“Mrs. Horowitz,” I cut in, pleading. “Let me talk to your daughter, let me say goodbye to her—”
I heard a gasp as Natasha reached for the phone and took hold of it.
“Here I am,” she said.
For a moment we just stood there, listening for each other’s breath. Then she said, “I don’t even know why it hurts so much.”
And I said, “I’ll write to you, sweetheart.”
“Yes,” said Natasha. “I’ll be waiting.”
“No,” said her Mama, putting her foot down. “Not if I can help it!”
We heard the sound of her slippers slapping against the floor. When at last it faded, I said, “Play for me, Natasha.”
I expected her to ask, “What shall I play,” but she didn’t.
First I heard a soft touch. She must have set the receiver not in its usual place away from the piano, but right on top of it, so that not only my ear but also my entire being would sense every vibration. Then, in a burst, came a sequence of notes, which sounded familiar, even though their sound resonated in a manner that was entirely different, and much more powerful from that of the clarinet. It was The Fifth.
Dit-dit-dit-dah...
The music came, it rose into my ear and descended into my heart. It made me forget where I was, where I had to be going. At first I recalled that it had been inspired by the song of a yellow-hammer, or perhaps by the way fate would knock at the door. Then I left these interpretations far behind. My mind filled with radiant beams that shot through the gloom, bringing gigantic shadows that rocked back and forth, forth and back. They were closing in on me, aiming to destroy everything from within, everything except the pain of longing, endless longing to which I had to succumb.
In a climax that climbed on and on Natasha led me forward into another universe, and then far beyond, into the infinite. To me she was no longer a girl. A muse, that was what she became.
I was stirred—deeply, intimately—by the solemn yearning for something I could not even put in words. And until the final chord—and the moments that followed it—I remained paralyzed, powerless to step out of her spell, out of this silence she imposed upon me, where grief and joy come, rushing in from opposite ends, to meet.
After a long while, “Goodbye, Lenny,” she said, softly.
“Wait,” I said. “What is it you’re thinking about, when you play like that?”
“If I tell you, you’ll think me crazy.”
“If you don’t, my own sanity will be gone.”
“I’ve never revealed this to anyone, not even to my Pa,” she said. “Only when at last he forgot who I was, when he deteriorated into being stony, did I whisper my thoughts to him. Why did I do it? Perhaps I wanted to shock him into coming back, into talking to me, recognizing who I was. Or else, perhaps I wanted to ease his fears—the way I imagined them—because it was time for him to go.”
“He taught you how to play this piece, didn’t he?”
“Pa used to say that playing the notes correctly was only a small part of performing. Memorization was important, but even more so was learning how to immerse myself, how to become the spirit of the music, especially when it’s dark.”
“You make me so curious,” I said, and hesitated to add, “so in the end, when he forgot who you were, what did you whisper to him?”
“You don’t want to hear this.”
“I do.”
She took a deep breath.
Then, in a low voice, she said, “I told him that when I play this music I think of myself as Death.”
Amazed at the way her mind worked I said nothing. Beethoven's Fifth, evoking the image of Fate knocking at the door, was a dark piece, and darkly did she play it. Which told me one thing: there was something about her, something I could not define, except to say that it startled me.
If I had my wits about me—which I didn’t, because of the passion, the memory of her touch, her kiss—if I were free to think with any degree of clarity I should forget her and find me a simpler girl.
In my silence Natasha went on to say, “I told him, close your eyes, Pa.”
“Here I am,” I said, “closing mine.”
“Now, Lenny, imagine hearing the music. At the sound of it, can you see me coming, wearing a shroud, which flutters long behind me in the wind and captures the last rays of sunset? Can you see me floating towards you, all through the night? I'm so powerful, then. And forlorn. And aching to make you happy, by taking you out where I am, into the darkness, faraway from all trouble, all misery.”
I was too overwhelmed to speak.
“Perhaps this is not what you expected to hear,” said Natasha. “But it’s the way I feel. It is the truth.”
“And I love you for it.”
Her last words to me were barely audible.
I think they were, “I’ll be thinking about you, Lenny.”
Always Remember
Chapter 11
It was not immediately that I noticed the silence between Natasha and me. Finding myself on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean I ached to read her words, to detect her whisper rising to me from the paper. I figured that her letters would take time. They would have to be redirected from Camp Lejeune to our compound here. And so I told myself to be patient.
That night, as I landed in a darkened airport outside London, I imagined my father back home, bent closely over the radio, wishing to protect me by learning every hint, every rumor, every report about the European front. He would shush the neighbors and ignore their complaints about his raising the volume when it was time for the news. Perhaps he thought I could just hear it, at full blast, all the way across the ocean.
In his last letter to me he had explained that as an island nation, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods: a million tons per week, simply in order to be able to survive. Meanwhile, the Germans attempted to stem the flow of merchant shipping that enables Britain to go on, to keep fighting.
This time, his letter sounded verbose, to the point of being overwhelming. But underneath this unusual excess of facts, facts, and more facts, I had caught his tone. There could be no other name for it but prayer.
