In Partial Disgrace (42 page)

Over the years Priam refined his own tremulous tone, which he called
vibrando
. In the evenings he played for his wife what he called “keyboard conversations,” and she occasionally accompanied these rondos with a half-hearted tambourine. His favorite program consisted of several new pieces, such as “To a Dying Poet,” “Easy Sonata Spanish Dances Manqué,” Lefeburewely’s “Monastery Bells,” and his favorite of all, the
fantasia effusio
, “Battle Fog,” commissioned especially to incorporate all his modifications, and to this day the only piece ever played upon it not written for other instruments. So it was that this clavicytherium consisting of three keyboards (fretted and unfretted) and six codimentary pedals, driven by a steam turbine large enough to power a small factory, passed on to my father’s hands in the first years of our blind century.

Felix was in his thirties before he felt comfortable with the prerogatives of heirs and began his own modifications, according to preferences he himself only vaguely understood. His childhood memory of musical soirees consisted of excruciatingly boring evenings on hard chairs without conversation, the crossing and uncrossing of legs, suppressed coughing, stale sweets, unventilated rooms, a grossly extended family which expressed itself by brief programmatic bursts of applause, and an audience applauding itself for enduring a trial for all concerned—the tyranny of the human.

He felt that things had gone too far in the direction of taste and touch, too far toward emulating the overrated human voice, which was not there in the first place. Somewhere in that instrument lay delicious secrets which had nothing to do with singing, but rather the Assyrian ratios of wood against metal. It cried out to be shorn of its language props, its symphonic rhetoric, and above all the endless technical compromise to improve trumpetish compositions.

There came a day when Ainoha declared her own disinterest, one too many whiskeys being set down upon the instrument, each leaving a pale white ring, and a small army of locals was hired to move the relic to Father’s den. During the move, an inadvertent brush on the keyboard suggested to Felix that it sounded better when played upon men’s backs, and when finally set down in the library, he ordered it placed upon two worn tractor tires.

The acoustics were muffled by the rubber base as well as the room’s books. Disconnected from the steam turbine, as well as its social function, the gothic lettering across the instrument’s brow was changed to serrified Roman capitals. Its tone was confused, as if unsure of its place in the history of technology. Yet if there was little it allowed, there was nothing it violated, either. When he played, say, the bravura “Capriccio for the Departure of His Dead Brother,” it was no longer music from another better world, but music which did not require a world. And now alone with his instrument, he began a movement toward a feeling he could not name, although he knew it was away from originality and personal expression, while still extremely novel and highly private. First he replaced the French action, which was always a trifle sloppy, with the tinny but more lifelike American castings. Then he replaced the English cabinetry, which had begun to split and check, with pine salvaged from the lining of trenches during the early Balkan Wars, which thus weathered, warped, gassed, and blasted by every inhuman invention, was incapable of further mischief, insuring an even resonance throughout the sharply changing seasons. He also installed a curved maple bottom to disperse the harmonics, and along the trebles added a fourth silent string to pick up any lost vibrations. And finally he replaced the all-leather hammers with those of rabbit skin, a single capercailzie sewn in the tuft.

Throughout this my mother and I occupied ourselves without the slightest guilt with the used Bösendorfer of infinite nostalgia and a gramophone of His Master’s future voice. But as we whiled away the hours in the music room, in his study Father had became increasingly aware of the slight error which centuries of technical subterfuge has distributed throughout the twelve fifths of the keyboard, in order to make the remotest tonalities undistressing to the ear—and this began to annoy him as much as the fulsome, too wholesome tone color of Priam’s heritage.

One day when Father attended an afternoon concert in the Silbürsmerze park, he saw a composer—dressed more like a mechanic than an artist—get up from his stool and crawl inside the grand piano, where he continued to play. He loved the offense it gave to the office-heroes in the audience, but once inside the instrument, Father knew that they were at no cutting edge but back to the stringed gourd which had so unhinged Marcus. As much as he enjoyed for a few moments the mutilation of the classic, he found that his delight in the discomfort of the audience was gradually evaporated by the tonal dice games, an artform constructed almost entirely of hurt feelings, and he had his first premonition that there might come a day when Klavierland would exist no more.

