Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

I lied before. The sex isn’t that good. I had low expectations, so I was thrilled he knew anything . But actually he’s pretty stiff, noncreative. I’ve tried things a couple of times, normal things for our society, and he’s pulled away from me, started talking fast in German, turned bright pink.

The last time he did it, I put my clothes back on and decided to ignore him for the rest of the day. I went to the window and opened the curtains. I wasn’t thinking about it, but maybe on some level I did it to scare him. He stood staring down at the cars, saw all the buildings, saw for the first time how high we were. He didn’t cry, but he looked like he wanted to. He stayed there a long time, shaking and mumbling. Then he closed the curtains and ran to the couch, ran bent over at the waist as if he were scared of falling. I’m surprised he never opened the curtains himself while I was at work. You’d think a genius would be more curious than that.

To calm him down, I got my big music encyclopedia off the shelf and showed him all the pictures in the Bach section. The house where he was born, the church in Leipzig, a portrait of his oldest son. He pointed at each and said things I couldn’t understand, but they seemed to make him happy. He flipped back a page to the Vivaldi section and made some kind of joke. He giggled and giggled, so I just laughed along with him.

“Yep, that Vivaldi,” I said. “One funny guy.”

After I put the encyclopedia back on the shelf, I got out the little Chagall book I’d bought at MOMA.

“Here,” I said, and I opened it to The Fiddler. “This is what I think of when you play Chopin. See how he’s making music, floating there above the town? That’s what you sound like, like there’s nothing under your feet but you don’t even notice.”

Bach squinted at the picture, pointed at the fiddler’s face. “Grün,” he said.

“Yes, it’s green. I wouldn’t make fun. You looked strange enough yourself when you were twelve inches tall.”

I flipped to the one called Birthday, the one where a man floats above the red carpet, floats above a woman to kiss her. A city window and a little purse. The man has no arms. The next page was Couple of Lovers on a Red Background , where they’re lying in the red, and they’re red themselves, drowning in it, only they’re not drowning, because up above is a huge blue pool where the real water is, where the blue man throws flowers and the fish-bird jumps down.

“These are pictures of love,” I said. “ Love. ” He put his hand on his heart. I’d taught him that one the week before. “Everyone in these pictures can float, because they’re in love, or they’re the fiddler on the roof, or just happy.” I pointed out the window. “That’s why we can stay up here so high. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is. Twenty-seven stories up!” I flashed my fingers in two tens and a seven. “Because we’re playing music and we’re happy.”

He crawled back to the window, his nails digging into the carpet, then reached up and lifted just the corner of the curtain. Together we watched the bus shed passengers twenty-seven stories down. Then he looked at me and pointed at the wristwatch I’d given him, the one Larry left behind because it wasn’t digital.

“You want to know how long the building can hold up against gravity?” Although maybe it was something else. How long must he stay here, how many lifetimes have passed since his own, what time is it in Germany?

“Tock, tock, tock,” he said.

I chose to answer the gravity question, because it was the only one I could. “A long time. Long time. It won’t fall down while you’re here, at least.”

Since that afternoon, when he sings the blues, it sounds like the blues .

“I’m so forlorn,” he sings,

“life’s just a sorn

my heart is torn

vhy vas I born

Vhat did I dooooo

to be so bleck… and blue?”

He won’t look out the window anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He knows. Every siren he hears now, he looks at that curtain. I’ve never been in the blissful ignorance camp, but in this case maybe it was too much for one man to handle. Sometime last October, Larry made us stop watching TV so we wouldn’t see bad news. I couldn’t understand how it worked for him, because for me it was worse. If we don’t watch the news, I said, how do we know the city’s not on fire? How do we know we’re not the last ones alive? Since Johann’s been here I’ve kept the TV off, but I’ll turn on my radio when he’s in the bathroom — if only to hear some stupid ad, because then at least I know we’re all okay. Those shrill furniture store jingles are the sound of safety. There’s still money to be made, they say. There’s still something left to buy.

He’s been turning pale, and if I’m not mistaken he’s getting smaller. You can see it around the eyes, the way they’re sinking back into his face. The skin feels loose on his arms. He hardly leaves the couch anymore, and when he does — when he finally gets his courage and dashes to the bathroom — it’s with shaking legs and outstretched arms, like he’s worried the floor will give way any moment. He’s scratched the arms of the sofa to shreds.

Yesterday I played the piano to see if he would follow suit. I brought out my big blue Gershwin book and got through “A Foggy Day” with only three or four mistakes. I’m good, if a little rusty. At the end of high school I was even applying to conservatories, making tapes and getting ready to go on auditions, when I realized that although I could play almost anything you put before me, and skillfully — I’d won competitions, even — I’d never gotten through a major piece without one error. I could play the whole Pathétique flawlessly, then a measure from the end I’d breathe a sigh of relief and wreck the last chord. And so I majored in finance.

“Maybe that’s what you are,” I told Johann after I’d flubbed the last two measures. “Maybe you’re my repressed ambition.” Not likely, the way he sits with his mouth caving in, his glare darting between me and the window.

He sighed. “I’m vhite… in-side,” he sang.

“You’re white all over, Johann,” I said. Though truth be told, lately he’s a little gray.

I get the feeling his tock, tock, tock is running out. But if my test sticks are accurate I started ovulating yesterday, so I only need him to hold out a little longer. We made love twice this morning. I’ll buy him a fattening dinner tonight.

I had to leave him on the couch at noon, lock the door, ride down in my loud, slow elevator to show the Lindquists their fifteenth (and God, let’s hope, final) apartment. Johann didn’t look good at all when I left him there, so small and pale, curled in the cushions. I wonder if I’d be as terrified by his eighteenth-century Leipzig, or if there’s something intrinsically horrifying about our modern world, about this new century, something we can handle only because we’ve been so slowly inured to it. At other moments today I’ve wondered, too, if Johann shriveling in on himself is in fact a sign that part of me is coming back to life. Or that another life is ready to start inside me.

“I have to make money,” I told him as I left. “Deutschmarks, right? You’d understand. I’m sure you wouldn’t have slaved your Sundays away on half the organs in Germany if you didn’t have twenty mouths to feed. I’ll need to buy things. Piano lessons. For the baby.”