The stage crew started to give the priests their church back, but Melanie remained in her seat. She wanted to run but had no place to go. She struggled to understand what had just happened. In that hallucination — if it was a hallucination — she could see herself clearly, as if standing somewhere beyond her embodied self. What she had experienced was real in the same way that she knew that her dreams were real, and the vision referred to her existence in the universe in the same way that her dreams spoke about her waking life. Strangely absent, however, was the gleeful ego rub that usually accompanied being the center of attention, getting singled out and applauded by an enthusiastic crowd. For the first time, she truly didn’t care what the conductor or her fellow musicians or the audience had thought.
At one time, before that day, Melanie had considered her violin a part of her body, an appendage. But the music she, they, had just produced existed separately. It was now outside of her, beyond herself, and set loose into the wild to fend for itself on this bitterly cold March afternoon. That music no longer belonged to her any more than it belonged to Harkályi or to the conductor or to the audience. It was free. And so was she. Her informal resignation from the Opera House Symphony Orchestra had already been accepted, and she felt great about it. She felt liberated, her violin separate now, no longer hers. No one could possess such a thing. It was Independence Day. She sat amid the chaos of the altar’s reconstruction and laughed until tears beaded in the corners of her eyes and a heavily accented voice addressed her. “I understand that you are an American?”
Lajos Harkályi pulled an empty chair over to face hers, scraping it across the stone floor. Behind him, the stained-glass window blinked out and the colors of the church faded back to their natural stony gray. Yet Harkályi’s eyes still appeared bright, alive. Musical. An entourage of orchestra representatives and autograph seekers remained, for now, a respectful distance away. A reporter with a tape recorder cornered Harkályi’s girlfriend.
Melanie wanted to apologize, but he cut her off.
“Do not be sorry,” he said. “I have no problem with what has occurred today. What is your name?”
“Melanie Scholes.”
“I am pleased to meet you, Melanie. I am Lajos.”
She shook his hand, which was warm enough to bring the feeling flooding back to her fingers and toes. “I … I’m sorry I ruined the recording. Your premiere.”
Nanette appeared among the clutter of stagehands and altar boys. Melanie shot her a give-me-a-sec look over Harkályi’s shoulder. She snapped off a couple photos of the two of them, and it occurred to Melanie that she didn’t need to act natural this time.
“On the contrary, I think that you may have saved it. I am flattered that my music moved you in such a way. It shows me that perhaps I did something correctly, and that you—” He yawned into the back of his hand. “Forgive me, I am extremely tired. It tells me that you have real music inside of you.” Reporters clamored for his attention. “This is something we can discuss on another day.” He pulled his billfold and a rotund ballpoint pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “Here is my telephone number at home in Philadelphia. I will be there before the end of this month. Call me — collect, if that is what you prefer.” He had the borderline-illegible handwriting of a child, but the surface of his business card was as smooth as marble. She tucked it between the strings of her violin. She stood when Harkályi did, and he hugged her in front of all those people, a public gesture of support. More cameras whirred and flashed at them. She got it, finally: Harkályi’s popularity and subsequent wealth had rendered him invisible. But she now saw him, the real him, or at least believed that she did. In becoming an icon he had sacrificed his complexity, the fluid motion of his humanity. And it seemed like he had accepted that, made his peace with it. Of his millions of fans, Melanie alone knew him, understood who he was. She held him tighter. The shoulder of his luxuriously soft jacket absorbed her tears before he was swallowed up by his followers and devotees.
7.
Nanette threw her arms around Melanie’s neck. “Baby, you were great!” she screamed. “That was so cool. What did the composer guy say?”
Confusion impeded Melanie’s attempt at a rational response. She didn’t want to talk about it, least of all with Nanette. No words existed in English or Hungarian for what she had experienced. For what she was still experiencing. Music she had never heard before appeared in her head. She needed to write it down.
The vision, or whatever it was, wouldn’t fade. It embedded itself in her mind like a catchy melody. It defied meaning. She realized something crucial, however: it was time to go. She needed to leave Budapest, to leave Nanette, and to return to the comfort she had found up in that impossibly tall tree, until the lynched chorus began to holler. Something in that brief, initial sensation of serenity triggered an acute understanding of how miserable she was with the recklessness, with the out-all-night bacchanalia she used to distract herself for a few hours at a time from the music she felt surging through her veins. Something in the horror of seeing those men dangling, hearing their moans, which would continue to haunt her for years to come, told Melanie that she had lost all sight of what made her who she was.
She didn’t want to blame Nanette, however: she bore full responsibility herself, which was why she needed to leave Budapest and her expatriate life behind. On a practical level, she was likely out of a job anyway. No way the conductor would have her back. She had contemplated the move for ages, even checking ticket prices and looking at audition dates with orchestras in Philly and Baltimore, Washington and Boston, but had always hesitated to give up the privilege of the expatriate lifestyle. Here, she was an American. Back in the States, she would become just another aimless kid with a violin, like all the other conservatory dropouts working in music stores and performing for community theater. But this concert sealed the deal. Leaving was no longer an option — it was a necessity. She was trapped. If she had to, she would move in with her brother and his wife for a few weeks. Take on some private students and practice her butt off until the next round of Boston Symphony auditions.
“Did you get a program?” she asked Nanette.
“Yeah, here.” Nanette fished a copy from the side pocket of a camera bag.
There was little room to write amid the program notes and biographical information and the colorful advertisements for Unicum, salami, and banks. “Give me a pen.”
“What—?”
“Hold on,” Melanie said, and jotted down the first few notes of a simple melody, a theme. She heard it over and over, like a skipping record. More would come soon. She felt it brewing inside her. She had never composed music before, and wasn’t entirely sure that was what she was doing, but it seemed like it. The melody was both unrecognizable and as familiar as her own name. She handed the pen back to Nanette.
“What did the composer say?”
Melanie would wait until later to tell Nanette that she was leaving. “He … he thanked me.”
“Isn’t he really famous?”
“Let me get my stuff and we’ll go.”
Nanette sat and held Melanie’s violin and bow in her lap. Melanie pocketed Harkályi’s business card and exchanged her Bible verse for her case and coat. The conductor, speaking into a Magyar Televízíó microphone, gave her a look of pure evil that would make the front page of the next day’s Hírlap. Back on stage, Melanie wiped down the strings and placed her instrument into its snug little coffin. Nanette put her arm around her shoulders, and on their way out the church doors Melanie offered a silent prayer of thanks to Beethoven. He heard her. He was grateful too.