by Joshua Cody
V
Sister Morphine
Le Rêve est un seconde vie.
[Dreaming is a second life.]
—Gérard de Nerval, “Aurélia,
ou Le Rêve et la vie.”
At this point a question may well have been inadvertently raised, if not voiced, and thus may merit address: how did these words end up in front of your eyes? One possible answer is that one morning I woke up in my little hospital bed, not more than a cot, really, in my little hospital room, not more than a cell, really, and I was suddenly bored enough to write these words down in a journal, the words that are now floating before you. I started at the beginning—not the beginning of the volume you currently hold; that beginning was added toward the end. No, I started here, with these words, “at this point,” at the beginning, the omphalos and all that, how my mother (as I began writing, in longhand) had graduated from high school in 1910, in Vienna—how long ago that seemed, how far away. And how (I continued) this was such a big deal, for a young woman in Central Europe in 1910; even if it had been a few years later, it would still have been a big deal. So my mom’s parents, brimming with pride, wanted to celebrate; they went to the great Hapsburg port of Trieste, and that’s how the whole story really began.
They stayed for a week at a hotel with a terrace right on the water. One night my grandfather (he claimed) spent a whole night drinking with James Joyce, who, he said, told him he’d hatched a scheme to import textiles from Ireland that would forever absolve him of financial turmoil. My grandfather covered the tab because, in his words, “From the moment I set eyes upon this man, I knew that while fortune would forever elude him, fame most certainly would not.” My grandmother didn’t believe it. I like to think it’s true. Merely embellished, maybe.
After the week in Trieste, my grandparents put my mom on a steamship to Egypt, for a month-long stay with Uncle Al. The idea was self-improvement as well as celebration: Alexandria, the jewel of the Mediterranean, was the most diverse and cosmopolitan city in the living museum of Egypt. And my mom would perfect her French. And Al was doing well: he’d moved from Austria to Constantinople before the turn of the century to set up emporia. This wasn’t that unusual; Austria had long been Central Europe’s conduit to the Levant, and there was money to be made there. Al’s store became a chain: after Constantinople he opened a second down the Turkish coast, in Izmir (then Smyrna); a third, moving east, in Aleppo, Syria; a fourth in Alexandria. But my mom’s month-long visit became a four-year stay with my father-to-be, an aspiring poet from London. My father’s family had been in England for a couple of generations, but they were originally Hungarian Jews, so there was common ground: the binding soil of Central Europe, the binding culture of the Hapsburgs. I’m certain my parents regarded these four years in Alexandria before Ferdinand’s death as the loveliest in their lives. How couldn’t they? Tennis at the sporting club, gimlets at sunset, the warmth of Alexandrian dusk. My dad had a sinecure at the British Post Office that let him write as much verse as he wanted; my mom, a contralto, sang Maddalena and Cherubino at the Alexandria Opera. Then I was born, and then the world exploded.
My father took us back to London when Britain declared war on the Ottomans, correctly predicting that the British military’s deposition of the khedive would ignite a revolution. The irony that he would meet his death two years later during this very conflict needs no underscoring. After my father was killed, my mother and I moved to Budapest, a mid-size apartment on Andrássy Street, four blocks away from the Liszt Academy. Budapest, for her, was a way to extend the marriage in her mind. London would have been impossible; his absence was too obvious. In Budapest, there were distant relatives of my father: perhaps she felt that dim traces of light imply long distances to bright, still-living sources.
She never sang after my father died, but she taught me piano, and by the time I applied for school, I knew I was good enough to get into the Liszt Academy, and I was right. I didn’t think I was good enough to get into Vienna, but I was wrong. Vienna! Mozart and Beethoven and Mahler and Sibelius. When I got the letter I ran over to my friend Andy’s place (Andy was my best friend, a dark, slightly melancholic character who wore bow ties and a mustache and was an excellent violinist, but we knew he was doomed to a career in law). Vienna! Andy couldn’t believe it. He and the whole gang took me out that night to this place we loved, a dark restaurant in a basement where the beautiful Romanian girls would go, and late at night these terrific folk musicians would play on old instruments, reed violins and jughorns, hurdy-gurdies and dulcimers. But we mainly loved it because the owner would let us drink. Drink we did. Andy ordered a fifth or sixth round and raised his glass “to Vienna!”
