Swimming Across: A Memoir

by Andrew S. Grove

  School kept me so busy that I had to give up kayaking. But I didn't spend all of my time studying. The Franz Liszt international piano competition was held that winter, and my mother and I got tickets. It took place at the Academy of Music, which was located a few blocks from our house on Kiraly Street, so we could just walk over to the concerts.

  I had never been to a music competition before. Each contestant first had to play the same piece of music—a sonata by Franz Liszt. I thought listening to the same piece over and over would be boring; instead, I became fascinated by the nuances of the piece, and I started to notice differences in the performers' playing styles and technique. By the end of this part of the competition, I was humming Liszt piano sonatas as I walked down the street.

  My mother and I attended together. We had good seats on the first-level balcony. We could look down over the shoulders of the performers and watch their hands in action. In the intermissions, we compared notes and ranked our favorites. When the judges announced their decisions, we reacted with approval or horror, like soccer fans reacting to the referee's call. A Russian pianist won. Rumor had it that he used his prize money to buy a winter coat—right there in Budapest. It seemed that the selection in our stores was better than what he had at home. I found this strange.

  My fascination with opera also continued to grow, so much so that I decided to take singing lessons. This wasn't the first time I had tried to get involved in singing. Some years before, I had tried out for a folk-singing group. I liked the sound of my own voice, and I fantasized that I would be discovered as a latter-day Chali-apin. I showed up at the audition, but when I belted out one of the few Hungarian folk songs I knew, the chorus director cut my performance short and sent me home. After this rejection, I didn't try to sing for a long time.

  It took courage to try out again, but some years had passed and my voice had changed, and to me, at least, it sounded much better than before. The audition was longer this time. I sang, then the accompanist played some chords and I had to break out each of the notes of the chords to demonstrate that I had a measure of musical aptitude. This time, to my relief, I was accepted.

  The lessons were half an hour long, two evenings a week. They were outright boring. The teacher made me practice singing scales. She was pretty matter-of-fact about my voice and paid a lot more attention to the advanced singers. I didn't care. I was learning real singing, so I persevered with vigor, using the times when I was alone in the apartment to practice. I would have been mortified if anyone at home heard me. My singing was not meant for friends and family, only for me and my teacher.

  After several months of scales, during which my singing voice got smoother and more flexible, I was promoted to simple Schubert songs. The particular songs my teacher chose must have had great pedagogical value because they were just as dull as the scales. I persistently asked to sing something more interesting, and eventually my teacher took pity on me and allowed me to choose the next song. I asked to learn my favorite aria from Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro. In it, Figaro explains the re- alities of army life to a young boy who is anxious to join up. The music varies between lyrical and military melodies, between cajoling and aggressive tones, representing the variety of drama that I craved.

  This was a lot more intricate than the Schubert songs, and it took months to get it right. Not only did I have to control my voice through the range of the aria, but I had to learn to pace the music just right. I had never really learned to read music, and I always had trouble with timing. But I loved every minute I spent on it, even when I had to sing particular parts over and over.

  One winter evening after school, I got involved in a deep discussion with one of my schoolmates when I realized it was time to go to singing class. He came with me and we continued our argument all the way there and even while sitting in the anteroom until it was time for my class. I went in and practiced the Figaro aria. My classmate had told me he didn't know anything about music and wasn't interested in opera, so I was surprised that he was still there when I came out. We resumed our walk, but before we could resume our argument about chemistry he asked, “What was that stuff you sang? I could hear you through the door and it sounded really neat.”

  When my singing went well, it made me feel better about everything, even if things at school were tough. I thought I had made an important discovery. I realized that it's good to have at least two interests in your life. If you have only one interest and that goes sour, there's nothing to act as a counterbalance to lift your mood. But if you have more than one interest, chances are something will always go okay.

  During that winter, a friend introduced me to one of his friends, who was a pianist. The pianist loved opera and liked to accompany singers. This was a rarity. Most pianists I knew wouldn't condescend to accompany singers. I jumped at this opportunity and started to show up at this fellow's house along with a small group of other students. We were ambitious and decided to learn the first scene from the first act of Mozart's Don Giovanni. My voice best fit the role of Don Giovanni, and I threw myself into his persona with relish. Don Giovanni's figure, his ease with women, his devil-may-care attitude, captured my imagination.

  The scene was only a few minutes long, but it involved several singers in intricate interaction, and it took several months for us to get it right. When we did, the music was so beautiful that it gave me shivers.

  Another song that I liked and learned was a Schumann ballad called “The Two Grenadiers.” It's the story of two of Napoleon's soldiers rising from the dead to come to the defense of their embattled emperor. The range of the music was just right for me, allowing me to sing it quite well, and I especially liked the drama. I tried to act it out using only my voice, but my face and arms often got into the act, too.

