4: Étude-Tableau
“The students these days are just incredible,” Dadaïki Hishinuma murmured as he tore off a rather large piece of naan and put it in his mouth.
“Was there one in particular you liked, Mr. Numa?” Nathaniel asked innocently. Hishinuma just smiled and said, “Well.”
“It must be fun to hear so many talented kids play your music. Something only a composer gets to feel.”
After Miëko offered this anodyne opinion, Hishinuma shook his head slightly.
“It’s fun, but it’s also stressful. This one captured everything I wanted them to, but this one totally missed the point. ‘You idiot! Stop that right now!’ If only I could just …” Hishinuma made a grabbing motion.
“I imagine it’s very stressful,” Nathaniel sympathized. After all, he worked in both theater and film, and also composed and transcribed. Miëko’s seen him in rehearsal a few times, and she’s never seen a more demanding and detail-oriented director. He crafted every note and every nuance in his musicians until they were just right.
“How far does a musician’s freedom of interpretation go?” Miëko asked.
“Depends on how you interpret freedom. And interpret interpretation,” Hishinuma said, shrugging. “If it’s just for self-fulfillment, I don’t think that’s any good. But in most cases, it is in fact for self-fulfillment, so.”
His immediate reply, as well as the curtness of its delivery, suggested that he had had his music freely interpreted many times in the past.
“Anyhow, buddy boy,” Hishinuma said, sticking his face toward Nathaniel. “Do you believe that a composer knows his composition best?”
Hishinuma was smiling, but he also glared. Nathaniel cleared his throat.
“I’m sure you do, Nathaniel. The meaning of this sound, of this phrase—as well as the message meant to be delivered. You are the composer, after all. It came from me, like heaven and earth from God, yes?”
Hishinuma chewed his naan with his mouth slightly open. Despite his age, he still ate an incredible amount—and held it well. The three of them had each ordered four pieces of naan, but he was well into his third; both Nathaniel and Miëko were just starting their second.
“The thing is, there are people who really think themselves god. ‘I brought this note into the world. I know this piece better than anyone else. My intention is absolute.’ That type, I’m sure you know.”
Nathaniel made a face; he was in fact that type.
“But the older I get, the more I get the sense that we are just vessels to bring a music that already exists into the world.”
“A vessel?” Nathaniel asked.
“Just like a performer. We’re the opposite sides of the same coin. That music exists, like in math—the concept of ‘one,’ or ‘parallel lines,’ exists. We just discover it. That’s all we do.”
“So we’re prophets, of sorts,” Nathaniel murmured.
“That’s exactly right. We hear the voice of God and we deliver it. Great composers, amateur musicians, we are all just major and minor prophets. That’s what I’ve come to believe. Mm, this cheese naan. I’m getting another.”
“I’ll add a garlic naan, then,” Nathaniel said, and gestured to the waiter.
“Now that I think about it, it was Hugh who said that musicians should always strive to add something new to the world. New music, new interpretations.”
At the mention of their mentor’s name, Nathaniel and Miëko traded glances. Nathaniel had shared the idea with Miëko of grabbing Hishinuma to grill him about what he knew about Hoffman’s bomb and his last days, as well as Daphne’s intel on the honeybee prince. Miëko didn’t feel great about it, but her curiosity beat her decency and so she now sat here with an ex-prof-cum-frenemy-composer and her ex-husband with naan and curry before her.
“You’re curious about the boy, yes?” Hishinuma never missed a beat. He had probably already guessed when Nathaniel casually asked him to dinner.
Miëko and Nathaniel looked at each other again, and then decided it wasn’t worth lying. “Yes, Mr. Numa—is it true that Maestro went to him to teach him?” Nathaniel set his knit fingers on the table. Miëko wasn’t sure he was breathing.
“It is,” Hishinuma said dryly. “I heard him during the First Round and practically sprinted out of the hall at the end of the performance. I called Daphne and asked her where the hell Hugh found this boy.”
“And then?” Miëko asked. The way she and Nathaniel were leaning forward was a little comical; they both became small children when it came to their musical godfather.
“Daphne said that they were distant cousins.”
“What!?” Nathaniel and Miëko yelped simultaneously. They got a few looks, but neither registered them. Hishinuma waved his hand.
“Really, really distant. You know how Hugh is a quarter Japanese, right? This is a different bloodline that separated with Hugh’s grandmother and her sister.”
“Hmm,” Nathaniel hummed. He seemed relieved. Miëko wondered what her own expression looked like.
