The Brahms Deception

by Louise Marley

  She had looked into her heart but found only innocence and loneliness. It had not seemed so terrible, after all, to spend two weeks with Hannes, to enjoy a private holiday to soothe her weary spirit. She began to look forward to it, to treasure their little secret, to plan how to do it, what to take, what she would say. Her step was lighter for a time, and she suspected her eyes glistened with anticipation. She felt as if she could, perhaps, be happy again.

  Kristian brushed stray raindrops from his hair as he walked back down the dim corridor. There was no sound from the transfer room, or from the bedrooms on the floor above. He pushed open the heavy door into the kitchen. The bright ceiling light stabbed at his eyes, and he squinted at the group clustered around the island. Elliott and Max were gazing at a printout, and Chiara sat with her chin in her hands, watching a pot bubble on the stove. When the door whispered shut, she glanced up.

  “Ciao, Kris,” she said. “Elliott has an e-mail from Chicago. They have put someone on a plane. She will be here tomorrow evening.”

  Kristian glanced at the big wall clock. It read 2:15, but the hour seemed meaningless now, to both his mind and his body. Time, he thought, had become something elastic, stretching and twisting and distorting itself. It seemed he existed in two places at once—a sunny May day in Castagno of 1861 and this raindrenched February night, squinting beneath electric lights. It was making his head spin. He pressed his fingers to his temples.

  Chiara was at his side in a moment, one small hand under his arm. She led him to one of the stools, and pressed him onto it. “Sit,” she said. “There will be something to eat in a moment.”

  Elliott raised his head from the itinerary before him. “You’re time-lagged,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go back.”

  Kristian set his teeth to stop the retort he wanted to speak. Max noticed, and shook his head. “I know you’re disappointed, but it’s the best thing. You’ve already transferred three times in a short period—it’s not good.”

  Kristian said, in a tone that grated on his own ears, “Who are they sending?”

  Without speaking, Max shoved the itinerary across the metal countertop. Kristian read the name at the top. “They can’t be serious.”

  “They are,” Elliott said glumly.

  “Better gird your loins, everybody,” Max said. “This is going to be brutal.”

  Chiara looked blank. Kristian said, “It’s Lillian Braunstein, Chiara. She invented the transfer process, and she’s not a particularly nice woman.”

  “Ho capito.” Chiara turned to the stove, where cloves of garlic were simmering in olive oil. The pasta pot steamed, and she gave it a stir, then turned the garlic in the skillet. “You like garlic, Kris?”

  Kristian forced himself to speak lightly. “So far, I like everything you cook, Chiara.”

  “Bene. I am making aglio e oglio.”

  “Can I help?”

  She pointed to the enormous Sub-Zero on her left. “We will have a salad. Lettuce and cucumbers are there.”

  “Tomatoes?”

  She eyed him over her shoulder. “The tomatoes are in a basket by the window. We never chill tomatoes.”

  Her stern look made Kristian smile despite himself. He set about washing and cutting vegetables, then slicing the fragrant tomatoes. He told himself he wouldn’t think about Braunstein. He wouldn’t think about Clara. Perhaps he should leave even before Braunstein arrived. Just get on a plane.

  Chiara brought him a wide pottery bowl, and he tossed the salad in it. She added oil and balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. Elliott and Max set out plates for the salad and bowls for the pasta. Soon all four of them were perched around the island. The pasta was magnificent, dotted with crusty cloves of garlic, drowned in the greenest olive oil Kristian had ever seen, and liberally sprinkled with some strong grated cheese. Chiara saw him raise his eyebrows at the taste of it.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Love it,” he said. “What is this cheese?”

  “Pecorino. It is from sheep’s milk, a specialty from the mountains.”

  “It’s great,” Max said around a mouthful. Elliott nodded, and waved a fork in salute.

  Despite his dark mood, Kristian was hungry. The moment of good cheer helped him through the meal. As he passed the salad to Elliott for a second helping, he said, “Do you live in Chicago, Elliott?”

