The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  Sebastian nodded toward a small seating area where maroon velvet club chairs nestled around a roaring fire.

  “Have a seat, let me see if there’s any room at the inn,” Sebastian said, smiling.

  Watching his tall figure cut across the room as he headed over to the reception desk, she wondered at his calm demeanor. A few minutes ago he’d been just as jittery as she was. Which Sebastian was real? Meer’s anxiety level accelerated at the thought that she didn’t know him at all. Not really.

  Her internal metronome kept swinging wildly from the sense that everything would work out to the certainty that disaster was imminent and she should take off and run away now, even from Sebastian. Meer had suffered free-floating anxiety before, first when she was a child and then again in college and knew the symptoms: sweating, trembling and a racing heart.

  Five minutes later the manager opened the door to room 23, a junior suite painted dusty blue that had high ceilings, parquet floors and large double windows overlooking the church across the street. And in front of those windows, almost as if it waited for Meer, was a shining black lacquer Bösendorfer piano. Its surface was like satin. Its keys gleamed. The instrument was begging her to sit down and play.

  For the first time in four hours Meer put her handbag down, actually let go, placed it on the piano bench and sat down beside it. Placing her fingers on the keys, she shut her eyes and sat there quietly, just feeling the smooth ivory.

  Somewhere behind her, Sebastian talked to the hotelier but Meer wasn’t paying attention to them or thinking about the priceless treasure in her bag as she began to move her fingers about the keyboard. She hadn’t chosen the Appassionata Sonata as much as it had chosen her. Nothing mattered in that moment but the blanket of sound that blocked all her thoughts, chased away her physical awareness of herself, picked her up in its arms and flew her away, soared with her into another plane where there was only sound. Rich, full, rounded-note sound.

  Meer only became aware that Sebastian was talking to her when he put his hand on her shoulder but she didn’t want to return to the moment, she wanted to—no, needed to—finish at least this one piece. Afraid the piano was the bridge to her nightmares, she’d avoided it for so long but now that she couldn’t escape her memory lurches anyway, there was no reason to hold back.

  Finished, she lowered her head and listened to the last notes lingering in the air, to the metamorphosis from sound to silence, from timbre and tone to only vibration. She didn’t feel any less worried when she stopped, but she was better prepared now for what was coming next, as if the music had fortified her.

  With a sigh, she pulled her bag toward her. It was time. Opening the oversized leather satchel, she reached inside, felt the handkerchief she’d wrapped the flute in, and pulled it out. The thin object was covered in the cotton, inert, yet her fingers experienced something living, with potential. Not unlike how the keyboard had felt to her.

  “Meer? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said for five minutes. Are you all right?” He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. “You’re shivering.” He stroked her hair as if she were a child in need of calming. “I’m afraid for you. Look at you—and you’re just holding it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. This could mean so much to so many people. Including you. What if this is the one thing that could pull Nicolas out of the abyss?”

  He leaned in, kissing her lightly on the lips. To Meer it felt as if he were transferring fire from his mouth to hers, that where he’d touched her would be indelibly scarred and she pulled back lest he scorch her more.

  “I need to do this,” Meer said. “I can’t be scared of it.” Unfolding the handkerchief, she exposed the flute and they both stared down at the ancient human bone engraved with hundreds of complicated, exotic symbols.

  Chapter 67

  Wednesday, April 30th—8:45 p.m.

  They were still studying the flute and its mysterious markings when the rain started to beat harder on the windows. The thunder was so loud the building vibrated with each new crack. Sebastian drew the drapes and returned to where Meer was sitting on the couch. And then the lights went out.

  The darkness was immediate and complete. Meer was aware of Sebastian getting up; she heard him knock something over and curse under his breath, and then she smelled the distinct odor of sulphur.

  Suddenly candlelight glowed, illuminating his face and the part of the room where he stood. Light from another time and place. It might have been the nineteenth century. This could be Archer Wells holding the candelabra. But it wasn’t, Meer reminded herself, as Sebastian walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver.

  “No dial tone but this is a remote. It wouldn’t work in a power failure. I don’t know if there’s a wall phone in the suite. Did you notice?”

  “No, but there’s usually one in the bathroom.”

  He was gone for a few moments and then called out: “Yes, you’re right.”

  She heard him dialing, talking in German, and then he returned.

  “There’s a blackout in the whole area. None of the trams or subways are running either. Something to do with the storm. I’m going downstairs and get more candles.”

  At the door, about to leave, he hesitated, walked back to her and sat down next to her. “You understand this has nothing to do with us. No one knows where we are, but don’t open the door for anyone, all right? I’ll take the key.”

  Meer had a sudden memory of being in the dark like this with him before. Of him standing just this way in a doorway some other time. Of him asking for a different promise.

  No, not him.

  “You’re seeing a time before, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “And am I there?”

  “No, not you.”

  “But someone connected to me?”

  “I’m not sure,” she equivocated.

  “You don’t want to find out, do you?”

  “No.” She realized it only as she said it. Realized more, too, but didn’t say it.

