Extraordinary Renditions

by Andrew Ervin

  At the end of the final scene, the instruments, and eventually the singers, would drop out one by one over the span of twelve minutes, until only a timpani and a traditional string quartet remained, just a hair out of tune, to saw over a folk-influenced section that vacillated between a funeral march and a spirited danse macabre, then close with a gentle lullaby. The opera didn’t end as much as slowly, painfully die.

  Melanie’s violin, hidden in the rear of the section, would be the second-to-last thing the audience heard before the drums petered out into oblivion and presumably left the crowd enraptured and uncertain. She had been made to understand that she was chosen for the part not due to her abilities, but because her expensive Austrian violin possessed the perfect tone the part required. But so what? That breathless instant of tranquility right before the applause came would justify the endless rehearsals, the harassment and belittlement at the hands of that Napoleon-complexed conductor. Even Melanie had to give Harkályi some credit—the effect was numbing in its gracefulness. At least that was how it had sounded at rehearsal.

  5.

  The taxi crossed Margit Bridge into Buda but couldn’t get anywhere near Batthyány Square. The speakers immediately behind Melanie’s head rattled with a warped cassette of frenetic Gypsy music, puking up tones no violin should ever be forced to make. The driver pulled to a stop at a makeshift police barricade and lit a cigarette. The stink competed with three pine-tree air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror. Melanie felt vaguely queasy again. Two bored motorcycle cops in jackets of blue and white leather redirected traffic. The taxi driver rolled down his window for an explanation and a blast of cold air. More resigned than satisfied, the driver punched the meter and turned around with a ticket for 2,500 forints. Melanie handed him a five-thousand, but he shook his head. “No change,” he said. He opened his leather accordion wallet to demonstrate the vast empty vistas contained therein—a common enough ploy among Budapest cabbies. At one time she would’ve let him take the fiver. Instead, she fished out a half dozen hundred-forint coins and handed them over. “Köszönöm szépen,” she said sweetly, and stepped out into the cold. She half-expected him to get out and chase her down, but the bleating music faded behind her.

  Her breath looked like cigar smoke, which was also approximately how her clothes smelled. She was five blocks from the concert site and already running late. Wooden, blue-painted barriers blocked the streets, strangely free of the parked cars that typically clogged the sidewalks. A precaution, she surmised, intended to protect the political dignitaries who would be attending the opera. The police had shut down the entire neighborhood, and pairs of patrolmen stood around smoking and cursing on every corner. They never asked for her papírok. Unlike the majority of the expats she knew, Melanie’s documents were both legit and legal.

  Batthyány Square was a small city block-sized park across the Danube from the parliament building. Bums and drunks typically overran the benches and the subterranean red line metro station, secured for the afternoon, and would do so again once the camera crews and suits dispersed back up to the hills. Canapé tents and banks of lights filled the square, around which a fleet of shiny black Mercedes formed a double-parked ring. Many boasted diplomatic plates and ambassadorial flags.

  On the southern end of the square stood a Baroque-era church, freshly painted for the occasion. Some accounts said that Beethoven personally conducted the premiere of his König Stephen overture in there, which, according to one historian, explained how the building survived two World Wars and the Soviet occupation. Melanie was in awe, nervous as all hell, again, at the prospect of personally meeting the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven. And Mahler had once conducted for a season in the opera house, and that enlivened for her, at least slightly, even the most tedious reruns of yet another Erkel opera. She would sit in the pit and watch their little bastard of a conductor swirl his baton around and try to imagine old Gustav in the same position. Did his musicians, like they did nowadays, roll their eyes and make monkey ears behind his back? She imagined so. But Beethoven! The anticipation of performing in a church in which Beethoven himself brought to life those otherworldly notes and rests felt akin to walking in the footsteps of some true messiah. The promise of literal inspiration compelled her to get inside, to get in tune—and then correctly out of tune again. Because the recording engineers and the Hungarian secret service had occupied the church for the past week, the orchestra was never given the opportunity to rehearse there. She didn’t know what to expect from the acoustics, from the aura.

  A red carpet ran from the small fountain at the center of the square, across a street that was usually blocked by a line of pollution-spewing BKV buses, and down three steps into the church. The blinding-white exterior jumped out in extreme contrast to the dingy Angelika kávéház next door and, to the right of the square, the decaying redbrick railway station now owned by an Austrian supermarket conglomerate. A few soldiers milled around, guns drawn, sipping from Styrofoam cups of coffee, or something stronger. Portable outdoor heaters contributed to the overall merriment of the event.

  According to the gossip filtering through the pit during rehearsals, the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest had offered the orchestra the use of this church only after a three-part exposé in HVG elaborated the extent to which the Hungarian Catholic Church had collaborated with the Nazis. His eminence was expected to attend the premiere and, from the look of the security arrangements, so were the prime minister and perhaps even the president. Given the Hebraic flavor of Harkályi’s oeuvre, no one of authority had seriously considered the national cathedral up on Castle Hill or even Saint Stephen’s Basilica for the event.

