Pleased that a fellow Pole had penetrated to the heart of the scherzo, Krystyna went back to the beginning, repeating her analysis.
‘Does he use the same …’ Wiktor hesitated for the right word in German, and Krystyna helped him in Polish: ‘The same strategy?’
‘Yes. Does he do the same in the last étude?’
‘The one you liked so much?’
Wiktor smiled with pleasure. ‘You remember?’
‘About music I remember everything. No, Pan Wiktor, the process is not similar. The last étude is sheer power.’ She turned toward the students: ‘That damn-fool German said that Chopin was good for salon divertissements. Soft. Vague. Till Bukowski here slapped him in the face with a glove. It was a napkin, really. But listen to this, which I played that night on purpose to stifle such rumors.’
She launched into a titanic rendition of the final étude, striking the great chords with such force that the room trembled, running the blizzard of arpeggios until it seemed as if they must engulf all Vienna. When the brief, tempestuous piece ended she turned to Wiktor and said gently: ‘I will explain it, but I’m not sure you would understand. It’s very technical, you know.’ Then she smiled at him as if the sun were reappearing after a storm. ‘Chopin tricks us all the time, the little magician.’
Playing the étude very softly, she spoke along with the notes: ‘He adds a sixth, a seventh and an eighth to produce the new chord you like so much. And from it emerge the thirteen great bass chords. It’s a harmonic variation, really. C minor to C major, then subtly back to C minor and here an A flat major. And the great chords appear first in the right hand, not the left. Then they thunder over to left, with everything becoming C major.’
As Wiktor stood silent she asked for some paper and a pencil, and with exquisite script she wrote out the thirteen notes which made the étude so powerful. ‘You can play them on your own piano. C to set the stage. Then C, B, E flat, C. Then C, B flat, A flat, B flat. And the last chain B flat, A flat, F, A flat. And there you are.’ She showed him how to pick out the single notes, and on the third repetition he had them mastered.
‘Now you can play Chopin,’ she said with impish delight, leaving the piano and going to where beer and sausages were being served.
Wiktor followed her and said, with quivering emotion, while she stuffed a very large sausage into her mouth: ‘Panna Krystyna, will you do me the honor of occupying my carriage at the gala tomorrow?’ Before she could answer, he added: ‘It’s not my carriage, really. It’s a fiacre, but I hire it all the time.’
‘I would be delighted,’ she said between bites. ‘But what is the gala?’
He explained that he would be riding against the best Austrian officers at Die Schmelz, and she said quickly: ‘But if you’re off riding, I’ll be alone. May I bring Karl and Steffi to keep me company?’ With her mug of beer she indicated two students, who stepped slightly forward to introduce themselves. They did not look quite like the kind of people he would have invited, but Krystyna Szprot was so delectable that if he could acquire her only with them, he must agree: ‘Please join us.’
At seven in the morning Buk took the three Arabians out to the parade grounds where hundreds of other horses, equally polished and groomed, awaited their riders, who arrived, like Count Lubonski and Wiktor Bukowski, in private carriages or hired fiacres. By eleven the grounds were filled with some of the most colorful uniforms in Europe, and at noon the emperor himself arrived in a red-and-gold barouche, from which he prepared to review the opening parade of his regiments.
Wiktor, as a civilian, did not participate in this exhibition, but he and Krystyna watched with pleasure as the units marched past, military bands blaring German tunes and marshals on horseback patrolling the parade. It was the Austrian Empire at its most magnificent, and if the wars that ravaged central Europe could only have been fought on such parade grounds and by such troops in neat array, Austria would surely be the most powerful nation on earth.
‘Look at them!’ Karl said scornfully from the back seat of the fiacre. ‘They haven’t won a battle in forty years.’
‘Is your uncle there?’ Steffi asked.
‘He’s the fat one on the horse.’
‘Which horse?’
‘The borrowed one.’
