by Andrew Ervin
Melanie watched Nanette repack the rest of her equipment. Then they bundled up and left together, circling the landing to the top of the stairs. They didn’t even bother to try the elevator. Stepping outside felt like walking into a city-sized meat locker. Smelled just as bad too.
“Looks like snow.”
“It’s too cold to snow,” Nanette said, “but at least all the dog shit has frozen.”
They walked up to the körút and took the tram one stop to Nyugati. The platform where they got off sat on an island in the middle of the four-lane road, between the glass-and-iron face of the station on one side and the shiny exterior of a huge communist-era department store on the other. A flight of stairs led to the underpass built beneath the körút and the train station. It reverberated with music and, already, drunken laughter and singing. Everyone wore red, white, and green ribbons. Their favorite of the many colorful local bums, the Fisher King, shuffled among the various street musicians collecting coins from passersby, his Burger King crown and filthy beard likewise decorated for the holiday. Nanette kissed Melanie good-bye and took the escalator farther down into the stinking bowels of the city, where she could jump on the blue line. Mel backtracked to the Budapest Suites. It was a relief to be on her own for a few hours. Away from Nan. The sidewalk seethed with revelers swinging plastic jugs of homemade wine and celebrating Hungary’s almost-was independence.
3.
The Budapest Suites stood out even amid the endless series of gorgeous art nouveau buildings that lined the körút. Each possessed a unique charm and state of disrepair. Melanie’s muscles grew tense as she approached the salon, which turned out to be open despite the holiday. Great news. Now fewer and fewer businesses closed for the national holidays; everything was open today.
A separate entrance for the salon steered people away from the lobby of the hotel, which appeared busy. From cold or worry, Melanie’s hands shook as she pushed through the revolving door. She forgot, however briefly, about her burning stage fright. She wanted to remember to pick up some pastries from the good cukrászda upstairs on her way out.
The building’s heat, cranked all the way up, enveloped her. Sweat licked coolly at the back of her neck and trickled down inside her shirt and cashmere sweater. An acute feeling of exposure lingered on her body from the photo session and she felt embarrassed, revealed in some way to the entire salon. The place buzzed with life and gossip and an annoying, standard-issue techno beat she believed undeserving of the term “music.”
A half dozen people in the reception area smoked English cigarettes and dropped the ashes into their own and others’ glasses of sparkling wine. Whatever excitement she felt about her pending new look faded in a spritz of fruit-scented hairspray. Everyone else looked like models, but she was chubby and gross. As an expat, she had grown accustomed to the locals’ sneers and snide looks—not everyone appreciated the presence of such a large and affluent foreign population. In the eyes of those present, she was no doubt contributing to the stereotype of the ugly American. The disdain was palpable.
“Do you speak English?” she asked the woman behind the desk. The receptionist’s low-cut T-shirt revealed enough of her huge breasts for Melanie to admire the tanning-bed-induced, baked-potato texture of her skin.
“Yes,” she said, exhaling loudly.
“Are you Judit?”
The receptionist’s lipstick parted like a pouty vermilion sea. “Judit, uhn, is very busy. Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m a guest of the hotel,” she lied, “and a friend of Nanette Oread.”
The woman rolled her eyes and exhaled again. “Just wait. You can sit.”
She stood and disappeared into the next room. As the frosted-glass door opened, Melanie saw a series of women having their hair washed by a band of white-robed attendants hovering over a row of sinks. The intricate motion of the various stylists, hair washers, and the occasional customer appeared choreographed, like a secret dance of the Hungarian nouveau riche. Women young and old prepared for holiday parties and gallery openings across the city. Some of them might be at her concert a little later. The nausea contemplated an encore. The most compelling people present were those with no apparent role in the unfolding drama, those who gathered only to watch and to be seen watching. She waited for what had to be fifteen full minutes before the receptionist came back. “Judit can help you today, but you must wait.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know—thirty minutes. Maybe more.” She looked like she was made out of crinkly brown construction paper.
“Fine,” Melanie told her, unwilling to be frightened off. She sat and tried to make herself comfortable.
