To avoid losing the Chopin in the service of mere and selfish memory, Dirk struggled to follow the architecture of the piece. If Bach was music for the court and the church, Chopin was music for the bedchamber. Or the moonlit copse. If Bach had been Euclidean, as Felix once asserted, Chopin relied on a different rhetoric. Dirk had no reference for it. Dionysian? An opiated Dionysus.
A recurring spiral in the melodic line, first up but then corkscrewing back to lower registers, with turns and hesitations as languorous as the drip of rainwater from branch to leaf to upraised lips.
In listening to music Dirk usually tried to empty his mind of vapors and images. Tonight, however, the first three nocturnes returned Felix to him in ways it was hard to fathom. Dirk struggled to escape such particularities—how Felix had sometimes looked at him, quizzical, with a half-smile, the way a dog turns its head on its neck as if waiting the answer of an unasked question. What next?
He let the music unfold in his mind a certain apprehension that it took a little while to recognize. There is Felix, dropping out of the sky, tumbling from the basket of a hot-air balloon. （Do people come to us any other way, really?） I am on the ground, knocked out by the contact. Felix is on hands and knees, leaning over me, slapping me awake. What am I trying to say about this? This happened to me, it truly happened. Preposterous as it seems—it’s no more preposterous than anything else. And I remember it here, under the influence of Chopin. Life has made this experience a memory.
Without a memory, what does experience mean—or matter?
He thought of those poor invalids who had been dead and then somehow revived, and how often it had been said they were severed from their true nature. Maybe they had had their memories broken off, and so they weren’t truly alive, not the way others were.
But then memory could kill one—as it had done Nastaran.
At the height of outrageous curiosity Felix had once asked him about the eye-patch. “Behind that black circle, is your bad eye actually still there? You say you lost your eye—do you mean that actually? If you lost it, where is it?”
Of course Dirk hadn’t answered. The truth is, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the falling tree in the woods had prodded his eye out the way a spoon dislodges a stone from an overripe cherry. Maybe the eye was rolling about in the Black Forest someplace, minding its own business, having experiences without memory.
Oh, the nonsense music could liberate from the wretched mind.
The otherness of it—the wordless significance.
The ’cello music assaulting him with beauty in the decommissioned chapel at the von Koenig schloss. The unplayed dotar in Nastaran’s bedchamber.
Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications.
Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.
72.
While Felix was still alive, Dirk visited the house known as Meritor only once. He remembered the circumstances the rest of his life, though, as a kind of coming home. If that sort of comparison wasn’t baseless at its heart.
The Stahlbaum family—its guests and assigns and lackeys—had packed themselves into three carriages. They’d spent the better part of a week on the road from Munich. They’d stopped at Nuremberg. Another night at Leipzig with its publishers, for all Dirk knew, still buying their paper stock from Herr Pfeiffer & Sons back in Meersburg. Then, alighting for several days in grandiose Berlin, they’d heard two terrific concerts.
The boys were bored at the long carriage hours but thrilled with the idea of travel. They were frantic to get to meet the sea. Ethelinda was equally enthusiastic. She had never been farther north than Berlin. Still, only Felix had yet seen the property. Had he promised them too much?
They came upon it toward the end of the sixth day. It sat at the knuckle of a high spit of land on the island of Rügen. At first, all closed up against the sun and winds, the three-story outpost looked as if it must have been built as a fortress against the Danes—or maybe, when the Danes held this region, by themselves as a fortress against others.
The proportion of window glass to stone fa?ade was ungenerous to light. And the grey granite was hewn in larger blocks than a house usually required. The place had something of the air of a temple, or perhaps a banking establishment. But the channel beyond it was glistening, and all agreed the sobriety of the house counterpoised sensibly against the dash and impudence of the sea.
The parlors, with one broad door and a lot of small windows with shutters, looked out to the west toward the smaller island of Hiddensj?, in the Danish, or Hiddensee as the locals called it. If Sebastian and Günther climbed on the desk in the corner of the parlor and peered through the high window, they could spy the small stretch of open Baltic Sea that divided Hiddensee from a northerly hangnail of a promontory that curled around from Rügen.
Dirk chose a room at the top of the house, facing the north. Though he had misgivings about the force of the wind through the casements—misgivings that proved well founded on the first cold night—he concluded that the view of islands in light was worth the bother of shivering. Instantly he fell in love with one break, where water met sky. No intervening land to disturb the sense of everness. The pale dash of horizon between homeland and Hiddensee. Such, perhaps, is to be expected of one born in the steeps of Alpine vales. Claustrophobia becomes a characteristic of childhood.
Dirk would come to adore Meritor—the name that young Sebastian concocted out of meer and tor—sea-gate. The vivid broom bucking in the wind was lively and silly. And even on stormy days, the countryside near the ocean possessed more light than the brightest Munich days. Only when the fog bellied in, as it liked to do of a summer morning, did the house hunch to its stone knees and seem to be thwarted.
That first visit, Dirk found his way down the cliffs with Felix and the boys and the wretched Otto von Blotto. They meandered along the shore. The dog growled at every strand of seaweed he came across. The boys collected rocks and shells, and threw them seaward, trying, they said, to build a bridge of stone between Hiddensee and Rügen.
“Meritor was repurposed as a hotel, a sort of seehotel, I think,” said Felix. “But it failed. Until the roads are improved, it remains too far for the summer traveler.”
“It is lovely, but is it sensible to fall in love with a place so far from Munich?”
“Au contraire, I find it usefully distant from Munich concerns, all those eyes and opinions. My hope is that by next year we might live here all summer. People are starting to do this sort of thing, you know.”
“I should be sorry to see so little of you and your family for such a length of time.”
“You’d come, of course. That’s the idea.”
Dirk laughed. They linked arms against the wind. “You’re mad. I have a small shop. I can’t afford to close it for a season.”
“You can bring your tools and paints and grommets, your adzes and awls, and work here all summer. I’ll arrange a workbench for you. The boys will promise not to pester you.”