Goodbye, Paris

by Anstey Harris

  I point out that I’m not paying her to keep me company, but it falls on deaf ears and she lures me into letting her stay in the workshop by making me coffee. I wonder whether I should try and get her to discuss the things I know. But today will be complicated enough.

  She doesn’t look how I expect a drug user to look. I know nothing about cocaine, apart from that it isn’t fair trade and isn’t very good for you. Her skin is bright and clear, her makeup immaculate. The line of black kohl on her upper eyelids has been applied with a perfectly steady hand and peters out into two ticks at the outer corners of her eyes as neatly as the purfling bee stings on my cello.

  “Are you all right?” she asks, and I assume I’m staring.

  “Yes. Perfectly. I’m just excited. Excited about the cello.”

  “Me too,” she says, and I feel the sweat on my palms.

  Then, out of nowhere, “Grace, can I tell you a secret? Something no one else knows. Mainly because I don’t know who to tell, not because I don’t want to.”

  I hold my breath. I try to gather my thoughts and make sure that I react sensitively and supportively. The whole cocaine idea is so at odds with this sweet girl in front of me that I feel I know nothing about her, too.

  “I’m writing a symphony.” Her face is calm, solemn; her deep eyes earnest.

  It takes a few moments for the penny to drop. My first reaction is just shock that it isn’t her cocaine use that she wants to confess.

  “You’re kidding?”

  She shrugs, shakes her head. “No. I’m not kidding. I’ve already started it. Well, some of it; melodies, themes.” She waves her hands around dismissively, a disorganized conductor of an abstract piece.

  “That’s amazing.” I marvel at her self-belief, her scope. I could never have had the bravery to attempt something as huge as that at her age, at any age. Nadia is prepared to scale this challenge; she knows she has the tools she needs and she has the ability—the confidence in her music—to use them.

  “Wow, I’m so impressed.” I shake my head; partly in disbelief, partly in brutal envy.

  “You don’t think it’s silly?”

  “Oh my God, no. Who would? I think it’s phenomenal.” What she fears is the outside, the criticism of others. She is scared of letting their limitations embrace and confound her, but, in Nadia, this will pass.

  I am entirely the opposite. It dawns on me like a cacophony of trumpet blasts; like something so obvious I should have seen it from the start. I hold failure to me like a talisman; I firmly believe it’s the only thing I am guaranteed to achieve. Sadly, understanding our differences isn’t the same thing as being able to fix them.

  I stare at Nadia like she’s a stranger. “I think it’s wonderful.”

  “You don’t think I’m biting off more than I can chew? That I might not finish it?”

  “God, Nad, by the time you’re eighteen, you’ll have written a symphony. People will still be able to hear it, to play it, long after you’re dead.”

  “That’s cheery.”

  “But you know what I mean.”

  She smiles slightly. “Thanks, anyway. For not saying it’s stupid.”

  “There’s a story about Mozart,” I say. “I’m sure it’s not true, but it’s great.”

  Nadia nods her head for me to tell it to her.

  “Someone asked Mozart how they should start writing a symphony. Mozart said that they should start with something simpler, a concerto perhaps. He said that a symphony required experience and understanding and commitment and was obviously far too much for this composer.”

  Nadia looks at me, pulling a face. She’s worried the outcome of the story will be a criticism of her.

  “So the composer said to Mozart, ‘But you started writing symphonies when you were eight.’ And Mozart said, ‘Yes, but I never asked anyone how.’ ”

  Nadia laughs. The story has made her feel good.

  I remember Nikolai telling me that story at college. We were in a practice room. He was pacing the floor, listing my limitations. I was bent over my cello, my arms limp down its front, my bow defeated in my hand.

  Nikolai tried to get me to feel the music more deeply. He sat behind me, his arms wrapped along the length of mine, his breath hot in my ear. We read the music together, beat out the rhythms, hummed the melody line. It wasn’t ever enough.

  Nadia will not need to go through that. She understands the depth of her talent and she is listening to it, letting it carry her along, allowing it to lead.

