Dureski’s Requiem
Karl Mann knew he was being watched. Shadows loomed around him, resolved, and became flesh in the jaundiced half-light from a streetlamp outside. Smooth, shorn crowns swayed in the dark. He heard the soft hiss of paper against paper. Low, thin, ghosts like underfed children neared, their tiny hands reaching out, grasping, seeking the hem of his coat, the legs of his trousers.
And the music remained. The memory of that terrible, hideous music.
Mann beat at the wall, seeking the switch for the lamp that stood on a small table beside the door. The lamp came alight. He blinked.
He was alone in his library, with only shadows and his thousand-odd volumes to greet him. Outside, Zurich seemed to sigh as a gust of wind swept down the narrow avenue fronting his home.
Had the music really affected him so? Or perhaps this was a stroke. He was an old man, after all, and strokes could be preceded by hallucinations, couldn’t they?
But there was no pain. No numbness. Only the dull, lingering horror of the visions brought on by the premier performance of Josef Herzog’s new Requiem—the performance he had just fled.
Desperate for succor, Karl hurried to the sideboard, splashed two fingers of brandy into a tumbler with shaking hands and drank it all in a single gulp. A buttery warmth invaded him from the belly outward. The tremors in his hands subsided. Gradually—very gradually—the beating of his heart slowed toward normal. He leaned on the sideboard with one hand and pressed the heel of his other palm into his throbbing forehead.
That was when the voices returned. Goethe, they said.
He spun, heart hammering in his chest. Who was that? Was someone in the room with him?
Goethe.
On his left. He turned toward the partially open window, great, high bookshelves flanking it like sentinels. A chilly night breeze slipped in, silent as a serpent, billowing the sheer white curtains and slithering over the floor of the chamber, coiling at last around his feet.
For a long moment he stood, in search of anything out of the ordinary. Then, little by little, sense returned. He was in his library, in his house, in the city he had called home for more than half his long life. There were no hiding places in this room, no alcoves, not even a closet. It was a comfortably large box, filled with oak bookshelves and his vast private book collection. On the inner wall, a full company of phonograph records and compact discs stood arrayed as neatly as the volumes on his shelves. This was his sanctum, where he passed the bulk of his leisure hours at home. Here, he read and reminded himself what it meant to be human. Here, he listened to music and wondered at its beauty and symmetry and magic.
Yes, magic. That was always the attraction, wasn’t it? Notes on a scale. Colors in sound. Ideas bereft of words or literal meaning. But, sequenced properly, spaced in time with care and skill, those seemingly random noises gained weight, form, function. He had always reckoned music to have a vast and awe-inspiring power over his mind and soul. It soothed him in times of distress, settled him in times of fear and doubt, warmed and comforted him in his darker hours. Music made him human.
And now it had turned on him, like a wayward lover or an ungrateful child.
Impossible, he thought. You’re succumbing to an aging imagination, Karl.
Nonetheless, he remembered his hurried walk home, his furtive glances into each dark alleyway, the silent, shambling forms in every well of shadow.
So real. He could still hear the awkward clicking of their thin limbs against one another, like winter-bare trees stirred by the wind. The sound of paper against paper. Staring eyes. Emaciated faces.
But only shadows, he reminded himself. Mere shadows.
It was Josef’s music. That horrible Requiem. Somehow, it had burrowed into him and awakened something long buried. Memories. Sights. Sounds. Smells.
Old names.
Goethe.
Karl Mann spun again. The whispered word had come from behind
him—right behind him. But, of course, the only thing behind him was the sideboard, an open decanter, and his empty tumbler. Feeling the warm sting of tears in his eyes, Mann poured another brandy—three fingers, this time—and gulped it down.
Outside the library, he heard slow, deliberate footsteps climbing the front stairs.
Mann’s breath caught in his throat. A momentary silence followed.
Then, a small, uneasy voice, just outside the door. “Karl? Are you in there? Your door was open.”
Mann felt the dread upon him evaporate. “Josef?” he said. “Come in.”
The door opened. There stood the maestro, Josef Herzog, Karl’s longtime friend, recipient of his most generous patronage. The sight of him—small, slight and bald, eyes doe-like and dewy under dusky brows—settled Karl for a moment.
Then Karl remembered the source of his distress. Josef was the composer of the music which, this very night, had so affrighted him. Music which had seemed to conjure ghosts before his very eyes.
“Josef,” Karl managed, a little sternly, as if scolding him.
