cut short his excuses: “Just get on with it. You never know with Mother; she might send you back to your camp first thing tomorrow morning.” That was convincing enough. Frank picked the light body of the instrument and touched the strings with the bow. “Help me, God; dear God help me…” The sound, to his tearful surprise, came out clean and forgiving. Frank immediately felt better, and Helmut’s flippant mood was making it even easier. He was distracting Frank with their old jokes; they were laughing, warming up. The rambling sounds of their instruments suddenly brought order into the world: the shadows dispersed, the curses were lifted, and the chimeras retreated to their caves.
They played Liszt’s Consolation No. 3 arranged for piano and violin. First Helmut played solo, and he played exactly the way Frank liked it played. He made the piano sing, speak, and whisper – the evocation of human voice and intonations was breathtaking. The first attempts at duet didn’t come out very well. “It’s a fine arrangement,” Frank said. “It’s just that the duet version turns the piece into dialogue; the mood necessarily changes from reflective to confessional. I don’t feel it yet… Now, if this phrase is a question…” just as his violin enunciated the phrase, Helmut’s piano yielded the answer. The contact was so precise and crisp, like a spark of static electricity. They looked at each other involuntarily and laughed. Moreover, they both felt that the very fact that Frank had been out of practice for a long time suddenly had deep meaning in the context of that very piece. The confident piano, smooth and flowing, supported the diffident violin like a current of air, and together they achieved the rounded interpretation of consolation. “I like it,” Helmut said. “I like it that way. I don’t want it to be a virtuosic stunt.” Frank agreed; when they were polishing the piece, they made sure that the effect remained. “I still disagree about these teardrop notes…” Frank grumbled, “this place again…”
The telephone receiver rattled in the restraints of the door handles: “Dinner, darling.”
Frank came back to reality with a shudder. It was early evening.
“We are busy.”
“Darling, you haven’t eaten today yet… And Father wants to see you.”
“Tell him I’m busy.”
He then rose impatiently:
“What the hell, I’ll go and see him. Wonder what he has to say. We need a break anyway. You must be starving.”
They didn’t play after dinner. The magic simply wasn’t there anymore. After talking to his father Helmut was in the right mood for committing a murder.
“Is it because of me?” Frank asked.
“Oh, no, never mind. It’s the same farce every day.”
He threw himself on the sofa and covered his face with a cushion.
“Shall I close the curtains?”
“No… But I wouldn’t mind some jazz.”
Frank sat at the piano and after some thinking improvised a jazz variation on Consolation.
The evening light gilded the furniture, the piano, the carpet, accentuated the shadows, and gave the place the mysterious air of tastefully arranged theatrical scenery. Frank realized with a jolt of surprise that even though he had spent the whole day in the room, he hadn’t seen it properly yet. He looked around curiously. Taking advantage of the asymmetry of the house, the library was a larger, happier, and better planned sister of the dining room. He particularly liked the semicircle of large windows letting in light during most of the day. There was also an exit to the garden. Helmut explained that the books had been left by the previous owner, nobody in his family read them. Frau Krauss had been long planning to refurbish the place and possibly transform it into a photo studio. As soon as Helmut knew about it, he installed his piano there and claimed the territory for his practices.
“It’s a nice room,” Frank said quietly.
He thought Helmut was asleep, but then a voice droned under the cushion:
“You should have seen my music room in the Pillars.”
“Do you miss your life in England?”
“Missing is a useless feeling.”
“Why did you return?”
“And why do you think?” Helmut sat up. “I only have Mother to thank for everything. A friend of hers, a journalist, was in charge of some sort of campaign aimed at rounding German expatriates of important standing back to Germany. Although I was nobody, she somehow talked him into writing about me. A ray of Arian light wasted on a stale swamp of British public. Something along those lines. So silly… Mother doesn’t care about music; the man who wrote about me had never heard me play. The whole case was built on the cut-outs from British newspapers Mother had supplied him with.”
“What was in those cut-outs?”
“British critics liked me, and the reviews were positive. But I also had a rival – who doesn’t? He was older, bolder, and the critics enjoyed arguing about him. The German article made it sound like I’d been „pushed aside, overlooked, and underrated“ because of my German origin. The stench immediately reached London; I had a hard time proving that I had nothing to do with that publication.”
“Did your mother really do that?”
“It’s a war, Frank. A never ending war between me and her. She couldn’t have chosen a better time. It stirred so much silt and dirt… The Auldridges stood by me of course, but I thought I’d been abusing their hospitality long enough…”
Politically things were developing faster than he could follow. One day he simply realized that a German relative within the frame of the family portrait didn’t exactly help his uncle’s career and reputation.
“It was time to move on, that’s all. It was an easy decision to make because I had no intention of staying in Germany anyway.”
“As soon as you get your visa, you must go to America. I’ll be all right.”
“Of course you’ll be all right. I’ll find a lawyer to look into your case. Surely something can be done. But it’s going to take time.”
“You’ve no idea, child,” Frank said warily.
He was longing for Consolation with all his being, he wanted to play. Instead, he had to listen to Helmut’s daring plans verging on fantasies. “It’s important not to rush things… Visas are difficult but not impossible… We’ll have to contact your friends in America…” He talked and talked – well into the night. One thing Frau Krauss was right about: Helmut was too young to see the things as they really were, he was a stranger in his own land. There were many things he didn’t know, and he refused to listen. “He doesn’t see that our paths have crossed only to diverge again, perhaps forever, that this little time together is not to be wasted. We must play every day, every minute, play everything we didn’t have time to play back in Leipzig.” Frank’s eyes were fixed on the piano of liquid gold shimmering in the horizontal rays of the setting sun. He was straining his ear for the noises outside the room. The house hadn’t gone to sleep yet, it wasn’t too late to play.
“Frank! Are you listening to what I’m saying?”
It
