Music for Wartime

by Rebecca Makkai

  The question, then, is how to seduce an eighteenth-century German. If I just show up in a nightgown, he’ll think I’m some kind of harlot.

  I did it by introducing jazz. We went chronologically, from my African Rhythms CD through Dixieland, and by the time we got through two bottles of wine and up to Coleman Hawkins, he was leaning close, murmuring things in German. I wasn’t expecting much. Every month in Cosmo they keep announcing some new sex position, as if for years people reproduced like Puritans and we’re only now figuring out the pleasure aspect. But Johann, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

  I try not to talk on the phone in front of him, since he can’t understand I’m not talking to him. He’ll laugh when I laugh, try to stand in front of me, nod when he thinks I’m asking a question.

  When I got in the cab the morning after our first night together, I turned on my cell for the first time in two days and found a message from Larry. “It’s me,” he said. I could picture him standing with the phone, his back to the smudgy window of his efficiency. “Wondering if my shoe polish is still there. In the hall closet. Call me.” I haven’t known Larry to polish his shoes in the past ten years, so this meant he had a date. Or wanted me to think so.

  I called his land line, since he’d be at work. I talked to his voicemail. “Me,” I said. “Wednesday morning. If you left any polish, it’s probably gone. My friend moved some things in, so I had to make space. My friend John. Nothing too serious, but he’s staying awhile.”

  When I finished, a prerecorded woman asked if I’d like to review my message. I did. Then I taped over it. “Me. Sorry I took so long. Can’t find the polish. It was old anyway, wasn’t it? You should just buy some new. So. Good luck with whatever the shiny shoes are for.”

  The cabbie smiled in the rearview. If he understood my English, he probably approved of my benevolence.

  Johann is obsessed now with jazz, especially blues. Funny, I’d have pegged him for a Charlie Parker fan, something more complex. He still speaks only a few words of English—coffee, eat, pajamas, no—but he’s memorized a number of blues lyrics. Across the table most nights, between dinner and ice cream, he’ll start into something like “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” and he even does that low, gravelly Satchmo voice.

  “No joys for me

  no company

  even ze mouse

  ren from my house

  all my life srough

  I’ve been soooooo

  bleck and blue.”

  Only he’s grinning when he sings it. I think he’s proud of himself.

  When he plays from the Chopin book I got him, it sounds different than it should—sharper, less Romantic, I suppose—but then there’s something wonderful about the way he plays fantastical music in this normal, rhythmic way as if it weren’t Chopin at all, just Hanon warm-up exercises. It reminds me of a Chagall painting: Here are some people, floating above a town. Here is a cow on the roof. Here is the blanket sky, poked through with blinding stars. But this is just the way my town looks at night! I took my easel into the street to paint my flying neighbors, to get the purple starlight right. Normal, normal. Nothing Romantic going on here.

  I gave him some staff paper the other day, thinking maybe he’d write something while he’s here, but he just looked at it, said, “Nein, nein,” shook his head sadly. Maybe it’s against the rules to compose here, to leave parts of his genius as evidence. Maybe he can leave his sperm, but not his handwriting.

  My father used to make me and my brother try to compose. He’d sit us down, have us close our eyes, tell us if we cleared our minds of every noise and picture, something would come. It never did. I feared it was because of my cheating, my inability to filter out random images. I’d almost be clear, and then: Gorilla! Airplane! Christmas! I want to ask Johann how he does it, how he can sit and just concentrate. How he can keep out everything that isn’t sound—the fifty thousand colors of the world, the smell of something burning four stories below.

  The longer he’s here, the more I think I should learn German. We could piece together a conversation then, between us.

  My Brahms-bearded art professor, the one who introduced me to Chagall in the first place, would use a piano during lectures. The class met in the small recital theater at the back of the fine arts building, and there was a Steinway on the stage, and somehow he’d gotten a key to the lid. He loved to run from his projection screen to that piano, talking about “Colors are like notes; together they make chords.” He probably thought he was being quirky.

  “This is blue and green,” he said, playing C and D together. “Analogous. So similar they create tension. Now blue and yellow.” A third. “Now blue and orange.” A fourth.

  Another time, he ran to the piano to explain a terrible Rococo painting, something with clouds and bosoms. “The whites in the Fragonard are like this,” he said, and trilled high up, delicate and saccharine.

  But I was never sure he knew what he was talking about. He lost my faith when we studied Guernica and he said there would never be a war on American soil in our lifetime. (No canvas of mangled, color-void bodies. No slaughtered bull, no spears, no pale-eyed crucifixion.) It struck me as shockingly naive for a smart man, very bag-over-the-head.

  And he was wrong about colors, too. “They have no innate meaning,” he said the second week of class, “but they have connotations we all share, as a society and as humans, yes? Green tunes us in to nature, life, so we feel soothed. Blue is sky, so we think dreamy, ethereal, and the same with white. Black is fear. For three million years we lived without electricity, no? There are good reasons we’re afraid of the dark. Red, we see blood. So violence, drama, excitement, passion.” That’s where I took exception, where I still do. For men, yes, maybe. But for any woman since the dawn of time, red means no baby this month. It means, for better or worse, the staining and unignorable absence of a baby.

