The Raindrop Prelude’s recurring A flat, I had always thought, was one of piano playing’s greatest paradoxes. The fact that technically it was so easy – with its many repeated notes – made the prelude seem generally more straightforward than, say, pieces with lots of complex finger manoeuvrings. Yet its simplicity was precisely what made it so complicated, because how can a person strike a single note over and over at exactly the same volume and tempo? After all, apart from the physical challenge, since a finger strains when performing the same movement repeatedly, the pianist’s problem is to find a way to play the note with feeling so that the repetitiveness of a single note heard again and again with absolutely no variation does not become boring.
As is traditional among pianists, I had always alternated between the index and third finger to keep the tempo regular and stop either from becoming overtired. But the scar tissue from the accident, or perhaps the metalwork itself, had stiffened my fingers so the index finger of my left hand came down heavily and loudly on the A flat with a regularity so exact it was almost militant. And whereas previously the left hand had intuitively responded to the melody in the right, making subtle adjustments in volume and tempo and tone to add colour, softening instinctively in the places where the melody was pleading or seductive and vulnerable, now it came down on the A flat with absolute consistency.
That my left hand had acquired this mechanical quality ought to have neutralised the prelude’s capacity for misery but instead it brought it to the fore. And as I played automatically, like some kind of pianola, my mind thought about other things, thoughts unrelated to the music, thoughts about Mim, for instance, and my childhood piano lessons. I remembered the two grand pianos my Russian piano teacher had kept side by side in her converted garage, a black Yamaha for everyday playing and a Steinway for special occasions and Shostakovich, and how if I arrived early I stood outside to listen to the breathy puh-puh-puh of her keeping time. Sometimes, if I stood on my toes to reach my eyes over the glass, I’d see her leaning forward, her pockmarked face elongated and sheared in two by the swirled brown windowpane so that her long dark hair bled into the piano as though she was not so much playing it as being sucked in by it.
What do you like so much about this piece? said Hannah Kallenbach. Because although the fingers of my left hand felt detached, like a set of nerves which had come apart from the rest of the neural system, my eyes had closed and I’d tilted over the piano as you do when you’re about to fall over. I can’t explain it, I said. It wasn’t the narrative of Chopin’s illness or the rain that moved me, it was the way my hands moved in relation to each other. They seemed to understand something about the piece that I had never understood myself. Before, they had been a pair, operating together, but now they were independent. Previously, in the opening bars, my left hand, responding to the right hand’s tentative melody, had softened and slightly slowed its repeated A flat to echo it, but now, with its pins and its fused joints, it ignored it and just kept on striking its key as firmly and evenly as a pulse. And a few bars on, as the rain swelled and the melody became dejected, whereas previously the left hand had elongated its A flat in sympathy with the melody, now its note remained unswayed. That night, as I sat at the piano, the piece wasn’t just a retelling of the story of Chopin and his situation (like mine, only more lonely), it was something that was happening, there on the piano, a relationship unfolding between two hands which were like two characters, one expressive, the other inexcitable, who’d been together once but were now detached.