Buk came up to advise his master that the riding exhibition was about to begin, so Wiktor begged Krystyna to excuse him, took from a box at the rear of the fiacre a plumed hat, and walked crisply to where the horses were tethered. Buk had the best of the three, Mustafa, ready, but Wiktor said: ‘We’ll save him for the race. I’ve got to win the race.’
He chose instead the horse of middle quality, a most handsome beast who responded well to commands regardless of how they were delivered: a pressed knee, a shift of Wiktor’s hips, the shadow of a whip, a change in voice. This mare had lived so long with her owner that she had become an extension of his existence, and if any civilian was going to have a chance to compete equally with the fine horsemen of the cavalry units, Wiktor Bukowski on this mare was such a man.
If Emperor Franz Josef had dozed through most of the musical concert, he certainly stayed awake at the exhibition of horsemanship. In his youth, many decades ago, he had been an excellent horseman, and the portraits of himself that he liked best were those in which German and Italian painters had depicted him astride one of his large horses. Then he looked truly imperial.
Now he sat in his barouche, accompanied by two barons with their baronesses, covered with medals that shone in the sunlight. He was an impressive man, not given to fat, still erect, still captivated by any display of uniform and plume and glittering sword. A more brilliant man could not have held his vast empire together, but he in his bumbling way showed himself so ordinary that he did not evoke great envy.
‘Who’s the gentleman there who rides so well?’ he asked, and his equerry said: ‘The Polish nobleman Bukowski who challenged the German critic to a duel over a pretty pianist.’
Franz Josef frowned; the incident had been pejoratively reported in the Berlin press, as the embassy there had informed him. But Bukowski seemed to be an interesting person: ‘Isn’t he the one with the Arabian stud? Up in Galicia somewhere?’
‘The same.’
Franz Josef said nothing, and the equerry signaled for the competition to begin.
Teams of four riders from the various regiments displayed remarkable skill in maneuvering their mounts through displays rigidly prescribed, and not all were officers from cavalry regiments, since army regiments also took pride in having members who were fine horsemen, but on this bright, sunny day it was the cavalry units that triumphed, and the winning four had trained their horses to kneel before the emperor as he bestowed the first prizes. Clearly, the best team had won.
Now came the competitions for individual riders, and since civilians were admitted to certain of the events, there was a kind of disarray, for they were not in military uniform and this detracted from their general appearance, but when Wiktor Bukowski appeared on his fine mare, he in the uniform of a Polish magnate glorious in fur and shako, the horse in polished silver fittings, he created a stir, and patrons in the carriages told one another that this was the Polish nobleman who had behaved with such gallantry a few nights before. Even Lubonski, who had feared some kind of reprisal because of his protégé’s misbehavior, observed with pleasure the fine impression Wiktor was making. ‘He could marry anyone he wished, that one,’ he told his wife, and she agreed.
The competition had been arranged so that each rider had maximum opportunity to display his horsemanship: turns, leaps, gallops, twists, obedience and general deportment. Half the contest depended on the horse, half on the man who rode it, and nearly a dozen notable cavalrymen preceded Bukowski in the trials, but when he rode forth, he quickly became the crowd’s favorite, and there were both gasps and cheers as he led his horse through the intricate tests, concluding with a wild, mad dash in which he seemed an ancient warrior on upland plains.
He
won. And while the crowd cheered he brought his horse to the imperial site, but he did not ask the beast to kneel or bow. Horse and man stood proud in the wintry sunlight and accepted the prize.
‘Are you Bukowski from the Vistula?’ Franz Josef asked.
‘I come from the northernmost of your villages, Your Majesty,’ Bukowski said, and this would be reported in the press. It wasn’t exactly true. Several villages in western Moravia were slightly more northern, but only by a few miles. Wiktor Bukowski would be proclaimed as his emperor’s northernmost subject, a superb horseman and a man of gallantry.
In the race, which he had planned to win with Mustafa, he had the great good fortune to lose to a popular cavalry major. For a Pole to have won two events would have been too much, but he was called back to the imperial presence for a silver medal and additional encomiums.
