3: Nocturne

“My God. I was shocked,” Alain kept repeating, seemingly from the aftereffects of the day’s events. “Miëko reacted pretty much exactly as he predicted. And who would have thought it’d be Miëko? Totally unexpected. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it were from the nitpicks and complainers in Moscow …”

Beside him, Miëko sat, clutching a wineglass and glaring.

Sergei was likewise wordlessly emptying his glass, deep in thought and staring at Hoffman’s recommendation letter lying on the table as though with intent to pierce it with his will alone.

The night was yet full of life. Outside, people bustled about, and cars traced fluorescent arcs through the city streets.

The three of them had ensconced themselves at a quiet table in a bistro on the outskirts of Paris. A favorite of theirs, the restaurant played host to their hours-long drinking and debating several times a year; the owner, remembering them, had guided them to their usual table.

Whether from lack of appetite or a late lunch, the dishes on their table were few, but two bottles of wine already stood empty.

Miëko’s bad mood, she was realizing, was in part to hide her embarrassment. The cause of that embarrassment, well, lay before her—that unvarnished, clean, wholehearted letter. Back at the recital hall, in her fit of fury, she had snatched the letter from Alain’s hand and read it in one furious burst.

Afterward, Miëko indeed had not a word of defense for herself. Over time, her fury cooled and her face reddened. A swirl of emotions: shock, disbelief, embarrassment, insult. They churned within her, but, before the unforgiving words of the letter, she could only hold them in.

Her companions looked upon her, at times sympathetic, at others stern. How perfectly Hoffman, now having rested in peace for five months, predicted Miëko’s reaction to Kazama. Could it be Hoffman’s genius, or Miëko’s simpleness? Probably some of both. But Miëko only blamed herself for her predictable, her childish reaction. She could see Hoffman smiling down at her—now, now.

“Gosh, is he cruel,” Miëko murmured, almost to herself. The wine she normally would have drunk with a sense of liberation tasted peculiarly bitter tonight.

Honestly. What a shock.

Miëko, from her youth, received appraisals usually invoking her naïveté and wildness. Though she had oft been considered a problem child, she had never been thought of as second-rate, either. But now, that same Miëko, like the countless Japanese and European professors who criticized her directness of expression, unorthodox performance, stage mannerisms, and anything else they could come up with, found herself rejecting the musicality of a youth who hadn’t even debuted yet.

She felt a chill.

Had she become too old? Too prim and boring, but unable to recognize it yet? She had sworn never to become that person, but had she unknowingly, unwittingly joined the side of the “establishment?”

Her wineglass was empty.

“Hey, Miëko. Why did you get so angry?” Alain (who, up until now, had been making such a game of teasing her that one would expect him to tell the story to his grandchildren) asked with unexpected seriousness.

“Hm?”

“I’ve never seen you react to anything like that. It’s different from when you’re normally angry. You become really … like, cold, and calm. But today you just exploded. Why? Why the rejection?”

Miëko sank into thought. It was odd. The fury was totally gone. In fact, even the performance which had conjured such emotions was already fading from memory.

What could it have been?

“And what about you? Did you not feel anything? Discomfort, displeasure, any … almost biological rejection?” She struggled to find an appropriate expression. But she couldn’t give her words the necessary weight. Alain shook his head.

“No, not really. I did think it was a little dangerous, almost, though—such a visceral shock, and joy.”

Miëko nodded. “I think that and my terror, my fury are just a hair apart. The same emotion, but felt either as release or assault.”

“No, that makes sense. I can see that.”

The atmosphere of an audition is special—no recording can quite capture the emotion of that moment.

—You don’t need to see auditions, though, do you?

A voice, heard long ago, spoke in Miëko’s mind. Warm and suppressing a laugh, and yet serious—a celestial voice.

Maestro Hoffman.

From deep in her heart, the hurt, the ignored sensations, crawled up and suffused her body.

O, O, O. So that’s what it was.

I had been jealous of this boy.

Perhaps from the moment she saw that one line on his info sheet, she had been angry. “Studied with Hugh von Hoffman from 5 years old.” Just that one, nothing line. A line she would have killed to have on her own info sheet.

