“A sonnet, a miracle,” he said. Clara clinked glasses with Margo and Max and then three times with me, and twice three times more, repeating the old Russian formula in a mock-whisper. No one said anything until he spoke: “All it takes is a senseless round fruit no bigger than a baby’s testicle and you have heaven.”
We were all tasting his wine.
“Now try the other,” he said, proceeding to decanter the pinot into my glass once he saw that I had downed the sauvignon.
“Another small miracle.”
We all tasted, swayed approbation on our faces. Inky’s grandfather was staring at me. He suspects they’ve broken up already. He’s trying to feel her out before seeing if he can patch things up between them. I’m now definitely the one-too-many in this crowd. I should have called a cab. I’d be in the station and far away by now.
“I think both wines are wonderful,” I said, “but I’m such a boor when it comes to wines that I very often can’t tell one from the other.”
“Oh, just ignore him, he’s just being his usual Printz Oskár.” She was speaking to them, but seemed to be winking at me, or neither winking at them nor at me. Just winking, or maybe not at all.
She is far too clever for me, I thought. Too, too clever. How she shifts and beckons and rebuffs and then switches, and just when you’re about to give up and head for the first train back to the city, she’ll throw you a Printz Oskár for you to chew on, and dangle it way over your head to see if you’ll try to yap and jump, yap and jump.
“Has she said why she’s here?” he finally asked me.
“No, I didn’t,” she interrupted.
“Well, prepare yourself. You’ve come for Leo Czernowicz, Czernowicz playing the Bach-Siloti. Then we’ll hear him doing the Handel. And then we’ll be in heaven, and we’ll have soup and wine, and, if we’re truly, truly lucky, one of Margo’s salads with these strange mushrooms she’ll use to shut me up for good if one more bawdy comment comes out of my mouth.”
“Sit,” he said. I looked around at the many chairs and armchairs in the living room. “No, not over there — here!”
He opened the pianola and began fiddling with it before inserting the head of what turned out to be a long, unfolded strip of something like perforated yellowed parchment.
“Is he familiar with the Bach?” he asked.
I looked at her and nodded.
She was made to sit right next to me on a narrow love seat. I’d wait for the music, and then I would just let my hand rest on her shoulder, that shoulder which now, more than ever, seemed to know and to second and to want me to know it knew everything I was thinking.
“Well, even if he knows the prelude, this is something you’ve never heard in your life. Never. Nor will you ever hear it played this way. First you’ll hear him play the Bach prelude on the pianola and then Siloti’s transposition of that Bach prelude. Then you’ll hear it as I’ve had two students from one of the colleges nearby remaster it. And if you behave, and you don’t interrupt too many times, and eat your soup, I’ll let you listen to Leo’s Handel. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Leo Czernowicz, just a few years before the Germans found him and took him away and didn’t know what to do with him, so they killed him.
And there it was. At first a very faint drone, then the sound of a gasp, like air sputtering and hissing its way through a congested windpipe, and then it came, the prelude I’d heard who knows how many times before, but never once like this: hasty, tentative, and ever so deliberate. Then we heard the Siloti.
“The prelude is too solemn,” said Clara, “too somber, too slow perhaps.” She had to find something wrong with it. Why wasn’t I surprised?
“Not to worry, we’ve had to speed it up, of course, because those of us who heard Leo play remember he was very fast, too fast. But it doesn’t matter. Art is about one thing: speaking directly to God in God’s language and hoping He listens. The rest is pipi caca.”
He put on the CD, and sure enough, I finally saw why we’d traveled for two hours on this freezing day to get to this house.
“Shall I play it again?”
Clara and I glanced at each other. Sure.
“Then I’ll go and look after the lunch,” said Margo.
Without hesitating or even waiting for our response, he proceeded to play the Bach-Siloti a second time.
Deftness and dexterity, something so easy, lambent, and yet ever so contemplative in the face of what lay in store for the likes of Czernowicz, who was, so many, many decades later, still speaking to God. I kept thinking of his playing this piece as the piano cut holes into the very piece of cardboard in front of us — how could he not have known that in a few years he’d drink of the black milk of dawn? The more I listened, the more it seemed to become more about him than about Siloti, more about Jews like Max who outlived the Holocaust but would never live out its sentence, more about the fugue of death than about Bach’s prelude and fugue. I knew that this would never be undone, that from this too there was no turning back, no coming back, just as I knew that without Max and this old house, without winter on the Hudson, without Clara and our three days together, the prelude would remain the glistening empty shell it had always been for me until now. It needed the Shoah for it to come alive, it needed Clara’s voice in my intercom, Clara’s laughter as she waved obscene gestures in her car, it needed our being here like this in Edy’s warm corner by the lurching bull, and her admonitions forbidding so many things; it even needed my inability to focus on the music, as though not focusing on the music while thinking of reaching out to her would end up being part of how the music needed to be heeded, registered, remembered. If art were nothing more than a way of figuring out the design of random things, then the love of art must come from nothing less random. Art may be nothing more than the invention of cadence, a reasoning with chaos. It will use anything, just anything, to loop itself around us, and around us again, and around us once more till it finds its way in.
Could one ever listen to the Bach after the Siloti?
No one answered.
I asked if I could hear it once more.
He looked pleased. I was hooked, he thought.
Then, when the glorious beginning swept over us again, he excused himself to go help Margo out with lunch.
Left alone with her, I began to feel a sense of total discomfort. All of these empty chairs around us, and yet here we were, Clara and I, squeezed tight together on this narrow love seat. I wanted to find an excuse to move away, perhaps by making a show of wanting to get closer to the music. But I stayed put, did not breathe, did not budge, didn’t even show I had thought of budging. She too must have felt awkward before noticing my own discomfort. But she masked it better than I, for she didn’t even stir. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed anything, and my reading of her discomfort, as my reading of the Siloti prelude, or of what she meant by Printz Oskár each time she used the words, or of our awkward love seat arrangement right now, was nothing more than another misreading, my startled gaze to the world looking back at me. Was there any way for her to know what I was feeling, thinking? Or hadn’t it even crossed her mind? She was so distracted by the music that she hadn’t even noticed that her thigh was touching mine, from hip to knee, hip to knee, which is to say, almost 20 percent of our bodies. What if I told her that while the prelude was streaming over us, my thoughts were focused on the hip-to-knee, joined at the hip, you and I, Clara, for we’re of one kidney too, and all we need is a slight tilt in our seating, and it could just as easily be my hips against your hips, me inside you, as we listen to this music, again and again, the smell of you on my skin, everywhere on my skin, because I want to be bathed in your smell, rub it on my back, your wetness on my neck and everywhere on my body, you and I, Clara.