Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  Clair gave him a quizzical smile, his eyes somewhat glazed but sparkling. “My teacher said something like that once. My teacher’s German, too.”

  “Then your teacher is very wise—especially to be teaching in America. Ha! Well, look, I’ve found some Grieg for you, and also some other things. Do you know Schoenberg?”

  “The serialist.”

  “Much more than that. But yes. Come on, then—let’s see how bad we are.”

  Kleister stepped with newfound energy to the piano. Lena chose a seat nearby, not too close, with a long view toward the entryway. Oskar was about to join them, but Clair stepped into his path. “Something’s up,” he whispered, “back at the room. Anna was acting funny. I’m worried about Hagen.”

  Oskar put a hand on his shoulder. Just a bit of reassurance, mild case of nerves—that’s what it should look like. “Afterward,” he murmured, “we’ll talk. Don’t worry.” Clapping the shoulder: Turn around now, the show must go on.

  They began with the piece Clair already knew, though he’d learned it in a different and simpler arrangement, one that was graceful and easy to remember, where the flute took the melody while the piano stood in for a chamber ensemble. Clair stumbled at first, but then his determination seemed to burn through the alcohol and he dug into the tempo and stayed there, playing through his mistakes, getting it right the next time. When they reached the end, Clair was damp with sweat; strands of hair clung to his temple where he’d brushed them out of his eyes.

  “That was very good,” said the doctor. “Truly exceptional. Now we make it beautiful.”

  They played the piece again, at a tempo that sounded more natural to Oskar: loud, then soft, then very loud, the processional leading to the slow ceremonial interlude and finally the glorious, foot-thumping dance. When it was over, Clair stood beaming with tears in his eyes. The doctor rose and formally shook his hand.

  “You are an artist,” he said. “Never think you are not. No matter what else you may think you are.”

  Clair nodded.

  “Let’s have a rest now,” the doctor said. “I’ve got something here to listen to. Something rather special and…delicate. Perhaps you’ll like it. Though I must be honest: not many people do.”

  Kleister occupied himself, happily it seemed, removing the platter from the phonograph and easing another from its brown paper sleeve. Clair remained standing in a kind of transfixed state, holding his flute with a handkerchief to keep the sweat off it. Oskar slid a chair up behind him, and Lena handed him his wine glass.

  “You were so good,” she told him.

  That seemed to pull him back into the present. He took the wine and said thank you, then sat down. He’d entered a new world, one where being invited for dinner and music was very serious business. The doctor was ready for the next act.

  “Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten,” he announced, “by the German composer Arnold Schoenberg, now working, according to the latest news I’ve heard, in America. All of Schoenberg’s work is banned in Germany, so we shall all be breaking the law in just a minute, which I find makes it easier to concentrate. What is it about these notes, this phrasing, that’s so dangerous to the sanity of the German people? It cannot be only that the composer is Jewish. Schoenberg’s student Webern has also been banned, despite having no Jewish grandparents at all, the lucky fellow! So the poison comes not from the blood but from the music itself. And in this case, we have not just poisonous notes but poisonous words to go with them—a setting of poems, rather scandalous poems, full of wild and unhealthy passion, by the poet Stefan George.”

  “George!” The name was out of Oskar’s mouth before he knew he was going to say it, and the sound of his own voice—surprised, happy, childish—caused him a moment of shame that he saw, just as quickly, was ridiculous.

  “You know George?” Kleister said, intrigued, reverting to German.

  “I—we read him a lot, in the Jugendbewegung. Quoted him a lot, I should say. I found him…difficult.”

  “He speaks to certain readers more clearly than others, I think.” The doctor looked from Oskar to Lena to Clair as though speculating which of them George would speak to most clearly. “So then, you have circled the flame!”

  Oskar recognized this as a George quotation—Wer je die flamme umschritt / Bleibe der flamme trabant!—that everyone in the Movement knew, though not many outside it, which only made it better. He nodded.

