Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

She would tell the story to younger colleagues, starting with the albatross, focusing on Eden Su, ending with Tossman, whom they knew about already. The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistakes could be. How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it. But she wondered, even as she told the story, if she wasn’t still missing the point. If maybe it wasn’t something, after all, about love — something she was too cold to understand.

The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.

I n almost any culture, it’s an omen: of a death, or a birth, or a journey. Sometimes a bird in the house is said to be the ghost of the recently departed. We aren’t capable of seeing it rationally — especially as it falls in love with itself in our windows, as it flaps frantically past family portraits, as it kills itself against our walls.

When I was four months old, my father’s parents saw each other for the last time. My grandmother would be dead within the year, crushed under a bus on a Budapest street. My grandfather would live on in Hawaii for two sunburnt and hazy decades. The summer of 1978 was a rare convergence for them — Chicago being a fairly precise midpoint, the birth of a baby being a neutralizing force.

The scene, as it’s been relayed to me: my mother in our family room, holding me. My grandmother at the kitchen table with my sister, peeling apples. My father in the living room, playing piano. My grandfather on the stairs, a threadbare towel around his neck. (His blind left eye, doomed in infancy when his tubercular mother broke out of quarantine and kissed it, dripped so constantly that the towel became necessary late in life. He lived out his second half as a hatha yoga instructor, and at least when he stood on his head the tears fell into his white hair and not his mouth.)

And then: A sparrow flew out of the fireplace and past my screaming mother, sprinkling ash, flailing in loud circles. It found its way through the kitchen door, and my grandmother, still seated but reaching one hand straight up, grabbed its tail. The longest feathers stayed between her fingers as the bird flew on, raining small, perfect circles of blood on the kitchen tiles, on the flesh of the peeled apples, on the lid of the Cuisinart.

The Mozart stopped mid-phrase and the bird found the upstairs hallway, following some unhelpful instinct of altitude equaling safety. My grandfather tried to throw his towel over it. When this failed (depth perception not his strength), he rolled the towel and snapped it like a locker-room bully until the wall was smeared with ash and blood, and the sparrow, dazed, beat its wings into the floor and tried to claw a foothold. The old man wrapped the towel around it like a sack, and flung the whole thing out the window with such force that the bird had five full seconds to stretch its wounded wings before it needed to fly of its own accord.

My grandfather credited his luck. He always won at the track, as well. His secret was to bet on the white horse. The white horse was the only one his good eye could follow.

My grandmother, who knew more than a bit about omens, was somber the rest of the day.

When the two guests had returned to opposite ends of the world, there remained in the house only the detritus of their stay: the gifts my grandfather had brought; a brown patch scrubbed indelibly into the upstairs wall; in my sister’s room, where a writing desk had been set up for my grandmother, the typewriter purchased for the visit and the curiously tangled ink ribbons she’d abandoned.

She always shuffled cards as she wrote, but when my mother cleaned she found only five, their margins softly obliterated. Of the Hanged Man, only the bottom half remained. Lost in the fog of whatever world she’d been creating, or in the present world (announcing its intentions so brazenly), or perhaps in some past and brutal one, my grandmother had chewed and swallowed almost the entire pack.

[TAPE #2: 4 MINUTES, 13 SECONDS]

Would a glass of water be possible?

June the fourteenth. The theater on

The rumors we heard — on entering the theater — were thus: That Sophia Speri had refused several opportunities to leave the country, that she remained maniacally insistent on completing this final concert. That her husband had divorced and disavowed her, that he had fled. [Unintelligible.] I don’t know, mind you, if this — it was what they said.

Yes.

We heard a man say, “Ah, if she’d been a clarinetist, she might have run through the hills with her instrument. But she’s married to the beast with ivory keys. She’d sooner cut off her own arms than run to a refugee camp in with no pianos.” We did not engage him in conversation. This was heard in passing.

Remember, please, that it was dark.

I believe that everyone in attendance understood the gravity of the situation. The invitations were secret, the hall was blackened. No one uttered her name. I made note of this.

I don’t recall. There — the only further talk was of the music, the sheet music.

That her brother had smuggled it into the country.

This is only what the woman was saying, a woman’s voice in the dark. That he had [unintelligible] the trick by reprinting each sheet of the piano score, along with mismatched lyrics to folk songs, confident that the border police could not pick out the tune. That the piece was thought unperformable by only two hands, a sort of composer’s joke, you know, that it required at least three hands, with one pianist sitting on the other’s lap.

I wish to add that this story cannot be true. Our border police, like all fine citizens, surely recognize our nation’s traditional songs.

Yes, she did.

The information, the story that we overheard — and again please remember that we did not take part, ourselves, in the — the story went that she’d been unwilling to trust a duet partner and had worked her own nail beds bloody.