The choir sings “Io non mori’ e non rimasi vivo” – I did not die and I was not alive. You’re holding Nick, trying and failing to lift him out of the water; his skin cold and soft and horribly like butchered meat. That is what death feels like. Soft, but cold. No life, no tension behind it. The flesh giving way, giving up, submitting to whatever comes next.
You’re wrapping a veal cutlet behind the counter of your father’s shop. A Western Union van pulls up outside. Your father stares at the van but says nothing. Your mother steps out from the storeroom and makes a sound in the back of her throat, neither a cry nor a gasp. The bell above the door jangles and the Western Union man enters and asks for Yitzhak Cohen. He hands your father the telegram and apologises as if it could possibly be his fault. He leaves the store with the expression of a man not yet numbed by being the bearer of bad news. Your mother begins to cry. Doesn’t even have to read the telegram. You take it from your father’s shaking hands and read it, picking out only your brother’s name and those words that burst from the page before coalescing into a single, inescapable fact.
This music was always there, beneath each moment, long before Ron wrote it. The choir’s voices fill the auditorium, transforming it into a space without gravity, and you are watching an event that occurs almost a mile above the desert, a single atom shattering, triggering a series of events that fills the night with fire. This isn’t a moment of destruction, but rather an act of terrifying creation; another sun being born and living only a fraction of a second before consuming itself into nothing but dust. If you took the sound of that moment and drew it out over minutes, rather than millionths of a second, what you would hear is the Inferno oratorio, sung by a one hundred-strong choir.
**
You last saw Doris and Charles at Ron’s birthday party, back in ’47. The Fanshawes. Connecticut and affluent, but involved in good causes and activism, much like Ron. They were in Paris when he died, and so couldn’t attend the funeral.
“We were devastated, of course,” says Doris.
By Ron’s death or the awkwardness of their absence?
They’re a dapper enough pair. You’d mistake neither for members of the proletariat. Charles teaches architecture at Yale while Doris collects art and recently had one of her “people” pick up a Jackson Pollock at auction.
“Can’t stand the stuff, myself. So self-indulgent. But it’s all the rage. And that sort of thing can only ever increase in value.”
After an aside about Pollock’s work – “Like something the cat hacked up” – Margaret steers the conversation onto the subject of tonight’s concert.
“Well, I thought it was top drawer,” says Charles. “Wasn’t it darling? What do you think?”
“Sublime,” says Doris.
“Of course,” says Charles, “the only shame is that Ronald wasn’t there to hear it for himself.”
“Well, yes,” Margaret says curtly. “But it was a memorial concert. His being around to hear it would have defeated the purpose of it somewhat.”
You feel yourself blushing. Angie suppresses a laugh by turning it into a demure cough. Doris and Charles don’t react at all.
“So,” says Charles. “What next for our young maestro?”
You ask what he means.
“You’re based in Los Angeles, yes?”
He pronounces ‘Angeles’ with the same hard “g” as Margaret. You tell him that’s correct.
“Yes,” says Margaret. “Mr Conrad composes music for the motion pictures.”
“For movies?” says Doris. “You mean musicals?”
You tell her it’s mostly westerns and crime movies, actually; an exaggeration after months of being blackballed at Capitol. Even then Doris looks startled, as if you’d told her you write jingles for soap commercials.
“Well, now,” says Charles. “I don’t suppose you’ll be writing that sort of thing for much longer.”
“Meaning…?”
It comes out a little aggressively, but Charles takes it in his stride, laughing through his nose and taking another sip of his Old Fashioned.
Doris answers for him. “What my husband means is that now you’ve made your New York debut there’s no need for you to waste your talents on something as disposable as the cinema.”
“Disposable?”
“Why, yes. What was it you said? Westerns? Cops and robbers?”
“Among other things.”
