The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Her position at Bambi Bar had changed, too. Lettie Tan had greeted her coldly when she checked in for work that Thursday afternoon.

  ‘We don’t take kindly to traitors here,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, Ma’am?’ Dulce asked. ‘Who have I betrayed?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. It may be your idea of loyalty to an employer to spend your afternoon off lounging around the Midtown Ramada in the company of notorious illegal recruiters, but it’s not mine.’

  Dulce had been so shocked to find that Lettie knew, she’d been unable to say a word. Lettie had further reduced her already meagre pay to that of a hostess since it ‘was clearly more appropriate’. That night Dulce had done her best to sing but the previous day’s events and the sight of her employer lurking in the freezing shadows, sourly scanning the few customers and the lacklustre act, turned everything into a nightmare. She forgot words, she missed cues, she couldn’t find her heart. Every so often she’d catch sight of Danny’s face, a mask of gnomic indifference lit from below by his keyboard’s white plastic glare. Only later did she work out that it must have been he who’d shopped her to Lettie. Only he had known where she was going. And yet … Dulce could never be absolutely certain. One never knew the full extent of these people’s power, the network of their informers, the tabs they kept.

  One day nearly a month after she had written to Australia an envelope arrived. Dulce tore it open and read that Spanier Entertainments (Pty) thanked her for her letter but regretted that Mr Carl Spanier had been deceased for nine years. Consequently any business undertaken by a person purporting to be him had no legal validity whatever.

  I don’t know about you, Danny, she thought exhaustedly at him as she lay between acts on the mat on Bambi Bar’s roof that night. I don’t know about anyone any more. I don’t even know about myself. The keyboard player was outlined against the night sky, leaning over the coping, smoke lazing up around his ponytail, gazing down into the street far below with eyes which glittered with neon. She ached and ached for home, for her brother Noriel and the rest of her family, for the beach at dusk with the sea quietly rinsing the strand, for the fireflies and choir practices and the haunting old hymns and songs. But it was impossible. Such shame; such betrayal. A tear slipped down her cheek, cutting a trail through the rouge and powder she hated to wear.

  Later that night – or it might have been on another occasion around that desolate time – Danny, whose laconic, knowing antennae must have been quivering and dabbing like those of a cockroach, said that now she’d got used to life without her virginity might she not fancy a bit occasionally? Like now would do fine, he suggested. Right here on this very mat. Much more refreshing than sleep. Light up a toke, chill out.

  ‘We’re none of us virgins in this life,’ he volunteered with surprising regret in his voice, and let a not unsympathetic silence develop for a minute or two while the cacophony of midnight revelry, bar music and traffic shuddered up from below. ‘I’m even a little envious,’ he added. ‘Me, I’ve got nothing except my keyboard. At least you can become a whore.’ But he used a beautiful and forgiving Tagalog euphemism, ‘kalapating mababa ang lipad’, a low-flying dove.

  People’s Disgrace

  FROM BOYHOOD ON, Feodor Sarin had been fascinated by codes, ciphers and numerologies of all kinds. That he had an extraordinary head for figures was recognised by his schoolmates, particularly those who shared his passion for train-spotting. A serious-faced, peaky lad in spectacles, bundled up to twice his size against the cold, he would stand for hours at the ends of platforms. Unlike the others, though, Feodor carried no notebook and pencil. He could memorise any engine’s number at a glance and – though this had yet to be thoroughly tested – recall it perfectly years later. And that was only half his talent. He could also remember the precise pitch of a whistle so that, as the boys ran down to the station when school was out and heard the sharp toot of an engine about to leave, Feodor would shout:

  ‘That’s two-o-seven-seven-three-one-two-one. Zhaporets class. Betcha. Anything you like!’