  Nadia wanders into the front of the shop with her duster, satisfied by my reaction. I busy myself with the Klotz school violin I need to have ready for tomorrow. Peace settles over the shop for the first time in a while.

  Nadia is humming; I can’t quite get the tune, but I’m sure I know it.

  “What’s that?” I walk into the shop to hear it more clearly.

  “I’ll show you.” Nadia reaches up and takes down one of the violins. It’s her favorite of the ones I’ve made myself—a copy of a little Bohemian I once bought at auction.

  She turns the fine tuners on the tailpiece to get the strings spot-on. Her face takes on a different set; a certainty and a determination.

  “Listen,” Nadia says, and starts to play.

  The tune is magical. I do know tiny licks of the main theme; it has borrowed from folk tunes and tangos, it has stolen arpeggios from history and diminished chords from old stories. It is the start of Nadia’s symphony.

  The music is extraordinary. It soars and swoops and dives. It has light and joy and then sudden and fierce bursts of shade and fear. It is the perfect balance of a tune you’re sure you know and then a sudden realization that, no, this is new; this is comfortable and appealing and easy to learn or play, but it is new.

  I understand quickly that the piece is autobiographical and wholly about Nadia, or at least about her life. There is the sharp jangle of a sitar spiking through and then a sudden pizzicato of picked notes as percussion. There is the repeated use of a bass refrain that I can tell is taken from pop music.

  Above all, it has a strong melody, a line that I know I will wake up humming in the night. That is the mark of a truly great piece of music. I have no doubt, suddenly, that Nadia can sustain this right across all four movements of a symphony.

  Plenty of people attempted symphonies when I was at college. Nikolai discussed it with me but I brushed it off, certain I’d have time to come back to it later. Some of the works were good and published, some were great and unpublished. Others were execrable and the result of a growing ego in tight combination with little class or style.

  Nadia’s symphony will be so exceptional, people will have difficulty believing it was written by a student. I am sure of it.

  “It’s beautiful.” I am in awe. I can’t fathom how someone so young can understand so much; understand and then have the instinct—it can’t be the experience—to translate that into music, to apply a structure. “It’s absolutely wonderful.”

  “That bit, that I just played, that was the first movement, and I’ve nailed the next two—I think. I don’t know about the fourth yet. It’s evading capture.” She grins and I can see how happy it’s made her.

  I nod and smile. “I’m so impressed, Nad.”

  She speaks with her back to me as she puts the little Bohemian back on the rack above her head. “I’ve perfected three parts so far; two violins and a cello.”

  I put one hand out to steady myself, my fingers flat against the leather of the counter.

  “You, me, and . . .”

  I can’t imagine who else. I can’t see how this could get worse. My mind is flying, the top of my back wet with the sweat that is prickling down my neck.

  “ . . . Mr. Williams.”

  I sit down behind the counter.

  “Tomorrow night at your house. You cook dinner. First outing for your cello. First performance of my first movement.”

  I feel sick. “You can’t do this. How dare you?”


  She shrugs. Her face is flat with hostility.

  “What about my privacy? You can’t just decide something and steam ahead.” As I say it, I see the blue book. Its corners wave at me like tentacles, its pale cover threatens to reveal everything.

  “Well, I have,” she says, and picks up her bag to leave. “And Mr. Williams is fucking thrilled.”

   Chapter Eleven

  By the next day, my house smells like a home. I decided to embrace Nadia’s supper idea and I’ve made a cake for dessert, one I can decorate with strawberries and cream and make summery. The baking has filled the whole place with warmth and comfort. I should do it more often. Measuring and mixing and stirring has cleared my mind of the things that frighten me, the horrors of the evening to come.

  I decided to live a lie, for all of today; after all, I have managed it with David for almost nine years. Today, I am the kind of person who has dinner parties, albeit for the oddest of guests. I am fearless and I am able.

  I realized last night that I hadn’t really cleaned the house since David left, and spent the first hours this morning hoovering skirting boards and wiping down basins.

