by Rick Wilber
Now she watched Kristian mimicking her own movements of that first day, passing through the sun washed salotto, the high-ceilinged cucina, wandering upstairs to inspect the camera da letto with its shutters thrown wide to let in the summer breeze. She followed him there, watching as he peered from the window, glanced into the dressing room, ran a hand over the wide, plushly comforted bed.
Ah, the bed.
Even thinking of this morning gave her a shiver of ecstasy. It had been very early, before the cook had arrived, before even the sun had crept past the eastern hills. The memory made her long for the day to pass so that she could return there, could feel again the rush of his passion, the opening of herself, could give herself over to his unfettered desire.
Kristian turned abruptly from the bed, and stared at her in the doorway. He would think, of course, that she could not perceive him. She went to the bureau and took out a handkerchief, as if that was what she had come for. She heard a questioning chord on the fortepiano, heard his deep voice calling her name. She turned her back on Kristian, and hurried downstairs, her silken skirts whispering over the dark wood. Johannes was waiting for her.
***
Kristian gazed at her in wonder. She had borne eight children, he knew, and was the veteran of hundreds of concert performances, a wonderful composer in her own right. How many times he had gazed at the old pictures, trying to imagine what she truly looked like, how she played, what charm she had that had drawn two of the nineteenth century’s greatest composers to her side. And here she was.
She was as appealing as Frederica Daniels was plain. She had white skin, abundant dark hair caught up in some complicated arrangement, and dark eyes. The grief of her husband’s recent death shadowed those eyes, but she was lovely nonetheless. Kristian followed her to the door of the bedroom and watched her graceful descent to the first floor. He had not expected her to be here. It was not in the histories, the diaries, the letters. How hard the two must have worked to keep this visit secret!
A voice called, “Clara! Komm’ mal her!”
Kristian slipped down the stairs after her.
The scene in the sunny little salon was like something from a painting. The Master himself sat upon the bench of the fortepiano, and Clara settled herself beside him, her long-fingered hand caressing his sleeve, her cheek just touching his shoulder. He chuckled, a rich, contented sound, and moved a sheaf of paper closer to her. She bent forward to look at it, her hands automatically reaching for the keyboard. She began to pick out a chord progression, and then a fragment of melody. He shifted to his left, and she smiled up at him as she moved closer to the keyboard. A moment later the flowing sounds of a Lied rolled from the instrument. Clara hummed the vocal line as she played, and the Master nodded, following her reading, smiling.
Kristian stared at them in awe, forgetting all about his mission for the moment. This was a historian’s dream. He hardly breathed, striving to hear every detail, every nuance. There, did Clara stress that agogic accent? And there, did she slur the bass line more than later pianists thought was right? Of course, this little piece had no p dolce marking, he knew that, but still! The variations of dynamic, the stretching of the largo, the languid legato . . .
He brought himself up short. It was important to concentrate. For all he knew, Frederica had been lost through just such indulgence, forgetting who and what she was in the thrill of discovery. He must look for her, must look everywhere. The Clinic had promised him, if he were successful in bringing her back, that he would have his own Insertion. The prize would be his, after all, if only he could find her.
He forced his eyes away from Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, and turned toward the little courtyard behind the villa.
The translational effects of the codification were supposed to make him able to perceive her. His mind would “see” her mind, would recognize her presence. The director had given him four hours. No longer, he had said emphatically. If we lose another one, the university will kill the program, and that would be a terrible waste.
Kristian had promised. Four hours.
With the music following him, he searched. She had to be within a one-hundred-yard radius of the Insertion locus. The codification began to fail if the traveler moved beyond that distance. Kristian was to examine the house, the garden, the courtyard, and the street adjacent to Casa Agosto. He could go no further.
He looked in the courtyard, peering behind rose vines and under a splintered wooden table. He looked over the back gate, where the narrow street wound between the other eleven houses of Castagno. He sidled between the house and the stone fence, coming out again into the front garden. A gardener stooped over a bed of flowers, but Kristian saw no one else. He went back in the house, and found Clara and Johannes being served luncheon at the kitchen table. Except for the cook and the gardener, it seemed they had the villa to themselves.
He stood in the doorway and watched the two of them. An idyll, he thought. That’s what this was. A tryst, which no one was ever to know about.
But Frederica had discovered it.
Where are you, Frederica? Where are you hiding?
***
The vitello was like butter upon her tongue, the pomodori and the mozzarella bursting with essences of sunshine and clean earth and fresh water. She closed her eyes, letting the flavors flood her mouth. Nothing in Chicago had ever tasted like this. Never in her life had she felt the way she did here, sensuous, satisfied, utterly alive. She couldn’t be expected to return to the pallid sensations of a cold, worn-out world, not when there was this cornucopia of feeling and sound and taste!
No. Absolutely not. This Kristian would simply have to go back, empty-handed and frustrated. And though Hannes was beginning to talk about returning to Vienna, Clara must not leave. She had letters from her children asking for her return, and it was unfortunate for them, perhaps. But they were not so young anymore, after all. And the concert dates. . . well, the agents could find other pianists. Clara could not leave Castagno. Frederica would not allow it.