  He was always right, which didn’t make him any more popular but which confirmed him in a class of his own and on his own – one of those freakish kids whose talent is so weird, so spectacularly futile, that at most it only ever earns an awed contempt. In winter when the long-haul trains pulled in on their journey from the dark landscapes of the far north, little Feodor would be there on the platform in the snow flurries, gazing seriously at the ginger fangs of frozen urine caked beneath the ends of the carriages, the blocks of excrement moulded by wind into fantastic streamlined sculptures, hundredweights of stained incrustation set like iron and waiting for the steam hoses in Central Station four hundred miles away. The huge locomotives which hauled these trains cried a mournful three-note chord: a deep minor triad which wailed away across the wastes as though the engines were expressing the endless melancholy of the steppe and forest through which they passed. At night Feodor heard the sound in bed and his eyes would fill with involuntary tears: something to do with being able to identify the particular engine, with being able to follow an old friend out of the station and away on its unseen trajectory; with distance and loss.

  As time went by Feodor’s teachers found themselves forced to make difficult distinctions about him. Either he was greatly talented and quite without gifts or he was hugely gifted and utterly without talent. ‘He has an ear for mathematics,’ succinctly observed Dr Ugarev. ‘Come to that,’ said Dr Rubinskaya, who taught Feodor the piano, ‘he has a head for music.’ ‘But no heart, eh?’ ‘Who knows?’ Rubinskaya asked. ‘We’ve only the school doctor’s word for it that Feodor has a heart. I freely confess the boy’s a complete enigma to me.’

  Whether it was talent or gift he lacked Feodor undoubtedly had a bent for music, for it increasingly inclined his adolescence towards musical studies at university. Without it he might have turned into one of those obsessive youths who slowly vanish into themselves before surfacing again in their early twenties to announce with calm, crazed intensity that the future can be predicted from the precise position of the name ‘Jehovah’ in the Bible, from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, or from the relative masses and periodicity of the inner planets. Instead, he went to study music at the prestigious Academy at Mekanograd. Feodor proved to have a heart after all, for here he met and fell in love with Nicolai Ghiaurov. Oh, he didn’t know it was love; whatever signs of romance or the erotic in Feodor’s life were far too obscure for so commonplace a diagnosis. Until then he had only ever come close to expressing any such thing in a poem written at fifteen, when he’d vaguely had at the back of his mind the presence of a fellow train-spotter, a boy named Basil with sticking-out ears. It had been a prodigious intellectual exercise in which Feodor had set himself the challenge of writing a sonnet in code in which both coded and decoded versions preserved the correct rhyme scheme. En clair, it was entitled ‘Pistons at Dawn’; and although it did make syntactical sense in both versions even the poet had to concede that much meaning was not readily apparent in either. None the less, it seemed to him to tremble on the edge of intelligibility in a most tantalising and profound way. He certainly never showed it to Basil, whom in any case he despised for being dim-witted.

  This Ghiaurov, by contrast, was unquestionably talented as a composer. He was short and beautiful and carried everywhere with him a gun-metal pencil case like those used by rural doctors for their clinical thermometers. Whenever an idea struck him he would pull the little cylinder’s cap off with a hermetic pop! and take out a freshly sharpened pencil, releasing with it the resinous smell of cedar. With this he would scribble notes on the back of an envelope or on the flyleaf of a book. Feodor Sarin watched, fascinated.

  ‘You, of course, could remember without having to write it down, little Einstein of the tundra?’

  ‘Well, yes, I could.’

  ‘Only tell me how and I shall be your friend for life.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ his
devoted admirer admitted. ‘I guess I turn the notes into digits. Yes, I’m pretty sure I do. It’s so quick I never have to think, you see. I don’t imagine I could remember tunes on their own. They can’t exist by themselves.’

  ‘So in your bizarre world Beethoven’s Fifth starts “5–5–5–3; 4–4–4–2”?’

  ‘It’s not as crude as that!’ cried Feodor. ‘You have to take the note-values into account, establish the key, the time, all sorts of things. Just numbering all the notes of the octave one to eight or even one to thirteen would be no more than the dumbest substitution cipher. But I can’t really say because I’ve never really thought about it. It’s like … like when I see you come into the lecture theatre and I smell cedar and think “Nicolai!” but I don’t have to think “N-I-C-”.’

  ‘Do you know, no-one here knows if you’re a genius or a freak.’

