The Cello Player - Hardcover

Michael Kr�ger

2.54

28 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005915 ISBN 13: 9780151005918

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

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The narrator of this wonderfully perceptive, highly entertaining tale of love and loss is a middle-aged German composer who writes serious avant-garde music, but makes a living writing theme music for television. When Judit, an ambitious young cello player from Budapest (whose mother was once the composer's lover and who may or may not be his daughter), shows up on his doorstep, he agrees to take her in while she studies at the conservatory in Munich.
Judit's presence evokes memories of a far different time for the composer, when life was about art and his biggest concern was finding a room for an afternoon tryst. When our protagonists set out for the composer's house in southern France, where he will finish his opera and she will master her instrument, it gradually becomes clear that this young woman is playing more than the cello. Funny, ironic, and oddly illuminating.

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About the Author:

Born in Wittgendorf, Germany, in 1943, Michael Kr�ger is a distinguished writer, critic, and publisher. He has been the publisher at Carl Hanser Verlag since 1986, and his books have been awarded numerous prizes over the years. He lives in Munich.

There was no cemetery as far as the eye could see. The taxi driver, a heavy, sullen man with a bird face, made a vague gesture with his right hand in response to my question about where I should go, but without speaking; he was silent now, having spent the entire ride addressing with growing impatience a radio show and the tattered, rattling voice of the dispatcher. I should have asked the friendly taxi driver who had brought me from the Budapest airport to the hotel an hour earlier to wait after all. He had offered me everything-young women, nightclubs, gypsy music: You say, I get. But I'd wanted to rest for ten minutes before the funeral, so I sent him off. Where is the cemetery? I implored the bird man, from the backseat, while he calmly lit another cigarette on the stub of the old one, sending a shower of sparks onto his loosely knit sweater. He had stopped under a tree whose sooty leaves hung limply from its branches; behind the tree was a dilapidated square where an old car without wheels was sulking; in the distance were a few cowering houses. No people and no graves in this wasteland. Fortunately, the hotel porter had written down the address of the cemetery for me, so now, with the driver gazing at me suspiciously, I looked for the slip of paper as I sat in the oppressive, cramped vehicle, which was full of smoke and incomprehensible sounds. I was beginning to sweat. I had assumed as a matter of course that taxi drivers in this part of the world cheated their fares-an assumption that the hotel porter had confirmed by pocketing a sizable tip-still, the thought that this deadly driver would abandon me in this no-man's-land simply for his own amusement was more than I could bear. And yet, I couldn't afford to annoy him, for there were hardly any other cars in the area, let alone taxis; but above all, there was no cemetery. I looked for the note; the man kept smoking and coughing, then he opened the car door and spat a heavy glob of phlegm on the dusty ground. The situation was so outrageous and humiliating that I was just about to shout the name of the hotel at the man and demand that I be taken back to my starting point when I finally found the note crumpled up in the breast pocket of my suit and triumphantly held it out to him. Here, the address of the cemetery, I urged the laconic fellow, who peered at the unprepossessing document out of the corner of his eye and nodded thoughtfully. He started the car and again began a steady muttering and carrying-on, as if he had put the ignition key into his speech center. The view outside the cab did not improve, particularly as a fine rain began to fall, covering the dreary neighborhood with a gray mist. Any hope I'd had of arriving at the cemetery a half-hour before the burial-not only to get a sense of where the grave was but also to explore possible escape routes-dissolved as I rode in my smoky cage. I wondered if we would ever arrive. Then the driver pulled into a gas station, shouting and snorting, and stopped beside a pump that did not look especially promising. He got out, fumbled at the back with the tailgate, and then disappeared for some time. I finally caught sight of him behind the car, tearing large chunks from an enormous sandwich he held in one hand and guzzling a cloudy liquid, probably cider, from a bottle he held in the other. As he stood there chewing and drinking in front of the radiator, I noticed that the left side of his face was disfigured by a red, frayed patch of eczema that spread over his eye and ran down his neck under the collar of his greasy sweater. As he made no effort at all to fill the tank, and no attendant put in an appearance, I energetically pushed my coat, suit, and shirt-sleeves from my wrist and tapped several times on my watch with my right index finger, assuming this gesture must be recognizable anywhere in the world. Not a twitch of comprehension in his face. But once the last of the sandwich had vanished into his maw and the bottle had been stowed in the trunk he decided it was time to fill up his tank. When at last the counter on the pump had come to a halt while there was still a chance of reaching our destination, for which we had set out more than an hour ago, the man tore open the door on my side and barked furiously at me. That could only be about money, I thought. So I pulled out the bundle of bills that a tired woman in the hotel had given me in exchange for my hundred marks, and put a medium-sized bill into the outstretched palm. But the hand did not close on the bill. Nor did it close after I had put two more on top of the first. By then, a group of ragged people had stepped closer, forming a half-circle around the driver and watching the silent transaction. Among them was a woman with a pom-pom hat who shamelessly thrust her shaggy head into the car and reached out her hand to snatch one of the bills. I had no idea how much money I had handed over or how much I was still holding, nor did the hostile maneuvers I found myself subjected to give me time to figure it out. I had to act. The only way out of this situation was to attack. I pulled myself out of the backseat with the bundle of remaining money firmly in hand, stood up, legs apart, in front of the group of people gathered around the taxi driver, paused for a moment, then screamed as loud as I could: If I am not taken to the cemetery at once, I'll have the police throw all of you in jail! And as I kept on screaming, rousing myself with the worst profanities and proud of the courage I never knew I had, I butted my fist into the chests of the flabbergasted men and, with a swipe, knocked the shameless pom-pom hat from the woman's head. Even the driver seemed impressed. Don't stop now; don't drop the reins. In my mounting rage, I was about to go for the throat of the crimson bird-head when a little oil-smeared man stepped between us and, in excellent German, asked about the cause of this violent confrontation. I want to go to the cemetery, I yelled; where the hell is the goddamn cemetery this idiot refuses to take me to, even though he has already taken wads of money from me! It's a scandal for a visitor to be treated like this; the simplest rules of hospitality have been violated; all of Hungary is being infiltrated by scoundrels who are entirely ignorant of the laws of civilization....

