Part II
Chapter Eight
Imogen Schwarzwald grew up in a room filled with the sunny warmth of late spring mornings, even though the world she looked over was decidedly more gray. When she was just old enough to take a peek and see this world for herself, she pushed a little step-stool to the window and climbed-up to the ornate sill and looked out the room's large window over a sea of red tile rooftops to one of Copenhagen's commercial waterfronts. The masts of a few large sailing vessels were still visible in those days, though steamships had by the early 1920s replaced most of them, but the wharves in the 20s were still a hive of bustling activity. Of more import to our tale, a music conservatory was located just behind the Schwarzwald house so her view of the world was often framed by mesmerizing orchestral works, so her worldview developed within this contrapuntal milieu.
And it did not hinder matters that her mother was a pianist, not to mention a composer of some modest repute, so Imogen's early weltanschauung was well-informed by an atmosphere of early musical training, not to mention accomplishment. Perhaps this never-ending cascade of sight and sound contributed too much to her development, but that's something we'd hardly be in a position to know, but consider how the frenetic music of commercial activity stood beside the measured cadence of Bach day in and day out before you draw your own conclusions.
Yet of equal, or perhaps greater importance, Imogen's earliest artistic nature stood in stark relief to her father's.
Aaron Schwarzwald had been a physician all his working life, and though originally trained as a surgeon, an accident and brutal injury left him little recourse but to pursue a career in psychiatry in later life. Confined to a wheelchair and always in great pain, he'd spent a good deal of time with Imogen when she was a child, and he taught her all that he could - which was indeed a magnificent bestowal.
So imagine if you will a seven year old girl who by then was very nearly fluent in the languages of Beethoven and Einstein and who, on her seventh birthday, presented her first composition, a modest piano concerto, at the music conservatory behind her father's house. Her work was at the time hailed as the product of an uncompromising genius, and she was told that night and for many years thereafter that she was destined to enjoy a glorious career in music.
Which impressed Imogen Schwarzwald not at all.
Already her life was caught between two opposing tides - the artist's more decadent world of light and shadow and, because of her father's tireless influence, the unyielding precision of scientific hypothesis and experimentation - yet in the end she was her father's daughter most of all. His settled view of the world, patient and methodical in the extreme, proved a more comfortable fit to the little girl...much more so than the often dilettantish phantasmagoria of Copenhagen's fin-de-siècle haute bourgeoisie.
But there is an uneasy cohesion between the water's ebb and flow, isn't there; surely one cannot have one influence without the other?
She was born the year after the first Great War began to slowly fade from view, and so it came to pass that she developed within one of the most potent eras of intellectual achievement the world has ever known. And though you may not know this, Copenhagen was one of the most important - no, vital centers of academic free-expression in the world - and further, consider that by the 20s Copenhagen was a city in very good company indeed. London and Berlin, perhaps, were more advanced centers of scientific investigation at the beginning of the century, Vienna and Paris perhaps so as well, but of course those in America would be nominating Boston's inclusion on such a list, yet the point to be made here is a simple one: Copenhagen was a center of academic research second to none and, during the first thirty-three years of the new century, research into the nature of the subatomic world blossomed in here.
And it was to this world that Imogen Schwarzwald belonged most of all.
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The birth of the scientific worldview that came to dominate the twentieth-century coincided with a brief, last flourishing of Jewish culture in Europe, and more than a few historians have gone so far as to claim that, rather like the tides, one simply could not have have existed without the other. Steeped as it was in the religious constructs of the Old Testament, this community had long valued the cohesive spiritual needs of family and community like few before and, perhaps, this cohesiveness grew into, over time, a fount of virulent resentment - but such statements are rife with stupefying, even offensive oversimplification. And let us just add that by the 1920s anti-semitism was, and not for the first time, growing into a divisive populist force within European culture and politics, so let us resolve here and now to accept European anti-semitism as fact and simply leave it at that. What good does it do to dwell in the darkness?
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If your eyes are not yet accustomed to such darkness, perhaps you might understand that this anti-semitism was hardly a salient part of young Imogen Schwarzwald's life, because in Denmark such hateful things tended to happen elsewhere, in cities such as London and Berlin, Vienna and Paris, and yes, even in such egalitarian 'cities on a hill' as Boston. Even so, by the time Imogen was thirteen years old, the darker undercurrents of this resurgent illiberal virus were once again surging into action. Standing around the precipitous well of the past as we are now in the early years of the twenty-first century, peering yet again into such darkness is not so easily imagined, yet it was certainly even less so for a young girl who had grown up assiduously protected from such things.
But please, do keep in mind that as you fall into the well, as your mind struggles to adapt to the darkness as you fall, you may very well see flickers of light as time passes, yet it is best to understand that people see what they want to see even as they fall, and that there is no light at the bottom of the well save what you carried with you on your way through the depths.
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The Arts, or more broadly speaking painting, music and, perhaps not so sadly, literature, have come to represent to many people a peculiar form of decadence commonly associated with a pervasive loosening of social mores. Think Caligula and pre-Christian pole-dancing during the waning days of the Roman Empire and you'd not be too far off the mark, but recall that the Arts have been well represented through time by people of all creeds and 'races,' and that ultra-conservative fascists of the 1920s and 30s, in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, tended to view most artists with more than a little suspicion. And consider this as well: for these leaders Art was either something that could be harnessed and used to advance the objectives of the state...or it was problematically much more subversive to the aims of the state and had to be pushed aside.
