The Eighty-eighth Key
Part III
Chapter 15
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"What is, do you suppose, the difference between a dream and a nightmare?" Werner Heisenberg asked, his settled hands resting on his lap, his entire demeanor expressing openness to her reply.
And yet, Imogen now remained resolutely still, as if she was suddenly and utterly quite incapable of speech.
He inhaled sharply as he waited, then gently shook his head. "Then let me tell you," he continued. "You can never control the outcome of a nightmare, dearest Imogen. A nightmare comes calling, doesn't it? Quite unbidden, yes?" He stood and walked over to the piano in her solarium and sat there, waiting in vain for her to come to him. "And there is nothing you can do to prevent its coming, is there? Our dread fascination with death keeps us from waking, doesn't it?"
Yet she still remained fixed in time and space, her eyes lost within the certainty of the moment. Saul and Avi had gathered all the university's scientists and they were even now making their way to Sweden - with the help of British and American commandos who had miraculously arrived just in time to assist the group. All she had to do was stall Werner long enough to keep him from acting in time to prevent their escape.
Werner began playing the opening to Saint-Saëns Aquarium and she felt her Will dissolving as the music took hold, and without realizing it she began to sway as the music washed over and through her. Struggling to regain control she stood and walked over to her favorite window, and there she looked out over her mother's garden. She focused on the order she saw in her mother's work, all the while refusing the music, doing her best to turn away from the prying chords.
And even when the music stopped she remained absolutely still, waiting for the final assault she knew was coming.
"You know, if there was a way I could let you remain here, I would do so," Heisenberg sighed. "Well, I would move heaven and earth to make that happen. But, dear Imogen, you must understand that I only have your best interests in mind when I tell you that you all will be safer with me and my group in Leipzig than if you remain here. The political activities of your friends have drawn too much scrutiny, and I can no longer protect them all, so you must help me, Imogen. I understand what you are doing, this playing for time, but you must also know that I will have to take you with me. So I ask you once again, do you truly understand the difference between a dream and a nightmare?"
She turned and faced him, looked past him to the old grandfather clock standing like a sentinel across the room before she smiled inside. "It is time, Werner."
"Indeed? How so?"
"We must leave now, the two of us."
"Leave? And where are we to go, Imogen?"
"Leipzig, Werner."
"So, you come willingly?"
"Of course."
He studied her face for a moment before he sighed again, and he realized in that moment that she had beaten him. Worse, he alone understood that by sacrificing herself to let the scientists flee she had chosen the nightmare. He looked at the resolve in her eyes with wonder, then he gently led her from her father's house to the Mercedes parked on the street, and he helped her inside before he walked over and spoke with the small group of Gestapo.
"They plan on leaving this evening. You might have time to detain them before they flee," he lied - and forever sealing her fate. "I am taking her to Leipzig straight-away."
Saul Rosenthal watched from the safety of nearby shadows, and when it was safe he turned away from everything he knew and followed his love into the darkness.
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Callahan sat with his mother at her Bösendorfer, and he tentatively worked his way through the opening notes of Gershwin's Prelude No 2, the easy symmetry of the original arrangement for piano as comfortable as the moment might allow. She had always recoiled from Gershwin, his loose harmonic structures apparently biting into her like a pair of ill-fitting shoes, but she seemed more open to him now, more accepting of his lusty American motifs.
Sam and Stacy Bennett, and Al Bressler too, looked-on from across the living room of the house in the compound just outside of Tel Aviv, the three of them now all too aware of the fragile contours of Imogen Schwarzwald's day-to-day existence - as well as the delicate relationship she maintained with her son, their friend. Al Bressler, of course, had no knowledge of Harry's ability on the piano, and he sat - in dumbfounded silence - as his old friend worked his way through piece after piece, trying to coax his mother out of her latest bout of melancholia.
She had seemed receptive, even talkative when Harry first led her to the piano, then he had played something by Camille Saint-Saëns and it was as if her world imploded. They had all watched in silent horror as she fell-in upon herself, withering into a hunched shell of herself as her son drifted through the first lines - but by then it was too late. Harry saw it too, and he forced the passage to drift towards Respighi's The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset, and she seemed to rally for a moment - before, in the end, she gave way to an unseen, infinite sorrow.
He went back to Gershwin, this time to the Prelude, and he forced her to play with him.
"I know how much you hate his music," Harry whispered to her, "but please try, Mom."
