Part I
It was her father who took the seat next to me. She sat down to his right. What if she had been the first to enter the room?
Not that I didn’t like her father. We soon struck up a conversation about footstools and props, and I recommended the latter and offered him to try it out on my guitar when we got back to the house.
“Sure,” he said. “Thank you. I’d love to.”
Then, suddenly, she joined in the conversation. I hadn’t realized she’d been listening. “I prefer to just cross my legs, lean back, you know, like this.” She demonstrated quickly and smiled almost apologetically, which had me a little surprised. I had watched her more closely during the last few days and had not found her shy.
“Well, it’s comfortable, but you can’t play everything so well that way,” I answered, sounding remarkably composed.
“I can’t play well anyway,” she said and laughed.
“You play the guitar?”
“Not really, just a bit, you know, just for fun.”
That bashful smile again. I wanted to say something nice, something encouraging, she did not need to be shy with me – but I was tongue-tied. Her father kindly took over.
“She’s better than all thirty of my pupils together,” he said.
You needn’t tell me that, I thought.
She and I didn’t talk any more during the meal, and I was glad when her father started a discussion with Oliver, my teacher. I wasn’t sure – had there been a hint of suspicion in his eyes when he looked at me after his daughter turned away? I had a feeling it was not easy to hide anything from this man.
When our cheerful little group stepped outside the restaurant, I took my time to light my cigarette, letting all the others pass. I was lucky – she came outside last of all and started walking at the end of the slow trail with Samantha and that funny girl named Miriam. I plodded along behind them, without any clear idea what I was going to do. I was grateful for the chilly autumn wind because it cooled my face, and for the cigarette in my hand. She didn’t smoke – possibly even anti-smoking – but I needed it now to keep calm. And she was only fifteen after all…well, I had been smoking since I was fourteen, so that didn’t say anything.
Fifteen…
I had almost fallen off my chair when Sullivan, the violin teacher, had announced her at the concert some three hours ago, “at fifteen she is the youngest participant of this workshop.”
The sky was clear and the stars shone brighter than I had ever seen them at home in the city. There weren’t a lot of lights in this sleepy mountain village with its estimated thousand inhabitants. But I soon turned my eyes away from the sky and to the three girls walking in front of me. It wasn’t far to the hostel-like mansion where we were lodging for the week, and I had to take advantage of the situation before we got there, though I didn’t know in the slightest how to.
I saw that she wasn’t taking part in Samantha and Miriam’s discussion about food. Boy, that Samantha could talk for hours and hours… I wondered where she got all that energy from, as thin as she was – clearly anorexic. Anyway.
I took one more drag at my cigarette and caught up with the girls. I put a hand on her shoulder. She stopped and looked at me. Samantha and Miriam were so absorbed in their conversation about tiramisu, they didn’t even notice.
I let go of her shoulder and waited, allowing the other girls to bring a distance between them and us.
“What is it?” she asked at last.
I started slowly following the others, she walked along beside me.
“Well.”
I could feel my face heating up. I should have at least prepared some words to start with. Thank god it was dark.
“Well,” I said again. “The concert – you did a pretty good job there.”
“Oh no,” she groaned. “Don’t mention it!”
“What?”
“I screwed up about everything you can possibly screw up.”
I was confused. Were we talking about the same concert?
“But then again, I guess you’re never content with yourself.”
I get it, I thought. Overcritical.
“You were –” She cleared her throat. “You were fantastic.”
“I played wrong somewhere in the second part
“But that didn’t matter. Because the rest was so good. I mean, timing, clarity, dynamics. And the feeling.”
We reached the bridge over the small river that ran through the village.
“You know, when I hear and see all those prodigies – you know, folks like Cathy and Samantha – it seems to me like they’re not really aware of what they’re doing.”
We simultaneously stopped when we were halfway across the bridge, leaned on the balustrade and looked down into the splashing water.
“They’re playing great stuff, no question, technically as well as musically. It just seems to me like they don’t really understand what they’re doing, they do it right automatically. It’s in their nature. But you –“ She turned and looked at me. “You do understand. You can play Bach, and you can play Beatles and stuff. Because you’re aware of the music. Know what I mean?” Again her laugh sounded embarrassed. “It’s hard to put this in words.”
I exhaled a cloud of smoke, careful not to blow it in her direction.
“I don’t think you need to put it in words,” I said. “I see what you mean when I hear you play, and I feel what you mean when I play myself. I saw it when we were jamming last night, me and Oliver and your dad. Any other person would’ve got bored by the time, but you just sat there and listened, you know.”
“It’s good,” she said. “It’s good to know that there is somebody who understands.”
We were silent for a while, but it was not an awkward silence.
But then she said, “We’d better get going, don’t you think? They’ll be wondering what’s keeping us so long.”
“Alright.”
I threw the cigarette butt over the railing.
“You’re polluting the river,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
She laughed. At least it didn’t sound embarrassed this time.
We could see the others further down the street. The house wasn’t far, I had to hurry up.
“Would you mind?” I asked.
“Mind what?”
“If they made fun of us, like, you know…”
“Well – no,” she said. “You mean, like, innuendoes. Well that’s annoying of course, but I wouldn’t mind.”
I could tell she was confused by the question. Damn it. But it was our last evening here. So I carried on.
“And if it was true?”
Boy, I was sounding like I knew exactly where this was heading. No such luck.
She didn’t answer for a long time. “I – well – what do you mean?”
I saw that I couldn’t expect her to get anything out of my cryptic hints. To make things worse, the house was moving closer. The others were reaching it just now.
What’s the point, I thought. Just spit it out.
“I like you,” I said. “I really like you. I mean – I really like you.”
Oh well. Now it was my turn to laugh embarrassedly, though I didn’t feel like it at all.