It was not long afterward that he sniffed out a retired professor at the Monstifita Conservatory, one Dr. Janko, who before arthritis had curled his fingers like so much burned paper, had been at work on a massive keyboard in which all auxiliary vibrations had been preserved—four keyboards of thirty-two keys each, so that each semitone succeeded another, each sharpened sharp, each double-sharpened flat, were preserved in all their purity to their remotest diatonic regions, yet all these faraway places were still staunchly related to the key of C, so that the notes could not be made to disappear until the vibration of each string came naturally to an end.

The Janko keyboard was invincibly difficult to play, but it fully suited Father, who had perfect pitch but no formal training to forget. Of all Grandfather’s accessories, he found only the pocket hand exerciser from Dresden useful, though he still found occasion to use all the pedals, like all fortunate men whose antecedents have their place in every piece they undertake.

He knew then that if he would not play for a public, neither would he play for himself. He would play it for
it
self, allow the instrument to be the judge of him, frozen in a history that no one could locate. No performer, no composer, he would devise an instrument which only he could play, and so he performed without embarrassment a kind of random, dodecaphonic, dysphoric nonsense which gave him enormous satisfaction, in which no one in the entire countryside, much less our house, could share, nor was meant to.

There would be no evenings, merry or sober, spent round this instrument. No suitor would come to beguile his nieces. No strange hirsute visitor would call on him and ask him to sponsor a recital. No reviewer would get caught up in the finer points of explaining the intention of his composition. And he was grateful above all to realize that he would attract no pupils. He came to see that the Janko keyboard did not lend itself to those ineffable inner states which must elude the poor written word. However, as a weapon against artpiousness it had no equal. It was, indeed, the only way he could relax after training sessions and contact with the general public.

He began to see that this eclectic machine could be turned against the very class it captivated, and had he been interested in making such a thing as an aesthetic, he might return music to its military origins, and march against the sentimentality, stuffiness, and weepyeyed pale virtuosity by which the weak could make overstimulated women weep, a weapon which could be brought to bear against the cult of family values and civil society in general. It was shameful, no doubt, to work such idiots over, yet he couldn’t help indulging himself in this anti-bourgeois music par excellence.

His hands were about to fall.

“And now for some
chow
music, Herr Professor!”

And thus he began, like the mechanic, with a few sweeps of sentimental C-majorness, to gradually disconnect the phrases from their harmonic center, willfully losing its heartbeat in chattering thickets of sound. In this many-layered but non-propulsive music, the notes were no longer played singly, but looked forward and backward at once, sub-harmonic resonances separated by fifty-second pauses, rappelling into the lost world of the future. Then he opened the pipes of the old
wohltemperer
, solo to swell, transposing the
heckelphone
onto the
quinte tromba
, the
tuba mirabilis
onto the
fl
û
te à
cheminée
, the
bois celeste
onto the
muted viole
and
corno d’amore
, and finally launched into the double counterfugue,
A
Confutatis Tremendae
.

“Enough,
dayenu
, enough!” cried the Professor, clapping his hands over his ears, but too stunned to move.

