The Brahms Deception Page 10

  He chided himself for thinking of her that way. This was hardly the time, but the moment felt intimate, the two of them in a pool of light, the rest of the kitchen as dark as the night outside. As she grated cheese onto a cutting board, she said, “What do you think you can do in the transfer? It is a very strange problem.”

  “I don’t know yet. But there’s something—I noticed something odd, when I was first there. I hope I can figure it out.”

  “What was this odd thing?”

  He hesitated. It was tempting to tell her, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to do that. That he would ever be ready. He said carefully, “I can’t even describe it. I hope I’ll be able to understand it when I go back.”

  “You will be careful? It will not help to lose two of you.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  She drained the ravioli, slid them into a large, shallow bowl, and drizzled them with the tomato sauce, now a lovely pink color. She set the bowl before him with a spoon and a fork, and moved the cutting board with its mound of fragrant cheese close to his elbow. He pinched up cheese with his fingers and sprinkled it over the pasta.

  At his first bite, he said, “This is good! How is it a doctor is also a cook?”

  She smiled at him, and pulled a stool up next to his. “Everyone in Italy is a cook. You didn’t know that?”

  He answered with his mouth full: “I didn’t know that. All I know is that you have the best food in the world.”

  “Yes,” she said complacently. “We do.” She watched him eat for a moment, then hopped up to get him a glass of water. As he sipped, she said, “Your family must be very worried about you.”

  “There’s only my sister, in Boston. I should call her before the transfer, but I don’t know what time it is there.”

  She glanced at an enormous clock in the shadows beyond their little circle of light. “It is in the afternoon, I think. Sunday.”

  “It’s so strange, all this shifting about in time. I hardly know where—no, when—I am.”

  “Are you feeling time lag?”

  “Nope. Just jet lag.” He laughed. “Hardly the same thing.”

  “I think it may be similar, though I have not experienced this time lag.” She propped her chin on her fist. The light gleamed in her dark eyes. “I would like to transfer someday.”

  He scooped up the last of her delicious sauce with the spoon. “Where would you go, Chiara? What would you like to see?”

  She smiled. “It will seem silly to you, perhaps. I would like to see Saint Francis.”

  “I don’t think it’s silly. But why Saint Francis?”

  “Have you been to Assisi?”

  He shook his head.

  “You would like it very much. I would like to show it to you! It has something special about it, some sort of—aura, I think is a good word in English.” She pronounced it in the Italian way, giving all three vowels even weight, then wrinkled her nose and laughed. “It means something else in Italian, a breeze or a wind. In any case, Assisi is a wonderful place because of Saint Francis, and I would like to see why he has such power, even after all these centuries.” She reached for his empty bowl. “What about you? Did you always want to observe Brahms?”

  “Actually, my first choice would have been his friend Clara Schumann.” And she’s there. It’s like a dream. “But it’s an honor—it was amazing to see him.”

  She carried the bowl and silverware to the sink, and when she came back she had a telephone in her hand. She gave it to him. “To call your sister. You have to dial the country number first.”

  “I know.” He punched in the number, and waited while the connection wound its way across the Atlantic. The ring sounded different to him, foreign. It rang once, twice, three times. He started to scowl. It rang twice more, and then he heard the recording, Erika’s cheerful voice. “Hi, you’ve reached the North Pole. Leave a message if you dare!”

  Kristian hesitated, then said, “Rik? Are you there? Pick up!” He waited a moment, and when she still didn’t answer he said hurriedly, “Rik, it’s me, obviously. Everything’s fine here, just wanted to let you know. I’ll call back—” He bit his lip, and then said in a rush, “I hope you’re okay. Call Dee Dee if you need help, right? You promised me.” His only answer was the final beep of the recording. He broke the connection, and laid the phone down on the counter.

  “Is everything all right?” Chiara asked.

  “I think so. She didn’t answer.”

  “She probably went out, no? A movie, or a coffee date.”