  ‘That,’ Feodor said with startling dignity, ‘is their problem. To me, I’m me.’

  ‘And what music does “N-I-C-” conjure up?’

  ‘It’s the sound the Azovskiy Express makes in summer when its air horns are already hot with the sun. Loco number seven-five-double-o-nine-nine-eight-one. It’s a true D flat rather than the C sharp it has in winter. You can tell the day’s temperature from a locomotive’s sound. Coefficient of expansion. Simple physics. Your name is summer for me.’

  Thereafter young Ghiaurov never laughed at Feodor, never again called him the Einstein of the tundra or blinked birdily with the other students in imitation of his spectacled gaze. In fact he became quite protective and, if the truth be known, awed by a strangeness of mind which he was powerless to evaluate. For his own part Feodor enviously adored Ghiaurov’s straightforward musicianship, his ability to improvise at the piano and invent hummable tunes.

  It was inevitable, therefore, that Feodor Sarin should have gravitated towards the purely academic discipline of musicology. His doctoral thesis was on music and encryption, whose roots he laboriously traced to the fifteenth-century Burgundian and Flemish schools, to the parody masses of such composers as Binchois and Josquin. He obtained (and even more laboriously read, since his English was not good) articles by the British musicologist Eric Sams who proposed that Schumann had used cipher extensively in his music. Sams had ‘decoded’ all sorts of words and phrases. Feodor was interested to discover that when similar methods were applied to other extracts and, indeed, to other composers, a variety of messages floated to the surface. In one of his cantatas Bach appeared to be groaning in German (even as his tenor bewailed the weight of sin dragging him down) ‘Six thalers a pound is coffee tod.’ It was tempting to invent the two extra notes needed to complete ‘today’ (if that was what it was) but try as he might Feodor couldn’t juggle them right. Still, the bulk of the ‘decoded’ sentence seemed perfectly intelligible, though he did wonder why Bach should have bothered to make the remark at all. The same went for a phrase in Haydn’s Creation where the violas said ‘Dislike all mountains, O.’ More scandalously, Chopin in one of his scherzos confessed ‘I long to suck his toenails’ in French. Using a complex series of probability curves Feodor eventually worked out what commonsense had already told him, which was that any coherent notation system – whether of notes, letters, digits or symbols – could, by applying selective rules, be made to yield almost any ‘concealed’ text. But doing the research and putting it all together as a thesis was stimulating and rewarded him with Mekanograd’s most brilliant doctorate in years.

  All this happened as great events were shaking the country. He might have spent his first twenty years in a world of his own, wrapped in steam, but Feodor was perfectly aware that he’d done so in revolutionary times. There was little one couldn’t gather by simply standing at the ends of platforms in an obscure provincial railway station. Troop trains, hospital trains; goods trains consisting of nothing but bulk cement wagons or steel girders; the fluctuations of passenger expresses on their seasonal pilgrimage to the southern coasts; all these could be read. But now came the denunciations. They hadn’t been revolutionary times at all, apparently, merely revisionist. The original ideals had been betrayed; a flabbiness had been allowed to creep in because the leaders themselves had hankerings for the ancien régime. They did their shopping in exclusive stores full of imported luxuries; their bedrooms were scented and had libraries of pornographic videos.

  Feodor had bidden a sad goodbye to his only friend Nicolai, whose own postgraduate years had been spent giving lessons in composition, and went home with his newly minted doctorate to visit his parents. He had barely arrived when a buff envelope with a revolutionary slogan printed across its flap reached him. The letter it contained was from the Academicians’ Union and urged him to report at once for vital patriotic service in the capital. An ancient Lubomir class loco he’d never seen before hauled him slowly thither while he stared at the sliding landscape through spectacle lens and dusty pane, reflecting that since Lubomirs were essentially a sixty-year-old short-haul design it must mean the big Khans and Zhaporets had been diverted to more pressing tasks than chuffing musicologists about the country. He couldn’t imagine why the Union had sent for him; but on reaching the unsmiling granite edifice he was soon informed that he’d been chosen from a thousand possible candidates to head the newly formed Board of Musical Purity.