  I lied before. The sex isn’t that good. I had low expectations, so I was thrilled he knew anything. But actually he’s pretty stiff, noncreative. I’ve tried things a couple of times, normal things for our society, and he’s pulled away from me, started talking fast in German, turned bright pink.

  The last time he did it, I put my clothes back on and decided to ignore him for the rest of the day. I went to the window and opened the curtains. I wasn’t thinking about it, but maybe on some level I did it to scare him. He stood staring down at the cars, saw all the buildings, saw for the first time how high we were. He didn’t cry, but he looked like he wanted to. He stayed there a long time, shaking and mumbling. Then he closed the curtains and ran to the couch, ran bent over at the waist as if he were scared of falling. I’m surprised he never opened the curtains himself while I was at work. You’d think a genius would be more curious than that.

  To calm him down, I got my big music encyclopedia off the shelf and showed him all the pictures in the Bach section. The house where he was born, the church in Leipzig, a portrait of his oldest son. He pointed at each and said things I couldn’t understand, but they seemed to make him happy. He flipped back a page to the Vivaldi section and made some kind of joke. He giggled and giggled, so I just laughed along with him.

  “Yep, that Vivaldi,” I said. “One funny guy.”

  After I put the encyclopedia back on the shelf, I got out the little Chagall book I’d bought at MOMA.

  “Here,” I said, and I opened it to The Fiddler. “This is what I think of when you play Chopin. See how he’s making music, floating there above the town? That’s what you sound like, like there’s nothing under your feet but you don’t even notice.”

  Bach squinted at the picture, pointed at the fiddler’s face. “Grün,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s green. I wouldn’t make fun. You looked strange enough yourself when you were twelve inches tall.”

  I flipped to the one called Birthday, the one where a man floats above the red carpet, floats above a woman to kiss her
. A city window and a little purse. The man has no arms. The next page was Couple of Lovers on a Red Background, where they’re lying in the red, and they’re red themselves, drowning in it, only they’re not drowning, because up above is a huge blue pool where the real water is, where the blue man throws flowers and the fish-bird jumps down.

  “These are pictures of love,” I said. “Love.” He put his hand on his heart. I’d taught him that one the week before. “Everyone in these pictures can float, because they’re in love, or they’re the fiddler on the roof, or just happy.” I pointed out the window. “That’s why we can stay up here so high. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is. Twenty-seven stories up!” I flashed my fingers in two tens and a seven. “Because we’re playing music and we’re happy.”

  He crawled back to the window, his nails digging into the carpet, then reached up and lifted just the corner of the curtain. Together we watched the bus shed passengers twenty-seven stories down. Then he looked at me and pointed at the wristwatch I’d given him, the one Larry left behind because it wasn’t digital.

  “You want to know how long the building can hold up against gravity?” Although maybe it was something else. How long must he stay here, how many lifetimes have passed since his own, what time is it in Germany?

  “Tock, tock, tock,” he said.

  I chose to answer the gravity question, because it was the only one I could. “A long time. Long time. It won’t fall down while you’re here, at least.”

  Since that afternoon, when he sings the blues, it sounds like the blues.

  “I’m so forlorn,” he sings,

  “life’s just a sorn

  my heart is torn

  vhy vas I born

  Vhat did I dooooo

  to be so bleck . . . and blue?”

  He won’t look out the window anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He knows. Every siren he hears now, he looks at that curtain. I’ve never been in the blissful ignorance camp, but in this case maybe it was too much for one man to handle. Sometime last October, Larry made us stop watching TV so we wouldn’t see bad news. I couldn’t understand how it worked for him, because for me it was worse. If we don’t watch the news, I said, how do we know the city’s not on fire? How do we know we’re not the last ones alive? Since Johann’s been here I’ve kept the TV off, but I’ll turn on my radio when he’s in the bathroom—if only to hear some stupid ad, because then at least I know we’re all okay. Those shrill furniture store jingles are the sound of safety. There’s still money to be made, they say. There’s still something left to buy.

  He’s been turning pale, and if I’m not mistaken he’s getting smaller. You can see it around the eyes, the way they’re sinking back into his face. The skin feels loose on his arms. He hardly leaves the couch anymore, and when he does—when he finally gets his courage and dashes to the bathroom—it’s with shaking legs and outstretched arms, like he’s worried the floor will give way any moment. He’s scratched the arms of the sofa to shreds.

  Yesterday I played the piano to see if he would follow suit. I brought out my big blue Gershwin book and got through “A Foggy Day” with only three or four mistakes. I’m good, if a little rusty. At the end of high school I was even applying to conservatories, making tapes and getting ready to go on auditions, when I realized that although I could play almost anything you put before me, and skillfully—I’d won competitions, even—I’d never gotten through a major piece without one error. I could play the whole Pathétique flawlessly, then a measure from the end I’d breathe a sigh of relief and wreck the last chord. And so I majored in finance.

  “Maybe that’s what you are,” I told Johann after I’d flubbed the last two measures. “Maybe you’re my repressed ambition.” Not likely, the way he sits with his mouth caving in, his glare darting between me and the window.

