Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [70]
“Yes, I understand exactly where you are. It won’t be easy, but you can do it. Definitely, you can do it. Let’s start with the Britten. Play it again, just the first movement, and then we’ll talk. We can work through this together, a little at a time.”
When he heard this, he felt an impulse just to pack away his instrument and leave. But then some other instinct—perhaps it was simply curiosity, perhaps something deeper—overcame his pride and compelled him to start playing again the piece she had requested. When after several bars she stopped him and began to talk, he again felt the urge to leave. He resolved, just out of politeness, to endure this uninvited tutorial for at most another five minutes. But he found himself staying a little longer, then longer again. He played some more, she talked again. Her words would always strike him initially as pretentious and far too abstract, but when he tried to accommodate their thrust into his playing, he was surprised by the effect. Before he realised, another hour had gone by.
“I could suddenly see something,” he explained to us. “A garden I’d not yet entered. There it was, in the distance. There were things in the way. But for the first time, there it was. A garden I’d never seen before.”
The sun had almost set when he finally left the hotel, crossed the piazza to the cafe tables, and allowed himself the luxury of an almond cake with whipped cream, his sense of elation barely contained.
FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, he returned to her hotel each afternoon and always came away, if not with the same sense of revelation he’d experienced on that first visit, then at least filled with fresh energy and hope. Her comments grew bolder, and to an outsider, had there been one, might have seemed presumptuous, but Tibor was no longer capable of regarding her interventions in such terms. His fear now was that her visit to the city would come to an end, and this thought began to haunt him, disturbing his sleep, and casting a shadow as he walked out into the square after another exhilarating session. But whenever he tentatively raised this question with her, the replies were always vague and far from reassuring. “Oh, just until it gets too chilly for me,” she had said once. Or another time: “I guess I’ll stay as long as I’m not bored here.”
“But what’s she like herself?” we kept asking him. “On the cello. What’s she like?”
The first time we raised this question, Tibor didn’t answer us properly, just saying something like: “She told me she was a virtuoso, right from the start,” then changing the subject. But when he realised we wouldn’t let it go, he sighed and began to explain it to us.
The fact was, even at that first session, Tibor had been curious to hear her play, but had been too intimidated to ask her to do so. He’d felt only a tiny nudge of suspicion when, looking around her room, he’d seen no sign of her own cello. After all, it was perfectly natural she wouldn’t bring a cello on holiday with her. And then again, it was possible there was an instrument—perhaps a rented one—in the bedroom behind the closed door.
But as he’d continued to return to the suite for further sessions, the suspicions had grown. He’d done his best to push them out of his mind, for by this time, he’d lost any lingering reservations about their meetings. The mere fact that she was listening to him seemed to draw fresh layers from his imagination, and in the hours between these afternoon sessions, he’d often find himself preparing a piece in his mind, anticipating her comments, her shakes of the head, her frown, the affirming nod, and most gratifying of all, those instances she became transported by a passage he was playing, when her eyes would close and her hands, almost against her will, began shadowing the movements he was making. All the