An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  At eight o'clock I think of ordering a snack and having an early night; but, as the light fades, I leave my room, traverse the labyrinth of corridors to the lift, and descend to the lobby. Lilies, ferns, chandelier, mirrors, umbrellastand; the eyes of Schubert gaze at me from the reception counter. The clerk is tearing up paper forms.

  2.94 | VIKRAM SETH

  I lean against the counter and close my eyes. The world is mad with sound: forms rip; trams rumble past, vibrating underfoot; coffee cups clink, and over the murmur from the busy bar I can hear the peristaltic cranking of - is it a fax machine or a teleprinter? What does Schubert make of these noises?

  "What can I do for you, sir?" No, he is not Viennese. What is his accent? Serbian? Slovenian?

  "Nothing; nothing. I'm just waiting for someone."

  "Is the room satisfactory?" he asks, reaching for the telephone, which has begun to ring.

  "Perfectly ... I might have a drink in the bar. Or could I have it here in the foyer?"

  "Certainly. I'll tell the waiter. Please have a seat wherever you wish . . . Hallo? Hotel am Schubertring."

  In a corner of the lobby, away from the smoke of the bar, I drink a cold glass of Kremser wine. Helen, Billy and Piers pass by in front of me. I look down at the peonies and roses arranged in a basket on my table.

  "... and you aren't to take your Spartacus guide and disappear into the Bermuda Triangle," says Helen.

  "Until the performance I'll conserve my energy," says Piers calmly.

  "What are you talking about, you two?" asks Billy, as they pass out of earshot.

  A second glass of wine; and now it is dark. Time to walk; but it is three hours earlier than I set out last night, and the city is livelier. Memory and despair close in on me - pulsations of intolerable pressure, followed by relaxation, almost elation. By the Musikhochschule I feel that I can re-create the past, that any wrong turn can be righted, that I can just walk into Mnozil's and see the old man there, like some ancient Caesar, staring ahead of him, replying in brief, noncommittal remarks with no eye contact at all to the questions of some regular customer

  AN EQUAL MUSIC

  2-95

  sitting in an unseen corner - family problems, the loss of a job, money worries. The strangest questions and confessions: but why would anyone bare his heart to rough old Mnozil, who almost made an art of abrupt-

  ness:

  I cannot recall having a proper conversation with him; a year and a half of frequenting his establishment, first by myself, then with Julia, was probably not long enough for that, though a bottle of wine, festively wrapped, stood on our table around Christmas my first, grey, happy winter. Frau Mnozil seldom emerged from the kitchen, but her Bohemian-Viennese presence was amply represented in the fare: Knôdelsuppe or Krenfleiscb or Schokonuss-Palatschinken ... a litany of treats. Not that we could often afford them. Usually, when we couldn't stand the food at the student mess, it was potatoes in a vegetable soup for forty schillings, and unresented dawdling in the smoky, garlicky, coffee-scented fug.

  He never deigned to serve. The waiter went to the counter, and Heir Mnozil, who had already overheard the prder, handed him the drinks. He was not tolerant of newfangled tastes. When one unlucky tourist wandered in and asked for mineral water, he was asked, in broad, indignant Viennese, whether he wanted to wash his feet: "Wiïsta die Fitss' bod'n?" To the timorous response, "What would you recommend instead?", mine host's answer was dismissive: "A andres Lokal!"

  I was happy here once. But what kind of life could I have given her? And how could I have stayed longer under the regime of my mentor? He too came here, but we sat at far tables. At the end we barely spoke. I walk past it now; all changed, changed utterly: glossy, unwelcoming tables, indistinguishable from a hundred other places. So is my memory consigned to history.

  Attached to the counter was a glass cabinet containing

  2.96 | VIKRAM SETH

  vegetables - radishes, peppers and so forth - and

  sausages and wrapped cheeses. The funny thing was that

  no one ever ordered from it. Julia and I had a standing

  wager: whoever saw a purchase from that counter would

  be stood the next meal by the other. More than a year

  x went by between our bet and our final parting, but

  v**- neither of us ever claimed on it.

