The First of July(82)

He nodded to Theo. Tried an arrangement of chords. Tried to get the feel of the organ, knowing that had Theo been in his seat, he would have experimented with confidence. Would once have done that, would never do it now.

Then, he played. Bach, because Bach was what he knew best. He could hear Theo moving heavily from bellow to bellow and yet, there, immediately, was blue, purest blue, then mauve, like a morning glory they had seen on a wall in the hot summer five years ago. Now he began “By the Waters of Babylon” and created green, falling over blue. He made a few mistakes. Started again. Stopped. He looked back at Theo, who was mopping his brow and counting the bellows.

“Am I stoking up rainbows?”

Benedict shook his head.

Theo was gasping, slightly, but Benedict’s hands were already moving again, and with the opening chords the blue filled him even as the familiar music filled the cathedral below him and his heart beat so fast that he could hardly breathe and for a brief time Theo and the pain of Theo was lost to him, as he focused with utter intensity on the notes. He had no sheet music in front of him, was out of practice and on an unfamiliar organ, yet on this second pass he was nearly note-perfect. His feet moved securely across the unfamiliar French pedal board as though he had known it all his life; keyboards and draw-stops obeyed his hands as if being offered to him. His head and shoulders moved minutely with the music. Theo would soon reach the end of his physical ability to step from bellows to bellows, but for Benedict the purity of the color, the astonishment that, so out of practice, he could still draw all this out of a strange organ, and the longing for his old life, almost consumed him; and the Bach, the music, was his, could only ever be his.

After a few minutes, Theo said “Enough. Enough, I think.” His voice was very quiet, though he was breathing fast from exertion. His expression was unreadable. He stood, leaning against the wall by the bellows. Benedict stayed sitting, absorbing every detail, trying to commit the organ to memory.

Theo walked up to him, put his hands on Benedict’s shoulders. Benedict stared ahead at the console.

“It was quite beautiful,” Theo said. “What a fool I’ve been. Always a fool. There’s something wrong in how I’m put together. Something mad or cruel in there. Perhaps that’s why I’m good at this war thing. This,” he lifted his claw and stroked Benedict’s cheek, “this is what I’m really like all through. And you know it.”

They had only just come down the stairwell when a priest appeared in front of them, rushing across the nave with another man, a civilian in his forties who wore a thick dark coat and was holding a Homburg in front of him like a shield. Both men were clearly in a fury.

Benedict caught only the word orgue in their fast and enraged French; but from the gesticulating upward at the organ pipes, then at the braced walls and sandbags, the shaking fingers, and the priest’s sour expression, he grasped quite well what he already knew. That they had trespassed in the organ loft and played the organ without permission.

Theo answered in French; he had traveled in France in past summers as a boy, and his French was far better than Benedict’s. Benedict recognized the name Bach when the priest said it with anger, but the conversation moved too fast for him to keep up. Theo was shaking his head and looking nonplussed.

“Ah,” he said, still facing his interlocutors as if conversing. “The priest believes, he’s not sure, mind you, that we might have been playing enemy music. I assured him that, there being no sheet music at hand up there, you were merely using your musical genius to improvise.”

Then he turned to Benedict, his face benign. “I can’t think of the right word for pompous ass. Help me out here, Benedict. What’s ‘pompous ass’ in French? And surely the priest’s chum is young enough to be in uniform?”

Theo could hardly get a word into the flow of complaint.

“He says that we have violated his great house of God and the noise we made may have alerted the enemy. I’ve just pointed out that the enemy can hardly have missed the fact that there’s a great hulk of a cathedral here. The enemy has very good maps, as we know, and has a reasonable claim to have produced the greatest musicians in history, so they’ll know more about this organ than the cathedral director of music does.”

Now the priest spoke, clearly trying to control his voice. Theo answered gravely and slowly; Benedict understood much more. He caught the name Cavaillé-Coll, and, later, London in England, and whatever Theo was saying seemed to bring down the fever of the argument. At one point he placed his palm on Benedict’s back, as if to introduce him. Both Frenchmen turned and scrutinized Benedict. Eventually the layman, now with an expression verging on respect, put out his hand and shook Benedict’s. Then he shook Theo’s.