Dissonance

by Lisa Lenard-Cook

  “Lovers,” I said. “My mother. And Hana Weissova. My mother. My mother who was married to my father. Who was my mother.”

  “Anna—” Carl leaned to touch me again and I pushed his hand away.

  “Don’t touch me!” I cried. “It’s horrible! Why would you tell me such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true,” Carl said. “And it wasn’t ‘horrible.’ They were very happy, Anna.”

  I took several deep breaths, in, out, in, out. “Did I know?” I asked him.

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. You knew they were close, certainly. But your mother took great pains to shield you from their—relationship.”

  I tried to peer into one of the dark blank spaces of my mind, but saw only a huge wooden door, locked. “I must have found out,” I said slowly. “That would explain. Everything.”

  “Perhaps,” said Carl, handing me my brandy again. I took a small sip, and then another. I heard a clock ticking, in another room. I closed my eyes to look again at the huge wooden door.

  “My God,” I said again, then laughed, a weak, choked sound. “I guess you can give me your therapist’s number now.”

  “Good girl!” Carl said. “Face your demons and cut them down.”

  “Shakespeare?” I asked.

  Carl laughed. “Mayer,” he said. “Vintage Mayer. Now you will stay the night, won’t you? What did you tell Mr. Anna?”

  I laughed again and shook my head. “That a sick friend needed me. I didn’t tell him it was myself.”

  And then that night I dreamed.

  A long corridor, lined with candlelit wall sconces. I, in a long nightgown, carried a candle myself. A piano played, far off, a Liszt etude, a sound whose distance did not change as I moved down the hall.

  And then I was on an elevator, an elevator that turned in different directions, not just up and down but right and left. It was so black, I could not see, and I was alone, except for the Liszt, still far off.

  The elevator became a room, a room on the other side of the huge wooden door. A tall bed, and the music all at once close, though there was no piano. Movement on the bed. More darkness.

  And then my mother and I were sitting in our kitchen, drinking tea. It was late. “There is something about that particular Liszt,” she said, and I said, “Tsolidschaya vodka. Leon’s blue suit to dry cleaners. Candles for mother’s candlesticks.”

  My mother laughed. “Clever Anna,” she said. “Read between the lines.”

  “In dreams begin responsibilities,” I said. “What evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

  “Clever Anna,” said my mother. “Clever, clever Anna. You mustn’t ever tell.”

  Then Hana was there in the kitchen with us, the Hana of the picture, the Hana I had known and not imagined. She sat by my mother, holding her hand. “Yesterday’s ugliness may be tomorrow’s beauty,” she said, her voice melodic, pleasingly accented, low-pitched. She was smoking a cigarette that smelled medicinal. Kool, said the package.

  “Remember, Anna,” she said, exhaling smoke with her words. “Do not be afraid.” She set down the cigarette and then took my hand and held it. “Remember,” Hana said.

  Carl was sitting at the edge of the bed when I awoke, holding my hand. “You were dreaming,” he said.

  “She talked to me,” I said. “Hana Weissova. She said, ‘Remember. Do not be afraid.’”

  “And do you remember?”

  I saw again the tall bed, the mysterious movement, but it was in the dream, not real. “I’m too old to return to my childhood,” I said, feeling tears fill my eyes.

  Carl pulled me into his arms. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Anna. Love is where we find it, not where we seek it.”

  I sniffled. “More vintage Mayer?” I asked him.

  “Vintage indeed. And happily true.”

  August 1959

  I have found a lovely house, one I know I will live in until I die. Set on a tree-lined street that dead-ends at an acequia in the South Valley, it is surrounded by a high adobe wall. The house too is adobe, not at all like my wonderful stone house in Praha, and yet it reminds me of it in a way that is not at all unhappy. It reminds me of the complacency I felt in that house, the peaceful command of my surroundings, the way I could move from room to room and know it was mine, my place in the world.

