It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  Her laugh of joy gave the transformed version of a past reality a new-minted authenticity.

  “Love at first sight?”

  “At second sight rather.”

  Fjodor came tripping up – arm in arm with his new conquest – all smiles – curves and soft wet eyes – looking sweet like a young woman should – and distinctly dressed – for déshabillage.”

  “So there you are, may I introduce you to Alice, though I think you’ve met her already?”

  “Oh yes, we have met on the stairs, and how nice it is to see you in something else than your beloved worn-out motley morning coat, and may I introduce you to Caitlin, whom you have heard a lot about already.”

  While he gave Alice a light kiss on the cheek Fjodor and Caitlin shook hands knowing that they would be bound to meet each other often in the future. While Caitlin was somewhat apprehensive because of what Fjodor – who was still a stranger – knew – Fjodor acted discreetly to suggest that he knew nothing in particular about her epic past.

  “I must say, Ralph, you have not been exaggerating. I congratulate you both. You deserve one another, that’s clear. And Caitlin, please do not take Ralph’s remark about my morning coat too seriously, as he likes to walk around naked as a child himself if he gets half a chance, but I trust you will be able to improve on his manners even though it may be an uphill battle all the way.”

  “But maybe it’s perfectly all right out here in the countryside where everything is so natural.”

  Alice would appreciate all such opportunities.

  “Don’t believe a word of what Fjodor says. He loves exaggerations without which he lacks the spicy peripeteia of drama, tragedy and comedy. Have you ever seen me walk around naked?”

  “I have, but not in any unusual degree.”

  “Your loyalty does you honour.”

  All good banter for the comfort of a greater intimacy.

  “But darling, you’re not any better, always unshaven and sauntering around in your slippers, guests or no guests. It’s a wonder you do dress when you have go out?”

  “And it’s an even greater wonder that I actually manage to go out at all.”

  And she lapped it up like cream – her due.

  “It’s also due to a meticulous planning that enables you to lounge behind your screen in the lap of a deep armchair together with Alice, engrossed in listening to Parsifal or Don Giovanni or – ”

  “Dinner is served!”

  They went indoors to settle in the dining room where Jessie – Jennifer and Charlotte arranged the steaming dishes of fish – vegetables and baked potatoes. Seymour and Mortimer were handling the wine and discussing its colour and flavour. He pulled the chair out for Mary but waited to join her till Jessie had sat down beside him. A state of combustion – from all the four corners of the world – prevailed as they all kept talking while hardly anybody had the patience to listen. The Champagne had increased the heart rate – lifted the spirit and added a new zest to life. The loaded dishes with pale green leeks – orange-red carrots – white and green asparagus – bright red tomatoes and yellowish sauce Mornay – smelling of Gruyère and Parmesan – were handed round by helpful hands – stretched out everywhere to take hold of spoons and handles. The cacophony fused with the mutual fellowship at the beginning of a meal. In one way he liked it as it was a product of generosity and well-being though in another way it was a little too gregarious to be enjoyed thoroughly. He looked across the table – past the deep purple and pink Irises – Brueghel – bloemenboeket – towards Caitlin who was telling Seymour something that made him laugh. When she saw that he was looking at her she winked at him – so that he knew she had been telling a joke about him for he was so far what they mostly had in common.

  “Cheers everybody! I hope you will like Seymour’s salmon newly caught in the Spey River.”

  Jessie sat down to a choir of cheers just as Seymour lifted his glass.

  “Here I must thank Ralph who proposed the trip to Scotland and who furthermore helped me land the salmon after a long hard fight. Cheers!”

  They drank again the chilled Meursault and began eating and speaking all at once. Grilled – that was Seymour’s favourite way of preparing Salmon – not Jessie’s – she liked food to be boiled and sober – but had the grace to let him have his way now and again – as a special treat.

  “Where’re the children to-day. I haven’t seen them?”

  “They’re staying for the weekend with my parents and I miss them already; but once again, it was such a good idea to suggest to Seymour that he had to rearrange his life the better to suit himself and us, of course. And with the house here we do not need so much really, as we don’t owe anything on it; so he can go to London Monday morning and come back Thursday evening if he stays in the clinic. If he stays here he has to get up at six but won’t be back before seven.”

  “In a way it was Seymour himself who came up with the idea as a pious wish. I merely spelled it out, so to speak, but he was a bit worried about what you would say, and suggested even that I should persuade you to accept some of my more Bohemian ways, but I felt certain that you would like the idea both for his sake and for the sake of the children.”

  “Yes, it’s now that they need him.”

  “But it’s also now that you need him.”

  “It is, and you’re lucky. Caitlin is very attractive and you’re in the seventh heaven, both of you.”

  Hivven.

  “I just hope it will last.”

  “It doesn’t, but it will be superseded by trust, care and love, wind and weather permitting.”

  “You speak like an old crone although you’re quite the opposite of an old crone?”

  “I have seen what I have seen. Such an euphoric state cannot last.”