Alexandria, Egypt, c. 1920.
I said, “Vienna? I’m going to Budapest.”
A pin dropped. I felt like the whole restaurant was staring at me. I didn’t realize it then, but we were what you’d call bourgeois intellectuals, everybody was studying philosophy and history and classics. We were also Hungarian nationalists—except for tonight.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s the matter?” Andy said. “Nothing. I love watching my friends throw their lives away.”
“Throwing my life away,” I said. “Right. Just like Reiner and Solti and Sándor did, only the most successful musicians in America. I’ll study with Bartók, that hack.” As the waitress brought our food, deep-fried calves’ brains and stuffed cabbage and veal-filled pancakes and cold cherry soup, Andy held my arm. “You’re joking, right?” he said. No, I said.
“We’re stuck here,” Andy said. “You can escape! You’re going to die four blocks from where you were born!”
I said, “Andy, I was born in Egypt.”
We ate and drank and argued and flirted with the girls and debated the pros and cons of Vienna and Budapest and didn’t really talk about some other aspects regarding moving to Vienna in 1934. It isn’t that we were avoiding it. We would talk about it, all of us would. Just not that night. But everybody talked about it. But then again you have to understand that people would talk about a lot of things. So often it’s only in retrospect that one traces the disease to a symptom, whereas in the heat of the moment every nerve ending of the body is clamoring for one’s attention. Perhaps this isn’t the worst place to remind ourselves of the astonishingly complex design of one’s momentary field of vision, forever bursting (well not forever, but you know what I mean) not only with the immediate stimuli of the present moment—Andy’s law-school-ish counterarguments, for example; or the delicious crunch of deep-fried brains; the sharp green eyes of a Romanian girl in a white dress; a newspaper photo, yellow and brittle as a dead moth, of Hitler, taped to the wall; the watery crash of a beater hitting a dulcimer; Andy ordering another round of drinks and laughing and shaking his head. We’re bombarded not only with these, but with the recalled stimuli of the past as well. And these two layers wrap around each other like two electric currents encircling some wobbly magnetic pole. Some of these stimuli, both the remembered and the immediate, will, in the future, be remembered, some forgotten; and some of those remembered will, in retrospect, be trivialities: and a few will be History.
•
The first day of classes, I walked by a practice room and heard a violin student playing the opening of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. It was marvelous. The Kreutzer begins with a solo violin; the pianist enters fifteen seconds after, with an A major chord. It was as if I’d never heard an A major chord before, and at that moment I knew I would never be a pianist.
Next, two cold d minor chords, and at that moment I was thrown into despair; what would I be, then?
Next, a whole measure of E dominant seventh, a sign of hope, and I knew I would be a writer.
I peered through the door’s small square window and glimpsed the pianist’s face. F major! This, in music, is called a deceptive resolution. The phrase is self-descriptive, really; you’re expecting something, and something else happens instead, and it’s ma
rvelous. In music, the E chord is “supposed” to lead to an A chord, so when it leads to an F chord instead, colors shift slightly and deepen, like you’re suddenly staring through a small square window into the eyes of the girl you know you’ll marry. The funny thing is that I was always afraid, even after the wedding, that I wasn’t really in love with Valentina, but with that particular F chord, and she just happened to have perfectly coincided with it on the space-time continuum. But I would calm myself by remembering that she, as well as Beethoven, was the creator of that chord—not just her exquisite Bulgarian hands but her very being: not just her exquisite figure but her entire landscape.
First page of Beethoven’s manuscript of the Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano, with Beethoven’s corrections, 1803.