Because the left hand refused to accompany the right, the right hand missed its partner. I could tell by the way it played, moving its fingers faster and more expressively, that it was using one flirtatious technique after another to try to be reunited with it. At first the right hand played delicately, pressing its fingertips timidly on the keys as if it were something fragile or naive, something that needed taking care of. Then, because the left hand wasn’t moved, its rhythm and volume remaining consistent, the right switched tactics – instead of courting the left’s sympathy (or protection, maybe), it feigned indifference, as if attempting to arouse the left’s interest through its own lack of it. And when the left hand resisted, the right expressed its unhappiness by playing more gently and delaying the resolution of its leaps of melody to make them sing with special sweetness. In the absence of feeling from the left, the right hand strained its cadences until they seemed so … so … How can I explain it? Well, they seemed so full of feeling. The more the right hand failed to get a response, the more desperate it became. Alone, it played faster, with an almost hysterical speed. Until the climax, when the storm is at its most vicious, where it suddenly became heavy, giving the impression – because it had slowed so much that it was out of sync with the rhythm – of disorientation, as if it were dazed or unable to manage without assistance. The right hand’s fingers climbed the keyboard, drifting away from the left, expanding the melodic theme, slowly, by a note or two – tentatively at first, then with resolve – until the strain of the gap became apparent and, worried it had gone too far, the right hand returned to the original melody and tempo (though the high notes lingered in the air, since the sea air had corroded the hammers and deprived the piano of the warmth for which Bechsteins are known). For some time it went on like this, the right hand extending the melody a little further, for a little longer, prolonging the distance between itself and its old companion until, reaching the cadenza, when Chopin fears Sand dead, it held its high note for such a long time that my heart – worrying that, like a kite that nobody is holding, the melody would not come back down – sped up and I felt certain my left hand would finally do something, that it would swell up from beneath the melody and ‘catch it’. But it didn’t. Obedient to the score, it remained restrained, firm, steady, even-tempered, so resistant to being carried away that it might have seemed cruel had it not at the same time felt somehow comforting, as if the absence of sentiment was not a way for the left hand to distance itself from the right, but the opposite, a way to contain it.
WINTER
Chapter 10
It doesn’t look like life,
it looks like sea life
I sometimes sat and looked backwards: instead of facing the solarium window and looking at the panoramic part of the view, I’d sit with my back to it and look at the building site. Despite the weather, at eight o’clock each morning the construction site came to life. The workers arrived and started doing things, restoring the large sheets of plastic tacked to the window openings, refilling the ditches in which the matrix of pipes – the skeleton of the sewage system – had been laid. Their activities said Everything can be made good again. The bricklaying said One thing, stacked on another, will amount to something. In the context of a peninsula that seemed to be slipping into the sea, there was something satisfyingly contrary about the way that, a row at a time, the circular walls were rising from the perfectly square podium. It’s better than the alternative, said Hannah Kallenbach. What’s the alternative? I said. Erosion.
And it’s true; if there’s one thing that bored me it was watching the coastline in its losing battle with the sea. I was tired of how the ocean pulled up and subtracted a few inches of shore. I was sick of the gigantic waves pressing so constantly against the harbour wall that I feared one day I’d wake to find it gone completely. I was tired of the mountain dirt tumbling down the mountain, and the stagnating seaweed making the air reek of rotting chicken, and the salt corroding the window frames, how every day the ocean drew things into itself – a sandbag, seaweed, it even swept away two boys (who were later recovered by lifeguards).
Sometimes, with the sun shining brightly through the blueness of a winter’s afternoon, I’d go driving. Not for any particular reason or in any particular direction, just heading out for an hour or two until (as happens sometimes when one is tired or has been driving for some time) I couldn’t say which direction I was facing or which way was home. I’d start out, as was my habit, along the co
astal road, winding my way around the peninsula through seaside suburbs whose names and streets I didn’t know. At the beginning the sea would be on my right. In the middle of the ocean was an iron structure – not a building, a large machine for retrieving or measuring things. On my left were churches and B&Bs and retirement homes, their windows hidden behind lace curtains.
Mostly I headed out in the general direction of the city – which is where the coastal road ended up – because I liked the company of the city workers heading home, their routes intersecting with mine at traffic lights and roundabouts. And although I’d sometimes veer inland, through the poorer suburbs, I’d always keep the sea nearby (I couldn’t see it but there were seagulls circling overhead) so that if I turned right, before long, I would see it again.
But one day, having lost my bearings in a suburb with rows of identically shaped houses, I arrived in an industrial area somewhere west of the city. It was early evening and traffic was at a standstill. A group of begging children threaded their way down the aisle of cars with a cardboard sign – Your Kindness Is Appreciated God Bless – and, because I was frightened of them, I opened my wallet and emptied out a wad of cash, mostly pounds.
