
Emily was bewildered. “From the concerts?”
But Anna simply smiled as though all knowledge had already passed between them. Sasha, like an attendant lord, led her to a window-seat.
“You look like alabaster,” he said, “with the moon locked inside. You have the world at your feet. Not to mention the reviewers.”
Reviews, indeed, had spilled as from a jewel box, lavish, exotic, glittering with superlatives.
She said self-deprecatingly: “It doesn’t hurt, I’m sure, to be the protégée of a newspaper magnate.”
“But the other papers too,” he said. “They’re all under your spell. As I am.”
“Sasha.” She touched his hand fondly. As a sister. A rival sibling for Sergei’s love. He drew it away irritably.
“I don’t want your pity. Besides” — there was an edge of urgency in his voice — “I’m worried about you. It’s that blooming look — you’re expecting more than you can possibly have. I know you’ll think this is spite, but it can’t last, you know. It simply won’t be allowed. You won’t do anything silly will you?”
“Silly?”
“He goes through these stages. I can see it coming on. I hope you’ll be sensible.”
It was later that week that she woke one morning to find Sergei still in bed with her.
“Merde!” he laughed. “I fell asleep!” And they made love as the morning sun gilded them.
They agreed it was enchanting, and she brought coffee and Frenc
h toast. She cautioned herself not to become addicted.
A few nights later it happened again. This could, they told each other, become a habit.
Shortly after he had left on the morning of the fourth occurrence — so that her practice would not be interfered with — Emily received a hand-delivered note from Anna inviting her to be present within the hour at morning tea in Westmount. It did not seem to be the kind of invitation that could be declined.
“Child,” Anna said. “I want you to understand that I find you utterly charming and therefore I hope, quite sincerely, that you will not be hurt. Since you are also intelligent, I am confident that things will work out well. You must understand that a certain point has been reached. It is quite over now.”
“I can’t give him up, you know. I love him.”
Anna shrugged. “We all love him, child. Now, I have three possibilities for you, each excellent. You are aware that your musicality has reached a pitch that will not go unremarked in the world. Very quickly you will become famous and will forget all about us. You have offers from the orchestras of Dallas, Minneapolis, and Sydney, Australia. The auditions, of course, took place at our little concerts. Now, which one do you choose?”
With infinite care, Emily set down her china teacup in its saucer and said coldly: “I believe I will go now.”
“When you are ready to send your telegram of acceptance, Sasha will come and help with the necessary arrangements.”
Emily left for rehearsal. That night Sergei did not come and at lunch the next day, he was abstracted. A flicker, like the shadow of a small swiftly flying bird, passed over Emily’s confidence.
“Sergei, is something the matter?”
“My love, it is too distressing. I cannot come again tonight. Another of our little concerts, a fledgling performer, rather tedious I’m afraid. Which is why I spare you from coming. You need rest and practice.”
For a week, though the lunches and nocturnal visits grew erratic, she felt no anxiety. It was a major decision and she knew who would win. When, during the second week, she saw him scarcely at all, she had difficulty eating and her sleep and playing were affected. Nothing, he assured her, was wrong. In the third week, during which he neither came nor telephoned, she became ill and missed two rehearsals. By the fourth week, she was frantic.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 14