•
This story isn’t really about my marriage to Valentina, this Bulgarian girl with serious, almost-almond-shaped eyes, low voice, unblemished olive skin, and bony ankles who always seemed to be enveloped in a scent of violets. If it were, I’d relate little anecdotes—like the time we were, the two of us, alone in a practice room at the academy; she was grading papers, and I was fooling around on the piano, stumbling my way through the middle movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. She came over to the piano and sat beside me, eyes twinkling. “Yes,” she said, “you can play!” But she took over, as did a kind of dream; she closed her eyes and, referring to the piano, said—
—you see, it sings.
But this story isn’t about that, so I feel justified in skipping ahead a few years to 1963, when the Rolling Stones signed a record deal for the first time and when I, at the tender age of forty-nine, was for the first time thrown in prison. By then I had a column on music in the most prestigious magazine in Hungary. I’d written a dual profile of two composers I knew, Ligeti and Kurtág. For me, they were the greatest composers in Europe; they divided Europe between them and there was no third. Ligeti’s music was expansive, scored for huge orchestras, and dealt with immense sheets of shimmering sound that seemed to freeze time; Kurtág’s music was miniature, employing just a few musicians, neurotically fixated on the tiniest details. Ligeti had fled Hungary for the West after Kádár, the prime minister, crushed the 1956 student uprising; Kurtág stayed. Both Ligeti and Kurtág were Jewish. But Ligeti was sent into a forced labor camp during World War II. His brother had been sent to Mauthausen, and he died. Both of his parents had been sent to Auschwitz. His mother had survived and his father had died. Might these be reasons why Ligeti fled Hungary? I certainly didn’t suggest such a thought in my article. So when I received an invitation to the prime minister’s office after the article came out, my editor and I had no idea what to expect. I remember waiting with my editor in the plush antechamber of the Office of the Prime Minister, perched on the Danube, about twelve blocks from the apartment Valentina and I had bought on Andrássy Street, two blocks away from the Zeneakadémia, and two blocks away from the apartment in which I grew up. I remember wondering if we were actually going to meet Kádár. We didn’t. The minister of culture let us in. We knew him casually. He enjoyed the article, he said. Then he asked if I would be amenable to help the Hungarian government.
Of course, I said. (What does one say?) What can I do?
The charade was quintessential propaganda, Kádár-style. I’d be imprisoned for a week. But my magazine would report—and the national media would repeat–that I was hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment. I’d wear a fake IV; I’d appear, every now and then, on a balcony, in a wheelchair, with a fake catheter sticking out of my chest. After a week, I would miraculously recover, and nothing more would be said of the event. On Friday at midnight, a limo would whisk me home. Did I have any questions? he asked.
Yes, I said. Why not just throw me in prison for a week?
Because the Kádár government, he said, does not imprison writers.
That was the brilliance of Kádár, and in a way—even though I’m certain he killed my friend Andy, people don’t just disappear, we all knew Andy participated in the uprising—I do wish I’d met him, just to see how the air reacted when he displaced molecules of it. Of course everyone would decipher the true story. Even if I’d wanted to keep it a secret, it would have been impossible. But Kádár didn’t want it kept a secret. His power lay precisely in the very transparency of the charade.
I suppose part of me worried. I’m sure I asked myself what would happen if Friday midnight rolled around and there was no limo waiting downstairs; if my “hospitalization” was extended; if the “doctors” had found some type of complication that necessitated another day or two, just to keep me under observation. But when I strolled into the hospital, threw on this hospital gown, when they glued fake IVs to my chest and arms, sat me in a wheelchair and rolled me out to the balcony of my suite—it was very nice, really, like a good hotel—and my editor and I smoked a cigar, I felt this kind of giddy amusement at the sheer absurdity of the situation that I do feel is inimical to Eastern European culture, a temperament that the West will never apprehend.
The one thing I worried about was my mother. She had never fully recovered from the death of my father. I remember once—I think I was around twelve—I awoke in the middle of the night. Someone was crawling past my bedroom door. I lay in bed, frozen, for God knows how long, terrified. Finally I jumped up and swung my door open. My mother, bejeweled and in evening clothes, was dragging herself along the carpeted corridor, humming drawn-out glissandos from the bottom of her register to the peak. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m at the edge,” she said. “I think I’m going over the edge. Or at least—I can see the edge.”