“Well, there you have it. The movies are all well and good, but there isn’t a single film starring Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne or, what’s the other fella called? Cary Grant. There isn’t a single film starring any of those characters that’ll last as long as the Eroica. Even when a composer such as Copland works in Hollywood, he produces only minor, forgettable works. Can you imagine going to a concert to hear the music from Fort Apache?”
“I rather enjoyed Fort Apache,” says Charles.
“You enjoyed it,” says Doris. “That’s not the same as considering it beneficial to the common man. You enjoy a hotdog whenever Harold – that’s my brother – whenever Harold insists on taking you to the Yankee Stadium. That doesn’t mean we should start handing out free hot dogs on every street corner.”
“Man cannot live by hotdog alone,” Charles smirks. He looks at you for a moment, narrowing his eyes. “Say. I just thought. Weren’t you the young man who joined us on that trip with poor old Larry Black and Dotty Markham and her sister and… who else? When was that, Doris? Thirty-six?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“As late as that? You’re probably right. Spring, if I recall. Was that you?”
You shake your head, offer an apologetic shrug.
“Oh well,” says Charles. “Must have been another of Ron’s young men.”
Doris shoots her husband a caustic sideways glance and Charles sips his cocktail without as much as a blink. Margaret Bernard remains stoic.
You make your apologies, avoiding Angie’s gaze, and walk away without a destination in mind. Your bowtie is too tight and your feet feel very suddenly compressed by your dress shoes. At Capitol, this concert was both a tacit confession and a potential embarrassment. In Manhattan, the movies make you a vulgarian. Hollywood judges you because you’re queer and because Ron was a Red. New York judges you because you’re a cog in capitalism’s grotesque machinery. Perhaps Doris and Charles would approve if you were writing music for films about factory workers and collective farms.
Wasn’t changing your name enough for them? Abandoning Cohen for something more goyish? Ron’s suggestion. “Look at Copland, look at Gershwin.” Though, to your mind, Gershwin still sounds pretty Jewish. You looked around Ron’s apartment for inspiration and saw the spine of a book, Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad. Later still you learned the author was born Józef Korzeniowski, which had a certain irony. Your father’s expression, when you told him what you’d done, was enough to break your heart, but you wouldn’t relent. Your name was now Sol Conrad. And things were never the same after that.
Was all this not enough for the Uptown set, for Ron’s friends at the Century Club, for the WASP sponsors and donors and patrons of the arts who make up maybe eighty percent of those milling around the bar here at the Waldorf?
In the restroom you take a piss you don’t really need, glad simply to be away from those people. A Negro attendant hands you a towel and some soap, and as you wash and dry your hands you’re joined at the washbasin by a guy you first noticed in the bar. Not part of your group. He was sitting at the bar, looking over at you, and your eyes locked just once. You didn’t dare look again, in case Angie noticed, but now he’s staring at you in the mirror.
He’s dressed smartly enough. Pinstripe tailored suit, good shoes. His grooming is old-fashioned for his age; you’d guess he’s about forty. Handsome. A businessman, most likely, from out of town. Chicago or Detroit. In New York for one night only. Probably has a room here, and as you walk back to the bar he’ll ask if you’d like to join him upstairs for a drink.
Forward, and confident, because he can afford to be.
He’ll invite you to his room and you’ll go there, and the whole thing will be over too quickly because however drunk you might be you’ll still remember that Angie is waiting for you downstairs, talking to – or being talked at by – Margaret and her friends.
The guy – you’ve decided his name is something butch like ‘Bob’ or ‘Frank’ – smiles at you and you look away. You felt something you don’t want to feel. It’s always in the eyes. Across a room, across a bar, across some shady path. You’re thinking of another night, a long time ago. Hours you will never forget. Walking along the frozen river as the sun began to rise. Or Pershing Square, a group of men standing around the statue of Beethoven, and one of them looking over. That first lecture at Juilliard. A famous tutor with a name you’d heard on the radio, looking around the class, familiarising himself with his students, his eyes resting on you a beat longer than anyone else. You once lived for those moments, but things are different now.
