Kathleen Spivack - Unspeakable Things

Voraciously, each severed finger leaped onto its place on the hand of its rightful owner as if to strangle it. They attached themselves and started sucking greedily.

The shock was so secret and so immediate that no one could speak. It had happened so suddenly. Without a further word, the men pushed back their chairs and left the Automat.

David sat there wondering what to do with the jar and where to pour the remaining liquid. He dumped his leftover cup of coffee into the jar, and quickly, before anyone could notice, he, too, ran out of the Automat. The jar waited on the stained table. That evening, it would be added to the huge ever-steaming pot of unusually strengthening pea soup. There would be a number of street fights in the city the next day among the temporarily insane warriors who had ordered soup for lunch.

The Quartet walked through the city grimly without speaking. Their left hands were tightly curled around their newfound brothers. A green cloud surrounded them. “Welcome back,” crooned the restored hands from every cell as they caressed their prodigals. Holding their precious left hands carefully, the musicians entered the subway and took the long trip back to their underground living quarters. Their shabby basement room was home to them now. And all of New York City was their city now. They walked the last blocks. The great-spired city, its dusk like conflagration, reverberated with magnificence. The organ notes of sunset were calling to one another, orange-purples and a corolla of reds. Sound ricocheted from the gleaming towers. A hundred thousand little lights went on. “We’ve been here all along,” they blinked. “Did you just notice us?”

“And where have you been, my darlings?” asked the fingers of the restored missing ones. “We have been waiting so long for you.”

“Wait and find out,” thought the pinkies impatiently to themselves. They couldn’t bear to be touched, for they were different now. But the hands could not keep from caressing the soft pads, the fingertips no longer calloused, of the newfound fifth fingers.

“We have been so lost without you. Now we are complete.” They stroked each other in the safe snail of the closed hands. The pinkies shook off the grasp of thumbs and loving palms. Being fingered by others irritated them.

Once back in their room, the Quartet could not wait to try their beautiful new hands. The instruments bucked in their cases, ready to be let out. “Easy, boys,” the musicians soothed as they carefully released their instruments and began the ritual of wiping them down. They were gentle and loving, and the left hands lay compliant.

“Bach,” the first violinist declared. “It must be Bach. For thou shalt have no other God before Bach. The hushed harmonies of God.” He stopped, and the musicians hesitated. “No,” he said, correcting himself, “Mozart. Mozart is more joyful.”

“Yes!” cried the fingers in finger language, unwinding themselves from one another and stretching. The lost brothers twitched in the presence of their newly attached siblings and tried to free themselves from this quintuplet group behavior.

As the first strains of the Mozart Quartet No. 1 in G Major began, it was evident that something was wrong. Discordancy and squeaking erupted along the fingerboards. Since the musicians were rusty, they tried to ignore the involuntary misbehavior of their left hands. They pressed closer to their instruments, urging the music forward with their bowing arms. But the hands cramped and the fingers squabbled against one another.

For the newcomers, these regenerated fingers, were not “normal.” They had become superfingers. They were no longer team players. After being nourished for so many months by Felix’s brew of liverwurst and other life-enhancing substances, they had evolved into a master race of little fingers. They stretched in strange ways, made sexually suggestive motions, and clambered all over the strings of their instruments in lewd postures. They threatened to break the others’ knuckles. Angrily, they shoved and scratched. “Move out of the way!” They reached out and hammered the notes of all the parts.

But the other fingers and thumbs would have none of this. Calloused, with strongly developed muscles, they also fought back. “Keep off, this is my note,” they insisted, shoving just as hard. Nevertheless, the old fingers were being pushed out of their way by the superpinkies, and they could no longer hit the true notes. Those new digits were dominant, prehensile. They could do anything, reach any note at any moment, and hit the top harmonics, too. They were aggressive and warlike. “We’re the boss now!”

While the fingers quarreled about who would be boss, the musicians stopped playing. “What is it?” asked the second violinist. “What are they doing?” He looked at his twisted fingers, excitedly scratching one another. “Listen.”

“Can it be? I think they were playing Wagner.” The cellist sighed. “It sounds so dark and so horrible. This is not Mozart!” This was the dawn of a new race, a master race with master fingers. It was the sound of triumph and victory.

Outshouting the sweet notes of Mozart, the little fingers tapped the Meistersinger overture, which Hitler had decreed for every rally.

The Tolstoi musicians listened to the music and watched their alien fifth fingers knocking out every note. The new fingers were celebrating the immolation of the old order.

The Quartet realized that the new fingers had to be retrained. The musicians decided to use a system of punishment and reward. Recognizing that only Germanic authority would work at first, they reluctantly began spanking their lost fingers. The new pinkies were strong-willed, but the Quartet simply would not tolerate Wagner. Each time they pushed another finger out of the way, each time they secretly plucked down a Wagnerian note, the musicians whacked the offending fingers with their bows. “This hurts me more than it hurts you!” they grunted. Then the cellist cried, “It hertz!” The four men doubled over in laughter.

Deprived of the elixir that had sustained them, and without Felix’s formula, the fingers slowly shrank. They were no longer special. They missed their liverwurst mixture, pig fat and innards, which the Quartet, on principle, refused to serve. To stave off all noxious Germanic influences, the Quartet switched to Italian salami instead. The little fingers became weaker and more compliant. The men worked hard to accustom them again to the familiar classical tuning, to move them down on the strings, to get over the habit of pressing the strings slightly higher and sharper, when the rest of the fingers were peacefully obeying their traditional tuning.

For tuning had changed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, some composers and players had started adding additional stretch to their instrumental tuning, But in 1939, Goebbels, then Minister of Propaganda, made it official. He decided to change the tuning of all musical instruments. The note A was cranked from 432 hertz to 440. The old classical tuning of A, as it stood, was too calming, too inward. Goebbels wanted something that would incite the crowds. Though not discernible to the human ear, this change moved the whole tuning up, one whole tone sharper and more insistent. The director of music, Furtwängler, supported this edict. It was known that Verdi, Italian and individualist, had refused to alter all his tuning, while Richard Wagner, his nineteenth-century contemporary, had complied. The operas of Wagner, Teutonic, nationalistic, now with an entire industry devoted to them at Bayreuth, inspired the passions of the Führer. That was enough reason for Goebbels’s decision. He did a few experiments in support of the edict. And the music of Wagner was on the last program given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before it was forced to close its doors at the end of the War.