A Greater Music Read online

  To M as much as to me, it simply wasn’t possible that I would die first of the two of us. Such thoughts had even escaped her lips, and on more than one occasion. This assumption was hardly unreasonable considering the parade of illnesses, both major and minor, that had been M’s adolescence, the three operations she’d had so far, and the hereditary allergy which threatened to flare up whenever she strayed too far from her familiar environment. It was so much a part of her life that she barely even noticed it any more, living hemmed in by the many medicines which she had to take, the doctors’ addresses, the phone calls to book appointments. M’s allergy caused her unimaginable suffering, so much so that, she told me, she’d once decided to kill herself rather than bear it any longer. The doctors were all of the opinion that M’s other disorders of the nervous system were triggered by this allergy. Even though these weren’t life-threatening, whenever I thought of death it had become a habit to think of it connection with M. M knew this perfectly well. But how foolish I’d been to think that way—now M would have no reason to hate or envy me any more, as she was going to outlive me. But there was no way she’d ever be able to learn the details of my death. She would never know about the humiliation, and this was all that was needed to set my mind at ease.

  Death, being unaware that one is no longer living. Strangely enough, after that thought surfaced in my mind, the pain seemed gradually to lessen in intensity. Like so many other things that get forgotten in this world, the feeling as though my lungs were bursting slowly lost its original character, becoming “pain” only in name, a pain that was “mine” yet felt strangely disconnected. I was lying on the water. I wasn’t floating perfectly, though; I was lying on my side facing the riverbank, repeatedly sinking beneath the surface only to float up again a few moments later. I could gulp down a quick breath if I twisted my head when I floated up, but this was getting progressively more difficult. I knew I had to tilt my head up so I could breathe, but I was so weak that I frequently just sank straight back down again. My legs were starting to weigh me down, dragging me back under. The pain in my side remained constant all the while, but it now felt less like pain and more like evidence of some irreversible severing or fatal decision in the midst of this slow death. I was conscious of the sensation that we call “pain,” but it wasn’t the least bit painful any more. Eventually, like my inability to breathe, it became both the sole thing left to define me and my final farewell to this world, the total sum of my existence.

  3) We’d arranged to go to Joachim’s house on Christmas Eve. His mother’s house, to be precise. I was also planning to attend a midnight church service, though for architectural rather than religious reasons. The area where his mother lived was nothing special but, according to Joachim, it had a particularly beautiful church. His family was Protestant, but Joachim hadn’t been to church for a very long time. It wasn’t snowing on the morning of Christmas Eve, but the snow that had fallen the night before hadn’t completely melted, leaving the roads churned with dirty slush and snow still piled up on the pavements. The wind was so strong it swept up snow from the unmelted piles and scattered it into the air. Joachim had been in a bad mood all day, perhaps because of the imminent family gathering. In fact, he’d wanted to skip the whole thing, catch a bus straight from the airport to the train station, then jump on the first train to Schleswig-Holstein. But I didn’t have the money for yet another trip, and besides, several years ago I’d gone on holiday to East Asia over Christmas, so I knew what a bad idea it was to travel at that time of year. All the tourist attractions are closed, and the only thing haunting the deserted streets is your own solitary shadow. In the mornings, while you spread subway tickets out on the table at the guesthouse, after breakfast and coffee; while reading the information boards in a woodland park that seems once to have been a mountaintop castle, strewn with the wreckage of broken armaments or the detritus of some bygone aristocratic hunt; while browsing the Christmas market in the square; at all times, and in all places, your thoughts revolve solely around deciding where to visit next. But then, I’d known in advance that it would be like that, that everything would be desolate and I would end up wandering around on foot, shivering in the cold. In fact, I came to realize that the 1,500 kilometers I’d traveled had only served to further the distance between myself and my original goal. It was a goal that simply could not be attained. I struggled to explain to Joachim about that holiday to the East. That holiday of which I had never spoken to anyone, when I took the night train far away with heavy bags and a heavier heart, yet was ultimately unable to break free from myself. But Joachim just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to say. “What on earth is that supposed to mean? ‘Break free from myself,’ you mean like dying or going crazy? So your holiday was pointless, I can’t understand what that has to do with Christmas. And besides, Schleswig-Holstein isn’t exactly East Asia, is it?” This wasn’t entirely unreasonable; right up until our last goodbye, I’d been dreaming of traveling to the north. But not now. After breakfast we take our dog Benny for a walk. The sun is shining through a gap in the clouds though, as usual, the cold wind makes our skin feel tight. We walk in silence, along the same route we always take. Sometimes Benny stops to have a sniff around, and if he catches a scent or just absent-mindedly flops down on the ground, we stop walking too, and stare at the wood of denuded larches, their outlines stark and bare. In the wood there is a small lake, completely frozen over at this time of year. People go there to skate. We walk over the frozen lake. Benny barks nervously as soon as we step out onto the ice, perhaps disliking the cold, slippery sensation beneath his feet, and speeds off to the far bank. Heeding Benny’s distrust of the ice, we decide against crossing the lake and stroll around the edge instead, watching the skaters. Joachim doesn’t have a jacket, so is wrapped up in two sweaters, a hat and a black muffler. At times he looks more like a “Peter” than a “Joachim.” My love. Joachim calls Benny in a low voice. My love, stay. We’re coming right back. Good boy, my love.