  I was so long without a place in the world. I was without a family, without possessions, and then I rented the little house on Amherst and began slowly to acquire things again. I purchased my Plymouth. I found my Kawai. My dreams began to explore the future instead of relive the past. I allowed myself, once again, to love.

  And I am curiously not unhappy. My heart can still ache for Anton, for Pavel and Heidi, for Mama, Papa, and Irena, for all the others, but the heart apparently has a way of healing as well. “There are those who wish to die, and there are those who wish to live,” wrote Raja. “Which are you?”

  Oh, Raja! I wish to live. And I wish for Anton and Pavel and Heidi, for all of them, to live too, and so I keep them alive in the only way I can, through my music.

  Anton was my only sweetheart, the only man I ever loved, and yet my memory of this love is curiously colored, as if there are things I have chosen to forget of it. We used to laugh at him, Raja and I, at his seriousness, at his singleminded pursuit of that which did not seem to matter. The Americans say, “Lighten up,” and, had we had this phrase, we would have said it to Anton: Lighten up. Nothing can be that important.

  But what was important, in the end? Was it Anton’s belief in economic determinism? Was it my belief in a love of life? Did I live because I loved life, loved it even when it became unbearable? And did Anton die because he did not?

  But then what of the children?

  Men are such driven creatures, moving always with a purpose, a plan. Women pause; they reflect; they can juggle many things without dropping a one. Women are capable of loving in a way men are not: They can love without seeking reward or remuneration; they can love because they love.

  Anton did not speak of love. “Do you love me?” I would ask, and he would look at me oddly, as if it were a foolish question, of no great import. Yet I knew that he did, or loved the woman he thought me to be, whoever she was.

  She is a woman who no longer exists.

  A woman can love many people, in many different ways. Those one loves or has loved already are not crowded by new loves; the capacity increases, exponentially.

  Such a philosopher I have become!

  Back to my house. I move in next month, after the lovely large back room is opened up with windows and a door to what will be a garden. That will be my conservatory. In the garden, I will plant roses and lilacs, spring bulbs of tulips and daffodils, fruit trees and wildflowers, impatiens and mums.

  A woman can love many things, many people, and a woman is not afraid to learn from the lessons life offers her. It moves on, life. And so do I. I move on.

  How does one begin to rediscover the moments unremembered? I found I could not call Carl’s therapist. Instead, I wondered at the intricacies of the piano, read music theory, opened a blank notation pad and scribbled two kinds of notes.

  The piano, I wrote, is unique among instruments for its double stroke. Listeners balked, throughout the ages, at composers from Beethoven to Stravinsky. The ear, I added, yearns towards harmony. Reality, I continued, is not so simple.

  On the piano, I played a C. Do, said the piano. I added a C#, and the notes complained.

  Dissonance assaults the ear, I wrote. The ear demands consonance, completion. The ear insists that every question be answered, that every incomplete cadence be completed.

  I looked at what I had written and turned to a blank page. Then I put the notebook down and got in my car, drove two-laned highways through the awakening New Mexico summer.

  On my way home from these drives, along the Española highway and then up the road that climbs the Pajarito Plateau to Los Alamos, I would try to answer the questions I could not write down.
How, for example, do two women who are attracted to each other admit that attraction? How do they consummate it? Does it begin innocently, a hand on a hand, a touch that sends a sudden electricity? I tried to remember that sort of touch, the way I had once felt when Paul touched me, but knew if I remembered, that I would also mourn its loss.

  Instead, I tried to remember my mother and Hana Weissova together. I had the photograph, where both faced the same camera. I had the dream, where my mother admonished me not to tell, and Hana insisted I remember. I had Carl Mayer’s hand on my shoulder as he said the words, over and over, as if they were recorded on an old stuck 78: They were lovers, Anna. They were lovers.

  Lovers. Love. Loving. To love: I love, you love, she loves. Love was all I’d ever wanted, all I’d never had.

  Evenings, I sat at my piano. I played Hana’s symphony all the way through. I practiced my parts for the Terezín concert, set for early July. I played Hana’s symphony again, as much as I could on a single keyboard.

