The soloist

by Salzman, Mark

  "I'm not unwilling to deliberate. Your Honor. I think the other jurors are just extremely frustrated that I don't share their opinion."

  "Are you honestly listening to their opinions, Mr. Sund-heimer.>"

  "Yes, I am."

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  "And you honestly feel that there is no chance of your changing your mind?"

  "Your Honor, the deliberations have become repetitive— we're not getting anywhere. We've covered all the points many times. The disagreement between me and the other eleven jurors is fundamental, not a disagreement over details."

  The judge paused for a long time, then exchanged a weary glance with the prosecutor. He sighed heavily, leaned forward in his seat and, addressing the whole courtroom, said, "The jurors having been polled, the court finds that further deliberations would be meaningless and that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked. The court declares a mistrial, and the jury is excused."

  All of a sudden it was over. This time the dead Zen master's mother was not in the gallery. Ms. Doppelt nodded gratefully at me, but I couldn't imagine that she had much to celebrate. Now she was going to have to do the whole thing over again.

  Philip Weber smiled in the same bland way he had throughout the trial. His father reached forward and touched him on the shoulder, but it was an awkward gesture, and Philip didn't seem to react to it at all. He looked over at the jury box, and I'm sure he could tell that I was the one— maybe because I was the only one looking at him. Our eyes met, and after a pause of a few seconds, he shrugged, as if to say, Who knows? It was a very unsatisfying ending.

  They say that after reaching a verdict, most juries are able to reconcile their differences, heal the wounds created during the most heated arguments and leave with a generally positive feeling. Not so our jury; we had failed, and everyone went

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  home angry Toward the end of the deliberations only two people remained polite to me: Grace, who seemed incapable of raising her voice at anyone, and Dwight, who remained controlled during the whole procedure. I suspect it had something to do with his military background; he'd had to keep his head under worse conditions, I'm sure. Maria-Teresa had never yelled at me, but she had made no effort to conceal her exasperation.

  WTien Judge Davis declared the trial over, only Dwight said good-bye to me before leaving the courthouse; he said something about knowing what I must have felt like through the ordeal. He even shook my hand. I didn't see Maria-Teresa leave; I could understand why she would want to get out of there without having to talk to me again. I waited in the empty room for about rv'enty minutes so I wouldn't have to ride on the shuttle with any of the others, then left the courthouse. I was halfway down the front steps when I heard someone call my name.

  It was Ms. Doppelt. She walked up to me and said, "I just wanted to say thank you. I've never had to go through what you had to go through, and I don't know that I could. That was a hard trial to sit through, and a very hard one to understand clearly. You did, though, and you did a very important thing, and under unbelievably bad circumstances. I won't ever forget it."

  I was unable to tell her how much her appreciation meant to me. We shook hands, and my experience as a juror at last came to an end.

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  After a few days I called Kyung-hee's mother to resume his lessons, but right away I sensed that she felt uncomfortable talking to me. "Sorry fe)r trouble you," she said, "but Kyung-hee no more coming your house fc)r lessons. Kyung-hee very sorry."

  I asked why and she seemed hesitant to discuss it, but finally I was able to learn that her husband had had mixed feelings about lessons with me from the beginning. He felt that it was too expensive for them, for one thing, and involved too much driving time for Mrs. Kim. But, most important, he wanted Kyung-hee to spend more time on his math. For the first time, I learned that the boy showed as much promise in that subject as in music. Which explained, at last, how the Kims could be so perversely unenthusiastic about Kyung-hee's musical ability. Faced with their child's two extraordinary gifts, they worried that trying to pursue both might be a mistake. Now Mr. Kim had, perhaps understandably, decided that music was the more expendable of the two. In view of this, he had decided that Kyung-hee should study the cello once a week rather than twice, and with a local cello teacher who was less demanding and who

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  charged a more reasonable fee of eight dollars for forty-five minutes.

  In spite of my deep disappointment, I did not tr' to persuade Mrs. Kim to change her husband's mind. After the ordeal of the trial I didn't have the energ' to argue with anyone, and even if I did—offering to teach their son for free, for example—I would still have had to cope with Mr. Kim's resentftil suspicions that I was leading his son into poverty, and I did not want to find myself in that situation.

  I stopped practicing entirely after the trial ended. The few times I forced myself to try, it was like playing with mittens on my hands.

  Toward the end of that summer I moved out of my apartment and found a place in the hills up north, away from campus and the cit>^ Fall came and went, then winter, and I still didn't play. I taught without using my cello at all. I don't remember much about that time. It was as if for seven or eight months my mind was fiill of static, a cloud of soft noise, and I had only a slight awareness of what lay on the periphery. It was like a dream where you want to look at something but your eyes can see everywhere but right in front of you. For that whole period my cello stayed in its case in my bedroom closet.

