Sitting on the low wall opposite the empty house, he leans the neck of the instrument back over one shoulder and clamps its body between his knees.
♦♦♦
He lost the fax that bore the news, and soon forgot its exact wording, which must have reduced complex information to its terrible essence. The details he found out much later. He had been playing, rather than practising—playing just for himself, which was always when he was at his best, gifting himself the music for nothing but his own pleasure, in the bright morning light of his apartment on the Avenue Georges Mandel, where the walls were lined with oil paintings and the windows faced southeast. He was watching the bow glide across the strings, the sound made almost visible by the wispy smoke of rosin that spurted from the collision of horsehair and steel, as if from a bottle of newly opened champagne. There was a trembling remnant of gritty coffee shiny and cold in a white bowl on a small table, next to the metronome, some pencils and a pile of spare strings held like preserved specimens in long plastic tubes.
♦♦♦
Sitting on the low wall opposite the empty house, he begins to play his cello.
♦♦♦
What he did not do, when he read the fax, was stop to think, although there was no urgency in the way he began to pack up the instrument. In fact, he was slow, without being especially reflective, as he closed the music on the stand, and laid the bow in the faded plush of the cello case, after unscrewing the end so that the horsehair went slack. Something in his mind had slackened too, gone almost numb. The fact of what he had read seeped slowly through his consciousness, without any resulting emotion. He had no thoughts—merely knowledge, which may have meant that he had no second thoughts either, explaining what he then did, which was so bizarre, and so inevitable. There was nothing else to be done, and he did not consider doing anything else. But he was not quite sure what he was doing, and he did not know precisely what he was going to do.
♦♦♦
The music has been going on for ever when it starts. A thread of sound, usually continuous though sometimes splitting into two or even three, and occasionally snapped off to begin afresh, emerges from the strings and dissolves into the air. The music is in a triple metre and it dances, though it would be hard to dance to. It clings to the lowest strings and the sound is a deep ache: sometimes there is bright colour in it, and sometimes it is bleached into grey and the street fades, just a little. The trills loosen everything that matters. Behind the cello, as if muffled by the heat, there is a smear of traffic noise. The music does not stroll or amble, and it does not rush; speed and time are irrelevant. Instead, each note has its place, at the right moment, a series of actors finding their light. A figure, too far away to be made out, stands for a second to listen, about 15 metres down the road, in front of the sinking sun. The figure makes an almost imperceptible movement, no more than a slight raising of the shoulders and arms, and then goes on its way. The heat does not fade. The music continues in its own climate.
♦♦♦
All the best friendships are unlikely and this one was more unlikely than most. And then again, perhaps not. Their lives were divided by two continents and a sea, but were bound into similar rituals of discipline and performance. They saw each other seldom. They rarely wrote to one another. When they did they wrote in English, their sole shared language. Phone calls were an expensive rigmarole. But it was a friendship that had intensified without their noticing, and neither of them could explain it. It was an odd pairing, he knew, not least for its physical dissimilarity: the cellist and the sumo wrestler.
He remembered when they had met, but could not chart the gradual progression from acquaintance to friendship. Nor could he remember what had first sparked his enthusiasm for sumo. He realised it was an unexpected interest, and revelled in the surprise he inspired when explaining its grace and beauty, its ancient traditions. It was, he reminded people, an infinitely older practice than his own, and required an equal dedication. He liked its ritual and formality, revelling in its doughy ballet, the way it teetered between animal wildness and human elegance, the way a pirouette could disintegrate into a comedic thud, the ripples shooting through smooth flesh-mounds like underwater disturbance. The discipline with which any wrestler approached his craft, with a bulk that belied breathtaking flexibility, took his breath away. In his mind, he would often bless the concert platform with salt, to purify it—an imaginary ritual, taken from sumo, that honoured departed spirits.
He loved to perform in Japan, where they brought him flowers at the end of his encore, and clapped his performances in a unison rhythm. He liked the sea of shiny black hair reflecting the polished wood of the sleek concert halls, the brightness of the kimonos, the endless speeches that followed official receptions. Often he was thinking, with at least half his brain, even as the other half still thundered and shivered with the afterglow of some concerto or other, of a forthcoming wrestling match, and the grunt and skid of its own music. And he would make sure to drink hot sake with his friend the sumo wrestler, who, famous and celebrated now, worshipped even, lived in Tokyo with his wife and children. Mitsugu never seemed to take an interest in music, though he sat politely through concerts and bowed afterwards and made a show of delight that never seemed genuine. But that didn’t matter; it was almost pleasing. Their wives got on perfectly well, and took charge of greetings cards, and made sure to enquire after the doings of their children on the few occasions when they met as a quartet. But, although nothing was ever said, it was understood that the friendship was really a duo, of two masters wedded to an art, and welded by an understanding of dedication.