  The piano could not do that lone clarinet justice.

  Nights, I tossed awake in bed, thinking about Hana’s notebooks where they lay in the piano bench. Some nights I arose and went to them, seeking hints in what she’d written after 1965, the year my mother had died, hints that she’d loved my mother, hints that she’d mourned her.

  There was nothing to find.

  The piano duet can take one of two forms: It can be played on one piano (called “piano, four hands”) or on two instruments. Unlike a polyphonic arrangement, where one voice sounds the melody and the other the accompaniment, a duet’s intention is counterpoint, a dialogue rather than a soliloquy, a harmony rather than a solo.

  Composers of piano duets range from Mozart to Ligeti, and the variety of these works reflects this range. The instrument’s unique virtuosity is multiplied times two, its capability doubled, its effect twinned.

  Not just any two pianists can play a piano duet; just as voices must blend, the pianists’ styles must have a certain concordance, a way of being at once individual and paired. The literature of piano technique suggests that this can best be achieved by paying attention to entrances: It is all in the timing, in other words.

  As usual, theory here proves far too reductive. While good timing plays its part, as does a particular attention to staying close to the score (another aspect emphasized by the theorists), the successful performance of a piano duet requires far more than mere mastery.

  I am referring again to that elusive “heart,” but here it acquires a resonance, an echo. Here it acquires both a twin and a mirror; here it acquires a reflective ability of which an individual instrument is incapable. Here is the solo revealed as a chorus, the single voice revealed as every voice.

  The duet opens the door.

  So perhaps it was like this:

  Two women meet, two women of a similar age and appearance, two women who have both learned to shield their hearts. They meet each others’ eyes, and it is like looking into a mirror. It frightens them, and they look away, quickly.

  But a seed has been planted. Who knows how this happens, the chemistry that is called love? I would like to think it is a chemistry, some magnetic attraction of forces much larger than mere mortals, something that makes a particular person’s melody play again and again in another’s mind.

  They meet again. This time, they do not look away when their eyes meet. They have been thinking about each other; they cannot deny this. Perhaps they go out for coffee. They talk, and their voices trip over each other in their hurry to tell all that they must. They laugh, both at once, and the sound is like a sweet harmony, and then their eyes meet again and, across, the table, they each reach a hand, until these hands meet, and hold on.

  I tell Carl this story. I tell him in words like these, and he listens, and when I am finished, he smiles and takes my hand. “My dear Anna,” he says. “You are such a hopeful romantic.”

  “I believe the phrase is ‘hopeless romantic,’” I say.

  Carl shakes his head vehemently. “No, no, no. That is all wrong,” he says. “Romantics are hopeful. They believe, in spite of everything.”

  I take my hand from his and reach for my tea, a meaningless gesture fraught with meaning. “Is that how it was, though?” I ask him. I don’t look at him.

  “You would like me to tell you a story, too,” Carl says.

  “Yes, Carl,” I say. “Tell me a story.”

  I wish I could say I played Cupid, he began. I wish I could say I arranged it, that it was part of some nefarious plan.

  But I didn’t realize myself it had happened until it already had. All I can give you is what I have myself: the memories of a man who was there.

  Do you remember the time I convinced your mother to play with the Opera? Perhaps not. I don’t think she brought you with her. It was a dazzling performance. The music is supposed to be secondary to the libretto, but the night that Katherine played the arias meant nothing. The audience stood and cheered for the pianist. Your mother glowed. She glowed, Anna.

  But that is not my clearest memory of that evening. This is: After the performance, we went downtown to celebrate. The entire cast was there, and the orchestra, and, of course, Hana Weissova, your mother’s dearest friend.

  Your mother was constantly surrounded by people. They were congratulating her, urging her to resume her career, or merely trying to bask for a moment in that glow.

  I watched her, and when I caught her eye, she looked both pleased and frantic, if it is possible to discern such plurality from one’s gaze. But then she looked past me and the fear vanished, replaced by such a sad joy that I turned to see what she was looking at.