  Melanie’s security clearance was going to depend upon her ability to find the orchestra’s stage manager. That the party outside continued unabated provided a reason to stop worrying about being late. The sight of the freely flowing alcohol brought flashbacks to the night before, to the taste of the vodka no doubt continuing its path through her bloodstream. She was sweating under her collar when she heard someone call her name: “Melanie, hey!”

  Woozy and distracted as she was, it actually came as an incredible relief to see Nanette, who gave her a sloppy public kiss. “You’re here?”

  “The prime minister’s here, or coming here, so I got sent over. You didn’t think I’d really miss your television debut? I wanted to surprise you. Here, I got it all scoped out.” She was visibly drunk. She took Melanie by the hand and led her through the celebrating throngs. “Sign in and you get an ID card. The security’s tight.”

  “I didn’t get my haircut.”

  “I fucking knew you wouldn’t, but I’m glad.”

  “You’re not going to give me grief about it?”

  Nanette squeezed her hand. “I might, but not today. You can’t take your phone backstage. I can drop it in my bag. If those metal detectors fuck up my film, I’m gonna kill someone. I guess I shouldn’t say that so loud around here.”

  Poised between the intense Hungarian winter and the artificial suns alighting the square, between her childhood and her adult life, between her unrequited wanderlust and her blossoming desire to get back to Boston, Melanie remembered why she once loved Nanette so much, however briefly.

  Nan brought her around the church and down Fő Street, which was also devoid of motor traffic and emptied of parked cars. A tree of intensely bright lights blocked the road and shone upon the modest, recently Windexed stained glass. Beyond the church they found a kind of truck trailer with a ticket window built into the side. A well-dressed will-call line snaked down the block, but Melanie stepped up to the window marked “Zenészek” and showed them her papers. A man in an Eskimo hood and mittens checked his clipboarded list and reluctantly handed her a photo ID badge to wear around her neck with instructions to remove it only once she got seated onstage. It was a terrible, living-dead picture, one of four taken in a Nyugati Station photo booth. He also gave her a ribbon of red, white, and green and ordered her to pin it over h
er heart.

  Fucking foreigner, his eyes said to her.

  “I should go,” she said. Nanette gave her another drunken hug and Melanie joined the security line forming in the alley behind the church, where most of the brass section and even the woodwinds, whose instruments were in danger of cracking from the cold air, were required to prostrate their cases on the frigid cobblestones. They took apart and reassembled trumpets and flutes, played stray notes here and there for the benefit of the humorless secret service agents and mustachioed policemen. They ran her violin through a portable X-ray machine, then, cleared, she stepped through what passed for a stage door leading to a foyer behind the altar. Another sentry eyed her badge and without warning patted her forehead, cheeks, and nose with makeup powder intended, she supposed, to make her less shiny for the cameras. A card table along one wall had cups of mineral water and cold black coffee. Teenaged altar boys carried the musicians’ coats and pocketbooks and instrument cases somewhere into the pit of the rectory and issued claim tickets that, instead of numbers, featured biblical verses. Melanie got one that said, “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”

  They used a cramped hallway as a kind of green room, from which she poked her head out into the church to get a feel for the space—far larger than it appeared from the outside—and to see about channeling the blessèd spirit of Beethoven. She strolled the perimeter of the room, climbed the conductor’s riser. She felt disoriented, overwhelmed, anxious to get started.

  There was no stage, no curtain. The altar had been carted off and their music stands and the rigid folding chairs sat splayed across the sanctuary, along with a dozen superfluous chairs that would go unused. The score to Harkályi’s Symphony No. 4 included instructions for the orchestra to place extra, empty chairs amid the musicians on stage in order to “honor those souls freed from the earthly bonds of Auschwitz,” and now organizers did the same thing at every concert of his music, whatever the composition. The stage crew today had placed empty chairs on the stage even though The Golden Lotus had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. Quite a gimmick, but audiences loved it. Even with that extra spacing, the musicians would be playing right on top of each other. She pitied the bassoons, soon to be seated in front of the long-armed trombonists, until realizing that she might not have access to her bowing arm’s full range of motion. When the production moved to the opera house, it was conceivable that the musicians would have to contend with empty chairs in the pit, even though no one else could see them, as if it wasn’t claustrophobic enough down there.

  The lights set up in the street outside amplified the colors of the stained glass, which shone directly onto the thirty or so rows of pews in which dozens of musicians sat adjusting reeds, head joints, and pegs while the party continued out on Batthyány Square. The clarinetists made quacking noises that rose up to a balcony, where the photographers and cameramen battled for position.

