An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  She sang a phrase, in key, before she went to the piano. She had absolute pitch when I knew her, but would she have maintained this, unreinforced by external sound?

  Some things become clearer, some more mystifying. The clues are fugitive. Lyon for Nyons: a slip of the tongue? a lapse of memory? an unheard consonant? I make such mistakes all the time.

  How can she handle it as she does? Why did she not share it with me? How can she bear to play music, to think of music at all? When she came to hear us play at the Wigmore, what did she hear? The encore was not announced in the programme.

  A day passes, and I feel unhinged, so anxious, so uncertain am I. There are no rehearsals, so I am not compelled to play. I can't even listen to music. I read a few poems from an old anthology. But I am gripped with a sense of horror that this should be true and a compelling, hopeless wish to protect her - for what can I do? - from the fact of it.

  The next day I decide to write to her. But what can I say other than that I want to see her again? Does she want me to know? Has Luke told her anything? Am I deluding myself? Is there anything to know at all?

  4-3

  Into my perplexity falls a letter: blue envelope, dull golden stamp, yesterday's postmark, the familiar slanted hand. Once again I use the paper-knife she gave me on an envelope sealed by her.

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  The morning light falls on several sheets of light blue paper on which, in dark blue ink, I read the longest letter she has ever written to me.

  Dearest Michael,

  Yes, it is true. You would have found out sooner or later, and, through our meeting in the park, it's turned out to be sooner. Luke was very upset, and it was clear that you too were shocked about something. When we got home he told me he had told you. He didn't mean to let it slip. Poor Luke: he was glum for a whole hour. He felt he'd betrayed me when really he'd taken the burden of divulgence off my shoulders. He's usually very protective of me in a James-James-Morrison-Morrison sort of way, and when his friends come over he makes sure that everything is completely natural. He doesn't want anyone, least of all any of his friends, to have an inkling that anything at all is the matter with me. But a lot is the'matter with me, I'm afraid - and I've been afraid to tell you, afraid that it would break things somehow, or break into things. If I had to come backstage and bring to life those dormant

  ! memories, I did not want you to feel that we were on anything but an equal footing. Certainly I didn't

  1 want what I saw in your eyes two days ago. That is also why I am writing to you, not speaking to you, about it.

  But my situation is not quite pitiful - or is it pitiable? The fact is that, as deafness goes, mine at least gave me time to cope. It happened over

  - months rather than minutes, and it had no horren-

  Ï dous side-effects.

  ï I'm not trying to make light of it. I did not think at first that I could live through it. Music is the

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  VIKRAM SETH

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  AN EQUAL MUSIC | I91

  By the next week, the hearing loss was closer to

  60 decibels, and the doctors were very worried and completely perplexed. There had been no history of this kind of thing happening to a young person in my family. Tante Katerina, who lives in Klosterneuburg, is quite hard of hearing, but then she's over

  70. It's true, I had had an infection in both ears probably from swimming - when I was about eight, and it had lasted almost a year. But that had been clearly diagnosed, while these symptoms seemed to be completely causeless. They defeated the first specialist we went to, and it was only a month later that a second specialist, a much younger man, came up with the probable diagnosis of "auto-immune ear disease" - something I'd never heard of before. He kept explaining to James the value of a "high index of suspicion" for recognising comparatively uncommon diseases, something that he had always possessed: a sort of Hitchcockian gift, it sounded like - but apparently this is standard phraseology.

  The treatment was heavy doses of mixed steroids and immuno-suppressants. If you'd seen me at the top of that double-decker bus then (not that you could have, since I was in Boston) I doubt you'd have recognised me. It was just horrible. I looked in the mirror and saw someone bloated with drugs and desperate with fear.

  For a while my hearing stabilised, even got better. But when they tried to taper off the drugs, things not only reverted to what they'd been before but got worse. Finally they managed to get me off steroids, but my hearing was shattered - is shattered. I feel as if I'm muffled in cotton-wool, and without my hearing aid I can hear almost nothing

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  clearly. Then suddenly things bang out at me or I hear an unearthly high whistling. That's how it's been these last two years. I have my good days and bad days, and sometimes this ear is better and sometimes that, but I no longer have any hope that my hearing will return.

  The doctors have explained that the protective

  * systems of my own body are treating parts of my inner ear - no one knows why or how - as hostile or dangerous, and destroying them. But don't read anything symbolic into this. I did, and it made things worse. I felt I was going out of my mind. I don't any longer. It is just another thing: a strange physiological fact, which no doubt will be curable a generation or two down the line, but not, alas, now.

  It was a strange transition from the world of sound to the world of deafness - not soundlessness, really, because I do hear all sorts of noises, only usually they're the wrong ones. I was so afraid to lose my music, and I was so afraid for Luke, left with a mother who couldn't even hear him cry. If it hadn't been for him, I don't know if I would have had the will to cope. Poor baby, he was only four years old at the time. James was wonderful - when he was there. He shaved off his moustache so that I could lip-read him better! His bank kept him flying to and fro until he told them he wanted a posting with a bit of stability. Hence London.