She didn’t say a word. When her silence started to worry me, I said, “I’m sorry if I…did I say something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No. But I don’t understand.” She looked at me and gave an incredulous smile.
I couldn’t make sense of it. What was so hard to understand about “I like you”? I could say it another way, if that was the problem.
“I love you,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I have to tell you. It’s pretty bad.”
My hands were sweaty again. She would turn me down, I saw it coming.
But she was silent. We drew near the gates of the fence that encircled the house and the church beside it. I, too, was at a loss for words now. I had made a complete fool of myself.
Suddenly a fear seized me. “Please,” I said as we crossed the front yard, “please don’t tell anybody. I – I’m serious, and I’d like to keep this private. That OK with you?”
“Sure,” she breathed and nodded, but did not look at me.
She came to the common room a little while later, where I was in the middle of a table soccer match to prevent myself from starting to think, me and Samantha against Tom and Zak. She was pale. Mechanically she picked up a bat and joined her mother, Miriam and Sullivan at table tennis.
Tom scored a goal.
“Are you tired, Pete?” said Samantha. “Maybe I’d better keep on talking.”
I decided I was not going to let that happen. The last ten minutes had been too much of a torture.
“Two men meet in the street,” I said as Zak brought the ball back into the game. “One says, ‘Something painful happened to me last week: I wanted to travel to Pittsburgh, and the lady at the ticket office had such enormous knockers that instead of I need a ticket to Pittsburgh I said, I need a ticket to Titsburgh.’ ‘You call that painful,’ says the other guy, ‘yesterday I wanted to ask my wife, could you pass the butter, please, and instead I said, you motherfucker, you’ve ruined my whole life!’
A ping pong ball whooshed past my left ear. She was finding it hard to concentrate as well.
The next morning, I awoke feeling drowsy and sore. Like I was having a hangover. I turned off the alarm on my cell phone and slowly crawled out of bed. I dressed and went to the bathroom. As I looked in the mirror above the sink, I found I wasn’t only feeling hung over but also looking it. I’d hit the sack not much later than one o’clock last night, so that made more than seven hours of sleep, and I had only had two pints at the restaurant. What was the matter with me?
I splashed my face with cold water and made an attempt at combing my hair. Tom came in.
“Forget it,” he said and grinned, seeing the comb in my hand.
She was already sitting at the table when we came to the breakfast room.
Tom and I sat down at the opposite end of the table. I was desperate for some coffee. Oliver poured me a cup, and I made myself a piece of bread with strawberry jam. From the corner of my eye I could see her eating a bagel with honey, looking as if every bite took her a great effort. Then she put the other half of the bagel onto her father’s plate.
She and her parents went back upstairs while I was still in the middle of breakfast. They would soon set off. I racked my brains how to get to talk to her alone. I needed one last word before they left, which might well be the last time I saw her in my life.
I finished my last piece of bread in a hurry and told Tom and Samantha and Maggie, whom I was going to give a ride back home, I needed to get my stuff together. Going up the stairs, I met her coming downstairs with her bags and her violin. Our eyes met only for a fraction of a second.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said and passed me.
I went into my room, got the guitar and the music stand. This time I met her parents on the stairs.
“Ah, Peter,” said her father, “I think you’ve still got the pencil with the magnet that we lent you.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry. If you’ll wait a second…”
“Give it to Katie,” he said. “She’s outside in the yard.”
Thank you Carl! I thought. This was my chance. I went down the rest of the stairs, put the guitar down in the entrance hall, opened the case and got out the pencil, and went outside.
She was just cramming her bag into the space between the driver’s seat and the back seat. I went around the dark blue Volkswagen.
“Here,” I said and held out the pencil.
“Thanks,” she said, took it, and put it into one of the outside pockets of her traveling bag.
“That magnet is really handy,” I said. “I have to get me one of those.”
“Go to the violin maker’s,” said she, “they sell them there.”
The awkward silence again.
“Listen,” I said. “Let’s have this straight. You don’t like me?”
She didn’t answer.
“I just need to know.”
Time was pressing. Her parents probably were on the way down again already.
She stared past my left shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“But you don’t love me.”
Suddenly she looked me in the eyes. “You’ve got a girlfriend.”
“I –“ I could feel the blush rise to my cheeks. “How do you know?”
She was looking at my shoulder again. “On the first or second evening, you left the company to go phone somebody. I didn’t suppose your parents were having you update them about your whereabouts on a regular basis. And I – well, I just happened to spot her picture on your cell phone. When you showed us that video of your dog.”
I swallowed. “I’m going to end it as soon as I get home. It’s high time for a change anyway. It was never really serious, not as far as I am concerned.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “But of course you’re serious about me, the little fiddling duckling, I get it.”
Fiddling duckling? Where’d she got that expression from?!
I was about to object, but her parents emerged from the house, followed by Oliver, Tom, Maggie, Miriam, and the violin prof. She rounded the car, ignoring me. I followed her, biting my lower lip. That’s it, I thought. They’re gonna leave, and I’m never gonna see her again.
“This is good bye then,” said Sullivan and started hugging them. “But we’ll see each other soon, I hope.”
You’re lucky, I thought.
I said good bye to her father and to Oliver, who was going to travel with them. She was imitating her mother, embracing the girls and shaking hands with Tom. Then they came to me. I did the handshake with her mother, then she stood before me. This time it was my right shoulder that seemed to have caught her interest.
“Good bye.” She held out her hand.
I seized it briefly. “Bye. And all the best…with your violin.”
“Thank you.”
At last she looked at me.
“Everyone ready for departure?” her father called. “Oliver, Katie?”
And she turned away, got into the car, gave one last wave to our little assembly, and was gone.
