Find Me

by André Aciman

  When Michel returned I couldn’t wait to tell him about the score. “This is not a sonata, it’s a cadenza—” I began.

  “Chicken or beef?” he interrupted. Our supper and well-being tonight trumped everything else.

  I loved it when he did this. “Are we on an airplane?” I asked.

  “We might serve vegan food as well,” he continued, parodying an Air France stewardess. “And I have a fabulous red.” He stopped a moment. “You were saying?”

  “Not a sonata but a cadenza.”

  “A cadenza. Of course! I suspected it all along.” He halted a second. “And what’s a cadenza?”

  I laughed.

  “It’s a brief one-to-two-minute moment in a piano concerto when the soloist improvises upon a theme already explored in the concerto itself. Usually, the signal for the orchestra to come clamoring back in and close the movement is a trill played by the pianist at the very end of his cadenza. I couldn’t figure out what the trill was when I first saw it but now it makes perfect sense. This cadenza, however, goes on and on, I don’t know for how long yet, but it’s obviously more than five to six minutes long.”

  “So this was my father’s big secret? Six minutes of music, and that’s it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Doesn’t add up, does it?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I have to study this. Léon keeps echoing the Waldstein.”

  “The Waldstein.” He repeated the word with a broad smile. It took me a moment and then, once again, I understood why he was smiling.

  “Don’t tell me you’re twice my age and you’ve never heard the Waldstein Sonata.”

  “I know it inside out.” Again the smile.

  “You’re fibbing. I know it. I can tell.”

  “Of course I’m fibbing.”

  I stood up, went to the piano, and started playing the opening bars of the Waldstein.

  “The Waldstein, of course,” he said.

  Was he still joking?

  “Actually I’ve heard it many times.”

  I stopped playing and then moved to the rondo. He said he knew it too. “Then sing it,” I said.

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “Sing it with me,” I said.

  “No.”

  I started singing the rondo and, after a bit of coaxing by staring at him from the piano, began hearing his tentative attempts at song. I played more slowly, and then asked him to sing louder, till in the end we were singing in unison. He placed both hands on my shoulders, I thought it was a signal to stop, but then he said, “Don’t stop,” so I continued playing and singing. “What a voice you have,” he said. “If I could, I would kiss your voice.” “Keep singing,” I said. So he kept singing. When I turned around at the end of our crooning, I noticed he had tears in his eyes. “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know why. Maybe because I never ever sing. Or maybe it’s just this: being with you. I want to sing.” “Don’t you sing in the shower sometimes?” “Not in ages.” I got up and, with my left thumb, wiped the tears from both his eyes. “I like that we sang,” I said. “I do too,” he said. “Did it make you sad?” “Not at all. I was just moved, as though you’d pushed me out of myself. I like it when you do that: push me out of myself. Plus I’m so shy that I tear up as easily as some people blush.”

  “You, shy? I don’t think you’re shy at all.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how shy.”

  “You spoke to me out of nowhere, picked me up actually, and in a church of all places, and then you took me out to dinner. Shy people don’t do any of this.”

  “The reason it happened that way is because I wasn’t planning any of it, wasn’t even thinking. It all came so easily, maybe because you helped. Of course I wanted to ask you to come home with me that same night, but I didn’t dare.”

  “So you left me stranded all alone with my backpack, my bicycle, and my helmet. Thanks!”

  “You didn’t mind.”

  “I did mind. I was hurt.”

  “And yet now you’re here with me in this room.” He paused a moment. “Is this too much for you?”

  “My generation again?”

  We laughed.

  Getting back to Léon, I took up the score.

  “Let me explain to you how a cadenza works.”

  I riffled through his record collection—all jazz—but finally landed on a Mozart concerto. Then I located a very complex and expensive-looking music system sitting on an eighteenth-century coffee table. As I fiddled to see how it worked, I avoided looking at him so as not to give what I was about to ask any importance. “Who told you to buy this?” I asked.

  “Nobody told me. I told myself. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He knew I liked his answer. “And I know how to work it myself. All you had to do was ask me.”

  It took a few moments, and we began listening to Mozart’s piano concerto. I let him hear a bit of the first movement then lifted the stylus and moved it forward to the part where I suspected the cadenza started. This cadenza was composed by Mozart himself. We listened to the cadenza until I pointed out the trill that signaled the return of the full orchestra.

  “That was Murray Perahia playing. Very elegant, very clear, simply superb. The key to his cadenza is these few notes taken from the main theme. I’ll sing them for you and then you will too.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  “No way!”

  I played the notes first, then began singing as I was playing them and continued playing, to show off a bit. “Your turn now,” I said while playing the notes again, and then turned my head toward him to signal it was his turn. He hesitated at first but then did as asked and began humming the notes. “You have a good voice,” I finally said. Then, because I felt inspired, I played the notes once more and told him to sing them again, saying, “It would make me happy.”

