Bass

Kessler was there first.

He was always there first. He had been there first on the twenty-second of August, and on the twenty-fourth, and on every Tuesday and Thursday since, and he was there now, at ten to eight on the first Tuesday in September, in the long low room on the ground floor of the music building, in the second row of the twenty-four chairs, in the chair at the end by the wall, which was the one from which a man could see both the door and the window without turning his head.

He was in a dark suit. He had a notebook on his knee, closed, and a pencil on top of it, and his hands folded on the pencil.

“Morning,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir in here.”

Kessler looked at the twenty-two empty chairs, and at the piano, and at the record player on its trolley, and at the door, in that order, without any expression whatsoever.

“There is nobody here, sir,” he said.

---

There had been nobody here last spring, either, except Frederick. That was the point of eight o’clock. Dr Pike had told him so in January: she had taught Introduction to Music at eight in the morning for nineteen years because nobody else would take the slot and she had been awake since four for most of her life and might as well; and for a whole semester on Tuesdays and Thursdays he had been the one chair out of twenty-four with anybody in it, and had counted rests out loud in fours, and had liked it more than nearly anything.

Introduction to Music II was at eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well, in the same room, and in April he had signed up for it on the first morning the list opened, and been, he was fairly sure, the only person who had.

Then on the twenty-second of August he had come in at ten to eight and found Kessler in the chair by the wall.

“Hartmann has him,” Kessler had said, before Frederick could ask. “Until a quarter past nine.” And then, because Frederick had gone on looking at him: “It was free, sir. At eight.”

At eight o’clock exactly, that first morning, Dr Pike had come in with her bag and her small black book and a cardboard box of sheet music, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at the room.

She had stood there for some time.

“Two,” she had said.

Then she had put the box down on the piano and opened the small black book and found the register, which was printed, and run her finger down it, which did not take long.

“Hanover,” she had said. “Good morning, Mr Hanover. Welcome back.” The finger went down one line. “And. Kessler.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t give a first name.”

“No,” said Kessler.

Dr Pike had looked at the register, and at the man in the chair by the wall, who was forty-six and had a face like the end of a wardrobe and was sitting in her class at eight in the morning in a dark suit with his hands folded.

“Are you a mature student, Mr Kessler?”

Kessler had considered it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you have any musical experience?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“I have been to concerts,” said Kessler. “I stood at the back.”

Dr Pike had written something in the small black book. Then she had looked up, at the two of them, at the two chairs out of twenty-four, and something had happened to her face that Frederick, who had sat in front of it for a whole semester, had never seen it do, which was to be delighted and completely baffled at the same moment, and not to know which to do first.

“Well,” she had said. “I’ve never had two.”

---

She came in now at eight, as she always did, exactly, small and upright in a cardigan the colour of a damson, with the bag over one arm and the box of sheet music under the other, and put them both down on the piano, and looked at the two of them, and was still, Frederick thought, after a fortnight, not used to it.

“Good morning, Mr Hanover. Good morning, Mr Kessler.”

“Good morning.”

Kessler inclined his head about a quarter of an inch.

“Today,” said Dr Pike, “we sing.”

Frederick sat up.

“Music II is the voice,” said Dr Pike. “I told you in August. Music I was listening. You listened. You counted the rests in Haydn and you didn’t clap in the wrong place, which puts you ahead of most of Vienna in 1782.” She opened the box. “Music II is what happens when the instrument is you. So we start where everybody starts, which is a church in Leipzig, about three hundred years ago, on a Sunday.”

She took two sheets out of the box and came down the room and gave one to each of them. It was a single page of music, four lines of it, two on the top stave and two on the bottom, with words under the notes in German.

“Bach,” said Dr Pike. “A chorale. A hymn tune that the whole congregation knew, which he took and harmonised in four parts for his choir, so that the tune is on the top and everything else is underneath holding it up. Soprano, alto, tenor, bass.” She touched each line of the music on Frederick’s sheet with one finger, top to bottom. “He wrote about three hundred and seventy of these. Every student of music in the world for two hundred years has learned harmony by copying them out, and hating it, and then not hating it.” She went back to the piano and sat down. “This is the one from the Passion. You’ll know it even if you don’t know you know it.”

She played it once through.

He did know it. He knew it from the chapel at Windsor, and from a church in Stockholm at Easter when he was twelve, and from the radio in his father’s car; the slow, heavy, falling tune that seemed to have been written for people walking very carefully behind something.

“Four voices,” said Dr Pike, when she had finished. “And I have two students and one piano.” She looked at them over the top of the music stand. “So the piano is going to be the alto, because the alto is the part that nobody notices until it isn’t there, which the piano is good at. And I’m going to be the soprano.”

“You sing?” said Frederick.

“I was a soprano,” said Dr Pike, “in 1974. I sang the top line of this in a church in Ohio every Good Friday for eleven years.” She put her hands on the keys. “I am now whatever is left of a soprano after fifty years, which is a sort of determined noise in roughly the right place.” She looked at Frederick. “Mr Hanover. You’re the tenor.”

