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—then his library resolved around him once more. Josef stared from his seat opposite.
“My God,” Karl said, breathless, as though he’d run a marathon. “My God, I beg you, Josef. I was young. I was little more than a boy—”
“I was a boy,” Josef said flatly. “You showed me no mercy then. I’ll show you no mercy now.”
“Josef, the girl—”
“This isn’t simply about the girl. She’s but one example of your casual cruelty.” He paused, finished the last drops of brandy in his tumbler. “It has taken me decades of aspiration, but I do believe that, finally, my own capacity for cruelty approaches the same boundlessness as yours.”
Karl leapt forward and fell on his knees. It was a superficial gesture, he knew, but perhaps it would somehow convince Josef; at least buy Karl enough time to formulate a plan. “What of mercy?” he begged. “Charity?”
“Your god is the god of mercy, mein herr. My god—the god you executed with the bulk of my people and my family—is a god of blood and sacrifice.”
Karl took a chance and sprang, hoping his bursitis was held at bay by his madness. He lunged at Josef, hands grasping. If he could get the advantage, he could overcome him, he knew it. He was much taller than Josef, and still strong, though a good twelve years his senior.
Karl had Josef by the lapels, rose, then tried to throw him to the floor. Josef was small, true, and not strong, but his balance was good, and he was quick. He planted his feet, grasped Karl’s shirt. Karl huffed through clenched teeth. Josef stared back, grimacing, indomitable.
Karl’s heart beat faster and faster, filled with a passion and purpose unknown to him since the last days of his young manhood. Suddenly, the maestro’s left arm flashed in a wide arc. Karl’s vision exploded into a darkness aswarm with fireflies. Down he went, one leg bending awkwardly beneath him.
He drifted, lost in a brief, but seemingly endless, darkness. Nearby, he heard Josef rifling in his coat; the whir of the CD carousel in the hi fi system; a soft sigh, as of finality.
Finally, his vision cleared. Little by little, the darkness receded, though the fireflies remained. Then, Karl heard the first strains of a slow adagio moving toward crescendo, reminiscent of the opening dawn motif of Wagner's Das Rheingold; ascending strings with an underscore of brass, building slowly—so slowly—toward some unknown but inevitable climax. The crescendo rose at an impossibly slow pace, almost too slowly for its changes in intensity to be audible.
Then Karl realized what he was hearing. He drew himself up on the edge of Josef’s chair and sat, still blinking, blood gumming his vision. It was Josef’s terrible Requiem.
Josef stood beside the stereo system. “Deutsche Gramophone made a recording of our final rehearsal yesterday. They offered it to me for my criticism.”
“The Requiem,” Karl said. The adagio gathered like an oncoming storm.
“The Requiem,” Josef said. “My Requiem.”
The crescendo sounded, like the tearing of a great veil. Amid the clamor, a choir broke in, howling a grand and feverish rendition of the first central theme of the Requiem: a tender folk melody, not unlike a lullaby, inflated to epic proportions by the full complement of choir and orchestra; a song of lost love transformed into a grand funeral dirge.
Something fleet and dark moved in Karl’s peripheral vision. He turned toward it, lost sight of it in the blood choking his vision, blinked and wiped.
There was nothing. Josef was the only living soul in the room besides himself.
Goethe.
Karl snapped up onto his knees, peering round the chair that he leaned on. Amid the grand swelling of the music, its oceanic peaks and troughs, he swore he heard voices. Not a choir, but simple whispers, barely audible, hissing like a nest of serpents, calling his name—his real name.
Goethe.
He turned to Josef. The maestro stood staring at his bloodied hand, cut by the glass broken against Karl’s temple.
“Josef,” Karl said, pleading. He could sense it already—something terrible gathering at the behest of the music.
“Music is a strange and magical thing, isn’t it?” Josef said. “As I said a means of time travel. A few bars, a single phrase, and every memory attached to said phrase is reconjured. Palpable, right before your eyes, as if you could touch it.”
The whispering voices gathered, multiplying. They were all around him, though the room was empty. Beneath the murmur of the voices, the music played on, the grand theme of the opening giving way to a lone violin reprising the lullaby theme. Weepy counterpoint was provided courtesy of the violas, and beneath that, an ominous, throbbing underscore by the cellos and double basses. Beneath this triptych—solo violin, median strings, and throbbing bass—a small contingent of the choir provided an atonal wall of sound; a strange, shimmering cloud of noise, not unlike the sonic equivalent of a sky shuddering with summer heat lightning.
“My father was a musician,” Josef said, still staring into his bloodied hand. “The greatest French Horn player in all of Poland.” He smiled. “Perhaps the only French Horn player in Poland. Nonetheless, he loved music. It was his breath. The beating of his heart. And as he loved it, so did we, his seven children.”
Karl felt breath on the nape of his neck. He lunged forward, turning to see who lingered behind him. His awkward lurch sent him sprawling. As he lay there, he heard footsteps in the hall outside, slowly, ponderously climbing the stairs.