Her Hungarian wasn’t perfect, far from it, but it wasn’t bad for someone who had never taken lessons. She understood just enough to follow the conversations around her. The ladies-in-waiting were agog over some Hollywood actor’s visit to Budapest to shoot a film, and about a famous transvestite’s appearance in that very salon just yesterday. One woman, accompanied by her daughter and her daughter’s Puli, looked like the recipient of at least one face-lift that didn’t take.
A glamorous woman of indeterminate age approached and said, “Kávé vagy pezsgő?” and upon receiving an answer fetched a hot mug of surprisingly good coffee. Vienna’s famous coffee houses were just three hours away, yet it was still next to impossible to find a decent cup in Budapest. A little hair of the dog would have done her some good, but Melanie never drank alcohol before a concert. She sipped slowly and self-consciously, holding the saucer in her lap the way her mother had taught her. The usual magazines stood in perfumed stacks on the table, along with several unread, erect-postured hardcover books and current issues of the three local newspapers written in English. She flipped through one while listening in on the conversations around her. The caption “Nanette Oread” appeared beneath every photo. The cover story detailed the different Independence Day festivities throughout the city, and she was surprised to find a long feature on Lajos Harkályi on the front page of the Arts section. Much of it was lifted almost verbatim from the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but it was also more or less common knowledge. Born in Hungary, Harkályi had been sent to a concentration camp as a child, which was where he started to compose music. After the war, with the personal help of Eugene Ormandy, he ended up at the Curtis Institute, where he devoted himself to composing music full-time. He labored for years in obscurity until a small indie label agreed to release his Symphony No. 4 (“Musik Macht Frei”), which according to the Pulitzer Prize announcement, “fulfilled all of the obligations of the masterpiece while simultaneously looking back in terror and forward with hope of redemption.” The album had sold four million copies and his subsequent recordings did nearly as well. Whatever. Sure, his story was tragic, but no one talked about the actual music.
A different woman finally escorted Melanie to the hair-washing area, where she was draped in an elegant silk smock and silently directed to a chair that tilted comfortably backwards to a sink of blue glass. She wished she had removed her sweater. Having her hair washed took forever because the woman used what had to be five or six different shampoos, conditioners, and rinses. She was leaned forward again, her hair patted down with a towel, then led to another room deeper in the heart of the hotel and into a plush, overstuffed version of a traditional barber’s chair. Four of them lined the full-length mirrored wall like obese ballerinas. From where she sat, the mirrors in front and behind revealed hundreds of her own bright-red faces staring back at her. In the spotless silver screens, the flat motion of the salon behind her took on the elegance of a vintage black-and-white film, but her own reflections looked like they had been crudely colorized for cable TV.
A heavily accessorized woman, presumably Judit, approached. She looked angry. Before she said a word, Melanie panicked. She wanted to scream, to throw a blow-dryer through the nearest mirror. She could already see her reflections shattering. They tinkled and sparkled on the marble floor.
She saw her severed hair among the broken glass, like some kind of lost limb that still tickled her scalp. She gagged. There was no way she could allow this woman to cut off her hair. She heard fabric tear as she pulled off the smock. She dropped a five-thousand forint bill on the counter, grabbed her coat, and bolted for the door. Everyone watched her in bemused disbelief. Melanie hated every last one of them.
Tears rolled down her face and ice formed in her hair. Unwilling to face the crowds back at Nyugati, and risk running into someone she knew, she pulled her coat close around her neck and rushed home. Four long blocks. She cried the entire way, uncontrollably, without any specific reason she could pinpoint. Nanette will never let her hear the end of it—she could be a total bitch like that sometimes. She half-jogged the entire way, sobbing into her scarf. Her teeth chattered. Clothes stuck to her damp skin. It felt like someone had dumped an ice bucket down her turtleneck. She couldn’t feel her ears, and was going to get pneumonia, but at least her headache was gone. A pack of drunk boys in generic-looking blue jeans and bootleg NBA jackets came out of the McDonald’s and jostled each other for her attention, taunting her with fake boo-hoo-hoo sobbing. She could still hear them as she slammed the apartment door behind her, shutting out the whole stupid city.
4.
Melanie stripped off her wet clothes and left them in a bunch on the kitchen floor. The whole room stank of garbage and sour milk and something so nasty she didn’t even want to attempt to identify it. She shoved some pans off the stovetop and onto the counter, creating a chain reaction that sent an ashtray full of butts crashing into the sink. She ignored the new pile of broken glass and filled the kettle from the tap. She took a match from the box and turned on the gas.