Arriving at dusk I saw the city enter its blackout. It was a different place than I had imagined, a gloomy one. Gone were the famously bright lights of Piccadilly Circus, a public space of the city’s west end. It looked utterly deserted. The houses looked grimy. They had not been painted since the beginning of the war in 1939, because factories were not making paint—they were making planes.
The next morning, walking through the war-ravaged city, I noticed children having a good time playing in the rubble, which had been scattered in the street in the wake of last night’s air raid.
I wrote to my father, saying that the people here were amazingly resilient and planned ahead for survival. Huge emergency water tanks were being filled, in hopes of sustaining this metropolitan during a siege. In public parks and gardens, acres of allotments had been reassigned to growing foods. To my surprise I spotted vegetables growing there, between the beds of roses.
Beautiful, decorative railings around buildings and along the Thames river were being removed—you might even say, sacrificed—for the purpose of fashioning them into weapons.
To me it looked like the end of the world, only in reverse: plowshares beaten into swords, and pruning hooks into spears.
At noon Trafalgar Square was bustling with Allied servicemen, wearing the uniforms of twenty different nations. Most of them were marching around, looking for action. I stood there, under Nelson’s column, pretending to be playing a role, an unscripted role in some heroic movie, protecting the British Commonwealth and by doing so, protecting the entire free world.
Meanwhile, one English girl after another would come by and offer a smile or a flower, which made me feel wanted.
“We love you,” said one girl.
“You’re my hero,” said another.
My heart swelled. Of course, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle
, which had been given to me upon arrival at the London Detachment, added to the thrill.
Within days I became highly proficient at riding it, hoping that my officers would not pay attention to my stunts. A spectacle, that’s what I was: roaring through alleys, dodging rubble, and for an extra kick, standing on the saddle while lifting the front of the motorcycle off the ground.
All that action served me well. It distracted my mind from a growing unease, somewhere deep inside. I was fearless not only because of my love of adventure and not only because I enjoyed riding the beast but also because of a sense of emptiness. The hope to hear from Natasha had started to harden into despair.
Also, no letters arrived from my father, despite the fact that he had usually written to me every week.
In fact, I was becoming too fearless for my own good, because my daring manner of maneuvering the bike brought about new orders for departure, away from both the bike and the city of London. I was chosen, along with ten other enlisted men and two of the officers, for training that was modeled after the highly acclaimed British commando methods. We arrived at Achnacarry, Scotland, where our exercise schedule proceeded regardless of weather, which was nothing to write home about. It was poor.
We were quartered in prefabricated huts that were made of corrugated iron, shaped into half cylinders. We slept on wooden slabs laid across six-inch blocks, with straw mats in place of mattresses. During seven gruesome weeks, our practice went on around the clock: Bren guns, grenades, pistols, Thompson submachine guns, foreign arms, Garand rifles, and all over again. Bren guns, grenades, pistols...
In addition there were even more intensive sessions: physical training, scouting, patrolling, map reading, toggle bridging, and all over again. Physical training, scouting, patrolling...
We crossed a stream by using a fifty-foot rope ladder to climb a tree, and from there sliding down a taut rope stretched downwards at a thirty degree angle, to reach the opposite bank. For descending from cliffs, we used a hundred foot length of rope, looped around a rock. We climbed down in bounds, and brought the rope section along with each increment of descent. Then we crawled under a barbed wire, ascended a log ramp in order to jump from an eight-foot height over some barbed wire obstacle, and finished the course with a bayonet charge.
A rapid, seven-mile march topped it all off. It demanded extreme endurance, as all men had to keep in step, which was meant to create teamwork. By the end of it I felt like a part in a well-oiled machine, moving at to its beat, surrendering to its purpose, whatever that might be. I no longer felt as an individual.
My mind seemed to have gone numb. The only thing that would bring me back into myself was my longing for Natasha.
Despite my exhaustion I wrote her a letter almost every evening. It included nothing, not a word about what I was going through, because I assumed that these mundane details about our training methods would be boring, utterly boring to her, and on the flip side, they would be of particular interest to the German enemy, should the letter fall, somehow, into their hands.
So I limited myself to sweet nothings, hoping that Natasha would find pleasure, somehow, in my writing, and that it would not fall into the hands of my bigger, more formidable enemy: her Mama.
I wrote,
Last night I was invited into a Scottish home and the host urged me to eat up, saying, “Look, there’s plenty on the table!” “You sure?” I asked, and with a smile he answered, “Sure I’m sure!”
Even so I should have gone easy. The next morning I figured that what I ate was probably the family’s rations for an entire week, which they spread out to show hospitality.
A week passed, then a month, then forever went by. There was no answer. Not a single letter arrived from Natasha. Again I tried to explain away her silence. I told myself that once a letter would come out of the NJ post office and make its way to Camp Lejeune, it would have to be redirected from there to the London Detachment and then to Achnacarry, Scotland, which might cause it to be lost anywhere along the line.
