Find Me

by André Aciman

  He did not finish his sentence.

  Did I want to go for a stroll, he asked.

  I said yes.

  Michel said he used to have a dog, and they would go for long walks together, returning after dark. But since the dog had died he’d never wanted another. “He suffered a lot before dying, so I put him to sleep, but I won’t ever go through such a loss again.”

  I did not ask. But that I didn’t ask must surely have warned him I’d pondered the question.

  Soon we approached the wood. He said he would show me the lake. “It reminds me of Corot. It’s always early evening and perpetually sunless here. Corot always has a dab of red on the boatman’s bonnet in his paintings—like a sprig of mirth on gloomy November fields where there’s never any snow. Reminds me of my mother—always on the verge of tears but never a sob. This landscape makes me happy, perhaps because I can feel it’s gloomier than I am.” When we reached the lake: “Is this where you recharge?” I asked.

  “The very place!” He knew I was ribbing him.

  We were going to sit on the grass, but it was damp, so we loitered by the shore a bit, then turned back.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, but there is a reason why I asked you here.”

  “You mean it has nothing to do with my looks or my youth or the sheer brilliance of my intellect, to say nothing of my ripped body?”

  He embraced me and kissed me longingly on the mouth.

  “It definitely has to do with you—but I promise that what’s in store will surprise you.”

  It was starting to get cloudy. “It really is Corot country, isn’t it—mournful as ever. But it puts me in a good mood. Or maybe that’s because you’re here,” he said.

  “Clearly because I’m here.” He knew I was ribbing him again. “Or maybe because I’m happy too.”

  “Are you really?”

  “I’m trying to hide it, can’t you tell?”

  He put his arm around me, then kissed me on the cheek.

  “Perhaps we should head back. A little Calvados wouldn’t hurt.”

  On the way back, he said it was my turn to talk about my family. He was probably trying to show he wasn’t going to do all the talking about parents and was giving me equal time to talk about mine. But there was so little to say, I said. Both my parents were amateur musicians, so I was the culmination of their dreams. My father, a university professor, was my first piano teacher but soon realized, when I was eight or so, that my capacities surpassed his. The three of us were exceptionally close. They never disagreed with me, and I could do no wrong in their eyes. I was a quiet child and by the time I was eighteen or so it was clear that my inclinations ran in all ways. I said nothing at first, but I am forever grateful that my father made it easy for us to speak about matters most parents are reluctant to even hint at. After I went to college, they separated. I think that unbeknownst to them, I was the bond that held them together, whereas they’d always had different interests, led different lives, and had very different friends. Then one day my mother ran into someone she’d known years before my father and decided to move to Milan with him. My father had altogether given up on meeting a partner but a few years later he met someone, on a train of all places, and they now have a child whose godfather and half brother I am. All told, everyone is quite happy.

  “Do they know about me?” he asked.

  “They do. I told him on Thursday when he called. Miranda also knows.”

  “Do they know I’m much older than you?”

  “They do. My father, incidentally, is twice her age.”

  He paused a moment and was silent.

  “Why did you tell them about me?”

  “Because it matters, that’s why. And don’t ask me if it does.”

  We stopped walking. He scraped his shoes against a fallen branch, tore a shoot and cleaned the rest of his shoe with it, then looked at me.

  “You could just be the dearest person I’ve ever known. Which also means you could hurt me, devastate me actually. Do people speak like this in your generation?”

  “Enough with my generation! And stop saying things like this. This kind of talk upsets me.”

  “I won’t say another word then. Do people you know ever use the big word?”

  I could feel it coming. “Please hold me, just hold me.”

  He put his arms around me and held me tightly.

  We resumed walking in silence, arm in arm, until it was my turn to scrape my shoe. “Corot country!” I cursed. It made the two of us laugh.

  Back in the house: “I want to show you the kitchen. It hasn’t changed in eons.” We walked into a large kitchen that was clearly never meant to be a place where the owners might sit to have coffee or eggs. Pots and pans of all makes were hanging on the walls, but not in that faux, fashionably cluttered, chic French-country style found in magazines and home decor catalogues. It was ancient and dysfunctional in parts, and no one was going to hide it. As I surveyed the room I thought that it probably had electric wiring and gas and water pipes going back many decades, if not generations, that needed to be torn out and replaced.

  We left the kitchen and headed to the parlor where he opened a tiny antique wooden cabinet, found a bottle, and took out two snifters, which he held in one hand with his fingers thrust between their stems. I liked how he did this.

  “I’m going to show you something I believe no one has ever seen. It came into my father’s hands not long after the Germans left our house. When I was in my very late twenties, and a few days before my father fell into a coma—he knew his time had come, and no one was stupid enough to try to tell him otherwise—he asked me, when we were alone together, to unlock this tiny cabinet and to take out a large leather envelope.

  “My father said he was younger than I was at the time when what was in the envelope came into his possession.”

  “What’s in it?” I asked, holding the envelope.

  “Open it.”