***
Kristian followed Clara and Johannes back to the fortepiano, and lingered in a corner as they resumed playing. The Master had put aside the sheaf of Lieder, and had brought out a thick manuscript. Kristian followed the German well enough to understand that it was the Quartet in A Major they were working on, though the niceties of discussion eluded him. There was, however, as he knew very well, that special marking at the end of one movement. P dolce, the Master had written. Kristian waited, hoping, willing them to reach it.
Literally, of course, p dolce meant “soft, sweet.” But musicologists had argued for nearly two centuries about what Brahms meant in terms of true nineteenth-century performance practice. What made the passage “sweet?” Some asserted it was a question of tempo, of dragging just a bit. Others thought it had more to do with the way the keys were struck, or the way the motif was expressed. It was a small, much-debated detail, and the only way the true answer could come was through Insertion. Frederica had won, and then lost, the right to find it.
It was Kristian’s turn. The alternate, the second-place winner. Here he was, and here was Brahms, with his collaborator. And it was coming, the passage he knew so well. He recognized the cadences leading to it, and he could picture the printed score in his mind, that enigmatic notation. . . they were almost there. . .
***
She felt his attention on them, and it washed over her, all at once, why he remained in the salotto when he should have been searching Casa Agosto high and low for her.
P dolce. He thought he would find out what it meant, and he would go back, even having failed to retrieve her, with the prize. P dolce.
No. She would not allow that, either. Why should he, who had everything else, have this? He had looks, and popularity, and friends. This was hers, and hers alone!
She seized Johannes’ arm, lifting his hand from the keyboard just before he reached the passage. He turned to her in surprise, and she threw her arms around h
is neck and kissed him, deeply, tightly. Let Kristian watch this! Let him see for himself! The mystery of Johannes, mind, body, soul, and music, were hers. She would give up none of it!
Hannes’ breath quickened against hers, and his body stirred. She melded herself against him, feeling his heat, breathing in the scents of tobacco and wool and sweat. He chuckled against her hair, and whispered, “Liebchen,” before he swept her up in his arms and started for the staircase.
Though her head was already swimming with desire, she glanced over his shoulder, and saw Kristian in the very center of the room, staring after them, openmouthed. She buried her face in Hannes’ lapel to hide the cat’s smile that crept across her face.
***
Kristian resumed his search. He looked in every corner, every closet, every nook and cranny of the villa. Suppose the translational effect didn’t work? After all, it had never been tried before. Suppose she was here, but he couldn’t perceive her - could she perceive him?
Frederica, Frederica. They want you back. Where are you?
He found nothing. He went outside again, moving carefully and cautiously past the garden, back into the street. He turned toward the other houses of Castagno and moved just a little farther. Almost immediately he felt the shifting, the slight dizziness, that meant he had reached the perimeter of the locus.
He stopped where he was, gazing back at Casa Agosto. His time was almost up. His heart pounded with frustration as he watched the house, as the sun sank behind the hills, the sky darkened into evening. And then, as shadows stretched around him, the curtains in the upstairs bedroom twitched.
Someone was at the window, looking down on the street. On him.
The next moment, Kristian was opening his eyes in the twenty-first century. His body lay surrounded by clinical equipment, and the physician’s assistant bent over him, brow furrowed.
When Kristian stirred, the technician breathed a sigh, and straightened. Kristian struggled upright, and saw that the Director was also present, a look of relief brightening his tired face.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Kristian said. “I want to try again.”
They made him wait three days. He had to describe what he had seen and experienced over and over again, first to the Director, and then to two clinicians, who compared his notes with those of the other six Insertion subjects. They nodded over his account of reaching the outer edge of the locus, and they frowned over his being unable to perceive the missing Frederica.
“Are you sure,” he asked them, “that the translational effect works?”
“It has to,” one of the clinicians told him. He was a thin, intense man in his sixties, whose entire life had been devoted to developing the Insertion process. “We were very careful to align your brain mapping with the previous subject’s. Your codification includes key recognition triggers which should enable you to perceive her presence in the Insertion. We’ve checked and double-checked, run the simulation thirty times. You should perceive her easily.”
“What if she’s not there?”
The other clinician shook his head. “She couldn’t leave. She would snap back here the moment she moved outside the perimeter of the locus.”
“But where could she hide?”
The first clinician gave an expressive shrug.
***
Frederica was furious to see him return. He appeared in the salotto just as she and Hannes had begun work.
She had played the A Major Quartet before, of course, but Hannes didn’t know that, and she took pleasure in his admiration of what he believed to be her sight-reading of the score. She was halfway through the opening movement when Kristian showed up. He watched her from the doorway, a curious expression on his face. She missed a fingering, and had to stop. Anger made her cheeks burn, and she kept her eyes down so Hannes wouldn’t see it.