  “Whoever he was he did something terrible to you, didn’t he? Did he hurt you? Is that why sometimes it seems as if just as you’re going to open to me you shut down?”

  “Maybe,” she whispered.

  “I’ve learned from your father and from Fremont Brecht that we’re here to do it right this time. We come back within the same circle of people and are given a chance to do it better. Not to make the same mistakes. I would never hurt you, Meer. Just the opposite. I want to help you and keep you safe.” He reached out and brushed her hair off her forehead in a tender gesture.

  Her conflicting emotions warned her to stay away from him and at the same time to give in to him. When she did neither he gave her a heartbreaking half smile that surged through her.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. All right?”

  She nodded.

  While he was gone, Meer sat in the semidarkness. What she and Sebastian were experiencing was what her father had told her about. What ancient sages, followers of Pythagoras and Jung, early Christians, pagans and Kabbalists had identified as being connected to what was known as same soul consciousness. People are part of one great cosmic awareness, her father had tried to explain in different ways over the years. And souls who’d bonded in several lives over time and grown together through the millennia were eventually able to communicate with each other without words through that awareness. When she was old enough to understand it, she’d thought it was a hopeful concept. Even an amazing, magical idea. If it was true, the longing and loneliness plaguing so many people would be eradicated. But she never had truly believed it.

  Putting the flute up to her lips, Meer tentatively blew a C note. The bone was so brittle and fragile-looking she was afraid it would shatter with the effort. The sound was awkward, trying but failing to become music. Again she played the note and waited but nothing in her rose up and presented itself. What had she expected? In her memory lurches Archer only wanted the flute if it could be del
ivered with the song. Without that the instrument was a curiosity, nothing more. Even with the song it might be nothing more.

  The candelabra Sebastian had left on the table near the piano cast flickering shadows on the walls and in the half light Meer studied the flute.

  One of her favorite paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a melancholy nocturnal scene by Georges de la Tour, called The Penitent Magdalene. In it a slight, brown-haired woman, her face turned away, sat in a darkened room where a single candle burned, its image reflected in an ornately framed mirror, drenching her in its mystical light. There were castoff pearls on the table and gold necklaces and bracelets dropped on the floor. In her lap, her hands clasped a skull.

  In this candlelight, the flute in Meer’s hands took on the same mysterious color and portentous glow as the human bone in the painting.

  Studying the hundreds of black markings engraved into the cylinder, she struggled to find just one that was familiar, but none were. Whether they were a long-lost language of ancient hieroglyphics or meaningless symbols, she didn’t know or remember from any of her memory surges. But she did remember how it felt in her hands before…somewhere in time when she’d first touched this slim bone, when she stole it from an urn hanging on a tree by the side of a sacred river in a land she couldn’t even name.

  The object measured six inches long and was less than two inches around: too small to be Devadas’s ulna or radius, femur or tibia, but it could be a piece of any of them.

  Devadas?

  Across all the years, she’d suddenly and inexplicably remembered the name of the man who had once held her in his arms, and it was as familiar as the elusive music she’d been almost hearing since she was a child.

  She whispered it out loud: “Devadas.”

  Closing her eyes, Meer struggled to remember more of the memory surge that had presented itself to Margaux in Beethoven’s house in Baden that had something to do with a burial scene and this bone, but there was only the chaos of thousands of gossamer cobwebs connecting one time to another. Somewhere at the center of the perplexity was the certainty that the marks were ciphers that translated into the memory song.

  Casper Neidermier and Rudolph Toller were right about that. Beethoven was right too.

  Meer needed to call her father. These were manmade marks: an archaic alphabet of sound. Maybe he’d know something about them. Maybe they were connected to the Gematria, the reading of the Hebraic words and letters translated into mystical numbers, a holy language that he’d been studying most of his life.

  Chapter 68

  Wednesday, April 30th—9:15 p.m.

  “You shouldn’t have phoned your father but at least there’s no possibility of anyone tracing the call if it went through the switchboard,” Sebastian said. “You can’t phone Malachai either. What if his hotel room phone is tapped? People other than us are desperate for what’s sitting next to you.”

  One by one Sebastian lit the candles he’d brought upstairs, and as the room became brighter the scent of paraffin intensified, imbuing the air with an aroma that for Meer, harkened back to long-lost memories. He came and sat down next to her.

  “Wouldn’t you kill for the chance to find the memory song and to finally remember the whole story behind all the fractured images that have been torturing you since you were a little girl?” he asked. The depth of sadness in his eyes was almost intolerable to look at.

  He didn’t know her well enough to even guess at how far she’d go to quiet her memories. It was Nicolas he was thinking of, Nicolas in his hospital room, dissociated and disconnected, drawing the haunted face of some lost child and chanting the Jewish prayer for the dead.

  “If I talked you through it, would you try to hypnotize me?” Meer asked.

  “You don’t have to, I know how. When Rebecca wouldn’t let me bring a hypnotist in to see Nicolas, Dr. Alderman, a member of the Society, taught me.” He hesitated. “You’re kind to do this for me.”

  “For Nicolas,” she corrected.