  I expected some sort of deed, will, or certificate, or a compromising set of photos. Instead, when I opened the leather folio I found a musical score on eight double-sided sheets of onion paper. The staffs were drawn by the unsteady hand of someone who obviously didn’t own a ruler. On the front was written: From Léon to Adrien, January 18, 1944.

  “Adrien, my father, never explained. All he said was, ‘Do not destroy it, do not give it away to some archive or library, just pass it on to someone who’ll know exactly what to do with it.’ It broke my heart because from the look on his face as he spoke these words I could tell he knew there was no one else in his life or in my life to give this to. I also think he knew, just knew—about me, that is. And the strange thing, as he looked at me with that deep, searching stare of those who know they are about to die, was that everything between us, every moment of love, every disappointment, every misunderstanding, every coded glance had all but dissolved. ‘Find someone,’ he said.

  “Of course as soon as I looked at the score I was completely at a loss. Beyond the few years I’d spent playing the piano, I knew nothing about classical music, and he, on his part, never pushed me. So I never bothered with this score.

  “But there was another reason why I was truly perplexed when I took a look at it. I was born twenty years after the date on the score and yet here was someone I’d never met, much less heard of, who bore my middle name, Léon. I asked my father who this man was, but he gave me a blank look, made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then said it would take too long, adding he was tired and that he preferred not to say, not to think. ‘You’re making me remember, and I don’t want to remember,’ he said. I didn’t know whether it was the morphine clouding his mind or whether he was resorting to his go-to phrase—I’d rather not say—when trying to avoid a delicate subject, especially when he wanted you to know that if he uttered another word it would open up Pandora’s box. Had I kept asking, I would have received that curt, impassive hand motion of his again, which is how he dealt with beggars he had no patience with.
I’d planned to ask him again anyway, but the score slipped from my mind and I needed to care for him, as his condition kept worsening. In retrospect now, I almost think that what had kept him alive during his sickness was the need to find the chance to hand me the score without my mother’s knowledge. Months after he died, I asked around and learned that not a soul on my mother’s or my father’s side of the family was called Léon. Finally, I asked my mother, ‘Who was Léon?’ She looked at me with a bewildered and amused look on her face: ‘You, of course.’ Had there ever been another Léon, I asked. No one. Léon had been my father’s idea. They had argued about names. She wanted Michel, after my father’s grandfather who had bequeathed us his property. My father insisted on Léon. She won, of course. Léon as a second name was a concession. No one ever called me that.

  “Only then did it dawn on me that my mother couldn’t have known anything about the existence of Léon or of the score. Had she even seen the score, she would have asked who Léon was and wouldn’t have let go of the matter until she’d gotten to the bottom of it. That’s the way Mother was—intrusive and implacable once she set her mind on something. She insisted I become a lawyer—and there was no gainsaying her.

  “As it turned out and after I’d made some inquiries among the staff following the death of my father, one of the older servants did recall a certain Léon. Léon le juif, Léon the Jew, they called him in the household, starting from my grandfather, who hated Jews, down to the cook and the chambermaids. ‘But,’ in the words of the same old cook, ‘that was a very long time ago, before your parents even knew each other.’ I could tell it was going to be like pulling teeth to get more out of our cook, so I let the matter slide, figuring I’d ask him at some other time and not give him the impression I was grilling him for answers. I asked him about the Germans who occupied our home, knowing that speaking about those days might lead us back to Léon, but all he said was that the Germans were de vrais gentlemen who tipped well and treated my family with exceptional respect, not like that old Jew, he said, recalling I had asked about Léon. He was the last in our family to have known Léon, but after my father died he retired and moved back to the north, where he too disappeared. So the trail went cold.

  “When my mother died, I decided to sort through the family papers—but I found nothing about the Jew. The one thing I failed to grasp was why my father had kept the score under lock and key and why I had ended up with Léon’s name. What had happened to my namesake? I had hoped to find a diary or a school record of my father’s early years. But my father had never kept a diary. I did find diplomas and certificates and numberless musical scores among his papers, some on paper so brittle and with such high acidic content that they crumbled as soon as you touched them. Strange to say, though, I never once saw him leaf through those scores. Occasionally, when he’d overhear pianists on the radio he would criticize their playing, always saying, ‘He might as well be typing on a Remington.’ Or about another world-famous pianist, ‘A great pianist but an appalling musician.’

  “I have no sense of how turning to law changed him or, for that matter, why he abandoned his career as a musician. Or, to put it more bluntly, I never got to know who was the man behind the man I thought my father was. I knew the lawyer only but had never even seen or met or lived with the pianist. And it kills me still today not to have known and spoken to the pianist. The person I knew was his second self. I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between.”

  “Whom am I speaking to now,” I asked, seizing his drift, “second, third, or first self?”

  “Second. I think. Age, my friend. But a part of me would die to have you speak to my younger self, to have had you here in this house when I was your age. The irony is that with you I feel your age, not mine. I am sure there’ll be a price to pay for this.”

  “You’re such a pessimist.”

  “Maybe. But my younger self bungled and sped through so many things. An older self is more frugal, more cautious, and therefore more reluctant—or more desperate—to rush into things he already fears he might never find again.”

