by Simon Avery
But it was too late. Stróbl wasn’t seeing blood, but the tale she would tell. Krisztina tried to shift herself but the movement brought a fresh spasm of pain in her belly, and the writer across the room to straddle her. She lowered her face to Krisztina’s and studied her eyes, licked her mouth, her eyelids, her nose. She still had the knife in her hand. It flashed in the light from the window. Outside the city murmured and the river roared. These things would never change. It would continue long after they had all gone from here. Stróbl closed a hand over the wound she’d inflicted, pressed her fingers into it until Krisztina cried out. She felt the skin stretch and tear, felt the blood spill down from her belly to her sides. Stróbl pressed the knife against Krisztina’s throat. Krisztina lifted her hands, closed them around Stróbl’s throat, but her strength was gone. Her hands were slippery with her own blood. Stróbl smiled at the forlorn attempt, slapped away Krisztina’s hands then pressed the knife into the soft flesh of her throat. Krisztina closed her eyes. Another few seconds and it would be done and that would be the end of it.
What would she see when she took the life from her? All of it – all of the secrets she’d only ever shared with Alice: the lonely fatherless childhood, the piano lessons in a cold house with an old man who molested her, the adolescence spent flirting with drugs, the sex with strangers, the first album that was like a small ripple in a big lake; and then Alice. Everything else was meaningless after that, just a sad, redundant blur.
But it wasn’t for Rebeka Stróbl to take. None of the lives that comprised the pages of The Teardrop Method were. Krisztina knew it. Time might heal Krisztina. She’d heard it said and dismissed it over this past year. It was all that people you loved had to offer you; but it was a platitude based in truth. She would heal. When she looked into Rebeka’s empty eyes, it was clear that those tender mercies were just out of reach. The damage was too deep; it was a wound she could never mend.
Krisztina thought of Alice; fixed her mind on her face, let the sweetness of her memory lift her up and away from the spent flesh of her body. She felt the release and exhaled; a long slow perfect breath that sounded like the last note of a song.
But then the weight on her body was removed. Stróbl had been lifted away from Krisztina and swept across the room. Krisztina pulled the dead weight of her body into a sitting position and then dragged it to the wall where she leaned as Felipe Lejeune and Rebeka Stróbl locked themselves in a struggle that looked like nothing more than a lover’s embrace. Krisztina could hear their short gasping breaths, and Stróbl cry out as Lejeune took hold of her wrist in an attempt to loosen her hold on the knife.
Krisztina saw them, saw the crash in Paris, the way the seat belt held the writer in place. She saw Stróbl jerk forward then snap back, her hair moving in slow motion. By the time her eyes opened, her new husband was flying through the windscreen, the glass shattering into a thousand beautiful pieces, and then he was gone, colliding with the other vehicle, his face turning into a red mist. Gone. And then there were the months of empty silent corridors, and nurses’ footsteps and bandages and haunted eyes and the hushed tones of expensive doctors. There was surgery and new skin, but the old Felipe had vanished on the day of the crash. His skin might heal but he would never again be the beautiful face that graced billboards on Times Square and the Champs-Élysées. The man he’d once been, the essential components that made a personality was damaged beyond compare, beyond repair. All that had remained was an empty house, an empty marriage, a broken face and two damaged minds.
“No!” she heard Stróbl hiss in her husband’s ear. “Just this one. Please…”
He tugged her away from his body and she wrestled the porcelain mask from his face. The mask fell to the floor between them and within seconds, one of them had trod on it, shattered it into several pieces. Lejeune lost his footing and his hold on his wife relaxed enough for her to lift the knife. Without thought, she plunged it into his face, once, twice, three times, her face contorting with anger. There were tears too. Krisztina wanted to look away but she couldn’t. She tried to lift herself but the pain in her belly was excruciating and the blood was soaking her, leaking down her legs, pooling at her toes.
