A deep harp pulse, then a double reed, followed by a muted horn choir: before I realized that the piece had started, a door opened beneath me, and I fell effortlessly into another place. An orchestral work, but deployed in a chamber, slower and more melancholy than any music I've ever heard, a sound written after the history of the human race was only a faint memory.
I didn't possess the sophistication to say when it had been written. I didn't even worry it. The notes took occupancy, a horizon of tones stretching in all directions; I was at the center of the sound. Someone was singing, a contralto, although it took me measures before I identified voice as that new, ravishing instrument that had entered. She sang in a language I didn't know but understood perfectly. The song was so agonizingly drawn-out — sustained loss unfolding in the background of a peaceful scene — that I couldn't make the pulse out. One measure became eight; eight crystallized into sixteen. I knew that sound: the last day of the year.
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben; Sic hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen, Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben….
Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet. Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.
I couldn't say how long it lasted; I was stunned to learn later that it took less than ten minutes. Just as the tune seemed reconciled to ending, its texture thinned to nothing, the strings waited on the verge of resolution, that reed hung on a suspension, and the whole chord stood still in space, frozen, refusing forever to give up the moment of quick here now. Then the portal closed; I came back to this man's room, all the noises of his apartment and the street, noises I had designed my life around not hearing.
He waited a suitable moment before ruffling the silence. "Well? What was that all about?" Didn't he know already? I snapped my head up, opened my eyes, saw him again in the corner of the room, sitting amid his notebooks and clothes and rummage treasures. He hadn't moved during the piece. Had he meant to use the music to win me, heart and frozen soul, he could not have succeeded better with my assistance.
"I don't know," I answered sharply. I closed my eyes and let my head drop back to the bed. "I don't speak German."
He laughed at my hostility. "Not the text, goof. The music. What does that tune mean?"
I was auditioning all over again. I was to tell him what that frozen chordal unfolding contained. Against my will, I wanted to answer correctly. Wanted badly. But anything I might say would be wrong. I kept still and waited, knowing that the least sound would give me away. I could think of nothing to add to the notes. But my interviewer waited just as patiently for the thing he wanted from me. I would have hummed that infinitely patient theme out loud by way of explaining what it meant, if I thought my voice could carry it. I said nothing for as long as nothing was possible, then came out with, "It's about leaving."
Todd sat up. "I've been waiting forever for someone to hear that." Unable to leave well enough alone, he added, "The most beautiful delaying gesture ever written."
He identified the tune as one of the Rückert Lieder by Mahler. He would play it again for me later, under different circumstances, when it would sound completely changed. But this time, over the sea in America, in 1983, in a cluttered, unzoned apartment, between two people who couldn't, despite themselves, have the first idea of what was going on out there, in the real house of cartels, conspiracies, and national states, it sounded completely out of place and time: a round, bitter, beautifully inviting rearguard action against loss. But we didn't understand, yet, just how much there was to lose.
"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," he said, coming over to where I waited. "I have gotten lost in the world. Although der Welt, feminine, seems to be in the dative: maybe 'to the world.' Abhanden is definitely not the tantalizing choice: abandoned. False cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would say, if they were French."
I hated him at that moment. His arrogance ruined for me what sound I could still just make out. Truth was, I was not a native speaker. I had studied it once, but had gotten nowhere. Had he played any other piece, I would have heard little, maybe nothing at all. I would have flunked the audition if the piece he'd chosen hadn't been so clearly a sound track for the only thing on God's earth I have an ear for. I wanted to be outside in the cold. I wanted to be by myself, in the apartment I had left a man to get. To die away from the world's noises, to live alone in a quiet place. In that song.
Todd kept chattering amiably, as if I were another of his news vendors or street drunks. I wanted him to stop talking, but he wouldn't. He jabbered on about the composer, the exhaustion of romanticism, the absolute distrust Americans have come to feel toward European culture, toward their own past. He prompted me to join in, but I snubbed the invitation. He prodded me again, but a look from me cut the game dead. He stood, went to the window, and stared at something farther than the neighborhood. He squinted, looking for that metaphor, the outside world with its untraceable, newsprint, global urgencies closed off to us, hermetically sealed. "But I do love you," he said. I was the only person within earshot.
"Thank you. I mean, for___"I gestured at the record player with a wrist. He turned to look at me. I saw in his face the evidence he'd been denying since the day he came by the library to ask about a disappearing man. I understood that all the people he spread himself out over — the cashiers, the subway vets, the three-piece-suiters, college friends held at phone's distance, everyone who elicited that uncalculated, soliciting, contagious charm— were grapples, last-ditch efforts to reverse the departure he was well into. He had the Ressler gene, recessive, latent, but irreversible.
He returned the record to the closet shelf. "I have become a stranger to this place," he said, not daring to look at me. I realized later that he was trying again to translate the song text, quote of the day.
XVIII
Canon at the Sixth
"Does it have any side effects?" he asked one night in my room, our habitual place for love. We lay still straddled; 1 crouched exhausted on top of him. Although subzero outside, we were moist from exertion. Sex, slack and slow, expansive, aesthetic, like serious wine tastings where nothing gets drunk but everything sampled, sometimes turned fierce for no reason, vocal, frantic, a muscle purge. The first such escalation scared the daylights out of us. Neither had initiated any change of pace, but all of a sudden we were both running hard, testing the edge of control. The more frightening it became, the more wildly we went at each other. Afterwards, still winded, I murmured about not knowing he was a sprinter.
"Sprinter? 'Hurdler' wouldn't half say it. You get that from a book? Private reference?" I made an embarrassed pun about open circulation. After that, even our most passive encounters — wide-eyed stroking — had a whiff of danger, as if anything could trigger fierce surprise.
Following such an outbreak, we lay motionless in my room, awkward in the impossible non sequitur, the return to nonchalance. The behavioral masterstroke, more crucial to human evolution than the opposable thumb: the ability to pretend that nothing just happened, that there is no seam. "Does it have any side effects?" he asked in the dark, after geologic pressing desperate enough to crystallize carbon. He could make himself obscure in half a dozen languages, including his mother tongue.