Andrew Crumey - The Secret Knowledge

Why not memorise it anyway? A small, tactical gesture of defiance, her right to play what she likes. She’ll never be perfect like the one who was here before but she can still be an artist. She spends her hour working through the movement, repeating each section and imprinting it on her mind and fingers, this song of sadness or joy, pain or triumph, she’ll remember it even though she doesn’t know what any of it means. At home she continues so that when the time comes for her to see Mr Conroy again a few days later she knows it by heart, though he’ll never hear her play.

She arrives for the appointment and knocks the door, he calls for her to enter and she finds him sitting reading. His office looks bare, without a single picture or ornament, the shelves largely empty, giving an impression of transit, or someone living almost entirely inside his own head, with little need for physical comfort or external distraction. He looks up, his glasses catch the light. “Do you have it?” he asks at once.

“The score? Sure.”

“Leave it there,” he instructs, nodding towards the desk. She deposits it on an empty corner and stands waiting for him to say something else, but he’s turning the pages of his book as though having already forgotten she’s there. Eventually he looks again and says, “Thanks.”

“You said we needed to have a meeting.”

“Not really.”

She’s taken aback. “You made it sound so important.”

“An over-reaction.”

Whose does he mean, she wonders, feeling increasingly exasperated. “I came here specially for this.”

Conroy appears to have some emerging recognition of his own rudeness. “Take a seat,” he offers, waving towards a chair and laying aside the open book. “Tell me what you make of the piece.”

By now it has suggested so many contradictory pictures: a lullaby sung by a skeleton, an anthem for the broken-hearted, a text message saying “it’s over”, a stump of flesh expelled in the toilet. “I wonder what he’d have done if he’d lived.”

“Klauer? Been a different person. Not the one destined to shoot himself but someone else instead. I think it was going to be a symphony but he didn’t get as far as orchestrating it. All we’ve got is an outline.”

A sketch of a life the composer was condemned never to lead. That would be one way of making sense of it: the jumbled image of so many unrealised possibilities.

Conroy says, “The owner of the original manuscript gave me the photocopy on the understanding that I wouldn’t share it with anyone. He wants to protect his investment.”

The explanation is prosaic; Conroy’s face implies something more he wants to say, yet doesn’t.

“What should I be practising instead?”

He’s not listening, he thinks for a moment then suddenly asks, “What would you consider the most important thing in your life?”

She guesses he wants her to say music. “Family and friends. Being healthy.”

“You lose those things.”

“Sometimes. That’s why they’re important.”

“Training to be a performer isn’t like studying to be an engineer or a geographer. It’s about your whole life, what you are as a person. There mustn’t be distractions. Do you have a boyfriend?”

Paige feels her face redden. “Yes,” she lies.

“Is he a musician?”

“No. What about your partner?”

He looks surprised. “Who?”

“You said your partner left you. When I had my lesson.”

“I did? It was inappropriate of me. Did you find it inappropriate?”

“I thought it was a strange thing to say at a first lesson.”

“I only remember telling you to read Adorno. He’s important, you know.” Conroy ruminates. “How about Humoreske ?”

“What?”

“Schumann. As a study work.”

“Instead of Klauer? But I’ll need another twentieth-century piece won’t I?”

“Forget the syllabus, you came here to study because you love playing.”

“I want a degree though.”

“I’ll take care of it. You’ve got talent, that’s what matters. We need to be flexible. Do you know Humoreske ? No? One of the movements has a third stave with a theme you’re meant to hear inside your head, but not play. What do you make of that? When I recorded it some years ago, I thought of the hidden melody, exactly as Schumann instructs. I wonder how many people could hear it when they listened to the CD. I wonder if anyone even listened.”

Perhaps it’s only because the boy in the café mentioned a breakdown, but a suspicion is growing in Paige’s mind that Mr Conroy is slightly unhinged. Not simply artistic or eccentric, but a bit mad. “Would I need to think of the hidden tune too?”

Conroy shrugs. “If it’s written then you’ve got to obey the instruction. Did I tell you why she left me?”

“You said you got back from a concert tour and she’d walked out, taken all her belongings.”

“Yes,” Conroy reminds himself, “like she was never there. Has it ever occurred to you how easily a person can disappear from the world?”

She’s only been struck by how easy it is for new ones to appear.

“You’re still too young to think about these things. Life for you is the future, it’s something that’s going to happen. Eventually you realise it’s already over, though you didn’t notice at the time. I died, you know.”

This really is mad. “What do you mean, died?”

“On stage. It wasn’t a bad performance, in some ways it was one of my best. But it was when my life stopped being in the future and started being in the past. Did you know I recorded several CDs? Great reviews, then the label dropped me. That’s what Klauer could have looked forward to, having his moment of success then going out of fashion.”

“At least he’d have had his moment.”

“Did the police interview you?”

Paige guesses he’s talking about the Egyptian violinist. “I never knew anything about it.”

“An officer came to my house and searched it, I didn’t realise what was going on, I left him upstairs undisturbed. Look what I found afterwards.” From his pocket he extracts something small and round, a shiny object that he shows to Paige, expecting her to take it from his outstretched fingers. “I don’t care if they spy on me, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

She looks at it, wondering if this is a joke, a provocation, or just the way that some people react when a relationship fails and for a little while they break adrift from reality. “It’s only a button battery,” she says.

The story is told of a marvellous automaton with the appearance of a Turk seated at a chessboard, a hidden mechanism enabling it to move and play. In fact it was operated by a concealed hunchback pulling strings. Hannah Arendt thinks of it as she sits in the respectably shabby reception area of the Institute for Social Research. She arrived here in New York with her husband only a few days ago; before that they were in Lisbon for three months trying to arrange the crossing. Plenty of time to ponder the costumed robot that wins every game through trickery.

It’s a sunny June morning and she can hear the rumble of traffic outside. The secretary offers her coffee, says cheerfully that Dr Adorno will be with her soon, but Hannah declines the drink, she can taste bitterness already. Her visit is not for Adorno’s sake, she despises the man. She is here because of Walter Benjamin.

Friendship is considered an abbreviation of the customary distance between people; yet it need do nothing to alter the quantity of separation, only its quality. Hence the paradox that the greatest mark of friendship, as of enmity, is silence. When Hannah saw Walter in Marseilles, the two of them having been brought together again through the frantic scramble for visas, she was shocked at how haggard and distressed he was. In an atmosphere of urgency and desperation he entrusted to her a collection of his own papers, instructing that if she reached America first then she must take them to Adorno. Nothing else was said. The Institute for Social Research, originally based in Frankfurt, had supported Benjamin’s work; these same Marxist scholars tried to bring him to New York to join them in exile. Hannah appreciates their exertion; but unlike hers it was a collective effort, and the room where she waits is pervaded by the same oppressive aura of bureaucratic uniformity. The coffee table has the Institute’s publications available for perusal; the chair she sits on is made neither for work nor comfort, only for a condition of delay that everyone hopes will not be too protracted. What exactly do they do here? Much of their labour, she has heard, is invested in making applications to charitable funding bodies.