The Secret Knowledge

by Andrew Crumey

  “Not even prestigious enough,” says Benjamin, “for my books to have suffered the honour of being burned by the fascists. Though I feel the heat.”

  There is not a trace of sympathy in Carreau’s features. “Tell me, in all your hashish dreams, did you ever foresee a future like this?”

  “I foresaw it only when sober. Intoxicated, I was in paradise.”

  “Better to have stayed there. And do you honestly have nothing left to give?”

  “It’s the truth, sir.”

  The travel documents are still poised in Carreau’s hand. He purses his lips, reaches out his arm. “Take them.”

  “Thank you…”

  “Just take them.” Carreau rises to his feet to give the papers to Benjamin, too weak to leave his bed.

  “And the chief of police…?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Thank you for the book.” He looks at it in his hand, tapping it with satisfaction. “Isn’t life hellishly ironic? Good luck to you, sir.”

  The transaction complete, Carreau leaves the room, and in the silence bequeathed to him, Benjamin continues to stare a while longer at the open briefcase, then stuffs the travel papers inside his jacket and lies back with a sigh. He knows the truth: Carreau is a liar and a fraud. There will be no bribe, no negotiation, the parting good-luck wish was an admission that Benjamin is on his own now. Tomorrow they will all be sent back to France and interned there. Carreau is a cheating non-entity while Benjamin, on the contrary, is a genius and an honest man, completely honest, for it is true: he has nothing. His gold coins have been divided between Henny and Joseph, and they will all still have need of them.

  Yvette is relieved to see her husband return; being alone in the dining room under the scrutiny of the lone stranger has been unnerving for her. When Carreau sits down again at the table he blocks the suspicious man’s unwelcome line of sight. “Did you get it?” Yvette whispers.

  He nods.

  “Then where is it?”

  “I left it at the desk, Suner’s there.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

  She glances beyond his shoulder. “That man’s been staring at me.”

  Carreau doesn’t need to look round. “You should be flattered – have you really forgotten what it feels like?”

  “Don’t mock me, Louis. You get what you want and suddenly everything’s a joke. That’s typical of you.”

  He turns and waves to Pablo, who gives a harassed acknowledgment from the other end of the room.

  “What about the refugees?” Yvette asks him.

  “I told you, I’ll have a word with the chief of police, it’ll all be sorted by morning.”

  Pablo attends them with a bow; the bill is paltry and Carreau settles it with a few notes, leaving a large tip. “Thank you, senor, thank you!” The waiter insists on shepherding them out of the dining room to the hotel lobby, where Suner is speaking on the telephone.

  “That’s right, we need a doctor, one of our guests is feeling ill.” Suner looks at Carreau and raises a finger of his free hand to show he is in control of everything. “Get Ramon over here to have a look at him. Yes, he can pay, he’s a professor, his lady friend came down not long ago to tell me they need help.” Suner reaches below the desk and brings out the calfskin book which he slides without comment across the smooth surface into Carreau’s grip; the negotiations continue a little longer before Suner hangs up.

  “He can pay?” says Carreau.

  “I expect he’ll have to, one way or another.” Suner gives a hoarse chuckle, amused by the plight these foolish French Jews have thrown themselves into.

  Carreau reaches into his jacket for something, cocks an eyebrow in apparent surprise, mutters an impatient self-condemnation and then says to both Suner and Yvette, the two of them equal in their ignorance of his intention, “I must go upstairs briefly.” He leaves them standing awkwardly alone.

  Suner smiles sympathetically at madame who is looking old and tired. “Would you like to sit down?”

  She responds with no more than a dignified lifting of her nose. This little hovel is like the whole of Spain, she can’t wait to be out of it, just as soon as her husband can complete his work.

  “If madame would like a drink…?”

  Nothing the manager might possibly say could make her any less eager to escape. She moves away from the desk, Suner becomes occupied with meaningless paperwork, then absents himself to the adjoining office. Not long afterwards, the dining room door opens. It is the lone stranger who comes out, eyeing Yvette significantly in the instant before she glances aside and focuses her attention on a potted plant on the windowsill, potent object of simulated interest.

  “Good evening, madame.”

  She thinks she hears a German accent embedded in his good French, and cannot avoid his greeting, nor conceal her unease. “Good evening, monsieur.”

  “How many goodly creatures are there here.”

  It sounds like some form of code; a relief, because it means he must be looking for someone else. “Monsieur,” she says with a polite and final nod as she turns away to examine once more the trailing leaves of the plant.

  But he is not to be so easily dismissed. In a whisper close beside her ear he suddenly says, “Take my advice, get out of town, you and your husband. Do it tonight.” Startled, she sees the curt bow with which he takes his leave of her.

  She is still trying to make sense of it when Louis returns, looking cross. “Come on,” he says gruffly.

  Suner, alerted by his guest’s descent, comes back out of the office and goes to hold open the door for them, attending their every movement like a panting dog, exhorting them to return tomorrow for an even more delicious meal. Once outside in the street, Yvette asks her husband what happened with the professor.

  “I offered him some medicine,” he says. Then drawing his wife close to his side, he escorts her safely away.