I didn’t recognise Hannah Kallenbach at first because she looked so different from the Hannah Kallenbach I’d been carrying around in my mind. I might not have recognised her at all were it not for her dangly flower earrings, the ones she had worn when first we met. I was so surprised to see her in the car beside me that I didn’t notice the traffic moving until a man behind me hooted, shouting, You’ve got a car, now learn how to drive it!
I lost her for a while and then she drew up beside me again. She wore a blue mackintosh and her hair was wet from swimming or getting caught in the rain. She had an amused expression, as though someone had said something funny on the radio, and was less severe-looking than I remembered, perhaps because she was eating something from a polystyrene box. Perhaps she looked less formidable because she seemed more tanned than before, or more muscular. Or because her hair had grown quite bushy. I felt drawn to her. It was more than just the pleasure of recognition I felt, the pleasure of seeing someone again. She was an attractive woman, I thought. Though perhaps, like the red-brick textile factories and low-rise carpet warehouses beside the road that grew more brooding as the evening approached, it was just the way her face was backlit by the setting sun which gave it a romantic sort of mysteriousness.
When the row of cars moved forward, Hannah Kallenbach looked over at me with the narrow eyes I remembered so clearly. I lowered my head and turned the knobs on the stereo. Remember, a man on the radio said, you are the master of your emotions. At night things feel worse because your power over your emotions weakens. On another station a lawyer was talking about a man who’d stabbed his wife nine times because she’d told him his kids weren’t his and she was going to leave him for someone younger and thinner.
I stayed behind Hannah Kallenbach, indicating when she did, taking her turn-offs. I don’t know why I was following her, and the imaginary Hannah Kallenbach, displaced by the proximity of the real one, wasn’t there to ensure that every move I made was tracked down and accounted for.
Hannah Kallenbach drove slowly, as if allowing me to keep sight of her tail lights as the streets darkened. Following her had produced a pleasant sensation in me, a kind of lightness, a floating sensation, the sort of dizziness you get from singing or the weightlessness which makes someone who is happy or travelling very fast say, It feels like I’m flying. I turned right and left along the grid of city streets, which narrowed eventually, until the buildings got shorter and further apart and their vertical thrust gave way to jacaranda branches curving over me, which made the streets feel less like streets and more like tunnels leading to another world. I knew I was driving badly – I nearly knocked over an old man crossing the road with a crutch – but I had the feeling that I was not in charge of where I was going, that I was being moved by something, something bigger than me, as one gets carried along by faith or a body of ideas, so when he swore at me I just shook my head as if to say that it wasn’t me driving and I couldn’t be expected to take any responsibility for it. Swathes of time passed in which I couldn’t say where I’d been or what had happened around me. I tried to concentrate. Eyes, do your work! I said, as though my eyes weren’t automatically watching where I was going, as though without instruction they might stray off or spend too long looking at the signs beside the road.
Hannah Kallenbach pulled into her driveway and got out. I ought to have gone home but I parked at the end of the street and followed with my eyes as she made her way to the front door and disappeared behind it. I remained for some time, not starting the car, with one hand still resting against the steering wheel, the other on the gearstick. From time to time I sighed as if deciding to leave but when I tried to reach for the keys my hands ignored me. Several times I thought, Alright, I’m going to switch on the ignition now, but I’d just sit there watching the large drops of water dislodged from the leaves of the tree above me joining the existing rivulets on the windscreen. Then I fell asleep, or rather tried to, because although I was sleepy and let the blinds of my eyes draw shut (Not for too long, I thought, I’ll just blink for a moment), the seatbelt was pushing into my back and the flashing red light of the immobiliser stood in resistance to my exhaustion.
