The cascade of the first variation emerged from the clavier into Keyserlingk’s ears, and he listened attentively, without ever understanding its mathematical formulation. Perhaps he would close his eyes at the sound of the first chords, his knees quivering in agitation during some of the canons and fugues. Dresden and Leipzig both under his command, the Soviet troops billeted there trafficking in carpets and wristwatches, and he wishing ardently to go home — or not, I don’t know. He would raise his eyelids and study Goldberg’s emaciated back, his thin arms opening wide and closing in over the keyboard. A Jew, as his surname indicated, a survivor of Auschwitz, and the Count listened to him play, wiping away the tears, moved by the harsh fate of this young man, hundreds of kilometers from home. Until a deep sleep would overcome him, he’d succumb during the fifteenth variation, an inverted canon. I know he would because I never managed to make it past that one either, couldn’t get out of bed to turn the record over. Once the sixteenth started, my sleep was guaranteed.
I didn’t know — can you believe me? — that somniferous powers are often attributed to this piece. I discovered those powers by chance, and since I invariably fell asleep at the end of side one, I didn’t know the latter variations very well for several years. Sometimes I managed to turn the record over, and I would always wake up again when the Aria resumed, just as in the beginning, the same slow and majestic air. I should have gotten up then to turn the stereo off, but I preferred not to, anguished by the darkness, in the disquiet of late night. The record would go on spinning, the stroboscopic eye tirelessly counting the grooves on the edge of the turntable (a model from the 1980s; they don’t make them like that anymore), the needle advancing toward the center of the record.
What can he have meant by total infinity? Spinning in silence, turning his words over and over until suddenly: a tumult. Like the sound of a sea changing color, I thought. A roar, the machine of the sea first stopped and then set back into furious motion, a bitter dispute, as if in gibberish, unintelligible. I jumped to my feet, my eyes on the window: they’re here, idiot — on a Saturday morning? A Saturday morning. They are here, you idiot: run for your life.
6
From the top of the stairs, trembling in the skylight’s illumination, certain that they’d seen me, that it hadn’t escaped their notice that I’d slipped on the tiles in the hallway and had now stopped in my tracks, aware that there was no other avenue of escape, the only exit to the street blocked. The voices of those men, brawny as Achaeans. One I could see from behind, the brief bronze of his right hand cleaving the air, wondering aloud who to leave alive and whose throat to cut: this head, this other head (Batyk’s), the boy’s (go right ahead!), but mine? The tutor’s? To what end? What good would that do Kirpich and Raketa — for the hoplites with shoulders bulging out from beneath their chitons were none other than they?
The violent argument before the none too receptive ears of their victims, their throats slit, arranged in a circle on the living room floor like complacent spectators or enormous puppets they would later carry out to the trunk of the car without worrying about banging their heads on the front porch’s flagstones or thudding them down the steps.
Without worrying about hurting them because they were dead!
Paralyzed by the noise of the violent argument, I didn’t make a move, until they fell silent, and one of the killers, the woman, looked toward me, raised her eyes, discovered me at the top of the staircase, and asked without turning: “Which of us is right?”
I looked at her a second, still gripped by fear and without managing to conceal my surprise. I went down to her, seeking in her eyes an explanation. Then, removing her gaze from the figure that had so irritated her, the figure of her husband, Nelly settled her eyes on me. Eyes of a mauve tint now, like spheres containing an oscillating liquid, a miniature sea complete with waves, a sailboat rocking upon its silken waters.
A vision of a sailboat and the sea that makes the tutor fall to his knees and raise his enraptured eyes. Another tutor in another book, let’s say. Not me. I held her gaze, though without daring to explain the source of that liquid to myself or from whence that sailboat … Nelly raised a hand toward me, raised the white circles of the palms of her hands to my eyes. She discovered, incredulous, the effect her words had had on me and burst out laughing.
About which the same bad writer, an epigone of the Commentator, a glosser of no imagination, would have noted that it had the effect of breaking the spell, undoing the enchantment, but which that morning, in the reality of the Book, made all the crystals that filled the garden gather in all the energy of her laughter and become even denser, frenetically multiplying, growing throughout the house. Imprisoning me.
Nelly asked me again: “You, you’ve been listening to us!”—I hadn’t been listening to them, I’d heard her without understanding her, had made an effort not to understand her—“Which of us is right?”
7
The meaning of the Book must not be altered by facile interpretations such as those proffered by the Commentator in his insubstantial commentaries. Nor should it be distorted by the opportunistic interpolations he performed in the depths of that public library. Seeing her and hearing her argue in that tone of voice, and then understanding her question with absolute clarity and seeing myself compelled, unnaturally, to concede that she was right, made me understand how much intelligence the Writer put into that phrase of his, which mentions neither astonishment nor bewilderment, only the force of an ax that falls and strikes. Without my ever yielding to the temptation to add words, inclusions you would never notice, Petya. Keeping myself honest and at a respectful distance, using my lips to give voice only to the words of the Writer, without falling into the heresy, so frequent in the Commentator, so much to be expected from him and never any the less reproachable for that, of interpolating his own glosses, as when he twists and does violence to sentences by lesser writers in the deliberate and, coming from the Commentator, false aim of extracting a few drops of sense, interpreting.
Letting myself be taken by surprise, always, yielding to the greatness of the Writer’s images. Because once or twice I, too, have wondered: like a fist, only a fist? However great the power with which it hits you, would I wake up, as in the Writer: If the book we read doesn’t wake us up like a fist pounding against our skulls, what are we reading it for? Clear and beautiful, Petya, incomparably strong. But only one fist? I’ve approached that fist (in my mind), I’ve opened it, spread out its fingers and inserted that hand into an iron gauntlet. And then it goes like this: If the book we read doesn’t wake us up like a fist [clad or enveloped in an iron gauntlet] pounding against, etcetera. You see? But this step was rendered unnecessary by his redoubtable intuition, because he glanced back over his shoulder, without need to take the fist away or envelop it in anything else, and this time hefted an ax which he raised and let fall with all the force that the first image lacked. And even more: A book should be the ax that breaks up the frozen sea inside us.