Josef loomed over him. “I was the only one of them to survive the camps, mein herr. One of nine. My mother. My father. Six brothers and sisters. All of them fed the crematoria, or dropped dead in the factories, or were shot during a random liquidation, or were gassed. To this day I still have no idea what fates they met. I only know that I was the only survivor. The stories of others like me fill in the gaps sufficiently, I think.
“And you, a handsome young officer. Dashing, charming, refined . . . how you loved your music! That stayed with me, even afterward—how you insisted that I was to dust your records each day, as well as the grammophone, and make sure that your collection was alphabetized. As work details went, mein herr, your employ was almost civilized.”
“You’re alive aren’t you?” Karl said around a mouthful of blood. He felt a loose tooth at the forefront of his jaw. “I saved you from the gas chambers or the quarries or the factories.”
“True,” Josef said, nodding and kneeling beside Karl. “This is true—” The first movement ended. The second began.
The Lacrimosa and Recordare. The same movement during which Karl had seen the ghost of the serving girl.
Josef continued. “—but you chose the one person who gave me hope and some small happiness in the midst of that hell you made, and you violated her—murdered her—right before my eyes.”
Karl remembered. His thrusts had torn her. By the time he came, she was bleeding, the blood and semen rolling down her thin, pale thighs in thick rivulets. Before she could bleed on the floor and stain the Persian rug, he had hiked up his trousers, dragged her by one arm onto the verandah, and put a bullet in her head.
All while the boy watched.
“That was sixty years ago!” Karl roared, tears and mucous and blood on his face, in his mouth, dripping from his chin. “Is there no mercy in your heart, Josef? We were at war!"
“With whom?” Josef asked, his bitterness evident. “With families who worshipped a different god? Who looked different than you? Who celebrated on different days of the year and prayed in a different tongue?”
The male and female choirs sparred; brass opposed the strings; strings clawed heavenward in search of advantage; the woodwinds spiralled out of control like a plunging fighter plane.
Then, suddenly, all voices and the whole of the orchestra were in concert, yoked by the force of the hitching tempi like a team of wild horses. The operatic grandeur of the Lacrimosa became a militaristic march-cum-funeral dirge—a theme of pure will and determination. Timpani thundered,
keeping the march, driving the will theme toward a thunderous, fractious dissolution.
“It’s been so long,” Karl said, almost whimpering. “Who knows what moves us when we’re young—”
“Love moves us when we’re young,” Josef said quietly. “Hope. Possibility. All of those you stole from me. Even my heart’s true love—my father’s true love, music—even this you stole from me. Forever after, the Horn Concerto—my father’s signature repertoire piece—was anathema to me. It took me twenty years to return to my father’s house—to the house of song, and sound, the house of the language without words. And when I finally returned, I found that house emptied; abandoned; gutted. Music, like the world, has never been the same in the wake of your terrible war on humanity.”
Karl, in tears, terrified by the sound of the music and Josef’s awful determination to persecute him, tried to turn away. Josef took his thinning white hair in hand, holding him.
“Furthermore, old friend, so ashamed was I of my heritage—so disgusted—that I changed my name and renounced my God in an attempt to move on with my life, to build something new. Moshe Dureski died that day in your sitting room, watching as the last person who cared about him was beaten, and raped, and casually murdered by a handsome young officer with exquisite taste in music.”
“Please,” Karl managed. The whispers were growing intolerable now, like the ringing in the ears of a tinnitus-stricken old artillery soldier. “Please, Josef—”
Josef continued. “When I met you again, I knew you instantly. Certainly, your name was false. But one fake sees through another, you know. Once we were better acquainted, and I found means of identifying you beyond a doubt, I was satisfied. Here was my opportunity for vengeance.”
Goethe!
Karl heaved himself from Josef’s grasp, trying to find the source of the hissing voices surrounding him. His eyes betrayed nothing, though his ears were abuzz. Outside, he still heard footsteps climbing the stairs toward the second floor landing.
Josef stood and took a deep breath. He threw a glance at the door, as if he, too, heard the footfalls. “For a time I considered exposing you to the authorities. There are still Nazi hunters in Israel who would gladly see you tried and executed, old man or no. But an altogether different opportunity presented itself. Even under an assumed name, you professed to love music. You were a passionate and generous patron—even supporting me through one of the darkest times of my life since the war—all because you loved and believed in the power and promise of my music.”
That brought Karl back to the present; that single reminder of how they had first met when Josef was a promising but dirt poor conservatory student. Karl, impressed by a performance of the young man’s second concerto, offered to pay for the remainder of his education.
Josef smiled, seeming to remember the time fondly. “What better means would I have of avenging myself? I would strike at the last thing that a lonely, aging German aristocrat loved and valued. I would damage, violate, and murder that thing you loved, right before your eyes. My art, my salvation, would also be my revenge.”
Finally, the Recordare repeated, choir and strings leading the rest of the orchestra toward a frenzied, fractured crescendo. Then, nigh upon a great, ringing apex, the whole sonic wall seemed to collapse, as if from exhaustion. There was a long, ringing silence, followed by the final phrases, sung by a sextet of female voices accompanied by solo oboe and violin.