  “Native,” Elliott said. “My partner and I have an apartment on the Near North Side.”

  “How about you, Max?”

  Max finished the last of his pasta and put down his fork. He leaned back, patting his lean belly. “I’m from Oregon,” he said. “On the coast. I moved to Chicago to work for the Foundation. It sounded interesting.”

  Kristian blinked. Suddenly Max was standing at the sink with dishes in his hand. Elliott’s second helping of salad had disappeared. Chiara was staring at Kristian, frowning, as if he had done something odd. “What is it?” he said.

  “You’re losing time,” Elliott said.

  “You blanked out,” Max said.

  “No,” Kristian said hastily. “No, I’m fine. I was just—distracted.”

  He was afraid to ask what he had missed. He didn’t know how many minutes had elapsed. It couldn’t matter that much, surely. He looked down at his plate and saw that his food was gone. He drank some water, and did his best to act normally. It was surprisingly difficult. He was suddenly aware of every movement, every sound. He avoided Chiara’s sharp gaze.

  Elliott said, “I’d better get to bed, I guess. I’ll have to head out to Pisa about noon.”

  Max said, “I’m going to sleep until she gets here. Somebody better wake me before you get back, though. She’ll eat me alive if I’m in bed when she arrives.”

  “Yes, you should sleep. I will wake you,” Chiara said. She stood, and began to gather the plates. “I will sit beside Frederica tonight.” Kristian jumped up to help her. “You should sleep, too, Kris.”

  Kristian didn’t say anything, but when Elliott and Max had both left the kitchen he said, “I’ll stay up with you, Chiara.”

  She was at the coffee machine, preparing an espresso. “It is not necessary,” she said. “I am used to these odd hours.” She pulled combs from her hair and replaced them, pushing at the mass of curls with her hands. Kristian laughed, and she said, “Cosa?”

  “You keep doing that,” he said. “It never looks any different.”

  She laughed. “I know. I should cut it, I suppose.”

  “No! I love it as it is.” As she put a small cup beneath the spout, he said, “Make me one, too. I really can’t sleep.”

  She took another of the little cups from a cupboard. “I could give you something.”

  “I don’t like to take drugs.”

  “You should be tired.”

  “I’m tired, all right.” He took the cup she held out to him, and sniffed the roasted coffee aroma. “But it’s not the same as being sleepy.”

  They went back to the island and settled themselves. Chiara took a cautious sip from her cup, then set it down. “Tell me what it’s like,” she said.

  “What, the transfer?”

  “Yes. Tell me what you felt.”

  “It’s hard to put into words,” he said slowly. “Even though you can’t smell anything or touch anything, it’s real. It’s as real as being in this kitchen, as sitting here with you. No one knows you’re there, but you can see and hear everything.”

  She ran a finger around the rim of the little cup. “I think,” she said lightly, her gaze flicking up to his and then down again, “that there is something you do not like to tell us. Something that happened which would—perhaps which would be worse for Frederica.”

  He chewed on his lip for a moment. He could tell her. He wondered if he had already told her something, something he couldn’t remember, something he had lost when he lost time. He drew a breath, thinking perhaps he would blurt it all out.

  He waited too long. Chiara sighed, and
set her cup aside, letting the subject drop. “Well. I am going to—how did you say it?—grab a shower. I’ll be in the transfer room in half an hour.”

  “I’ll see you there. Thanks again for the great meal.”

  When she had gone, Kristian gathered the remaining plates and bowls and flatware and rinsed them. He loaded the dishwasher, and set the pans to soak. With a last look around the kitchen, he put his hand on the light switch and . . .

  Found himself at the piano in the reception room. He blinked. He couldn’t remember walking to it, going past the stairs, past the closed door of the transfer room. He barely remembered Chiara telling him the piano was here. He couldn’t recall coming in, folding back the dust cover to expose the keyboard, pulling out the bench.

  This, as Max would have said, wasn’t good. But he didn’t know how to fix it.