You clutch another paper towel and dry your hands a little quicker, still staring into the basin. Your hands aren’t properly dry, but you throw a dime into the attendant’s tip tray, and leave the restroom as if fleeing the scene of a crime.
Chapter 25:
MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001
They began at a ramen bar in East Village, the staff barking at them in Japanese as they entered. The waitresses looked like something from Anime; bobbed pink hair and bright plastic accessories.
Pavel asked her how she came to New York, what kind of work she’d done before becoming Sol’s assistant. She went through her CV. Much of it felt like several lifetimes ago. Waiting tables part-time in a self-styled bistro in Chipping Campden. Had he heard of the Cotswolds? (He hadn’t.) In New York she worked weekends in a shop that sold “ethnic stuff” and incense sticks. Then, after graduating, she applied for the job as Sol’s PA. It had little to do with her degree in musicology, but she didn’t want to teach. Working for Sol seemed a happy compromise.
Pavel asked how much she earned and Natalie coughed and laughed and told him he was being forward.
“What does this mean – ‘forward’?”
“Rude.”
“Why is it rude?”
“It’s… we don’t… that isn’t something people talk about.”
“Why not?”
“Because… it isn’t. It makes people uncomfortable. Especially the English. It’s like this unwritten rule we have.”
“But not for Russians.”
“I’m not Russian.”
“But I am. So how much does he pay you?”
She told him how much and Pavel almost choked on a steamed dumpling, his coughing fit brought to an end only when he spat it out and took a swig of water.
“What’s so funny?”
“He is a wealthy man. He should be paying you more.”
“I get by.”
Pavel nodded. He wouldn’t press it any further. He ate another dumpling and smiled at her with his mouth full. Beneath the table, their knees touched. Natalie couldn’t remember the last time she had talked this much about herself. Ordinarily, it was the sort of thing she would shrink from, changing the subject as quickly as she could, letting others do all the talking, but with Pavel it felt different. She didn’t mind.
A moment’s silence was broken when the bell above the door jangled, more customers entered, and the women with the bobbed pink hair yelled, “Irasshaimase!” Natalie and Pavel nearly jumped out of their seats. They looked at one another and laughed.
After another moment’s quiet, Pavel said, “Why is he alone?”
“Who?”
“Mr Conrad.”
“I don’t know. How does anyone end up alone? He was married once. But they divorced. He doesn’t have any family. There was some rift between him and his parents.”
“That is sad,” Pavel said. “A man his age, having nobody.”
“That’s not true,” said Natalie. “He has me.”
Pavel nodded slowly. He was staring into some far corner of the restaurant, lost in a thought. Now was the time.
“What is it you want out of all this?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this. Your grandfather’s music. Proving the connection with Mr Conrad. What is it you actually want?”
She’d allowed a trace of anger into her voice. She wasn’t angry with Pavel, as such, but if she was going to carry on helping him, she needed to know.
“Lots of things, I guess,” Pavel said. “Money, obviously. If there is money that should be ours, my family’s, we should have it. Is that wrong? We were never rich. My grandfather, my father, my mother’s family, always poor. But it’s not just that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I feel like people should know who he was. Sergey. Because everyone forgot. Almost like he’d died. Like they’d killed him with all the others. But they didn’t. He lived. And he married. And he had children. And his children had children. And nobody knows.”
Why couldn’t he have left it at “money”?
“Do you remember him?” Natalie asked.
Pavel nodded. “He was a quiet man. I think he was a good man. Not always. He told my father that before they sent him away he was mudak. An asshole. But that’s not how I remember him.”
He reached across the table and held onto her hands, squeezing them gently. His hands were warmer than her own. She didn’t want him to let go.
“Thank you,” he said. “For helping me.”
