Extraordinary Renditions (23 page)

She tuned her pegs down by another quarter tone as required—but she didn’t stop there. Instead, Melanie threw the strings wholly out of whack, even compared to the other atonal elements of Harkályi’s precious composition, and deviated wildly from the score. Zsuzsi stirred in her seat but didn’t risk looking over and losing her place; when her part ended and she stopped playing, the pronounced pocket of silence made Melanie’s violin that much louder, more jarring. It sounded beautiful, alive and natural in a way that she could only think of as sexual. The first violins in front of her began to rock in their seats, visibly distraught. The conductor eyed her entire section, trying to identify the offending party. More instruments grew hushed on cue, like confused voices silencing themselves. The singers retook their seats. Melanie ignored the score in front of her. The cello and viola died slowly until only the timpani and her own screeching violin remained, as out of tune as an upright, elementary-school piano. Disbelief passed through the orchestra, followed by something like anger—now directed fully at her—but her bow kept seesawing away. She looked for the timpanist but couldn’t see him. He struggled to keep up, to vamp along with Melanie and cover up the disaster in progress, but the combined effect soon breached that thin membrane separating music and noise. It sounded sirenlike, as natural as childbirth and just as messy. Even after the timpanist gave up, Melanie continued to play solo, exorcising herself of demons real and imagined. Filthy, infected sounds gushed from her body and every tone she dragged from her violin and ragged bow purged her of another sin until, at long last, she slid to one long, breathless glissando, then stopped.

The final altissimo squeak rose from the sounding board of her instrument, carried itself aloft, and ascended until it found itself trapped and muted among the plaster balusters of the ceiling. Calluses pulsated on her
fingertips. The conductor eyed her in disbelief, in rage. He held his empty hand in front of his face as if shaking an invisible snow globe, then dropped it at his side before she was able to breathe again.

The church exploded. The audience’s ecstasy found expression in the whistling and clapping and stomping of leather soles. The crowd jumped to its feet. The prime minister kissed his wife, shook the hands of well-wishers in the row behind him, and applauded with gusto. Melanie didn’t dare to look at Harkályi. Her bow, a knot of horsehair tied to a stick, fell from her hand. The violinists in front of her turned around to stare without shame. The conductor took a jaunty bow and trotted off to the chancel. Beneath Melanie’s feet the heaters mercifully—miraculously—came back to life.

The cacophony of shouts and applause solidified into a steady rollicking beat until the conductor took the stage again. Motioning to Harkályi, he held out his cupped palms the way a beggar might ask for spare change. Melanie braced herself. Lajos Harkályi stood, aglow with the triumph spilling down on him from the very walls of the church. Nothing about his composure, his countenance, gave the slightest hint of disapproval, yet Melanie’s only concern involved collecting her things from those altar boys and getting the hell out before bumping into him. She didn’t care about that wormy conductor, but she couldn’t face Harkályi, not after the damage she had done to his opera. The prime minister hugged him and mugged for the cameras. The conductor pointed to the singers, asking them to stand. Bouquets fell at their feet. Erzsébet Holló received the loudest ovation and deservedly so. Her performance would make her a household name throughout Hungary and beyond.

The conductor waved his hand, directing those musicians who had distinguished themselves before his eyes to stand. He never took his gaze off Melanie but, needless to say, didn’t lift her from her seat. Her career in Hungary was over. But a change came over the audience, a kind of
clucking disapproval. Waves of protest rippled through the pews. Men pointed at her. The conductor, in his confusion, looked at Harkályi.

Melanie could see the composer’s warm smile. He closed his eyes and nodded in what looked like acceptance, even joy. The conductor turned. He held his hand out toward her, and she stood. Tears streaked down her cheeks. Zsuzsi looked on in utter astonishment. The roar grew exponentially. Then the whole audience was standing. People cheered, yelled, clapped at her. Cameras in the balcony twinkled like distant, long-dead suns. Nanette stood behind one of them. Harkályi bounded up to the podium, raised the conductor’s hand in triumph. The entire orchestra stood. Cameras continued to flash amid the cheers and a spontaneous eruption of a nationalistic hymn by the audience, after which they dispersed into their warm limousines.

