Extraordinary Renditions (22 page)

The stage manager, a portly beast of a man in rimless glasses, ordered the musicians to take their seats and remove their ID badges for the duration of the performance. Secret service agents moved silently into position among the stations of the cross and someone pulled open the main doors to invite in the cold air and several hundred dignitaries and hangers-on. The floor stopped rumbling, the heater turned off so the microphones wouldn’t pick up the vibration. The rows of pews, divided by a center aisle, filled up fast. The stained glass threw prismatic colors at the faces and starched shirts of the quickly assembling congregation. Tickets for the event ran in the 100,000-forint range and didn’t include seat assignments, so tuxedoed gentlemen elbowed each other to get up front. Murmurs rippled through the crowd and orchestra as various celebrities and prominent members of parliament made themselves visible among the three reserved and cordoned-off rows closest to the musicians. Red, white, and green banners hung from the ceiling and swayed amid the commotion.

Melanie placed her violin and bow on her lap and shook the blood down into her fingers. Warm, stony reverb filled every corner, each one lit up for reasons of national security and national television. She couldn’t see Nanette. She wished she had thought to use the W.C.

The audience took its place. The lights flickered and then dimmed as the prime minister and his bat-faced wife entered from a door Melanie had not noticed before. Slowly, uncertainly, people stood and applauded. Those in the orchestra tapped their feet or bumped their bows gently against their music stands. Melanie shared a stand with a fifty-year-old housewife named Zsuzsi who smelled like burned toast and hadn’t shaved her legs since glasnost. Not a good look with white stockings. Zsuzsi swooned like a
schoolgirl at the sight of the prime minister, and even Melanie had to admit that he was more handsome in person than on TV. The happy couple turned their backs to the orchestra and gave the room a cheesy photo-op wave. They genuflected and crossed themselves before sitting.

Once the clamor receded and people sat again, a young tuxedoed man stood from the audience and hollered a string of obscenities and declarations that Melanie couldn’t completely understand. He shouted something unintelligible about “There is no freedom in Hungary” and “Where is our grand democracy?” The crowd was aghast. One man took a swing at him. The entire orchestra, all eighty-plus musicians, did what they could to conceal their laughter as the security guards dragged the protestor out and no doubt beat him to a gooey pulp right there on the red carpet. The P.M. stood and faced the crowd again with a shrug of his shoulders and that self-deprecating smile he surely had practiced intently in front of a mirror. Cameras flashed on the balcony like Chernobyl-sized lightning bugs.

Then Lajos Harkályi, the guest of honor, entered with a buxom date not all that much older than Melanie. She prayed it was his daughter. A feverish, temporary insanity overtook the crowd. They stomped their feet and hooted. They clapped in unison the way Hungarian audiences did when extremely excited or extremely drunk. Or both, as was likely the case today. Somewhere, recording engineers fumbled to adjust input levels. Harkályi was tall, far taller than Melanie had imagined. He wore a natty new-fashioned tuxedo jacket, no tie. His nest of silver wooly hair was cut uncharacteristically close and neat for the occasion, compared to the style Melanie had seen in photos of him; his date sparkled with stage lights and sequins and the holy pseudo-virginal radiance of the stained glass. The prime minister hugged Harkályi. The composer and his girlfriend slid into the front-row pew, which had a block of empty seats reserved for the archbishop and president, who didn’t show: more empty chairs.

The March weather seeped deeper into Melanie’s fingers as the church grew colder. She hoped that the mass of people would soon generate some body heat, even if it was the odorous variety she knew to expect on the metro. The concertmaster—or kapo, as they called him—took the stage, his shoes click-clacking across the floor like a tap dancer’s. Applause. He pointed to the principal oboe, who played a long A with which they all joined in to tune their instruments. Or un-tune them. Melanie was pleased with her tone and with the acoustics of the room. The kapo sat and noisily adjusted his chair until the conductor bounded in from off-stage. He climbed the podium to wild applause. Melanie would have liked to insert her violin bow into his rectum. The public didn’t realize that this jerk’s career leading an orchestra began only after he failed to demonstrate any affinity at all for composition, the violin, or even the piano—the instrument that made his mother famous throughout Europe after the war. Her name alone landed him and his older brother positions of tremendous importance within the hermetically sealed world of Hungary’s musical establishment. Tellingly, no other orchestra had even considered him for as much as an assistant music directorship before now. His awkward, constipated-orangutan style and horrendously flawed ear annoyed Melanie to no end.

