Between Each Breath

by Adam Thorpe

  I arrived later than I’d meant to and was forced to sit at the front – the only row with free places. Some of the performers were still milling about, fiddling with their instruments or chatting. Apart from the flutes, the instruments were modern. A soprano was testing her high notes beyond the back screen. Definitely amateur, but not cruelly so.

  And then a man with a grey ponytail – amazingly like the customer on the café terrace nearly a week ago – arrived out of breath, carrying what looked like a theorbo case. Five minutes to go, but a theorbo could take at least ten minutes to tune up. Red in the face from running, he sat immediately opposite me, setting the huge and ridiculous instrument between his knees, tightening the strings on the long neck. It was the customer on the terrace. This reminder embarrassed me. My behaviour had been adolescent. Pre-adolescent, even. Since my failed attempt to retrieve the book (and to see the girl again) three days back, I had grown up. I was determined to take a hold on myself from now on.

  Acis and Galatea might have been put on especially for me, as it happened: all about hopeless love. The photocopied programme had the English libretto, with a part of the Estonian introduction helpfully translated:

  The nymph Galatea, daughter of Nerea, is loved of Polyphemus, a Cyclops of monstrous body. But Galatea loves the young shepherd Acis, son of God Pan. One day, while Galatea was reposing to the edge of the sea on Acis breasts, Polyphemus surprised these and, in an access of fury, killed Acis in crushing him under a enormous rocks. Galatea, using some magic powers, immortalised her defunct lover in a fountain stream unfinishing.

  Everyone retired and there was an expectant pause.

  A man in a blue suit and cravat, with hair like Beethoven’s, emerged from behind the screens. The only words I recognised in his speech were names: Handel, Acis, Polyphemus, Galatea, Ovid and KP Peanut Butter – although the last must have been a phonetic coincidence. The man bowed to a discreet clapping which went on longer than it would have done in England but not as long as it would have done in Germany. When the performers emerged, the clapping picked up from near extinction in an exaggerated crescendo that suggested the presence of friends and family.

  But I was not clapping. My hands were frozen in the act, as if I was holding a ball; my mouth was open and sweat had broken out on my upper lip. Right next to the theorbo player, directly in front, a mere six feet away knee to knee, settling in her chair with her violin, was the waitress from the Café Majolica.

  In the end, it was the theorbo player’s fault. Up to that point, my eyes and her eyes hadn’t met. I’d kept mine mostly fixed on the other players and on the singers at the back – a good dozen of each. When my gaze did wander onto her face, she was concentrating on the score in front of her. The notes were fairly straightforward, had perhaps been rendered down to something simple enough for her level, which I judged as a competent Grade 6. The violin players were named on the programme as Kaja and Riina. She had to be one or the other. She looked more like a Riina, somehow. Kaja made me think of a cage. She was wearing a black dress with floppy cuffs. It reminded me, unfortunately, of a witch’s gown.

  Emotion flickered and passed over her face as if she was missing a layer. It made me think of rain on water, rippling and spotting and dimpling. Anxiety, pleasure, shyness: nothing escaped the surface of her face. She sat slightly hunched, the spotlights – only softened by one or two yellow filters – polishing her high cheekbones, which again made me think of something I couldn’t quite place, although a sighing or sort of soughing noise came into my head – a very pleasant and faraway sound under the Handel.

  Her violin was a tad tatty, like a school instrument. No sign of recognition. Why should there be? She must serve hundreds of customers every day. I felt about fourteen. No, I felt old. About thirty-seven.

  I studied her fellow musicians, to distract myself. The cellist was a Hoffnung figure, very tall and thin and chinless with a quiff of bushy hair, his jacket too big for his shoulders. One of the viola players went pop-eyed whenever she played, looking incredibly like Kenneth Williams. The theorbo player jerked his head in time to the beat, the neck of the instrument like a ship’s long prow in a swell, moving up and down, up and down, over the waitress’s head. The harpsichordist kept chewing his lips with anxiety. The singers were good, for amateurs, and of all shapes and sizes. The tenor playing the lover Acis was short and tubby, while the bass playing Polyphemus was tall and blond. He had rubbery lips; the passage that begins ‘I rage – I melt – I burn! The feeble god has stabb’d me to the heart!’ was accompanied by a fine spray caught by the lights. Galatea was toothy and fairly plump, but her voice was like a treble’s.

