Death and the Maiden

by Gerald Elias

  He wished he were still in his high balcony seat with the rest of the audience, comfortable and eager and relatively carefree. Better yet, he wished he were still in his hovel of a home, away from this unreality, where he could grouse endlessly and unimpeded about the state of the world.

  When the quartet walked onstage—Yumi’s arm entwined in Jacobus’s to lead him to his seat—the audience stirred with a combination of unease and interest and indecisive applause. To Jacobus it felt like a hanging jury and he was on trial. It would definitely be a noteworthy performance in the storied annals of Carnegie Hall. But it also might be the worst.

  Jacobus pictured the disposition of the quartet in his mind’s eye—Yumi to his left, then Annika Haagen to hers, and finally Nathaniel opposite Jacobus to complete the semicircle—and contrasted his and Nathaniel’s appearance with Haagen and Yumi, dressed, no doubt, in sleek black concert dresses. At Ramsey’s suggestion Jacobus had removed his still damp jacket only to reveal equally inappropriate concert attire—frayed flannel shirt and brown corduroy pants. Even the white shirt and tie Ramsey had scrounged up from somewhere backstage would do little to boost their rankings in the marketing study. Jacobus couldn’t remember whether he had shaved that morning—probably not. Of course, he had no need for a music stand in front of the chair in which he was now sitting. He assumed Nathaniel was wearing his trademark African dashiki—the day Nathaniel had quit his desk job with the insurance company to become a freelance consultant was the last he had worn a jacket and tie. Gauging the edgy silence from the audience, Jacobus thought it must have been on a night like this that the word “disconcerted” was invented.

  He tried to block out his anxiety. He would just pretend he was at home. After all, wasn’t he playing with his best friend and his former student? What could be easier than that? “Death and the Maiden” had been so easy at Yumi’s lesson—after all, he knew the music intimately—but to perform one of the most challenging quartets in the repertoire? And at Carnegie Hall in front of a paying audience, with no rehearsal? Ludicrous! He was not a performer. Hadn’t been for decades. He was tempted to get up and walk out. His hands were ice cold and sweating. For a moment he couldn’t even remember the first note! The hell with blocking out his fear; it was impossible.

  He heard Nathaniel dig his end pin into the stage floor, then give the A. It was too late; he’d have to go through with it. How could he possibly remember every nuance of every note of a piece of music more than a half hour long? He couldn’t. It was impossible, he repeated. He played his A, as did Yumi and Haagen, which helped disguise the fact that his hand shook and his bow slid all over the fingerboard as they tuned.

  Once they finished tuning, there was nothing left to do but start. Jacobus knew that the eyes of the quartet, and the entire audience, were upon him. It was his responsibility, as first violinist, to lead the entrance. He froze in his seat. What was he supposed to do? End the charade, is what I’ll do. Just get up and walk off the stage.

  “Jake,” Nathaniel whispered almost inaudibly to him.

  “What?” he replied.

  “Just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t fuck up.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Jacobus said, hearing Yumi and Haagen stifle a laugh.

  He knew his violin technique was no longer a match for Kortovsky’s, Lensky’s, Short’s, or Yumi’s, and he knew he could not maintain the fast tempos he had heard at the rehearsal. He had to find something else in the music, not just to avoid disaster or disguise his own weakness, but to give it meaning in a different way.

  Inevitability. The inevitability of death is what this quartet is about, he thought. Mine, his, hers, everyone’s. It doesn’t have to be fast. It only has to be relentless. Inexorable. In the manner of a conductor holding a baton, Jacobus raised his bow arm, creating a gesture in the silent upbeat to mirror the violently defiant character and tempo of the first phrase they would play in rhythmic unison—a five-note brasslike fanfare in which he and Nathaniel repeated the same note, D, while the inner voices, Yumi and Annika, started on D, then descended scalewise to G, like dark stairs down to hell. A unique opening to an inimitable piece of music.