When he returned to his own fiacre he found Krystyna excited by his performance and eager to grant him a victor’s kiss, but on the ride back to the city center the two students asked Wiktor how he could justify such a preposterous display, and to his surprise, Krystyna agreed with them when he tried to explain. She felt the exhibitionism quite brazen at a time when citizens in various corners of the empire lacked food.
Karl said: ‘It makes one wonder if the empire can continue.’
‘What ever do you mean?’ Wiktor asked, and Steffi replied: ‘Your Poland, for example. Broken into three parts, no one of them well-governed.’
Bukowski was stunned by such remarks. Poles in Vienna sometimes thought about the partition of their country, and occasionally in dark corners they whispered about it to friends, but it would be unthinkable, for example, to raise the question with a minister of government like Count Lubonski. And since he, Wiktor Bukowski, might conceivably be such a minister one day, he, too, must refuse to countenance such talk. ‘It has been agreed among the powers that Poland should be divided, and you must admit that of the three parts, the Austrian is much the best-governed, thanks principally to patriots like Lubonski.’
The others fell silent, but when the fiacre, at the end of a long line of carriages returning to the city, reached the Ringstrasse, the two students said they would alight, which left Wiktor seated alone with Krystyna. Trembling so much that his hands showed his nervousness, he took a deep breath and asked: ‘Panna Krystyna, would you consent to dining with me tonight … at my rooms?’
‘I would be delighted,’ she said so quickly that he could only gasp. Calling to the dour Serbian driver, he directed him to Concordiaplatz, where he told the man to wait while he hurried the pianist up the wide, curving stone stairs. Almost thrusting her into the big gloomy room, he said: ‘See, I, too, have a piano,’ and with that, he rushed down the stairs to ask the driver to go to several stores and purchase the ingredients for a dinner, hurried down to the basement to instruct a maidservant how to prepare the food when it arrived, and then ran back upstairs.
‘Well!’ he said breathlessly. ‘This room could use a woman’s touch.’
‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Krystyna said, and shrugging, she went to the piano and began half-playing, half-strumming some Parisian music-hall songs. ‘They do wonders with an accordion,’ she said, and with a skill that astonished Bukowski she struck the piano in a rhythmic way which simulated the effects of an accordion.
‘I love Paris,’ she said. Then she struck a series of discordant notes. ‘But my heart yearns for Warsaw.’
‘Why don’t you live there?’
‘Forbidden. The Russians will not allow me to return.’
‘Why not?’ Wiktor sat beside her on the piano bench and gazed at her distraught face, seeing for the first time some of the tempestuousness that plagued her.
‘I said some things about Polish music. That our Moniuszko was better than any music being composed in St. Petersburg or Vienna.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘Of course! That’s why I said it.’
‘And you were exiled?’
‘By the police. I can’t go back.’ She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders and added: ‘Well, it was Moniuszko … and other issues.’
He said: ‘You like things Polish, don’t you?’
‘I am all things Polish. I play Chopin to proclaim my attitudes to the world.’
‘But you do play other composers?’
She turned to face him. ‘I am very good at other composers.’
‘Like Mozart?’ He paused. ‘What I mean … when the Germans played the Mozart concerto the other night. I thought that slow movement was … well … exquisite.’
Krystyna turned back to the keyboard and with great poetic feeling played the piano portion of the slow movement, that sigh of autumn wind passing through a forest of golden leaves. It was quite thrilling, the way she played it, and Wiktor asked: ‘What I mean, do you think the lullaby in Chopin’s scherzo … well … is as good as the Mozart?’
Now she played the lullaby, that flawless composition, so perfect for its setting within the larger piece of music, and for a while she passed back and forth between these two splendid works, and she was allowing her fingers to drift when Wiktor caught her by the shoulders and kissed her fervently.
‘I liked that,’ she said forthrightly, and by some magic gesture, or by the passion of her next embrace, she let him know that she intended spending the night with him, here in this barren set of rooms.
