Читать книгу After You've Gone - Jeffrey Lent - Страница 11

Next to the gas-ring was a glazed bowl of tough-skinned oranges from Spain that when broken open revealed a pulp crimson in color and a flavor vibrantly tart that shrank to sweetness as it was chewed. In the morning after his coffee he would eat one of these fruits and stale bread bought the day before with chipped hard butter he kept on his window ledge. The apartment was always cold in the morning although the pipes continued their sporadic hissing and thumping and he could only guess that the furnace and boiler were stoked on some schedule discerned by the landlady who clearly believed there was virtue to be attained starting the day this way. Henry understood well enough coal heating to know there was no money saved in the process—what was cold took more fuel to warm than to maintain warm. In his younger years, those not so far passed, he would’ve sought the woman out and tried to explain this but now he accepted it as it was and so did not spend his mornings reading or practicing the cello or brooding melancholic but peered from the windows to gauge the weather and dressed to his best guess and went out onto the streets to walk the morning away. He walked mostly the great loops of streets of the old town that lay within the ring of the Amstel and the canals that ran up toward the open water of the Het Ij, separated from the rest of the old city by Prins Hendrikkade and the Centraal Station, but he avoided that end—the Station held no allure and suggested a folly he refused to consider. So he walked. Over the weeks extending his way beyond the main thoroughfares and obvious shopping jostle of Kalverstraat and learned the beauty of those small pinched alleys with their implausible nooked shops of uncertain and oft confusing array of goods. A room perhaps ten feet square would hold a pair of marble topped end tables, a brass spit-toon, a collection of chipped porcelain dolls and three or four old leather folios. With an American cigar store Indian standing watch over these precious items. Or the used bookstore with its small bins of British and American editions of classics and outdated popular fictions. A woman sat behind one of the tables reading a magazine. She wore her hair in a tight practical bun—the hair of a woman who had just entered middle age. Her facial structure was strong and, when he was out again on the narrow pedestrian way, his feet bumping against raised cobbles he realized she was a beautiful woman who had someway given up on her own beauty. A husband and mob of children he guessed. More so, some heaving disappointment in her life. But then he was prone to seek that in others, these days.

It was in this way early in the fall, when the weather was still alternating with warmth of summer and the chill rain that was just-not freezing, that he found the cello. Which he did not know he was looking for until it appeared.

It was not that innocent. The cello was not found in one of those hob-gob shops but an emporium devoted to used instruments he entered deliberately, although he thought he was browsing. But had held a quiet but deliberate affection for this instrument ever since hearing one played for the first time more than a quarter century before. Of course there had been music in the house, first Olivia and then both girls playing the piano and then the gramophones. But until now, or not even yet, the idea just dawning, taking shape, he’d never considered attempting such a thing himself. Although through years of listening to music both in performance and recordings, it had been the cello that drew him. And now he stood before one, available, his for an acceptable sum. The cello was upright in a stand, polished to catch and hold all available light in its buffed contours and he walked straight to it and stood looking down upon it. He turned away and took up a clarinet from its velvet-lined case and turned it about in his hands but only as a pause, as the truth of his consideration was coming over him. He then went to the bins of sheet music and thumbed through and was about to leave the store when he turned and looked again at the cello. And his reaction was again direct and immediate but this time twofold in a combination that was embarrassing and emboldening at once—his mind heard the lovely soft notes ranging like a voice in a room just beyond his knowing but not locked, beckoning even. He turned away and went out and walked hard around the block and was sweating in a damp misting rain when he returned without pause through the door and bought the thing.

In that first week he twice took it out and with tentative fingers attempted to find notes but the gut strings were old and impossible to tune even if he’d been sure of the tuning. Which he was not. It was clear he needed a teacher but he had no idea how to find one beyond the obvious return to the shop where the cello was acquired and inquire there but his pride was up—the young clerk who’d sold it to him had been swift, almost rude with the transaction. But one morning purchasing the International Herald Tribune for the news in English, without forethought at all he asked the proprietor if, by chance, he happened to know of a cello or violin teacher. Who looked up from reading the English headlines upside down from the paper laid on the counter and said, “You want the Russian.”

“Yes?”

The man nodded confirmation. “Oude Hoogstraat. Past the brewery but before the fish market. Yes?”

“Yes.” Henry knew the street, or had passed it and could find it again. The rest of the directions were vague but interesting. But if it took two or three days that was fine. He was learning the city at a pace he liked. Also, a fish market could not be that difficult to locate.