  Jacobus took a final deep breath, and came crashing down on the first note, the long unison D, fortissimo. Miraculously, the other three followed him. It was together! Then Jacobus showed them the next group of four faster notes—not with blinding rapierlike speed as Lensky had done, but each note separate, more like individual saber thrusts. The other three followed him perfectly. No, they weren’t following—they were joining. They sensed his intent and understood where he would be going.

  The next five-note phrase repeated the rhythm and intensity, but the inner voices in the second violin and the viola went in a different harmonic direction, so Jacobus took a microsecond of extra time landing on the downbeat of the fourth bar. Then came the echo of the phrase, pianissimo; questioning, expressing doubt of the resolve of the previous four bars. Unlike Lensky and Short, Jacobus played these notes on the string, a bit longer, more likely the way Kortovsky played them. Since only Jacobus had the quick notes here, the others would immediately understand what bow stroke he wanted for the rest of the movement. By the time they reached a pause in measure fourteen a few seconds later, the final moment of rest before the music begins with unremitting energy and motion for the rest of the movement, Jacobus was beginning to feel a sense of liberation and joy he had not experienced since before he lost his sight. How ironic, he thought as he played, to feel this way in the expression of death, at which point he told himself he had better concentrate on the music or else he would indeed fuck up.

  When they finished the first movement—in better shape than he had imagined possible—Jacobus was already mentally and physically exhausted. Not having had enough time to warm up—a few weeks might have done the trick—his left pinkie wasn’t working properly; it was hurting and sluggish. His right arm, from the constant energetic playing, was sore and heavy. How he would manage to survive the remaining three movements was a mystery.

  They began the Andante con moto, the variation movement based upon Schubert’s song that gave the work its title, with deathly calm and simplicity. Jacobus played the pianissimo elegiac chorale with no vibrato except where Schubert indicated a subtle swell in the sound. The others responded as if they had played together for years. Of course, Yumi and Annika had, and they were at the top of their game as quartet players, trained to understand and react immediately to musical ideas with technical proficiency. And Nathaniel—he must have been keeping a secret from Jacobus because his playing was as good as it had been when they had their trio together.

  The calm beginning to the movement allowed Jacobus to regain some of his energy and to relax his hands, and he was able to play the first variation, in which his part was essentially that of a breathless maiden pleading for life, supported by the other three in a quietly throbbing accompaniment. During the variation, though, he heard some restlessness from the audience and recalled that this was where the video images of genocide on the big screen were being shown. He remembered that tonight he was part musician, part backup in a production number, and silently cursed Ramsey for taking the audience’s attention away from the music as it gained dark momentum in the second and third variations. The fourth variation was the only one in a major key, but it was nevertheless frail and pallid, the last breaths of a dying maiden recounting fleeting moments of joy. Jacobus tried to ignore the unrest in the audience that had turned into audible outbursts—he made his best effort to concentrate fully on his playing—but finally recognized that people in the audience were sobbing in response to the music they were hearing and the horrific images they were seeing. He thought of his parents, who had died in the greatest genocide of the twentieth century—who’s to say which genocide is the “greatest”?—and Eli, missing for so many years. Tears welled up in his blind eyes—fortunately he had his dark glasses on so no one could see—but his nose st
arted to run and there was nothing he could do about it while he was playing.

  The second movement faded peacefully into eternity, and Jacobus had a moment to collect himself and blow his nose.

  Yumi whispered, “Jake, are you okay?”

  “Hell, yeah. Let’s go.”

  They dove into the third-movement Scherzo that recalls the dark energy of the first movement, and then the finale, the driving D-minor Presto, a tarantella that gallops to doom on a black horse. Now Jacobus gathered all the remaining energy in his being because he knew that even when he was in his best form he would be exhausted by the end. This was also the movement in which Ramsey’s dancers were to select audience participants and dance themselves to death, but he didn’t give a shit about that now, because if he diverted his concentration for a split second it would be catastrophic. The movement went on and on, never relenting, never accommodating. He was mounted on that black horse. It was killing him to stay on it. It would kill him to fall off. Then, just when the piece should end and all has been said melodically, harmonically, and psychologically, Schubert does the unthinkable, turning up the heat one last notch from presto to prestissimo! Jacobus had nothing left. He couldn’t go on. Yet he had to. His hands were numb, his mind was a blank, yet he played on, tears streaming from his eyes. Death surrounded him and he was hurtling into the abyss.