Naked, the usual heat of the apartment felt about right. An ogre in blue overalls lived downstairs in the dank basement of the building, from which he controlled the heat with a huge lever mounted on the wall. Every November 1 he switched it from OFF to SWELTER, and every April 1 he moved it back again, regardless of petty details like the actual atmospheric conditions. What he did with the rest of his time remained a mystery. He obviously didn’t work on the elevator. She and Nanette typically adjusted the heat by opening the living room windows and curtains to various apertures. None of that was necessary right then. Her ears and fingertips and toes still tingled. The radiators clanged and clanged around the clock; they needed to place bowls full of water and orange peels on them to prevent their skin from drying and cracking. The dry cold was murder. The kettle whistled, G-flat sliding up to D-sharp, before she removed it from the heat. Chamomile.
Melanie loved having the apartment to herself, even if it was a complete mess. Once the concert was over and done with she would scrub the floors, vacuum, dust. It’ll be like therapy. She carried the pot, a clean mug, and an oversized Milka bar into the bathroom and set them on the floor, where they kicked up a tiny puff of baby powder. She avoided looking at herself in the mirror and then realized that she was avoiding herself, so she looked. Her face was puffy. Rings had formed under her eyes. She dislodged some remaining specks of ice from her hair. She was exhausted, miserable. So absolutely miserable.
The pre-concert jitters manifested themselves most clearly in her stomach, which lurched at the very thought of appearing in front of an audience. She wanted to throw up in the sink. Obsessing only made it worse. It was uncontrollable. She knew, deep down, that some day people would catch on to her—they would discover that she was a fraud and did not possess even the vaguest hint of musical talent. It was certain to happen. It could happen today. Today, she wouldn’t even be able to hide down in the pit but, instead, would be up on stage in full view. On national television. The composer would be there. The entire nation of Hungary would be watching her. It would get made into a multiplatinum album.
The Polaroid and a few of Nanette’s less essential cameras were scattered around the living room. Melanie ran her finger along a row of CD spines and it stopped at some piano music. The Diabelli Variations—Beethoven’s simultaneous tributes to and parodies of his contemporaries. Anything to distract herself from the scene at the salon, from the impending opera. She didn’t even want to think about her violin just yet. She hated that violin sometimes, just like she hated her job. The opera orchestra was just a stepping-stone until she could get up the energy to move back home. She planned to audition for the Boston Symphony one day soon. In the meantime, she slipped into the tub. The suds rose slowly to cover her belly. The music wasn’t loud enough. Only the right hand was audible, the high end.
Slowly, oh so slowly, she felt her pre-concert nerves settling, as she knew they would. They always did. It was a terrible, exhilarating cycle: there existed a now-familiar transition, a fibrous layer separating her fear from the deep-rooted animal need to just get the concert underway. It was the waiting that killed her. Once it started, she would feel that gushing, can’t-step-in-it-twice river of sonic clarity that existed nowhere else but on stage; that feeling was precisely why she had learned to play music in the first place, why she pushed herself so hard to practice. Then, at the merciful end of every concert, with the applause raining down, she would want nothing more than for the music to start anew, to wash over her one more time. She would want to run back to the top of the slide and speed down again, laughing, screaming. This first climb up was the worst part. Right now, with her fingers beginning to prune, she struggled to recall that sense of self-erasure, that lovely erosion of her ego in favor of an artistic experience she will share with the audience, the other players, even the conductor. The glory of cozying up next to the godhead for a few movements. She relaxed more. She had chewed through half of the candy bar. Embarrassed by her private gluttony, glad Nanette wasn’t home, she wrapped the remaining part in its foil and slid it out of her immediate reach. As she did so, her hair splattered onto the tiled floor and despite the grief she knew to expect, she was pleased to feel it affixed to her head instead of severed and swept into piles in some trendy, faux-chic salon. As badly as she wanted a new look, she resigned herself for the time being to buying some new clothes instead. An entire spring wardrobe, if that was what it took. The Beethoven ended abruptly, seemingly in the middle of a waltz. The effect was jarring even before the CD changer rolled over to Nan’s most recent favorite band. It was noise, worse than static, and so popular that there was no getting away from