  Until then, I’d never realised how like a woman’s back a violin is: the light was playing off the soft muscular curves of the varnished alder wood, sliding past its wasp waist in lozenges of white. I have no idea why violin-makers favour alder wood: one told me, once, how they’re wet-loving trees, and how he always thought of the curve of oxbows or the current’s soft bulge and swell when he was turning the wood. All I could think of now was the subtle camber of bare flesh.

  The choir sounded a little barbershop at times, and the English pronunciation was haywire, but the music was swirling me into an even giddier state. Everything was golden, beautiful, shifting with the shadows and shapes of the pre-industrial world. Why wasn’t the girl noticing me? Passion had not altered an inch since 1718. Or since the Golden Age, when Mount Etna harboured the Cyclops.

  Whither, fairest, are thou running,

  Still my warm embraces shunning?

  She was, I reckoned, in her early twenties. I hoped she wasn’t a teenager. It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t Acis, but the Cyclops. She was still avoiding the audience, avoiding me with her eyes. I saw they were coloured a very deep green. No, blue. Or even grey. Could she have turquoise eyes? She wasn’t a waitress any more, she was a violinist, an amateur violinist. As if that was more legitimate.

  O! didst thou know the pains of absent love,

  Acis would ne’er from Galatea rove.

  I felt this weird anxiety, which I recognised as adrenalin pumping right down to my feet and back to where it was busy crumpling my heart like it was about to go into the waste-paper basket. Everyone must be gazing on her in the rows behind me – two hundred or so people, maybe more, gazing on her in wonder. Or was I the only one? I envied the men in the group, the conductor, the theorbo player whose instrument’s neck was still pitching in a deep swell just three or four inches over her head.

  The theorbo player was, in fact, plucking his solo. Deep in concentration, his grey ponytail bouncing behind him, he failed to realise that his ship’s long prow had descended an inch or two and was rocking about even closer to the girl’s head. Dangerously close. It might knock her out.

  Aware of it, she looked above her with only her eyes, hunching a little lower but still in danger of being struck, the corner of her mouth playfully tucked in with that ghost or beginning of a smile I remembered from the café.

  I was smiling too, and she must have noticed because it was at this point that she looked straight at me and we clocked each other.

  Her eyes went away and came back as if from a long voyage and I smiled some more, and so did she, and we were sharing this joke about the theorbo’s neck nearly braining her. We shared it as if we had known each other for years. My face flushed and then – miracle! – so did hers (a coppery red, she went) and her eyes swept off and away from mine. And then the theorbo player, his solo not yet finished, spotted the danger at a glance and the prow rose up as if on a big wave, well clear of her head, as he was pressing and plucking the strings.

  Oh, I felt very good. But I couldn’t bear to meet her eyes again for fear of burning up. Damon sang rather warblingly of love leading to problems all your life, and sure enough Acis was crushed, Acis was no more, and in the quietness of that lovely passage before the last act, you could hear the scrape of the bow hair on the strings.

  And al
l she retrieves of Acis is his soul.

  She didn’t look at me again. After the concert she was next to a young, intense type with an afterthought of a goatee beard. I was hanging about alone among the remnants of the audience, and became convinced she was complaining about me – about the man in the front row who’d kept giving her the eye.

  Nevertheless, she glanced at me and I nodded. I went up to her as if on rails.

  ‘Great concert,’ I said. ‘Nice violin playing.’

  ‘Yeah? My violin is real shit. Real cheap. From a school.’

  I gabbled on, despite the shock of hearing her talk like someone at the end of the twentieth century: ‘Well, I know this professional viola player in England who has a few decent violins for sale, extremely good value. He’s friendly and you can trust him. Earls Court,’ I added, pointlessly.

  ‘OK,’ she said, as if faintly amused. The goatee beard was studying me with apparent distaste. Of course she wouldn’t be able to afford a proper violin. The whole thing sounded like an opening gambit.

