Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [65]
When she was about to go, I said: “I love you,” in that fast, routine way you say it at the end of a call with a spouse. There was a silence of a few seconds, then she said it back, in the same routine way. Then she was gone. God knows what that meant. There’s nothing to do now, I guess, but wait for these bandages to come off. And then what? Maybe Lindy’s right. Maybe, like she says, I need some perspective, and life really is much bigger than loving a person. Maybe this really is a turning point for me, and the big league’s waiting. Maybe she’s right.
CELLISTS
IT WAS OUR THIRD TIME playing the Godfather theme since lunch, so I was looking around at the tourists seated across the piazza to see how many of them might have been there the last time we’d played it. People don’t mind hearing a favourite more than once, but you can’t have it happen too often or they start suspecting you don’t have a decent repertoire. At this time of year, it’s usually okay to repeat numbers. The first hint of an autumn wind and the ridiculous price of a coffee ensure a pretty steady turnover of customers. Anyway, that’s why I was studying the faces in the piazza and that’s how I spotted Tibor.
He was waving his arm and I thought at first he was waving to us, but then I realised he was trying to attract a waiter. He looked older, and he’d put on some weight, but he wasn’t hard to recognise. I gave Fabian, on accordion right next to me, a little nudge and nodded towards the young man, though I couldn’t take either hand off my saxophone just then to point him out properly. That was when it came home to me, looking around the band, that apart from me and Fabian, there was no one left in our line-up from that summer we’d met Tibor.
Okay, that was all of seven years ago, but it was still a shock. Playing together every day like this, you come to think of the band as a kind of family, the other members as your brothers. And if every now and then someone moves on, you want to think he’ll always stay in touch, sending back postcards from Venice or London or wherever he’s got to, maybe a Polaroid of the band he’s in now—just like he’s writing home to his old village. So a moment like that comes as an unwelcome reminder of how quickly things change. How the bosom pals of today become lost strangers tomorrow, scattered across Europe, playing the Godfather theme or “Autumn Leaves” in squares and cafes you’ll never visit.
When we finished our number, Fabian gave me a dirty look, annoyed I’d nudged him during his “special passage”—not a solo exactly, but one of those rare moments when the violin and clarinet have stopped, I’m blowing just quiet notes in the background, and he’s holding the tune together on his accordion. When I tried to explain, pointing out Tibor, now stirring his coffee beneath a parasol, Fabian seemed to have trouble remembering him. In the end, he said:
“Ah yes, the boy with the cello. I wonder if he’s still with that American woman.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t you remember? That all came to an end at the time.”
Fabian shrugged, his attention now on his sheet music, and then we were starting our next number.
I was disappointed Fabian hadn’t shown more interest, but I suppose he’d never been one of those particularly concerned about the young cellist. Fabian, you see, he’s only ever played in bars and cafes. Not like Giancarlo, our violin player at that time, or Ernesto, who was our bass player. They’d had formal training, so to them someone like Tibor was always fascinating. Maybe there was a tiny bit of jealousy there—of Tibor’s top-drawer musical education, of the fact that his future