• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 12258 0

She replies that she is—well, a housewife, a faculty wife, but she is studying the piano, she hopes to be able to continue in Vienna in a year or two. (They are alone for a moment, standing close to each other. Never has Sophie wished so keenly to be alone with a man. What has permitted this moment is a small crisis—a sign announcing no visitors, the mine closed for repairs, the Professor storming off with a cascade of apologies pouring from his lips, telling them to wait, declaring that his personal acquaintanceship with the superintendent will resolve this impasse.) He says she looks so youthful. A girl! He says that it is hard to believe that she has two children. She replies that she was married very young. He says that he has two children, too. “I am a family man.” The remark seems roguish, ambiguous. For the first time their eyes encounter each other’s, his gaze mingles with hers; it is unabashedly admiring, that look, and she turns away feeling a spasm of adulterous guilt. She moves a few paces off from him, shielding her eyes, wondering aloud where Papa is. She hears the tremor in her throat, another voice deep within her tells her that tomorrow she must go to early Mass. Over her shoulder his voice now asks her if she has ever been to Germany. She replies that yes, one summer years ago she stayed in Berlin. Her father’s vacation. She was just a child.

She says that she would love to go to Germany again, to see Bach’s grave in Leipzig—and she halts, embarrassed, wondering why on earth she has said this, although indeed to place flowers on Bach’s grave has long been a secret wish. Yet in his gentle laugh there is understanding. Leipzig, my home! He says why of course we could do that if you came. We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasps inwardly—the “we,” the “if you came.” Is she to construe this is an invitation? Delicate, even devious—but an invitation? She feels the pulse twitch at her brow and flees the subject, or warily moves away. We have much good music in Cracow, she says, Poland is filled with wonderful music. Yes, he says, but not like Germany. If she were to come, he would take her to Bayreuth—does she like Wagner?—or to the great Bach festivals, or to hear Lotte Lehmann, Kleiber, Gieseking, Furtwängler, Backhaus, Fischer, Kempff... His voice seems to be an amorous melodic murmur, cajoling, politely but outrageously flirtatious, irresistible and (to her utter distress now) wickedly exciting. If she loves Bach, then she must love Telemann. We shall toast his memory in Hamburg! And Beethoven’s in Bonn! Just at this moment a splashing of feet through gravel announces the return of the Professor. He babbles delightedly, saying “Open Sesame.” Sophie can almost hear the sound her heart makes as it deflates, sickly pounding. My father, she thinks, is everything that music cannot be...

And that (as it evolved in her recollection) is nearly all. The prodigious subterranean castle of salt which she has visited often and which may or may not be, as the Professor claims, one of Europe’s seven man-made wonders, is less an anticlimax in itself than a spectacle which simply fails to register on her awareness, so agitated has she been made by this indefinable whatever-it-is—this infatuation—which has struck her with the random heat of a lightning bolt, making her weak and a little ill. She dares not let her eyes meet Dürrfeld’s again, although once more she glances at his hands: why do they fascinate her so? And now as they descend in the elevator and then embark on a stroll through this glittering white kingdom of vaulted caverns and labyrinthine passageways and soaring transepts—an upended anti-cathedral, buried memorial to ages of human toil, plunging giddily toward the underworld—Sophie blots out both Dürrfeld’s presence and her father’s perambulating lecture, which anyway she has heard a dozen times before. She wonders despondently how she can truly be the victim of an emotion at once so silly and so devastating. She will just have to put this man firmly out of her mind. Yes, put him out of her