There was blood too in between Felipe Lejeune’s fingers. He’d staggered backwards with his hands covering his wounded face. He cried out like a feral animal. There was a moment of emptiness when all Krisztina could hear was the Danube roaring beyond the balcony, calling out to them all.
And then all that was left was the song. Lejeune lowered his hands and Krisztina realised that his face was ruined utterly. He rushed forward then and wrapped his wife in one final embrace; let the momentum take them out onto the balcony and over the rails. Krisztina heard them both cry out; ragged fearful screams. And then there was only the song as it crystallised in her mind. The pieces of two lives falling into place as they plunged into the Danube. It had been a puzzle and now it was a song. A damaged love song.
chapter11We carried the good days with a song in our hearts
Now we’ll carry the bad ones like a burden on our backs
I know you’re trying to hide but don’t
Nothing has changed. It’s still a beautiful day.
12
Review for Wire magazine by Dave Cook
Krisztina Ligeti
The Teardrop Method (2014)
Six years after her debut album, the elusive Hungarian singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligeti returns with a haunting and complex record populated by a parade of damaged souls and Eastern European melancholy.
An aura of loss hangs over the album from the titular opener to the closer, ‘Your Broken Face’.
Ligeti’s wisp of a voice is imbued with a fragile resonance as she describes a romance broken by the battlefield in ‘Yellow Jack’; is stark and clear as a frozen lake on the paean to the missed opportunities of ‘Clocks’; or raw and utterly broken in the lush orchestral eight-minute centrepiece of the album, ‘Assoluta’.
The vocals and music unfold in a whisper, and each cut seems to wait tremulously for the dawn; the mournful jazz trumpet of ‘Stiletto’ jostling with the abrasive and jittery electro-industrial ‘In from the Cold’ and the sinewy, throbbing bass rhythms of ‘Sleepwalker’.
A bittersweet meditation then, on the fragility and fleeting beauty of life, and a triumphant return. Let’s not wait another six years.
13
Eighteen months later
When the doctors could no longer do anything for him, Krisztina’s father requested to be released into the care of his daughter. She travelled back from her new home in Paris to be with him during his final days at the house with the blue shutters and faded yellow walls beside the lake.
It was the end of summer. Lake Balaton was transformed by a gentle light, the like of which Krisztina had never seen. The last of the tourists were leaving the towns and villages, returning to their old lives and to autumn. But the days were still warm and inviting. Krisztina and her father walked through blue and violet flowers, which had been scattered and abandoned by summer until her father tired and they had to sit for a while. Dawn coaxed the mountains out of the darkness. Dusk came creeping, chased the boats from the lake. They spent their time listening to music together, reminiscing about her mother, drinking wine on the deck and watching the sun rise and fall for five sweet days. Krisztina heard his song coming closer every day. She listened to it making its way through the trees; ragged and angry, exotic and sad. Something beautiful and tarnished and tired of running. Bad faith, her father had called those wasted years more than once. She heard it in the mournful trumpet and the plucked strings that she heard in the trees; she heard it soaring through that lonely aria that was made up of the pure air and the blue sky.
They talked about Budapest and Krisztina’s new home in Paris; conversation inevitably led to Felipe Lejeune and Rebeka Stróbl. It was easier to talk about it now after almost two years. Life had moved on sufficiently. After the couple had plunged into the Danube, Krisztin
a had crawled to the phone and called the police. They recovered their icy bodies some hours later, less than a mile downriver. They had tramped about Krisztina’s hotel rooms and cogitated on the events while she was taken to the hospital and operated on. She’d slept for more than twenty-four hours and woke with the couples’ song itching inside her skin. It was like a fading memory, but she sang the melody into her phone, and wrote down the words that she could remember. It wouldn’t be what she had heard completely, but it would be OK. She’d realised that she could live with the compromise. Once she was released, she booked the musicians back into the studio to get ‘Your Broken Face’ down on tape. By the time she returned to the hotel, Krisztina was ready to box up her belongings and move on, away from the memories this place stirred in her: here she had loved Alice, made a home and the beginning of a life with her; here her blood had been spilled; here a husband and wife had embraced and fell to their deaths. It was too much every time she opened the door.