  The last three chords crashed down. He was in hell.

  * * *

  As per instructions, the quartet remained seated and the audience remained silent. Since there was a mound of humanity heaped in front of them—Jacobus could hear their heavy panting in front of him—standing for a bow would have been meaningless anyway. Though too exhausted and shaken to stand, Jacobus felt a sense of exhilaration—he would not call it triumph—that seemed to liberate him from a pent-up internal bondage whose very existence he had never realized. This performance about death had validated his life. It was his redemption—Kortovsky’s tacit participation in it moved fleetingly through his consciousness—yet the lack of applause, the silence, made him feel cheated in this, his great achievement. Peter Lensky, whose invisible presence he felt in the silence, could talk all he wanted about the primitiveness of the act of clapping one’s hands, and Jacobus could not disagree with him conceptually, but the absence of it now made him realize that he had the blood of a performer, and his musical red corpuscles needed to be oxygenated by a visceral response, barbaric or not. At the very least, applause would acknowledge the effort; at best, it would be a spontaneous combustion of a primal fire that his performance had ignited.

  So the silence disturbed him, and he was grateful to hear the big screen slide down from above, and then the nostalgic popping noise of old film enter the ambience of the hall. The film was about to start. It annoyed him, though, how much vestigial noise there was—people in the audience were still fussing, people onstage moving about, whispering, trying to get comfortable enough in their awkward “death” positions to endure their physical discomfort for the three minutes of Marian Anderson’s rendition of “Death and the Maiden.” He imagined Jonel and Fern, with their lithe dancers’ bodies, capable of effortlessly contorting themselves into spandexed pretzels, entangled with heaving, sweating bellies in gray suits, and almost laughed out loud. He knew that the urge to laugh was no more than a tension release, but the difficulty in stifling it was compounded when an earlier prediction he had made to Ramsey of rampant body odor, reminiscent of the fecund earth, was being borne out. So Jacobus bit his tongue as hard as he could, held his breath, and thought depressing thoughts, hoping that the vocal performance of “Death and the Maiden” would help him regain the solemnity appropriate for the occasion.

  The pianist played the brief choralelike introduction and Marian Anderson began to sing. Jacobus, not surprisingly, had always considered the violin to be the king of orchestral instruments, but whenever he heard Anderson sing, it reaffirmed his opinion that the human voice at its greatest trumped even the violin. In the first stanza, that of the maiden pleading for life, the fragility of fear in Anderson’s soprano register was palpable. Then, only moments later, when Anderson’s voice changed and became the voice of Death, he could feel the hall turn cold, as the becalmed power of the inevitable emanated not just from her mouth or her vocal cords or her diaphragm, but from her being.

  The register of Anderson’s voice descended into hell, finishing a full two and a half octaves below her highest soprano note, well into the range of a male basso. Jacobus, no longer giddy, felt himself trembling on that last note, not just for Schubert’s and Anderson’s incredible technical three-minute achievement, but for how deeply it had reached inside him, opening awareness of eternity as a vast space that now surrounded him and that he felt he would soon enter.

  When that last note died away, the faintly frightened murmur from the audience signaled to Jacobus that the house had momentarily gone black.

  “Afraid of the dark, huh?” Jacobus whispered to Nathaniel, indicating by his inflection he meant the public and not his friend.

  “They’re not used to it like you are,” whispered Nathaniel back. Jacobus heard the dancers and audience members onstage rise to get ready for their bows, apparently still in the dark, as there was quite a bit of jostling going on. “As soon as the lights go on I’ll bet they give a standing ovation. Aha. Lights are coming up.”