  One time that spring, my parents and I were visiting a friend who had a piano. Somehow it came up in the conversation that I was learning “The Two Grenadiers” and that I had the music with me. My parents' friends persuaded my mother to sit down at the piano. I had seen how the boy who accompanied us on Don Giovanni had to struggle with the music even though he worked on it for many weeks. So I was stunned when my mother, although initially reluctant, took the music, put it on the stand, and started playing without a moment's hesitation. I sang “The Two Grenadiers” and my mother accompanied me perfectly, following my cadence and adjusting her playing when I lost my timing. Singing while she played made me feel very close to my mother. Even so, I was never able to talk her into accompanying me again. That spring, I had another chance to sing. It was for Class Night at the university. Class Nights were a tradition where each class put on some entertainment for their professors. Snacks and dancing would follow. It was a very small affair, held in a room in the university building. There was a piano in the corner. My classmates and I put together a number of short skits, and other people told jokes. In addition, I rounded up my singing buddies and the accompanist, and we sang the first scene from Don Giovanni. Even though most of the class had never heard the real thing—or maybe because of that—our performance was well received.

  To top off the evening, Hilda came over to us with a proposition. She had caucused with some of the senior staff and they had an idea: How about if our class, which was obviously talented in matters of this sort, put on an opening act for the graduating class's traditional performance at the end of the year?

  This proposition blew us away. The performance was held at a big theater off campus and was the social high point of each university year. It was attended by many hundreds of people, and tickets were always oversubscribed. Lower-class students were not even invited to attend, so the notion that a first-year class should be asked to perform was extraordinary. We accepted on the spot.

  I suggested that we work up a pantomime around our experience in the analytical chemistry lab. That would be familiar to all chemistry students, as it was everyone's first exposure to practical chemistry. I already had an idea, so I volunteered to write the script.
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  In fact, analytical chemistry had already become my main focus, and not just from the point of view of writing the script. In the fall semester, chemistry lab had started out as a place where we would merely do experiments that brought home the lessons of what we had learned in class. In the spring semester, however, the lab changed and focused on experiments whose purpose was to identify unknown compounds. That's what analytical chemistry is about.

  The early assignments were simple and we could complete them in a single class, but as the semester progressed, the compounds that we had to look for became more complex. To make matters worse, they were combined with other compounds, making the task a lot more complicated. Sometimes we worked in teams, other times we worked individually. More often than not, we needed several lab sessions to come up with the answers. Just to ratchet up our anxiety several more levels, we were told that our performance on these assignments—whether we identified the right substances and how long it took to do it—counted significantly toward our grade.

  While some considered this analytical lab drudgery, I loved it, and I was good at it. Maybe my home tinkering helped a little. I particularly liked the deductive process involved in figuring out how, if one experiment gave one set of results and another experiment gave another set of results, it followed that the compound in question had to be X.

  Hilda urged us on in her cheerful, energetic way. Her way of consoling us when we got stuck was to assure us that this was a trivial task, particularly compared to the final assignment. That one, she warned us, was so very complicated that nobody had yet gotten it completely right.

  The warmth of late spring arrived and with it came the dreaded final assignment. We were each given a mystery solution containing half a dozen or so compounds. Each solution was different. Our task was to identify the compounds. The grade depended on how many you could identify. Mine was a clear solution with absolutely no clue to its ingredients. We had four weeks to decode it.

  There were two different ways of going about the analytical process. One was by following preordained steps, rigorously iden- tifying some compounds and eliminating others step by step by step. If you did everything correctly and interpreted your results correctly, this was bound to lead to the correct result—eventually. However, this rigorous process was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming, and there was a danger of running out of time.

  Alternatively, you could make your own path. You could start with the rigorously mandated, conventional process, but as the results unfolded, you could take an intuitive leap and make up your own sequence of experiments, adjusting them as more results became available. This method had the advantage of being much more direct and faster, but it was more risky because if your experimental flow went in the wrong direction, you could blow the whole assignment.

  I was confident enough in my grasp of inorganic chemistry to choose the high-risk option. After a few steps, I departed from the predetermined flow and, keeping careful notes, struck out in a direction that seemed logical to me. At first, I made rapid progress. I identified several components in my compound and eliminated many others. Then the going got tougher. Experiment after experiment yielded no new information. I became increasingly obsessed with the task at hand. It loomed monumentally large.