Father responded only by dropping the flats of his hands onto the lowest and highest octaves of Janko’s keyboard. The chords enveloped the tone-deaf Professor, on whom it produced goosebumps of a strange, indeterminate hue, and the dogs curled about me at the door—who had merely cocked their ears in semaphores of puerile curiosity at the sound of the Bösendorfer—now suddenly rose as one, totally alert. Sitting on their haunches in deep reverential respect, like a pair of tawny sphinxes, they took the notes into their bodies, those chords flying out to the east, a sound like that of walking on birds, away from the singing voice into the soul of the percussion people, dividing the hemispheres of the brain with Time’s Arrow. This reverberation seemed to go on forever, back to the original timbre, with no separation between wood and metal, past Marcus’s smoking braziers to the campfires across the river, which the barbarians could only extinguish by wounding themselves and dousing the embers with their blood. It was as if he had canceled out all those echoes buzzing in the soft dilettante’s sleep of ages and approached the Heraclitan ideal—registering the overtones of the original historical note. The style of styles did not rise or fall—it was neither calming nor exciting. Only the Chetvorah seemed to recognize it as the sound of primeval men breaking camp without a goal, a well-known accompaniment to a task with unforeseen consequences, a rasp of wood on metal, the real prelude before the etude, the sound of changing your mind. And when it finally seemed unendurable and the air itself was smeared with notes that would never die on their own, Father kicked out the damper as well as the sixth pedal, and as the tone began to subside, the two tiny negroes swung out from each side of the instrument, ringing in a little postlude of triangle, bells, and trapdrum—to remind us that the task of the barbarian is to civilize the men of science.

The afternoon disappeared into a mournful, barely audible triple
pianissimo
, at once sardonic and ethereal, a solitude which was itself almost art.

The Professor had drawn himself up in a perspiring, quivering glower, his tone hyperboreal.

“I believe, sir, our business is concluded.”

Father seemed taken aback.

“You’re going away, then?”

“Yes, I must see about the horses.”

“Very well, very well. Why must you . . . Do you find it dull here?”

“You
will
excuse me.”

“Very well, then. I thought you would stay with us a little longer. A few hours . . . It’s rather little, Berganza, rather little.”

“Sir,” the Professor stammered, his jaw jutting and rattling, “you ridicule me, sir, and have insulted the only comfort of my old age. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: people do not love you for what you know!”

Flinging open the study door, he barged past us spies down the stairs, as Father gave a start and clutched at his chest.

The horses were at the door. The Skopje in high felt boots sat listlessly in the box, his soft, fleshy torso and smooth, puffy face bloodless in the twilight, while his white scarf and shirttail blazed purity. In one hand he held the reins within a white cloth, in the other a popular illustrated magazine. His face had the yellow cast of a burning manuscript. Lun and Jofi sat chained on either side of him, white dressings stained with gore about their necks, and muzzled with bows of white satin ribbon. The dogs stared impassively to the east with reddened, slanted eyes, their faces reminiscent of those hirsute teenage fanatics whose passport photos hung in every postal guild, with eyes which neither see nor mirror, just places to take hold of the skull like a bowling ball. As the wind turned the poplar leaves silver, Father continued his efforts at repair, as he assisted the Professor in mounting the carriage step.

“You have taken on a complicated history, my friend. These dogs, you must understand, are the only hunting dogs native to China. There’s mastiff in them, and Samoyed, no doubt. But they were never used for guarding their honorary patrons. They pointed and retrieved, if you can believe it: a lion stalking a golden quail—now there’s a mandarin bit for you,” he said with a false laugh. “And then as the civil wars ceased they were used for herding. Thousands of years denied their natural function, and only later, when the Tartars took them, did they become natural assassins. So you see there’s some confliction here, which no doubt appeals to you. Their very lack of balance might be turned to an advantage, who can say? No one ever knows how a dog might assist a man.”

Then he reached up to shake his hand, but the Professor refused to acknowledge him.

“One final thing you ought to bear in mind as far as upbringing goes,” Father went on, grasping the coattail of his only male friend in Klavierland, “is the westernizing that these dogs have suffered.” He reached up and ruffled Lun’s fur to show the straightened rear leg. “Shortened thigh bone, yes?” And then he squeezed the roll of fat behind her neck. “This we owe to our British fanciers. If this were a human fetus, Professor, what would be your
diagnoze
?”

The Professor said nothing.

“Professor,” my father said, his untaken hand almost shaking, “an interpretation, please! Here’s a hint: an ugly synonym for certain Asiatics . . .” There was a long harsh pause, then through the Professor’s silence, the word appeared crisply in my father’s throat: