Orfeo

  The ominous tune and empty miles concentrated him. Deep inside a traumatized country still dreaming of security, he listened. The sounds would soon be like those stone-carved glyphs so eroded no one could read them anymore. But over the Fiat’s worrisome new rattle, for one last time Els heard the Fifth choose between truth and survival.

  The tune wandered as if in shock: strident minor sixths and thirds, then murmuring fourths. Fragments flared up, alternating between fight and surrender. At last there arose something like a pulse, a timid motor rhythm driving toward a goal as amorphous as the one Els now chased. There came a lassitude, a yielding to chance. The music pressed on toward some still-deniable cri de coeur. It barreled forward, now a march, or perhaps a parody of one, lumbering on like a huge, blind beast.

  The movement offered up anything Els might want to find in it—hope, despair, stoic surrender. A reprobate crawling back into the fold. A flaming blow for conscience. The towns clicked past: Stubblefield, Pocahontas. But the music was all Leningrad, the night of the premiere—the whole city listening through Stalin’s ears, waiting for judgment. Waiting to hear whether the rogue composer would stay true to his art or beg for mercy, be spared or disappear.

  The sun slipped below the line of the windshield, and Els flipped down his visor. In the field to his right, a hulking green machine bigger than a summer dacha dragged itself down the black grooves of earth, over a slight hummock, all the way out to the horizon. The deranged Allegretto started up. The desolate theme from the first movement turned into a lurching waltz, a deep-woods Russian folk tune, a triumphal horn call, a halfhearted military band. Vintage Shostakovich: a cavalcade of perky, grim, mocking, and sardonic snips, reaching for the one freedom that would always be available, however complete the disaster: the condemned man’s dance.

  Then the Largo. Strings and light winds, harp and celesta, spun a long, eerie elegy, pushing the first movement’s theme into a place beyond further harm. Tremolo played against a figure of rapped-out alarm. Els had heard the movement too many times to make out anything new. But for a quarter hour, the naked pain stretched out in front of him, a virgin outing. It spoke of whatever was left, after the worst that humans did to each other.

  At the premiere, they cried openly, not caring that they wept. The whole audience—victims of the present’s catastrophe—knew what the Largo said. Millions dead, tens of millions sent to the gulag. And no one had dared speak the fact in public, until this music.

  Those who showed up that night to hear the accused man grovel heard, instead, this. Here was music simple and populist, just as Stalin commanded, and in a language whose anguish everyone recognized. Naming the crime so bluntly should have been suicide. But to convict Shostakovich for speaking out, the state would have to admit to crimes worthy of this Largo.

  The hard midday light began to soften. Stubbly farmland gave way to the edges of urban sprawl. Traffic thickened. He passed a semi stopped on the shoulder. The Fiat shuddered from the shock wave. A laugh tore out of Els at the huge downbeat of the final movement. He caught his own glance in the rearview mirror, and beyond that, toward the vanishing point, flashing red lights.

  For one last time, the pound of tympani launched Els into that demonic march: driving brass punctuated by skittering winds. Crescendo, accelerando, then the flood of strings falling into formation. The car crept up above seventy, ready to break for it. Els scouted the gathering traffic. What was this hell-for-leather madness? This shrill joy, never so crazed, so inevitable.

  The march: Russian to the bone. Easy enough to hear triumph—hip-booted regiments of Cossacks, heads sideways, goose-stepping past Lenin’s mausoleum. That’s how Els’s teachers had taught him to hear it. Kopacz, Mattison . . . That’s how Western listeners had heard the march, as late as the nineties: Shostakovich throwing together a blast of Soviet Realist bombast, a sellout finale to save his neck.

  The lights in the Fiat’s rearview swelled and gained, even as the strings released a torrent of screeching bats into the air. Clear now: a squad car, pursuing its prey. Els’s foot pumped on the accelerator. The bats gave way to demented jubilation, and the ancient car shuddered. He was going well over eighty when, all around him in the sealed compartment, martial grandiosity exploded into forced festivity.