  % ,.*

  5-8

  Late at night rain begins to fall. Heavy salvos against my window keep me awake and, when I have fallen asleep from exhaustion, wake me up.

  While shaving, I notice that the bump on my forehead has almost disappeared.

  The rehearsal is in the Musikverein this morning. They cannot spare the Brahms-Saal where we will perform tomorrow, so we practise in a long, narrow, beautiful room with a view of the Karlskirche. The rehearsal goes well enough, but after it is over, I am overcome by a sense of foreboding.

  I look out at the strange, majestic church beyond the full-leafed linden trees: its blue dome, and one of its two mosque-like minarets. They remind me, in their aptness and their oddness, of the minarets of the synagogue in Bayswater, not far from my flat. London and Vienna project themselves upon each other. Something is going to go wrong tomorrow, badly wrong. I fear for myself, and I fear for Julia.

  At the Asia, where Julia and I have lunch on our own, I say hardly a word. Afterwards I suggest we go to the hotel.

  "Michael, I must go home."

  "Oh no - not again!"

  AN EQUAL MUSIC

  197

  "I can't. I must practise. I want to work on a few things that came up this morning."

  "How can you be so pragmatic?"

  She laughs, and reaches out for my hand across the table. I can sense it trembling.

  "What's the matter?" she asks gently.

  "I'm anxious about tomorrow. It's as if I can see Carl in the audience, judging, disapproving, marking me down

  - I'm just worried, Julia. I shouldn't be saying this to you."

  "Don't be."

  "Come to Venice with me." -.?

  "Michael - " She releases my hand. "

  "I don't know how I've lived without you all these years."

  How feeble and trite my words sound to me, as if they have been plucked out of some housewife fantasy.

  "I can't," she says. "I simply can't."

  "Neither your^ mother nor Maria knows for sure you're going to'"Stay with them. So why must you stay with either?"

  "I can't . . . Michael, how can I go to Venice with you? Just think what you're asking me to do ... Please don't look so unhappy. If you want, we could go to my mother's place now, and we could both practise. And later go out for dinner."

  "I don't particularly want to meet your mother."

  "Michael, stop bending that fork."

  I put it down. "What piano does she have?" I ask, seizing on the first thing I can think of.

  "A Bluthner. It's been in the family for a hundred years. Why? You did say 'piano', didn't you?"

  "Yes. And does she still have a small dachshund?" r "Michael!"

  "A coffee? At Wolfbauer?" -

  298 | VIKRAM SETH

  "I'd better get back. Don't put me under still more pressure. Please don't."

  "All right. I'll come over to your place," I say.

  Shared time is better than none. Why taint such sporadic joy with long views before and after? We drive north. Her mother, introduced to me, starts visibly. ' Though we didn't meet at the airport, she must recognise me from photographs, surely. For years I have visualised her as a large woman being pulled along by a small dog. Julia is calm, refusing to ratify our antipathy.

  I practise in the attic, she in the music room leading to the garden. At four she brings me tea and tells me we won't, after all, be able to go out for dinner. We meet at seven for a silent meal presided over by her mother, interrupted mainly by jittery yaps from a far room. One of Mrs McNicholl's main objections to remaining in England was the absurdity of our quarantine law
s. The other, according to Julia, was her wish to live once again in a Catholic country. After dinner I tell Julia I've had enough and am going back.

  "I'm not practising any more either," says Julia quickly. "Let's call it a day. Let's drive around."

  Frigid thanks to Frau McNicholl are rewarded by frigid expressions of pleasure at our meeting. She stands under a copper beech in the garden - a blood beech, as she would call it in German - telling Julia to drive carefully, and to be careful.

  In the car I ask: "Did you have to tell Maria you'd spend our last day together with her?"

  "I wasn't thinking at the time. I wish now I hadn't."

  Tall poplars parallel the train-tracks along the Danube and a lovely light touches the tops of the long stands of chestnut. On the other side of the road, light lingers on the walls of the houses and the monastery of Klosterneuburg.

  AN EQUAL MUSIC | 299

  "Why is Pentecost such a big deal here?" I wonder aloud, still annoyed with Maria.