  We walked up and down, having assured ourselves that the lake ice was solid and not likely to break. Snow had erased the contours of the paths through the wood, rendering them indistinguishable from the surroundings, but the footprints of people and their dogs were outlined sharp against the whiteness. Wild rose bushes hung with small, hard, red fruit formed a low hedge, and every time the wind blew the high, snow-laden branches quivered and creaked ominously. Hulking crows perched on ice-covered branches that glittered silver when struck by the low, slanting rays of the winter sun. Soon, though, swiftly gathering clouds obscured all traces of its presence in the sky. It looked as though it would snow again that evening. Joachim was walking about three or four paces ahead of me. He said that if he’d known how to skate he would have borrowed a pair and gone out onto the ice right now. I’d learned how to skate when I was eleven, I told him, but that it was so long ago that I wasn’t sure whether I would remember how, and besides, it was so cold right now that I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. We resumed our silent walk. We felt the cold stab of the air entering our lungs as a physical impact, and if we coughed the steam of our breath came out white. I asked Joachim if he was cold without a coat, but he just shrugged in reply. When we came up to the lake caretaker’s hut, a humble shack made of yellow bricks and wood, he suggested that we’d walked for long enough now and might as well head home. We found Benny waiting for us at the hut, fixing us with his faithful stare, almost as if he feared that we might disappear if he didn’t keep us in sight. The return trip was colder than the way out. I was all but running. We decided that it was too cold to walk all the way, and took the tram. Benny’s dislike of the tram was plain, but he flattened his body to lie obediently under the seat when Joachim told him to. Every time Benny jerked his head up, clearly ill at ease, Joachim produced a dog biscuit from his pocket and held it out to him. Benny would then settle down again, bury his face under the seat and chew his biscuit. The thought only then occurring to me, I asked Joachim if he’d bought a p
resent for his parents. “A book and some perfume,” he replied briefly, adding that he hadn’t bought anything for his brother.

  “In that case I guess I can get something for him.”

  Joachim assured me there was no need, although I suggested that going empty handed to a Christmas dinner made me feel uncomfortable.

  “Besides, you can’t,” he grinned. “All the shops will be closed now, you know. I mean, where are you going to get a present from?”

  In that case there was nothing to be done. We went home, Joachim ironed a shirt to wear that evening, and I made a simple Chinese noodle dish for lunch. After I boiled the water for the noodles according to the instructions, scooped them out with a sieve and drained them, I fried them in the big wok together with a jar of bean sprouts. According to Joachim the wok had been a real bargain, something he’d gotten off his friend’s Vietnamese neighbor. Once the noodles heated through, I dished them up and finished them off with a sprinkle of salt, some garlic, and Thai chili sauce. The radio was playing Christmas songs back to back, many of them with practically the same melody, so we switched over to a news program, made some jasmine tea, and ate lunch. The tram rattled by outside. On the news we heard that the snow had caused many accidents on the motorways, and that there were floods in southern Germany. Once he’d finished the dishes, Joachim flopped down on the sofa, yawning, and began to browse one of his many train magazines—he couldn’t get enough of them—while I flicked through the television channels. The Christmas-themed programming was ubiquitous—Christmas carols, Christmas films, Christmas Mass, Christmas cooking, Christmas plays, Christmas discussions, etc. On the table there was a silver box of chocolates with some left over, and a book Joachim had been reading, General Physics Theory with Mathematical Proofs. He’d already passed the basic physics exam in his first term, but had apparently forgotten almost all of it and so was looking over it again. Benny was lying by Joachim’s side; Joachim had the magazine in one hand and held Benny by the scruff of the neck with the other. The small, snow-covered road that ran through the backyard was visible through the high glass window. Lined with individual gardens known as “small gardens,” it led to the local cemetery. The winter landscape was unchanging, and would remain so at least until the Christmas and New Year holidays were over. Every morning after breakfast we read a book, prepared something simple to eat, and watched some monotonous TV program; at night we listened to the radio, and three times a day we took Benny out for a short walk. In between that, we passed the time by doing the laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and taking the tram into town if there was something we needed to buy. Switching over to MTV, I stretched out on the bed, a wave of drowsiness surging over me. I’d barely gotten any sleep the previous night, having arrived at Joachim’s in the early hours of dawn after a six-hour train journey. I’d flown into an airport outside Berlin, which meant two train changes with all my luggage, though Joachim had met me at the airport and helped carry the heavy bags. Arriving back in the city after a three-year absence, the first thing I saw was the night bus-stop near the station, in the falling snow. I sat on a suitcase while we waited for the bus; they came every half hour. The snow was falling heavily, too heavy for an umbrella or hat to be of much use. The roads had completely iced over because of the sudden drop in temperature. The train had been delayed by around two hours and after catching the bus we had to change again to take the tram. It was the Christmas holidays, and on top of it being late at night the snow was really coming down, so there were barely any passing cars even on the main road. The first thing that struck me was how unimaginably cold the bus stop was. That infinite, embalmed silence, the frozen torpor of the season, compounded by the extreme cold, pincered the heart in a viselike grip. Snow, rain, agonizing cold, the blank sky, the air heavy as if weighted down. Even when we got back to Joachim’s and got into bed the cold still did not completely dissipate. The sound of the wind continued until morning, and until the sun trembled over the rim of the horizon, rising as cold as the thin layer of ice that rimmed the outside of the window, I couldn’t shake myself free from the memory of the airplane’s narrow seat, the continuous roaring of the engine, the vibration of the train as it rattled over the tracks. And so of course I was incredibly tired, and just as I was thinking to myself how tired I was, I fell asleep.