When she arrived to visit at the hospital I could tell something was wrong—the look of etched concern half-hidden under rudimentary graciousness. She took a seat in a chair of striped canvas that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a steamship in 1910. In fact, she herself wouldn’t have looked out of place on a steamship in 1910, where, in a sense, she forever was.
We chatted, rather aimlessly, about an article she had been reading about glaciers. Then she glanced at me and asked in a different voice if she could bring me anything, and suddenly she was on the verge of tears.
“You do know this isn’t real,” I said, but before I’d finished I knew she didn’t. How far along she was into senility? Alzheimer’s? Something else?
“I’ll be back every day,” she said, oddly, and she got up and kissed me and left, and I saw her speaking with one of the pretend nurses, and I wondered what exactly the actress employed as the nurse had been instructed to say to those unfortunate souls like my mother who weren’t in on the masquerade.
Finally Friday rolled around. By now I had cabin fever. My mother returned. I asked her when she knew she’d marry my father. She didn’t answer directly. She spoke of being a couple versus being together, and how that changed things: the subtle recalibrations in the way friends and acquaintances greeted them as they entered social gatherings, the country-house weekends, the piano bars, the shooting parties: a door would open the same way, she said, and then the welcoming gestures would be replicated with a degree of exactitude—the same approach to the handshake, the same curve of the hand through the air, as if algorithmically preordained—that betrayed their artificiality. I realized that a possible definition of love is the sharing of very particular forms of social alienation. Then I wondered if this were the only definition of love. And suddenly this thought made me feel lethargic. Or maybe, out of respect, I wanted to leave my mother alone with these intimate memories and, not physically able to leave the space, opted for sleep, feigned or otherwise. It was eight o’clock at night; I wanted to sleep through the final four hours of my stay, which felt like the last few hours of a very long flight, that mix of anticipation and fatigue.
I opened my eyes to see the long thinner wand gleefully click six degrees to her right, jumping atop her short fatter bedfellow. I congratulated my internal alarm. But no wonder, I thought as I got out of bed; it
wasn’t as if this time hadn’t been inscribed somewhere deep in the folds of whatever part of the brain is responsible for the perception of time’s passage. My mom was asleep, in the chair that looked like it belonged on a ship. I nudged her awake as I took off my hospital robe. “We’re going,” I said.
“Where?” she asked, confused.
“Home. There’s a limo outside, waiting.”
“No,” my mother said, “you’re in the hospital.”
A pretend nurse walked in, smiled knowingly. I returned her smile, then looked back at my mother and said, “It’s okay. My editor’s waiting outside in a limo. The hospital story is just a cover—it was the article I wrote. The prime minister wanted to send a message. But we can go now.”
My mother shook her head. “No, you’re sick. You’re in the hospital. On the Upper East Side.”
Upper East Side? What was that? “Mom, we’re like twelve blocks from Andrássy Street. Valentina’s waiting for us.”
“Honey,” she said, “you can’t leave. You’re in the hospital. You’re very sick.”
Suddenly, dread. Everyone had lied to me. My editor, the minister of culture, the prime minister. But of course he had—he’d killed Andy in 1956. I was in prison. My mother was right. I looked around the room. It looked different, suddenly, like a camera lens had been replaced, and the color balance had been adjusted. After years of relative nonchalance, I was experiencing the dark side of Goulash Communism. I realized with horror that since Andy’s disappearance I’d been faintly telling myself, “After all, he knew what he was getting into.” Meaning the uprising of 1956. But he participated. Why would I pose a threat? My own editor—my employer, my closest intellectual companion, the father-figure that eased me into society—betrayed me? Of course. He sold me out, just as he had surely sold out others. How else had he uniquely been able to procure intellectual freedom for the magazine? By forsaking his son.