Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

He had written to friends A through L, and now he saved the rest and wrote instead to students. Here in the briefcase’s outermost pocket were class rosters from the past two years, and letters addressed to those young men care of the university were bound to reach them. The amounts they sent were smaller, the notes that accompanied them more inquisitive: What, exactly, had transpired? Could they come to meet him?

The postbox was in a different city than the one where he stayed. He arrived at the post office just before closing, and came only every two or three weeks. He always looked through the window first to check that the lobby was empty. If it was not, he would leave and return another day. Surely one of these days, a friend of the professor would be waiting there for him. He prepared a story, that he was the honored professor’s assistant, that he could not reveal the man’s location but would certainly pass on your kindest regards, sir.

If the earth moved, all it would take for a man to travel its circumference would be a strong balloon. Rise twenty feet above, and wait for the earth to turn under you; you would be home again in a day. But this was not true, and a man could not escape his spot on the earth but to run along the surface. Ergo, the earth was still. Ergo, the sun was the moving body of the two.

No, he did not believe it. He wanted only to know who this professor was, this man who would teach his students the laws of the universe, then ask them to prove as true what was false.

On the wall of the café: plate-sized canvas, delicate oils of an apple, half-peeled. Signed, below, by a girl he had known in school. The price was more than a month of groceries, and so he did not buy it, but for weeks he read his news under the apple and drank his coffee. Staining his fingers in cheap black ink were the signal fires of the world, the distress sirens, the dispatches from the trenches and hospitals and abattoirs of the war — but here, on the wall, a sign from another world. He had known this girl as well as any other: had spoken with her every day, but had not made love to her; had gone to her vacation home one winter holiday, but knew nothing of her life since then. And now, a clue, perfect and round and unfathomable. After all this time: apple.

Once he finished the news, he worked at the professor’s proof and saw in the coil of green-edged apple skin some model of spiraling, of expansion. The stars were at one time part of the earth, until the hand of God peeled them away, leaving us in the dark. They do not revolve around us: They escape in widening circles. The Milky Way is the edge of this peel.

Outside the café window, a beggar screeched his bow against a defeated violin. A different kind of leather case lay open on the ground, this one collecting the pennies of the more compassionate passers-by. The café owner shooed him away, and the chef sighed in guilty relief that he would not have to pass, on the way out, his double.

After eight months in the new city, the chef stopped buying his newspapers on the street by the café and began instead to read the year-old news the widow gave him for his fires. Here, fourteen months ago: Minister P—— of the Interior predicts war. One day he found that in a box near the widow’s furnace were papers three, four, five years old. Pages were missing, edges eaten. He took his fragments of yellowed paper to the café and read the beginnings and ends of opinions and letters. He read reports from what used to be his country’s borders.

When he had finished the last of the box, he began to read the widow’s history books. The Americas, before Columbus; the oceans, before the British; Rome, before its fall.

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end.

He took a lover in the city and told her he was a professor of physics. He showed her the stars in the sky and explained that they circled the earth, along with the sun.

That’s not true at all, she said. You think I’m just a silly girl.

No, he said and touched her neck, You are the only one who might understand. The universe has been folded inside out.

A full year had passed, and he paid the widow in coins. He wrote to friends M through Z. I have been in hiding for a year, he wrote. Tell my dear wife I have my health. May time and history forgive us all.

A year had passed, but so had many years passed for many men. And after all what was a year, if the earth did not circle the sun?

The earth does not circle the sun, he wrote. Ergo: The years do not pass. The earth, being stationary, does not erase the past nor escape toward the future. Rather, the years pile on like blankets, existing at once. The year is 1848; the year is 1789; the year is 1956.

If the earth hangs still in space, does it spin? If the earth spins, the space I occupy I will therefore vacate in an instant. This city will leave its spot, and the city to the west will usurp its place. Ergo, this city is all cities. This is Kabul; this is Dresden; this is Johannesburg.

I run by standing still.

At the post office, he collects his envelopes of money. He has learned from the notes of concerned colleagues and students and friends that the professor suffered from infections of the inner ear that often threw off his balance. He has learned of the professor’s wife, A——, whose father died the year they married. He has learned that he has a young son. Rather, the professor has a son.

At each visit to the post office, he fears he will forget the combination. It is an old lock, and complicated: F1, clockwise to B3, back to A6, forward again to J3. He must shake the latch before it opens. More than forgetting, perhaps what he fears is that he will be denied access — that the little box will one day recognize him behind his thick and convincing beard, will decide he has no right of entry.

One night, asleep with his head on his lover’s leg, he dreams that a letter has arrived from the professor himself. They freed me at the end of the march, it says, and I crawled my way home. My hands are bloody and my knees are worn through, and I want my briefcase.

In his dream, the chef takes the case and runs west — because if the professor takes it back, there will be no name left for the chef, no place on the earth. The moment his fingers leave the leather loop of the handle, he will fall off the planet.

He sits in a wooden chair on the lawn behind the widow’s house. Inside, he hears her washing dishes. In exchange for the room, he cooks all her meals. It is April, and the cold makes the hairs rise from his arms, but the sun warms the arm beneath them. He thinks, The tragedy of a moving sun is that it leaves us each day. Hence the desperate Aztec sacrifices, the ancient rites of the eclipse. If the sun so willingly leaves us, each morning it returns is a stay of execution, an undeserved gift.

Whereas: If it is we who turn, how can we so flagrantly leave behind that which has warmed us and given us light? If we are moving, then each turn is a turn away. Each revolution a revolt.