The Blind Accordionist Page 8

  “Given my profession, I of course wanted to photograph her, but this was forbidden. I only had to broach the idea of a portrait before it was immediately dismissed. ‘I can never be photographed,’ declaimed the Captain. ‘Should they want to draw me, paint me, imagine me—well, I cannot stop them. But no one, no one ever, shall fix my image in light itself.’ It was true: though I had by then seen many images of her, not one was a photograph, and though I tried to argue my case, my attempts were in vain. She was adamant that she must never, ever have her picture taken.

  “On the evenings she was engaged, I was to drink chocolate in the small café opposite La Fenice, drawing the crowds away from her by attracting them to myself, only then to disappoint them when they realised I was a mere lookalike. At first, our plan didn’t work—no one would believe I wasn’t she, but when I hit upon the simple yet brutal idea of blacking out a front tooth with coloured sticking plaster, they rapidly came to their senses: my smile saw them run; La Capgras could have no imperfection. In the watery labyrinth of that city, all shimmer and shadow, it was easy to vanish, and we were able to spend many hours alone and undisturbed.

  “We discovered that our similarities were not only physical. We had both been born into complex families—and what family isn’t? you may well ask, but ours, I believed, were more complex than most—and we had been moving ever since we were little. Neither of us had a native tongue; we were both born into many languages. Neither of us were ever at home, and we were both, perhaps, always fleeing from one. Neither of us had ever felt truly loved.

  “ ‘When I first saw you,’ the Captain told me, ‘I saw the double nature of the world, and how in the double, imagined aspects lie the pleasure and beauty of things. Everything is double. Everything has its companion.’

  “One night, we were crossing some misty bridge or other when our story turned again: the Captain told me of another spy, a most subtle and dangerous one—the Blind Accordionist. Such was the sobriquet or alias or nickname of the said agent, and the Captain’s mission was to track him down. It was only then I realised: the Captain was not fleeing, nor hiding—she was chasing after!

  “And chase we did. A day later, her public obligations discharged, a message arrived at her poste restante, and we were moving again.

  “In Prague, we posed as lady travellers and diarists to meet her contact, a man known as the Jackdaw who had a curious moustache and frequented the lowest taverns. In Vienna, we discovered the Jackdaw was not who he had pretended to be and narrowly escaped on a train to Budapest, which we abandoned at a lonely halt for a quick change and a jump back onto a train heading south. The journey was long, and with no apparent destination, and—as can happen on such occasions—it proved an occasion for the further exchange of tales, and secrets.

  “The Captain’s life, it turned out, was not double as much as triple, or quadruple, or perhaps even more. She wasn’t in the pay of one master but was spying on behalf of several governments, agencies, and private individuals. Over time, she had double- and triple-crossed many of them, leaving her unsure as to exactly whom she was working for and, often, why. The only constant, it seemed, was her obsession with the Blind Accordionist. And when I asked who this person really was, she could say no more. I suspected that she didn’t even know.

  “It was when we arrived in Naples that things began to fall apart. The endless train had drawn its halt there, the end of the line. The Captain claimed she had friends at the San Carlo, so we made for the opera house immediately. When she sang, she claimed, she was invincible. When I sing, she said, my voice takes over, and I become the instrument. When I sing, the song sings me. I need to sing, she said.

  “And she sang. How she sang! Nightingales fashioned from quicksilver would envy her, the dying swan fall silent in admiration. Time itself stopped when she sang.

  “I have to say here that my own story was not, at that point, without its complications. I have said that I was a photographer—I still am—but this was a profession I only chanced upon later, after several previous attempts at a career. I began as a lady’s maid, but soon progressed to being the governess for the lady’s children after the previous incumbent ran away. I had to leave that position after I was falsely accused of the theft of a precious necklace—a necklace that, by the way, I had found to be most ugly—and then became an artist’s model, and from that an artist myself, if we can consider photography an art—which, gentlemen, was where I came into your conversation to begin with. But I am digressing again, and it is growing late. I meant to say that I was, perhaps, not an easy person to love. My own history had been marked by disappearance, evasion, inconsistency—the very things that, as a photographer, I tried to battle. I am aware of the irony. Furthermore, the one person who I desired to photograph more than anything in the world denied me the very chance of doing so. I realise now how frustrated I must have been.

  “I was saying that time stopped when the Captain sang—the problem being that when she stopped singing, time’s flow ran ever harder. In Naples, time poured, a deluge. Her supposed ‘friends’ in the city had allowed her to sing only because, it turned out, her performance was to pay off a debt that the Captain had—according to them—accrued on her previous visit to the city, and despite the success of her performance, it seemed she no longer had the financial draw she had once had—too much time spying, not enough singing—and a substantial portion of the debt remained. She tried to pay off the balance by producing a diamond from her bags—I was astonished, had never seen it before—but it turned out that the diamond had been stolen—from the person to whom she was offering it.