  He was already seated on the bench, and his hands had just found a chord on the yellowed keys. It was the piece Clara had been playing, the A-Major Quartet, with its marking of p dolce. He knew it perfectly, in its final, published version. He had meant it to feature prominently in his unfinished dissertation. He played a few bars, but the piano was out of tune and some of the keys were cracked. The low C-sharp didn’t work at all, and one of the pedals stuck.

  He lifted his hands, the phrase unfinished. It wasn’t right to play Brahms on this instrument. He hesitated a moment, then plunged into one of his Angel’s standards. “It Had to Be You.” The irony of it made him smile, and he sang the words under his breath as he played.

  Doggerel, really. Words chosen to rhyme rather than reason, but still, they were words that meant something to people, and combined with a charming little tune they stayed in the mind, touched the heart. Not every poem had to be Goethe, after all.

  He played through to the bridge, modulated, and began the verse again a step higher. He sang a bit louder, the vibrations of his voice in his head and his chest making him feel a bit more grounded, as if he knew where he was. When he was. As if—

  “That is very pretty.” He glanced up. Chiara had come in. She was wearing a sweater and jeans, standing in the door of the reception room, one small, perfect hand on the doorjamb. “Is that one of the songs you play for the Angel’s?”

  “In Angel’s, yes,” he said. His fingers went on with the song, just as they so often did at the piano in the bar, though he was looking at Chiara. Her hair was neatly brushed back, for once, and he noticed for the first time that she wore no makeup. She didn’t need it, with her dark eyelashes and clear, dusky skin. He felt an irrational urge to touch her, to know if her cheeks were as firm as they looked, if her lips were as soft. With an effort, he forced himself to look down at his hands as he finished the song.

  She came to the piano, and propped one hip against it, looking down at him. “It is very sweet, isn’t it?”

  “And very old.”

  She shrugged. “Well, not so old perhaps. Not so old as Brahms.”

  “No—you’re right. I suppose I meant, for popular music.”

  “Brahms was popular, in his time, was he not?”

  “Well, yeah. He was. There wasn’t that divide between classic and popular music, not the way we think of it now.” A little melody trickled from beneath his fingers, a Lied half-remembered. When he realized it was one of the pieces from Catherine’s recital, he stopped playing it. He didn’t want to think about Catherine, not with Chiara standing so near him.

  He began a little Mozart sonatina instead. Its orderliness made him feel better, more grounded in the moment, as if it helped to order his synapses. Chiara, arms folded, head to one side, listened. When he finished it, she smiled. “I like to hear you play.”

  He grinned up at her. “I like playing.” He started another piece, without really considering his choice. It was Clara Schumann’s little Polonaise in E-flat. “She was only ten when she composed it,” he mused aloud. “Ten years old.” His fingers lingered on the final chord, and he imagined her as she was in the portrait of 1829, her eyes enormous in her pixie face, her little hands delicately made. She had written four polonaises as a child, and he knew them all.

  Chiara spoke softly, as if not wanting to disturb his train of thought. “Who, Kristian? Who was only ten years old?”

  “Clara.” He answered without thinking. “She played it for Paganini, and he loved it.”

  “Who is Clara?” Chiara held herself very still, as if she knew that what he was saying, what he had played, were significant.

  He looked up at her, struck to the heart by her sensitivity. He meant to say something like that, something about how lovely she was in the dim light, how beautiful her eyes were, gleaming, long lashed, but something happened to him as he gazed at her, and he was once again in 1861, listening to Clara play this same little piece with its lilting dance rhythm.

  Paganini, who had himself been a child prodigy, was so moved by the young Clara’s performance that he exclaimed afterward she had real feeling in her art. He said other things, gave warnings meant to protect a young artist already working too hard. Friedrich Wieck had ignored them. He was focused on Clara’s success, her fame, the money and honor she could bring him.

  That moment still existed. Musicologists knew the date and the place of that meeting. He could observe it if they would let him go back, see the Wiecks and Paganini, hear the music, marvel at Clara’s precociousness.