  He eased off the pedal. The flashing lights closed the distance in a couple of measures. From the moment he’d fled his cordoned house, Els knew he’d be caught. But he never imagined he’d be plucked off the highway outside of Marine, Illinois. Satellites could read license plates from geosynchronous orbit. Any vehicle on the road ended up on spy cam several times an hour. Kohlmann’s phone was as good as a tracking anklet. Someone in a windowless cubicle in Langley had tipped off an Illinois state trooper in real time.

  The lights swam up in his rearview mirror. Els signaled and slowed. As he pulled over onto the shoulder, the cop blasted past in the left lane. The lights vanished in a pretty twinkle half a mile away before Els stopped his brittle giggling.

  He pulled onto the shoulder, quaking. The music turned into scattered night whispers, rumors in a dark minor. Through banks of doubt, a grim snare drum. Then something burst through the miasma and galloped to a sudden finish. Triumph, or its bitter parody. The People, perhaps: their directed, collective will. Or perhaps the outlaw artist, exit laughing.

  Els pulled back out onto the interstate. In the sealed car, aftershock hung in the air as it must have done in Leningrad on the night of the public trial. The audience on its feet for thirty minutes, the conductor holding the score above his head . . . And long before Czar Joseph and his Central Committee even have a chance to reach a verdict, the sentence is passed: set free—free to write again, free to be muddled, formalist, esoteric, and unclear, free to satirize, to disgust, to offend, free to pursue whatever shape the notes might take.

  Yet the secret police are never wrong, and the work of security is never done. It will all happen again, the ambush from above, the public attack by the engineer of human taste. Shostakovich, sentenced to a lifelong cat-and-mouse game, perpetual target in the war against dissonance, dissidents, and discontent. His music, always variations on the dead man’s jig. Decades later, long after Stalin’s death, the composer will still wear a packet around his neck containing the full text of the article “Muddle Instead of Music.” The words will give him the freedom that only an enemy of the people can feel.

  Els merged left, into the lanes feeding toward the Mississippi. The shakes dampened and disappeared, replaced by a great lightness. The siren of the squad car, the germ of a musical idea. The last echo of the Allegro died away, plunging him into the hum of engine and wheels. Once it might have sounded like silence; now the road noise was symphonic.

  The smartphone chimed and a window popped up on the screen. He swerved onto the rumble strip, trying to read the message there. The music player was asking him to vote. Two bright icons presented themselves: thumbs up or thumbs down. He had only to click—a swift judgment from his box seat—to decide the fate of the piece again.

  He made it to the gathering outskirts of St. Louis. A strip mall, a housing division. Before long Saarinen’s great arch soared up from the horizon, the gateway to the West.

  The trained ear can hold up an empty shell and make out the sea it came from.

  He reads through the newspaper article that Bonner thrusts at him. A sect of property-sharing polygamists has proclaimed an autonomous city of God somewhere in central Texas. At first he thinks it’s a demented marketing campaign that Bonner has dreamed up for Fowler’s opening: the ecstatic believers, camped out in the desert, singing, praying, and waiting for time to end. The bungled raid by the ATF. The FBI laying siege to the believers’ compound in a cordon as tight as the Prince Bishop’s earthworks around Münster.

  Too familiar to take in. What is all this?

  Bonner’s doing something with his mouth: call it smiling. He glances at the stage, where John of Leiden, sword in hand, heads into Act Two’s closing barn
burner aria, The glory of all the Saints is to wreak vengeance . . .

  Yeah—how about that? Been going on for weeks. Who knew? Shit happens while you’re busy.

  Els scrambles out of his seat and turns up the aisle. Bonner grabs his wrist.

  Where you going?

  Els doesn’t know. To the nearest television set. To the library. To the office of the artistic director of City Opera to plead innocence.

  He lowers himself back into the chair. What do you know about this? He sounds absurd, accusatory.

  Only what I read in the papers.

  Els stares again at the fulfilled prediction. This can’t be happening.

  Bonner’s face lights up. I know, huh? Total gold mine. Somebody’s watching over us.