The stage crew started to give the priests their church back, but Melanie remained in her seat. She wanted to run but had no place to go. She struggled to understand what had just happened. In that hallucination—if it
was
a hallucination—she could see herself clearly, as if standing somewhere beyond her embodied self. What she had experienced was real in the same way that she knew that her dreams were real, and the vision referred to her existence in the universe in the same way that her dreams spoke about her waking life. Strangely absent, however, was the gleeful ego rub that usually accompanied being the center of attention, getting singled out and applauded by an enthusiastic crowd. For the first time, she truly didn’t care what the conductor or her fellow musicians or the audience had thought.

At one time, before that day, Melanie had considered her violin a part of her body, an appendage. But the music she, they, had just produced existed separately. It was now outside of her, beyond herself, and set loose into the wild to fend for itself on this bitterly cold March afternoon. That music no longer belonged to her any more than it belonged to Harkályi or
to the conductor or to the audience. It was free. And so was she. Her informal resignation from the Opera House Symphony Orchestra had already been accepted, and she felt great about it. She felt liberated, her violin separate now, no longer hers. No one could possess such a thing. It was Independence Day. She sat amid the chaos of the altar’s reconstruction and laughed until tears beaded in the corners of her eyes and a heavily accented voice addressed her. “I understand that you are an American?”

Lajos Harkályi pulled an empty chair over to face hers, scraping it across the stone floor. Behind him, the stained-glass window blinked out and the colors of the church faded back to their natural stony gray. Yet Harkályi’s eyes still appeared bright, alive. Musical. An entourage of orchestra representatives and autograph seekers remained, for now, a respectful distance away. A reporter with a tape recorder cornered Harkályi’s girlfriend.

Melanie wanted to apologize, but he cut her off.

“Do not be sorry,” he said. “I have no problem with what has occurred today. What is your name?”

“Melanie Scholes.”

“I am pleased to meet you, Melanie. I am Lajos.”

She shook his hand, which was warm enough to bring the feeling flooding back to her fingers and toes. “I … I’m sorry I ruined the recording. Your premiere.”

Nanette appeared among the clutter of stagehands and altar boys. Melanie shot her a give-me-a-sec look over Harkályi’s shoulder. She snapped off a couple photos of the two of them, and it occurred to Melanie that she didn’t need to
act
natural this time.

“On the contrary, I think that you may have saved it. I am flattered that my music moved you in such a way. It shows me that perhaps I did something correctly, and that you—” He yawned into the back of his hand. “Forgive me, I am extremely tired. It tells me that you have real
music inside of you.” Reporters clamored for his attention. “This is something we can discuss on another day.” He pulled his billfold and a rotund ballpoint pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “Here is my telephone number at home in Philadelphia. I will be there before the end of this month. Call me—collect, if that is what you prefer.” He had the borderline-illegible handwriting of a child, but the surface of his business card was as smooth as marble. She tucked it between the strings of her violin. She stood when Harkályi did, and he hugged her in front of all those people, a public gesture of support. More cameras whirred and flashed at them. She got it, finally: Harkályi’s popularity and subsequent wealth had rendered him invisible. But she now saw him, the real him, or at least believed that she did. In becoming an icon he had sacrificed his complexity, the fluid motion of his humanity. And it seemed like he had accepted that, made his peace with it. Of his millions of fans, Melanie alone knew him, understood who he was. She held him tighter. The shoulder of his luxuriously soft jacket absorbed her tears before he was swallowed up by his followers and devotees.

Nanette threw her arms around Melanie’s neck. “Baby, you were great!” she screamed. “That was so cool. What did the composer guy say?”

Confusion impeded Melanie’s attempt at a rational response. She didn’t want to talk about it, least of all with Nanette. No words existed in English or Hungarian for what she had experienced. For what she was still experiencing. Music she had never heard before appeared in her head. She needed to write it down.

The vision, or whatever it was, wouldn’t fade. It embedded itself in her mind like a catchy melody. It defied meaning. She realized something crucial, however: it was time to go. She needed to leave Budapest, to leave Nanette, and to return to the comfort she had found up in that
impossibly tall tree, until the lynched chorus began to holler. Something in that brief, initial sensation of serenity triggered an acute understanding of how miserable she was with the recklessness, with the out-all-night bacchanalia she used to distract herself for a few hours at a time from the music she felt surging through her veins. Something in the horror of seeing those men dangling, hearing their moans, which would continue to haunt her for years to come, told Melanie that she had lost all sight of what made her who she was.

