Open City

by Teju Cole

  Moji went on in this vein for what was probably six or seven minutes. She told me who else had been at the party that night, and she described her precise memory of what had happened: we had both been drinking beer, she was close to passing out, and I had taken her to another room and forced myself on her. For weeks afterward, she said, she had wanted to die. I had refused to look at her, she said, and her brother Dayo knew that these things had happened, not that they had discussed it, but it was inconceivable that, in the shadows and absences of the night, he would not have known, and she hated him, she said, for having done nothing to protect her. And now, here we were, all grown up, and she still carried this hurt, which seeing me again, and seeing that I had lost none of my callousness, she said, had renewed and had brought back to her a distress comparable in intensity to what she had suffered in those weeks, only this time, she said, she had tried, for reasons unclear even to her, to keep her pain hidden and put a happy face on the situation. She had tried to forgive, she said, and to forget, but neither had worked.

  Moji’s voice, which had never increased in volume, had by now taken on a strained, shattered tone, as if she were getting hoarse. You’ll say nothing, she said. I know you’ll say nothing. I’m just another woman whose story of sexual abuse will not be believed. I know that. Look, bitterness has been eating away at me all this time, because this was so long ago, and it’s my word against yours, and you’ll say it was consensual, or that it never even happened at all. I have anticipated all your possible answers. This is why I’ve told no one, not even my boyfriend. But he sees through you anyway, you, the psychiatrist, the know-it-all. I know you think he’s a buffoon. But he’s a better man than you. He is wiser, he understands life better than you ever will. That is why, without me having to tell him anything, he knows what a malign influence you have been on my life.

  I don’t think you’ve changed at all, Julius. Things don’t go away just because you choose to forget them. You forced yourself on me eighteen years ago because you could get away with it, and I suppose you did get away with it. But not in my heart, you didn’t. I have cursed you too many times to count. And maybe it is not something you would do today, but then again, I didn’t think it was something you would do back then either. It only needs to happen once. But will you say something now? Will you say something?

  Other people had woken up, and were beginning to move around inside the apartment. Moji stopped speaking, and kept her eyes focused on the shimmering Hudson. I thought she would begin to cry but, to my relief, she didn’t. Anyone who had come out onto the porch at that moment could not have imagined that we were doing anything other than enjoying the play of light on the river.

  The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing. At that moment—and I remember this as exactly as though it were being replayed in front of me right now—I thought of how, in his journals, Camus tells a double story concerning Nietzsche and Gaius Mucius Cordus Scaevola, a Roman hero from the sixth century B.C.E. Scaevola had been captured while trying to kill the Etruscan king Porsenna and, rather than give away his accomplices, he showed his fearlessness by putting his right hand in a fire and letting it burn. From this act came his nickname, Scaevola, the left-handed. Nietzsche, according to Camus, became angry when his schoolmates would not believe the Scaevola story. And so, the fifteen-year-old Nietzsche plucked a hot coal from the grate, and held it. Of course, it burned him. He carried the resulting scar with him for the rest of his life.

  I went inside, and greeted the risers. Five minutes later, I left. It wasn’t until several days afterward that, looking up the story elsewhere, I saw that Nietzsche’s contempt for pain had been expressed not with a coal but with several lit matchsticks that he had placed in the center of his palm and that, as they began to burn his hand, an alarmed school yard prefect had knocked to the ground.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Monday was my first full day in private practice. The practice, which my senior partner, David Ng, has run for fourteen years, is on the Bowery. It’s a pleasant office, on the third floor of a prewar building, with windows that open out to a clear view of lamp shops across the street, and the uncluttered sky above them. There has been no sign of this year’s bird migrations yet, but I know they will come. At quiet moments, I will be able to take the auspices to my heart’s content. It has been a busy month: only last week, I moved into a small apartment on West Twenty-first Street. The view there isn’t good, but it is a desirable neighborhood (as the realtor reminded me ad infinitum) and I am within walking distance of the office. A few weeks ago, I had the hand surgery I had been putting off. The pain is gone.

  My fellowship ended with the end of summer, and I opted to work with Ng, though there were more lucrative offers farther from the city, of which the most attractive was in a group practice in Hackensack, New Jersey. It would have meant more money, the tranquillity of the suburbs, the things that more money can buy; but in the end it hadn’t been a difficult choice. Remaining here in the city is the only choice that makes emotional sense to me; my own instincts aided me, as did the professional advice of Dr. Bolt, the head of our service. Dr. Martindale, with whom I shared authorship of a couple of research papers, had tried to convince me to remain in academia, but it became clear a long time ago that the university setting is not for me.

  I have begun to organize my office. The office is bare, for the most part, but I have brought in a few books, and my computer has been set up, with a pair of small speakers that I can use to listen to music in between appointments. I have already bookmarked on the computer one of the New York classical music stations, feeling more tolerant now of the announcers than I used to. A new sofa came in on Friday, and the smell of its fabric, a curious combination of lemon and dust, dominates the room, but none of the patients has complained yet. On the door outside is a beveled brass nameplate that Ng had made before I even arrived.