it in any bar or supermarket. Melanie climbed out of the tub and wrapped her hair in a towel. She walked dripping through the apartment to change the music. It wasn’t that she disliked pop music per se. Even Bartók incorporated many elements of the folk tradition into his works, and a generation of contemporary composers would inevitably do the same with hip-hop and techno, but even at its best, she considered this four-four nonsense somehow antithetical to the natural rhythms of the human body. Or at least to the natural rhythms of her body. Pop music demanded attention to its own carefully packaged and marketed angst, yet came nowhere close to the emotional depth of, say, String Quartet No. 6. That was about angst too, real angst: World War II, the demise of the composer’s mother and motherland. The kind of music Melanie performed, or usually performed, had context. It had a spiritual depth. She put on Bartók’s No. 6 and turned up the volume. Then she put down another towel and lay on the edge of the bed that she still, for some reason, shared with Nanette. Her toes touched the rug and her skin was warm and smooth from bathing. She was still holding the glass bottle of lotion. She felt good, loose. With her hangover gone, forgotten, she started to get dressed. The new clothes she had purchased for the occasion were splayed out like a snow angel on the bed, and they included her first-ever pair of thigh-high stockings. Ankle-length skirt, long-sleeve shirt, and flats. The concert memo specified that she wear all white. All wholly inappropriate before Easter, but white suited Melanie. The skirt fit wonderfully. She looked ravishing, or as close to ravishing as she could get. She put on a heavy, antique sterling choker handed down from her grandmother. Family legend had it that Paul Revere hims
elf made the tiny ring that now served as the centerpiece. No earrings; her ears remained unpierced. No makeup—she couldn’t stand how it felt on her skin.
She had just enough time to warm up. She played her scales, ran through some of the opera’s trickier passages, and repacked her violin for the ride over to Batthyány Square. She would need to call a taxi. It was going to be a mob scene.
Most of Hungary’s so-called Class of ’56—those intellectuals who escaped during that year’s brief anti-Soviet uprising—had come back for museum exhibitions, concert appearances, and every manner of artistic residency. Melanie had seen countless “living legends” of science and the humanities paraded down Andrássy Boulevard, past the opera house and Oktogon to Heroes’ Square, where honor guards and cheering crowds welcomed them home. Hooray for Ernő Rubik and his cube! Harkályi had obviously left earlier, and in tragically different circumstances; his appearance today would mark his first trip to Hungary in decades, his first since he became an international sensation. The government had apparently tried to lure him back for years, since the success of his Symphony No. 4, and he had finally accepted the invitation. He had his pick of any concert hall and any orchestra in the world for the premiere of The Golden Lotus. Why he chose Budapest after all these years, much less the Opera Orchestra, was unclear.
Harkályi’s opera presented few real challenges, but the score did require half of the violinists, including Melanie, to tune their instruments a quarter tone lower. The resulting dissonance could be startling both for an uninitiated audience and for those in the orchestra. Keeping up required a lot more concentration than did their usual repertoire. She suspected that this stylistic device derived subconsciously from his time at Terezín. During the formative stages of his development as a composer, he must have grown accustomed to the tones of rickety instruments and so he based much of his subsequent work on some uniquely personal timbral system emanating from his inner ear. She wasn’t positive that was what had happened, but the theory went a long way toward her understanding of Harkályi’s artistic voice. Maybe that was one reason she didn’t hate this piece quite as much as she thought she would. And one section in particular, in the opera’s waning minutes, truly excited her. At the conclusion of every concert there existed that brief moment when the music had stopped yet the conductor maintained a beat or two of silence before dropping his shoulders or in some way motioning to the audience that they could applaud. Nothing in Harkályi’s oeuvre better lived up to the famous dictum about accounting for the “space between the notes,” or in this case, after the notes. Instead of resolving with the big dominant-to-tonic chords loved so well by the Beethovens and Brahmses of this world, the entire orchestra and the four voices performed around the themes woven in during the first few acts. Those melodies existed, but only as negative space in the music. They were what was absent. Harkályi required his musicians to play in long, glassy circles of harmony, with the occasional quarter-tone flourish appearing underneath the veneer like cracks in a frozen pond.