  Kleister nodded back. He understood. “Very good!” he declared, in English again. “We now have some music that seems quite simple, quite classical—a singer accompanied by a piano—yet manages to sound like nothing we’ve heard before. Something unworldly. The text is written here.” He removed a few sheets of ordinary paper from the record sleeve and offered them to Oskar. A series of brief stanzas had been typed out, numbered 1 through 15. “Regrettably, there’s no translation. I’ll set the scene for you. We’re in a garden, surrounded by walls—a place that seems beautiful at times, wild and even dangerous at others. The speaker—here, the singer—is an adolescent, in love for the first time. Over the course of the song cycle, this love drives him to intoxication, torment and finally release. The poet uses the garden to stand for the changing nature of young love, especially as it turns feral and seems to burst through the walls that contain it. The composer, in turn, uses the passion of the text to smash through the walls of musical convention. As the garden loses its flowers and fruits to wind and frost, so the music turns away from key and harmony and the sort of melody we’re used to hearing—all the things that keep our feet on the ground while we listen—and we’re tossed about like this poor young man in the magic and terror of his desire. Well—you can see why the Nazis will have none of that!”

  Having prepared his audience, the doctor lowered the tone arm, and down from the hidden loudspeaker came Schoenberg.

  It was an amateur recording. There was a background hiss and the rustle of sheets of music before the performance started: a line of solitary piano notes in the left hand, like tentative steps, and then the soprano, first at the upper end of the register and then dropping into lower regions that seemed to give the singer trouble. It was a difficult piece—to play, no doubt, but also to listen to. The character of each section was distinct, and hearing them strung together with only brief pauses in between had a jarring effect. At times Oskar would have said the music made sense, both words and feelings comprehensible. At others, the words seemed detached grammatically from one another, chosen for sensual effect and aimed at some part of you that was not the brain. Then there were spaces with no words at all, and spaces full of words but nothing identifiable as melody.

  Holding the text, Oskar now and then glanced at it, trying to figure out where they were. But it was mainly a distraction. He’d get caught by some passage and then realize that he’d lost his place in the recording, so he stopped trying to read along.

  The final section was longer than the rest, and unlike most of the others, he could think of how to describe it: as elegiac. By the very last line—The night is clouded over and humid—he found himself very much in the narrator’s shoes, having weathered all the confusions of adolescence and returned to his senses, alone, in a place lacking any definite qualities. When the music stopped and there was only the hiss of the record, he glanced at Clair, who looked fascinated by the last thing he’d successfully taken in—and what would that have been? Oskar skimmed backward through the text and found

  If today I do not touch your body

  The thread of my soul will be torn

  This seemed about right for an eighteen-year-old.

  “And there,” said the doctor, lifting the needle, “you have it! Poisonous music! I trust no one is feeling the ill effects. Shall we have dessert, then?”

  —

  It was very late by the time Kleister’s pent-up social energy was spent. He and Clair had played more music—Grieg again—and they’d listened to another record—Stravinsky this time, Le sacre du printemps, so
savage and magnificent!—and in the denouement they gathered in a smaller room, the doctor’s private study, to watch a silent movie. It was another amateur production but an elaborate one, filmed at someone’s home on a lake near Berlin. It was summer and the people in the movie were doing summer things, diving, sailing, playing croquet, dining alfresco, climbing out of an open motorcar that reminded Oskar of the old Horch. There was a young woman who appeared in almost every shot, and probably she was the reason Kleister had chosen this particular reel after an evening of passionate music—but maybe she was just the owner of the house or the person who’d hired the photographer. Perhaps this evening’s motif had not been passion but escape—into art, into beauty, into a dreamtime when life had been good.

  In the study there was a telephone. Oskar attempted to keep his eyes off the thing, but the doctor caught him looking and gave him a nod—like the earlier nod, a covert understanding. As they gathered themselves to leave, Oskar tried to think of a reason to tarry, to let the others go on without him. But then Clair was giving him an odd, insistent stare, and Oskar remembered promising the boy they’d talk afterward.