I decided not to worry.
❋
Having completed our commando training we returned to London to await our next orders. I went back to my Marine Security Guard duty, which was considered a prestigious assignment, available to qualified Marines. It allowed me to ride my motorcycle all over the city. During one of the air raids it had been blasted from under me by flying debris. I got up from the dirt, dusted myself off, and delivered messages afoot, limping.
I tried to call Natasha a few times, but when I managed, after several frustrating tries, to get the telephone operator, she said there was something wrong with the number.
“No,” I insisted. “That’s the right number, I’m sure of it.”
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “it had been disconnected?”
“That can’t be,” I insisted. “Did you try again?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
I could not even begin to guess what had happened, nor could I figure out a way to contact Natasha.
Meanwhile I got a new bike. Around the same time I became friends with Ryan, an enlisted man who had arrived from Detroit, only a month ago. We were idling about next to our non-military facility, which was located on Grosvenor Square, close to the American Embassy. It was then that—to my surprise—I noticed him stuffing a letter, which carried American stamps, into his shirt pocket. It irked me to learn that unlike me, he was getting mail, on a regular basis, from back home.
I wondered out loud, “How come I’m not getting any letters?”
“Well,” he said. “Someone has to be writing them.”
“I do have someone,” said I. “A girlfriend.”
“You do?” he asked. “How long have you been dating her?”
Which confused me, because by his measure of things, Natasha and I had not been going steady at all, and our relationship was little more than imaginary, as it amounted to a single kiss.
In response to my silence, “I see,” he said.
“See what?”
“She’s not as serious about you as you’ve hoped she would be, is she now?”
I said nothing.
So he pressed on. “Whatever happened between the two of you, perhaps it’s been just a fling.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “you shouldn’t stick your nose in my affairs.”
“Oh, stop being a dreamer! Wake up! Look around you!”
“What is there to see?”
“So many cute babes here, and they all adore us and want to have a little chat, which is a bit hard to understand, because they speak with that fascinating, mind-bending foreign accent, which makes me forget the name of my girlfriend back home.”
“It does? Really?”
“Really. I have to ask myself, What’s her name? And then I recall, Oh yes, it’s Lana. I used to be shy around girls, but no more!”
I shrugged, saying nothing.
So he pointed out at the gals at the other side of the square. “You see? They’re here for the taking. And as for your girlfriend, well, she’s back there.”
“Oh,” I said. “I know the way you think, know it all too well—”
“And so does Lana,” said Ryan, snorting a laugh. “That’s why she’s worried. That’s why she keeps writing.”
Again I said nothing, and he went on.
“The important thing,” he added, by way of giving advice, “is not to make any promises. I never talk about my plans, and when she does, all I say about the future revolves around my military career. I tell her that after three years as a Marine Security Guard I’ll be entitled to the Marine Corps Security Guard Ribbon or a service star.”
Listlessly I said, “Who cares? I never talk about ribbons and stars with Natasha.”
“Oh Lenny,” he said, shaking his head. “I can see how much you miss her.”
I said nothing a third time, because what was the point in saying, “I do.”
So he suggested, “How about making your babe jealous? Have y
ou thought about that?”
“Natasha is different from other girls. She’s a pianist, a rising star.”
“Oh, now that explains it!”
“Explains what?”
“Don’t you see? She’s in show business.”
“So?”
“So?” he repeated, as if there was no need to explain anything beyond that single word. “So she meets men, handsome men, all the time! They’re always around her: actors, musicians, singers, dancers, conductors, producers, stage managers, music hall directors, composers, and others, all of whom have more in common with her than you’ll ever do!”
At hearing this, a sudden weakness came over me, which Ryan must have noticed, because his tone changed.
“There, there,” he said, and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Do yourself a favor, don’t pray for a letter from her, much less faithfulness.”
I took a step back from him, mounted my bike, and bolted away from there, producing hellish noise for no better reason than to drown his advice, but to my dismay it went on rattling, rattling, rattling inside me.
I rode for a long while and when at last I came back to my quarters, surprise! There was an envelope on my pillow, and it was from my father.
My first thought was that by arriving here, this letter served to prove a point. It showed me that I was reachable. If you wanted to contact me, you could, which meant for some reason, Natasha didn’t. She must have stopped caring for me. What else could explain the silence of my muse?
My second thought was not exactly a thought. Rather, it was a jolt of alarm. I could see, quite plainly, that his handwriting had changed. It was with a shaky, trembling hand that my dad wrote,
Lenny my son, I wish I could go on keeping this from you, but at this point I can no longer do it. I’m in pain, severe pain, and it’s been wrecking me for the past three months.
You know me, I’ve always resisted—perhaps too stubbornly—to set an appointment with my doctor, because despite being a learned man, he can never help, and all he does, in my opinion, is rely on the wisdom of ignorants and prescribe drugs for them, drugs for which the unintended side effects are worse than the disease they’re supposed to cure.
The Music of Us (Still Life with Memories Book 3) Page 9