  I scribbled Howard’s name and number on the edge of the programme and gave it to her, nevertheless. She took it with a shy chuckle that swamped my heart.

  ‘You didn’t find my book,’ I said, swallowing in the middle by mistake. ‘Anna Karenina?’

  She frowned at me, clearly lost. She had not a notion who I was. Two people in long scarves came up and she turned and greeted them with wild affection in Estonian.

  I slipped away, feeling idiotic and foreign, and ate Chinese on my own by a tank full of mournful goldfish.

  ‘Get a hold of yourself. This is not a film. This is real life. You only have one real life.’

  The goldfish pouted at me through the glass, the waterweed swayed, a plastic shark snarled, all red mouth and white teeth as the tank gurgled and hummed. Gurgled and hummed and sighed.

  I’d studied her glossy cheekbones and heard the Sounds, that was the trouble.

  I had listened to the Sounds as a little boy, in Hayes, in Middlesex, circa 1966. I was playing on my parents’ handkerchief of grass they’d call a garden, with its plastic chairs and ornamental shrubs, framed by washed gravel the cat stubbornly reckoned was its litter. The Sounds had come into my head. They were not the rasps of the neighbour’s hand lawnmower, or the twitters of my mother’s transistor radio, or the moans of the jets from Heathrow low overhead, or the big words of the big kids swearing at each other as they swerved up and down the estate on their big bikes, but came from far away, so very far away that the little kid that was me looked up into the clouds and marvelled.

  The clouds rolled their piled whiteness over Hayes – over Dunstan’s the greengrocer’s, over Dagley’s hardware store, over Hepworth’s the tailor’s and the humming, gurgling factories – and I was hearing them. But I was stuck on that lawn, stuck to that spanking new, exemplary council estate with its thousand eyes called Ashley Park.

  It was the clouds that had made the Sounds, of course. At a very private frequency. Nothing to do with a girl’s cheekbones.

  Later, after I’d learned how to read music (in just a few weeks, but I was a dud at most other school subjects), I’d hear other sounds. At the end of the road that led to Ashley Park Estate, there was an old-fashioned set of telephone wires and when birds alighted on them – starlings, for instance – I’d read their little black bodies as scribbled notes, as music. And it kept changing. That was the origin of ‘Not For Brass Birds’ (1972), probably my favourite work, written when I was about ten.

  I moped for a few days. I couldn’t put my wedding ring back on my finger: something to do with the formation of the knuckle. I tried for ages to work it over the bone, just as I worked over the piece, slowly and methodically getting nowhere.

  I took a couple of short trips out of the city centre – one to the zoo, the other to the massive open oyster of the Song Festival Grounds where the Singing Revolution had started. The Singing Revolution! The regime was mined by songs, and then they were blown. Hundreds and thousands of people, simultaneously singing. Boom.

  The trolleybus was exciting. I thought of gritty northern cities in England a hundred years ago as it swayed and clattered past the grim blocks of the suburbs. I didn’t have a ticket, because I couldn’t work out how to buy one. I’d read that everyone has to speak a certain number of words each day or go mad. Now I realised why I was talking to myself. I was fulfilling my quota.

  Zoos always give me the feeling that humankind is a really bad mistake. I wandered past weird-named animals I’d never heard of, that no one celebrates, ranged as if on a shelf in an All-Must-Go sale. Standing in front of the snow leopard’s cage (I didn’t think any zoos had snow leopards, but there it was, very large behind a clump of withered bamboo), I imagined kissing her throat, on this very spot. Kissing her soft pale throat, on our day out.

  A young couple were having a full-blown snog in front of the spotted hyenas a couple of cages down. I felt unsteady in the knees; no doubt the old Cyclops had felt just the same on the slopes of Etna. The snow leopard rose and padded up to the front. The icy wastes of drift and gneiss and mountain plain were gone, and its eyes looked as if they couldn’t focus so close. Rats were tugging at a hunk of fresh meat at the back of the cage. I would test myself by going again to the café. They weren’t tugging, they were eating. As I watched, the rats tore off and ate half the snow leopard’s lunch. The sharp, urine-filled pong of the cage was saying: life is so futile it’s almost funny.

