Andre Aciman - Eight White Nights

And there it was. At first a very faint drone, then the sound of a gasp, like air sputtering and hissing its way through a congested windpipe, and then it came, the prelude I’d heard who knows how many times before, but never once like this: hasty, tentative, and ever so deliberate. Then we heard the Siloti.

“The prelude is too solemn,” said Clara, “too somber, too slow perhaps.” She had to find something wrong with it. Why wasn’t I surprised?

“Not to worry, we’ve had to speed it up, of course, because those of us who heard Leo play remember he was very fast, too fast. But it doesn’t matter. Art is about one thing: speaking directly to God in God’s language and hoping He listens. The rest is pipi caca.”

He put on the CD, and sure enough, I finally saw why we’d traveled for two hours on this freezing day to get to this house.

“Shall I play it again?”

Clara and I glanced at each other. Sure.

“Then I’ll go and look after the lunch,” said Margo.

Without hesitating or even waiting for our response, he proceeded to play the Bach-Siloti a second time.

Deftness and dexterity, something so easy, lambent, and yet ever so contemplative in the face of what lay in store for the likes of Czernowicz, who was, so many, many decades later, still speaking to God. I kept thinking of his playing this piece as the piano cut holes into the very piece of cardboard in front of us — how could he not have known that in a few years he’d drink of the black milk of dawn? The more I listened, the more it seemed to become more about him than about Siloti, more about Jews like Max who outlived the Holocaust but would never live out its sentence, more about the fugue of death than about Bach’s prelude and fugue. I knew that this would never be undone, that from this too there was no turning back, no coming back, just as I knew that without Max and this old house, without winter on the Hudson, without Clara and our three days together, the prelude would remain the glistening empty shell it had always been for me until now. It needed the Shoah for it to come alive, it needed Clara’s voice in my intercom, Clara’s laughter as she waved obscene gestures in her car, it needed our being here like this in Edy’s warm corner by the lurching bull, and her admonitions forbidding so many things; it even needed my inability to focus on the music, as though not focusing on the music while thinking of reaching out to her would end up being part of how the music needed to be heeded, registered, remembered. If art were nothing more than a way of figuring out the design of random things, then the love of art must come from nothing less random. Art may be nothing more than the invention of cadence, a reasoning with chaos. It will use anything, just anything, to loop itself around us, and around us again, and around us once more till it finds its way in.

Could one ever listen to the Bach after the Siloti?

No one answered.

I asked if I could hear it once more.

He looked pleased. I was hooked, he thought.

Then, when the glorious beginning swept over us again, he excused himself to go help Margo out with lunch.

Left alone with her, I began to feel a sense of total discomfort. All of these empty chairs around us, and yet here we were, Clara and I, squeezed tight together on this narrow love seat. I wanted to find an excuse to move away, perhaps by making a show of wanting to get closer to the music. But I stayed put, did not breathe, did not budge, didn’t even show I had thought of budging. She too must have felt awkward before noticing my own discomfort. But she masked it better than I, for she didn’t even stir. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed anything, and my reading of her discomfort, as my reading of the Siloti prelude, or of what she meant by Printz Oskár each time she used the words, or of our awkward love seat arrangement right now, was nothing more than another misreading, my startled gaze to the world looking back at me. Was there any way for her to know what I was feeling, thinking? Or hadn’t it even crossed her mind? She was so distracted by the music that she hadn’t even noticed that her thigh was touching mine, from hip to knee, hip to knee, which is to say, almost 20 percent of our bodies. What if I told her that while the prelude was streaming over us, my thoughts were focused on the hip-to-knee, joined at the hip, you and I, Clara, for we’re of one kidney too, and all we need is a slight tilt in our seating, and it could just as easily be my hips against your hips, me inside you, as we listen to this music, again and again, the smell of you on my skin, everywhere on my skin, because I want to be bathed in your smell, rub it on my back, your wetness on my neck and everywhere on my body, you and I, Clara.

I knew that the slightest stir in my body, even moving a finger, would suddenly rouse her from her own thoughts and tell her that our bodies were touching, hip to knee. So I didn’t move a thing; even swallowing became difficult, as I grew conscious of my own breathing, whose pace I tried to steady to a monotonous rhythm, and finally, if I could, to a halt.

But then another thought rushed through me: Why not tell her what was happening to me, what I felt, why not move, stir, budge, and show at least that I liked being glued together on this love seat and that all I had to do was touch her knee, part her knees, and just place my hand there, and, as in so many paintings of the Renaissance, let her slip a leg in between mine in a posture that speaks legends, like Lot’s with his daughters’? Was she with me? Or was she elsewhere? Or was she one with the music, her mind in the stars, mine in the gutter?

With all these feelings tussling within me, I knew I would never dare anything, especially now that we were alone together. Gone was my resolve, my wish to put an arm on that shoulder, as we listened to the music, and let a hand land ever so lightly and caress her there, and then bring my mouth where it ached to be, not to kiss, or even lick, but to bite.

I sensed her tense up. She knew.

Any moment now, Clara will stand up to help in the kitchen. Or should I be the first to stand now, to show that I wasn’t committed to this love seat arrangement, that I wasn’t trying to feel her up, that I couldn’t really care?

“Do you want to hear it again?”

I stared at her. Should I tell her now once and for all, just tell her and let the chips fall where they will?

“The music — do you want to hear it, or have you had enough?”

“Let’s hear it one more time,” I finally said.

“One more time it is.”

She stood up and pressed the play button, then after standing by the CD player came back and resumed her seat right next to me.

Do we touch hands, or what?

Just be natural, a voice said.

Which is what?

Be yourself.

Meaning?

Being myself was like asking a mask to mimic a face that’s never been without masks. How do you play the part of someone trying not to play parts?

We were back to hip-to-knee. But it felt mechanical, heartless, cold. I’d take that moment last night anytime, when she stopped before crossing the park and told me about Czernowicz as our arms kept touching, inadvertently.

This was all in my head, wasn’t it?

Suddenly I caught myself thinking of wanting to come back here again — if only to touch this moment again: the cluttered room, the frost, the dead pianist, she and I seated unusually together in this snow-globe cabin of our invention, and all this stuff around us, the soup, Inky’s brother, last night’s Rohmer, the snow on Manhattan and on Clermont-Ferrand, and the fact that if Czernowicz never knew what awaited him after playing the Siloti here, he’d never have guessed that, two nights after staring out to his world in prewar Europe, we’d be sitting in this room like the oldest and closest of friends, listening to a pianist that my grandfather and Clara’s grandfather might easily have heard in their youth, never once suspecting that their grandchildren. .