  When I woke from sleep I was at a loss to say where I was. The room was so dark I assumed it was the middle of the night. It was completely silent, the curtains were drawn, and there was no sign of either Joachim or Benny. It had been a dreamless sleep. The only source of illumination was the light from the TV, showing a live broadcast of a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. Karajan’s face appeared on the screen. Only when I looked at the hands of the clock on the bedside table did I realize that I’d only slept for three hours. It was unusually dark for daytime; when I opened the curtains I saw that the whole city lay overshadowed by black clouds, from which the snow had slowly started to fall. The Berlin Phil was doing Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Perhaps Joachim had changed the channel and left it on when he went out. Unfortunately, it was almost at the final movement, and after a brief commercial the program continued with Ravel’s Boléro. I wasn’t fond of the Boléro. It was a shame I hadn’t woken up a little earlier, when the William Tell Overture was still on. I must have slept in an awkward position, because my right arm and my entire torso were tingling. I lay there in the bed and stared at the old ceiling. Originally there’d been an electric bulb suspended from it, but now all that was left was a short wire. Joachim had thought the light made the room too bright, so he’d pulled it out. As a replacement, he’d put a desk lamp on the small table that could be used for reading and writing, and there was a stand by the bed. The bookcase was filled with magazines and dictionaries, along with several volumes on physics and art theory—no different from when I first came here three years ago. Several old magazines had disappeared and been replaced by new ones, and the collection seemed to be missing several Baedeker guidebooks, plus two or three books on maths or physics which I remembered from before, but apart from that almost nothing had changed. Novels were represented solely by the English-language versions of the Harry Potter Series and American Psycho. Those were inside the wardrobe, where we’d put my suitcase yesterday. I opened it, took out my books, and put them on the bookshelves. I’d brought some translations of Dostoevsky with me, but I wouldn’t be reading them here. I’d read them before, for one thing, though this had been some time ago, and had realized that reading them again would be tedious. I tried reading one on the plane, but had to put it aside. Joachim had more than enough magazines, so I tossed some into the wastepaper basket to make room for my books. After Christmas I would have to go into the city center to buy some more. Cookbooks or animal photo albums; classics which I’d read a long time ago but had forgotten both the plot and the significance, in fact everything but the title; twentieth-century contemporary history; postwar history; war crimes trials; or essays about the deaths of musicians. I’d always liked reading, but over the past few years I’d thrown myself into it with increasing gusto. One reason was that I’d begun to spend the vast majority of my time alone. I went into the kitchen to make coffee. The small fridge was packed, as Joachim had said. He’d stocked up on all sorts of groceries just before the start of the Christmas shopping wars. Two bags of coffee, an easy-bake Christmas cake and a bottle of milk, frozen spinach and other vegetables, honey and butter, bread and eggs, apples and red cabbage for cooking in pig fat, a jar of bean sprouts and a packet of Chinese noodles. The kitchen window looked out directly onto the road to the cemetery. At the entrance to the road, affixed to the wall of the building directly beneath the kitchen, a lamp gave off a yellow glow. Snowflakes swirled and streamed, glittering like shards of glass in that light.