FROM PIECES FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA
Norman Lock
I.
We are discussing the case of Orpheus, whom the French call Orphée, Italians Orfeo, and Germans also Orpheus, a fact surprising to us as we sit sipping boilermakers (concoctions in which we do not, as a rule, indulge, because of our wits, which must be kept about us even here, beyond the reach of events). While said to be unmusical, German has sonorities pleasing to the ear of Germans— states Prime Minister von––, who relishes sauerkraut and recites at this moment Rilke’s sonnets to him, to Orpheus, slumped in an ice-cream-parlor chair, an arm against its lyre-shaped back, his fingers touching, as it were, the strings of it. You cannot hope to ransom your Eurydice from death with unseductive songs! the P. M. chides the ancient Greek in a language that ought not to be understood by him, but somehow is. Threnodies for victims of earthquake, dirges for casualties of war, laments for penguins whose polar homes are shrinking are mutton to a woman in thrall to strange impulses. You must, as in antiquity, sing to her of indolent Thracian afternoons, of the blue sea among the Peloponnesian isles, of evenings under the myrtle trees. Eurydice must be made to wake from the fatal spell woven like a shroud by Hades’ hand. His fingers equal yours in nimbleness, though his voice numbs. Once, yours would bloom in her overnight as moonflowers do. Bewildered, Orpheus sits musing in the lengthening shadows (an effect of the Electrician’s, whose stage artifices delight) and dibbles with a finger the chocolate mousse brought by the Maitre-d, as if chocolate were a universal balm! I thought—the Greek speaks at last—that I was in the underworld and, coming up the winding stairs, expected to see the ice-cold marble halls of the palace of the dead. Who are you? His perplexity stirs in us sympathy for a man, like us, who belongs to another time. What sort of people are you? His voice ascends to a falsetto of fury to find himself so lost. Or are you gods? That makes us laugh! We are mortal and the dreams of mortals. We are real and un-, here and not, affirmation and negation, yes and no, 0 and 1. Would you like a drink or a cigarette or a dance ticket? There are pleasures of a kind in this hotel that make us glad we came. Where—asks Orpheus—did you come from? We squirm in our chairs, wanting to forget. The Plumber answers, for he has traced the lines of our descent deeper than most and knows: The world. We turn our heads, ashamed or afraid or both. The world with its smoking towers, roadside bombs, greenhouse gases, poisoned earth. Outside is death, Orpheus, and the cities of the dead! the Chanteuse says in a voice colored by emotion. (She has, like him, a gift to weld us to her breath.) He rises, knocking over the chair, which jars like an unstrung lyre the sudden silence of the hotel bar. Then maybe she is there, he says sadly. Eurydice! He strides toward the stairs, stops, stands uncertainly, asks: How do I reach the world? The Chanteuse cries, No, Orphée, please! Stay with us! She imagines love duets in the Aegean Room, romantic chansons sung among the ruins, and soft Lydian airs played by their two mouths’ embouchures pressed one against the other. What is a General of cavalry to the son of Apollo and Calliope, whose song moved trees and stones! How impuissant even the hotel’s Telepath, by whose gaze a spoon can sidle across a table! Stay, Orphée! The Chanteuse is opening her blouse while the lights dim to simulate the lambency of hearth or forge. A cardboard Argoslips across a painted ocean, her sail swollen with wind. We have the works of Pindar, Bulfinch, and Edith Hamilton. We know what is to happen, even if you do not: your death at the hands of the Maenads, your head on Lesbos! He listens as if to history’s distant roar, sound of sea and fire. His eyes rest upon the Chanteuse, turning her throat and breasts to roses. She sings—a Siren!—and he forgets Eurydice until the orchestra wheezes comically into the “Infernal Gallop” by Jacques Offenbach. The Funambulist dances the can-can on the tightrope, impudently showing her bloomers! This is a farce! the P. M. rages at the impious musicians. Lost to us as surely as Eurydice to him, Orpheus turns from us and enters the lobby mirror and his death—his separated head left to drift down the river Hebrus toward the isle of Lesbos, serenaded by nightingales.
II.