  Then, in February, Mrs. Kim called and asked if I was still teaching. She said that Kaing-hee didn't like his new cello teacher at all, and indicated that his grades in math had suffered rather than benefited from the shift in emphasis away from music. Also, she said several times that he had never stopped begging to be allowed to study with me again, and Mr. Kim had finally given his wife permission to call me. In view of my having stopped playing altogether, along with my

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  general state of mind at the time, I was not sure I could be a good teacher for Kyung-hee anymore, but it gave me some pleasure to know that he had missed me, as I had missed him, so I agreed to try again. He and his mother came over to the new apartment on Saturday morning and I felt genuinely happy to see him. He seemed almost afraid to look at me that first day, however, probably from embarrassment over my having been fired by his parents the year before.

  I asked Kyung-hee what he'd been working on with his other teacher, and his shoulders drooped a little. He reported that they had been playing a lot of Popper and Griitz-macher—dull student exercises, for the most part. But, he said, on his own he'd been practicing the Bach suites I'd given him, and he wanted to play the fifi:h for me.

  From the moment his bow touched the strings I could see that he had matured; he was more relaxed, and had obviously benefited fi-om his technical studies. By the time he finished the suite twenty minutes later, something in me had changed. Perhaps it sounds mystical, but I really did feel something move in me; it was both a physical and an emotional sensation. Never in my life have I cried in fi-ont of a student while he was playing, but that morning I did. Imagine! In fi-ont of a small boy like that. Fortunately, he was so intensely absorbed in the music that he didn't seem to notice my reaction, and I managed to control my emotions before he finished.

  While Kyung-hee played, the music seemed to have hands that reached into my chest, took a firm grip and shook me savagely—so hard that I felt as though I were really waking up fi*om a dream. It was like waking up from a dream only to realize that you are in another dream, but then finally you wake up for real, and there is something unmistakable about

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  that reality—you arc really waking up. That was what I felt like; it was so strong that it was like a hallucination. When I opened my eyes and looked around me, what I saw was a tiny boy plaing the cello, and I felt engulfed, swept away by something immediately familiar. It was the experience of music I had felt almost ever>' day for the
first half of my life. As he played I remembered what it felt like to be playing the music myself. Then I had a strange thought. I said to myself, It's so simple and so obvious: when he plays, the music goes into my ears, resonates in my mind and becomes a part of me! It becomes my music too. When I thought about it that way, the boy's awkward personalit% his appearance, his unfortunate situation at home—everything about him—became irrelevant except for the music. I had a delicious sense that teaching K>amg-hee might just possibly be enough. It could fill in the blanks; it could satisfy^ me.

  After Kamg-hee left that afternoon I took a drive up into the mountains to the east, to Mt. Wilson, where there is a huge observatorv' housing a telescope with a mirror a hundred inches in diameter. Fd read in one of my books that it was while looking through this telescope that Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, and had all started from one unimaginably large explosion at a single, infinitesimal point. I parked at a turnout in the road near the observatorys got out of the car and looked down at the ocean to the west and the cit>' directly to the south.

  From the mountains or from a plane the smog has distinct boundaries and real substance to it. It's toxic and depressing, but all the same there's something cozy about the way it looks. It's like a soft brown comforter draped over the cit>'.

  I wanted to sit on the ground at the edge of the turnout,

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  but at first I couldn't bring myself to do it in my good pants. Vd still not forgotten to dress up for lessons. But then I thought, What do I care, no one's going to see me up here. So I sat down. It felt so funny that I laughed aloud. It must have been twenty years since I'd sat on the ground.

  The city spread out in all directions, a huge basin of stucco buildings, parking lots and swimming pools, with a tight cluster of high rises stranded in the middle. Suddenly those downtown buildings reminded me of the Rodin sculpture "The Burghers of Calais": five or six figures standing close together, with horrible expressions on their faces because they're about to be executed. The high rises aren't ugly in themselves, but hemmed in by all of that crap surrounding them it was easy to imagine that they were leaning toward one another in despair.

  The white dome of the observatory behind me made me think of one winter afternoon in Ederstausee, just after my eleventh birthday, when von Kempen asked my mother and me to stay on for a while after the lesson to see what he called "a celestial performance." When the grandfather clock upstairs in his music room struck five o'clock, the three of us looked out the bay windows over his garden and saw the full moon, newly risen over the reservoir, glowing a dull, copper-ish red.

  ^'Mondfinstemis,^^ he said reverently—a lunar eclipse.

  I asked what this meant and he explained that the sun, the earth and the moon were now perfectly aligned so that the moon was now entirely in the earth's shadow; it could receive no direct light fi-om the sun.

  "So why can we still see it.>" I asked.

  The old master looked genuinely puzzled and limped over to his desk, where he picked up a newspaper, held it under

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  a light and, using a huge magnifying glass, read what was apparently a brief article about the eclipse.

  ''Ah, yes. Dear boy—such a fine, inquiring mind!—the paper tells us that the moon receives a bit of indirect sunlight thanks to our own earth's atmosphere, which deflects the light and sends some of it toward the moon."

