Care of Wooden Floors (11 page)

It was a short walk to the concert hall, as I had known for a while. I could not imagine Oskar elbowing his way onto a tram every morning with an
International Herald Tribune
and a briefcase full of fresh batons, perhaps individually wrapped in hygienic paper like the chopsticks and toothpicks in Chinese restaurants. The pavements were slick with water, their surface animated by the raindrops beating upon them. I carried an umbrella from the
stand under the coat-hooks by the front door, a cheap collapsible obviously intended as a spare – next to it was a bayonet-straight, mahogany-handled patrician number that was clearly Oskar’s first choice. I considered umbrellas essentially disposable items, an opinion forced on me by the fact that I have unintentionally disposed of so many through the years, and so I always buy cheap ones and strive not to become too emotionally attached to them, as soon they will be making their way in the world without me. Oskar’s umbrella looked simultaneously brand-new expensive and antique expensive. There was no way it was leaving the flat in my company. There would be no more screw-ups, not tonight. Tonight, I was not even in the flat to screw anything up.

Brooks ran in the gutters, seeking lower elevations. The canal would be refreshed tonight, I thought. Most of the route to the concert hall was along one avenue, a tree-lined axis of uncompromising straightness drawn to connect two cardinal points – a triumphal arch that led nowhere and which commemorated an entirely imaginary triumph, and a plain roundabout of no apparent significance. Either the palace or monument that had formed the other anchor had been removed – a distinct possibility in a country that could only function if it periodically forgot the colossal contradictions inherent in its history – or it had never existed in the first place.

The age that had had the confidence and power to smash these lines through its own capital had apparently balked at tweaking God into compliance. Like the Islamic carpets that contain a deliberate flaw, the avenue was
disrupted by the Divine. An Eastern church erupted from a square bisected by the boulevard, a heavy castellated cube covered in antiseptically white plaster that seemed pulled in tight to every angle and leading edge, a starched bed sheet tucked impossibly tight by some psychotic matron, surmounted by a fungal mass of time-green copper domes. Generous, almost Catholic, gilt glinted through the rain miasma, and even in the grim light the whitewash shone in a way that suggested it was producing its own energy, throwing off a kind of Cherenkov radiation into the cooling tank of the city. It was possibly ancient, but so perfectly maintained that it might as well have been built yesterday, a fresh cube of tofu swimming in the city’s murky tetsu broth.

On the other side of the avenue, the square had been greatly extended to accommodate the twentieth century’s contribution to the scene. This was a looming stack of stained concrete boxes, badly streaked by the falling rain, simultaneously giving off an impression of awful, imposing weight and of moth-eaten fragility. It was as if the innocent grey halls on the South Bank of the Thames had swollen in the rain, bloated with multiplying cement and asbestos tumours, and suddenly started to broadcast ineffable malevolence and alien-ness. It was the poster child of a public safety campaign against modernism. Something about it screamed ‘A gift from the Soviet people’.

For a single ghastly moment, frozen in the rain, I thought that this was the home of the Philharmonic, Oskar’s Philharmonic. It was, after all, clearly a cultural facility of some sort. But the address did not tally, and
instead I was directed behind the bulk of the church (which blocked, thank goodness, my view of the concrete monstrosity) to a modest Beaux-Arts façade in the adjoining street. Despite Oskar’s domestic fondness for modern minimalism, this well-mannered assemblage of columns and caryatids was exactly what I had imagined his workplace would look like. It was a building that, with its time-polished wood and shiny brass around the doors, ever so slightly resembled a musical instrument itself. Inside, the steep and tightly curved flights of steps that led up and out of the foyer, with their gleaming banisters and carpet rods, gave an impression that one was standing inside a tuba, and the bowed windows behind which the ticket-sellers sat resembled the pipes in an organ, complete with half-moon aperture in place of the notch in the windway.