  I was completely alone in this task. Each of us had a different compound and each of us chose his or her own path and everyone was completely preoccupied with his or her own problem, so I couldn't brainstorm with any of my classmates. Nor could I ask Hilda for advice. I had taken such unorthodox steps to get to where I was that she couldn't have helped me even if she'd been allowed to. Increasingly, I lived in my own little mental cocoon, inorganic compounds and elements dancing in front of my eyes day and night. We had one more week left, and I was seriously worried.

  I was heading home after a late afternoon at the lab. I took the tram. I liked to let other people crowd on first so I could hang on the outside steps with the spring air blowing in my face. It was a slightly dangerous position, but a very refreshing one. This evening, I was hanging on the outside as usual, looking ahead in the gathering May dusk, but I didn't see the traffic or the familiar streets going by. My mind was filled with atoms and molecules and experimental schemes.

  Then, all of a sudden, I got it. I don't know what set it off. The experimental results that were floating around in my head suddenly jelled and the confusion of the previous weeks coalesced into a solid vision of where I was and where I needed to go. I jumped off the tram and ran home. I took out my notes and checked to see whether my recollections of the past experimental results were correct. They were. I couldn't wait to get back into the lab the next day. With complete confidence, I planned the next sequence of experiments to confirm my hypothesis. They worked.

  I cleaned up my notes and wrote them up into finished form, listing all the inorganic chemicals that made up my sample. Early on the day of the final lab session, I walked up to Hilda and handed her my lab papers. She looked at them with an inscrutable smile, then glanced up at me and said, “Are you sure, Grof?”

  I said, “Yes.” But all of a sudden, I wasn't as sure as I thought I sounded.

  The next day, we all gathered around Hilda as she read out the correct answers to each of the compounds. Mine was the only analysis that was completely correct. In fact, according to Hilda, it was the first time that anybody got all aspects of this assignment right. My classmates looked impressed. Hilda looked proud. I was ecstatic.

  The news of my accomplishment ran ahead of me. In several of my other classes, the instructors congratulated me with a smile. It was a wonderful way to end the academic year.

  There was still one more task to accomplish before the university year was over: to perform our pantomime at the graduation ceremonies. I wrote and directed it and had a part in it, so I was almost as preoccupied with our skit as I had been with the final experiment.

  The graduating seniors were performing a spoof of the Russian opera Prince Igor. Their version was called Prince Szigor, which is the Hungarian word for “discipline.” They would sing their way through their university experience, making fun of their courses and teachers. The event usually consisted of only their performance, so inviting us to open for them was a break with tradition. The eyes of the entire university would be on us, and we wanted to do well.

  Our script was about the behavior of chemical elements during the torture of laboratory analysis. Each member of the class represented a particular chemical element. To the accompaniment of classical ballet music, played on the piano by my friend Zoltan, they mimicked how the elements reacted to each other, to heat, to filtering, and to other scientific manipulation. The whole thing was a big in-joke and the fact that our class had just been through analytical chemistry gave it extra spice.

  It was also a big in-joke about our class. For instance, two of the students—a guy and a girl—represented two elements that are almost identical; these elements always act the same way and are very difficult to distinguish from each other. These students were short and looked alike, rather like those elements, but the real joke was that they were actually dating each other and were inseparable. So when I tickled their feet with a Bunsen burner— actually, a larger-than-life paper cut-out of a flame—they jumped up on a chair and sat down in unison, holding hands with each other all the while. The first time we rehearsed this, everyone roared.

  We held numerous rehearsals, squeezed in between our time in the lab. Even though we were all preoccupied with our lab-work, the rehearsals were great fun. Everyone had something to add to the script, so the end product was a class effort.

  Despite our enthusiasm about our performance, outside of class I felt very awkward about my prominent role in it. Consequently, even though my parents badly wanted to attend the event, I was adamant that I didn't want them there. I told them their presence would make me even more self-conscious. My parents reluctantly accepted this but were very, very unhappy about it.

  The big day came a
nd we all gathered backstage. To my surprise, I was asked to make a few introductory remarks. I was not prepared and felt frightened by the thought of speaking in front of a big crowd. But when I came out in front of the curtain and saw the sea of expectant faces, I felt a curious calm. I suddenly had the impression that I was talking to a group of people who were there because they were interested in what I had to say. I managed to describe what the audience was about to see, and they responded with lively applause.

  Then the curtain went up and we began our show. Zoltan hit the opening chords of Swan Lake, and our class paraded out. Everyone was wearing similar clothes, distinguished only by the signs hung around our necks telling which elements we represented. The audience, many of them chemists, appreciated the humor, and there was lots of laughter as the elements showed their true colors.

  And so the first year ended with a big bang. The pantomime was a giant success. My academic work was promising. Even more important, for the first time I could remember, I felt at home in a group. I was no longer an outsider. I started the summer break on a real high.