  On the corkboard behind my chair is pinned a postcard of Heliopolis that I discovered by chance in a used bookshop two or three weeks ago. It is yellowed with age, and depicts a street shadowed by a building to the right. The building has what looks like a medieval European bell tower, with two pairs of columns on each side. Two men, tiny figures, walk along the side of the building. They are dressed in white robes. Another man, only a little larger, stands in the middle of the empty street, looking out at the photographer. He is also in an ankle-length white robe, but on top of his he wears a black jacket. To the right of this man, the street is patterned with the converging, silvery lines of a street tram and, near the horizon line, there are two trams. Their upraised, articulated elements, which connect them to overhead wires, make them look a little like houseflies. To the left of the otherwise bare street is a smaller, or perhaps simply more distant building, and one of the towers of this building is topped with an onion dome. The postcard, which is undated, simply reads, in small white print on the photograph, “9108 Le Caire, Heliopolis.” It is not a picturesque card. The sky is washed out, the shadows are dark, the composition of no great interest. It looks like something someone has forgotten, not something anyone would intentionally tack onto the corkboard. But I cannot shake the feeling that the small man in the black jacket and white robe, whose face is invisible because of the shadow of the street, plays the role of witness, and watches me while I work, and, indeed, it was this little figure who had first compelled me to pick up the card. Only later had I noticed that it depicted Baron Empain’s Heliopolis.

  While I was listening to the radio yesterday afternoon in a lull between seeing new patients, I was alerted to the performances this week at Carnegie Hall. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is playing three concerts under Simon Rattle. I went online and bought myself a ticket to the evening’s performance. Tonight is the final concert of the three, Das Lied von der Erde, which I’ll miss because it is sold out. Mahler’s mind was perpetually on last things: Das Lied von der Erde, with its pained notes of farewell and it
s bittersweet sound world, was largely written in the summer of 1908. The year before, in 1907, vicious politics of an anti-Semitic nature saw him forced out of his directorship at the Vienna Opera. This disappointment had come on the heels of a great shock earlier, in July 1907, the death from scarlet fever of the elder of his two daughters, five-year-old Maria Anna. When the Metropolitan Opera engaged him for the 1908 season, he brought his wife, Alma, and younger daughter over to New York. There had been a respite, a moment of glory and some satisfaction. He thrilled audiences with his conducting and innovative programming until the board pushed him out in favor of Toscanini.

  Last night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde. So strong is Mahler’s sense of an ending that his many musical stories of the end almost come to dominate what went before. He made himself a master of the ends of symphonies, the end of a body of work, and the end of his own life. Even the Ninth wasn’t his very last work; fragments of a Tenth Symphony survive, and it is even more funereal than the preceding works. From Mahler’s sketches, the work was completed in the 1960s by the British musicologist Deryck Cooke.

  I found myself thinking of Mahler’s last years as I sat on the uptown-bound N train last night. All the darknesses that surrounded him, the various reminders of frailty and mortality, were lit brightly from some unknown source, but even that light was shadowed. I thought of how clouds sometimes race across the sunlit canyons formed by the steep sides of skyscrapers, so that the stark divisions of dark and light are shot through with passing light and dark. Mahler’s final works—Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, the sketches of the Tenth—were all first performed posthumously; all are vast, strongly illuminated, and lively works, surrounded by the tragedy that was unfolding in the life. The overwhelming impression they give is of light: the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death’s implacable approach.

  The obsession with last things was not just apparent from his late style. It had been there right from the beginning of his composing career, as far back as the Second Symphony, which was an extended musical exploration of death and resurrection. Had he, in later years, written only Das Lied von der Erde, it would have been thought a fitting final statement, one of the great ones, to stand with Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Ninth, and Schubert’s last piano sonata. But to have followed Das Lied, as he did, with the equally immense Ninth Symphony the following summer, in 1909, was to become, through the force of his will, the genius of prolonged farewells.

  The concert was part of a series celebrating the city of Berlin. I bought my ticket for yesterday’s concert too late, and I was up in the fourth tier above ground level. The hall, a beautiful conch shell of a space, with a ceiling studded with fixtures and recessed lighting, was packed. The person next to me, a beautiful woman, dressed in an expensive coat, stank; it was a strong smell, something between saliva and alcohol, and I guessed it wasn’t a matter of inadequate hygiene, but rather an overapplied perfume. It occurred to me to change my seat, but that proved impossible. She fanned herself briskly, and the smell dissipated. Her companion, a tall, tanned man in a blue suit and a checked white shirt, a European-looking type with merry gray eyes, soon arrived. The concertmaster emerged from the wings to applause, and the orchestra began to tune, first with the oboist sending out a clear A, and then the sounds of the string instruments drawing themselves out of beautiful cacophony into the unison.