I was in good time, and joined the short queue to collect tickets. Other concert-goers stood around, mostly in ones or twos; there was a buzz of anticipatory conversation, but muted to an almost subliminal hum. It was an aged crowd and a conservative tendency in apparel was evident, with almost all present wearing suits and ties, and more than a few bow ties and waistcoats. In a similar crowd in London, I might have felt uncomfortably underdressed, but here I could safely wield the International Naïve Tourist Waiver. Plus I had absolutely no doubt that had Oskar considered a necktie obligatory, he would have mentioned it.

It was perhaps my imagination, but for all the efforts to keep up appearances there was a certain shabbiness to
the crowd. Many of the gentlemen’s jackets were patched at the elbows, polytechnic lecturer-style, and there was a note of exhaustion about their cuffs and other edges. Many of the ladies’ dresses were shinier around the exposed bluffs and headlands than they were elsewhere. In terms of style – I am no judge of fashion, mind – I had the curious sense of gazing into the past, as if I had come to the end of a recorded programme on an ancient video tape and a curtain of static snow had fallen to reveal a far older programme underneath, halfway through, a Narnia beyond memory where the Berlin Wall still stood and all was reassuringly wrong with the world.

The shuffling shoes ahead of me in the queue were certainly cheap, fashioned out of recycled bakelite and perished tennis balls around the time the
General Belgrano
was taking on water. And there was a charity-shop smell in the air, a strong top note of dust with the slightest hint of incontinent mortality. But might the crowd simply be picking up these characteristics from their surroundings, the way that over-enthusiastic fluorescent lighting could bring out every infinitesimal sign of wear and distress in a face, simultaneously draining away colour? Certainly, I doubted that a dustbuster had ever attended to the richly folded rococo décor. The heavy red fabrics that were draped here and there looked a little as if the shadows in their folds might not disappear if the fabric was pulled taut; some of the gilt had eczema. Could the foyer be exercising some form of negative Dorian Gray influence over its patrons, whereby the saccharin cherubim and seraphim painted on the ceiling remained young by sapping all that
was new, youthful and stylish out of the music-lovers below?

My ticket came with a strip of paper, blue-lined and possibly torn from an exercise book, wrapped around it. I unfolded this slip with a feeling of weary familiarity, but the handwriting that greeted me was not Oskar’s: it looped and slipped its leash like an over-friendly dog.

Meet me in bar afterwards!

Michael. (friend of Oskar!)

OK then.

How was the concert? I have been asked this before by people, on the rare occasions that I have attended concerts, and I have never known what to say. Normally, I would just reply: ‘Oh, very good.’ By this I mean: ‘There were no obvious mistakes. No notes were missed in such a clunkingly apparent fashion that I was able to detect the error. No one forgot how to play their instrument halfway through. No one ran amok in the audience. Nothing caught fire. Music played and I was so bored that my
hair
was bored.’

How was the concert? Not intolerable. I surprised myself by recognising the music. All classical music is recognisable in an oh-isn’t-this-the-tune-from-the-Kenco-advert way, but I knew that I had heard ‘Death and the Maiden’ before – possibly from the Sigourney Weaver film – and ‘The Trout’ turned out to be the theme tune to a BBC sitcom from the 1990s that I had only the faintest
traces of a memory of. Thus culturally anchored – and reassured that I wasn’t about to be exposed to some two-hour experimental piece consisting of a crying baby and the sound of a shovel being dragged along a pavement – I was free to enjoy myself. Still, it was hard not to consider the nature of the psychological characteristic that others present possessed and I did not, the characteristic that meant their enjoyment was immersive and rapt, and mine was partial at best. When listening to classical music, I want to be able to read the paper at the same time, or potter about. If forced to devote my attention wholly to the music, I wonder what I am missing out on, what secret channel of sublimity I am not receiving, what tiny disposition of cartilage in the inner ear means that classical music is little more than nice background noise to me, high-quality aural wallpaper. Obliged to gaze upon this wallpaper for a couple of hours, my mind will always turn to other things.