And neither was the brewery. Outside both were carts and resting horses, barrels and huge woven square baskets, and from both strong odors. Approaching he could see the workers around the carts but it was the fish he smelled first. And for the briefest of moments trembled as if approaching his mother’s house but also considered the single drawing matted and framed that was the sole decoration on his apartment wall, an ink study his father had made of a basket of cod that Uncle George had given him the night before he was to board the Boston-bound schooner for the rest of his life. Then, coming closer, mingling in an elaborate overlay came the smell of stale beer and the more pungent odors of malt and roasting grain. He paused, moving aside to let a beer wagon pass by and standing so spied between the wide doors of the two businesses a boarded-up storefront with a single dark brown door set into the center and above that but still on street level a pair of filthy windows. He stood considering this for some time. If this was the right place, and it had to be, what sort of man would choose to live here? No walls would be thick enough to mute the jumble and roar of sound nor cut the odors. He knew fish—regardless of how much they might wash down the floors and the processing rooms and the cobbles out front the smell was permanent. The business might cease but for years the ghosts of fish would swim the air. And it seemed brewing was a vein similar. A musician, a teacher, would be a man of some refinement. He came close to turning away, to begin the search again when the answer came to him. A very poor man of refinement. He’d once been one himself.

He knocked and waited. If there was sound of any sort within it was lost under the commercial din. More beer wagons rolled behind him. He knocked again. After a bit he decided that perhaps it was either truly the wrong address or the Russian was out, thinking he himself would be if he lived here. Perhaps it was quieter at night. And like anyone else the Russian would leave to shop, buy newspapers, pick up laundry. Henry was about to turn when the door opened. Six inches. A small alert face, bald above but with the idea of hair blown back just out of sight. Smacked tight mouth.

In his rudimentary Dutch, Henry asked if he was the music teacher Morozov.

The man swept Henry up and down and said, “You are English?”

“American.”

“American?” The suspicion was tangible, far beyond the barely propped door and tone of voice but as if the man had his own competing odor of fear to slip turtlelike within the fish and beer odors.

Henry said, “I’m a retired professor. Not of music. But I’ve purchased a cello. I would like to learn to play it.”

“A cello? Who sent you?”

Henry told him.

“You play another instrument then? A piano perhaps?”

“My wife and daughters all played the piano. I’ve never learned an instrument.”

The Russian leaned a little more, glancing up and down the street. Henry was not sure what he was looking for. Or how many things he was looking for. The man turned his eyes back up. Pale eyes of a blue gray. His face was heavily creased and worn as if a frown of concern had been stamped there years ago.

The Russian said, “This wife. These daughters. Where are they?”

And for the shortest of moments Henry took offense. He was there for music lessons, not interrogation. But he simply said, “My wife died almost two years ago. My daughters are grown with families of their own. I’m alone.”

The man now also paused but did not take his eyes away. He said, his voice a tone softer, “So you have a cello.”

Henry said nothing.

The man nodded. Then, without opening the door or extending a hand, said, “I’m Dmitri Morozov. Next Tuesday at two in the afternoon. Twelve guilders.”

“My name is Henry Dorn. What should I bring?”

“Dorn? A Dutch name.” The suspicion was back.

“Yes,” he said. “But a long time ago. Three hundred years.”

A pause. Then, “Three hundred years. A long time to come home.”

Henry said, “It feels that way. Now that I’m here.”

“Three hundred years. The cello is not new?”

“No.”

“Buy new strings. And then we will see what you have.”

“Very well, then. Next Tuesday at two.”

But the Russian had already shut the door. And Henry Dorn who had spent his adult life with teachers and professors of every stripe, type and disposition thought this might turn out to be that rare event. A singular being. At the least, his shoes slipping through the fish overwash on the cobbles, a mind framed and informed by a culture he’d studied but never encountered in an actual person. As he walked, contemplating this it occurred to him he was lonely. And because of this, or more truly to spite the loneliness he hiked on through the streets until he came upon the store where he’d found the cello and with something like his former self firmly and politely requested a new set of strings, a tuning fork and glancing upon it a sturdy secondhand music stand. He bought no sheet music because that would be Morozov’s job. To tell him how and with what to proceed. Then walked directly home and took the delicate gut strings from their paper envelopes and began to learn. The strings were obvious by size but the key was the envelopes, labeled from largest to finest. C, D, G and A. He removed the old strings one at a time so he might study how they were put in place and one at a time restrung the instrument. Then sat and did his best to tune the cello. It was not quite right, but close. There was satisfaction. Small to some perhaps.

He went out for his supper and returned and the fall dusk was settling in, the windows holding an array of light from the sky, water, and buildings in a multiple of glimpses and reflections extraordinary and radiant. He sat and watched the last bit of day lingering and lengthening—not a draining of dusk into dark like home. Odd word, he thought. Home.

He stood and turned on the gooseneck lamp on his writing table and tipped the metal neck so the flood of light went up the wall and went and studied the drawing of the basket of cod for a short time. But he knew it so well he could see it always and nothing new was revealed tonight. Out loud he said, “You ask too much.”

The third evening together on the crossing, Lydia Pearce had ended a discussion of particular frustration for them both by asking, “Henry, what do you want?”

He had not been able to tell her.

Olivia would have known. And that, perhaps, was the problem. Not that Lydia did not know but somehow he suspected his dear wife was still too close. Perhaps her spirit in his memory and sense of honor. Or perhaps he was frightened of this young woman who so strangely resembled everything he’d spent his life’s work upon.