  Everything is fresh and clean. I am occupying my mind with cleaning, baking, anything except music. Nadia and I have made a pact and she is due any moment to begin the process that will lead, she guarantees me, to my being able to play this evening.

  She is sunny and cheerful when she arrives, and I wonder if getting her own way always makes her feel so positive.

  “So this is how it works,” she tells me. “I promise faithfully to stay downstairs, sitting-room door shut, getting ready for tonight. OK?”

  I nod; now I am the child.

  “And you sit in your bedroom with the door shut there, too. And you play these four notes upstairs.” She hums four clear notes, little bells that pop into the air.

  They are the four open strings of a cello, and the rhythm in which she hums them is the exact rhythm I pluck them through after tuning. Bom, bom, bom, bom, like a marble rolling down four even steps.

  “And then play this.” Four more, an octave higher, and I hear myself checking the tuning of a viola. “And then . . .” She hums G–D–A, and E, the strings I pluck when I tune a violin. “That’s twelve notes. That’s a tune.”

  “You’re funny,” I say.

  “I’m not funny,” says Nad. “I’m clever. It’s bollocks to say you can’t play my tune in front of anyone—I’ve heard you a million times.”

  It’s true. I have tuned cellos, violas, and violins in front of Nadia so many times. I can’t deny it, despite how much I want to.

  “And then play it with your bow, a few times through, and then play something else. And I promise, promise, promise, I won’t open the door. Either door.” Upstairs, with my heart a metronome in my ears, I consider Nadia’s proposal.

  * * *

  “Enough!” Nikolai Dernov screamed at me in one of our last rehearsals. “I tell you over and over that you can do this. You can make that slide without sounding like a baby, like a stupid child. You can trust your hands.” He leaned his face into my mine. “Do it again.”

  The others tried not to look at me. Catherine and Shota stared at the music stands, the other two concentrated on the straight lines of their bow hair. Everyone blocked out the embarrassment.

  I tried the shift again, loud in the tense air. There were no windows in Nikolai’s studio, no way of looking out and remembering that the other world was still there, that this intense atmosphere wasn’t all there was. A strip of glass ran around the top of the walls to let light in. It didn’t open, as far as I ever knew, and it was too far up to see out of. Every day the studio felt more like a cell.

  Nikolai’s nose wrinkled up, his eyes narrowed. He made small spitting noises as I attempted to spider my fingers from fourth to fifth position. “You are so clumsy. You don’t even try. I sent a boy away from here.” He squeezed the top of my arm so hard it hurt. “I sent him away so that you could have his place and look what I get. You were not worth it.”

  My stomach knotted into a ball so tight I thought I would have a heart attack. I kept my mouth shut, my feet pressed into the floor. Anything less and I would have screamed and run.

  “You appall me.” Flecks of his saliva hit my chin. The institutional mustard yellow of the studio walls blurred behind his looming face as I tried to focus my eyes away from his.

  “Stop.”

  It was Shota. I glanced sideways at him, I could not look up. No, I pleaded silently, please don’t make it worse.

  “Leave her alone.”

  He had edged to the front of his chair as if he was about to stand. He held his viola by the neck and his bow was balanced across the lip of his music stand. He pointed with his free hand at Nikolai. “Leave her alone.”

  “Get out.” Nikolai’s voice was like ice. “Get out of my room.”

  I hoped he was talking to me but he wasn’t, he was staring at Shota.

  Shota stood up, faced him eye to eye. Nikolai was not a tall man and Shota’s shoulders were far broader.

  “All of you get out. Except her.” Nikolai pointed at me. “You will stay until you can do it. Even if we sleep here.”

  “I won’t leave her here on her own. You can’t keep doing this.” Shota moved closer to Nikolai. I had never been so afraid.

  I found my shaking voice. “Please go. All of you. I’m sorry.”

  Nikolai stepped back from Shota. “Well?” he asked him.

