When Imre told his daughter about Julius leaving, she was silent—when was she not?—and eventually said, simply, “1940,” and “Unimaginable.”
“I suppose it must seem that way to anyone of your age. I might just as well have said 2000. Now that really is unimaginable.”
The following day, the first day of December—a Wednesday—Méret called on Rosen just after dusk for her after-school tuition, feeling she was the harbinger of news. She had grown accustomed to Rosen feeding her pieces of history, paring it off from chaos to give her manageable, digestible chunks. Now she had something to offer in return—the morsel that was Phillipe Julius leaving for Paris. She felt it was a mirror, her news reflecting the life of Rosen himself.
The big room was bare. Stripped back to what it had been the first time she saw it. The books, the all-but-endless collected editions of Europe’s masters—Goethe, Schiller, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens—that she had sorted and shelved with him were gone. The rugs were rolled up and tied, the Bechstein was bound and wrapped in a carapace of heavy felt and standing on edge with its three legs pointing at her like a slaughtered rhinoceros.
Only the two chairs remained. The two chairs and the cello.
“How long have you known?”
It was the most adult statement she had ever uttered, powerful in its elisions of expression and its complexities of assumption and meaning.
He stood before her, elegant in his simple two-piece black suit—she had come to think of it as his uniform—hands clasped in front of him, paused on the brink of difficulty.
“I decided on Sunday.”
“I was here on Sunday. We always meet on Sundays.”
“I decided after you left.”
“And you did what? Just called the removal men on Monday morning and had them load up four years of your life.”
“I think from your tone, my dear, you mean four years of yours. I have moved before. I have packed and run before. The act is well within my grasp. It revives no old pain, so I cope with the new one entirely.”
“New pain?”
“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
She had not the emotional vocabulary to work it out and utter it, but it seemed to her that this must be what lovers leaving felt like. And that that was what he meant. And that was absurd. He was . . . what was he? Fifty? And she was thirteen going on fourteen.
It was a spell crying out to be broken. Rosen unclasped his hands and did what he always did, took out his silver cigarette case, tapped a cigarette against the side of it, lit up, turned his head, and blew the first whiffs of smoke away.
“Play for me,” he said.
“One last time?”
“Why should it be the last? And don’t answer that. Just play.”
“What shall I play?”
“You’ve been practicing a piece in private.”
“How did you know?”
“Just play for me, Méret.”
She wrapped herself around the cello, felt again the sensation she always felt, of music and the lifeblood of time seeping into her flesh, and struck up the piece she had rehearsed as a surprise for him—Bach’s Cello Suite no. 3, the sixth movement. Gigue.
“Shadows and light,” Rosen said when she had finished.
“Yes,” she replied, for that was what it was.