He stiffened his back and with a mild frown looked them over without making eye contact. He did nothing to establish a rapport with his orchestra. Nothing. They were strangers to him, despite the countless hours spent following his orders. A gesture as simple as a smile or even a nod would have put them—or at least it would have put
her
—squarely on his side. Instead, he adopted an adversarial posture. That thin sneer communicated something to the effect of, “Don’t you dare fuck up the most important concert of my stillborn career.” He raised his baton to begin the national anthem.

Ferenc Erkel’s slow, plodding dirge was easily the world’s most depressing hymn of self-celebration. The orchestra came in unevenly, so
several of the violins rushed to find their spots. Every musician made mistakes on stage from time to time; the correct thing to do in most instances was to skip a few measures and follow along with the sheet music, with eyes only, until finding one’s place and jumping back in. That these guys decided to play all the notes faster as a way of catching up to the rest of the orchestra only illustrated Melanie’s concern about the level of amateurism she contended with every day at rehearsal. They played faster, but that only made the discord more apparent. If the audience noticed the initial gaffe, it didn’t let on. Their esteemed conductor, however, grew visibly agitated. The music fell out of skew. Everything wobbled, unsure, for what felt like an hour. A train wreck was imminent. Panic grabbed hold of the reeds, who started to play faster to match the errant violins, until finally the timpanist took control of the situation—a responsibility that should have fallen squarely on the shoulders of the man with the baton—and leaned in a bit harder to establish a beat by which they could all correct themselves. It fell back into place just in time for the bleak finale. Melanie
felt
the music snap together more than heard it. From her seat she had a lousy view of the church and even, mercifully, of the conductor, but when they finally got into sync, the sonority of that room gave her chills. It was frigid to the point of disrespect for the musicians and audience, but the pinpricks up and down her arm derived not from the temperature, but from the immediately visceral sensation of hearing those gloriously melancholy tones reverberate through the eaves, of feeling Beethoven beside her. Within her. Locking in with other players, with a receptive audience, it was absolute joy. She even loved the usually tedious counting and keeping of time between her parts.

The applause hit them, a hot shower of jubilation and nationalistic pride. The conductor glowered, and then turned to the cheering crowd with the same thin smile. When he bowed in gratitude, his back to the orchestra, one of the tuba players cut loose with a sharp oompah. The
sound was unmistakable. The tubist pretended it was an accident, that she was clearing the spit valve and it went off in her hands. The orchestra members couldn’t reign in their laughter, their relief. That noise had unified them in direct opposition to their conductor. They staged a musical revolt, on Independence Day no less, and the conductor could only watch, dumbstruck as he lost his tenuous grip on an insolent ensemble. The tubist would certainly be fired. No question about it.

The raucous whooping and hollering wasn’t simply the audience cheering the entrance of the soloists. It was that, but it was also the orchestra, up on the sanctuary where the altar should have been, laughing at something as inane and banal as a fart joke—a fart joke at the expense of their esteemed conductor. And that was where, less than a month later, the bestselling DVD recording of the event would begin. With this rambunctious laughter. With the conductor’s face glowing bright pink in rage. With a shot of audience members who were unaware of what they had just witnessed and of what they were about to witness.

The three soloists strutted out, unaware, into a musical minefield: soprano Erzsébet Holló, mezzo-soprano Judit Szirmay, and contralto Sylvia Péntek. Their dresses glittered, respectively, green, white, and red. Tenor László Nógrádi, the chansonnier, followed behind. The crowd erupted even more. The conductor, overcome with game-show host conviviality, lasciviously kissed the ladies and pumped Nógrádi’s hand. Without room for sets, which were still under construction anyway, or for proper dressing rooms for costume changes, they performed a concert version of the opera. The singers sat at the front of the stage, facing the audience, except for Nógrádi, who remained standing.

Set in rural mainland China,
The Golden Lotus
used the practice of foot binding as a metaphor for the experience of the common man under
what Harkályi described in the score’s endnotes as the “corrupting sway and influence of capital.” It had taken him thirty years to complete. He derived the title from the ideal shape that a woman’s feet could attain by binding. According to the program notes, the wrapping of a young girl’s feet—which typically started at age three or four—upheld patriarchic, feudal-era ideas of beauty. Small feet represented nobility even among peasants and raised one’s social stature and prospects of good marriage. A mother would use a twenty-foot-long ribbon to adhere her daughter’s toes to the underside of the foot, often crushing the bones in the process. She then sewed the ribbon ends together to prevent loosening and crammed the child’s feet into shoes sometimes no more than a few inches long. As the flesh deteriorated, over time the stench of blood and pus could become overwhelming. When the bandages were drenched, the mother would scrape away the putrid flesh, tighten the ribbons further, and subject the girl to smaller and smaller shoes. The process lasted up to three years. The libretto described the sensation as something like walking through a fire. Harkályi, from what Melanie had read, also intended it as a jab at American decadence. Apparently the obsession with wealth and status not only hamstrung the nation’s natural spiritual growth, but also brutally disfigured Americans in the process.