Cemetery? Cemetery? asked the oily man. You want to go to the cemetery? And, with a friendly smile, he folded me up again and pushed me into the backseat, while the taxi driver with the eczema got behind the wheel again, started the car, and, to the applause of the fascinated spectators, headed back into the road-which, after a few minutes, actually took us to the cemetery. You wait here, I ordered the bird man. Wait, you understand? I pointed at my watch, raised two fingers, and again said, Wait, here. There was no more talk of money. And when, after buying a wreath from a sweet, toothless little woman, I turned to check on my taxi, I just caught a glimpse of it chugging and banging around the corner. Thank God, I thought, things have turned out all right, and, as I assumed that I had saved a lot of money by losing the greedy taxi driver, I pressed another bill into the rough hand of the graveyard woman.

The rain grew heavier. Outside the crumbling consecration hall, the puddles were too large to jump and one had to wade through them. A man in a uniform stood smiling outside the door, like an escort for the dead, observing the visitors' vain efforts to keep their feet dry. What care we take at the end!

In the middle of the puddle, discouraged, I turned around, stood on my heel, awkwardly took a larger leap, and ran across dry ground into the cemetery, my feet wet in my sopping shoes. Only after I had sprinted for a while, as if a destination were drawing me through the apparently infinite expanse of the cemetery, did I finally regain my composure. The silent order of the stones, most of them old and crooked comrades arching over Austrian bones, slowed my steps to a calmer gait, and my thoughts to a less erratic excitement. After ten minutes of walking, my hands clasped behind my back, I was already on such familiar terms with death that I was able to sit down on a tiny bench beside a disheveled grave to smoke a cigarette. It had stopped raining. The clouds were twisted into bizarre shapes by a rising wind; right above me they looked like a bear standing upright with raised paws.
At the edge of the stone, which guarded the remains of
one Martha Lunkewicz, mushrooms were growing, pale honey mushrooms like those in cemeteries in Berlin, but firmer, and still, barely, edible. Martha had given up the ghost in 1956-or had no choice: with that year in mind, which of the two was unclear. She had been in the world for nineteen years. Why wasn't her birthplace carved on the stone?

Though I was aware that I didn't belong here, I felt comfortable on my low, ramshackle bench, whose legs had burrowed deep into the ground while my own feet, wet, rested on the speckled ivy. I placed the pack of cigarettes on the gravestone, which made the sullen stone look as if it were wearing a red cap; I carefully pushed my smoked-out butts into the mulch. Maybe Martha and Maria were once friends. Martha's father was perhaps Polish, a Party member; her mother might have been from Budapest. Maybe they were neighbors and played music together. Martha, the older of the two, in a faded velvet dress inherited from her grandmother, a brooch pinned to her breast, sat at the piano; Maria, in worn white socks, played the violin. Every Tuesday and Friday from two to four; the neighbors did not allow more. Martha very focused in spite of the out-of-tune piano, and sometimes indignant when her younger companion did not keep time well. Bart�k. After they finished playing, they stood for a while together at the window and silently looked out at the street. What do you see? I see nothing, would be the answer, absolutely nothing. And when the conservatory is behind us, what do you think our lives will be like? We will live in Paris, Martha said, and there will be no car with two men sitting in it, ro...

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