  "What did you say?" says Julia, glancing my way. ' "Why is Pentecost such a big deal here?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps because the Austro-Hungarian empire was so polyglot."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Michael, it's best not to talk to me when I'm driving unless it's absolutely necessary. I need to keep my eyes on the road."

  She turns off at Nussdorf, and drives along the winding Kahlenberg Road.

  "But-Julia!" ; >

  She stops and pulls over.

  "Where do you think you're going?" I ask.

  "Exactly where you think I'm going."

  "Julia, don't. Of all places, why there?" I "Of all places, why not?"

  We are headecffor the scene of our last meeting, years ago; though it was by tram and on foot that we came here that day.

  Vienna stretches out before us beyond the vineblanketed slopes: a pop-up map of memories. We drive on; we stop; we park a little distance away, and walk to the place. Perhaps, like Mnozil's, it too will have disappeared or changed. But no.

  By the house stand two large chestnut trees, richbranched in foliage. Smaller leaves cluster directly round their trunks. Geraniums bloom by the water-pump. On the long tables outside, young couples, friends, groups of students sit, drink, eat and talk in the late light.

  A jug of wine from a vineyard beyond. The fall of night. We drink in companionable silence, not embitterment. My violin, uninsured against theft from a car, sits

  300 | VIKRAM SETH

  in its case at my side. Once again she touches my forehead, where it hit the stone bear.

  Against the lamps, I note the veins of translucent leaves. A lit twig shines white against the sky. Beyond that, the night is black.

  We talk little, perhaps because the candle on the table distorts my words.

  I am pouring her a glass when she says: "I'll come with you to Venice."

  I say nothing. I never expected this. Somewhere in the dark I thank something, but I say nothing to her. Not a drop splashes. My hand does not tremble. I fill my own glass now, and raise it, unspeaking: to her? to us? to the spirit of fugitive love? Whatever it is I mean, she nods as if to say she understands.

  5-9

  The morning of the performance is blue and hot.

  I send the fax that Julia wrote last night to a friend of hers in Venice - on the back of a sheet of music from my violin case - and wait till the hotel receptionist hands it back.

  The Maggiore meets in the lobby. We are all tense and expectant but the sense of foreboding I felt yesterday has disappeared. We walk over to the Musikverein, a couple of minutes away. This morning's final rehearsal is in the Brahms-Saal itself.

  The piano rests on the raised stage between two dull red pillars. Julia tried out several yesterday, and decided she liked the action of this one most of all. As for the sound, they are all well-tried, and Julia feels that if someone like Claudio Arrau could go onto the stage

  AN EQUAL MUSIC | 301

  without ever having played a note on the piano allotted to him, she is in good company.

  She has asked Piers, as onlooker, to do two things: first, to advise her about the balance of her sound in this hall, both absolutely and in relation to the rest of us. Second, she has asked him to follow the score closely when she plays piano or pianissimo, to make sure that she is not playing notes that only she, abstractly, can hear.

  The hall has changed since I saw it last, sitting in the audience years ago. The colours are different: there was a lot more white and gold then, and a lot more dark red and marbled green now. But the white bust of old Brahms presides as always over the room where he once reigned, and I am glad that, unlike Helen and Billy, I will not be able to see him from where I am to sit.

  The grumpy caretaker who took us to our practice room yesterday is less grumpy because I tipped him. I recall how, as students, Julia and I often managed to get into concerts in" the main hall, the Grosser Saal, by tipping the programme-sellers we had got to know. Besides, in a building so riddled with staircases and corridors it was almost always possible to find one that was unpoliced. In the interval - and Julia, for all her shyness, was the more brazen in this respect - we would move forward into seats that were unfilled, nod at our neighbours, and sit down. She justified this by saying that artists felt much happier if at least the front rows were completely filled.

  Julia and Petra are discussing what to wear this evening to avoid a clash. Julia will wear a green silk dress, and Petra a dark blue one. Kurt is talking to Piers about similar matters of peacockry: do we prefer tailcoats or dinner jackets? Piers tells him we do not have tail-coats. And cummerbunds? asks Kurt; do we consider

  302 | VIKRAM SETH

  them, in his words, "of the essence"? No, says Piers, we do not consider them to be so.