When the door opened, Herzog had worn the same troubled, supplicant’s smile he always wore when calling on his old patron and friend. Now, as he heard his name on Karl’s lips, his aspect changed. He acquired an expression of inevitable, but unpleasant, dutifulness. Josef stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He nodded toward the bar.
“May I have a drink, herr Goethe?”
Karl obliged and turned to pour another brandy. Then he froze. His temples throbbed like twin timpani, and he turned back to Josef. “What did you call me?”
Josef’s eyes dropped. “Herr Goethe, mein kommandant. Karl Phillip Emmanuel Goethe.”
Mann swallowed. “What are you—?”
“Don’t, Karl,” Josef said shortly. “We’ve played long enough, and I won’t have you degrading yourself by denying it.”
“I assure you, Josef,” he said, “I have no idea—”
“You’ve every idea,” Josef said, moving slowly nearer. He loosened his bow tie and tuxedo collar, smiling a little. “I’ve always hated these things. I never understood why I couldn’t attend the premiere of my work in comfortable pants and a warm sweater.”
They were an arm’s length apart now. Mann considered smashing his glass against the side of the maestro’s face, stunning him, then taking up the nearest heavy object—some tome from the library shelves, the decanter of brandy—and dashing the maestro’s brains on the hardwood floor.
But that seemed terribly ingracious. And questions remained regarding the Requiem, heard for the first time that evening by the public and recorded for posterity by Deutsche Grammophone.
Josef stared, smiling a little. “My drink?” he asked. “I could use it, mein herr.”
“Stop that,” Mann said. “You know my name.”
“I do,” Josef said, nodding. “I know both of them, in fact.” He stared. “Just pour me a drink and we’ll talk.”
Mann poured and handed Josef the drink. Josef swallowed half of it and drifted away to scan the albums and compact discs arrayed on the inner wall, beside the door.
The room and its furnishings, like the house that contained them, were old—some two or three centuries—proof of Mann’s love for antiques and fine sensibilities. But Mann loved music as well, and therefore updated his stereo system regularly—every five to six years, in fact, as time and technology dictated. It was housed in a custom-made armoire with the look of an antique, though the whole construction was designed especially for stereo equipment. Therein he kept his receiver, turntable, and compact disc player. Small, expensive acoustic speakers hid in the upper corners of the room, their wires run through the walls.
Josef admired it. “A fine system,” he said, and turned back to Karl. “You love music. Truly and deeply. More than anything, I think.”
Mann nodded. “You know this.”
“I know this,” Josef said, nodding. “That’s why I had to strike there.”
“Why?” Mann said dumbly, but he k
new why.
Josef’s hardened stare assured Karl that Josef knew that Karl knew, and that further pretense was useless. “I said I would not insult you,” Josef offered. “Don’t insult yourself, herr Goethe.”
Karl stared at Josef, his friend for more years than he could count. He rifled backward through his trove of memories, seeking the moment when they first met. What had it been, some forty-five or forty-six years before?
Now, Karl scarcely recognized the maestro. For all their years as friends, Josef Herzog had impressed Karl as a great composer, but also a person of excessive sensitivity. He cried easily. He spoke in soft tones, avoided eye contact, and always carried himself with a deferential stoop. Humility and piety rode on his shoulders like heavy yokes.
Now here Josef stood, staring back at Karl with eyes full of fire and darkness, a deep hatred and sadness which Karl never could have imagined seeing written on his friend’s face.
“Somehow, I’ve offended you,” Karl said, lowering his eyes. “What have I done, Josef?”
“Look at me,” Josef said.
“What’s come over you?” Karl asked. “In just the few hours since I last saw you, you’ve changed—”
“Our masks are off,” Josef said. “Here is my true face, mein herr. Here I stand before you, naked as the day my mother bore me. Moshe Dureski, of Krakow, Poland.”
Karl shook his head, feigning stupidity, though it was becoming harder by the moment to do so.
“Here,” Josef said, turning toward the stereo in its great cabinet. He turned on the power and stabbed two buttons on the CD carousel. The machine whirred, the discs within spinning past the narrow window in its face. “Perhaps this will help. Music is a means of time travel, after all. A few bars—even a few notes—and every memorable moment in your life linked to a certain melody is reconjured before your eyes.”
The carousel stopped. Inside the machine, a disc fell into place. The opening strains of Mozart’s Horn Concerto filled the room, as subtle and supple as a private performance.
Karl’s eyes grew wide. He stared into Josef’s face, and saw the ghost of a thin little Polish Jew—barely old enough for his bar mitzvah—staring back at him.
Josef was right—after only a few bars, it all flooded back.