  Els wants to punch the man. Instead, he scrambles back to his feet. Richard doesn’t bother grabbing him again. Els jogs up the aisle and out of the hall, just as the run-through of Act Three begins.

  In hours, he knows as much about Waco as anyone. He holes up in his room in Richard’s apartment, camped in front of the TV, surrounded by newspapers. He watches the standoff escalate its nightmare logic: The empire’s war machines. The siege works, cutting off the rebels from the outside. The core of believers huddled around their messiah, living on rainwater and stockpiled rations. He hardly needs to watch; he’s spent three years composing it.

  Richard finds him that night watching videotape of the compound taken from an Army helicopter: a few dozen religious zealots bunkered down against the most powerful government on Earth. A voice-over says that the siege is costing the taxpayers a million dollars a week. The camera pans across a nearby caravan of RV vehicles—campers who show up to see how the standoff will play out. They sit along the road in folding chairs, playing cards and barbequing, waiting for the climax of this live theater.

  Els speaks in a spectral treble, without turning to look. This isn’t coincidence.

  Bonner’s arms are full with pad thai and the day’s rehearsal notes. Peter. Turn it off. Let’s eat.

  What does this mean? It has to mean something.

  It means we’re a genius, you and me. Absolute psychics.

  People will think we . . .

  There’s no end to what people might accuse them of. Unearned luck. Very bad taste. Opportunism. Some Faustian bargain.

  Richard, Els says. We have to stop this.

  Right. I’ll get right on the horn to Janet Reno.

  Els doesn’t hear. He’s staring at his fisted knuckles. The news segues to a story about the World Health Organization declaring TB a global emergency. Bonner eats; Els watches him. It’s not the siege of Waco Els needs to stop. It’s the siege of Münster.

  Two days later, ATF forces overrun the compound. Armored assault vehicles, engineering tanks, tear gas, grenade launchers. Then fire. Els might have told them: everything will burn. Scores of adults and two dozen children, shot, exploded, and immolated, and every detail of the finale beamed around the world on live television.

  No need to watch through to the end. Els knows the end; he’s already written it. He stands in Bonner’s apartment in fetid clothes, fingers pressed to his head, waiting to be told what to do. Receiving no commands, he heads out into the blazing day and hops a cab uptown to Lincoln Center.

  Richard is in row three, laying into the starving throngs of Münster. I want to hear hope! he shouts. You still believe that God is going to come down and fuck the Prince Bishop and his entire paid mob up the ass!

  Els drops into the chair across the aisle. When Bonner sets the onstage planet revolving on its own again, Els tells him the news. The director stares as if Els were a college intern on the lighting crew who has started to give him blocking advice.

  Peter, I’m kind of busy. We have previews in six days. Is there something you need?

  We can’t do this, Els says.

  Bonner blows a raspberry and twists his palms toward heaven. He hoots. His smile is brighter than it has been since Knipperdollinck’s understudy went over the edge of the orchestra pit and smashed his coccyx.

  You’re out of your damn mind.

  Okay, Els says. We just have to postpone . . .

  Bonner snickers. There’s no other reasonable response.

  We can go next season, Els says. Or later this—

  Peter. Get real. We’ve put these people three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. Even a two-night delay would kill them.

  Truth is, since the standoff in Texas became a headline, sales for the show have gone from poky to brisk, and opening night now has a reasonable chance of selling out. Marketing has gotten behind the opera with renewed vigor; they’ve started plastering stickers across the existing posters and flyers: Come See the News That the Past Already Knew.

  Innocent children, Els says. Burnt to death by American law enforcement agents.

  There’s confusion onstage, an altercation over the scene’s blocking. Bonner trots toward the crisis. Els dogs him.

  Not our fault, Bonner tells him, without turning.

  Els grabs him by the elbow. Listen to me. The minute people see . . . We can’t capitalize on this. It’s obscene.

  True bafflement crosses the director’s face. The accusation is so bizarre it interests him. This is your story, Maestro. You want to quit, now that it’s real?