  Now he and the quartet would receive the momentarily delayed accolades from the audience. Truly a historic performance. Lilburn would write the review in the Times: “Death and the Maiden: New Life for the New Magini.” Or something like that. If nothing else, Yumi would be proud he gave it the old college try. But it was the last time he’d let her rope him into something so ridiculous. Before their bows, he wanted to reach out and hold her hand. He wanted to make it clear he did it for her and not for Power Ramsey. Power Ramsey! Jacobus was ready for a return trip to Circle of Fifths.

  The applause began. Jacobus could hear the mass of humanity, dancers and selected audience members alike, that had, according to Ramsey’s instructions, piled up in seemingly random fashion on stage in front of the quartet, now organize itself, separating like a human curtain to display the quartet seated behind it, waiting to take its bow.

  The volume of the applause increased for a moment, ready to erupt. But rather than gaining momentum, suddenly it began to disintegrate, with unintelligible vocal emanations emerging from the hall. Something was not right. There was yelling, calling for help, then a scream. Not pain or revulsion this time. Just fear.

  “Nathaniel, Yumi!” said Jacobus. “Where are you? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “She’s not moving!” said Nathaniel. Jacobus felt Nathaniel’s hand gripping his shoulder, squeezing it painfully. “I think her neck’s broken. I think she’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead, Nathaniel? Who?”

  “Annika. Annika’s dead.”

  “Yumi!” Jacobus yelled, in a panic. “Yumi. Are you all right? Where are you, goddammit!”

  “Jake,” said Nathaniel, “Yumi’s gone.”

  * * *

  Jacobus wasn’t the only one in a panic. Sounds of chaos swirled around him—shouting, crying, feet moving in every direction. The crescendo of tumult portended a riot. Jacobus, frozen in his seat, heard a familiar voice next to him on the stage.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Lieutenant Alan Malachi of the New York City Police Department,” he said into a microphone. “Take your seats immediately. This is an order.”

  Jacobus wasn’t sure by what authority Malachi could order two thousand people to sit down at a concert, but he wasn’t about to begrudge him the point because, surprisingly, the command seemed to be working.

  Malachi continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, astounding as it may seem, Carnegie Hall is now a crime scene, and I need your cooperation. Within a few minutes, the ushers will escort you out the front of the building, one row at a time. All those onstage and backstage will be escorted out the stage door. At the doors, you will
give the officers your name, address, and phone number and show them your ID, after which you will be excused and be allowed to leave. This will take a little time, but knowing how famous we New Yorkers are for pulling together in times like this, I know I can count on you. So please remain seated and relax until it’s your turn. Thank you.”

  Not so easy to relax when there’s a corpse sitting in front of you, Jacobus thought, but to Malachi he said, “Good job, Malachi. Never figured you to have the gift of gab. Now I got to get out of here.”

  “You’ll wait your turn, like everyone else.”

  Malachi ordered his troops to make sure no one approached Haagen’s corpse.

  Jacobus was not displeased to hear a lot of cops—he didn’t know how they had managed to get there so quickly—funneling everyone onstage in the right direction. Several of the dancers, only a few feet from Haagen, sobbed convulsively. He heard one voice—Imogene Livenstock’s, he was pretty sure—say, “Buck up, girls. Do as the officers say.” Others were talking with unnatural rapidity of what they professed to have heard and seen. There were footsteps all around, which on the stage sounded like a herd of cattle, but gradually there evolved a semblance of order and process, the talking quieter and calmer. Jacobus waited impatiently for his turn to leave.

  “Jake,” said Nathaniel, “Malachi wants to talk to you. He sounds pretty hot under the collar.”

  “What’d I do now? I’m just sitting here.”

  “I don’t know. Here he comes.”

  “Jacobus!” said Malachi harshly.

  I guess I’m not one of the famous New Yorkers, thought Jacobus.

  “Were you with Yumi between the dress rehearsal and the concert?”