  The guests exchanged formal good-nights with their host and set off down the long, empty hall toward the stairway. Aside from Kleister’s apartment, most of the top floor was taken up by offices—apparently unused, with empty slots in the doors where nameplates would have gone—and finally one marked STAFF ONLY, with a bathroom symbol.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Oskar said. “All that wine…”

  Clair quickly said, “Oh God, me too.”

  Lena gave them a scowl. “I’ll see you downstairs. I need to check on Anna.”

  Oskar didn’t bother groping for a light switch: the moon was nearly full, and the bathroom had two large windows. Clair walked over to look out onto a courtyard. On the other side, sixty or seventy meters away, stood a wing of the spa still in active use. Lights sparkled in several windows on the lower levels.

  Oskar said, in a phrase he knew from American cartoons, “What’s up?”

  For an instant he feared Clair was about to cry. This intuition might well have been just the early onset of a hangover, for when the boy spoke, his voice was quiet and evenly pitched; he meant to be taken seriously.

  “I really think,” he said, “we need to get out of here.”

  “I agree,” said Oskar—surprising himself, because until that moment he hadn’t consciously decided. “But why?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s Anna, for one thing. I wanted to tell you, when I went down before to get the flute, that I didn’t see her at first—I just saw that Hagen was all by himself and he seemed to be sleeping, so I didn’t— Anyway, Anna showed up, but it was like she’d been up to something and I’d just missed catching her at it. She was— I’m not sure, but there might have been somebody else around; I kind of thought I’d heard voices, without really hearing them—does that make sense? But I got the feeling Hagen was in danger. God, that sounds so stupid and dramatic. But that’s what it felt like, so I didn’t want to leave. But Anna scares me. And I knew everyone was waiting, so—”

  “You did the right thing,” Oskar said. “Listen, if Anna’s up to something, as you say, it’s best that we leave her to get on with it. We’ll make our own plans. We can start now. How about Lena?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got, ah, this feeling about Anna. What about—”

  “No,” said Clair. “Maybe. I don’t know, I think Lena’s all right. I mean, they’re both kind of mean to me. And Anna’s fucking crazy. I’m sorry, but she is. Every time she looks at me, I feel like I’m a turkey and she’s a Pilgrim. I guess that’s an Americanism—sorry!”

  Oskar got the general idea, and it was amusing, though he honestly felt too tired to smile. He could’ve fallen asleep right there, in the bathroom on his feet. He’d done it before, in training—bashed his head on a sink, spent a whole day in the infirmary.

  “But it’s not them,” Clair said. “Not Anna and Lena. It’s—”

  Something woke in Oskar then, as if it had been curled up along his spine, waiting to be roused.

  “There were these two men,” said Clair, “back at the ship. Remember how me and Hagen didn’t come ashore right away? That was Hagen’s idea. Something about these two guys bothered him, and he said, ‘Let’s just wait, they’ll go away.’ So while we were killing time, I asked who they were, and he just muttered something in German. But, you know, I understand some German—nobody thinks I do, so I get to hear the most remarkable things. I mean, I know ‘Arschlöcher,’ and everybody knows ‘Gestapo.’ But what he did say, in English, was that I shouldn’t worry, that nobody would bother me while he’s around. Only he’s not really around anymore, is he? In that sense.”

  There may have been a note of despair in Clair’s voice, but by force of will he suppressed it and added, “I’ve seen them since—I’m pretty sure—at least once. In Hameln, on shore. Near that man on stilts. And they saw me. And you. Because you guys were stupid and we were all sitting right up on deck. In broad daylight.”

  “I’ve seen them too,” said Oskar. He hadn’t registered it until now—as if a movie reel had been played too fast the first time through, and now he was watching it again at the correct speed. “In that village where we stopped. Polle. Just as we were pulling away. The same car. A black Opel. My God.”