  “We were moving again, and this time quite definitely fleeing. The Captain maintained that if she were to find the Blind Accordionist, all our troubles would be solved—I imagined a handsome reward, perhaps, though she never mentioned such a thing. But the trail had gone cold. I no longer remember quite how long we journeyed, always running, now hares, no longer foxes. We travelled third class, or by mail coach. We were often mistaken for vagrants, and more than once narrowly avoided a workhouse. At some point, we found ourselves in a flyblown town where everyone seemed to be worried about a game of cards of which we could make neither head nor tail. The Captain claimed she had an engagement on a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, but when we got there, we found the opera house had never been built and spent a miserable week eating broth made from salted fish, and left reeking of it. She had another possible engagement in Lemberg, but we took the wrong train and ended up in a town neither of us knew. It was dark when we arrived, and both hotels claimed to be full, so we retired to a café that seemed to be named the ‘Question Mark,’ were it named anything at all—the only symbol on the sign hanging above the doorway being a?’ When we walked in, everyone there looked exactly like us.

  “It was a strange evening. Everyone in the café, male or female, young or old, was our double, or triple, or quadruple. And yet, I remember feeling utterly unsurprised, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. I was not, I think now, entirely well. The constant travel, the anxiety of discovery, and the obsessive need for secrecy had claimed a heavy price on my health, and—in turn—on our friendship. After we had been ushered into a private dining room and eaten a dinner of pork sausage and sulphurous cabbage, the Captain turned to me and told me that it was time for us to separate. ‘I no longer need a travelling companion,’ she said. ‘Indeed, you have become a hindrance to me. Everything has its companion, and everything has its opposite. There is no doubling that is not also a splitting. I can only find what I want if I am alone.’ And with that, she got up, and vanished.

  “I had wanted to make her love me by doing everything she wanted, and then I realised that what she had wanted was someone who did not love her.

  “It would be many years before I saw her again. I had found myself back in Paris, having resumed my work as a photographer. I say ‘found myself,’ but I suppose I had made my way t
here, drawn by that memory of my first encounter with her. The work was lucrative enough, but life was far from indulgent. I had become a mask of myself. I kept my eyes carefully peeled whenever I passed a newspaper stand or kiosk but never saw anything of the Captain. Where she had gone, or who she even was now, I did not know. I took portraits for gentlemen, and sometimes my clients would say that I reminded them of someone, though they could never quite say who.

  “One of my sitters asked me to come and take some pictures at a ball he and his friends were holding, a reserved affair in which everyone was to come in costume. The event was to take place in a large house in Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of the city, and I—accompanied by my camera—was to be delivered by cab. I, too, was asked to wear a disguise, but I chose nothing more than the voluminous cape I wore when working and a pair of dark glasses I used to protect me from glare. I was asked to set up in a small anteroom equipped with adequate lighting from where I could observe the guests. They seemed to be wearing the entire contents of the Captain’s travelling bags.

  “I imagine you know where this story is going, don’t you? You are not mistaken. A woman presented herself. She wore a mask of feathers and pearls, seemed a creature so exotic not even our most intrepid explorers had ever recorded her. And despite that, before I had even seen the buttons on her boots, I knew her immediately.”

  “And she too. I hadn’t even had time to check the light gauge and set the focus before she spoke: ‘It is you, isn’t it? You are the Blind Accordionist!’

  “I was not, though I wished I had been. To have been desired so.

  “She looked at me proudly, challenging me to do my worst, the one thing she had always forbade of me.

  “The moment of feeling passed more rapidly than the snap of the shutter. The light flashed, and with it, I gained clarity. Looking back, I see now that I had already long realised how wrong she had been: Things are not double, but multiple, endless. There were not two of us, there were millions of us. There may only be one form of love, but there are many ways to speak of it. I finally took her photograph, and in so doing, I fixed her, and I destroyed her.

  “She left the room hurriedly, her mask having slipped.

  “The story should end here, and I see you are tiring, gentlemen, but it is not so clear. Things rarely are. I have never seen her since, but that has not stopped my search. Having taken her picture once, I found I needed nothing more than to do it again. Only then, I think, will I be rid of her. Why, after all, do you think I am in this dreary place now? I am still looking for her.”

  With that, the woman who had called herself Sosia ended her story, and the room fell silent, even more silent than it had been. Summer was reaching its end, and light did not hold as it had before. We put out the candles and made our way, slowly, to bed.

  DEAD JOHANN

  CROOKED GROUND, CROOKED water, crooked eye, crooked daughter. Plum tree, pear tree, name me, kiss me. Blind crow, button my boots; blind owl, count my teeth; blind man, sing my song. In the house there hides a room, in the room there stands a bed, in the bed there lies a man. One for salt, two for iron, three for blood, in the man there is no good.

  There is salt. There is no water. There is blood, there are ashes, there are bones.

  Speak of ghosts; they will come.

  THE VISITORS

  THEY CAME TOWARD the end of the summer, when the grass was parched and shadows stretched as far as the horizon. Autumn had stolen a march on the dog days; leaves as brittle as old tobacco crunched underfoot, and squirrels busied themselves burying fat acorns. The dirt track to the house was solid, and turning to dust. There was no sign of rain yet. The air itself was tired.

