Since my illness, Maya has matured beyond her age. Our roles too seem to have reversed. Now she is the one who mothers me and I acquiesce, willingly following her appeals, demands and instructions. She calls my scar ‘the wounded crescent’ and assures me that one day she will write a song about it. She believes that through her songs she can tame the ugliest and nastiest threats. She’s a dreamer, my Maya, and this scares me. You need to be practical to overcome the cruelties people inflict on you.
I hope Vasu can help her find the right balance. He knows the way, the so-called middle path. I am sure that’s the reason he has survived the upheavals of our lives. Only music used to disturb him, especially when I played my cello. He would wait in silence, gazing intently at me and the cello and then walk right up to me and sit on the floor leaning against my chair, as if he had entered a state of perfect quiescence. But as soon as I touched him, his body would betray the tension secreted inside and he would suddenly appear incredibly fragile.
I have often wondered why music affects us so much. How does it manage so easily to alter the whole texture of our emotions? It either magnifies them out of all proportion or diffuses them so thinly that we are neither able to notice their presence nor define their immediate cause. When I am sad I hardly ever pick a joyful piece, but look for something sombre or outright sad, as if C Major chords would insult my grief. I allow the melancholy tones to linger, hoping to find the measure of my own sadness. Perhaps then it might release its grip. The tempo and movements which I crave are slow and languid; they don’t completely overpower the grief but make it a little more congenial.
Vika often used to talk about music in terms of colours and shades. ‘I paint with music,’ she would say. Music for her was bright or dull, dark or light, smooth or jagged. Its effect on me in those years was much more nebulous; only rarely was I moved by it. Something has changed since then. When I think about music now, I feel as if I can touch the world and it touches me in return. The music purls through my body, soft and warm like a baby’s feet.
I have begun to feel that music by its nature is engrained in our bodies. Like a voice it streams out of me. I read and learn the score and after it has been rehearsed, it becomes part of me. Something similar happens to those who hear it; my presence, real or imagined, is always conspicuous. The sorrow of the music is refracted through my sorrow. In the music itself, it may be diffuse, but when I play and people hear the music, my body playing, it thickens the sorrow, as drops of lemon juice curdle lukewarm milk.
I remember playing Debussy’s Beau Soir with Vika, a short piece, moody, lyrical and quite difficult. We played it late on a bright clear day with not a hint of cloud, and yet as the piece unfolded it seemed as if I were sitting outside beneath summer rain, soft and warm. The cello imitated the wind and the piano the drops of falling rain.
Vika was shocked afterwards when I told her I was wet.
‘What do you mean, wet?’ she asked.
‘Physically wet,’ I said and laughed.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said, but I knew I wasn’t. Music affects me physically. I don’t know the reason, but it does and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I remember a little girl I met in Yalta years ago. She would hear me play, come silently inside, stand near the window leaning against the wall and then slowly begin to move. Her dancing movements were slow, soft and fluent, but at times out of sync with the music. She had long arms and when she was tired she would sit on the floor near my chair, her arms folded round her knees with her face resting on them, looking at me so intently that I would often miss some notes.
She would notice my error and smile.
‘Why do you dance?’ I remember asking her. ‘The music makes me feel sad, that’s why,’ she answered. ‘Even this one?’ I asked and played the Allemande of Bach’s Suite No. 6, the one Pablo Casals calls joyous.
‘Yes, even this one,’ she said and smiled.
‘But it shouldn’t,’ I challenged.
‘It does because it’s so beautiful,’ she replied, and went quiet.
In Venice Sophia took me and Marco to a concert where I heard the viola da gamba played for the first time. I have always loved the cello, but for the first time I thought that perhaps the viola da gamba was the instrument to which I should have given my life. ‘I hope you aren’t angry with me,’ Sophia said afterwards. ‘Not angry but betrayed,’ I wanted to say, ‘and not by you but by my own desire.’ I felt as if I were about to embark on a secret love affair.
Now I know who was playing that day. Sophia has recently sent me a recording of his Bach Suites. In that first performance he played three suites by a seventeenth-century French composer, Sainte-Colombe. The Gavotte in C Minor literally took my breath away. I wanted to run out of the hall, hail a boat and sail out into the open sea. ‘Like that girl in Yalta,’ I remember thinking then, ‘I too have a natural disposition for sadness.’