♦♦♦
There are very few people on the street. No crowd gathers. The driver has got out of the cab and now leans against it, wondering when this person lugging his instrument around Tokyo will realise his friend is not there, and ask to be taken to the nearest hotel. He does not know to whom the house belongs. He watches the short, balding, rather portly cellist playing, though does not recognise the music. He is not especially moved or excited, and in fact thinks the whole gesture a strange one, like a busker playing on any street corner. He can hear that the man can play well and fluently, but his attention is held more by the oddity of proceedings than by the power of the music. At the back of his mind there lurk questions about payment for this long job. The driver has a daughter who is learning to scratch out tunes on a small violin and he notices, almost with a laugh, the absence of little coloured stickers on the neck of the cello to show the man where to place his fingers. The choked giggle is to fend off what has threatened to become a terrifying intimacy.
♦♦♦
Galina Pavlovna was in Washington; in another room a housekeeper clattered; but, otherwise, he was alone in their Paris apartment on this bright morning in June, while the ornate trellis of the three Juliet balconies thinly sliced the sunlight onto the floor. Solitude was unfamiliar to him. The stretches of his life that he did spend alone were confined to dozing in aeroplanes or navigating the bland luxury of foreign hotels. Mainly it was a whirl of functions and orchestras, managers and musicians and acolytes in almost constant attendance. In another life, his dacha had been perpetually full, a constant to-and-fro of family, the paraphernalia of children and instruments, the piano sounding almost constantly amid voices raised in debate and anger and pleasure. And, for a time, there had been the curious presence of Aleksandr Isayevich, and the strange, even exhilarating, atmosphere, not of terror exactly but of unease—and foreboding.
He took the cello he had been playing that morning, one of a number he owned and not his best. When it was safely stowed, he moved swiftly: spoke to the housekeeper, dashed to the bedroom, put some clothes in a small wheeled suitcase with a washbag that he kept permanently packed for travel. He picked up the telephone, booked the usual car and, in the wait for its arrival, phoned both his daughters, as if for reassurance. Olga was in America and he had paid no heed to the time difference. She did not answer. Elena was in Paris, and the line was noisy with the cries of children. He told her he loved her. Ya tebya lyublyu.
When the car arrived an hour later, he made sure, as always, that the cello was leaning at a 45-degree angle against the back seats, wrapped in a green blanket. There were no seatbelts in the back of the car, and he wedged the base of the instrument under the front passenger seat, which he then sat on himself. His mind was elsewhere, and the driver realised his passenger was not going to talk a great deal beyond his usual request that the car radio be switched off. They made the journey to Charles de Gaulle in a silence that was not awkward. The fax, the news it had conveyed, pulsed silently in the stuffy car. The driver smoked a cigarette and wheeled down his window.
♦♦♦
He is absolutely calm, which gives him an odd professionalism. His hands are sturdy and powerful, the fingers long, his nails edged with thin crescents of dirt picked up on the flight. His cuffs are fastened with buttons rather than links. Occasionally his watch face flashes light out of the music as his hand wobbles on the string to make the sound tremble and shiver. The cello shudders on the long ferrule of its endpin, which does not seem as if it can support the weight. There is a scraping noise as the bow catches on the lowest string during a little rising phrase that works the melody upwards from darkness. The notes, the sound they make, are simultaneously woven of grief and of solace, roving through interlocking key signatures, as if from room to room of some abandoned house. F major. D minor. Each its own world. A universe of compassion. Sometimes there are many voices in the music, sometimes only one, in dialogue with itself. There is no argument in it. It is beyond analysis and virtuosity, beyond emotion perhaps, as it unravels, not tugged along but moving of its own accord. The sudden awareness of tragedy goes hand-in-hand with some great capacity for joy. In daring to express all that is unbearable and agonising, the music offers a world worthy of endurance.
♦♦♦
The airport routines were second nature, and some of the staff recognised the familiar figure with his small wheeled bag and his cello, which he manoeuvred easily. But this time, unusually, he was quite alone. This time, even more unusually, he had no pre-booked ticket. The next flight to Tokyo, they told him, was in seven hours. No matter: he paid for two one-way seats in first class without registering the cost, handing over his international pass for stateless persons. He stood, leaning against the counter, stateless and exiled in his shirt and tie, in the airport’s strange no man’s land, on the outskirts of Paris. Around him, citizens nonchalantly handed over powerful little booklets of belonging.