“I don’t know. Was he actually that great?” Alain murmured worriedly. They all looked at each other. Miëko, for one, agreed.

“No, I see what you mean—something really exciting, but just that one time. We’re only human.”

It happens sometimes—due to the order, or the atmosphere, or people’s conditions, or an angel going by, or whatever. Hearing the contestant at the audition or the first round, one gets all excited—“This one, this one’s something else”—and then ends up disappointed. Sometimes one doesn’t even remember, amidst all the excitement, the performance given by the contestant at the audition.

“We have a different problem, though,” Sergei said. Both looked at him.

“Problem?”

“Yeah. I think I’m starting to see what Hoffman meant by ‘poison.’”

Sergei’s expression had passed serious and become intimidating. He leaned forward in his chair, and the chair made an aggressive creaking sound.

“What do you mean?” Alain asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I mean, we have a huge dilemma on our hands.” Sergei calmly emptied his wineglass as though he were drinking water. With his tremendous tolerance for alcohol, it probably did feel like water for Sergei. And, when in thought, his drinking accelerated, giving off the illusion of actually becoming more clear-headed.

“Dilemma?” Miëko, who had been turning the word over in her mind, said. She looked to Sergei’s face, in profile at her angle, and felt a twinge of nervousness.

At the end of the audition, while she had been erupting in a fury, the staffers had been chatting and moving with great excitement. It almost seemed as though a star had been born even before the competition had started. Surely Kazama’s mysterious appearance and disappearance played a role. Though the person in question had long departed, the hall retained an energy that would not dissipate. When the lone staffer who talked with him described his dirt-caked hands and confusion regarding concert dress, the excitement only ballooned. His reputation had grown from “prodigy” to “legend” before the hall had even closed for the night.

“What does his father do? He said he was helping his father beforehand, right?” Sergei’s brusque inquiry to the competition organizers yielded no response; the info sheet was all anyone seemed to know about him.

Typically, those who pass the auditions are selected without much delay—if not without argument (it is a common occurrence for staffers to strain to overhear the sometimes-heated discussions among judges)—and notified, but today, the three judges moved into deliberations and took far longer than usual.

Naturally because Miëko initially flat-out refused to endorse Kazama’s continuation.

Contestants pass or fail based on the sum of each judge’s score, but since there is a minimum cutoff, the number who pass varies. There were two others whom they thought were worth passing, and these deliberations went smoothly. Almost all the time was spent on Kazama. And, since Alain and Sergei had given him near-perfect scores, even if Miëko had scored him with zeroes, Kazama would pass; nevertheless, as friends, they attempted to convince her. Miëko, for her part, though she knew his continuation was guaranteed, strenuously voiced her objections thus:

“I probably would not have objected this much if he weren’t Hoffman’s pupil. But, truly being his pupil and even having received a recommendation, his blatant rejection of Hoffman’s musicality—with such a crazy style of performance—is unforgivable. It’s almost mocking his mentor, no? I can hardly call it the attitude a musician should adopt. If this were an attempt to step out from a mentor’s shadow, to try on this or that style, fine. But failing to process and understand a mentor’s style, at this stage, is a serious problem.”

Having patiently listened to her opinion, Sergei and Alain took turns with their attacks:

“But you acknowledge his compelling technique and musicality, right? If so, whether we permit or deny his music, his art, is not up to us. If they meet a baseline competency, we give them a chance. That’s all this audition is. The contestant’s musical taste is not what’s up for debate right now.”

“Isn’t the fact that we’re sitting here, talking about him for God knows how long, incroyable in itself? Evoking such support and disapprobation from an audience means that he has that something. You’re the one who says that an overcrowded panel makes for boring contestants—that three is the perfect number of judges. It could have been a fluke, you’re right. But it definitely left an impression—on us, on the staff, on the audience. That’s what we should consider first. Not to mention his technique. Gosh, his technique.”

There were no faults in the pair’s arguments. Miëko slowly grew wordless. Alain’s next comment was the knockout blow:

“Don’t you want to listen to him again?