  “But you have me here and now.”

  “Yes, but for how long?”

  I did not answer. I was trying to avoid touching on the future, but as a result must have sounded more fatuous than he would have wished.

  “This, today, like yesterday,” he said, “like Thursday, like Wednesday, has been a gift. I could so easily never have found you, or never run into you again.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled.

  With that he poured each of us a second glass of Calvados. “I hope you like this.”

  I nodded, as I’d done the first time with single malts.

  “Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out. My father, your father, the piano, always the piano, and then you, like my son, but not like my son, and this Jewish thread running through both our lives, all of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper that we thought. Or maybe it’s nothing, just nothing.

  “In any case, I’ll leave you with the score. I’m going to see what they’re preparing for dinner tonight. Meanwhile, let me know what you think. Remember, you are one of the very, very few who have ever seen it.”

  * * *

  He shut the door very quietly, as if to show that what I was about to do required great concentration and that the last thing he wanted was to disturb me.

  I liked being alone in this room. It felt intimate, despite its large size. I even liked the smell of the old, thick curtains behind me, liked the aged mahogany paneling on the wall and the dark red rug, even liked my sunken, flaking old leather armchair, and the excellent Calvados. Everything felt aged, passed on, and set in place centuries ago for centuries to come. Wars and revolutions could not undo this because stubborn legacy and longevity seemed permanently inscribed everywhere in this mansion, down to the delicate snifter I was holding in my hand. Michel had grown up here, been sheltered here, been stifled here. I wondered if he had used this very armchair while scanning for erotic images in magazines as a teenager.

  What did he expect me to do with the score—tell him it was good or bad, say the Jew was a genius? Or maybe an idiot? Or was he looking for the man his father was before becoming a father and hoping I’d help dig him out from this rubble of musical notations?

  I began leafing through the score, and the more I stared at its second page the more I began to question why the staff lines were drawn in so unsteady a hand. There was only one explanation for this: there was no staved stationery available when this was written. Besides, Léon must have assumed that Adrien would immediately recognize the notes, or at least know what to do with them.

  But then I began to notice something else. The score had no perceptible beginning, which meant either that the score was incomplete or that it was composed at the very peak of the modernist era. And yet, how unoriginal was that, I thought, irony bringing a smirk to my face. I looked at the last page of the score, not expecting to find a clear ending to the piece either, and indeed there was nothing but a long trill leading absolutely nowhere. How predictable, I thought, and how dull! The no-ending ending—modernism at its foulest!

  Part of me didn’t have the heart to tell Michel any of this. I didn’t want to tell him that the score so faithfully coddled by his father and for so long was worth less than the Cartier leather folder where it had slumbered in a locked cabinet. Better to have left it sleeping.

  Then as I kept leafing through the first three pages, I became aware of something that truly made my heart sink. I’d seen these notes before. Dear God, I’d even played them five years earlier in Naples! But not quite in this order. It took no time to recognize the notes. The poor fellow had been copying Mozart. How banal! And then, worse yet—I couldn’t believe it—a
few bars later and not so subtly, I thought I recognized wisps of something everyone knew: the recognizable lilting rondo lifted from Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. Our dear Léon was stealing left and right.

  I looked at the pale sepia ink. Either the ink had faded over the years or the writer was using diluted ink. It looked so desperately and hastily scribbled down, that I imagined Léon mailing it from the Gare du Nord just as the train was inching its way out to who knows where he was headed in 1944. Did its owner have a sense of humor, I thought, as he pilfered notes left and right? Was he intelligent, or a fool? Could one tell anything by the handwriting? And how old could Léon have been? A young prankster in his mid-twenties like Michel at the time, or was he even younger?

  As I was trying to guess who or what Léon was, it suddenly hit me that there was a reason why I recognized the first series of notes. They were composed, or partially composed, by Mozart. But this was no sonata, no prelude, no fantasy, or fugue. This was a cadenza to Mozart’s D Minor piano concerto, which was why I had recognized the theme. But he was not copying Mozart; he was quoting from Beethoven’s own cadenza to Mozart’s concerto, which had also inspired Léon to echo a few bars from the Waldstein Sonata. Léon was having fun. All he’d done was to compose the parts that the pianist Adrien was probably meant to improvise at the end of the first movement, that glorious moment when the orchestra stops and lets the pianist play at will, which is where imagination, boldness, love, freedom, prowess, talent, and a profound understanding of what lies at the very heart of Mozart’s concerto can finally shout their love of music and invention in a cadenza.

  The composer of the cadenza had divined what Mozart hadn’t finished composing and what Mozart had left open-ended for others to finish for him, even if they composed it in an entirely different age when music had altogether changed. What one needed to enter into the mystery of Mozart’s composition was not to wear Mozart’s shoes or walk in his gait or echo his idiom, his voice, his pulse, his style even; what one needed was to reinvent him in ways he himself would never have imagined, to build where Mozart had stopped building, but to build what Mozart would still recognize as irreducibly his and only his.