‘If you insist,’ Millar smiled, and heaved himself out of the deep armchair. On springy steps he walked across to the grand piano, unbuttoned his blazer and straightened the piano stool. He was making, Perlmann thought, the face of someone trying not to look vain, even though he knew that all eyes were upon him.
The movements of his hands were economical, energetic in the powerful chords, but without any effusive artistic gestures, he never lifted his hands more than a few centimeters above the keys. Reluctantly, Perlmann was forced to admit that he liked that. He himself had tried to play that way.
And yet he found Millar’s hands repellent. They were, he realized for the first time, hairy all the way down to the joints of his fingers. The thick hair on his arms continued into his hands like fur.
He compared the playing hands with the hands of the four other men. The only disturbing thing about Silvestri’s slender, white hands was the yellowish shimmer on the right index and middle fingers. Angelini was holding a cigarette, and one couldn’t have seen the nicotine on his tanned fingers in any case. Von Levetzov’s hands were folded on his knee, manicured, smooth hands with the first liver spots, on the little finger of his left hand a signet ring with his artistically intertwined initials. Achim Ruge’s hands lay on the wide arms of the chair, heavy hands that looked more like those of a manual labourer or a peasant than an academic. Perlmann liked them, just as he had found it easy to like Ruge since changing rooms.
The face that Millar made when playing matched the sober, matter-of-fact movements of his hands. It was an attentive, concentrated face that seemed to show a certain emotion, even though Millar had not made the slightest attempt to comment upon the music or his feelings through facial expressions. I like that, too, in fact. Why can’t I simply take this man Brian Millar as he is? Why do I constantly have to chafe at him?
Millar was playing Bach. It must have been one of the English Suites, Perlmann thought, but he couldn’t have said which one. It was a while before he could identify his strange sensation: it was the absence of any surprise that what Millar was playing was Bach. Fine, the music coming from his room had been Bach as well. But that wasn’t it, he thought. He had the impression that it couldn’t have been anything but Bach; that where Millar was concerned it could only have been Bach. He thought he knew that if he had been asked before what Millar would play, he would have named Bach without hesitation. Bach and perhaps classical jazz, those were the sounds that suited his incredibly blue eyes in his clear, alert face, and his well-articulated, clear way of thinking, talking and writing.
He played brilliantly, or rather, Perlmann thought after a while, he played competently, even if that was an unusual word in this context. Perlmann was immediately prepared to concede that he would have expected nothing less from Millar. But it was more to do with Millar’s playing. He noticed it only reluctantly, but Millar played his Bach in a quite particular style; a style, besides, that he had never before encountered in such an extreme form. For a long time Perlmann sought words for it, and finally opted for this formula: the melody had been completely dissolved in structure. He tried to identify two features of his experience that were conjured up by Millar’s playing. One perceived the way in which the sequences of notes were spread out over time. The notes, even though they had faded away in the usual sense, in another sense remained where they were, and subsequent notes were added as part of a structure, and thus, from one bar to the next, a kind of architecture came into being, one that was experienced as simultaneity. The leading notes currently sounding were, Perlmann thought, like the moving tip of a piece of chalk writing, the traces of whose past movements were seen as a whole on the board. But isn’t that always the case with melody? Isn’t that actually the essence of musical form? How come it sounds like something new and specific in his playing, something special? How does he do that?
The other effect of Millar’s playing was that one couldn’t surrender to the heard melody. One couldn’t allow oneself to fall into it for as much as a moment; one was kept outside as if by an invisible wall, and that made listening demanding, even though one wasn’t really aware of it. Perlmann tried out a series of descriptive words: austere, brittle, matter-of-fact, cold, intellectual, gothic. He rejected them all. They were superficial and clichéd. One had to take into account the fact that the special quality of Millar’s playing was not simply the expression of a temperament, a character, but that it represented an actual interpretation, an interpretation of Bach’s music.
Perlmann hid his right hand under his left and tried to play along with Millar’s right hand. As he did so he moved his feet inconspicuously. It was a long time since he had done that. Back then, as a sixth-former, he had gone to practically every concert in which a pianist was involved, and sometimes he had even hitchhiked to Lübeck and Kiel. His favorite concerts were pure piano evenings, when you could concentrate upon the pianist entirely without distraction. At the back, in the cheap seats, you could brazenly close your eyes and try to imitate the hands that were playing at the front. Most of the works that he had the opportunity to hear in this way he was already familiar with. His musical memory was – apart from Bach – excellent. It hadn’t been that. Does Millar know what that is: a frightening passage?
By now the guests from outside, who had previously been sitting at the dinner table, had arrived in the lounge. The ochre-colored armchairs were all occupied, the door to the bar was open, and the formal clothes contributed to the impression that a little concert was taking place. Millar had now been playing for half an hour, and all of a sudden Perlmann found his Bach flat and boring. He would have loved to run to the trattoria and read in the chronicle what had been going on in the world when he had heard the grey-haired, bent-backed Clara Haskil at one of her last concerts.
Millar, who seemed baffled by the size of the audience behind his back, thanked them for their applause with an athletic bow that reminded Perlmann a little of a salute. The loudest and longest applause came from Adrian von Levetzov, who at first looked as if he was going to get up, but then, after glancing around at the others, remained sitting on the edge of his chair.
‘¡Un extra!’ cried Evelyn Mistral. ‘How do you say that in English?’
‘Encore,’ Millar smiled, and when he saw the others nodding he sat back down at the piano. For a moment he took off his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘What we will have now,’ he then said with complacent thoughtfulness, ‘is a precious little piece that hardly anyone plays. For example, it doesn’t appear on a single record. It’s a little trouvaille of my own.’
After only a few bars Perlmann felt a sense of familiarity. With increasing clarity he had the impression that he knew this piece, or rather, he had known it well a long time ago. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the past, for a long time in vain, until it was suddenly quite naturally there. Hanna’s piece, of course. It’s Hanna’s piece. The one we called the ‘ingenuous birthday piece’, one of her favorites.
He immediately saw her before him: Johanna Liebig with the dark strand in her fine, golden hair, which framed an unusually flat face with a very straight nose and a bronzed complexion. You could call it a beautiful face, although you had to be careful not to say it to her. He had always found it a little unapproachable, and had feared the direct gaze from her hazel eyes, which she was able skilfully to deploy. That unapproachability was the reason nothing had ever happened between them. He simply hadn’t dared, and suddenly he had realized that it was too late. At the time he hadn’t known that there was a time for such things, and that you could miss it, and even today he didn’t know whether she’d been waiting for it. Then, after a time when she kept out of his way, they became good friends. They listened to each other’s playing and criticized one another, and sometimes they went to concerts together. She was more talented than him, but in her case he hadn’t minded. There was no competition between them, on the contrary, he didn’t mind her being superior to him, and mothering him slightly, in a mocking way. He only grew furious when she, who was able to take everything more easily, more playfully, accused him of stubbornness. That made him feel helpless, and afterwards he wouldn’t say a word; something that happened later with Agnes, when she tried to rage against his ponderous and often humorless manner.