There was nothing she could say. She smiled. If this carried on she would cry. She gestured to one of the women with pink hair and mimed signing a cheque, even though she would pay their bill with a card.
From the ramen bar, they zigged and zagged their way across the Village to Pier 45. She half-expected the place to be deserted, fenced off with a sign that said, “Merriment cancelled until further notice”; the city draped in widow’s weeds.
Instead, in the greenish light beneath its pavilion, they found people slow dancing to a Sinatra song. Young couples and old couples, straight couples and gay couples. The kind of scene New York does so well. Across the dark river, the lights of Jersey shimmered against the water. To the south, at the far end of Manhattan, there was a sad, black nothingness of sky between the towers.
She invited Pavel to dance. They’d had a few beers at the ramen bar and she was already feeling a little drunk.
“I do not dance. I would be like a dancing bear.”
“Come on,” she said, grabbing him by the hands, dragging him towards the music. He didn’t put up too much of a struggle. They slow danced and they kissed and Natalie closed her eyes and listened to Sinatra and the sound of water lapping and gurgling against the pier.
The moment soared with happiness, a breathless joy that washed over her, surrounded her. It wasn’t that her time in New York had been unhappy, but rather that she had been resistant to happiness. Yet out there on the pier she was overwhelmed by a sensation of living in the present, her future as black, as unknowable, as the night sky or the water below.
She insisted they walk to his hotel, telling him it was too lovely an evening for the subway. Winter would kick in soon enough, and then it would be too cold to walk anywhere. “Let’s enjoy this while it lasts,” she said, and so they walked.
Natalie still hadn’t told him Carol’s name. How would this play out? Carol seeing the score and confirming everything. The story going public. A whirlwind of academic interest, maybe even a few column inches in the New York Times. Then plans to perform Sergey Grekov’s ballet, either in St Petersburg or here in New York. Or St Petersburg and New York. A joint production between the Mariinsky and the New York City Ballet. And of course, the authorities would have to let Pavel stay on in the States, so that together he and Natalie could tell his grandfather’s story. And Sol wasn’t getting any younger. By the time the truth – whatever the truth might be – came out, he’d be way past un
derstanding. His most famous work plagiarism? The network would pick up the bill, pay any royalties, settle everything out of court. What difference would it make?
There was never even a moment’s hesitation before she got into the elevator that night. They began kissing and undressing as it went up to his floor, and they ran the short distance from the elevator to his room.
The physical act itself was something wordless, instinctive. Not sex, not love, not even fucking, but something closer to a dance, and it terrified her. It terrified her with its perfection, with its rightness. It terrified her with its promise of a beginning.
Chapter 26:
WASHINGTON D.C., APRIL 1951
A wet spring day in Washington; the trees coming into leaf and its streets slicked with rain. The city is coldly unfamiliar to you, its marble facades grey beneath a clouded sky. You were here once, in the early ’40s, but came late in the afternoon, travelled straight to the concert hall, and went back to New York the same night.
The twelve hours before the hearing are spent in your hotel room, leaving it only for a joyless supper in the hotel’s restaurant. There is little conversation between the two of you. If your marriage is built on anything, it’s an ability to talk to one another for hours on end, but you have nothing to say. The noise of tomorrow drowns out everything.
In your room she tries to instigate sex, kissing you on the mouth and placing her hand on your crotch, but you tell her you’re too tired. She accepts the apology and falls asleep in minutes, but you’re incapable of sleep. How much longer can things go on with you turning her away like this? Tonight there’s an excuse, but on other nights, after all this is over, what then?
You can’t tell her the truth; that each moment of intimacy takes you back to that night in the Nevada desert, that thoughts of sex, of fucking, of making love are now entangled, inextricably, with the memory of Nick’s cold flesh. In quieter moments, when alone, you wonder how long it was before they found him. You picture the stillness of the bathwater; how it must have settled and become glass within minutes. The awful emptiness of that room in the hours that followed.
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