“Daphne herself didn’t know how they first met. I think even Hugh realized they were cousins only after the fact—not that it much matters, or that we’ll ever know. A fantastical relation.”
A fantastical relation. It was a little ridiculous, but also perfectly apt. It was just as ridiculous to imagine the greatest pianist of his generation teaching this fool, but also just as perfectly apt.
“I imagine you all know his father’s an apiarist. Their permanent residence is Paris, but it usually stands empty.”
“What about schooling?” Miëko asked.
“He goes when he goes. His father is also a licensed teacher, so.”
“Hmm.” The boy’s free, unencumbered spirit, Miëko thought, might have more to do with his upbringing than anything.
“But then fun thing is,” Hishinuma said, as though about to divulge a secret. Naturally his conversants leaned in. “He doesn’t own a piano.”
“Screw off!” “No way!” Nathaniel and Miëko were once again in disbelief. Someone actually shushed them. “What do you mean, he doesn’t have a piano? Like, not at home?” Nathaniel barked. Hishinuma sat, impassive, and nodded.
“I mean what I mean. He has no piano at home. But wherever they travel, either the boy or Hugh himself found a contact or a piano and got permission and just played. Before they met, the boy just played wherever he could.”
“I can’t believe it,” Miëko sighed. How could he play like that, when he only practiced with such a piecemeal schedule. Nathaniel looked bowled over as well.
No, maybe that’s the only way it was possible, Miëko thought. Counterintuitive as it was, not knowing when one could practice next could facilitate the degree of concentration and effort needed to reach his marvelousness and perfection.
“Hugh was also surprised at first, but what surprised him more was how the boy could create an amazing sound off of basically any piano, in any condition. He even knew how to tune them. Likely because he rarely had his pick of instruments. That’s what really got Hugh’s attention. It became fun, a game, a challenge, to go where he went, to find any old instrument, and hear an angel’s song come out.”
“So that’s why Maestro went,” Nathaniel almost whimpered. His envy was palpable.
“Yep. Anyhow, the boy didn’t have any scores either, so he got into the habit of memorizing any piece on first listen. Or they just improvised together. Daphne had heard them improvising together just once, when the boy’s father was working near their home. The way they traded the music back and forth on two adjacent pianos reminded her of two friends, both experts in the same field, having an intelligent, rollicking conversation.”
The two of them were rendered speechless. Maestro Hoffman improvising—it was literally unheard of to them. And if they hadn’t, almost no one else had either. That he would improvise, and at his age, with some boy at that …
Their unspeakable envy at this boy, Jin Kazama—when they were barely worthy of notice, when they had hardly heard him play in private, let alone improvise—manifested in Miëko’s reddening and Nathaniel’s trembling. But more than anything, they mourned the loss of the music of Maestro Hoffman’s improvisation to the eternity of time.
“Is there any chance there’s a recording of it?”
“No idea. They’re still sorting through his papers and files. Hugh was pretty cavalier about record-keeping, so maybe there’s something of his improvising between recording sessions or something like that.”
In these sorts of moments, Miëko and Nathaniel were one again one in their grief at their mentor’s passing.
“Oy, but there’s a bigger problem,” Hishinuma said darkly. “I see you two sitting there like the last ones to be picked for gym class baseball. Be honest with yourselves. Can you even judge him now?”
Miëko froze. She recalled Smirnoff’s sentiment.
—I’m beginning to see what Hoffman meant by “poison.”
—I mean, we have a huge dilemma on our hands.
“Do you think we can’t?” Nathaniel quietly countered. He of course knew what Hishinuma was saying, or rather was letting go unsaid. But Miëko, Alain, and Sergei understood the dilemma. She wasn’t sure he did.
“I won’t comment either way. That’s your job to figure out,” Hishinuma conceded. “But who can judge such a talent, such a monstrous talent? Historically, the greatest talents have always been rejected by judging panels. Their talent is just beyond the boundaries of their judging.”
Hishinuma ripped up his second cheese naan with a thoughtful expression.
“Hugh knew this would happen, and sent the boy into the world despite that. He is challenging us. We are being tested.”
“If you think so,” Nathaniel parried, still unconvinced.
We’re so screwed, Miëko despaired. She had often felt that as a judge, she was being judged just as much as she was judging the contestants. Who is let through and who is blocked says as much about the judges as the contestants.
Judgment is scary, Miëko thought. Somehow even more so when you’re dispensing it. I never knew.