"I don't hate Gershwin, my son. I resent him, and above all else, I resent his refuge in easy optimism to be almost revolting."
"What?"
"Go back to Respighi for a moment. Now try to feel the music, Harry. Feel the vibration of the notes, of the elemental chords. Through your fingers, if you can, or try with the side of your face. That's it. Rest your face on the piano just there while you play the notes, and let the vibrations play through you..."
Callahan played for a long time, searching for some kind of meaning...
"I'm not sure what you mean," he said after several minutes.
She sighed, then positioned her hands over the keyboard...
"Beethoven was deaf when he wrote the Ninth," she said as she played. "so how did he do it? Through recall alone? No, but he could still feel, Harry. He could feel the music, but think on this for a moment, would you? When you feel the power of the Ode to Joy, when you truly feel it within the structures of vibration, you feel exactly what Beethoven felt. When Strauss wrote his Death and Transfiguration how could he have known what death felt like? Yet when he died decades later his final words were that he was feeling exactly what he had written thirty years before. Should you want to feel death, you might want to learn to feel what Strauss created, yet do so with your face, or within your fingertips."
"What has that got to do with Gershwin, Mom?"
"With the Second Prelude, Harry, he begins with such profound respect for sorrow, yet by the second passage he absolutely revels in an exuberance that seems so infernally out of place! It's as though he can't help himself, Harry! He created such a lush, expressive exposition of sorrow, yet then he seeks an easy refuge in that awful Bohemian ragtime of the 20s. He either didn't know understand what he was doing, or his was a profoundly disturbed soul."
"Disturbed? I see a man walking through a park, lost in thought. Some happy, others less so. It's a walk through life, one path leading to another, and another..."
"Is that what you feel?"
"Yes. Every time. It's a journey."
"A journey? Or is it your journey, Harald?"
"Of course it's mine."
She laughed. "Ha! That's rather impetuous, don't you think. Or worse still, simply naive."
"Naive?" Harry bristled. "How so?"
"As a musician playing the works of another, you have to understand that what you are conveying is nothing short of the composer's feelings. When you play Gershwin, you are in a literal sense in touch with his feelings within the moment of creation. His thoughts and feelings, on a purely elemental level. Nothing more, nothing less. You may relate to the music in some peripheral sense, or you may wish to make it your own in some way, but what you are in fact experiencing is George Gershwin, pure and simple. Not Harald Callahan. And in order to become an artist, Harald" she said, pausing for emphasis, "you must learn to feel exactly what Gershwin felt. Feel precisely the way Gershwin felt. And Beethoven, and Strauss. You can always choose to be a hack musician and play the notes in their prescribed order off the printed page, or you can learn to see within the music, to seek out the composer's feelings. Only then can you possibly hope to allow others to experience the same magic."
"And to you Gershwin's feelings are..."
"Incongruous. Distortions. Almost madness. How can one write about a melancholy journey and then slip into a ragtime dance...?"
"Because life is rarely so simple as a linear progression," Stacy Bennett said, now standing above them.
"In life, perhaps," Imogen sighed, now exasperated, "but not within a single composition."
Harry looked up at Stacy, clearly shocked. "Why not, Mom?"
"Because, my poor Harry, life is simple. There is nothing beyond our suffering, nothing beyond the pain of this morbid existence. Everything else is a mask. The mask we wear to hide behind. To keep our suffering out of view."
"I'm not sure I understand, Mom."
As she collected her thoughts, Imogen seemed to collapse inward on herself once again. "I've lived a life of secrets, Harald. Cut off from my feelings..."
"Cut off?" Stacy asked. "How so...?"
"Cut off...yes," she whispered as she slumped over, slowly leaning on Harry's shoulder. "Oh God, no. There he is again..."
"Mom? Mother? There who is again? What are you seeing?"
"If it is as now as it has always been," Avi Rosenthal said as he walked into the solarium, "it is the bearded man with his cane. When he comes I lose her for days. Sometimes weeks."
Harry looked up at Avi, now standing beside Stacy, and he seemed uncharacteristically lost, somehow a man out of time. Harry knew that look, too. Avi's countenance was the expression of a man used to keeping secrets, and then Harry remembered that this old man kept secrets for a living...
Harry Callahan closed his eyes and began playing Saint-Saëns Aquarium once again - and immediately he felt his mother stiffen. Like the puppet master had suddenly taken control of her strings...
"Mother...? Play the notes for me," he said as he stopped playing. "Play the notes you're feeling right now."