Marco noticed my sadness. ‘Come with me to Australia,’ he had said a week after that concert. ‘You’ll be healed,’ he promised. He was wrong. So was I. Vasu too knew the nature of my affliction, but he chose to keep quiet, hoping that it would pass. He was wrong as well.
‘I’ll find a gamba for you to play,’ Marco kept telling me. Finally I gave in. I shouldn’t have.
‘He’s a liar,’ Sophia had warned me several times.
‘I know he is,’ I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t.
The viola da gamba was just an excuse. The urge to run away from Russia, the cello and poor Vasu was much stronger.
In Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the soprano voice carries the full weight of the grief. The accompanying music really just creates the atmosphere. Without the voice much of the pathos would be lost. Voice and words possess the power to drown us in a sea of sorrow. Gorecki opens the symphony with strings which seem to repeat the theme endlessly, creating the dark, dense surface of the sea on to which the keys of a piano drop notes one by one, like pebbles. As the surface of the water parts, the lamenting voice rises, just enough to be heard. Then it disappears and we wait for it to resurface. The music generates a sense of expectation and then forces us to wait for it to be realised. We wait and wait and when finally the moment of fulfilment arrives we feel ourselves free and blessed.
The string fugato is impressive, particularly when it reaches its climax, but it seems that the strings are called in merely to reiterate the sorrow which the voice so forcefully expresses. I wonder what a more alienated tonality would have done to the composition. I like tension in musical chords, harmony punctuated with brief moments of heightened dissonance, not a sustained assault of unpleasant sounds but just enough to make us long for a return to the harmonic line.
Gail, the conductor of the symphony orchestra, has noticed that although I like the Gorecki symphony I would personally have chosen something different. It’s the ease with which it expresses sorrow that disturbs me. I value understatement more than wilful explicitness, a hesitant glance more than a sustained stare. I have heard Shostakovich’s Leningrad only once and that was more than enough for me. His string quartets, by contrast, sound new each time I hear or play them.
Gail laughs at me. My preferences are out of line with her limited understanding of Soviet music, which she expects to be loud, bold and colourful. ‘There is nothing unusual about me,’ I tell her. The fake brilliance of Soviet public performances would force anyone to look for more subtle and ambiguous modes of expression.
Gail has asked me to suggest something for the orchestra to play next year. The name that came instantly to mind was Schnittke. I like his expressionistic style and his pessimism. Even his joy is tainted. Vika and I were lucky to hear his 1978 Sonata for Cello and Piano rehearsed in Moscow and at once wanted to try it ourselves. Once heard, who can forget the ten-minute-long third movement, a sustained alternation of lyrical and intensely melancholy themes fading into one of the most audible silences ever composed?
Aunty Olga knew Schnittke’s mother. She use
d to teach German in Engels, the capital of the Volga Republic, and although she tried several times to introduce me to him, I always felt too shy and intimidated. The last ten years of his life were marred by illness following a massive stroke which led to a coma. Vika has recently sent me a recording of his 1986 Cello Concerto, which he composed a few months after miraculously regaining consciousness. For weeks he couldn’t remember a word of Russian and spoke only German.
I don’t think I’ll suggest this concerto, since I know Gail wouldn’t like it. The lament of a single cello, followed by wailing dissonance, may disturb her. You have to listen to it again and again to appreciate its musical structure and feel its emotional impact. I call it To Silence and often wonder if in his coma the music Schnittke heard sounded like this.
Vika has returned to Moscow. She often phones and talks for hours. ‘Don’t waste your money,’ I tell her, but she doesn’t listen. Her few letters paint a sorrowful picture. ‘Home doesn’t feel like home any more,’ she complains. ‘The whole city has been turned into a messy shopping complex ruled by the mafiosi. In this fiefdom of the oligarchs, corruption rules supreme. The Soviet blat (corruption) seems a minor aberration by comparison.’
‘Why don’t you go back to your lovely Switzerland?’ I say.
‘You must be joking,’ she replies and tells me that although she has decided to keep her Swiss passport she is determined to settle down again in Moscow.
