Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

“And you stayed with him?” Melanie said. She couldn’t help it. “This is the same person? Him? ” She refrained from gesturing, so that László could remain in the dark. He was contemplating his empty glass.

“I fell in love. Maybe it makes no sense.”

“Not really,” Melanie said, but only under her breath.

Zsuzsi said, “But I had no children with him. Is like the two of you. You are a beautiful couple, and you should not care what are the rules of married and not married and who is widow. You know: Not everyone survives.”

Melanie wasn’t following anymore. Was she the widow? Was Vanessa?

“And now you see: The gas comes back for us. We are gone in Cleveland and the gas comes back, and instead it finds other people. It finds your beautiful friend.” Zsuzsi began sobbing into her hands, and Jed found the right moment to touch her shoulder. Melanie, near panic herself, looked across at the old man, at the absent way he observed his crying wife. She wondered what Zsuzsi had told him to calm him down — if she’d lied to him about the mouse, or even about Jed and Melanie. Told him they were doctors, psychologists. She studied his face: his caved-in mouth, his long, unruly eyebrows. His blue eyes milky with cataracts.

Zsuzsi looked up at Melanie. “You forgive yourself now for moving on. It is good your affair has ended, yes? Those two go together to their grave, and you are here and finding love. But I know from the first time I see you that you worry you make this happen, that your sins made come the gas. And I tell you this story because you need to know it was not from you. It was from me.”

Melanie opened her mouth to say, “No, I never had an affair, I had an engagement and a betrayal and a collapsing of my universe, no, you’re very confused,” but Jed shot her a look — a gentle glare, a blaze of green — and it was like an emergency transfusion of clarity. This story is not about you , the look said. Shut up.

“You cannot help that you fall in love with that man,” Zsuzsi said.

“No. No, I couldn’t. We don’t choose, right?”

Zsuzsi nodded vigorously. “Who is ever to choose?”

László started coughing, a thick cough that rattled his whole body, his hands braced against the table, and Jed jumped up to get him more water. He put the glass in front of him, but the cough continued with such intensity that he couldn’t stop to drink. Zsuzsi rose and stood behind him, lifting the glass to his mouth, and he breathed some water in, then dribbled it out into his white stubble. Eventually, the coughs spread out and stopped. He said something to Zsuzsi and waved her away.

Jed said, “It’s late.” And it was. It was dark outside. (The band would have been starting to play right now. Melanie had almost forgotten.) The mouse was still nestled in Jed’s palm. He said, “Are you sure you want me to take this? I’ll show you the memorial when it’s done.” But László was coughing again, and Zsuzsi was back at his side. Jed and Melanie slipped out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, up to the second floor hall, where Vanessa Dillard’s door was still ajar from what Melanie had thought would be her quick farewell trip to Jed’s.

He was saying, “I can’t paint over the mouse. I couldn’t do it. But that’ll be cool, right? It can be the only unpainted thing, like it’s the rawest and it stands out.”

Melanie nodded and said, “I think I’m stopping here. I need to get off this ride now.”

“I mean, wow . It’s called Stockholm syndrome, right? Do you think she’s really loved him all this time?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I mean, talk about compartmentalizing . Ha! Okay, so does that mean he was a Nazi? Is that the same thing? I mean it sounds, like, as bad or worse than Nazi.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, God. Oh. Why are you crying? Hey.”

She wiped at her nose and tried to unscramble her brain. “It was true down there, that look you gave me. What Zsuzsi said had nothing to do with me. We think we’re part of the story, but we’re just the tangents. It’s the same thing I’ve been — you know? In there.”

Jed looked horrified. “I don’t understand, but I know that’s not true!”

Melanie leaned against the wall and wondered how she could possibly still have tears left when she was so very dehydrated. “I’ll put it this way. You look into that dollhouse. Okay, that wasn’t fair, not a dollhouse. The museum, the memorial. You look into it from outside, and you have a few little relics, and you try to put a narrative around them, decipher them, but really you’re never going to know. Are you satisfied with that? Standing on the outside looking in?” He was quiet, and she worried she’d offended him. It was easy to forget how young he was. She said, “I’m sorry. I mean, maybe that’s the role of the artist.”

Jed’s voice was as kind as any nurse’s, any teacher’s: “I think it’s the role of the survivor.”

“Oh.” It was the point of his whole project, and she’d missed it completely. “Oh.”

Why was she always five steps behind?

He smiled, and she knew then that he would have slept with her, if she’d wanted. He would have taken her up to his apartment and made her feel young and unbetrayed again for one night. Of course he would have. It wasn’t so complicated. But he was still holding that little mouse, fragile and gray, and she didn’t want him to put it down for her or anyone. She wanted it to go straight to the waiting little room, in front of Maria Callas and home, at last, to the land of forgotten and remembered and misconstrued objects — after seventy years, at last. And she wanted to go home and sleep for a week.

Outside, there was a cascade of sirens — someone else’s emergency — and then they passed.

She said, “Good night, good night, good night,” and Jed started up his last flight of stairs, the mouse cupped in his hands, until she could see only his feet, then nothing.

It was, by design, her final image of the building. She sealed it there, like a movie director watching the dailies and selecting from among hundreds what would be the film’s closing shot: here, at the perfect angle, a beautiful man from below, fragile relic in his rough hands. Mouse equaling survival, et cetera. Sirens in the night. Fade to black.

She locked Vanessa’s door, leaving the Evidence box inside. Her sisters would be glad to handle the apartment’s sale, the transfer of personal effects, the donation of furniture to the women’s shelter.

It wasn’t quite true, she knew, that there was nothing for her in Zsuzsi’s story. The woman had managed — not just eventually, but right there on the spot in 1944—to forgive the most heinous acts of her lifetime, all for the sake of love. Or at least self-preservation. And here was Melanie, who knew that the rest of her life would be defined by the degree to which she could forgive Michael. This was the role of the survivor as well: the passing of judgment, the issuing of pardons. But she didn’t even think she ought to forgive Michael. She could only note, with slight astonishment, that at some point in the recent past she had managed to forgive Vanessa Dillard completely. Wasn’t that a triumph of sorts?

She walked down the stairs, trying to be exactly like someone in a film, an actress with a mark to hit, a single motivation, a paycheck on the other side of the front door.

She almost made it.

From inside apartment B, piano chords vibrated, delicate but insistent, and above them hovered a cracked soprano. A ravaged voice, a Stradivarius left in the rain.

It was down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet

She crossed the Sally Gardens on little snow-white feet.