“Don’t you want to show the Moscow or New York pricks this performance? Aren’t you curious as to their reaction? Pissing them off is good fun in its own right.”

They knew Miëko well: there are subtle differences in personality among the five panels of Yoshigaë’s preliminaries. They’re not exactly enemies, or even rivals, but the people comprising Moscow’s and New York’s panels (the latter especially—a certain someone sat, all smiles, in Juilliard’s recital hall this very moment, preparing for that evening’s audition) were sometimes referred to by Miëko as the “breeders” or “trainers.”

And Miëko’s imagination got the better of her: those oh-so-great, honored, distinguished members of the panels, sprinting up to her after hearing Kazama’s performance in hysterics, screaming this or that about how she possibly could have let him in, while she looked upon them with but the slightest smirk on her face. It was a scene so tempting that it almost made her forget her own fury. And it was what felled the last barrier of resistance within her.

“All right. Let’s contact the qualifiers.”

Before Miëko’s head had even completed its nod, Sergei had thrown the door open and started yelling at the staffers.

Ah, well. It’s too late now.

*   *   *   

It very well could have been Sergei who was thinking it was too late.

As the waiter poured out a third bottle of wine, Miëko was watching his face for any signs of what he’d say.

“I’m sure he hasn’t received any formal training,” Sergei said, almost to himself. “His behavior onstage, the break-less performance. It literally could be his first performance. Hoffman knew this. That’s why his info sheet looks the way it does; that’s why he wrote a recommendation.”

“What do you mean?” Alain and Miëko had a guess as to the answer, but they beguilingly asked anyway.

Sergei, recognizing this, replied sardonically, “Because he wanted to force us to accept him.”

“Duh.”

“Quit the faking. You know what I’m trying to say,” Sergei spat and emptied his glass in one monstrous gulp. “It’s just like Miëko said earlier. We can’t reject Maestro Hoffman’s judgment. We respect him too much, and his music was too great. And he’s not of this world anymore, at any rate.

“We did exactly as he wished. We allowed Kazama to continue. You saw the staffers. Fama volat. As for the contents of Hoffman’s recommendation. Why would he have attached one at all? To make it impossible to drop him. His precious pupil. There’s no way we can’t treat him preciously.”

Sergei glared at them. Alain added on, “Because without the recommendation, we might have dropped him.”

Sergei nodded, satisfied. “Exactly. He knows, to whatever degree, we’re susceptible to a bias in favor of ‘trained musicians.’ And if we’re being cynical about it—we gotta get those lesson fees, and the tuition, and all that. Who’s going to consider his no-name no-money kid on the same level as a Curtis kid who’s been playing since he needed a stepstool to reach the bench? That’s what this recommendation is guarding against.

“So there’s that—disallowing for a panel’s rejecting him. And also.” Sergei made a face, an expression as close to sad as could be on the Russian’s face. “Disallowing for the establishment’s ignoring him or doing him wrong. That’s why it was needed. To give this kid, from another world, a real chance. Because if we don’t, we’re going against Hoffman himself. But, what’s scarier than that, is—” Sergei glanced at them— “Hoffman’s right. He really does have that something. Even without any training whatsoever.”

Alain and Miëko sat, absorbed.

What have we done?

A sense of fear, of unknowable but fearsome machinations, churned within her.

A phone rang, piercing and violent. Alain and Miëko both jolted.

“Sorry—” Sergei picked up the phone. In his huge hands, the phone looked like a child’s candy.

“Yes, right. I see. Really.” The rest of the conversation proceeded inaudibly, and then Sergei hung up. In response to their curious looks, he explained, “It’s the administration. They finally got in touch with Kazama.”

“Only now?” Alain checked his watch. It was just about midnight.

“His father’s an apiarist. He has a professorship in biology, but right now he runs an apiary. Something about collecting honey near Hôtel de Ville.”^[1]

“An apiarist.” Alain and Miëko turned the word over as though they were hearing it for the first time. “Truly another world,” Alain laughed bitterly.

Whether we will accept him as a true gift, or look upon him as a calamity—that is up to us.

In that moment, this valediction of Hoffman echoed through all their minds at once.

1. Paris's city hall.

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