  She was looking, of course, at Hana Weissova, who sat quietly in a corner, nursing a Scotch. Hana smiled back at her, and that is when I knew.

  I made my way over to Hana, and sat down next to her on the little couch. I know you will find this hard to believe, but I didn’t know what to say, so I merely smiled at her.

  “Look at her,” she said, gesturing with her chin, and I did look. Then I looked back at Hana, who smiled and said, “Never believe that you have lost happiness forever, Carl. It will always find you once again. I do not understand, but it is so.”

  “Thank you, Carl,” I whispered.

  “De nada,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  But it wasn’t.

  It was mid-July, and hot, but that wasn’t why Paul came home from work nearly breathless. “They want me to go to Israel,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. I knew who “they” were.

  “I can’t tell you exactly,” he hedged, but then immediately grew excited again. “You can come, too. That’s what they said. That I should bring you with me.”

  I went into the den and sat down, knowing he would follow. I heard him mix our drinks, and then he came and handed me mine before easing into his recliner.

  “Why would I want to go to Israel?” I asked. “Take your mother.”

  Paul threw back his head and laughed, a gesture and sound I hadn’t seen or heard for so long that I was startled. “Why would I want to take my mother? he asked. “I want to take my wife. You know, a vacation?”

  “But you’ll be working.”

  “So? You can play tourist while I work.”

  “There are terrorists.”

  “And there are drive-by shootings in Albuquerque. Come on, Anna. It’ll be fun.”

  Fun? How could this stranger I called my husband talk to me of fun? But—didn’t Raja live in Israel? Hadn’t there been something in the will?

  “There’s someone I might visit there…” I began.

  Paul flipped his chair forward and came and sat down next to me on the couch. “That’s my girl,” he said.

  I winced; these were my father’s words. But I was also pleased that my husband and I were having a conversation that involved us both, and pleased too that he seemed excited about something—and that he was sharing that excitement with me.

  “And you’re a g
ood boy,” I said in a voice I hadn’t used with him for many, many years. In response, Paul took my glass and set it down, and then he kissed me.

  I got her name and address from the lawyer: Raja BenTov, 18 Chaim Weizmann, Haifa, Israel.

  Dear Ms. BenTov, I wrote,

  My husband and I will be visiting Israel in early August, and I would like to arrange, if possible, to meet you, to take you to lunch, to talk to you about your sister Hana Weissova, who I have been told was very close to my mother, Katherine Holtz.

  I look forward to hearing from you, and to meeting you.

  Yours very truly,

  Anna Holtz Kramer

  And then, a mere week later, a letter came back, a lovely pale blue airletter, a lovely pale blue stamp in its corner.

  Dear Mrs. Kramer:

  I am delighted to hear from you! Katherine’s daughter! I wondered if I ever would! And you will be in Israel! This is wonderful news! You and your husband will stay with me in Haifa—my house is much too large for one woman who daily grows smaller and her two much-too-indulged little dogs.

  You will no doubt want to see the diaries and letters Hana asked me to keep. “Someday Anna will want to understand,” she said, and that someday has finally arrived.

  Your mother was a beautiful and singular woman, and I am proud to have met her when I visited New Mexico in 1964. Hana loved her very much—but this you already know. Hana’s life was not an easy one, and yet she allowed herself joy despite all her sorrow. Your mother was a particularly great joy to her.

  As I know you will be to me. I shall count the days until you arrive.

  Shalom,

  Raja BenTov

  I wanted to take the diaries and scores with me but I was afraid they would be lost. My solution was to spend an afternoon at Kinko’s in Santa Fe, painstakingly making copies of everything. It ended up costing a lot of money, but the peace of mind was well worth it.

  Paul seemed so pleased that I’d decided to accompany him. He’d been to Israel once before, during a high school summer—1967, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Like Raja, he noted Israel’s similarity to New Mexico. “But it’s different, too,” he added. You feel the history there. It’s in the air.”