  There was every reason for the session to be a success. Sebastian’s voice was a comfortable and comforting timbre and the instructions he gave were similar to those that Malachai used. The lighting was soft—thanks to the power outage and the candles—and there was no noise to distract her and prevent her from entering a deep stage of relaxation.

  Except there was a vise on her consciousness keeping her in the reality of the hard-edged moment. After trying three times, Sebastian stopped. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said. “You’re not relaxing.”

  Getting up from the couch, she went over to the piano where the flute rested on the velvet-cushioned seat glowing in the candle’s light.

  “I’m sorry,” she said without taking her eyes off of it.

  Sebastian walked into the bar area, opened the small refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine. “It’s still cold,” he said. He poured two glasses and brought one to her. “You have nothing to apologize for. Come, sit down with me. We have the flute. We’ll figure out the rest.”

  As she sipped the wine, she stole looks across the room at the ancient bone instrument, as if willing it to give up its secret.

  “Have you ever wondered what triggered Nicolas’s breakdown?”

  “I have an idea, but there’s no way to know for sure.”

  “You think he saw the child’s skull the gardener dug up at Steinhof?”

  Sebastian nodded. “Nicolas was there…all the children were…playing outside. I think Rebecca believes so, too, but whenever I tried to talk to her about it she became irrationally defensive—as if because it happened on her turf it was her fault…” He stopped talking and looked off into the distance. Picking up the bottle, he refilled their glasses, and for a while they sat there in silence.

  An hour later, Meer woke up still sitting on the couch. In her head was the music she’d been hearing all her life. She recognized the tune, as if she’d always known it. She opened her eyes and smiled, thinking that she was finally going to be able to play the song and then all this would be over. But in the few seconds between having her first conscious thought and opening her eyes, the memory of the music faded.

  “You fell asleep,” Sebastian said from the table where he peeled an orange. “One minute you were sipping the wine, the next your eyes were closed.” He gestured to plates of cheese, bread, sliced meats and fruit. “I brought up some food. You must be hungry.”

  She wasn’t but knew she needed to eat something so she managed half the orange and some cheese.

  “For safety’s sake, even though it’s unlikely anyone was able to follow us, we should probably take turns sleeping,” he suggested.

  “Well, I already had my nap. You go ahead.”

  After Sebastian retired to the bedroom, Meer brought the flute over to the coffee table. As the hours passed, she sat vigil over the instrument. Finally, unable to resist, she examined it once more, scanning up and down the lines of engraved markings, not focusing on any one of them but visually playing with all the shapes.

  Through the window, the full moon shone through the gap in the drapes onto her lap, onto the flute, casting the bone in a bluish light, making the incisions appear even deeper than they were. Shutting her eyes, she touched them with her fingertip. One after the next. Tactually discovering each shape.

  Meer sat like that for a long time, listening to the occasional sound of a car whooshing down the rainy street, touching her treasure, trying not to think, sleepy, almost dozing…

  Her finger moved around and around one shape. Sleep…easy, dreamless, quiet sleep was at the center of the circle she touched. Once more around and Meer was certain she’d find the end of the dream and finally be able to rest. Everyone would be able to rest. Not just her. Not just now. Everyone. For all time. Around and around. One circle. Another circle. Three. Four. Five. Six circles. Another. Another. Nine. Ten. Ten circles. One inside the next.

  Meer looked down. Her finger was tracing a deeply engraved
circle close to the mouthpiece. It wasn’t just a simple circle but several tiny carved circles, a series of tight concentric circles, ten in all.

  She remembered this symbol. Had seen it before. But where?

  Playing the memory game, she went through an exercise of seeing the circles in her mind, then widening out as if she was stepping back and saw them on a gray metal disk and then widened out again and again and finally was in her mother’s antique store twenty-five years ago.

  The elderly man with the droopy white mustache, gold-tipped walking stick and heavy German accent showed Pauline Logan a clock he wanted her to buy from him.

  “Clocks like this were only made for a hundred years,” the man said. “Music clocks, they were called. Very entertaining. Very popular. So popular even master composers wrote music for them. Listen if you will. This piece is very lovely. Beethoven wrote it just for these clocks.”

  The music that emanated from that ancient timepiece was Meer’s introduction to classical music; the first piece that wedged its way into her consciousness. Every day for as many months as the clock was in the store, Meer would sit and watch the minutes move forward while she waited for the clock to play its magic music on the hour. It was the only antique in the store that she’d cared about and had cried bitterly when it was sold. As recompense, her mother had offered to give her piano lessons so she could learn to play the music herself. But she hadn’t been able to play the Beethoven piece and she never stopped missing her clock. And it had been her clock. She’d learned every inch of it: the face, the steel flutes, the casing, the inner workings and the maker’s mark engraved on the back of the face.

  The same mark she was looking at now.

  Ten concentric circles.

  And exactly like that maker’s mark there were small perpendicular lines marking these circles, too. Little nicks. Meer was sure, even though it had been so long ago, that they were in the same places; certain that everything about these circles on the ancient bone flute was identical to those on the back of the clock that had introduced her to music so long ago: to Beethoven’s music.