  You can’t cheat the fact that things have gone very wrong in the world. But at the same time it’s this very fact that you can stand above it all and say that things have gone very wrong which brings consolation; I picture it as a polyphonic chant streaked with white lightning.

  I bought Milly a postcard of an armadillo, even though the cage had been empty, and wrote her a silly-billy message in the zoo’s café.

  The trolleybus grew packed on the way back. There was a father in – yes – a leather jacket, holding two little girls by the hand. They had thick, very fair hair. One of the girls was clutching a floppy dog, the other was old enough to do without anything but her father’s hand. The future of Estonia, of the world! I was standing close enough to smell the drink off the man’s skin. He had that slightly swollen, bruised look of the real boozer, but he was still young enough – about my age – not to look ugly with it. He was very attentive to his daughters, and they were full of the zoo (or so I guessed).

  They never stopped chattering during the half-hour it took for the trolleybus to sway its way back on its thick, childish tyres, and the father was nodding at their every word. They’d gone way past their daily quota.

  I had tried to buy a ticket off the driver through a small window between the driver’s cabin and the carriage, but the driver was negotiating the six-lane boulevards and their heavy traffic, the options limited by the leash of the cable. I had to keep my equilibrium while my ears were pressed against the glass to hear what the driver – in this case, a woman with hula-hoop copper earrings – was shouting at me over her shoulder, then scrabble for change in the voluminous currency. It was designed to be difficult – maybe by the Soviets.

  Maybe my own music is designed to be difficult, too. Maybe all contemporary music of any worth entails keeping your balance while pressing your ear against the glass, picking up signals in another language.

  I had given up my seat to a tough old bird with a checked scarf tied around her face, who had not smiled as she sat, even when I’d looked her straight in the eye and grinned. What was there to smile about? Life and history had kicked it out of her, whatever it was. The younger kid was staring up at me, her floppy dog at her mouth.

  This could be my life, I thought. To be thrown back on one’s own resources. Poor as a church mouse. I would have to compose to eat. I would be risen again.

  That is, if I left Milly.

  I winked at the kid, gave her a big smile. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t smile back. When the trolleybus swayed viole
ntly, she found my leg instead of the rail. She held onto my trousers for a few minutes, until she realised. The little hand of love. The tiny pressure. It must be amazing to be her father, I thought.

  Their real, boozer father would have other things on his mind, however: how to earn enough money to take his daughters to the zoo, for instance. How to afford his drinking. And where was the mum? I was sure, I didn’t know why, that the wife was out of the picture. I felt compassion warm me through, looking at these people in the trolleybus. I’d never felt this on public transport in London.

  There was still time to remake my life.

  I bought a box of cigarillos and a tourist lighter from a kiosk by a tram stop and sat by the narrow lake in Toompark, in the shadow of the castle. The lighter had Tallinn, City of Delights on one side and Tallinn’s coat of arms on the other. I smoked three cigarillos, one after the other, hunched in my coat on the bench. Although the wind had dropped and there was a milky sun, the autumn chill remained. The leaves dropped steadily, as if hidden elves were releasing them. I reckoned the grey-barked trees I wasn’t sure of at first were aspens. Very faintly came the sound of drumming, perhaps from the group of what my father would have called ‘druggies’ at the other end of the park, near the kiosk and the tram stop. They wore singlets and looked haggard in their spiky goth gear, as if abandoned by their mates fifteen, twenty years ago – except that they were young, maybe even teenagers. I was slightly afraid of them, that they might follow me; I was entirely alone in the park.

  Milly hated me smoking, so I’d given up a few days after we were together. Now I was smoking again. I felt good, sitting in my coat alone and smoking, surrounded by golden leaves in a park in Estonia. In some ways I’d have preferred to have been here before the Wall came down, when it was still difficult and dangerous and the West was far away. To have met composers clandestinely, in grubby cellars or in their parents’ attics; KGB aerials on the tops of spires, the invisible reel-to-reels turning and turning. The bricked-up windows of torture cells. Arvo Pärt having to change the name of Sarah was Ninety Years Old to Modus, because of the anti-religious regulations. Russian soldiers instead of Finnish drunks: the whole country turned into Aldershot crossed with Watford – without the shops.