  “That could be. She doesn’t go out much.”

  “No? How old is your sister?”

  “She’s thirty. But she’s—she has MS.”

  “Is it so bad she can’t go out alone?”

  “She says not.”

  Chiara put her head on one side and regarded him. “You worry about her, I think.”

  “It’s just the two of us,” he said. “We worry about each other.”

  She gave an approving nod. “That is good. Families should worry about each other.”

  “We lost our mother early, and had to rely on each other.”

  “That is so sad. What happened to your mother?”

  “Embolism.”

  “Oh! So sudden. Shocking. And your sister—she took care of you?”

  “She did her best. It bothers me to leave her alone.”

  “But she has this Dee Dee to help her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is a nurse? A friend?”

  “Just a neighbor.”

  He suddenly felt the enormity of the distance between Castagno and Boston. It was as great a gulf, at this moment, as the gulf between contemporary Castagno and that of 1861. He thought of calling Dee Dee, but Erika would hate that. She was so proud of managing for herself, of being independent despite the intermittent need for the wheelchair. She could have done her teaching at home, at the lovely old Kawai grand they had both learned to play on. But she insisted on teaching at the school. She took the assistance buses when it was necessary, and she steadfastly refused to allow Kristian to go with her.

  Chiara said quietly, “What kind of MS does your sister have?” “Relapsing-remitting.”

  “And when you left? She was doing well?”

  “Yes. She hasn’t had an exacerbation—a relapse—for more than a year.”

  “That is very good. She could go a long time without another.”

  “Yes. But money’s tight, and when she works too hard—” He gave a rueful shake of his head.

  “Yes. Fatigue is not good for her.”

  “When I was at Juilliard, there was someone staying with her all the time. I felt better about that. Now that I’m back in Boston, there’s no room in our apartment.”

  “You are no longer at Juilliard?”

  Kristian looked away from her dark, intelligent gaze. He said shortly, “No.” I blew it. He stood up and pushed the stool back into place. “I guess I’d better grab that shower.”

  Chiara stood up, too, frowning. “Grab? Do you not say ‘take a shower’?”

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, take a shower.” He turned toward the door, then back. “The meal was great, Chiara. Grazie.”

  “Prego.” She walked with him to the door, and pointed him in the direction of his room. “I will see you in the transfer room when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  In his room, the hot shower felt wonderful. He realized with a little shudder of embarrassment that it had been two days since he had one. Friday afternoon, back in Boston, preparing to go off to work at Angel’s. Before any of this had happened. It hardly seemed the same world on this misty morning in western Tuscany as the world he had known in rainy Boston. He scrubbed his mop of hair, and wished he had made it to the barber the week before. He brushed his teeth, and dressed in a clean shirt and jeans. The sun was just coming up as he ran down the stairs, but time of day—indeed, the time of year—had ceased to have any meaning to him. Night
and day seemed to overlay each other, as if where the sun and the planet were in relation to each other meant nothing anymore.

  He wondered if that odd impression was the first sign of time lag, but he couldn’t worry about that now. And, he admitted to himself, as he opened the door to the transfer room, he didn’t care.

  He found Max and Elliott and Chiara there, but not the Bannisters. Frederica lay unmoving beneath her sustaining web of tubes, the transfer cap still on her head. Kristian paused beside her, looking down. Frederica, where are you? There was nothing to indicate that she was anything other than deeply asleep. He looked at the monitors above her head. He was no expert, but nothing seemed to have changed from when he first arrived. Her body was stable. Where was her mind?

  He moved to the cot opposite Frederica’s, kicked off his shoes, and lay down. Chiara went to call Frederick Bannister while Elliott and Max hooked up tubes and wires and sensors. They covered him with a thin blanket, and arranged the pillow beneath his head.

  “You’re all right lying on your back for a long time?” Max asked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Some people have trouble,” Max said. “Inner ear, or back issues.”

  “Nope. Sleep on my back all the time.”