  It would be hard, though. He would want to put out his hand, help the child prodigy up from the piano, protect her from the rigors of her life to come. And unless he did what Frederica had done—

  “Kristian?”

  He blinked, and he was once again in the shabby reception room in the transfer clinic. Chiara was now seated beside him on the piano bench. She had one hand under his chin, the other on his wrist. His hands were still on the keys, but he had stopped playing. “What?” he said, confused. “What happened?”

  She stood up, and pulled him gently to his feet. “Come, lean on me,” she said. “It is time lag. You need to sleep.”

  “She didn’t speak until she was four,” he said.

  “Who didn’t speak, Kristian?”

  “Clara. She didn’t speak. That’s why he made her learn everything by ear, to prove to himself his daughter wasn’t deaf.”

  “You don’t need to think about Clara right now,” she said.

  He said, “I do! You don’t know what’s—,” and then caught himself.

  “Bed,” she said firmly. “Let me help you.”

  He put his arm around her shoulders. They were slender, but strong. Her hand on his waist was firm as she guided him toward the door. “I don’t think I can sleep,” he said.

  “You will try.” Her tone brooked no argument.

  They walked together up the stairs. Kristian concentrated hard on being present in the moment, not losing himself again. It wasn’t easy. Chiara’s warm, small body made him think of Clara with her slender waist and strong fingers. He found himself reluctant to let her go when they reached his room. She opened the door for him to go in, and he had to fight an urge to put both arms around her, to draw her close to him, to feel her warmth against his chest. That wasn’t right, and he knew it. She wasn’t Clara. She was Chiara.

  She was about to follow him into the room, but he put his hand on the doorjamb and stopped her. “I’ll manage,” he said, a little hoarsely. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “Non fa niente. Are you sure you don’t need something to help you fall asleep?”

  “I’d rather not. Thanks.” He watched her turn toward the stairway, and start down it. When she looked back, he lifted his hand and touched his forehead in a mock salute. “Don’t worry, dottoressa. Straight to bed.” She smiled, and disappeared down the staircase.

  Chiara, he reminded himself. That’s Chiara, jeans, sweater, a doctor. Not Clara.

  But in that odd, disorienting way that he had come to recognize, it seemed just as likely he had watched Clara descend the stairs. It seemed perfectly possibl
e that when he woke again May sunshine would be streaming in his window and Clara Schumann would be composing at the fortepiano in the reception room, the wide skirts of her dress spilling over the bench, an ink bottle and a pile of fresh nibs close to her hand. He would wake and hear the strains of ten-year-old Clara’s polonaise trickling up the stairs.

  He turned on his side, and then turned again, tangling in the silly tourist-attraction sheets. It was a long time before he fell into an uncertain slumber.

  11

  Frederica clung to Hannes’s arm as they walked around the little garden, stopping here and there to gaze down into the valley, or to wave at someone climbing up the narrow street. The morning had dawned full of clouds that shadowed the hills and striped the garden with shadows, but it was still deliciously warm, especially in the layers of clothes she had to wear. Frederica had managed the chemise, the lace-edged drawers with their pleated legs and rather mystifying open construction, the corset, the crinoline that held the skirts out. It was a bit hard to remember which went over what, but she thought she had it right. Had she known what she was going to do—that is, what was going to happen—she would have studied the clothes of the day along with the music!

  She had chosen a different dress today, one of a purple so dark it was nearly black, with a violet underskirt. There were no bright colors at all among the four dresses in Clara’s wardrobe, but this one suited her coloring, and set off the creamy pallor of her throat.

  It was hard to believe she had been here just two days, in real time. Everything was changed. She was living the sort of life she had dreamed of. She felt like a butterfly that had emerged from its chrysalis, completed its metamorphosis in one swift, splendid step.

  She imagined her mother and father rushing to Italy, bending over the still, pitiful form of that plain girl. She indulged in a brief twinge of sympathy for them, but it was easy to suppress it. They had their own lives, after all. Her mother had her bridge and her tennis. Her father had his business, and his boards. They would have to let her go.