The Music of a Life
Page 8
When Berg wakes me up, I don’t recognize him immediately. He has put on the suit that was laid out on his bed, and the tie. His hair is sleek and glossy.
“I didn’t want to disturb you before, you were sleeping so soundly…. But it’s already six.”
On the table I see two glasses in which tea is steeping, an immersion heater hooked onto the window latch.
“Are you going … to the theater?” I say, trying not to betray my surprise at the change.
“Yes — in a manner of speaking. Well, to a concert. And by the way, I thought that if you were interested …”
We drink the lemon tea and eat bread, the same as had been wrapped in pages of sheet music, and some slices of salami. After the meal I wash up, comb my hair. Berg lends me a tie.
We are the first to arrive. The concert hall, at the other end of Moscow, belongs to the state railroads’ house of culture.
We remain for a long time in a cold, ill-lit entrance hall. Berg, invisible, silent on a bench in a corner, I pacing up and down past walls decorated with photos of locomotives, from the most ancient squat ones, with their smokestacks comically bell shaped, to the most modern. I also glance into the auditorium. It seems too vast to me; a concert is never going to attract enough people to fill it, especially in this district, miles from anywhere! Nevertheless people begin flocking in, at first hesitantly, like ourselves, then, as their number grows, producing that slight electricity of whispering, anticipation, excitement, that occurs before any performance. Once seated, they spread an agreeable tension through the auditorium. The magic of the theater! I say to myself. Who cares about the hall, or the stage, or what’s going to happen onstage? The main thing is that something’s going to happen.
Berg has chosen a seat in the very back row, where the light hardly reaches at all. Placed at the side, looking beyond the folds of the open curtains into the darkness in the wings from which the performers generally emerge, we can see a figure, the oval of a face.
“He must have got stage fright,” murmurs Berg, his eyes fixed on this dark corner.
He sits there, a little stiffly, with an absent air, as if rejuvenated.
Just then the pianist appears, the young man whose vigilance we had sensed as he waited in the wings. The audience welcomes him with parsimoniously polite applause. I turn to Berg to offer him the folded sheet of the program. But the man appears to be absent, his eyelids lowered, his face impassive. He is no longer there.