  James said, quite rightly, that I couldn't withdraw from life - and from him and Luke. We could afford a sort of nanny. She would take a lot of the work off my hands, and be there for Luke when I couldn't be. I should concentrate both on my music

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  193

  and on trying to come to grips with my, well, my condition.

  So I threw myself into the foreign world of the deaf: preventive speech therapy classes, lip-reading classes with hours of practice before a mirror; even a bit of sign language - which I've never really used. Learning anything takes so much time, so much effort - especially something you need just to be able to function as well - half as well - as you could before. It was difficult for me to summon up the will-power to do it. But, as I told myself, music is a language, German and English are languages, reading the hands and the lips are just languages where one improves one's skills with time and effort. It could be interesting. It was, it is, exhausting, but I'm much better at it than I ever thought I would be. (The fact that I had that ear infection when I was eight years old may have helped, as I must have been lip-reading then.) At any rate, I took to it like -a natural. But, as one of my teachers fonce pointed out, you will never be able to learn from the lips alone if someone has lost her glove or her love.

  I use a hearing aid, but not as often as you might think. It's complicated - sometimes it prevents me from hearing the correct pitch. When I've been with

  • you, I haven't used it at all, except at that concert. There's some sort of wi
re loop at the Wigmore Hall which helps when I set my hearing aid to a certain position. It's all very boring until it becomes desperately crucial.

  As for making music, since I do play chamber music still, I have learned to judge - from the bow,

  . ' the fingers, the change of posture, the visible upbeat of breath, from everything and nothing - when

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  to play and at what tempo. You heard my sad new virtuosity in action the other day with the Mozart. But it worked because I knew the sonata well, and I knew from the past how to read your hands, your eyes and your body. I couldn't hear much of what you played, yet I could tell that you played well though I can hardly tell you how I know that. And when you lent me the Beethoven quintet based on "our" trio, I didn't listen to it as in the past I would have. I put the bass on high, and half heard the quintet, half sensed it through vibration, as I read the score with my eyes. I got a great deal from it. But I know I will never truly hear what I have not already heard with these physical ears and can somehow revive in tune and texture from my memory.

  But let's not talk of Beethoven. Do you remember our walks in Heiligenstadt? . . . But enough of that. No, but well, do you remember where he says: "Aber welche Demiitigung, wenn jemand neben mir stund und von weitem eine Flôte hôrte und ich nichts hôrte oder jemand den Hirten singen hôrte und ich auch nichts hôrte . . ." Well, when you heard the robin sing in the Orangery the other day, that was what I felt, but it was not just humiliation, it was a sense of bitter injustice and deprivation and grief and loss and self-pity all mixed up in a frightful lump. And then you went on to talk of blackbirds and nightingales. Really, Michael, now that you know I'm deaf you had better amend your remarks so that you don't pierce me so neatly to the heart.

  It is a sunny morning as I write this. The house is empty. Luke is at school, James is at work, our

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  mother's help is taking morning classes in French somewhere in South Ken. From where I sit, on the first floor, I can look down through a bow-window onto the communal garden with its first crocuses, white, saffron, purple, yellow. A ninety-year-old woman is sitting on a bench, reading, with her small white dog - some sort of short-haired terrier near her. Directly below the window is our own little plot, and I will busy myself with a little work there late this afternoon, after I've practised.

  I know where and how you live, but you know nothing of the geography of my days - the shape and colour of my rooms, the curve of the crescent garden, my cyclamens, the tone and touch of my piano, the light on the plain oak dining table. I've told James we've met a couple of times - professionally, that is. Luke and he do jigsaw puzzles together, so the fact that we've met was bound to emerge anyway. James wasn't disturbed; in fact he suggested that I have you around for a meal. (You will, I think, get on with each other.)

  I do want to share my life and my music with you in some way. But, Michael, I don't see how our love can reach any sort of full expression. Years ago perhaps it could have, but how can it now? I can't live two lives. I am afraid of hurting everyone, all of us. I don't know how to proceed - or even retreat. Perhaps by trying to get you two to meet each other I'll be integrating nothing, since nothing can be integrated.

  You connect me to the greatest happiness - and unhappiness - I have known. Perhaps that was why I avoided you. (Besides, how could I phone you even when I had your number?) Perhaps, again,

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  that was why I stopped avoiding you, and came to meet you that rainy evening when your head - and mine - was swimming with all those fugues.

  Write back soon. Does all this make a difference to anything between us? It must - but what sort of difference? I could have faxed this letter, I suppose, but it didn't seem right.

  There was so much to tell you, Michael. I have probably said too much and too little.

  With my love, . . Julia

  4.4

  Dearest Julia,

  I'm replying at once. You've asked me to, so I'm assuming that what's addressed to you can only be read by you. Why didn't you tell me earlier? How hard it must have been for you, knowing that I'd have to know and not knowing when or how to tell me. What can I say? If I say all this is horrendous which it is - I am afraid of disheartening you. I had better stop; this will sound too much like pity. But if it had happened to me, and you had learned about it, would you not pity me? "She loved me for the dangers I had passed ..." And yet, when you played the Mozart that day alone, or the other day with me, none of this would have made any sense at all. I felt, well, just blessed to be in the periphery of that sound.