  A few of her fellow orchestra members had recording contracts with Hungaroton and many others released their own homemade CDs of standard-repertoire chamber music. Some were very good players technically, one or two better than Melanie, but for the most part they lacked feel. The orchestra consisted of the least musical musicians with which she ever had the displeasure of performing. A band of castoffs, has-beens, and never-willbe’s. The other, big orchestra in Budapest recorded for a London-based label and biannually toured the United States or Asia. When someone like a Schiff or a Solti returned to Hungary, he worked with that ensemble over at the Liszt Academy. For guest musicians, the Opera Orchestra got second-rate pop stars and novelty acts. They performed on heavy metal ballads by Edda and other aging Hungarian rockers. Perhaps it was their status as second fiddle that caused the general malaise she sensed even while they prepared for what was arguably the biggest concert in the orchestra’s history. Or maybe growing up in a culture with such a rich musical legacy led to the blasé, unimpressed attitude about Beethoven’s presence in the very same building. Either way, no one else appeared to revel in the musical spirit clinging to every pillar and pew. “Ludwig Beethoven stood right here!” she wanted to shout. “Don’t you people get it?”

  The stage manager, a portly beast of a man in rimless glasses, ordered the musicians to take their seats and remove their ID badges for the duration of the performance. Secret service agents moved silently into position among the stations of the cross and someone pulled open the main doors to invite in the cold air and several hundred dignitaries and hangers-on. The floor stopped rumbling, the heater turned off so the microphones wouldn’t pick up the vibration. The rows of pews, divided by a center aisle, filled up fast. The stained glass threw prismatic colors at the faces and starched shirts of the quickly assembling congregation. Tickets for the event ran in the 100,000-forint range and didn’t include seat assignments, so tuxedoed gentlemen elbowed each other to get up front. Murmurs rippled through the crowd and orchestra as various celebrities and prominent members of parliament made themselves visible among the three reserved and cordoned-off rows closest to the musicians. Red, white, and green banners hung from the ceiling and swayed amid the commotion.

  Melanie placed her violin and bow on her lap and shook the blood down into her fingers. Warm, stony reverb filled every corner, each one lit up for reasons of national security and national television. She couldn’t see Nanette. She wished she had thought to use the W.C.

  The audience took its place. The lights flickered and then dimmed as the prime minister and his bat-faced wife entered from a door Melanie had not noticed before. Slowly, uncertainly, people stood and applauded. Those in the orchestra tapped their feet or bumped their bows gently against their music stands. Melanie shared a stand with a fifty-year-old housewife named Zsuzsi who smelled like burned toast and hadn’t shaved her legs since glasnost. Not a good look with white stockings. Zsuzsi swooned like a schoolgirl at the sight of the prime minister, and even Melanie had to admit that he was more handsome in person than on TV. The happy couple turned their backs to the orchestra and gave the room a cheesy photo-op wave. They genuflected and crossed themselves before sitting.

  Once the clamor receded and people sat again, a young tuxedoed man stood from the audience and hollered a string of obscenities and declarations that Melanie couldn’t completely understand. He shouted something unintelligible about “There is no freedom in Hungary” and “Where is our grand democracy?” The crowd was aghast. One man took a swing at him. The entire orchestra, all eighty-plus musicians, did what they could to conceal their laughter as the security guards dragged the protestor out and no doubt beat him to a gooey pulp right there on the red carpet. The P.M. stood and faced the crowd again with a shrug of his shoulders and that self-deprecating smile he surely had practiced intently in front of a mirror. Cameras flashed on the balcony like Chernobyl-sized lightning bugs.

  Then Lajos Harkályi, the guest of honor, entered with a buxom date not all that much older than Melanie. She prayed it was his daughter. A feverish, temporary insanity overtook the crowd. They stomped their feet and hooted. They clapped in unison the way Hungarian audiences did when extremely excited or extremely drunk. Or both, as was likely the case today. Somewhere, recording engineers fumbled to adjust input levels. Harkályi was tall, far taller than Melanie had imagined. He wore a natty new-fashioned tuxedo jacket, no tie. His nest of silver wooly hair was cut uncharacteristically close and neat for the occasion, compared to the style Melanie had seen in photos of him; his date sparkled with stage lights and sequins and the holy pseudo-virginal radiance of the stained glass. The prime minister hugged Harkályi. The composer and his girlfriend slid into the front-row pew, which had a block of empty seats reserved for the archbishop and president, who didn’t show: more empty chairs.

  The March weather seeped deeper into Melanie’s fingers as the church grew colder. She hoped that the mass of people would soon generate some body heat, even if it was the odorous variety she knew to expect on the metro. Th
e concertmaster—or kapo, as they called him—took the stage, his shoes click-clacking across the floor like a tap dancer’s. Applause. He pointed to the principal oboe, who played a long A with which they all joined in to tune their instruments. Or un-tune them. Melanie was pleased with her tone and with the acoustics of the room. The kapo sat and noisily adjusted his chair until the conductor bounded in from off-stage. He climbed the podium to wild applause. Melanie would have liked to insert her violin bow into his rectum. The public didn’t realize that this jerk’s career leading an orchestra began only after he failed to demonstrate any affinity at all for composition, the violin, or even the piano—the instrument that made his mother famous throughout Europe after the war. Her name alone landed him and his older brother positions of tremendous importance within the hermetically sealed world of Hungary’s musical establishment. Tellingly, no other orchestra had even considered him for as much as an assistant music directorship before now. His awkward, constipated-orangutan style and horrendously flawed ear annoyed Melanie to no end.