  The last concert Gustav Mahler himself ever conducted was in Carnegie Hall, in February 1911. It contained none of his own music: he led the New York Symphony Orchestra, which later became the New York Philharmonic, in the world premiere of Busoni’s Berceuse Élégiaque. On that day, he was in a fever, and he conducted only against the advice of his personal physician, Dr. Joseph Fraenkel; the fever must have burned unbearably within him that evening, as he conducted Busoni’s piece, set to the following words: “The child’s cradle rocks, the hazard of his fate reels; life’s path fades, fades away into the eternal distance.”

  Again the oboist played an A, and this time the woodwinds tuned, and they were joined by a flurry of strings. At last a signal came from the stage, and a hush fell on the hall. Almost everyone, as almost always at such concerts, was white. It is something I can’t help noticing; I notice it each time, and try to see past it. Part of that is a quick, complex series of negotiations: chiding myself for even seeing it, lamenting the reminders of how divided our life still remains, being annoyed that these thoughts can be counted on to pass through my mind at some point in the evening. Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them. The only thing odd, to some of them, is seeing me, young and black, in my seat or at the concession stand. At times, standing in line for the bathroom during intermission, I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. I weary of such thoughts, but I am habituated to them. But Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question. Simon Rattle, smiling, his curly hair bouncing, came onstage to applause. He acknowledged the orchestra, and then the lights dimmed further. The silence became total and, after a moment of anticipation, Rattle gave the downbeat, and the music began.

  The first movement of the Ninth Symphony is like a great ship slipping out of port: weighty but nevertheless entirely graceful in its motion. In Rattle’s hands, it began with sighs, a series of hesitations, a repeated falling figure that stretched out at the same time that it became more frenzied. I was listening, as always, both with my mind and with my body, entering into the familiar details of the music, discovering new details in the score, points of emphasis and articulation that I had not noticed before, or that had been brought to the fore, for the first time, by the conductor. Rattle, as I watched, was conducting Mahler, but he was also communicating—at least to me, as a longtime partisan of that music—with other performers of the same: Benjamin Zander, Jascha Horenstein, Claudio Abbado, John Barbirolli, Bernard Haitink, Leonard Bernstein, Hermann Scherchen, Otto Klemperer, and not least Bruno Walter, who had premiered the piece in Vienna a year after Mahler’s death, and two years before the beginning of the First World War. These were the names of mostly European men, many of them now dead, names that had, in the fifteen years since I came to the United States, come to mean so much to me, each name connected to a specific mood and inflection—balanced, extreme, sentimental, pained, consoling—on the symphony’s vast score. Simon Rattle, as he shaped the sound of the first two movements, guiding the orchestra through the frenzies and the lullabies, was staking his claim as one of the titans in this piece. The third movement, the rondo, was loud, rude, and as burlesque as it could conceivably be.

  Then, out of a calmness that seemed to have all in the auditorium holding their breaths, the sweet, hymnlike opening of the final movement, carried by the string instruments, filled the hall. I was stunned: I had never before noticed how similar the melody in this movement was to “Abide with Me.” And that revelation steeped me in the deep sorrow of Mahler’s long but radiant elegy, and I felt I could also detect the intense concentration, the hundreds of private thoughts, of the people in the auditorium with me. How strange it was that, almost a hundred years ago, right there in Manhattan, just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony, aware of the heart condition that would soon take his life.

  In the glow of the final movement, but well before the music ended, an elderly woman in the front row stood, and began to walk up the aisle. She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all
ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music. One of her arms was slightly raised, as though she were being led forward by a helper—as though I was down there with my oma, and the sweep of the music was pushing us gently forward as I escorted her out into the darkness. As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which, to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog.

  Mahler had worked, without self-pity, through his illness, through the catalogue of sufferings, and in his gargantuan compositions had worked elegy finely into elegy. He liked to say, with characteristic gallows humor, that Krankheit ist Talentlosigkeit—illness is a lack of talent. He made his own death matter—there was one of his great talents—so that it almost seemed as though he really died like a dragon breaking down a wall, as is said of certain great Chinese poets. His funeral was to be in Vienna, in Grinzing Cemetery. And so, after he’d gotten the definitive sentence of death—a streptococcal blood infection, secondary to an earlier diagnosis of infective endocarditis, a condition devastating to the heart valves—from Dr. Fraenkel, who had arrived at the diagnosis in consultation with Dr. Emanuel Libman, chief of the medical service at Mount Sinai Hospital, Mahler had undertaken the arduous final journey home. He’d gone first by boat from New York to Paris, where he unsuccessfully tried an experimental serum at the Institut Pasteur, then by train, in great discomfort, to Vienna, where the crowds welcomed and extolled him, whom before they had treated so cruelly, following his motorcade as though he were Virgil returning to Rome to die. And die he did, a week later, at midnight on the eighteenth of May, 1911.