  He sighed. “I’m vhite . . . in-side,” he sang.

  “You’re white all over, Johann,” I said. Though truth be told, lately he’s a little gray.

  I get the feeling his tock, tock, tock is running out. But if my test sticks are accurate I started ovulating yesterday, so I only need him to hold out a little longer. We made love twice this morning. I’ll buy him a fattening dinner tonight.

  I had to leave him on the couch at noon, lock the door, ride down in my loud, slow elevator to show the Lindquists their fifteenth (and God, let’s hope, final) apartment. Johann didn’t look good at all when I left him there, so small and pale, curled in the cushions. I wonder if I’d be as terrified by his eighteenth-century Leipzig, or if there’s something intrinsically horrifying about our modern world, about this new century, something we can handle only because we’ve been so slowly inured to it. At other moments today I’ve wondered, too, if Johann shriveling in on himself is in fact a sign that part of me is coming back to life. Or that another life is ready to start inside me.

  “I have to make money,” I told him as I left. “Deutschmarks, right? You’d understand. I’m sure you wouldn’t have slaved your Sundays away on half the organs in Germany if you didn’t have twenty mouths to feed. I’ll need to buy things. Piano lessons. For the baby.”

  And so I left him, and even if he’s still there when I get back, I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t last the night, if he evaporates by morning. But I never planned on his being in the picture long-term. I don’t actually want him to raise the baby. It’ll be easy enough to explain why he’s not around. “Well, the baby’s father is quite a famous man,” I’ll say, “and this would simply ruin his reputation. Believe me. Very. Famous.”

  Waiting for the elevator, though, I did something I didn’t know I was going to do. I took out my phone and called Larry. When he answered, I said, “Don’t talk.” I said, “It’s good that not everyone is like me, born expecting the world to come unpasted.” I said, “I see it now. You were up there playing a fiddle with no roof to stand on, and one day you just looked down and lost your grip on the air and fell. And I’m sorry.”

  Larry was quiet, and then he said, “Okay.” And then he said, “I’ll call you after work.”

  It occurred to me—of course it did—that if I got back with Larry next week, or the week after that, he’d never know the baby wasn’t his. And who’s to say it wouldn’t be? Am I the expert on reality these days?

  On the long ride to the ground floor I slid on my stilettos, growing three inches even as I sank three hundred feet. I put on lipstick and prepared to sell the Lindquists a place to live, a nice plot of air so high above the city the Indians didn’t even think to charge beads for it. I practiced saying: Look how convenient. And how stable. It’ll last a thousand years, if nothing knocks it down. I know you’re going to love it.

  ACOLYTE

  (SECOND LEGEND)

  In the bedroom of her Budapest apartment, using the stage makeup left from her acting career, my grandmother painted young women’s faces old. Greasepaint doesn’t go stale, and when properly applied—when a skilled hand traces lines that are not yet lines but the faintest shadows on taut faces—it can achieve the most astonishing prophecies of the body’s eventual self-betrayal. My father, still very young, stood far from the blackout curtains with a candle, and in thanks for this illumination my grandmother called him her little acolyte. She handed out canes and shawls, taught the girls to walk with the weight of eighty years—and thus superannuated they shuffled through the streets at night, without fear of predatory soldiers. And if they chose to carry things other than yarn in their knitting baskets, so be it. Who would suspect?

  Another impossibility, yet by most accounts true: More than once she voluntarily strapped a yellow Star of David on her arm before walking into the ghettos to visit old theater friends, her papers in her pocket to prove, later, her right to leave. How this could ever have worked is unclear, but then the ghettos were slippery, temporary things, their borders well guarded but shifting, the soldiers bribable and perhaps susceptible to charm and
beauty. There are stranger things true. There are simpler things not.

  Impossible as well: When my mother was engaged to my father in 1964, she traveled alone into Communist Hungary, which her fiancé was not allowed to reenter and her future mother-in-law was not allowed to leave. She spent three days there, and at the end of that time my grandmother asked her to smuggle out of the country the particularly incriminating anti-Communist novel she’d completed a decade prior. My mother rode the train to Austria with three hundred onion-skin pages tucked in her girdle. A vádlott was published in 1999, twenty years after my grandmother’s death. It’s the only book I’ve read, in rough translation, of her forty. But her longest novel, I’ve just learned (reeling with the glee and fear of things I don’t even believe in), involves a man from the Romanian region of Moldavia shot to death by the fearsome Iron Guard. Ten years ago, I wrote a short story about an American boy learning of someone shot to death by the Iron Guard in Moldavia, in the city of Iaşi. I’d chosen the region at random, then was drawn in—drowned—by its history.

  I’d love to take this confluence as an indicator of inherited memory, as evidence of further connections, further legacies—of empathy, artistry, guts. But to claim one ancestor would be to claim them all, even those on the wrong sides of humanity’s decisive moral battles. The slave owners, the anti-Semites, the Huns, the cowards. And furthermore: Wasn’t the presumption of a genetic morality the error at the very core of Nazi ideology?