With soaring heights of aesthetic joy apparently denied to me, my thoughts strayed to the corporeal. I started to think about my legs, and whether they were comfortable or not; I wondered if cavemen had sat like this at all, or whether it was a more recent thing. My legs were like sullen guests whom I had dragged along to this concert and was eager to please; my concern for them only intensified their grumbles. The focus on them grew sharper, soon pinpointing problems at microscopic level; a rogue fear that half a dozen blood cells had died and fused together, a newborn clot roaming the legs’ circulation, searching blindly for some vital system to lodge in. All of a sudden,
I was aware that I was a pulsing sack of blood, relying completely on the cooperation of millions upon millions of individual cells; these teeming workers had had little opportunity to make any grievances known to the controlling mind as their feedback and petitions were reduced to nonsense twinges and discomforts that I ascribed to either hypochondria or a hangover or dismissed entirely. But even now an enraged delegation of blood cells might be marching up a major artery, bearing at their processional fore an encrusted mass of their deceased brethren, intending to cram this clotted protest deep in the cerebrum and bring about a permanent industrial stoppage. Strike, meet stroke.

But the music did not stop suddenly, as I feared it might, an abrupt silence brought on by the cessation of my life. (‘Rebellious legs,’ the coroner would remark, gravely. ‘It was the sitting down. They wouldn’t stand for it.’) The performance came to its natural end after little more than an hour. The musicians stood for applause, and I scanned them for potential Michaels. They looked very pleased with themselves. I remembered how Oskar looked after performances I had seen him give – a tightening in the cheeks at either extremity of a perfectly horizontal mouth, a feline narrowing of the eyes; a mask, a self-imposed rictus of satisfaction that looked as if it might snap into an expression of anger, or loss, or humour, the instant it relaxed in private. But it never relaxed, in private or otherwise, it just switched seamlessly back to his normal face, the pine doors of a cabinet closing on a dead TV set.

The bar was not decorated in the same thrombosis red as the rest of the building, but hung with dark green embossed wallpaper. A green room. Green rooms in theatres were green because that colour was most restful on the actors’ eyes after an evening spent gazing into the limelight – burning lime was once used as stage lighting, with blinding effect. This was a generous, high-ceilinged room made strangely claustrophobic by the fact that the wallpaper continued above the top of the walls and covered the ceiling, in the process apparently smothering what I imagined were plaster cornices and mouldings, which now appeared as vaguely malignant lumps and ridges. A communist-era chandelier dangled from a particularly prominent tumulus of wallpaper in the centre of the ceiling, distributing a kind of restless surgical light. It was an obvious triumph of proletarian aesthetics and wiring over bourgeois conventions of beauty and safety; a cuboid entanglement of metal struts and sheets of yellowing fabric, it strongly resembled a box kite hitting an electricity pylon, and would have been far more comfortable in the brutalist megastructure across the street. With the wallpaper, it was like an abstract ice cube floating in a glass of congealed crème de menthe.

The bar was original, though, an ornate teak longboat in dry dock, staffed by the best-dressed people in the room and backed by huge mirrors in gilt frames. But a long portion of it was topped by an ageing sneezeguard, the plastic of which was beginning to fog and craze in places. I ordered a gin and tonic, in English, a language that the barman clearly understood. A mobile phone trilled behind
me; the till that my money disappeared into was new. The West, home, at once felt closer than it had done at any time during my stay here, and very far away. I felt as if Oskar’s flat was a bathysphere submerged in alien depths, and I had just briefly surfaced, an isolated bubble of humanity bursting into the atmosphere of others. An awful sloshing wave of homesickness caught me, trailing misery. How much longer would I be expected to stay? Oskar had said at least a week, almost certainly two, possibly more. At this moment, even the end of the first week seemed an impossible age away. The beginning of the week also felt distant; time telescoped away in both directions. I found a place to sit and sipped my G&T. Was I still hungover, perhaps? The gin, I thought, would revive me. Maybe it was the hair of the dog that I needed. Yes, the hair, the hairiest hair of the hairiest dog. Let the hangover be deferred, thin out that clotting blood with a dash of spirit, get things moving.