  “Good.” He slipped a pillow beneath Kristian’s knees, and Elliott fixed the transfer cap on his head. It made him shiver a little, even now, feeling the wires snake beneath his hair and find purchase on his scalp.

  Chiara came back with Frederick Bannister. Kristian, the cap on his head, his arms and ankles bristling with tubes, grinned up at the group around him. “See you tomorrow,” he said cheerily.

  “Thank you for this, young man,” Bannister said somberly. “Considering that . . . my daughter was . . . that she won the—” His eyes flickered away, and he let the sentence die.

  “No problem,” Kristian said.

  Chiara glanced up at the monitors, then down at Kristian. “Buona fortuna.”

  “Grazie.” And he was gone again.

  7

  Clara had nearly fainted once, in her first pregnancy. Marie was born in September of 1841, a terribly hot Leipzig summer. Clara had no one to advise her as she awaited the birth of her first child except her beloved Robert, and though he was, as she was fond of saying, “both father and mother to her who had lost both,” he knew little about how to handle a pregnancy. He knew nothing at all of women’s clothes. Clara had refused to cancel any of her performances, although there were some people who thought a woman in her condition should remain out of the public eye. Accordingly she had followed the current fashion and tried to hide her pregnancy beneath bigger dresses and stiff whalebone stays. The stays were like iron bands about her waist. She couldn’t draw a proper breath, and she could neither bend nor sit down in comfort. Playing became more and more difficult, with her waistline cramped and constrained.

  One day, when the sun was at its highest, she had been trying for some hours to play through the score of the Symphony no. 1 in B-flat. It was a task she had promised Robert she would fulfill, and she had been putting it off in favor of practicing her own music for an upcoming concert. As she sat at the piano, gazing at the multiple staves of the orchestral parts, her vision had suddenly and distressingly filled with tiny black spots. For a terrible moment, she didn’t know up from down, right from left. Robert had not been at home, and there was only the maid to run to her when she cried out for help, to steady her, help her to her bed, to loosen her stays and bring her lemon water and dab her temples with vinegar. The moment of weakness passed, and it never returned. Clara, in defiance of convention, sent for a dressmaker that very afternoon and ordered three loose-waisted gowns.

  At this moment, nearly two decades later, she felt very much as she had then. It made no sense at first. She was wearing no stays, because the fashion had happily given way to the more comfortable corset. She was perfectly rested. She had eaten Nuncia’s excellent lunch, and Hannes was beside her, strong and steady and assured. There had been a letter from the children only yesterday, forwarded to her from Berlin. Marie was the only person who knew where Clara was, and she wrote that the children were well enough. There were a few minor complaints, a scratch, a little cough, some worry about schoolwork. There was nothing to worry about. There was no reason to be anxious. No reason to feel faint.

  Why, then, did she feel as if a blanket had fallen over her? It stifled her breathing, muffled her hearing, dulled the sensations of her skin. Her eyesight blurred, and the black spots she remembered swelled and coalesced, darkening her vision until she could see nothing. She leaned forward, as if she could shake it off, escape this feeling of suffocation.

  Perhaps she was being punished. Perhaps she should have resisted all of Hannes’s pleas, ignored her own desires, thought of nothing but her work and her family. Perhaps, after all, she should not have come here.

  The sense of being smothered intensified. She wanted to grip Hannes’s arm, but her hand would not obey her. She wanted to breathe faster, deeper, but her lungs would not answer. Her toes wriggled and stretched without her volition, and her heart thudded, as if she had run too fast up the stairs.

  She had a terrifying sense of being pushed into a corner of her own body—nein, of her own mind. What was happening? Why could she not call out to Hannes? Oh, mein Gott, was she dying? Was this what it felt like?