  ‘The what?’ he asked. The concept rang no bells.

  ‘Essentially, and by any other name, you’re the music censor,’ he was told. ‘Our comrades in the Art Theory department have convincingly shown how wrong we’ve been until now in allowing our native composers to become contaminated by foreign decadence. In short, we’re at last taking seriously the example our great neighbour the USSR has been setting in condemning all that decadent Jewish cacophony by Schoenberg and others of the Second Viennese School. Music’s no different from any other art: it must be firmly anchored in social relevance otherwise it leads inevitably to the effete cult of the individual moaning on about his own precious sensibility and mortality. What ordinary person ever whistled twelve-tone music as he worked? Your own region is, of course, particularly rich in characteristic folk music.’

  ‘It is?’ asked Feodor. He tried to recall the tonal landscape of his native province but could hear only the whistles and hooters and sirens of railway engines.

  ‘Yes, they told us you were a wag.’ A clap on the back and a guffaw. ‘This is your office. Basically, you have a staff of ten. All the music publishers are bound to submit any new composition to your department first for checking. Your people will be testing it for social relevance, which is comparatively easy. The reason we picked you is because of your ability to spot the subtler kinds of counter-revolutionary thought, even deliberate sabotage. We read your thesis, you know. Quite brilliant. We realised at once that you’re the only person who could possibly do this vital cultural job. That’s why your salary’s unusually high.’

  And so at the age of twenty-four Feodor Sarin became willy-nilly the country’s chief music censor. He soon found the work was pretty dull and routine. Daily his subordinates waded through new submissions; and while at first they threw out nearly everything, the changed climate soon began to make itself felt. Compositions began arriving with titles like ‘A Popular Symphony’; ‘Quintet – The Land Reform’; and, in the case of a triumphal cantata for peasant voices, ‘Fowl Pest Eradicated Through Correct Thought’. Feodor might not have been a wag but neither was he stupid. He subjected the Fowl Pest cantata to a personal scrutiny for hidden expressions of discontent. For one electrifying moment he thought he’d found treason in the brass section during the farmer’s anguished outcry at the silence which has suddenly fallen over his poultry sheds. ‘Balls to the Motherland’ seemed to be the cantus firmus before Feodor pulled himself together and realised it was nothing of the kind. These were transposing instruments, in any case. He was thankful he hadn’t told anyone before double-checking. The fact was that under enough pressure of duty and expectation a musical text could take on the attributes of a
Rorschach ink blot. Stare at it long enough and you could read unsettling things which could only have one source … Besides, every cryptography scholar had taken to heart the awful example of the New York lawyer, James Martin Feely, who in 1943 had entered the lists of the great Roger Bacon controversy by publishing a ‘solution’ to part of the manuscript which read, famously: ‘The feminated, having been feminated, press on the forebound; those pressing on are moistened; they are vein-laden; they will be broken up; they are lessened.’ It might as well be the ineffable Nostradamus as medieval proctology.

  Feodor soon made another discovery, which was that his salary was unusually paltry. On the other hand the job for some reason included a good deal of free travel so he was able to slip away from the capital to attend music festivals in distant provinces. The festivals were a bore but there was lots to drink and opportunities for spotting fresh locos. He began to earn the reputation of being a first-rate Party man. Then without warning the most dreadful event of his life began taking shape, although for a time it was completely unrecognisable. A competition was announced for a new National Anthem. The old one, the ideologues had decided, was too identified with the revisionist era. The tune was too bland, the words too self-consciously literary (the first two lines ran: ‘The Morning Star at early dawn/Is the Motherland’s unsleeping eye’). First some new words had to be written and approved, and then they had to be set to an appropriate tune. Some months went by until the Academy decided it could accept a poem beginning ‘From the Subiy to the Plaszhda,/From the Borin to the Bob’ and the nation’s composers were asked to submit suitable music under a system which guaranteed anonymity until a firm choice was made. In this way, it was felt, no Academician would be swayed by an illustrious name to endorse an indifferent tune.