‘Why don’t you come home too?’ she often asks me. ‘Don’t you think it would be fun to live together?’
‘Perhaps,’ I want to reply, but keep quiet. She knows that I am tempted.
She has inspected the Yasenovo apartment and assures me that it needs only minor renovations. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she says, ‘and when you begin to feel better, we’ll start playing together again.’ When I ask her about her physicist husband, she laughs loudly, saying that she could leave him tomorrow. ‘He’s so boring and uptight,’ she adds, and giggles like a teenager.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ I tell her. ‘Give me time to think.’
‘We’ll get you a gamba,’ she says and from the silence that follows we both know that she has overstepped the mark.
‘A gamba would be good,’ I reply, to release the tension. Then she tells me about a workshop in Basel where her husband has a friend whose grandfather owns a partnership in a workshop reproducing antique musical instruments.
‘You only have to say you’ll come,’ she announces, and waits. The final bait, I know, has been cast.
The year is about to end, I mumble to myself, and so is the millennium. Perhaps Vika is right. Perhaps the time has come for me to pack up and go home.
‘No need to pack,’ Maya would say. ‘Just go and don’t look back.’
She is wonderful, my Maya, so straight and determined. I hope she is all right. I hope she is happy.
Vasu
It’s a bright sunny day. The autumn has all but gone and the winter is nearly here. The sunshine has appeared as a blessing from the heavens to mark this special occasion. Maya and I are leaving the Metro station on our way to see Anna and Vika in their new apartment. Maya has a copy of her little book on Mongolia and can’t wait to hug her Mama. I am not so keen. I would rather walk with Maya up to the door, then turn back and sit in the park before returning to the hotel and spending the evening reading and writing.
In the morning I’ll catch a flight to Venice to meet Isabella. A week ago I received an email from her inviting me to attend the opening of an exhibition of her architectural drawings and photos. Attached was a flyer and a photo of Sophia. Isabella’s reply to my answer: ‘Congratulations, I’ll try,’ was brief but emphatic: ‘No trying, Zio Vasu – just come. We’ll wait for you. And yes please, bring Maya with you if she’s free and wants to come.’
‘Not a word about Anna,’ I had said to myself, and although I wasn’t sure if the omission was deliberate or just an oversight, it made me sad.
For a very brief moment I thought that I should ask Ira to come with me to Venice. I even phoned her but she was out and I didn’t have the resolve to phone her again.
I had met Irina at a conference in Paris. Her Russian name drew me to her. ‘Can I call you Ira?’ I had asked her in Russian, trying to appear friendly. She could have asked why, but she didn’t. She just smiled and said konechno (of course).
Ira works in a restaurant on rue del la Gaîté not far from the cemetery, and rents a small apartment on the fourth floor of a block overlooking it. She used to be photographer and took wonderful aerial shots of cities.
Whenever I am in Paris, once or twice a year, we spend a week or so together. We enjoy making love and although it happens only rarely, we have learnt to be patient. We aren’t in love as we would have been many years ago when we were young, but we do love one another in our own uncomplicated way.
‘A part of us dies each time we fall in love,’ I remember Ira telling me once. ‘You’re wrong,’ I could have argued. But I didn’t. Ira is right. There is no need to complicate things. None at all.
Acknowledgements
I thank Roland Bleiker, Dominique Sweeney, Stephanie Anderson and many other friends who read different sections of the manuscript. I am grateful to David Pereira for checking that I haven’t written anything silly about music. Diana Giese worked with me to give the manuscript a coherent narrative shape. I am indebted to her for her support and encouragement. Some of the events of August 1991 coup described in the chapter Moscow, August 1991, are based on news reports and material from a book Russia at Barricades: eyewitness accounts of the August 1991, edited by Victoria E. Bonnell, Ann Cooper, and Gregory Freidin. Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 1994.
Subhash Jaireth was born in a small town in Punjab, Northern India. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Moscow studying geology. He has published poems in Hindi, Russian and English. His book To Silence: Three Autobiographies was published by Puncher & Wattmann in March 2011 and has recently been performed as theatre piece. He lives in Canberra, Australia.
After Love Page 23