  Her children’s faces flashed through her mind. She tried to cling to them as they sped by, somber Marie, laughing Elise, pretty Julie, little Felix, the others. She thought of dearest Robert, gone now for nearly five years. Had dying felt like this for him? This diminishment, this—this dwindling of self? Her very spirit quailed before the power that oppressed her. Was this her punishment? Her penance for having pursued her own dreams, for having persisted when Robert wished she would not? Or was she being punished for being here, for coming away with Hannes in shameful secrecy . . .

  She could no longer see at all. She could hear, but only distantly, the muted sounds from the kitchen, the rumble of Hannes’s voice near her ear. She could only faintly sense the touch of his skin, the warmth of his arm against her shoulder.

  Clara turned this way and that, trying to see, trying to understand. If this was death, it came slowly, cruelly, dimming her perceptions one by one.

  It brought a terrible memory back to her, one she thought she had banished forever, one that was a source of such pain in her childhood that she could hardly bear to recall it.

  It had happened four days after her fifth birthday. She had not understood, at the time, why her mother had packed all her little dresses, her doll, her shoes. Her grandfather embraced her, and there were tears in his eyes. Little Clara didn’t know why, but she wept corresponding tears as he held her in his arms. Moments later, she and her mama climbed into a carriage that bore them away from their comfortable little house in Plauen. They left Clara’s baby brother behind, which seemed ominous and mysterious. They drove a very long way, or it seemed that way to Clara. The carriage was cold and uncomfortable. Her mama was tense and silent throughout the journey, barely speaking until the trip came to an end and they stepped out of the carriage and onto the walk of a strange house in Altenburg.

  Though Clara knew no one in this new house, her mama had all of her things brought in from the carriage. When everything was piled in the front hall of the house, the carriage went away empty. Her mother finally spoke then, her words broken and unsteady. Clara begged her mother, over and over, to explain what was happening, but each time she turned her face away, covering her eyes with her handkerchief.

  They were not at the strange house for more than an hour when a new carriage arrived. From this one a stiff woman in an ugly old-fashioned hat and heavy traveling cloak descended. She marched up the walk and banged the door knocker. Clara’s mama whimpered at the sound, as if the heavy brass had struck her physically. Clara, watching from a bow window, shrank into a corner as the door opened and the woman came in, the carriage driver behind her
, and began giving orders.

  In moments, it seemed, as Clara’s mother clung to her little daughter and began to weep openly, all of Clara’s belongings were whisked back down the walk and into the new carriage. Clara asked again and again, “Where are we going, Mama?” Her mother couldn’t answer her for sobbing.

  When the stiff woman turned to Clara and held out her hand, Clara recognized Johanna Strobel, who had been with the family since before she was born. With a feeling of relief, the little girl put her hand in Johanna’s and followed her obediently to the door. Clara began asking questions, but Johanna was as unable to speak, it seemed, as her mother. Johanna bundled Clara into her little cloak and tied her boots. She straightened then and, in a choked voice, said, “Clara. Say good-bye to your mama.”

  Clara said, “What? Why, Johanna?” And then, as the maid took a firm hold on her hand and dragged her toward the carriage she said again, louder, “Why? Why?” She began to wail, reaching back for her mother. It seemed neither Johanna nor her mother could stop this from happening.

  Clara’s father had not even allowed her mother to bring her to him, to ease the transition. He had sent his maid. While Clara sobbed frantically and tried to reach back for her mother’s hands, Johanna shut the carriage door. Clara screamed and tried to climb back out, but Johanna, with tears on her face, said, “No, no, meine Schatz. We have to go.”

  There were no last kisses, no embraces. The driver clucked to the horses. The carriage began to roll. It carried the little girl off into the darkness, leaving her mother weeping on the doorstep.

  It was all darkness after that. The carriage, with Johanna sitting across from Clara, her face a rigid mask of misery. The horses, their feet pounding through the night. The windows showing nothing but darkness, pierced now and again by the lights of someone’s home, someone who must be happier than Clara. It was dark inside the carriage, dark on the road, agonizingly dark in Clara’s mind.