He kept the instrument with him, and went to the familiar first-class lounge, and sat with some fizzy water on a table by the window, watching the bubbles coat the little wedge of lemon. The blue-and-red ink of the Air France insignia on the soggy paper coaster was distorted and magnified through layers of glass and ice. He did not read, and realised that he still had no real plan beyond waiting for the hours to pass. He thought constantly of the information that had scrolled flimsily out of the white box with a beep and whir that he heard still. Later, he was to learn, or perhaps imagine, more: the cry from Akimoto, Mitsugu’s wife, and the tiny four-month-old body in the wooden cot, with not a mark on her, seemingly asleep were it not so clear that she was dead, even before they touched the slightly curved fingers of the small hand with its tiny fingernails, and found them cold. Beneath the black floss of her hair, one of her eyes was open: a shiny jet pebble, edged with white. She was their fourth child, and she had died for no reason, from no cause; she had simply stopped breathing, and so she had died. Her coffin, filled and covered with orchids, was impossibly small, and Mitsugu went into the honbasho with prayer beads draped round his neck.
♦♦♦
He is wrestling the sound, and with the instrument that produces it, lest either overwhelm him. Yet the strenuousness takes no effort. The music weeps for the illimitable human capacity for pain, from which he is calmly extracting some tiny kernel of elation. His shoulders are still, the music comes from his elbows and his wrists, and when an open string is played and his left hand is not needed it drops briefly to his side. His thin lips are slightly parted, with the lower jaw jutting, tongue moving from side to side. He is not performing from memory; “by heart” may be nearer to it, or perhaps just tuning into something that has always been there. The notes are in his bone marrow, and he no more has to think about what his two hands are doing than he would if he were -eating. The -technicalities of playing have little to do with what it is he is trying to say.
♦♦♦
The plane took off, landed to refuel, took off again. Ears crackled and burst. The hours passed, and he needed little to fill them. The cello was leaning up against the seat next to him. Company. Taking flight always, for him, had a double sense; he had many homes, and did not know where home was. In the air, it mattered less. A stewardess cooed over the cello as if it were a child, and brought champagne, which he drank to make himself sleep. Smoke from cigarettes and cigars wafted around the cabin, and he did doze, waking with a start to check the cello was still there (though where could it have gone?). Fragments of music played in his head—Bach, Dutilleux, Shostakovich. In his bag was a score of Tchaikovsky, and he took it out and looked idly at the opening page, hearing its low scurry of semiquavers very clearly in his head. But he was drawn inexorably back to the small hand, the tiny fingernails, the loss that would have to be carried through life by his friend, the champion wrestler.
He knew Narita airport well but was usually collected by a car, and he walked some way—a strange figure now, with his bulky instrument—in search of a taxi. He was rumpled, fatigued by the shallowness of his mid-air sleep, his ears still bubbling. He had flown in-and-out of nights and days and was fiddling with his watch, trying to prise up the stiff catch at the side of the dial that would allow him to swivel the hands forward, forward, into the late afternoon of a Japanese summer’s day, just 24 hours since the news had arrived on another continent, 6,000 miles away.
The address was written in his diary, but there was no question of being collected; sumo wrestlers, he knew, were not permitted to drive. The third taxi he asked was willing to make the journey. He was able to obtain a wodge of yen from an airport bureau, with the driver as halting interpreter. Wide awake now, he groped for his glasses, the better to revel in the rush and glitter of Tokyo, which always thrilled him. The air was damp with heat, and he sat in his shirt sleeves, longing for the traffic to pick up speed so that a rush of hot wet air would burst through the cab’s open window. He watched the crowds of people beneath the blaze of billboards, the symbols from the unfamiliar alphabets rose-gold in the afternoon light. The scene was of a speed and urgency unknown to the lazy elegance of Paris, but the palette was muted compared to the American stridency with which he was so familiar: the clothes more sombre, the pavements cleaner, the movement of the crowds more regimented. The streetlamps, not needed, nevertheless began to click on, warming from amber to white as they drove across a series of suspension bridges.
♦♦♦
His mind is drenched in the sound, but as often when he is playing it drifts and splits of its own accord, backwards to the mundanity of breakfast, sideways to an infant’s corpse. The tuning of one of the strings is still awry: some of the higher notes have curdled.
♦♦♦
The nightlight in the bedroom at Baku. Sleeping in my father’s cello case. Suitcases after gunfire, and my baby hands, reaching up to piano keys. Playing this piece in London long ago, quelling the shouts of the crowd with the music, with tears on my face as the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, and as I saw, through the silver mist of the music, the killing, and the killing, and mourned for a nation. Letters on headed notepaper that pulled our lives up by the roots. Names toll. Galina. Olga. Elena Mstislavna.