  “Nevertheless, we’ll do our best to make it last as long as we can.”

  “I wish you could, I really wish you could.”

  There was something here he did not know but which he had better be very careful about. So Seymour had either been very good at suppressing the symptoms of the deterioration or he had simply failed to become aware of the disharmonic note. Maybe the wear and tear of habits or a more general disillusion after great expectations or maybe even some specific event?

  “By the way, one of your roses has mildew.”

  “Sally has told me already and I’m going to spray them all to-morrow.”

  They returned to their plates and he removed a long shiny bone – that once had made the Salmon jump upstream full of live – from the pink deadened flesh and became disgusted with himself for taking pleasure in eating a corpse. He was sharing the guilt of having killed a fellow mortal being and he was even persevering in his mistake by feasting on his fried carcass.

  “Why are you looking so grim all of a sudden?”

  “A sudden thought about the frailty of life struck me.”

  “Here, let me fill your glass. That should cheer you up.”

  “Thanks, yes, I need a glass or two to-night, I think.”

  “Now, don’t get drunk. Caitlin wouldn’t like it.”

  “No, of course not. And I wouldn’t either, and besides, we have to be down at the Broad before sunrise; but you must excuse me for not having told you about what has happened and for not having telephoned Suzy. I will do that to-morrow afternoon to tell her that we did manage to find a bracelet, a rather unique piece, but that was all. As I told you there was only a sporting chance of getting a better view of the burglary and of his death than the one we already had. It was like a shot in the dark, more or less, and my investigations did not discover anything new. I read the report carefully, but could not reach any firm conclusions, so I’m afraid that we will have to leave the mystery as a mystery.”

  “Did you have to buy the bracelet and how did you find it?”

  “We had to buy it and consid
ering the people involved I am not at liberty to divulge any more than that, and I am sure you would prefer not to know anything about the actual details.”

  “It’s a secret from the underworld?”

  “Oh no, it’s nothing that sinister, but discretion is nevertheless taken for granted.”

  “So one does not ask questions?”

  “At least one does not imagine that one has to believe the answers one might get.”

  “After all, it’s at least sixteen months since it happened, so it will always remain a mystery.”

  “ Yes, the trace is cold, and that’s also the official assumption.”

  “He was drinking far too much so it might have been an accident as well.”

  “That’s certainly the most plausible explanation, considering the circumstances.”

  “It was just because I hoped to play a part in a chilling but real drama for a change.”

  “Would you really prefer such mysteries to singing?”

  “Oh no, certainly not, but as an additional source of excitement.”

  “Why do most films and the majority of books expound violence and murder?”

  “Simply, my dear, because ordinary life has become so dull and predictable that we must have something exciting to dream about or rather to titillate us out of our humdrum indifference. Crime is exciting because it adds zest to life, it gives life the depth of death it ought to have, and in the presence of death life is appreciated as the gift it is, though at a cozy distance, as a titillation.”

  Her sincerity was tempered by a smile at his earnest question.

  “But I thought you knew that.”

  “Maybe to some extent but it’s clarifying to hear how succinctly you can put it.”

  “There’s nothing secret about it, you know!”

  Her laughter was as clear and deep as her voice on the stage. The release of a laugh.

  “Maybe it’s one of the aspects of modern life I would prefer to ignore.”

  Resignation and sadness – mitigated by self-indulgence.

  “But you just can’t, can you? It’s all over the place, like mildew on the roses.”

  “Opening the door to the public room is like getting inundated by the activity of a madhouse.”

  “You are rather misanthropic?”

  “Generally speaking, yes, but not as far as particular individuals are concerned.”

  “That confirms the rule. But I agree, even music is becoming more and more meaningless.”

  “You mean that classical music has become an intellectual exercise and popular music trivial?”

  “Yes, they have both become inhuman as a reflection of the general Zeitgeist of society.”

  “I could not avoid hearing what you just said, Mary, so as a composer of modern classical music, I must defend our art. It’s not inhuman, but an expression of an abstract dimension.”

  “But Oliver, then you must necessarily assume that there is a real difference between what’s inside, namely abstract dimensions, and what’s outside, namely life and behaviour; and that there really are such abstract dimensions capable of being expressed by human beings?”

  “Of course I do!”

  Credere – convincere – the fallout was self-identification – a self-image – a sacrosanct entity.

  “But how can you say so? Any organism is a total unity. Everything in it must be in complete coherence for it to function; every organism, from a Paramecium to an Elephant or a Primate; there are hardly any bourns or limits in nature, only in mental constructions.”

  “I don’t know anything about all that but in music it’s certainly different. You cannot compare music with anything else. It has its own dimension, so to speak.”

  “But how can music be unique, and disconnected from all the rest of the universe, such as trees, stars, biology, evolution, philosophy and all that which I love to sing, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini?”

  “Modern music has many different styles, such as Serialism, Dodecaphony, Spectral Music, and World Music which uses all musical forms, beside of course the music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Bartók and Messiaen even, plus the New Simplicity, the New Complexity, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. You cannot just call it all modern music.”

  “How can serial aleatory music, such as that composed by John Cage and Stockhausen, stand alone in a universe where nothing is aleatory but mutually dependent. That’s the basic law of evolution, quantum theory and Buddhist philosophy; and when you have three independent disciplines all reaching the same conclusion, or converging on the same point, you require exceedingly good arguments to doubt their mutual veracity.”

  “And it’s naturally in perfect agreement with common sense and real human experience.”

  “Not according to my experience. My music is uncontaminated by such trivial considerations. It is purely abstract and an expression of an abstract realm beyond our four dull dimensions.”

  “But how can your dimension be separated from everything else? All laws of nature are mutually dependent. There is nothing that rests in itself, everything exists in interdependence, as proved by Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, which states that nothing can be seen in isolation or that no system is understandable only on the basis of its own axiomata.”

  “But all this has nothing to do with what I do in the realm of pure sound.”

  “Can you relate to Il canto sospeso, Manifest Destiny, Tabula Rasa or Te Deum?”

  “I never liked Nono, Burstein and Pärt very much, they’re all rather old-fashioned.”

  “Then you’re not fond of Messiaen, as he thought music should be beautiful and emotional?”

  Mary’s daily experience – and the experience of the other singers as well as the musicians.

  “Oh no, he’s probably one of the worst.”

  A thoroughly disarming smile made him all of a sudden understand Jennifer. It was only because he had not really seen him yet – being perhaps a little biased.

  “But as the sense of the sacred vanished from our lives, alienation, fragmentation and meaninglessness resulted in either a dehumanised and abstract kind of music or in a trivial and superficial kind of music, for great art has, if analysed statistically, only flourished in historical periods in which the sense of the sacred was pronounced; and this general deterioration is illustrated by the fact that the ability to distinguish the twenty-two microtones, the śrutayaḥ, clearly from each other, is changing from generation to generation, even in India.”

  “And modern music is intimately connected with the Zeitgeist, as Ralph just said, for it reflects its alienation, lack of empathy, fragmentation, superficiality and meaninglessness, and it is not congruent with nature, human physiology, evolution or the rest of the universe, which the music in Europe as well as in India, China, Persia and Japan always and definitely were.”

  “But you’re an opera singer and not a musician, and Ralph is a painter, so your theories have nothing to do with music, and Boulez definitely stated that if one does not write dodecaphonic music one is out of tune with one’s time, I mean with the prevalent mood of society such as it is.”

  “It’s a question of how much one should accept being influenced by alien forces, I mean, if I do as I like even if that does not conform to what the majority likes, I remain true to myself, but if I jump up on the bandwagon of the current trend I betray myself and I betray what I feel. Much modern literature and art express this malaise of not being in touch with one’s self and of not knowing what one feels; and as such it is indeed expressing the Zeitgeist quite adequately. But I find the Zeitgeist trivial and boring, devoid of emotional depth and beauty.”

  “It’s amazing that you can still use such words as ‘depth’ and ‘beauty.’ Nowadays no one knows what they mean, and if one does, one regards them as being antiquated relics of a distant past, like, for examples, fragments of Preca
mbrian fossils.”

  “I agree, you have to have experience of such emotions to appreciate them. If they remain unknown they exist beyond your horizon.‘Nor is it possible for thought a greater than itself to know,’ as Blake said; and Oliver, apart from the critics whose livelihood depends on the illusion of modern art and the people who use modern art as an investment, ordinary people tend to regard modern art and modern music as prime examples of cases in which the Emperor has no clothes at all.”

  “Ordinary people do not know what they are talking about. People talk about diseases, but there is a difference between what an epidemiologist knows and the general level of knowledge.”

  “But the knowledge of an epidemiologist would only be a extension of the general knowledge; it would not contradict general knowledge on all fronts, and people in general have a fairly good idea of what reality is, for example, they can always recognise authenticity.”

  “But Mary, what do you mean by ‘authenticity?”

  Oliver did not like the smell of that word to judge by the wrinkles on his crooked nose.

  “When I sing and the feelings really begin to well up on their own from the tips of my toes and I become the sound of the words in my throat, and my feelings flow over to touch not only the other singers, but the musicians and the audience, then I get a different response, a much stronger response, from them than if I merely sing without this feeling of absolute authenticity. When everything is focused, when it has duende, everything has meaning and the beauty of it becomes all-encompassing. That’s ‘authenticity,’ and it’s in the same category as the song of a blackbird and a lark; they sing fully, they have no second thoughts, no way of holding back.”

  “You’re both hopelessly romantic.”

  “Come, we had better join the others in the living room.”

  “Well, you have all the arguments, I suppose, I just have my music.”

  “And I would like to hear some of it one day.”

  “Maybe you might even like it?”

  “Jessie, please excuse our bad manners, but we became engrossed in a discussion about music.”