  And he did sing again, until we sang together. “Next week I will start taking piano lessons,” he said. “I want the piano to be part of my life again. Maybe I want to learn composition too.”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was humoring me.

  “Would you let me be your teacher?” I asked.

  “Of course I would. What a stupid question. The question is…”

  “Oh, shush!”

  Then I told him to sit while I played Beethoven’s and then Brahms’s cadenzas to Mozart’s D Minor concerto. “Luminous,” I said, as I began playing, feeling that I was playing the two perfectly.

  “There are many others. One was even composed by Mozart’s own son,” I said.

  I played. He listened.

  And then, because I felt inspired, I played him my own improvised version on the spot. “This can go on forever, if you wish.”

  “I so wish I could do this.”

  “And you will. I’d be better at the piano if I’d practiced earlier this morning, but someone had other plans for the day.”

  “You didn’t have to agree.”

  “I wanted to.”

  Then, out of the blue: “Could you play the notes you played for your student from Thailand?”

  “You mean this?” I said, knowing exactly what he was referring to.

  * * *

  “What’s interesting here is that after our friend Léon’s cadenza quotes a few bars from the Waldstein Sonata, something far crazier happens.”

  “What?” he asked, almost overwhelmed by too many musical facts for one day.

  I looked at the score and then once again, just to make certain that I wasn’t making any of it up. “It seems to me, and I’m not sure yet, that at some point after quoting the Waldstein Léon dithers awhile until he slips from the Beethoven to something that very possibly inspired another piece by Beethoven, something called Kol Nidre.”

  “Of course,” he said. He was close to laughing.

  “Kol Nidre is a Jewish prayer. You see, the Jewish theme is very veiled but it’s smuggled in there … and
my hunch is that unless someone were musically trained, only a Jew who reads music would recognize that the centerpiece of this cadenza is not the Beethoven but Kol Nidre. Those few measures are repeated seven times, so Léon knew exactly what he was doing. Then, of course, he goes back to the Waldstein, and to the trill that announces the return of the full orchestra.”

  To let him know what I had in mind I played the cadenza and then Kol Nidre bit by bit for him.

  “What is Kol Nidre?”

  “It’s an Aramaic prayer at the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and represents the recantation of all vows, all oaths, all curses, all obligations made to God. But the melody has charmed composers. My hunch is that Léon knew that your father would recognize it. It was like a coded message between them.”

  “But I know this tune,” he suddenly said.

  “Where did you hear it?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I know it, maybe from way, way back.”

  Michel thought for a moment, then, as though rousing himself, said, “I think we should sit down for dinner.”

  But I needed to get the matter off my chest.

  “There are two ways in which your father could have known this tune. Either Léon hummed or played it for him—why, I have no idea, unless it was to prove that Jewish liturgy had beautiful music—or your father attended a Yom Kippur service, which might suggest a closer bond between the two. The service on that day is not an occasion for tourists to come and watch how Jews celebrate the Day of Atonement.”

  Michel thought for a moment, then said, “If you invited me, I’d come.” I took his hand, held it, kissed it.

  During dinner we discussed what we considered might have been the reason for the secret cadenza. An inside joke? A distillation of a work in progress? A challenge to the pianist? Maybe a gesture from one to the other, a salutation, in memory of a friendship that might have lapsed, who knows. “So many things I haven’t had time to examine yet,” I said. “Unless the cadenza was thought up in dire circumstances and was a Jewish salvo composed from hell itself.”

  “Are we reading too much into this?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We have an amazing butcher in town, so the filet is simply excellent. And our cook loves vegetables, asparagus if she can still find it, which she cooks magnificently despite her allergies. I love Indian rice, so smell this,” he said, delicately fanning the air over the rice in my direction. He knew he was teasing me.

  But then I said there was something missing.

  “Léon is Jewish, is hated by your grandparents, is most likely considered a bad influence on your father’s career, and the servants think he’s beneath them. France is already occupied and soon the Germans will be living under this very roof, if they aren’t already eating at this very table, which you told me they did. Léon cannot be in the same house, unless he is hiding in the attic, which no one here would have tolerated. So how does the score fall into your father’s hands?”

  I had brought it with me to the dining table.

  “Try this wine. We have three bottles left. We’ve let it breathe in the kitchen.”

  “Can you just focus, please?”

  “Yes, of course. What do you think of the wine?”

  “It’s stunning. But why are you constantly interrupting?”

  “Because I love seeing you focusing like this and I love it when you get so serious. I still can’t believe you’re staying with me. I can’t wait to have you in my bed—can’t wait.”

  I sipped some more wine, then he replenished my glass.

  As I was cutting the meat, I couldn’t help adding: “We still need to figure out how the score ended up here. Who brought it? And when? For a Jew to come here to deliver a score in 1944 seems absurd. In fact, how it got here might say everything about this score. It might even say more than the music itself.”