To postpone the chore of finding somewhere new, Krisztina had agreed to tour the record prior to its release and, afterwards, to take her new band across Europe to promote it. She’d quickly become almost addicted to the rush of performance, reticent but tolerant of the nomadic days and nights, strangely excited about waking up to a different view every morning. Grudgingly she began to enjoy living out of her suitcase.
Krisztina returned to Budapest briefly to make two videos for the singles the record company wanted to release. She sat for an interview with Dave Cook for Wire magazine and spoke about the album, about the people she’d written about. The genesis of the songs was nobody’s business, but the souls that made the songs deserved to be remembered.
And then in Paris she had met Emilie. Emilie had once been an artist. She had been one of the many brilliant faces that had been ferried backstage and later to a party thrown by the record company. Krisztina had retreated to the bar and spent an hour talking to the staff of the hotel; anything to be away from people telling her how wonderful she was, how moved they were by her music. She appreciated the gesture but after a while she felt like a fraud; she had nothing further to give them beyond the music. But then there had been Emilie. Her long chestnut hair was scraped back from her face and tied up. Her elegant and porcelain face was smeared with fresh oil paint: Cadmium Red, Viridian Green and Cerulean Blue. It was under her fingernails and dried onto her spectacles. She didn’t seem to care. She was beautiful. She’d asked if Krisztina wanted to get away. She heard Alice asking her the same question. She said yes.
Emilie showed Krisztina her city: all the elegant worn buildings, the trees and the taxis, and the golden light. They took a boat down the Seine; they got lost in the slightly seedy back streets of Pigalle and ended up in Montmartre. Finally they ended up in a quiet restaurant away from the crowds and they talked until after midnight.
The songs had been a way out of the pain of life; a way to find a path out of mourning for Alice; a way back into the world. And Emilie was the final step. Krisztina had been hesitant initially. She’d had to resist comparison with Alice every moment she shared with her for the first few delicate weeks. The conversation flowed differently; their rhythms were strange and hard to synchronise; their sense of humour altogether different. But then Krisztina realised that she was trying too hard to fit a square peg into a round hole. One night, in the soft violet shadows of Notre-Dame, they embraced as tourists drifted past them, then they kissed. The Eiffel Tower’s beacon of light moved across the vaulted sky and the shadows of the trees speckled across the terraces of the cafes.
It had been nothing more than a speculative kiss; but there was in that moment the sense of it being a way out of old thinking and the road to something new and sweet and good. Krisztina wondered if the memory of this moment would return to her years later and fill her with either warmth or sadness or both.
After that it had been the sum of small acts that began to unite them, the gentle mystery and mathematics of love. Krisztina moved into Emilie’s apartment on Rue Lepic. Years ago she had gutted the ground floor, and converted it into a studio. There was nowhere to sit; all of the marbled work surfaces were spattered with paint and covered with glasses filled with brushes and turpentine, and palettes comprising different combinations of colours. All the coffee cups and ashtrays and plates were spattered with paint too. There were several standard size canvasses propped up against the bare stone walls, and three large scale oils taking up the centre of the workspace, all of them unfinished. Each morning Emilie rose with the Parisian morning light, pulled on her paint spattered shirt and glasses and went to sit in front of her easel. She smoked her first cigarette of the day, drank her first coffee. Then at some point not too long after, she would look away finally, out of the window into the courtyard in despair. She couldn’t find her way out of the desert.
But a week after Krisztina had moved in, she woke early one morning to find Emilie’s side of the bed empty. She could hear opera. Madama Butterfly. She rose and tiptoed downstairs. The flagstones were cold on her bare feet. The studio was empty, but the windows and the doors had been thrown open, letting the first light of the day in. Emilie was outside in the courtyard, smoking her cigarette, staring in at the studio, at Krisztina. The Puccini was louder down here. It was a Maria Callas recording from 1955.