  Some wanted to buy hats in town, others to take walks to the lake or woods, and a few contented themselves to stay in and drink the early pear brandy. They had come to help, but Elizabeth found their company stifling. She had quickly grown used to the house’s stillness and emptiness but had not yet spent enough time alone listening to the creaks and sighs of the old wooden frame. She didn’t know how many visitors there were; they never stayed in the same place for long enough for her to count, congregating in the drawing room or on the porch or even in the kitchen in twos, threes, fours, or larger groups, sometimes singly surprising her on the stair or in the scullery. There were too many, of this she was sure.

  A smell of woodsmoke drifted over the porch and a faint haze hung in the air, but Elizabeth could see no fire. Loggers, she thought, or hunters, on the other side of the forest. Fire could be dangerous this time of year, though some evenings, when the sun hung low and refused to set, the sky seemed made of it.

  Sometimes, whether out of frustration or so as not to let her anger or sadness show, Elizabeth left them and went out alone. When she returned, they would say they had worried about her, and she felt guilty but saw only new hats and emptier bottles of pear brandy.

  She couldn’t remember who they all were. Uncle George, Aunt Katya, Cousin Anya. Some from her parents’ side, others from Emil’s, some those distant family members or friends whose provenance she had never really understood. With their strange black coats and impractical shoes, their stiffly formal manners, and their dialectal words with strange vowels and unexpected clusters of consonants, they all became one. Aunt George, Uncle Katya, Cousin Chatchka. Gruskovtort, bernspirog, kolak na pera. Was it possible there were so many different names for a pear tart?

  She stepped down from the porch onto the dry grass. It would scratch her feet, she knew, were she to take her shoes off, or her skin if she lay down like a dog and rolled in it, indulged in its rough caress. But then they would come for her, and help her back up, and tell her they worried, and she didn’t want that. She took another step out and saw her shadow stretch to a vanishing point miles ahead of her. The sky wouldn’t catch fire this evening, despite the smoke.

  Some of them she swore she had never seen before: a strange pair of women, a lonely young man, an older one who wore a frock coat and shaded glasses. These came and went, never asking anything of her, not paying her any attention at all.

  Emil had fixed that porch step. The heads of the nails he had hammered still shone, beginning to burnish after what, a year? Two? She had lost track of the time. He had never done anything like that, usually lost in his papers and books, but had made a job of it that one time, at least, sanded and planed the rough wood, held a spirit level so no one would stumble.

  She unbuckled her shoes and let herself feel the brief scratch of the grass, then the dust, then the still-cool earth below. She pushed down, and the world pushed back at her.

  The visitors had all arrived together, in a moment, and she wondered how they had managed, and supposed they had all walked from the village, as there had been sign of neither horse nor carriage. It was good they had come now, at the tip of the seasons, before the rain started and the road turned to mud, impassable until winter when frost hardened the ruts and snow smoothed the way for a sledge, good they had come at the end of summer when there was still warmth in the air, when the light held, when she could go walking.

  It was time now. She put her shoes back on and stepped out for the forest.

  She didn’t want them around, not all the time, not even much of it. She wanted to feel grateful for their help but more often felt responsible for them, even though they mostly ignored her. She had quickly grown to like the quiet ones most, the ones who hardly looked at her and stood on the stairs or in the corners, the young man and the woman in the long, old-fashioned skirt who she thought must be distant cousins, and who sat at the edge of the grass for hours, sometimes, just near where she was passing now, though there was no sign of them today.

  As she got closer, she felt the breath of the forest. Moss and mushroom, the dampness of the pre-ghost of frost, a curled tongue of yet-invisible mist reaching to her, something on the turn, beginning to rot. The heaving sadness of the late summer, its imminent end, roiled w
ithin her. She had always felt the sadness in everything, Emil told her that, even a sunflower, he said, handing her a bunch from the field on the other side of the village. They’re the most purely joyous things I can think of, he’d said, and I know that you will find the sadness in them.

  It was true, she had known it then and felt guilty again, at fault, as though she and she alone were responsible for the sadness in everything, and she had tried to believe that it wasn’t her but that everything held its own sadness regardless of whether she perceived it or not. Her attempts had mostly been futile. Even Emil became exasperated. The sadness was in her, and not in the things around her.

  But not now, though, now it felt different: the breath of the woods, that first touch of cold, preserved or premonitory, fat blackberries in the bramble, all brought…not joy, no, not that, but something else, she didn’t know what, couldn’t find the word or even identify the feeling. She was glad the visitors had come, and glad she had left them behind now. She was glad she had come out walking. Contentedness, perhaps, nothing more than that. As a girl, the bare sight of new-polished shoes and their warning of the return to school trawled her soul, but now the promise of the cool weight of the pear in her hand, one of those they had saved, its first bite against her teeth, the first chestnuts, woodfires, the languid air, and long dry grass drew her into the future.