And you might ask why? Why...the need to be crush Art? What is it about a painting or a piece of music that can be so overwhelmingly subversive that the full power of the state is required to weaken its influence...?
Why, indeed...?
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Perhaps in different times and space other little girls experience the same forces, if only from slightly different perspectives.
Take, for instance, a little girl in South Vietnam. A girl we've come to know as An Linh, and to most who'd known her she was indeed a Peaceful Soul - though to many men, to the soldiers and reporters who frequented the Caravelle Hotel's bar, she was would always be known simply as Cat. An Linh, like all the others in her family, lived in the shadow of her father's career working for the French legation in Saigon, so when the war for reunification began in the early 1950s, such 'collaborators' were among the first targeted. An Linh, if nothing but a Peaceful Soul, soon found herself all alone in the world and growing up in a series of Catholic 'homes for unwanted children.' Turned-out on the street just after her fourteenth birthday, An Linh possessed a basic education - she could read and write French and, to a lessor degree, Vietnamese. Yet there had always been those around her, even in those impressionable days before the Americans came, who had convinced An Linh that her greatest attribute was an astonishing physical beauty. Any number of men, mainly older men from France but other round eyes from Europe too, engaged An Linh's services as a model when an agency signed her, and for a few years she made enough to get by, though nothing more. Yet consider this: for a teenager this degree of self-sufficiency was intoxicating, and it forever colored An Linh's worldview.
Even so, An Linh remained a curious creature of South Vietnam's hazy gray shadowlands. Many orphans were branded - some with justification, depending on your point of view - as the children of collaborators. Not a daft girl, she remained an elusive, fearful soul, never living in one place for long and growing justifiably suspicious when strangers asked about her whereabouts. Her modeling assignments became less frequent as a result, her economic self sufficiency much less resilient - yet what she still possessed she could deploy with great skill.
So, An Linh became, for a time, the type of model most often seen in less reputable magazines - if the idea suits your own world view more comfortably. At first, and for much less money, she appeared in glossy pictorials that featured lots of slinky underwear, and little else. Soon enough, though for more money, such clothing disappeared. Within a few months she found her prospects taking off, literally, when she agreed to take off all her clothing in front of a motion picture camera. Then, inevitably, she was asked to 'perform' with another man, and it all came so easily after that. One man, then two or three, then a man and a woman...until the only thing left was two women, or sometimes more.
And she became self-sufficient once again, and for a time, even prosperous. But this is an old story, isn't it? Just one more torch-lit mirrored-hall we see in the darkness as we fall, because you'll always find such places in well of the past.
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Imogen Schwarzwald began university soon after her fifteenth birthday. She was, as we've mentioned, already considered a prodigy in music, but we should mention also in mathematics, though by the time she entered university music had all but disappeared from her life - but this drift away from music might be seen as, perhaps, the oddest part of our tale.
She was ten when this change happened. An age when life still presents little mysteries from time-to-time, before we finally grow jaded and unimpressed by such things as ghosts and goblins and circus clowns. She was with her father for two weeks that summer, down at their little seaside cottage on the island of XXXX. There were vast strands of white, sandy beaches on the island, and cool breezes blew in off the sea almost every afternoon, but what most impressed ten year old Imogen was the variety of clouds that formed in the noonday sky - and how they morphed during the afternoon into shapes both benign and, well, sinister.
Her father's cottage was a pastel melange of creams and pale yellows, though topped with the obligatory red tile roof, and there were still gaslights along the boardwalk that into town, and to the railway station, and she loved to watch the lamplighter come along in the evening and set the little globes ablaze. After all the late afternoon insects disappeared, men and women could soon be seen strolling down the walk, a few hand-in-hand but most just swept up in the moment...
One evening, just as the lamplighter passed, she watched a spry old man walking along with a bird perched on his shoulder, and she immediately assumed he was a sea captain. She was sitting on the cottage's front porch at the time, watching the clouds in their sky as night came and stole away all the day's best colors, but this old man was something else entirely.
As he drew near she saw he was dressed all in black, even the short cape he wore was the shade of deepest night, and she shivered when she saw the bird on his shoulder was the very same black. Who, she wondered, walked with a raven on their shoulder...?
He stopped once and looked out to sea, and then the strangest thing happened.
The old man walked with the help of a cane, and just then he tapped the cane on the boardwalk twice - and Imogen jumped when two bolts of lightning flickered somewhere beyond the far horizon.
Then the old man smiled at the sky - as if he alone commanded the lightning.
She watched as the old man resumed his walk a moment later, but when the hair on the back of her neck tingled she felt like running away and hiding. Still, she remained frozen in place as he came along the boardwalk, coming ever closer to her father's cottage in the night.
"Well, hello there," the old man said as he came to the little white picket fence guarding the house. He studied her for a moment - almost quizzically, with a wry twinkle in his eye and a sly grin forming in the shadows. "I think I know you."
She was too afraid to speak, too fearful of the immense power she felt radiating from inside the man's eyes, but she managed to shake her head.
He brought a manicured hand to his face and stroked his chin for a moment, as if the act of divining would somehow spur forth the memory. "Let me see," he sighed. "Ah yes, the conservatory! Imogen Schwarzwald! I was at the very first performance of your concerto! What a brilliant piece, so many cunning transitions!"
His words seemed to draw her out, as if his awareness of her abilities made him somehow safe. She smiled at him, seemed to curtsy in the smallest measure possible.
"And where is your father? Isn't he with you this evening?"
She nodded. "He's getting tobacco for his pipe."
"Ah. A fine evening. Very fine indeed. Were you watching the clouds just now?"
