by Neil Jordan
I have to learn this, she said. It’s the cello solo from Rigoletto.
She must have seen me coming down the aisle, because she spoke without turning.
Act One. Played with the basses.
So your sabbatical is over?
I hope so. Soon. And you? What brought you here?
She looked round then, as she played. What light there was caught her face as the hair fell away from it.
The opera? Made you think of me?
Yes, I said. And I wondered whether it really had or not.
Come down here, she said. Turn the pages.
There was a small recess, an opening in the balustrade. I pushed it back and walked down the narrow steps. I was in the pit then, with the empty music stands and a view of the gilded boxes way up above.
I can’t read music.
When I nod, you turn.
And she nodded, so I turned the page of indecipherable squiggles and dots.
Do you know Rigoletto?
I shook my head.
It’s about a curse.
About how we’re all cursed, one way or another?
How did you know?
I didn’t. I just said it. Isn’t that what all operas are about?
No. Rhinemaidens come up from the water. Orfeo descends into the underworld. Mimi dies from consumption.
And Rigoletto?
He tries to protect his daughter from the Duke. But the curse outwits him. And you turn now.
So I turned the page again. And the wrapped parcel brushed off her cheek.
You bought me something?
I didn’t know what to say.
You bought your wife something?
And again, I said nothing. She played two double-stopped notes.
And then the baritone takes over.
baritone what?
The voice. Rigoletto. The dwarf.
She put aside her bow.
Can I see?
And she had the golden string off my finger in one deft move. She peeled aside the folded paper.
What are they? she asked.
Pearls, I said.
You bought pearls for me?
Black pearls, I said.
Are they bad luck? Are they cursed, like Rigoletto?
She had the pearls out now, and was twisting them around her wrist.
They have bumps on them. Not smooth.
No, I said. They’re Japanese. Uncultured.
Why black pearls?
Because, I said, helplessly, and I quoted the brochure, they’re a symbol of hope.
Hope?
For wounded hearts.
And tears suddenly sprang from her eyes, like a procession of wet jewels. I had never seen a reaction so immediate. We were in an opera house, I tried to reason, surrounded by the colour crimson. Operatic emotions only.
Thank you, she said.
And I wondered had I enough credit to buy another set.
Kiss me, she said. The way the Duke kissed Gilda.
How did the Duke kiss Gilda?
As if he would die for her.
You mean operatically?
Not funny, she said.
She brought her hand to my face and I kissed her. I felt the pearls against my earlobe.
There now, she said. We’re cursed.
By whom?
Not whom. What. We’re cursed by the love-thing.
Can we lift the curse?
Never, she said. And there was the sound of voices, doors opening way behind us.
You must go now. Orchestral rehearsal.
I can’t sit and listen?
No, she said.
So I climbed the wooden stairs and left her there. I walked back through the shadowed auditorium, past a gathering in the foyer of men and women with instrumental cases. There were more of them on the opera-house steps, smoking in the afternoon heat. I saw the one I had followed, carrying a battered cello case, and he stopped, as if to continue an interrupted conversation. But I excused myself and hurried on.
As I crossed the street, he stood by the wooden doors, staring at me. The rest of the orchestra pushed by him with their oddly shaped cases, as if they contained outsize varieties of vegetables: mushrooms, carrots and courgettes. He stood there, staring, with his battered case which looked like it enclosed a Jerusalem artichoke, until I had lost myself in the foliage of the trees on the other side.
30
I bought a fish on the way home. I had Jenny in the car – it was my turn to pick her up – and stopped outside a fishmonger’s. As we walked past the dead-eyed things on the slabs of marble, I realised I was used to sea creatures. Bream, bass, mullet and plaice. Here we had carp and gar and pike and trout, all from rivers and green, muddy lakes. I chose a thing called a zander, or a pike-perch, and saw it lifted from the ice and wrapped in clear plastic and wondered was I doing this because someone else had taken the thing I should have given her.
Why are we cooking fish? Jenny asked.
Because Mummy likes a surprise, I told her.
No she doesn’t.
And I realised she was right. That the thing about people who know each other is that they know each other. Whatever love may exist between them has already been mediated by what they know of each other. The unexpected action, the wanted or unwanted gesture, happens on a landscape of anticipated sameness, so the simple and safe course of their day must now be interrupted by some obstacle they have to climb. And while the unexpected is so often what is demanded – by self-help books, magazine articles and marriage therapists – it causes problems of its own. And I wondered, was I going quietly mad? The pearls were a worry. But the fish was an absurdity.
I cooked her a bouillabaisse once.
What’s that?
A Provençal fish stew.
And that’s what this is for?
She stared at the dead eye through the clear plastic. It was obscuring itself in vapour, as if the fish was breathing.
I thought I’d bake it in garlic and lemon, with a few olives maybe, lots of onions.
What’s it called?
A pike-perch. They swear it’s a delicacy here.
Butter, the fishmonger said bluntly.
Butter?
Is best with butter. Just butter. Fried in butter.
Maybe butter, then, I said.
Fish with butter, Jenny whispered on the way out. Sounds horrible.
