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Adorno imagines the aftermath of his own death, Gretel reading every letter, recognising every name, being surprised by nothing. “Your story is a tragic one.”

“The word is overused. They say your friend Benjamin was tragic; others might call his demise typical.”

“He made a fatal error.”

“He was a fool, like Louis.”

Adorno finds it a wise and admirable comment, but also deduces that the woman’s late husband was not wholly wrong in doubting the possibility of love. “I thank you for this interesting piece of history, now I ought to return to my work.” He begins to rise, Yvette holds his arm.

“I admit my story is bizarre and you had no need to hear it. But I wanted to speak of Walter Benjamin. The book he gave my husband is real.”

“You thought it nonsense.”

“Whatever it is, wherever it came from, even when we discard my husband’s deceptions, it remains the fact that your friend carried the book over the Pyrenees; for him it was equivalent to life itself. I should like you to have it. To me it means nothing.”

“And to me it should mean more?”

Yvette looks sadly at the bright water of the pond. “If you will not receive what I am offering then I shall destroy it. I suppose it has no place in the archive of Benjamin’s papers, but perhaps he might have liked you to have what cost him so much effort.”

Adorno considers the strange proposal; a gift that focuses with startling clarity the nullity of all gifts, their purely symbolic value, where what is symbolised is always an exchange, because the gift has to be accepted as well as given. This poor woman’s life has been an illusion, her marriage a sham, her love affairs counterfeit. His acceptance would amount to telling her: it has not been wasted.

“Send it to me,” he says, giving her his card. Then he bids farewell to Yvette Carreau, leaving her sitting on the bench where she watches the ducks, looking now like the old woman she always was. He walks away and forgets her. Already he’s late for an encounter with Ulrike at her apartment.

The package arrives at his home the following day. Wrapped in brown paper he finds the slim, elegantly bound volume the Frenchwoman described; also some Xeroxed pages of musical manuscript and an accompanying note explaining them to be the work she spoke of. She knows it to be a fake, she writes, yet still cannot part with the original that has been her trusted companion for so many years.

Adorno leafs through the book, whose age and provenance only a specialist could determine. It is, as she said, written in some form of invented language, incorporating tables, diagrams and symbols one could guess to be mathematical or magical (categories indistinguishable except to the initiated). A frequently recurring mark resembling the Greek letter psi could equally be a pitchfork; Adorno suspects the work to be a coded treatise on demonology or the Kabbalah, topics upon which Benjamin allowed his intellectual energies to be squandered.

Yet there is no evidence at all, other than the widow’s tale, that this book ever lay within his friend’s possession. Adorno puts it aside and considers the score, allegedly the fabrication of an unmusical man. A moment’s perusal throws doubt on that, for Adorno can see at once that it is not randomly written noise, but a credible composition. If Louis Carreau forged this then he must have worked from some original model, perhaps several. Adorno takes it to the piano, arranges the pages, and begins to play.

The style is instantly recognisable; it is certainly a piece that belongs to the first decade of the twentieth century. The revolution of serialism has not yet happened; there is perhaps something of Scriabin in it, or Stravinsky. And Adorno reminds himself: this is supposed to be a fake. Louis Carreau was no artist, but he must have had some understanding of what he pieced together from unknown sources. One could almost say there is a hint of Ravel, only a hint. And my word, a thinly concealed quotation from Beethoven.

All of it pastiche, apparently — for the love of a woman! This Carreau was a sensitive soul, poor Yvette doesn’t know how lucky she was to find him. The man who will build an entire world of falsehood around his beloved, surely that man is rare. More common is he who covers his own false life.

Abrupt transitions suggest the influence of Mahler; hurrying onwards to the recapitulation, Adorno is irritated by consecutive fifths that feel almost barbaric. But Beethoven, he realises, is the key. Thomas Mann, when he needed to invent a composer for his novel, called Adorno to his aid, and the result was a masterpiece. Mann and Carreau have something in common. Or is it Carreau and Adorno? Are we all counterfeiters? The thought of that stupid woman conned by her husband for years over this… this… extraordinary concoction. The strange fact is that for all its manifest flaws, the work displays genuine if modest artistic talent. It’s about as good as anything Adorno himself ever composed. Not a masterpiece, no, such things are as infrequent as faithful husbands. But even were it average, were it no better than the work of any music student, that would still make the hoax a most striking one. And all for the most inconsequential of motives.

Beethoven’s music represents the social process; the way in which the part can be understood only in relation to the totality. Yet this organic wholeness is also the mutual estrangement of individuals; Carreau-Klauer acknowledges, in the first movement of The Secret Knowledge, the tonic-mediant relationship so characteristic of Beethoven, but instead of merely imitating he highlights its strangeness. Only ears tired by the sounds of industry can fail to notice the abrupt juxtapositions and shocking montage that Beethoven made into a style, and that this fictitious composer whose work Adorno now plays has managed, albeit naively and intuitively, to comprehend.

He has spoken to Ulrike about Beethoven. Fundamentally she prefers the Rolling Stones but won’t admit it. There lingers in her hesitation to accompany him to concerts, not fear of exposure, but suspicion that the whole of the so-called classical repertoire constitutes bourgeois hegemony, when really its finest works are both its expression and negation. The significance of recapitulation is its emphasis: the identity of the non-identical. In those atavistic consecutive fifths Carreau-Klauer involuntarily affirms the fundamental inadequacy that was, after all, the initial impulse. The Frenchwoman loved Klauer, so Carreau had to become Klauer. The music is a process of becoming that is forever unfinishable. There can be no ending to it — until Adorno stops playing.

Two days later he gets another phone call at the university. This time he’s expecting a journalist or radio producer wanting to know his views about the student movement; instead it’s a man who gives a name Adorno doesn’t recognise and says, “I believe you spoke with Yvette Carreau.”

“Who? Oh yes, the French lady.”

“She told you about a certain book?”

“I have it.”

A pause. “Perhaps we could meet to discuss this.”

Please not another pointless stroll past the flowerbeds. “Come to my office,” Adorno says; they agree an appointment and he hangs up. The country’s in a rising state of turmoil and there are people pestering him with trivialities. The book is in his drawer in the office; he thought of trying to find a colleague who might understand the coded symbols but his curiosity evaporated as soon as the item was out of sight. Instead he’s been thinking about the problems of the Missa Solemnis. No themes, no development. Omission as a means of expression.