  He stared at Clair, wanting more—more details, a fuller explanation, something the boy couldn’t possibly give him. There was one thing, though.

  “Back at the ship,” he said, “the Robert Ley. When you stayed behind, you and Hagen, he told you the men would go away. But why would they do that? Why didn’t they just wait for you? Or have the crew start searching?”

  Clair looked back blankly, as though the question made no sense. Oskar felt like shaking him. Finally the boy said, almost meekly, “They didn’t care about us—they weren’t following us. They were following you.”

  The moon through the tall windows glared as harsh as a klieg light, revealing every flaw in Oskar’s laboriously made yet erroneous modeling of the world. He must fix it all, right now. His body made a reflexive move of its own volition, to get on with this, but Clair stopped him with a hand on his forearm. The long fingers that had played a scarf—another detail Oskar simply hadn’t noticed—drew him around until he was looking into the boy’s intense, half-drunk yet harrowingly percipient eyes, inches from his own.

  “That thing Dr. Kleister told me,” said Clair, “when he said I was an artist? No matter what else you may think you are. He meant something by that, didn’t he? You know what he meant.”

  “He meant—” Oskar felt like he’d been dropped into water, warm water, the spa’s renowned thermal springs, and was floating there effortlessly. Any move on his part might upset the equilibrium. “I’ll ask him,” he said carefully. “I’m going to see him now. I need to use his telephone.”

  That must have sounded insane to Clair, as it did to Oskar. But the boy let go of his arm.

  “Go make your phone call,” he said. “I’ll get Hagen. Then we can go.”

  —

  Kleister had left his door unlatched, expecting Oskar to return. He was waiting in the semidarkness, the only light coming from the moon and a single lamp in the distant study.

  “Thank you,” Oskar murmured, slipping past him. “It should only take a minute, if I can get a line.”

  “The service here is usually excellent,” the doctor said, trailing him through the apartment. “Our clientele—some of them are here to get away; others like to remain constantly in touch. We cater to all types.”

  As it happened, an operator came on quickly. Oskar asked for a line to Bremen, and she said, “Will that be the Altstadt or the Vorstadt?” The Old City, he told her, and recited the number he’d memorized months ago.

  To his relief, the connection went through with no problem and was answered almost immediately at the other end. A bored-sounding voice said, �
�Brandt Insurance, here is the claims desk. What can I do for you?”

  This was not the script as Oskar remembered it, nor the kind of voice he’d expected to hear. Seeing no alternative, he went on anyway: “I’m calling for Herr Braun, please.”

  Now there was silence on the line, a weird silence filled with warbles and scratches and mysterious sounds that he imagined to be disembodied voices, trapped in the wire. He could hear his own heartbeat, too, and was about to slam the handpiece down before the call could be traced when the bored voice came on again.

  “I’m afraid Herr Braun is not available tonight. Is there anyone else who could help you?”

  “No, I’m sorry—may I leave a message for when Herr Braun returns? If you could tell him, please, that his cousin Peter is ill and has been taken to the hospital. His condition is not critical, but the doctors are concerned. Have you got that?”

  “I believe so,” the bored voice said. “Is there a number at the hospital?”

  Oskar hung up, his hand now trembling. He didn’t know if he’d just violated some protocol. He couldn’t guess what the consequences would be if the message failed to reach Jaap, his contact, or, for that matter, if it was delivered. They’d know he was alive, at least. That he was in Germany—otherwise the cousin would have been named Paul—and in some kind of trouble.

  He turned to find Kleister standing very close behind him. Those eyes by lamplight seemed darker than ever. They contained so many emotions it was hard, if not impossible, to filter them and determine which one was currently operative. Maybe they all were, and perhaps this was what happened to doctors, the very best ones—feeling every single thing felt by every patient, until you became a walking compendium of human sensory afflictions. When Kleister spoke it was unnerving, because he sounded so ordinary: a weary man being kept from his bed in the middle of the night.

  “What was your Gruppe?” he asked.