So it does, I agreed. I’ll pull up a recipe for baking it on the internet. You can feed me the instructions.
Feed you, she said.
While I skin and chop and peel. It’s called cooking. She’ll love us for it.
She loves us anyway, she said, with the odd wisdom children have.
And I was thinking of that odd wisdom when I turned left and found myself in a line of stalled cars with some kind of fracas in between them. There must have been a demonstration up ahead, a riot or an event, because they came running through the cars like multicoloured hornets, some of their balaclavas already red with paint or blood, followed by the khaki-coloured storm troopers. One of them leapt on the bonnet of the car in her hiking boots and gave a strange throaty cry. It could have been a whoop of triumph or a scream of pain. her coloured dress was ripped and I caught a glimpse of a muscular torso and realised that the she might well have been a he. Whatever the gender, she was athletic, because she crossed bonnet after bonnet like a competitive hurdler and had vanished down a side-street before the khaki ones could touch her. And the police behind them, with their velcroed flak jackets and their Perspex shields, were hopelessly late. Then the traffic began to move again, slowly, and I heard the dull thump of drum and bass and saw a Special Forces member in a black balaclava climbing a statue’s pedestal, trying to reach the speaker that had been perched above its muscular arm. The hand of the arm held a gigantic hammer, a symbol of some industry long dead now, and the electric cord of the speaker was wrapped round the bronze wrist. So they had performed their absurd dance and drawn a crowd and an outraged c
ounter-demonstration and a flotilla of police vans to subdue the subsequent riot and on it went. I was thinking of Istvan’s comments on the genius of the coloured balaclava when Jenny spoke from behind and asked me where she could buy those facemasks.
Why do you want one? I asked.
Not one, she said. Three or four. So we can all do the dance.
And as I parked the car, she pogoed up the driveway towards the Tyrolean house. I imagined three disembodied coloured balaclavas pogoing with her.
So we cooked. I deboned the fish and chopped the onions and garlic and wrapped the lot in greased paper and placed it in the baking oven. Jenny washed a salad and Sarah came in late and we ate the resultant dish to the sound of Pablo Casals.
Why do you always play that? Jenny asked.
Because I found it by accident and I want to listen to them through, from beginning to end. And it’s good for you to listen to great music.
That was Sarah, not me. But I could have asked the same question.
How’s the fish? I asked. I found the flesh buttery and slightly wet and I was glad I hadn’t heeded the fishmonger.
It’s brilliant, she said. An unexpected treat.
How was work?
We had an unspoken understanding that we never talked about mine.
Becoming impossible, she said, between mouthfuls. And I realised for the first time, it seemed, that she ate painfully slowly. My plate was almost empty, as was Jenny’s.
Like everything else, she continued.
What’s impossible, Mummy? Jenny asked.
We’re working on a site, darling, that some people think is sacred.
So you’ve had more of it, I said.
It seems to now go with the territory. Baghdad, and now here. Who would have thought that archaeology and politics could make such a combustible mix?
Combustible, Jenny repeated, as if she was savouring the word.
There are misunderstandings, darling. About the present and the past. And they can lead to demonstrations. People throwing things.
Pussy Riot, Jenny said.
Sarah gave me a concerned-parent look.
One of them jumped on the bonnet of the car. And I asked Daddy for a coloured what’s-it-called.
Balaclava, I said. And don’t worry. It was all quite uneventful.
The smell of fish permeated the house afterwards. I put Jenny to bed and she wrinkled her nose, as if to dispel it. I entered the office where Sarah was working and found it hanging round there too, like some ghostly residue. She asked what the fish was and I told her it was a zander, some odd Mitteleuropean cross between a pike and a perch.
You hated it, I said. She had her glasses on and was going through some notes.
No, she said, it was quite lovely, but boy does it stink the place.
And I wondered did we have extractor fans.
No, she said. Open the doors and the windows.
So I opened them all, but the smell persisted, intermingled with the humidity of the suburban fumes.
We may have to leave soon, she said. It’s becoming intolerable.
And I didn’t ask what was becoming intolerable. It was a broad subset that covered many different things.
Where would we go?
England, I suppose.
I’ll have no work there.
Aren’t there people to be followed? An errant wife or a wayward husband? Don’t they counterfeit Gucci bags there?
And what about you?
I’m worried about Jenny. And I’m in need of a – what do they call it? A sabbatical.
It began to rain later, one of those sudden heavy downpours that seem to come from a solid lake above the skies. And I realised every door and window was open, water was trickling in on the carpets and the window sashes, and I went around the house once more, systematically closing them. I went back to bed then, and curled my arms around her.
I feel I’m drowning, she said, only half-awake.
It’s the rain, I said. I’ve closed all the windows.
No, she said. I feel I’m drowning, in you.
31
How long, I asked Istvan, do we have to wait for an appointment to visit the city morgue?
It is the times, he told me. Most of the city works staggered hours. People are talking about blackouts too, which can’t be good.
For a morgue? I asked him, and he smiled.
Morgue will have its own generator. Meanwhile, there are government ministers need protection, paranoid billionaires, party bosses, is good time for security in general.