  What can you hear? Can you hear your own speech? Your voice hasn't changed. Is there really nothing that can be done about all this? As you said

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  once, I'm not good at seeing things through anyone else's eyes.

  It wasn't Luke's fault at all. If I had to know, and indeed I had to, his remark and your letter were, you're right, the simplest way. Seeing your handwriting on a letter again - so many miles of it in your easy sloping hand, with only a few words crossed out in five pages - put something back again into the silence of these years.

  No, I don't know your life now except those shards of it you spend with me or tell me about. I see you in your small room in the student hostel, or in my own rooms under the stairwell eye of Frau Meissl. I can't visit you where you live - I don't think I could handle that at the moment. But I must see you soon. I can't live without you; it's as simple as that. And, Julia, don't you need me too? - not just as a friend but as a fellow musician?

  I have to talk to you. If you miss me, you must -know how much I miss you. Come and see me, not tomorrow - you probably won't get this till tomorrow afternoon - but on Friday. Can you make it? If you can't, fax me. Or leave a message on my answering machine. If I pick up the phone, speak on regardless. I at least will have the pleasure of your voice.

  I opened your letter with your letter-opener. So much has become clearer: your silences, the sudden tacking of our conversations. But all this is still so puzzling and, well, so frightening to me. Is there nothing I can do to help in any way? We must meet on Friday. This can't, this mustn't make a difference to us.

  Love, . • •' Michael

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  4-5

  After a rehearsal with the quartet, I go to a large bookshop near the university and in the medical section downstairs buy a book about deafness. I feel compelled to know something about it. It is clearly if technically written - and so interestingly in fact that later, at night, when I am sitting up in bed with the book resting on my knees, for a few minutes at a time I lose sight of the fact that it is Julia's affliction that has spurred me to read it. I have put on a record of Schubert's string quintet and it is to the sounds of that music that I make my first acquaintance with the elaborate chaos that lies behind the tiny drumskins of my outer ears.

  The new words sink in one by one: recruitment, tinnitus, stereocilia, the organ of Corti, the basilar membrane, tympanometry, degeneration of the stria vascularis, membrane ruptures, neurofibromatosis . . . The music finishes. I read on without getting out of bed to change it. Structures, symptoms, causes, cures . . . not much about auto-immunity ... a certain amount about idiopathic conditions - which by definition have no known cause.

  She has faxed me to say she is going to come over tomorrow morning. I dread and long for this meeting. I want to leave it to her to speak; but what if she leaves it to me?

  There are so many exact questions - but beyond all that, and before all that, there is the fearful, unsurmisable question - what does it mean to her? And selfishly: what do I mean to her? Why, when music is slipping away from her, has she chosen to re-involve her life with mine? Am I for her a static mark, a reversion to the days when music was for her an actual sense, not merely an imagined beauty?

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  - .-:-.-. -.-• . .-. :. 4-6

  Julia
is laughing. She has been here for less than five minutes. This is not how it's supposed to go.

  "What's so funny?"

  "Michael, you're hopeless when you're being considerate, and it distorts your face. "

  "What do you mean?" I say rather sharply.

  "That's better."

  "What is?" .;;:•.;.. -.

  "What you just said." '

  "You've lost me completely." ' -'

  "You spoke naturally just now - because you forgot to be considerate. It's much easier for me to read you when you speak naturally, so don't mouth things. Please! Unless you want to make me laugh. Now I've forgotten what you asked me."

  "I asked you about your music," I say.

  "Oh yes," says Julia. "Yes, I'm sorry." She holds my hand, as if I were'the one needing sympathy. "I told you how, I stopped playing after my exams in Vienna - well, after we were married, James persuaded me to take things up again, for my own pleasure, for no audience at all. After he'd left for work, I'd creep over to the piano. I was so nervous, I could hardly touch the keys. I was two or three months pregnant, and was getting sick all the time, and felt really fragile, as if a chord of more than two notes would shake me apart. In fact, I began with the 'Two-Part Inventions'. They had no associations with you at all, just with my early piano lessons with Mrs Shipster. I hadn't played for about a year and a half - yes, it was a year and a half-"

  "Good for Mrs Shipster," I remark. "And good for your parents. And good for James. At least you didn't have to earn your living with your fingers."

  ZOO I VIKRAM SETH

  Julia says nothing. I notice how attentively she is looking at my face, my lips. What is holding me back? Can't I simply tell her how much I love her and want to help her?

  "Your hearing aid: is that why you keep your hair long?" ; "Yes."

  "Long hair suits you."

  "Thank you. You've said that before, Michael, you know. You don't have to repeat it now, just because -"

  "But it does . . . Have you got it on at the moment?" I ask. "Or is it 'in'?"

  "No, I don't have it in. I thought about it. But why change things?"