Reces meae non sunt dignae: sed tu bonus fac benigne, ne perenni cremer igne.
Worthless are my prayers and sighing: yet, good Lord, in grace complying, rescue me from fires undying.
The music ended, the second movement closed. Karl felt cold hands on the nape of his neck. The whispering voices grew louder. Skeletal knuckles rapped at the door.
Josef carried on, his demeanor darkening. “But therein lies the sting, mein herr. When the thing we love is tainted by the thing we hate, it is changed forever. When a means of avenging my family and my people occurred to me, I knew the price would be high.”
Karl was wracked with fear, trembling, sweating, his old heart thudding mercilessly in his chest. “Josef,” he managed, pointing toward the library door. “Who’s out there? Who’ve you called into my house?” The third movement of the Requiem began: the Dies Irae.
The Day of Wrath.
Josef turned and surveyed the door casually. “I can’t see them,” Josef said. “Nor can I hear them or feel them. But I feel the suggestion of them when this music plays, as would anyone.” He glowered down on Karl. “I’ve dared the wrath of my god, and tainted the only thing that ever offered me salvation in this world, all for your sake.”
New knuckles rapped at the door. Karl cowered, watching with horrible fascination, half-expecting the library door to burst open on its hinges.
Josef clarified: “In each faith lies the means for salvation and ascension to a higher plane, or a path to worldly power—the pursuit of the latter usually costing one’s soul. So it is even with the arts—with music. There are older and deeper magics still lurking in the orthodoxy, still available to the studious in ancient scrolls and tomes. For thirty years I’ve searched and studied. For thirty years, I’ve sought a means to strike at you in the most personal place possible, to cause you the greatest agony before your end.”
Karl shook his head.
The door buckled. Someone was outside, now pounding, trying to beat their way into the room. All around Karl the voices sounded, like the instruments in the orchestra of the recording that now filled the room. They whispered his family name, and tittered, and jeered, and cried, and begged to be let in.
“Josef,” Karl said again, begging.
“I could never reconjure them all, you understand. Six million ghosts—that would be a feat for even the most powerful necromancer.
“But eighty-four, that I managed. I gave each a voice through an instrument of the orchestra, or a voice in the choir. The musicians, the singers—all channeled the spirits of those tormented dead called back from the brink by me to punish you.
“Somewhere, the better part of all souls repose in paradise. Everything good and pure and hopeful and loving in them passes through the veil into the house of our father. Everything terrible in them—pain and pity, sadness and despair, hatred and wrath and hunger and thirst—all of these things linger when the soul ascends, like the skin shed by a serpent. In most of us, the balance is so small, that when we shed our darkness on moving to the light, our darkness evaporates. Like so much smoke. But for the worst of us—the most tormented of us—it will not depart, and it draws us down into the depths—to the place the ancients called Sheol—like a man with too many clothes trying to tread water in a stormy sea.
“And for those whose end is terrible, or slow, or sudden, what is left behind is palpable, one step from flesh. Every person murdered in your final solution, mein herr, left the dregs of their spirit on the earth when they passed to their reward. Those dregs linger still, and I’ve teamed them like horses through the Requiem. My music gives them shape, and form, and influence in the world of flesh.
“In your world. Because, of course, herr Goethe, the Requiem is dedicated to you.”
The door burst open. A cold wind swept through the library, and Karl looked to Josef. He saw that his old friend squinted against that phantom wind and drew his coat closer about him and shuddered, but his eyes betrayed no fear. Only a dark inevitability.
They crowded the hall and choked the landing, twenty deep, all the way into Karl’s bedchamber and the game room at the rear of the house. More crowded the stairway, no doubt, the foyer and living and dining rooms downstairs. But all of those eyes in those sunken, skull-like faces were trained on he, Karl Phillip Emanuel Goethe, an old man cowering on the floor of his library with an old friend crouching over him, the terrible music of Moshe Dureski’s Requiem filling the chamber around him. They looked like corpses made of shadow and ash, their skins gray and lifeless, their bones visible through their pa
per-thin flesh. All their crowns were shorn, and so, there seemed to be no men or women or children among them. They were fruiting bodies, shuttles of disease and rot and death, automatons of justice, without sex or identity or meaning beyond what they were called upon to do.
What the music bade them do.
The Dies Irae was aflame in his ears.
Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!
Oh, what fear man’s bosom rendeth, when from Heaven the judge descendeth, on whose sentence all dependeth.
Karl looked to Josef. Josef stood and drew his coat around him. “There’s a draft,” Josef said. “I think I’ll be on my way.”
Karl moved to rise and follow him, felt his left ankle balk painfully, and fell forward again. Josef disappeared amid the ghostly tangle of thin limbs and square shoulders. The shades shambled forward, pouring into the room like a viscous flood.
The Dies Irae became a piercing threnody of strident violins and growling cellos. The chorus sounded another atonal phrase, their voices commingling in the most terrible of harmonies, singing of loss and madness and terror made manifest, of the dark reign of profane powers and the necessity, at some point, for justice. Simple justice.
The shadows crowded in around him. Karl begged for mercy, but his pleas fell on long-deaf ears.