♦♦♦
His meetings with Mitsugu, who had not been allowed an independent dwelling until he was married, usually took place in restaurants or bars in the city centre. He had visited the wrestler’s house just once before; it was close to the sumo stables in Sumida. The large concrete cube of the building had tramwires slicing across it, and was softened only by two maple trees either side of the door, though there was a hint of further greenery on a balcony to the side, and he remembered a terrace at the back, and fountains. The cab parked in the black-paved courtyard, and he asked the driver to wait. There were no windows in the wall that faced the street. He pressed a buzzer by the black front door, where the glass was covered with the dense mesh of a metal grille that prevented the hallway from being seen. It had not occurred to him that the family would be out; it had not occurred to him even to consider whether the fax had been sent a day, a week, or an hour after the child’s death. But he was unsurprised when, even on a second and then a third push of the buzzer, nobody answered. On the spur of the moment, he had flown without announcement or warning across the world to see his friend, and his friend was not there. It did not matter. It might have been possible to speak to a neighbour, or ask the driver to find the stable, or track down one of his numerous acquaintances in Japan. Had he gone to the concert hall, he would have been greeted with reverence. But he did not think to do any of this.
He returned to the car and got the cello out of the back seat, snapped open the case, unhooked the bow, and then shucked the wooden instrument from the velvet lining of its pod. He crossed the road so as to sit down on a low wall that divided the series of front yards from the street, supported the cello with his body so as to tighten the hairs on the bow and, unwrapping the ruby pellet of rosin from its slippery silver cloth, he rubbed it up and down the hairs in a squeaky hiss of dust. The rosin caught the remnants of the day’s sunshine but seemed to take in the light rather than reflect it; some cloud deep within seemed to shift and swirl.
The cold of the plane and the heat of the Japanese summer had sent the instrument out of tune, and he took time adjusting each peg on the cello’s neck, winding and unwinding the four strings to the correct pitch, with the endpin anchored in its holder. In his sweaty shirt sleeves, the 62-year-old man with balding head and large, thick-rimmed spectacles completed these time-honoured rituals opposite the nondescript and empty house of his friend. He bowed his head, ever so slightly, as if mentally blessing the road with salt.
♦♦♦
In just five months’ time he will repeat this gesture, playing on into the night in front of the world’s press, sitting on a guardsman’s rickety chair in front of a bright scribble of angry graffiti, as a crowd of people step from East to West. A deafening tumble of concrete; broken glass at his feet. For now, as he sits on the Tokyo street and the day darkens round him, he is making his own private act, unhistoric: an offering for a friend who was not there and for a life that was never lived. He could have done nothing else. So he suffers. And exults. The orchids wither in the tiny coffin, amid the incense of the temple. The sound accepts its impermanence in the hope that its effect might be longer lasting. He sits alone in his music, glowing amid the matte faces of the dead, the jostle of absences for whom he plays, who seem to be plaiting unheard harmonies beneath the music’s single thread. That such total solitude should create such communion.
It seems to finish but there is a further note, some reminder of finality on the lowest string, and then there is a silence, and then it is over. He sits very still for a long while, his eyes closed. The neck of the cello suddenly soughs like a branch in wind and, in doing so, scythes through some invisible chain or thread—and cuts it. A world dissolves. Distances are restored. The buildings in the street return to their proper place and the distant rumble of Tokyo, temporarily stilled, returns.
Something indefinable that the music had etched onto his face shifted and then disappeared, like a change in the weather. He held the instrument with his upper body and let his arms fall down by his side, palms upward. Six minutes in all: a gesture of helpless compassion. He got up from the wall almost briskly, stepping out of the world in which he most belonged and back into the street, where life had to continue. The sky was navy; the night oily with heat. He saw the driver begin to move but held him still. And kissed him, once on each cheek.
Then he asked to be driven through the neon sparkle of night-time Tokyo, its lights reflected by warm pavements and hot roads and great towers of iron and glass, not to a hotel but back to the airport so as to catch the next flight back to Paris. And he assured the driver that there would be payment for the long round trip, and for the strange wait outside the house of the famous wrestler whose baby had died. Where, sitting on the dirty wall, a cellist had sent up a prayer for the dead, and for the living.
♦♦♦
“… when years later his friend, the Japanese sumo wrestler, Chiyonofuji, lost his baby daughter, Rostropovich found out, came with his own cello from Europe, and took a taxi to Chiyonofuji’s house without telling anyone, nobody, and sat with the cello at the front of the house, and then played the Sarabande of Bach as his prayer to Chiyonofuji, and to the champion’s daughter, who had just died. The taxi was waiting and came back to Tokyo Airport, which takes one hour and a half, and then he flew back to Europe. Can you imagine?”
Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello (BBC, 2011)