  Chapter Five

  Paige is in Starbucks with Ella when she gets the call.

  “It’s David Conroy. There’s something we need to discuss. Could we meet?”

  She’s seen him only once, when she had her first lesson a few days ago, and already he’s phoning her. Paige’s confusion is obvious to Ella who watches with a mixture of fascination and concern, able to hear the male crackle at her friend’s ear. Ella mouths Who? and Paige mimes helplessness. The meeting is fixed for later that week, the tutor hangs up and Paige explains.

  “But you surely aren’t going to…”

  “I’m seeing him at the college,” Paige says reassuringly.

  “He fancies you.”

  “It’s about the piece I’m meant to be learning, that’s all. He wants me to give him back the score.”

  “Hasn’t he got one of his own? Can’t you drop it off?” Suspicion comes easily to Ella’s mind. “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know, pretty old, in his forties.”

  “This isn’t about music. He arranges extra lessons in college, next thing he’s asking you back to his place for some advanced tuition.”

  Paige won’t be treated like a child. “Nothing’s going to happen unless I want it to.”

  “When did you ever know what you want?” Ella says lightly, and Paige’s silence chills the atmosphere. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Forget it.”

  But the subject has been raised and Ella won’t let it go. “Sean got a new job.”

  “I don’t care what he does.” Sean was a mistake, like the foetus he made. They’d pretty much split already when she found out. Her body told her what her mind must do: reject everything of him.

  “You’ve got the right attitude, Paige. Ignore them completely, best way to make them feel bad. Cut loose and never go back.”

  “I’m not playing games.”

  “But surely you miss him sometimes? Bound to, until you find someone else. Then you make certain he knows.”

  Paige doesn’t want to talk about
it, she gazes towards the door of the café and sees two boys entering that she knows from college. Ella registers the distraction and turns to look. One of the boys waves.

  “Who are they?” Ella asks.

  “I think the tall one’s called Rob.”

  The boys get their order then come to say hello. Introductions are made, the tall one isn’t called Rob after all, his friend hides shyly behind a long fringe. Ella invites them to sit.

  “Hear about the bust?” says not-Rob to Paige. Police came to the college and arrested an Egyptian violinist who’d been posting offensive remarks online. “He said the British troops deserved to die.”

  “Then what did he expect?” says Ella.

  “Got to have free speech,” the shy one offers, possibly wanting some kind of debate about it, but the conversation lapses. Ella restarts it. “Do you know a teacher at college called Conroy?”

  “I had him once as accompanist,” says the tall one.

  “Does he have a reputation?” Ella asks him. “You know, with girl students?” Seeing Paige’s reaction she adds, “Just asking.”

  “I couldn’t say,” he responds. “Only thing I heard is he had a breakdown in the past, gets moody. One time he got really angry with my mate Harry, swore at him.”

  Ella folds her arms in vindication.

  “What did your mate do to upset him?” Paige asks.

  He shrugs. “Nothing.”

  Paige has to go, she’s booked a practice room. Her plan was to work on the Klauer slow movement, there’s no need if Conroy wants her to return the score, but she’s glad of an excuse to leave Ella with the other two who look to Paige as though they should still be at school. She feels so much older than them all, after what she’s been through.

  Walking to the college she wonders how it would have turned out if she hadn’t miscarried. She’s sure she would have aborted it, but can’t help imagining the parallel world with an extra life in it. Adoption, perhaps, then years later her daughter finds her, demands to know everything. You work so hard to eliminate mistakes but they always happen.

  The practice room is still occupied: peering through the small window in the thick door Paige sees a Chinese girl playing what she guesses to be Rachmaninov, head bent in concentration, right hand leaping gymnastically across the keyboard. It looks dispiritingly perfect. Paige checks her watch then abruptly opens the door on the girl who stops, startled, and immediately apologises for having overrun. Paige tells her it’s no problem, drops her bag to the floor and feels the energy being pulled out of her by this clockwork virtuoso who will always be so much better and brought nothing but her talent. She bows and scuttles out.

  Klauer is irrelevant but it’s the only score Paige has, and rather than perform mechanical exercises or play from memory she prefers the distraction of reading, so she sits and begins. The dark and complex music is appropriate to her mood; the doomed composer’s handwriting makes Paige feel as if her fingers are able to touch his across a distance of a hundred years, a span that means nothing. When she played for Mr Conroy he asked what the music made her see, but the images keep changing, she’s distracted by thoughts of that idiot Sean, why did Ella have to mention him? She thinks of Mr Conroy’s sudden change of mind about the score, wonders what prompted his breakdown, knows there doesn’t need to be a reason though people always want a neat answer. Like Klauer, probably he got a bad review from a critic or fell out with his lover so he killed himself, that’s how it’s meant to work, one thing logically following another, except that his music isn’t like that, there seems no connection between the parts, no necessity, only chance.

  Why not memorise it anyway? A small, tactical gesture of defiance, her right to play what she likes. She’ll never be perfect like the one who was here before but she can still be an artist. She spends her hour working through the movement, repeating each section and imprinting it on her mind and fingers, this song of sadness or joy, pain or triumph, she’ll remember it even though she doesn’t know what any of it means. At home she continues so that when the time comes for her to see Mr Conroy again a few days later she knows it by heart, though he’ll never hear her play.