  In spite of the moon's diminished brightness, I could see details on its surface more clearly than I ever had before, perhaps for the same reason that distant trees and mountains look sharper when seen through darkened glasses. Von Kempen returned to the window to admire the scene further, then chuckled to himself. ''I just thought of something," he said, opening a fresh can of blended tobacco. "The moon and I, we have something in common. Can you guess what it is.>"

  "No, Herr Professor."

  "Oh, come! Take a guess, at least."

  I could never think quickly when put on the spot. My mind went blank, but to satisfy my expectant teacher I blurted out, "You both have reddish faces.>"

  The old cellist laughed out loud, but my mother was horrified. "What a thing to say!" she said loudly in English.

  Thankfully, von Kempen leaped to my defense before she could scold me any further. "Not at all, meine Hebe Frau Sundheimer. The young maestro is quite right. But I was thinking of something else." He lit his pipe, puffed at it dreamily, and then laughed quietly once again. "I am still visible because of you—that is why I am like the moon. How fortunate I am that you play the cello."

  Nearly a quarter century later I understood all too well what he meant. I heard myself think, My old life is done now—it's over. I didn't know whether to be afraid, delighted

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  or worried. It was such an unexpected thought that I didn't know how to feel at all. At that moment, I finally ceased to be a concert cellist. I felt detached from myself, if that makes any sense, but at the same time I was all there. Who else, after all, was this man sitting on the ground in his good pants.^

  I suppose I'd always thought of myself as a good man, a talented man, a professional musician with the right ideas about important matters, one who would never do anything really wrong. I've always simply assumed this; I could make small mistakes of judgment, I could have little accidents, but I would always make great music and never willftilly do anything really foolish or bad. Sitting on the edge of the turnout, though, I began to suspect that maybe I wasn't that man after all. I felt that now I could see my life from several different perspectives, giving me views of myself that were not all flattering. My failed career, the way I'd avoided my parents since leaving home, the way I'd resented my students' successes, my clumsiness with women. I did not become upset, however; it didn't hurt to think about these things. I just sat there and observed, completely enthralled. It was like that television program where the fat critic and the skinny one argue about movies. Except that here it was many critics, and the movie was me.

  On that day I began to have a different idea about why I couldn't play onstage anymore. I'd always assumed it had to do with my sense of pitch, because that was certainly what I'd noticed had changed. I couldn't hold on to the dead center of notes anymore because my pitch had become too sensitive; my fingers couldn't keep the notes pure enough. It felt like trying to split hairs with a butter knife. But now I started to think that maybe the problem had nothing to do with my ears.

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  When I was a child performer I could do no wrong. Anthing I did pleased an audience; I had no fear at all of making mistakes. There was also no question that I was going to get even better; ever>'one told me so, it was promised to me. When I was sent to von Kempen, I was going to become the next von Kempen. I was even going to surpass him; he himself predicted that, joyfully. But what had once been limidess expression for me suddenly acquired boundaries. I was the unfinished version of some greater perfection. I had no choice but to try to search deeper and deeper until I found that perfection and brought it to the surface. So I tried; I searched, I went deeper, but I felt like a diver jumping into the deepest part of the ocean without equipment and trying to find a sunken galleon. No matter how deep I went, there was not only no treasure, but no bottom. And that was when von Kempen died, just at the crucial time. When I needed him most he was taken away from me, and that made it much worse. With him gone, the expectation that I would bring his music to life in all its glory, to restore his honor and incomparable voice and at the same time establish my own, grew much stronger. It came from all sides—^my parents, critics, music patrons and, most of all, me.

  If a thirtv^-year-old man were to play exactly the way I did at fifteen, no one would have insisted that he become better. No one would have said, "I can't wait to hear you when you're forty!" Now I think I know what happened to me. Since musically I couldn't see how to improve, any more than one can willfully improve one's capacity- for hunger or joy, I turned my attention to the only aspect I c
ould control, which was intonation. I knew that, for example, musicians can become used to minor thirds that are too large. I became obsessed with locating any such habits in my own playing,

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  and for all practical purposes forgot that absolute intonation does not exist. As my mind focused on the impossible goal of achieving pure intonation, I became unable to feel the music. It was the same problem as what happened when I was staring at Maria-Teresa's family pictures and trying to make love to her at the same time.

  When you play music well, you are transported. However, my experience has been that you cannot make great music happen; you can only prepare yourself for it to happen. To a degree, your preparation determines what will happen, but once it starts happening you have to surrender yourself to it. Once you do so you are free, except that you are free only within the boundaries you created through your preparation. When, at eighteen, I started trying to force great music to happen I ended up making awful music; in fact, it wasn't even music anymore.

  It seemed as if that boy who killed his Zen teacher also wanted to achieve an impossible sort of purity. Before the incident during the retreat, he apparendy hoped that Zen would help him transcend his imperfect life all at once, in a flash; he wanted to become somebody else, somebody whose wisdom allowed him to experience perfect freedom. Maybe he did experience a kind of freedom when he lost his mind, but from any point of view other than his own it was a lousy kind of freedom.