When they stopped kissing she resumed playing the two themes and said: The Mozart is very good. Perhaps as good as music can be. But it’s mechanical. It could be anything—German, Moravian, French, even Chinese. Mozart sets the engine in motion and it chugs along. Very little heart.’ With heavy, mechanical beat she played the wonderful theme, then slipped easily into the Chopin, with its hesitations, tremblings, delicate nuances. ‘Chopin could be only Poland. No machinery animates him. It’s impossible to predict where he’s going.’
Boldly she contrasted the two great themes, then laughed, kissed Wiktor, and delivered her opinion: ‘I like Mozart very much. Love him, in fact. But I revere Chopin, and all Poles should, for he recorded our heartbeats.’
She stayed with Wiktor for three holiday nights and two days, and they were an experience far beyond anything he had hoped for, or ever imagined. She was a vivid, energetic little person, half-woman, half-child, and she made love as if it were the second half of a concert, the culmination of all that she had been preparing for.
‘You’re a wonderful man, Wiktor,’ she told him during the second night, and he was elated at the thought that this established artist could find him attractive, even though when with his horses or on parade he knew himself to be quite dashing. That was public, this was private, and he could not reconcile the two. But on the second day he received quite a jolt when he came back to Concordiaplatz from a visit to his offices to find that Krystyna had moved into his staid apartment two young couples who were seeking lodging in Vienna. How exactly she had met them he never discovered, nor where their permanent homes might be; all he knew was that they were vigorously against the Austrian government because it oppressed Slovenes in some place beyond the Danube. He asked Krystyna if she had ever been there, and she replied: ‘No need to go. We’re all brothers.’
When she left him, after the third night, he was quite bewildered. He was in love with this mercurial little genius, but he was also perplexed by her unorthodox behavior, and the very fact that she had stayed with him so willingly, almost without his asking, made him suspicious of her motives. Also, the bold way in which she had used his quarters had come close to offending him. He did not like her friends and supposed that if he knew her acquaintances in Paris, he would dislike them too.
His confusion was not diminished when a carriage drawn by two Lippizaners came to Concordiaplatz with a messenger who directed Wiktor Bukowski to report at once to Count Lubonski at 22 Annagasse.
When he hurried up to the reception room he found the count and countess awaiting him, rather grim in bearing, and the
former launched directly into the problem: ‘Wiktor, the secret police have been here this morning. Reporting on your behavior since the Christmas concert.’ Glancing at a typed report, he droned: ‘You insulted an official guest of the Austrian government, challenging him to a duel. You did well at Die Schmelz, but then you visited 119 Alserstrasse, a notorious center for radical activity against His Majesty’s government. You took into your quarters Krystyna Szprot of Paris, a political exile from Warsaw and an avowed enemy of the Russian government, with whom we have peaceful relations. Not content with that, you brought into your home two men and two women who have been agitating in Slovenian territories, and you are in the gravest danger of being declared an enemy of the state.’
Bukowski was aghast, but before he could speak, the countess, whose illustrious family had weathered a dozen major storms of Polish politics, said: ‘Wiktor, what you must do, at your age … It’s really quite important, Wiktor. Find a respectable young lady of good family, get married and settle down.’
He was too confused to speak, so Lubonski took over: ‘The daughter of the American ambassador, Miss Trilling, let me know that she would be pleased to meet you again. I’ve invited her to our little reception tonight. Please appear in your best presentation.’
The countess laughed. She was the daughter of powerful men and women, those who had built with their fortunes the entire city of Zamosc and from it had helped govern Poland in its good days. ‘What Andrzej means is wear respectable clothes and respectable manners.’ She paused to allow these suggestions to sink in, then added: ‘You have no great family fortune, Wiktor. Only two villages and a strong, clean name. Your only hope in this world is to marry well. And radical pianists from Paris do not qualify. The daughters of extremely rich ambassadors do. Please be prompt.’