  “This makes no sense. It’s like suggesting that the way a famous poem got to the printer’s is more important than the poem itself!”

  “In this case, it may be just so.”

  Michel looked at me with bewilderment, as though he had never thought of things in this twisted manner.

  “Was it delivered by mail,” I asked, “by hand, or did Adrien pick it up himself? Was a third party involved? A friend, or a nurse in a hospital, or someone from the camps? This is 1944 and the Germans are still occupying France. So he could have fled or been captured. If he was in the camps, which camp was it? Was he in hiding? Did he survive?”

  I thought about it some more.

  “There are two things that might tell us a lot. And we’re missing both. Why did the composer draw the staves himself? And why are the notes so crammed together like this?”

  “Why would this be important?”

  “Because my hunch is that perhaps these notes were not jotted down hastily at all.” I riffled once again through the pages. “Notice, there’s not a single scratch mark, nothing was crossed out where the composer might have changed his mind while composing. These notes were being transcribed, and in a place where score paper was impossible to come by, where it was even difficult to find ordinary paper. The notes are so terribly crammed—as though he were afraid he would run out of paper.”

  I raised the first sheet toward the candle standing in the middle of the dining table.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking for a watermark. A watermark might tell us a lot: where was the paper manufactured, in which part of France. Or elsewhere, if you follow my drift.”

  Michel looked at me. “I follow your drift.”

  Unfortunately there was no watermark on the paper. “All I can deduce is that it was cheap onion paper. So, the composer of the cadenza already knows these themes and transfers the notes in this compressed form. He wants your father to have this cadenza. This is all we know.”

  “No, we know something more. My father gives up playing altogether and begins to study law. The world of music is entirely shut to him. I cannot believe that this has nothing to do with Léon. Because one thing we do know. He kept this cadenza as though it were the most precious thing in his life. But then why keep it if he was never going to play it, why lock it up all those years in this cabinet—unless he promised to play it only in Léon’s presence? Or unless he kept it so that someone else should materialize and play it? Someone like you, Elio!”

  This flattered me but I did not want to appear to have seized what he was implying.

  “Do you think he meant to return it to Léon or to someone dear to Léon? Or did he simply not know what to do with it and didn’t have the heart to be rid of it—the way you continue to keep your father’s tennis rackets?”

  “Perhaps the most important thing is to determine who Léon was.”

  After dinner, using his computer I typed in Adrien’s full name and within seconds saw the years when he attended the conservatory. Even his picture appeared. “Dapper and natty,” I said, “and handsome.” I searched for the names of teachers before, during, and after those years. The records were desultory and scattered, but in not one was there a person called Léon. I looked for Jewish-, German-, or Slavic-sounding surnames or any with L as a first initial. Nothing there either. I looked for students with the name Léon. Nothing. Either he had another name or his name was removed from the school records. Or he’d never been at the conservatory. “There is no Léon,” I finally said.

  “So here ends our bit of detective work.”

  By then, we were sitting very close together on the sofa, the light was dim, and we were drinking more Calvados.

  “Perhaps your father studied with Alfred Cortot. But I doubt that Léon did.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  “Cortot was anti-Semitic and became even more so under the occupation. I believe the violinist Thibaud, whom Cortot knew well, played for the Führer.”

  “Terrible times.”

  “Any more thoughts on the matter?” he asked.


  “Why do you ask?”

  He shook his head ever so mildly. “No reason. I just love being like this with you. Talking the way we do, at night, in this room, sitting on this sofa, glued together while you’re fiddling with the computer, and outside all over, it’s just November. I love that you’ve taken such an interest.”

  “I love it too, very much.”

  “And yet you don’t believe in fate.”

  “I told you, I don’t think in those terms.”

  “Then maybe when you get to be my age and the dearth of things life has to offer becomes more evident by the day, maybe then you can start noticing those tiny accidents that turn out to be miracles and that can redefine our lives and cast an incandescent luster over things that, in the great scheme of things, could easily be meaningless. But this is not meaningless.”

  “This here tonight is wonderful.”

  “Yes, it is wonderful.” But he said it with a tone of nostalgic resignation verging on melancholy, as though I were a dish he was watching being taken away before he’d had his fill. Is this what happens when one is close to twice someone’s age: one starts losing people long before they’ve started looking elsewhere?

  We sat this way without saying anything. I gave him what I thought was a hug, but what he returned was a real, sad, famished hug filled with sensual despair.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, still reluctant to hear what I already suspected was going to be his answer.

  “Not a thing. But then this is what’s so scary—if you see my drift—precisely because there’s nothing wrong.”

  “Give me more Calvados.”

  He was happy to oblige. He stood up, walked over to the small cabinet behind one of the speakers, and took out another bottle. “Much better quality.”