The Hydrologist has not been seen for a time that seems to us long, though it may be otherwise here where duration is, like the rubber band, uncertain. We send him telegrams sung by the Chanteuse in a coloratura that charms carp from the depths of the canal he has been digging with an industry blind to necessity and sleep—a Suez whose concrete is not. Neither is the desert sand a mineral composition but is, instead, a musical one. (He is entranced by the musicians’ playing in their sleep a Sigmund Romberg operetta.) He scarcely looked at me, the Chanteuse says unbuttoning her Western Union blouse, while in bed the General waits with tremulous emotion. I am sorry for him. Feel sorry for me! he cries like a child General. You are making me wild as a bull elephant! The Telepath has turned us into voyeurs sitting in a ring, hands clasped in one another’s, to witness this bedroom farce. Ennui is demoralizing in weak men like us, whose indecent gaze might have persisted had the Hydrologist, whose specialty is channels of liquid distribution such as canals, aquifers, and aqueducts not shouted: Eureka! (He can be forgiven his unoriginality; he is dry as dust in every aspect of his life save water.) We meet him on the cellar stairs, leading by a filthy bandage an Egyptian mummy. By accident, I cracked open the lid of its sarcophagus with a pickaxe! The specialist is close to tears, overwrought with ambivalent emotion. I didn’t mean to disturb its eternal rest, he says; but, ladies and gentlemen, what a thing to find! We flinch because of the stink. Take it back where you found it! urges the hotel Plumber, expert in the unsavory. Indignant, the Hydrologist refuses: It will reveal to us the secrets of the pyramids and the meaning of the Sphinx. Does it speak? asks the Prime Minister until this moment speechless. But the Hydrologist has yet to pose a question to his shabby protégé. Did Cleopatra look more like Claudette Colbert or Elizabeth Taylor? the Manicurist quizzes it. (While blonde, she is a bona fide film historian.) How many constellations did Amenhope’s Catalogue of the Universe contain? the Soubrette, graduate of the Sorbonne, inquires. The Mummy does not respond. (Is it mute, willful, or are its brains buried by the Nile in a canopic jar?) I shall read its mind, says the Telepath. Yes, do! the Analyst agrees. I should like to map its mental landscape—its compulsions, torments, and desires. The Telepath takes the Mummy’s hand, shudders (as do we in sympathy!), shuts his eyes, thinks with strength enough to bend spoons:
What do you see? the Analyst asks. Birds mostly with, here and there, a snake. Ah! He dreams still of flight or wriggling his way from the tomb, the Analyst avers with a conceit I find intolerable. No doubt his is a dream life rich in latent content. I should like to try my thought-extractor on him—he says, shoving the unraveling mummy toward his consultancy. No! the Hydrologist shouts; it’s mine! The Prime Minister, whose diplomatic skills are sharpened by disputes regarding the hotel’s women, proposes to cut the mummy in two, Solomonwise. Bored by their wrangling, the musicians play Romberg’s “Desert Song,” which beguiled the Hydrologist at his digging. The mummy dances as if afflicted by a disorder of the central nervous system. Interesting—says the Soubrette, offering no comment on the unorthodox nature of the mummy’s choreography. It might be possessed by Hathor herself, goddess of love, dance, and alcohol. What’s happening? The General enters the lobby, looking pleased as would anyone having recently experienced love’s quavers and demi-quavers. Is that an Egyptian? he asks. Amummified one, replies the P. M. Ah! In Cairo I knew several while a subaltern attached to Lord Kitchener’s staff. Decent fellows, if a bit stiff. I’m dying for a gin! We adjourn to the barroom, the General gallantly steering the mummy by the arm. You’ll be fine after a bath and a change of linen. Do you like gin? Do you play bridge? Do you go in for singing a cappella? But the mummy remains silently grim. That night while the guests are sleeping, the defunct Egyptian (gifted with supernatural power by Kuk, god of darkness and the Underworld) invades the mind of Tey, adored millennia before our common age—now, by metempsychosis, the hotel Manicurist. There, it insinuates a dream in which they are once more lying in each other’s arms during the reign of Cheops, who built the pyramid at Giza. In the morning she has vanished. In her bed among the tumbled sheets is a length of gauze. At breakfast, the Boatman informs us that a swan boat is missing from the pier. They have returned—says the Telepath, who saw, in his own dream, theirs—to Aswan on the Nile, underneath the date palms, Ibis walking stiffly in the shallows, spearing silver fishes in the sun. The Taxidermist puts down his fork and hurries in another swan boat after them. (He hoped to learn the ancient methods of mummification.) But he returns, saying their dream is beyond our own. They are in a time that cannot be recalled by artifice, no matter how desperate we are to have it come again. The Decorator rolls up the scenery. The Electrician turns out the lights, plunging the subterranean lake into darkness. The musicians put away their instruments, sheet music scattering on the wind to the far corners of the night.