I didn’t get the connection, but let it go.
I am making list, expanded list of possible clients. In times like these, protectors need protection.
Protectors of what?
Government buildings, power plants, TV stations. You are well acquainted with war zones?
He knew that I was.
Security is stretched, private enterprise fills the gap.
Is this a war zone?
Not yet. But we – how you say – live in hope. Work for everybody.
I had to admire his quite insane optimism.
Besides, he said, you have appointment.
And I had, I remembered. With our bushy-eyebrowed therapist. So I walked back out on to those hot, deceptive streets. If I was to believe him, this sweet, baking tranquillity was just a crust that hid a boiling magma of volcanic chaos, just about to erupt. But I couldn’t quite make the leap. Boomboxes and transgendered protest do not a revolution make. At least not traditionally. And when I made it to the Viennese’s office, Sarah was already sitting at her chosen spot by the open window.
She dove right in.
I received a call, she told us, and thought I had better discuss it here rather than in that alpine house we rented, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in that glassy place they call the bathroom. In the car, even. Our domestic circumstances, I couldn’t call them fraught, doctor – are you a doctor by the way? No? Sweet Jesus, why not? Well our domestic circumstances aren’t what you would call fraught, since so little comes to the surface, so little is spoken. we’re walking on what we both know is thin ice and how I hate that phrase, doctor, why do we need metaphors, anyway? The ice is thin; it covers a lake or a river and is about to crack and the walkers sink in and maybe drown and that’s the metaphor, isn’t it? But it’s a bad one, doctor, because if the ice is thin and about to crack, it’s not from any pressure from above, but the volcanic possibilities below, about to erupt, and another metaphor, I’m mixing them but they only work if you mix them. Anyway, I thought I’d discuss it here rather than in that brittle ice palace we live in, but that doesn’t work either, doctor, it’s nothing to do with ice, it’s the heat that gets me, the humidity, it seems to be presaging a thunderclap or a lightning strike, or if nothing as dramatic as that, definitely a migraine. Yes, I get headaches in the heat, doctor, and lately more of them when at home. And you ask again, did I get a call, yes I did, I got a call and halfway through the call I remembered something I had noticed but never allowed myself become aware of, if you know what I mean, I had noticed it but filed it away under troubling, to be dealt with later. My husband hasn’t been wearing his ring of late, and the call brought it all into perspective, gave me, if not an explanation, at least a reason. Who called, Jonathan? Visa called, that’s who. They wanted to check a rather large purchase from a jeweller’s. And at first I had a tiny flutter around what I still persist in thinking of as the heart. Yes, my heart positively leapt, Jonathan, at the thought that you might have bought me a gift. But then they had to spoil it all and mention the date, and I realised that whomever it was bought for, it was not bought for me. He cooked a fish on that day, doctor, and I remember that because it was unusual, a gesture of some weird scaly kind, so I received a portion of baked zander, I think he called it, and someone else received a bracelet of – what were they, darling? Pearls, of course, you always bought the best gifts, I remember that, your taste was immediate and generally impeccable, you had
that talent for surprise that used to take my breath away. So there must be someone else out there who’s deserving of a trinket that cost two hundred and fifty dollars, a number which must become astronomical in that currency you use here. And they are hard to handle, I will admit that, and maybe Jonathan didn’t have enough of them, couldn’t make his way to the hole in the wall to get a wad of those smudgy, sweaty bills. Or maybe she was with him at the time, the deserving one let’s call her, so he was foolish enough to use his plastic, forgetting that at the very least a bill would arrive at the home of the undeserving one, and in the worst-case scenario, a phone call. That’s how it works, doctor, I remember it well, in the first flush of what’s-it-called – romance, maybe – you forget all sorts of things. So I was in the kitchen at the time, doctor, and Jenny was finishing her cereal and the heat, my God the heat, it was hardly nine o’clock and my brain was already beginning to congeal, so I dealt with it, doctor, I was rather proud of my demeanour, I am getting good, I told myself, at dealing with things, so I drove Jenny to her school – and it was only on the drive, through those god-awful fields with the nondescript towns whose names I can never remember, the air conditioning had time to work and the humidity reached a level that was bearable, it was only then – I was passing a big grain elevator and a system of overhead pipes that seemed to go on for ever – that the full import of the call sank in. I tried to think of explanations – had he bought it for me and subsequently lost it? – had it been stolen? – was there a significant date coming up? – my birthday is in February, doctor, and our anniversary in May – was he keeping the gift in abeyance, so to speak? – but I know my husband, doctor, when he surprises you he does it immediately, he is an immediate sort of man – and none of the explanations, doctor, could cover what I knew to be the dismal truth – that he had bought it for and given it to the deserving one. Has she a name, Jonathan? She must, but I don’t want to know it. And then over the fields of that yellow stuff they grow here – what’s it called? Rape? – I could see the line of police and the protesters already in place and I could hear the chant already – I’m on a dig, doctor, of a site that’s causing some controversy – and I thought I can’t go on with this for very much longer, I need an out, an exit, there was a reason we three came here, but I’m finding it very hard to remember what it was . . .