  “I don’t want to leave you here.” He stretched his free hand out towards me.

  “Please. I’ll come and find you as soon as I come out.” I began to feel that I could cope with anything as long as Shota and the others weren’t watching. I made a show of straightening the music on my stand, pretended to be circling my shoulders, relaxing my muscles, when really I was concentrating so hard on not crying that my teeth hurt.

  “I’ll wait an hour,” Shota said, his eyes steely, “then I’m coming back.”

  I did not notice the hour pass: my skin was tight across my shoulders, my elbow aching from the pressure Nikolai exerted through my bow. There was a red ring around my wrist where he’d held it, steering back and forward across the strings relentlessly. The doorknob of the studio rattled. I remember that they automatically locked from the inside to give the players confidence they would not be interrupted.

  “Grace!” Shota was shouting through the soundproofing of the door; his voice was muffled.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Nikolai. He stood up and walked towards the door. “What will you choose?” He shrugged his shoulders theatrically and there were sweat patches under his arms, darkening his gray shirt.

  “I’m not done, Shota,” I called through the closed door. I looked at the tramline welts on the fingers of my left hand; they would sting like mad later when the nerves started to recover. “I want to stay.”

  Nikolai raised his eyebrows, his wire-rimmed glasses moved up and down on his nose, and he nodded once.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said through the door, my whole body feeling so faint, so insubstantial, that I might have been able to vaporize and disappear.

  Shota thumped the door from the other side.

  Nikolai yanked it open. His outrage left a terrifying silence between us.

  The corridor was dimly lit compared to the practice room, and suddenly Shota looked small in his shadow.

  “How dare you?” he boomed into the passageway. “Who do you think you are?”

  There was a shuffling pause where Shota gathered his thoughts. “I was worried about Grace.” I could barely hear him.

  “If I were you, Mr. Kinoshita, I would be worried about my own position in this conservatoire. My own future.” Nikolai had his baton in his hand; he pointed it at Shota like a wand. “And I would mind my own business.”

  “I needed to see that Grace was OK.” I couldn’t see Shota now from where I was sitting, but I could imagine his face, the mix of
fear and determination. My heart pounded.

  “I am.” I found the words from the tangled lump caught in my throat; they sailed like mist into the corridor. “I’m nearly there.” My fingers pulsed with pain at the thought of playing any longer, of trying even harder.

  “Satisfied?” Nikolai’s voice was spiteful; he relished the victory.

  I heard footsteps outside in the corridor and Nikolai’s silhouette visibly shrank in the frame of the doorway. Shota was gone.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to stop for? Any more friends dropping by?” Nikolai’s face was white with anger.

  It was pointless to tell him that it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t asked Shota to come back. I could only put my bow on the strings, hover my left hand over the fingerboard in submission.

  It worked; Nikolai’s fury lost its focus and he settled back on his stool behind me, his fingers wrapped around mine. Our fused hand sliced one more time down the strings and I thought I would die.

  “There!”

  Nikolai hadn’t needed to tell me. I heard the note, the sweet strung-out smoothness that fluttered through the world from my strings. The perfect transition that pulsed like the blood in my veins, our veins. A thing of wonder.

  “Do it again.”

  He lifted his fingers off mine. He was still close enough that I could feel the heat radiate from his face, but he was no longer touching me. I moved my fingers down the strings. Over and over. I had never heard a sound so pure.

  Nikolai breathed out a long, exhausted sigh. “That is the music I knew you could make,” he said. He got up, bent his creaking knees and stretched out his back. He picked up his jacket from the chair. “Go to bed now,” he said, and left.

  I couldn’t go to bed. It took an hour of holding my fingertips under a cold tap to stop the bleeding, another hour to stop from crying. But I’d done it, I’d found the note that had made him happy.

  I remember all of this now because I could do it, even when I truly believed I couldn’t. I think of what Shota did for me, of how I went to find him in the morning and, with the great formality of inexperience, he asked me if I would be his girlfriend and how, clumsily, I’d accepted.