After You've Gone. Jeffrey Lent
the tall broad windows at the front, the view and serenity of height that had compelled him that sunstruck day in June when the sparsely appointed two-room apartment offered a graceful alternative to his railway hotel room and her grand suite at the Hotel Krasnapolsky.
The rooms were warm, the steam radiators thumping gently as if to remind of the coal monster in the basement. Out of his coat and hat he sat for a time on the side of the bed and studied the canvas case. His chest still straining. If he had to be trivial, why not a violin?
His sixth Tuesday. Morozov had served him tea, not in the Russian style but some brewing of his own device—likely simply a large kettle steeped throughout the day. Then sat after tuning with him and leaned forward, his hands on his knees and listened as Henry worked his way through Kummer’s Daily Exercises. Or the 1st. Midway through Morozov stood and turned his back as if he only wanted to listen not see. When the piece was done the teacher, with no expression on his face, came and stood behind him, his right arm coming down and lifting Henry’s right hand so the bow was away from the strings and guided the hand, arm, and bow through the air, hovering above the strings, not touching, just movement and then halted, pressed hard as if to say There and stepped away, settled himself and took up his own instrument and bow and played the piece through, slowly but with an even tempo, the bow not at stark right angles but quivering fluidity, not attack and retreat but sudden depths of caress. When done, Morozov looked at him, his face the same.
Morozov spoke an English less flawed than idiosyncratic. “The music,” he said, “you cannot force like a dying horse.”
Three hours later when the windows showed only reflected light and the cello had warmed through he opened the case and set the sheet music on the small beaten secondhand stand and brought out the instrument. The stand centered under the single electric ceiling fixture. He inserted the tail peg and tightened it and brought the beautiful fragile construction between his spread knees, tipped the bow against each string, tightened the A-string against its flat and without thinking or pausing to consider played the piece through and his right arm flexed as if it were merely an extension of the bow and was following not leading and the final six bars of the little exercise came forth into the room with all the dazzlement and purity of spring light and he sat listening to the final note trail off until all remaining was the echo in his inner ear. He sat so for a long time with no desire to move or even attempt the piece again. It was enough. An exquisite and muted triumph.
Finally he bent for the soft piece of flannel within the case and wiped the cello down. There were beautiful things in the world and there are beautiful periods or times—usually not known until they had passed. And yet throughout his life, there had been those moments when he was forced or found by accident, once again, beauty.
Briefly he considered the small table set just to the side of the large windows that held a gooseneck lamp and his pens, the sheafs of paper, the notebooks. But it was early and he had to go out again. He used to write in the mornings, at break of day but now chose to end the day. Because the writing had changed. It was his, alone. And he liked this.
There was a single gas ring he boiled coffee on mornings. Other than that he did not cook. So he wrapped again in the coat and went down the cramped stairwell and up the street to the end and entered the small single-counter café dimly lit whatever the time of day with old dark wooden walls and a stamped-tin ceiling murky from years of tobacco smoke. He sat on one of the stools and unbelted his coat and ordered the soup without asking what it was—it did not matter— the soup was a meal. With hard bread and a saucer of pickled herring. Three older men were at other stools and each glanced at him and then back to the polished wood beneath their elbows, these three part of a handful he’d come to recognize. The woman behind the bar was friendly in the way of someone who knows she has a new customer she may count on but does not know what to make of. He did not mind this. As every night he spoke Dutch and she responded in English and that was that. Without a thought he used the last hard crust to mop the soup, a brown combination of beans and ham and he did not know what else but the mopping was new to him— something that as a boy he’d have had his knuckles rapped for and as a man had never once considered but here it was the obvious thing to do—to leave anything in the bowl would have been ill-mannered and he knew this simply by observing others. Then he had a single crystal thimble on a long stem of Oude Genever, the clay bottle brought up from where it lay in chipped ice and he sipped this slowly.
It wasn’t only the pickled herring but the soups reminded him of his mother’s chowders: cod, scallop, haddock—each winter progressing the cubes of potato grew smaller, the fish more dense. By spring they would be down to seed potato and after great hesitation and a murmured discussion with herself, she would go the store owned by her brothers-in-law and purchase a sack of winter-stored fresh potatoes. But not until spring. They were not poor. In fact in Freeport they were wealthy people. But on Digby Neck and the Islands wealth was gained slowly and hard and easily lost, never assummed, never losing sight of the precariousness of everything and if for a moment or a day attention was diverted from that safe penurious grasp there were the God Almighty storms of the Bay to remind. The church was less sanctuary than seat of hope.
The wind had fallen with the dark and he walked slowly back along the canal, the frost in sharp refraction off the lampposts, the windows of the houses throwing warm rectangles of domesticity against the dark.
A woman passed around him, gently bumping as she did and he watched her stride away, wrapped in a scarf and long drawn-tight coat but clearly a slender young woman. He watched until she passed from sight. She did not look back.
That evening he filled his pen and wrote
I am a beginning cellist but shall not be a mediocre student. It is only so long since I was a beginner at anything.
Not true.
There should be time for work. Daydreaming loses its value when it overwhelms. It was Benjamin Franklin who asked, “Dost thou love life? Then take heed how you waste time for time is the stuff of which life is made.” Maybe I always misinterpreted his meaning. He certainly wasted time in a plentitude of enjoyments, if my memory serves. How did I miss that? I wonder if Franklin played an instrument? I’m quite sure he enjoyed music. I only now understand his years in Paris. Or think I do. “Ye shall know a man by his works.” I’m no longer convinced of that.
Daily I become more fond of Amsterdam. The tumult of infatuation, that heady first blush has passed and so now I proceed renewing the pace of the heart. The local citizenry surely consider me the strange American. But the shopkeepers are grown used to me, friendly in the abrupt way of the Dutch that makes sense to me now.
Write to Mother.
This last entry recurred through the filled pages. When the ink was dry he turned this page atop the stack, facedown, like the others not to be read again.
The apartment with its two small pools of light. Over the writing table and over the music stand and stool. The cello lying on its side, the swells and long neck and scroll of beauty. And the embarrassment only a teacher can know—leave the Kummer exercises for now. Practice the scales. How many variations on this had he himself begged, cajoled, thundered, red-penciled, conferenced over, tapped chalk for emphasis, sotto voce implored against his temper over the years? Countless. Was he a child again? Was all he knew of himself mere assumption? Was there even hope of relearning the world? Just months ago he’d not thought but known so. Now he was less sure. He contemplated the stack of writings.
He rose and turned off the gooseneck. Undressed and folded his trousers over the back of the chair, hung his shirt there and went on sock feet to the bed, sat and removed his socks and slipped into the bed. He reached and pulled the chain and the room and music stand went dark. Sleep far more elusive.
Somewhere in this night, Paris he assumed, was Lydia Pearce.
Whom he’d met on the North Atlantic passage, the unexpected encounter, the flare in an otherwise dark night, at first he’d thought Two lost from others recognizing comradeship. By the time they’d disembarked in Rotterdam and made their way north by train they’d entered into an irresistible but nebulous alliance. She maintained year-round suites at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky and for