Then I was in my parents’ house. The memory was from childhood, and so distant and so long forgotten that I thought for a moment it belonged to someone else. My father was away on a business trip and I’d come into the living room to find my mother sitting cross-legged on the Persian carpet in front of the fire. A record was playing – Chopin’s 24 Preludes – a plaintive melody with rippling chromatic harmonies, underscored by a sequence of repeated quavers. The lights were off but the fire had turned the walls a pinky-orange colour. She was smoking, tossing her butts into the grate and watching them disappear, mesmerised, as if finding there something meaningful, the way stargazing makes the galaxy seem comprehensible and small. Over and over, as the pianist reached the final notes, she lifted the needle and returned it to the beginning. Why do you like that piece so much? I said, and she, noticing me, started, and replied, Because when I’m listening to it I feel as though I’m in the company of somebody with such a great capacity for understanding – I feel so understood – that I don’t want to be without him.
A woman walking her dog was staring at me as though there was something about me which was deeply interesting or didn’t make sense. Afraid that she would ask what I was doing there – to which I had given no thought – I opened the door without knowing where I would go. I wandered along the avenue, peering into the windows of the houses, imagining that if I lived there my life would be somehow better than it was. I imagined which house would be mine: not the one with hanging baskets suspended from every window and railing, not the one with the unkempt front lawn, not the one with the beaded curtain hanging over the upstairs window. From behind the leafy hedges and wide expanses of cut lawn, the houses’ lit windows looked warmly at me. Most of the windows were closed but not all of them. In one house a woman stood at the window smoking a cigarette while having a conversation on the phone, the only part of which I caught was, Let’s be honest, you take a hundred different pills every night. In another, a man was complaining to his wife about his job. I mean, he said, I’m interested in education, I’m interested in upliftment, I’m interested in transformation … But sometimes I want to just say fuck it! Fuck everyone and everything involved. Sometimes, I want to just move to America and be somewhere. Oh, Fred, came the reply, sometimes you say the most outrageous things. Where else could we have a borehole in our garden? Not in Chicago, I’ll tell you that much.
There was a light drizzle, not enough to stop me from being outside. I stood for a while at Hannah Kallenbach’s house. Did she live alone? I didn’t entertain that hope since to do so would have required entertaining its opposite. What, anyway, did I want from her? I don’t want
anything, I told myself, but what I wished for was a reason, some pretext, to ring the doorbell. The house’s exterior provided very little information about what was going on inside it, though from time to time, when a light came on in one of the windows, I could see which room she was in; and sometimes, because of the size of the window or some other clue (I knew, for example, that the upstairs window belonged to a bathroom because steam rose from a pipe poking out beneath it), I could guess at what she might be doing. Once I did get a flash of Hannah Kallenbach herself. She appeared briefly in a lighted window to pick up something that looked like a printer-ink cartridge from the windowsill and I thought, Remember the little bird! because she cupped her hand over the cartridge with an unexpected tenderness. For a moment, before she pulled the curtains closed, she presented her face to the window and, producing a box of throat lozenges from the pocket of her jacket, sucked one, tilting her head to one side. The way she looked out at the street through the narrowing aperture of her eyelids, as if to sharpen her gaze and pierce the night more deeply, reminded me of the way people looked at me after concerts, their quizzically knowing expressions – too personal, too urgent, too high up the emotional register – giving the impression that they’d seen right into me. Hannah Kallenbach’s look had a strange effect on me. I felt a wave of inexplicable excitement. It was a Wagnerian feeling – luxurious, exorbitant, overstated – yet at the same time it was a physical feeling, rather than a real feeling, as if I’d been excited in the scientific sense of the word, as though all the atoms in my body had been heated up and were jumping around. I felt excited but I didn’t feel excited. It was just, I thought, one of the brain’s inexplicable reflexes. And although the source of excitement was far from sexual, it was there, rather than in my brain or my arm or any other organ, that it suddenly expressed itself, so that my hand rushed to my trousers and pressed down, not to fan the feeling so much as to confirm it, the way you press on a sore tooth to bring out the pain.
OK, Mr Field Page 8