Oskar’s toilet did not smell of chemicals or latrines. His bathroom smelled slightly of soap, but mostly it smelled of water. Not the marshy, damp smell that sometimes builds up in bathrooms. Water, the smell of a pristine glacial stream splashing onto rocks, the smell of ice. What is one actually smelling when one smells that smell? Ozone or ions or something. Perhaps if I paid more attention to shampoo adverts I would know.
I ran water over the plate and the paring knife and left them in the sink. Then I drained my glass, hovered over the taps, and turned back to the kitchen table. Again without allowing my actions much thought (another glass? And not yet 1 p.m.?), I took the wine bottle and thumbed the cork out of its neck. With my glass recharged, and my spirits recharged by its contents, I decided to take another look at Oskar’s study as a prelude to maybe doing something constructive, something worthwhile. It drew me because it was so perfect an environment for work.
It was as I had left it, of course; it was almost exactly as Oskar had left it. There was a subtle, near-imperceptible change in the air in here, the smell of paper, of newspaper clippings slowly turning brown (the printing press autumn), the smell of dust. I could hardly see any dust, but it had left its infinitesimal aroma, a ghostly trace in the air. Those motes in their lazy but restless diurnal migration of convection. A dust diaspora, banished from the surfaces. But Oskar had been away, now, for two days – it was settling. The finest sprinkling could be seen on the lid of the baby grand piano. The cleaner would be coming soon to move it along again. Cleaning products often have violent names – Oust, Raid, Purge. One could easily be called Pogrom.
I set my glass down on the blotter on the desk and drew my finger across the top of the piano. It trailed a path in the traces of dust. Next, I attempted to write my name amid the particles, but there were too few to make it out clearly, and I wiped it away. It’s a strange instinct, to want to sign one’s name in misty windows, wet concrete, snow. It is like animals marking their territory, particularly in the case of men inscribing snow. But I do not think it is a possessive, exclusive act: ‘This is mine, keep out.’ When we were a young species, the world must have seemed so unlimited and trackless, and to leave traces of oneself must have been to reach out, wanting to connect with others, strangers who would always remain strangers. To make one’s mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.
Idly, I struck a piano key (I do not know which one – it was near the middle) and listened to the note ring in the air. On the far side of the door, the television was still on, near-inaudible, a soft rhythm of speech and jingle, and there was the street, cars (not so many), trams (regular) and feet.
The trams dislodged a thought in my mind. I looked over the shelves of CDs, with their serious, wordy classical spines, and found a small section of works produced by the local Philharmonic. Oskar must have had some role to play in many of these recordings and, sure enough, there were some copies of Variations on Tram Timetables. Lou Reed was still in the CD player; I evicted him and opened the case containing Oskar’s Meisterwerk.
There was a slip of paper inside the case.
I hope you enjoy it! – O.
(There is better to come when Dewey is finished.)
How nice of him, I thought, or at least began to think as the sentiment stopped dead in my mind, like the needle being ripped off the surface of an old vinyl LP. This wasn’t nice, or if it was nice it was nice in a sinister spectrum of nice that I did not have the ability to see. How many of these notes were there? Briefly, the thought of ripping the place apart occurred to me, before I shook it from my head. It was just creepy, not threatening, and no reason to go insane. And if you must go insane it’s best to have a reason. If anything, Oskar was exposing a mental weakness of his own. I should feel superior.
The CD tray of the stereo was still sticking out, pornographically exposed. A tongue, a seedy player. I put in the disc of Variations and closed it, then scrumpled up the little note and dropped it in the bin. Was that a mistake? Perhaps I should have left the note in situ, so that Oskar would not know that I had been listening to his music. But the note had made clear that he welcomed my listening (‘I hope you enjoy it’), so maybe it was good to show interest. Also, if I put the note back now, I would have to smooth it out first, and it would be obvious that I had opened the case, screwed up the note, and then returned it, an obviously lunatic course of events. In any case, maybe the notes were Oskar’s way of keeping track of exactly where I had been in the flat. Faced with control-freakery of that order, what was the polite course – conceal traces, or helpfully leave them where possible?
But it was impossible to second-guess tactics of this kind. If they really were tactics; there was the strong possibility that Oskar’s actions were entirely guileless and friendly, and my reaction was the aberration. ‘Crazy,’ I said to myself softly.
Play. Oskar’s composition whizzed up in the player – his talent began its exhibition. The opening was very simple, a low metronomic note; then, with a higher double-note that sounded almost exactly like a tram bell, the piece suddenly became far more complex. What appeared to be three, or even four, different elements within the tune headed off in various directions, obscuring the composition with apparent chaos, then meeting and intersecting. They were simple, repetitive building blocks, like the beating of metal wheels over points, but at some moments it was difficult to tell how many pianos were involved.
Originally, of course, only the piano in this room had been involved. How did one do that – hear music that is nowhere but inside, and snare it, note by note? Was Oskar a genius? I had no way to tell. Being un-musical, a six-note advertising jingle is a work of alchemical, transcendent skill to me. But Oskar was clearly gifted, set apart from all but a tiny fraction of men and women. An agonising wash of inferiority swept over me – what had I ever done? Here was Oskar’s skill, picked out in Dolby clarity. Thanks to my work, many London residents now knew the phone number of their borough pest control officer, and what to do with discarded white goods. I like to think that I had invested my work with a little élan, but it remained the case that if I had not existed, those leaflets would merely have been written by someone else.
I regarded the piano with a mixture of curiosity and awe. It was all bulk, mixed curved and straight lines, reticent surfaces and concealed capabilities, like a stealth bomber. Do not play with the piano, Oskar had said. That presumptuous ‘with’ – of course, you won’t be able to play the piano, the most that can be expected is that you will play with it, like a child, and you shouldn’t even do that.
With as much care as I could muster, I opened the top of the piano and propped it up. There were its workings, complicated but unmysterious, ranks of sleeping soldiers, a harp set on its side. I hit a key and one of the hammers leapt up like toast out of a toaster, a note that gatecrashed the still-playing CD. Such a clear sound from a congregation of clumsy elements – wood, string, felt. Another note, clear and anachronistic in the music.
A strident machine bleat tore the calm, sending a jug of iced water down my spine. I came very close to dropping my glass, and had it not been empty, I would have spilled some of its contents. To be careful, I put it back on the desk, and as I did so the electronic shriek repeated. The phone was ringing. What does one do in these circumstances? Answer another man’s phone? It might be Oskar – what time was it in Los Angeles? My great fear was that, if I answered the phone, the person on the other end of the line might not speak English, and I would be taken for an intruder and the police would be summoned. How likely was this?
Third ring. Ring? It was like the death cry of a robot seagull. Eastern Bloc engineering, no doubt modified from the radiation leak alarm on a nuclear submarine.
Fourth ring. If it was Oskar, it was best to seem ‘in’, guarding the flat. If it was a non-Anglophone, I would just repeat Oskar’s name like an idiot. I caught the phone in the first half-second of the fifth ring, an assonant hiccup cut short.
‘Hello?’
A crackling, long-distance pause, the hiss of dust-covered copper cables. ‘Hello, hello, it is Oskar.’
‘Hello, Oskar. How are you?’
‘I