Interestingly enough, the tension thus created did not distract him from his work; it meant added pressure, of course, but the odd feeling that he was doing a balancing act with his violin on the borderline of two glances issuing from two very different, contrasting, and possibly even antagonistic individuals, that he was moving between a delicious secret and a dark betrayal, increased his concentration to an intensity he had never experienced before.
He wasn't trying to impress the girl or his teacher or himself; he was there, at once inside all three of them and outside the entire event; in a word, he was playing the violin.
Whenever it was raining or cold and the window had to be closed, the girl resorted to crazy stunts; with outstretched arms she'd lean so far out the window it really looked as if she might fall, or she would close the window and act very annoyed, pressing her nose, her mouth, and her tongue to the glass, making idiotic faces and mimicking him sawing away on his violin, or she would breathe on the glass and write letters in the mist, spelling out "I love you," would thumb her nose at him, tear at her blouse over her breast, implying that if she couldn't listen to that sweet music she'd go mad, stick out her tongue and blow tiny kisses from her palm; but if they ran into each other at school, they both pretended that none of that had meant anything, that none of that had ever even happened.
His teacher responded to the sudden qualitative improvement with pleasant self-satisfaction; he didn't praise him, but from the dim depths of the room he was radiating love, guiding his playing with angry, enthusiastic, and emotional interjections; and Melchior was overjoyed that after four years of hopeless suffering he had finally managed to deceive this seemingly wise and all-knowing man.
The game went on for about two weeks before the teacher got wise to them, though true to his cruel self he did not let on even then, slyly letting their story unfold and expand so that at the right moment he could pounce on them and wipe them away like so much snot; Melchior sensed this cruel anticipation, knew a catastrophe was imminent; but there was also the girl, who had no inkling of the impending disaster, who went on with her antics, swinging out the window, and he couldn't help watching and even laughing out loud at times, while keeping up his guard; he wanted both to protect himself and to annoy his teacher, and that — looking back now he was quite sure — made him even more seductive in the teacher's eye.
And in the meantime, he had to listen to long parables, colorfully told, spiced with exciting illustrations, all of them dripping with kindness, about the virtues of an ascetic way of life, about the psychological engine of aesthetics, the drawbacks of hedonism, the brakes, gears, and pistons of the human soul, and about those practical safety valves through which excess steam may and should be released from the body's power plant; the tales were filled with metaphors, figures, and verbal flourishes, yet when it became clear that these hints and allusions had no effect, Melchior had to pick himself up and with his music stand move deep into the room while his teacher took his place by the window.
The story might have ended there, because Melchior raised no objections: on the contrary, deep down he approved, he understood his teacher or thought he did, and considered the simple, physical regulation of human weaknesses to be the best, most helpful solution to the problem; he was innocent to the point of idiocy, an imbecile couldn't have been more innocent; not only did he have not the slightest notion of how babies were born, but he was also ignorant of the difference between the sexes, or more correctly, everything he was preoccupied with then moved in such a different dimension that even the things he did know he didn't truly grasp.
But the girl wouldn't give up so easily; she'd wait for him downstairs, and at that point all the clowning and mimicking came to an end, and a terrific struggle began among the three of them, a struggle in which Melchior could take part only with his senses — no, not even that, with his instincts — not realizing that it was a struggle, and that he was struggling for life.
And he could scarcely have had any idea of the agonies this man had to endure, the terrible struggle he had to wage with himself, yet he did know, for he was blackmailing the man all along.
He knew because on several occasions he overheard vague and embarrassed whispers about his teacher being a returnee from one of the concentration camps, Sachsenhausen perhaps, he didn't remember exactly, and about how in the camp his teacher wore not a yellow, not even a red, but a pink triangle, which meant he had to be queer; but as often happens, another story was also making the rounds, according to which he had to wear the pink triangle because of his liberal views — that charge was serious enough to have the accuser land in jail after the war — but what seemed to contradict this theory was the rumor that the teacher was in fact an outspoken member of the Nazi Party and had been active in the de-Judaization of German music; whatever the real story was, for Melchior it was all a bunch of empty words, they stuck in his mind, but he didn't connect them to anything, at most he concluded that for the grownups the war apparently hadn't been enough, they kept on squabbling even now, or that society had always viewed the artist as the carrier of some contagion, but sensible people paid no heed.
Nevertheless, his mother should have known better.
Melchior talked uninterruptedly until dawn, and this was the only moment when the cool, steady stream of his narrative was stemmed by an impassable emotional barrier.
His chest rose, and his gaze, still holding my eyes, turned inward and seemed to say, No, no more, the rest he couldn't let go.
His eyes filled with tears, he choked up, he seemed about to break into sobs or into loud accusations.
But laughing through his tears he yelled that I shouldn't take this seriously, nothing should be taken seriously.
Then, more quietly, almost finding his way back to his earlier tones, he said that every whore and every faggot had a mother and a soul-stirring story.
It was all sentimental junk, he said.
And several days later it was this story I continued telling Thea as we drove on that dark highway toward the city.
It's true, I did make a few unavoidable alterations: the mental state of a child prodigy was meant as a kind of introduction, a framework, and also, I tried to speak in impersonal tones, as if talking about a person neither of us knew.
But the impersonal tone and the attempted objective approach conjured up an abstract element in the story, one that allows us to weave the strands of personal causal relations into a larger and more general chronology which we tend to label — because of its impersonality and immutability — a historical process or the force of destiny, or even divine predestination; by insisting on this unalterable and impersonal viewpoint, which of course is an emotional rather than intellectual device, I tried to cover up my shameless betrayal of Melchior; I was retelling his story as if it were but a trivial episode in a larger history that, with its relentless flow of repetitions, kept extinguishing and giving birth to itself.
It was as if I had a bird's-eye view of a city; in it I could see an attractive young woman and a violin; I could see the cracks and empty spaces that history had cut out for itself and, using its own materials, would ultimately have to patch up and fill in; I could see a pretty little theater and inside the theater an orchestra pit and musicians in the pit, but at the same time I could also see a far-off pit, a trench somewhere near Stalingrad; in one pit I could see the vacant seat of the first violinist, and in the other pit a soldier wrapped in rags just about to freeze to death.
And looking down like this, from the bird's-eye view of impassive history, I would consider it a matter of little consequence that a few musicians disappeared from the orchestra pit and others vanished from the family bed and some people were hauled off to concentration camps and others to the front; details were beside the point, for history or fate or Providence ordered all this with one curt command: fill the empty space, music must be made in the orchestra pit, and in the trenches there must be shooting, and other pits and trenches were there for burials; someone has to fill in for the first violinist, no seat must remain empty, and the replacement must play the same music, wear the same historical disguise of white tie and tails, to make the changeable look permanent; and it must be made to appear negligible, barely worth mentioning, that French POWs from the neighboring camp have been ordered to occupy the chairs left vacant in the orchestra pit, and if, as a reward for ensuring unbreakable continuity, the guards should take these prisoners over to the Golden Horn Inn, this should not happen as if by accident, as if out of compassionate human concern dictated by fate or Providence or history, but for the sole reason that for a brief hour the new first violinist could slip into the innkeeper's second-floor apartment — the innkeeper himself was breathing his last on the snowy steppes of Stalingrad — and believe that it was for his sake that history skipped a beat.