Nógrádi’s spoken, chant-like introduction, which was in German, warned the audience and television cameras of the horrendous events they were about to witness, of the bondage to which people were subjected to in the name of beauty. In a remote Chinese village, Mother (Szirmay) defied her family, particularly Grandmother (Péntek), by refusing to bind the feet of her own infant Daughter (Holló). Mother and Daughter became objects of public scorn. Their shame cast an impenetrable shadow over the family’s fortunes. After a minute and a half, a solo cimbalom came in to accompany Nógrádi. It evoked the timbre of a pipa. A strain of Asian music ran throughout the entire piece, but it carried a
distinctly Magyar tone. The cimbalom remained a fixture of every Hungarian folk music ensemble and the associations with the local Gypsy music were unmistakable to the native audience.

Years had passed in the opera when the singing began in earnest. Nógrádi sat. This time, the orchestra came in together and the sound was staggering. They were one seamless mass: the orchestra and conductor and composer, the crowd and the cameras, the church and the city around them. The palpable spirit of Beethoven. Melanie felt it. The first part sung was the crying and moaning of the Daughter, now nine years old. Her big, unbound “peasant’s feet” made her a pariah. As the strings assembled into shifting vistas of harmony, Daughter—with the help of Grandmother—bound her own feet in secret. It was an incredibly demanding part for a singer, full of abrupt transitions from precise lyricism to howls of physical agony and emotional duress. From her seat, Melanie saw the green-black of the singer’s glittering gown, but little else.

Every musician was now on board and in precise and undistracted synchronization. The singers unfolded their story of pain and humiliation and violence wielded in the name of motherly love. Music surged in and out of tune. Harmonies arose and dissipated like clouds, then reformed themselves as hail that landed on the timpanis. The conductor smiled. His swaying grew more pronounced, more dance-like. Soon there were no longer notes on the page, only living music: music that consumed those black dots and rests like match heads and sent the ashes spewing all the way to the eaves, finally settling on the shoulders of prime ministers and diplomats and cameramen and Nanette somewhere firing away at Melanie through a zoom lens. A woman wailed, another sang solemnly, and yet another sat silent and motionless. Oboes and bassoons colored the very air they breathed and in which Melanie could now see her own breath. Horns blasted holes clear through the sound. The basses creaked and moaned like floorboards and the drums flagellated themselves
mercilessly over her left shoulder to punctuate the entire event. Melanie watched her bow repeatedly stretch itself out from her body and recline again, hitting against the neck as if it were a talking drum. Her fingers danced heavily on the ridged strings, the bottom rim of her violin gouged into her collarbone, but she felt nothing. She possessed no “I” capable of feeling, and from that absence she was reborn into some kind of vision.

Melanie’s body remained anchored to her chair—she never completely lost touch with her physical presence, yet a different part of herself became unmoored. Some kind of dream-self came removed from her body and hovered near the stage. She looked at herself there—
here
—playing the violin, and then she floated over the heads of the crowd and ventured through the front doors of the church. She followed the path of the river north to Margit Bridge and went down to the island, an oasis of groves and fields and footpaths. She sped over the tops of the trees. Colors appeared exceptionally vivid, yet somehow misaligned, like she was wearing a pair of wine-red lenses. She arrived at an enormous oak, one she had never seen before, and recognized it somehow as her home. She
belonged
in it. She joined a flock of eagles and hawks amid the branches, which elsewhere also contained bats and owls and pelicans and parrots of every color. It was the woodpeckers, however, that got her attention. Hundreds of them—woodpeckers of every variety, tap-tapping an intricate tribal rhythm. It was mesmerizing. The immediate sense of comfort overwhelmed her, like the familiarity of her own clean bed after a long trip. The voice of her violin joined the choral din of birdsong and roused her from her trance. Looking down, she nearly screamed, shaken not by the height, though she sat far higher than the top of any natural tree, but by a series of human bodies: black men dangled from the branches on ropes. They had been lynched and left to feed the amassed birds. The tops of their heads bobbed and swung heavily. Their dying moans sounded like upright basses and antique cellos tuned to some ungodly foreign scale. They accused Melanie
of complicity. She fled back to Batthyány Square as the string quartet finale approached, much too suddenly. She was going to be late for her entrance. Daughter was dying from a painful gangrenous infection.