She didn’t want to blame Nanette, however: she bore full responsibility herself, which was why she needed to leave Budapest and her expatriate life behind. On a practical level, she was likely out of a job anyway. No way the conductor would have her back. She had contemplated the move for ages, even checking ticket prices and looking at audition dates with orchestras in Philly and Baltimore, Washington and Boston, but had always hesitated to give up the privilege of the expatriate lifestyle. Here, she was an American. Back in the States, she would become just another aimless kid with a violin, like all the other conservatory dropouts working in music stores and performing for community theater. But this concert sealed the deal. Leaving was no longer an option—it was a necessity. She was trapped. If she had to, she would move in with her brother and his wife for a few weeks. Take on some private students and practice her butt off until the next round of Boston Symphony auditions.

“Did you get a program?” she asked Nanette.

“Yeah, here.” Nanette fished a copy from the side pocket of a camera bag.

There was little room to write amid the program notes and biographical information and the colorful advertisements for Unicum, salami, and banks. “Give me a pen.”

“What—?”

“Hold on,” Melanie said, and jotted down the first few notes of a simple melody, a theme. She heard it over and over, like a skipping record.
More would come soon. She felt it brewing inside her. She had never composed music before, and wasn’t entirely sure that was what she was doing, but it seemed like it. The melody was both unrecognizable and as familiar as her own name. She handed the pen back to Nanette.

“What did the composer say?”

Melanie would wait until later to tell Nanette that she was leaving. “He … he thanked me.”

“Isn’t he really famous?”

“Let me get my stuff and we’ll go.”

Nanette sat and held Melanie’s violin and bow in her lap. Melanie pocketed Harkályi’s business card and exchanged her Bible verse for her case and coat. The conductor, speaking into a Magyar Televízíó microphone, gave her a look of pure evil that would make the front page of the next day’s
Hírlap.
Back on stage, Melanie wiped down the strings and placed her instrument into its snug little coffin. Nanette put her arm around her shoulders, and on their way out the church doors Melanie offered a silent prayer of thanks to Beethoven. He heard her. He was grateful too.

Nanette called for a taxi. The shivers running through Melanie’s spine had nothing to do with the weather.

“Get a beer?” Nanette asked, of course.

The idea didn’t appeal in the slightest, but Melanie liked the idea of finding some neutral ground to tell Nanette her plans. She didn’t want to be back in that gross apartment, unless it was to book the soonest possible flight home.

“I want to change first. Get out of these shoes. Meet you down there?”

“Baby, it’s on me tonight.”

“Totally unnecessary. I’m thrilled you made it.”

“And miss your superstar debut? Fat chance. What else did Harkaly say to you?” His mispronounced name sounded strange on Nanette’s lips, almost indecent.

“Harkályi. He said he liked my playing. That I should call him.”

“That is so cool.”

Melanie’s reflection shone in the taxi’s window. The dome of the parliament building was lit up. “You have no idea.”

The taxi stopped halfway across Margit Bridge, the traffic around it frozen into a solid brick of metal and engine noise, carbon monoxide, and car horns. It would be faster to walk home. Nanette handed the driver some cash, and they spilled out onto the sidewalk. Cold as it was, they stopped at the same observation deck they had visited late the previous night. This morning. No view of Budapest was more spectacular. Nanette stood behind Melanie and put her arms around her chest, pinning her arms to her body.

Melanie contemplated throwing her violin into the water, along with the case and the bow and everything else. A fresh start. The melody forming in her head stopped her. Though currently only eight measures long, it felt like it had been with her forever. As the sound multiplied, the notes didn’t merely arrange themselves linearly into a longer composition. They also grew horizontally, starting with a lone violin, her own, which was joined by more instruments and more tone colors. She held fast to her music case and soon heard an entire string section and percussion—urgent tribal drumming, like a work song, like those woodpeckers—until now twelve measures of a spacious orchestral work repeated in her ears again and again. It was beautiful. She couldn’t hear the entire symphony, not yet, but she
felt
what it would sound like. Amid the reflected lights, the river had a deep, lustrous blue color. The burst of music in her head was like an act of resistance, an antidote to the cold, most immediately, but also to Hungary. To the incestuous claustrophobia of expatriate life. To Nanette.