  Helen stands apart from all this, resting her head first on one shoulder, then on the other, then stretching it upwards. She is worried, has always been worried, about the string quintet. Her viola is mercurial in its coalitions: a trio with both violins, with the other two middle voices, with both cellos ... In all this beauty there is for her no stable role, only quicksands of delight.

  Billy and I are looking over the slim golden programme for this evening, enjoying its elegance and amused by the Musikverein's happy consciousness of itself. Under "Franz Schubert" and before the dates of his birth and death and the music we are to play, is the legend "Mitglied des Reprasentantenkôrpers der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien". The only reason, of course, why poor Schubert could become a member of the Musikverein at all was that he was, strictly speaking, an amateur, with no official musical post anywhere in the city of Vienna.

  Nothing too surprising springs out at us for most of the rehearsal, except that at one stage, à propos of I don't know what, Petra suddenly says of our composer: "But he is a psycho-terrorist!" Helen, Billy and I look at each other, and continue playing. It is joyful music and we play it joyfully. From time to time I think of what Julia said yesterday about not being capable of playing in ensemble again. How can that be true, when it runs so counter to what my ears tell me today?

  A small cloud must have passed between us and the sun. For a few minutes the bright skylight grows dull, the hall dim. But then sunlight pours in again, and the slight, sombre interlude is swallowed up in the intensity of this final rehearsal.

  In the last movement of the Trout something odd

  AN EQUAL MUSIC | 303

  happens - something that hasn't come up in earlier rehearsals: Helen and I have played the first motif in two phrases of two bars each, but Julia, to our astonishment, replies to it as if it were a single four-bar phrase with a continuous diminuendo. Has she rethought things, or is it the impulse of the moment? In any case, this results in a bit of a discussion, and we decide that the first time we introduce the motif it probably would work better her way. Thus, when the accents - and, still later, the syncopation - crash in, the contrast will be even more effective.

  If she could
have heard exactly what we played, would she have done what she did? And would we have amended things retrospectively? It is all to the good. But once again I feel a sense of unease, lest something of this sort should happen on stage a few hours from now: something unsettling, that we could not, in advance, have settled.

  .-.- :• ' :- ?-. - •''-"" 5.10 • -.-•..-* «* *

  ;,>

  The statue of Beethoven in the arcade of the Musikverein building looks as if it is shivering from cold on this warm night.

  A slightly smooth young man from the administration tells us that since our concert is part of a chamber-music cycle sold largely by subscription, we can expect a good audience. He takes us to the green rooms. The room for us men is bright but somehow also drab, with a red candy-striped wall, a grey floor, a mirror, and framed facsimiles of yellowed scores. Julia, Petra and Helen are next door in a room with a piano, a lurid red-lipped portrait of Fritz Kreisler, and a huge coat-stand with a water stain on the carpet below. They emerge like rich moths, green and blue and gold: Petra in blue, bare-

  304 | VIKRAM SETH

  shouldered, smiling; Helen in pale gold, pressing a hand against the side of her neck as if in nervous pain; and Julia, wearing the same green dress she wore that evening at the Wigmore Hall, looking at me with what I think is concern - the gentlest, most speculative touch of concern. But am I not calm now? All will be well, though it is like a parting.

  Mineral water rests on the table, and I drink; and Piers has a swig of whisky from Helen's little flask. Billy is preoccupied with a fit of sneezing. All of us are aware that the exacting Viennese can be trusted to know every note of their Schubert. Now Helen is tuning up quietly to the piano. So green, so gold, so blue. How staid Billy and I will look among such gorgeous beings.

  Across the corridor, they wait, the ears for whom we play. Piers puts his eye to the peep-hole in the grand doors.

  "Full house."

  "It's seven twenty-eight;" this from Billy.

  "The scale," says Piers, bringing his violin to his chin; "C minor." And slowly we four rise through it and slowly, degree by degree, return to our tonic. My eyes are closed; but I imagine Julia and Petra and Kurt, a little startled at our ritual, glancing at each other.