“Look,” Emilie said.
There were three canvases set up on easels, all in varying degrees of completion. Krisztina saw herself in all three: she was haunting the emptiness of a hotel room or a lonely avenue at dusk; she was there in the impasto of a woman’s haunted eyes in a small room with an old man in bed; in the final picture, she was a woman standing beside a lake, staring up at the sun.
Krisztina’s first thought was: Shit, I’m going to die.
It was both absurdly funny and terrifying at the same time. Her legs gave way beneath her and she suddenly felt the cool flagstones on her behind. But then Emilie was there beside her, her hair smelling of coconut and cigarette smoke.
“Krissy,” she said in a soft voice. “It’s not that. I promise you, it’s not that.” Krisztina had explained everything to her one night early on. She hadn’t known if Emilie understood or believed her then. But it seemed she had. “It doesn’t always have to be about pain and loss,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
Krisztina nodded, staring at the paintings. Emilie hadn’t painted in years. But now, by understanding Krisztina’s route into the light, here was hers.
Nonetheless, she spent the next few days expecting something to happen. She looked both ways before she crossed the street. She stayed indoors and played her guitar, picked out new melodies on her battered old piano, shipped all the way from Budapest. She expected it every moment. She couldn’t help herself. But then, after three weeks, there were completed canvases in every corner of Emilie’s studio, and nothing untoward had happened.
Finally Krisztina allowed herself to relax. Perhaps tears didn’t always have to be part of the equation.
***
One day while Krisztina and her father were eating at the restaurant at the top of the hill, a couple of tourists at a nearby table recognised Krisztina. After twenty minutes of quiet discussion, the man came over and asked if he could get an autograph and have his photo taken. Krisztina glanced at her father who smiled softly at her and shrugged.
The man shuffled his feet, waited for his girlfriend to lift the phone and take the picture. Krisztina leaned in close enough to smell his aftershave, smiled, waited. The girl took the picture and Krisztina exhaled, shook the man’s hand, and they returned to their table, studying the photo on the phone. She’d grown accustomed to being recognisable finally. It had made her uncomfortable when they closed in around her after gigs, asking for autographs and photographs, but time had softened her attitude. She’d asked herself how Alice might have reacted had she been by her side, and realised that she’d have told her not to be so precious about it, to accept it as a small compliment in a world where there was a scarcity o
f such things. A little kindness. After that she’d learned to be patient, to be gracious. It was small part of your day, after all.
Her father closed his hand over hers at the table and smiled. “Think yourself lucky,” he said. “Back in my day the fans screamed throughout the whole show and you couldn’t hear your own voice. They overturned our van when we were in London once. The police had to come and flip it back onto its wheels.”
“You’re making this up,” Krisztina said.
“I’m not, believe me. Once our car accidentally knocked over this teenager who got too close. Apparently when she came around the first thing she asked the paramedic was ‘Is John OK?’”
“So I should count myself lucky?”
He took her hand. “Just be happy, Krissy. Enjoy the ride. The years have a habit of getting away from you. It all goes too fast.”
He died in his sleep on the morning of the sixth day. She went to wake him when he hadn’t risen by ten, and found him cold and still. She ran her hand over his pallid skin and the stubble of grey hair across his skull. This was my father, she thought, and now it is not. His song filled the room. It was deafening, immense; a threat and a promise. She opened the windows and let the warm air in, but the song remained. She thought of her father’s words again. She’d considered them often. Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself.
Krisztina went outside and made a call to her father’s doctor, and then she went down to the lake, stood on the deck and listened to the boats creak around her. She wondered if one day she might be able to do her father’s song justice; that perhaps this was where she began as an artist to move into uncharted waters. She’d take it home and try her best. The warmth of the notion filled her veins like sunlight. No more bad faith. It was another road out of the dark.