“What’s wrong, Liebchen?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing, Hannes, nothing at all. It’s brilliant.” There was nothing she could do but ignore Kristian’s presence. He had not detected her the last time, and she had no reason to think he would now. Still, she had hoped never to see him here again.
She turned back a page, and massaged her fingers for a moment. “I’ll start again.” She found a place to begin, and resumed playing, with Hannes frowning, nodding over something that pleased him, sometimes muttering to himself about the harmonies.
She pressed on, enjoying the feel of the real ivory beneath her fingertips, the easy flow of the notes. After a few minutes, she even began to enjoy having an audience, albeit an uninvited one. She kept her eyes fixed on the score, though she knew it by heart, had played it from memory many times. Once she had made the mistake of playing a later version of one of Hannes’ pieces, startling him with the improvements she added on what he thought to be a first reading. Since then, she had been careful to play what was on the page before her.
It was when she reached the Scherzo that she realized Kristian was behind her, looking over her shoulder at the score, at her hands upon the keyboard, at the Master listening to his creation being played for the first time. At the end of the Finale would come that enigmatic marking. P dolce.
She knew now what Hannes meant by it. She had heard it under his own competent although undistinguished hands, and then under Clara’s brilliant ones. She understood it now, though she would never write that dissertation.
Still, she would not - could not - let this interloper steal it away from her! Even thinking about Kristian Nordberg completing his dissertation on the dynamic markings of Brahms before she could finish hers - whether she meant to finish it or not - renewed her fury, made her pulse thrum in her throat, her cheeks flame.
She had felt just such fury when Clara Schumann tried to banish her from her mind.
It was the music that made it possible for her to slip inside Clara’s consciousness. Clara - poor, pretty Clara - knew nothing of brain mapping or codification, or of Insertion. Even the Insertion people had never realized how thoroughly she, Frederica, understood the process. She had quite deliberately hidden that from them, some instinct driving her.
Clara had been playing Wiegenlied, singing softly, with the Master standing beside the open window, listening to his fragile, perfect lullaby. Frederica had been floating through the rooms, imagining what it must be like to feel the linen of the curtains, to taste the fresh ravioli being rolled out in the kitchen. Clara had been lost in the music, and Frederica, without forethought, without really meaning to, simply . . . inserted herself. It had been an instinctive, almost childlike action. She wanted to be there, wanted to be in Clara’s mind, in Clara’s lovely body, to feel what she felt, to know what it was like . . .
At first Clara had not known she was there. She had gone on playing, and then risen to go to her lunch with Hannes. Frederica, through Clara’s senses, savored the richness of the ravioli, delighted in the brush of silk and fine lawn against Clara’s skin, reveled in the maleness of Hannes’ scent, the tinge of cigar smoke and bay rum. The two of them had strolled in the garden, and then decided to walk down through the little town’s steep streets. They moved out through the gate, and into the lane, but as they turned toward the other eleven houses of Castagno, Frederica felt that sudden vertigo, the wrenching sensation of being upside down or sideways or-
She couldn’t let it happen. If Clara moved beyond the locus, she would be cast out, and if she did not withdraw, she would be snapped back to the clinic, that cold white bed strung with wires and dials.
Energized by fury, she had gripped Clara’s mind with her own, her greater intellect as sharp as cat’s claws over the other woman’s unsuspecting consciousness. She was aware, dimly, of the spasm of anguish that shot through Clara Schumann. More immediately, she knew that Clara stopped dead in her tracks, clutching her temples, crying out as if something had struck her.
Hannes, solicitous as always, had scooped her up in his strong arms and carried her back inside Casa Agosto and up the stairs to the bedro
om. He laid her upon the bed, and lay down beside her to comfort her in what he took to be a sudden migraine. Frederica, drunken with power, with opportunity, clung to him, first as if in pain, and then with increasing passion. They made love in the hot Italian afternoon, as the birds sang in the olive trees, and Frederica, even at the moment of ecstasy, her first glorious understanding of physical passion, never loosened her hold on Clara’s mind.
It had become habit now, something as automatic as playing two-handed scales. At first Clara cried out for release, for freedom, but over the intervening months, her struggles had grown weaker and weaker, until at last they faded away altogether. In all that time, she had never once left the garden of Casa Agosto. Occasionally, Hannes was compelled to go back to Vienna for some engagement or other, but Clara cancelled every commitment she had, and stayed in Castagno. When Hannes quizzed her, she pled the need to rest, the need for solitude. She wrote to her children, assuring them she was recuperating from a mild but persistent illness, and that she would return in due course. She wrote to her agents and assured them she could not possibly concertize until she was well again. She spent her days in reading, playing, strolling in the little garden. She spent her nights in passion. Frederica came, almost, to believe that she was Clara Schumann. Even her playing had improved, amplified by Clara’s gifts, and by the sensual atmosphere of Casa Agosto.
And then Kristian Nordberg appeared.
She stumbled a little in the allegretto, recovered herself. She turned the page, and saw that it was there, above the final staff, that marking that meant “soft, sweet,” but also meant something else. Something Kristian wanted to understand.