  THERE’S SOMETHING TO say for a short third act: rapid rising action and a race to the finish. It takes only a recitative and two arias for the Prince Bishop to rally support in the north and tighten the snare of death around the crazed kingdom. The City of God can do nothing but play out its fate in a succession of otherworldly choruses. The siege seals up; food vanishes. A gentle siciliana in the harps and flutes predicts starvation. The believers hold out by eating every dog, cat, and rat within the walls. Then grass, dirt, and moss, shoe leather and old clothes, and finally the flesh of the dead, all to a lilting 12/8 dance.

  John, the Messiah, the World’s King, retreats into his beloved amateur theatricals. He turns the final days into a great masque. Revels fill the town square, and the cathedral hosts an obscene Mass. Raunchy figures in the high winds grope and snipe at each other. Chopped-up snatches of sacred chant circle and rise until the entire orchestra turns into a spinning bacchanal.

  In a flurry of brass, a group of the tailor King’s starving subjects flee the city. But the Prince’s armies pin them in the shallow meadows between the siege works and city walls. The refugees drag about, foraging the grass like desperate animals until they coat the ground with corpses. The music goes mad; sul ponticello harmonics slither through the strings.

  Every player in the orchestra plunges into the surging tutti. The attackers enter a city turned to walking dead. They offer the citizens safe passage for surrender, then slaughter them the moment they lay down their arms.

  Knipperdollinck and John, the amateur thespian, are tortured with red-hot irons and hung in cages from the tower of Saint Lamberti. But throughout his ordeal, the fallen savior makes no sound. His final aria—his last public performance—is total silence accompanied by a halo of strings.

  The music falls away to a pianissimo mime. Then, from nowhere, it comes back glorious. The anticipation theme from the opening bars of the opera returns, anchored by the cellos and trombones. Augmented now, it unfolds in growing astonishment. A chorus of dead souls fans across the stage singing the De Profundis. The tune bends ten centuries of musical idiom into stunned wonder. Few in the first-night audience can follow the harmonic vocabulary. But the house breaks into applause as soon as the conductor drops his arms.

  His colleagues force Els up onstage. He stumbles up in his white tie, blinded by the shining blackness. There’s sound everywhere, like the hiss of his father’s records that he woke to, as a child, on those nights when he’d fall asleep listening. He can’t make out what the static is saying or what this audience has heard. He hears only the cries of burning children, the snickering of fate, the great sucking sound of his endless vanity.

  He looks ou
t over the audience, sick. This is what he has wanted his whole life—a roomful of grateful listeners. And now the room wants something from him. An explanation. An apology. An encore.

  Someone to Els’s right—a crazy man, an old friend—takes Els’s fist and lifts it into the air. To his left, a resurrected John of Leiden beams. The conductor, the choral director, the choreographer, all the assembled leads and chorus flank him. Massacred believers and besieging mercenaries hold hands and bow, smiling at each other and at Els, the maker, celebrated at last, vindicated after all his long years outside. Els turns and plows through the happy cast, trying to escape into the gap in the velvet curtains before the contents of his gut come up into his mouth. In this, too, he fails.

  How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

  The man-made peak of Monks Mound loomed up from along the interstate. Once it had been the center of a city larger than London or Paris, a site for communal and dangerous art. Now it was part of a museum visited only by schoolchildren under duress. Its massive cone made Els want to turn off the highway, get out of the car, and climb. Cahokia seemed as good a place as any to be captured. But he was too close to his goal to be taken now.

  The road bore hard to the right, and the Mississippi, without warning or comparison, spread in front of him. Water filled the landscape in both directions, and he saw that flowing lake as if he were the first fugitive ever to stumble across it.

  The Voice took him by divine convolution deep into St. Louis’s southwestern suburbs. All Els had to do was stay on the road and obey. The neighborhood, when he reached it, surprised him: so different from what he’d pictured for thirty years. Stately homes sat back from the street behind moats of lawn. Brick and dressed stone, half-timbering, Federal, Tudor, Greek Revival, Queen Anne—houses as adept at faking styles as Stravinsky.