  She arrives for the appointment and knocks the door, he calls for her to enter and she finds him sitting reading. His office looks bare, without a single picture or ornament, the shelves largely empty, giving an impression of transit, or someone living almost entirely inside his own head, with little need for physical comfort or external distraction. He looks up, his glasses catch the light. “Do you have it?” he asks at once.

  “The score? Sure.”

  “Leave it there,” he instructs, nodding towards the desk. She deposits it on an empty corner and stands waiting for him to say something else, but he’s turning the pages of his book as though having already forgotten she’s there. Eventually he looks again and says, “Thanks.”

  “You said we needed to have a meeting.”

  “Not really.”

  She’s taken aback. “You made it sound so important.”

  “An over-reaction.”

  Whose does he mean, she wonders, feeling increasingly exasperated. “I came here specially for this.”

  Conroy appears to have some emerging recognition of his own rudeness. “Take a seat,” he offers, waving towards a chair and laying aside the open book. “Tell me what you make of the piece.”

  By now it has suggested so many contradictory pictures: a lullaby sung by a skeleton, an anthem for the broken-hearted, a text message saying “it’s over”, a stump of flesh expelled in the toilet. “I wonder what he’d have done if he’d lived.”

  “Klauer? Been a different person. Not the one destined to shoot himself but someone else instead. I think it was going to be a symphony but he didn’t get as far as orchestrating it. All we’ve got is an outline.”

  A sketch of a life the composer was condemned never to lead. That would be one way of making sense of it: the jumbled image of so many unrealised possibilities.

  Conroy says, “The owner of the original manuscript gave me the photocopy on the understanding that I wouldn’t share it with anyone. He wants to protect his investment.”

  The explanation is prosaic; Conroy’s face implies something more he wants to say, yet doesn’t.

  “What should I be practising instead?”

  He’s not listening, he thinks for a moment then suddenly asks, “What would you consider the most important thing in your life?”

  She guesses he wants her to say music. “Family and friends. Being healthy.”

  “You lose those things.”

  “Sometimes. That’s why they’re important.”

  “Training to be a performer isn’t like studying to be an engineer or a geographer. It’s about your whole life, what you are as a person. There mustn’t be distractions. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Paige feels her face redden. “Yes,” she lies.

  “Is he a musician?”

  “No. What about your partner?”

  He looks surprised. “Who?”

  “You said your partner left you. When I had my lesson.”

  “I did? It was inappropriate of me. Did you find it inappropriate?”

  “I thought it was a strange thing to say at a first lesson.”

  “I only remember telling you to read Adorno. He’s important, you know.” Conroy ruminates. “How about Humoreske?”

  “What?”

  “Schumann. As a study work.”

  “Instead of Klauer? But I’ll need another twentieth-century piece won’t I?”

  “Forget the syllabus, you came here to study because you love playing.”

  “I want a degree though.”

  “I’ll take care of it. You’ve got talent, that’s what matters. We need to be flexible. Do you know Humoreske? No? One of the movements has a third stave with a theme you’re meant to hear inside your head, but not play. What do you make of that? When I recorded it some years ago, I thought of the hidden melody, exactly as S
chumann instructs. I wonder how many people could hear it when they listened to the CD. I wonder if anyone even listened.”

  Perhaps it’s only because the boy in the café mentioned a breakdown, but a suspicion is growing in Paige’s mind that Mr Conroy is slightly unhinged. Not simply artistic or eccentric, but a bit mad. “Would I need to think of the hidden tune too?”

  Conroy shrugs. “If it’s written then you’ve got to obey the instruction. Did I tell you why she left me?”

  “You said you got back from a concert tour and she’d walked out, taken all her belongings.”

  “Yes,” Conroy reminds himself, “like she was never there. Has it ever occurred to you how easily a person can disappear from the world?”

  She’s only been struck by how easy it is for new ones to appear.

  “You’re still too young to think about these things. Life for you is the future, it’s something that’s going to happen. Eventually you realise it’s already over, though you didn’t notice at the time. I died, you know.”

  This really is mad. “What do you mean, died?”

  “On stage. It wasn’t a bad performance, in some ways it was one of my best. But it was when my life stopped being in the future and started being in the past. Did you know I recorded several CDs? Great reviews, then the label dropped me. That’s what Klauer could have looked forward to, having his moment of success then going out of fashion.”

  “At least he’d have had his moment.”

  “Did the police interview you?”

  Paige guesses he’s talking about the Egyptian violinist. “I never knew anything about it.”

  “An officer came to my house and searched it, I didn’t realise what was going on, I left him upstairs undisturbed. Look what I found afterwards.” From his pocket he extracts something small and round, a shiny object that he shows to Paige, expecting her to take it from his outstretched fingers. “I don’t care if they spy on me, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  She looks at it, wondering if this is a joke, a provocation, or just the way that some people react when a relationship fails and for a little while they break adrift from reality. “It’s only a button battery,” she says.