“I’m not a tenor.”

“Nobody is a tenor at eight in the morning. Sing the third line. It’s in the treble clef with a little eight under it, which means it sounds an octave lower than it looks, which is what tenors are: people who sound lower than they look.” She turned to the wall. “Mr Kessler.”

Kessler looked at her.

“You’ll be the bass,” said Dr Pike. “The bottom line. You don’t have to read it. Listen to the piano and find the lowest thing in the room and stay on it.” She turned back to the keys, and was kind, and was quick about it, as she was with the things she thought people might be frightened of. “If you can’t, that’s all right. I’ll play it. Nobody here is going to mind.”

Kessler looked at the sheet of music on his knee. He had not unfolded his hands.

“From the top,” said Dr Pike. “Slowly. One, two, three.”

---

She sang.

It was, as she had said, a determined noise in roughly the right place, thin and high and a little behind the beat, and it was also, Frederick thought, the bravest thing he had heard anybody do in a long time: a woman of seventy-six at a piano at eight in the morning singing the top line of a Passion chorale to two men in a room with twenty-two empty chairs, as though there were a congregation behind them. The piano went under her, the alto, steady.

He came in on the tenor.

He had a voice. Everybody had told him so since he was small, in the polite way people tell a boy things, and Hellström had told him his Swedish was better than his accent and his singing was better than his Swedish; and he found the third line, more or less, and held on to it, an octave lower than it looked, and went with it down the slow falling tune, behind Dr Pike, a little flat on the long notes, and tried to keep his eyes on the music and not on the window.

They got to the end of the first line. There was a pause on the long note, the held one, the fermata, where the congregation in Leipzig would have breathed.

“Bass?” said Dr Pike, over her shoulder, without stopping.

And Kessler sang.

---

Frederick did not know, afterwards, how to describe it, and tried, that evening, and gave up.

It came from under the floor. That was the nearest he could get. It did not seem to come out of the man in the chair by the wall at all, who had not moved, who was sitting exactly as he had been sitting with his hands folded on the pencil on the notebook on his knee and his eyes on the door; it came up through the floorboards of the long low room from somewhere a long way down, as though the building had a cellar nobody had told them about and the cellar had opened its mouth. It was very deep and very quiet and perfectly steady. It was underneath everything. It went under Dr Pike’s thin soprano and the piano’s alto and Frederick’s tenor, which was suddenly very small and very flat, and held all three of them up from below, the way the bottom stone of a wall holds up the wall, without seeming to notice the weight.

And it was in German.

He was singing the words. Not the notes on the sheet; Kessler had not looked at the sheet once. He was singing the words of the hymn, in German, from somewhere he had known them all his life, the long vowels and the hard ends of the words set down one after another under the tune with great care, like a man laying something on a table that he did not want to break.

Frederick stopped singing.

He did not decide to. He was simply not singing any more, and he did not know when it had happened, and he sat in his chair with the sheet of music in his hands and listened.

At the piano, Dr Pike stopped playing.

Her hands came up off the keys, both of them, and stayed in the air a little above them, and her voice stopped with them; and Kessler, in the chair by the wall, with nothing above him at all now, no piano and no soprano and no tenor, went on alone, at the bottom of the room, steadily, to the end of the line, and held the last note for exactly as long as the fermata was written for, and stopped.

The room was absolutely silent.

It was not a silence Frederick had heard in it before. In January it had been the silence of a room with one person in it at eight in the morning. This was the silence of a room in which something had been put down and everybody was looking at it.

Dr Pike turned round on the piano stool.

She looked at the man in the chair by the wall for a long time. Then she put up one hand, slowly, and took off her glasses, and held them in her lap, folded, and looked at him without them.

“Where did you learn that?” she said.

Kessler looked at the door.

“Church,” he said. “Dortmund.”

---

Nobody said anything for a while.

Outside, beyond the window, a sprinkler on the grass was going round, ticking, and somebody went past on a bicycle and rang the bell at somebody else, and on the bench by the door of the music building Sam was sitting with the notebook and the black umbrella, as he sat every Tuesday and Thursday at eight, and had looked up, and was looking at the window.

“Mr Kessler,” said Dr Pike.

“Yes.”

“I’ve taught music for fifty years, and this class at eight o’clock in the morning for twenty.” She had not put the glasses back on. “I’ve had some thousands of students, most of them in the afternoon, and most of those asleep, and some of them very good, and two of them are in orchestras now. And at eight o’clock I’ve had one King, who counts rests better than anybody I’ve ever taught.” She did not look at Frederick. “And nobody has ever sung me the bass of that chorale. Not like that. Not at eight in the morning. Not from memory, in the words.” She stopped, and Frederick saw her decide to say the rest of it, from several things she might have said, the way his mother decided things. “I’d like you to know that I was moved. I’m seventy-six. I don’t say it very often. I’m saying it now so that it’s said.”

Kessler inclined his head, about a quarter of an inch.

That was all. He did not say anything else, and his face did not do anything at all, and he did not unfold his hands; and Frederick, watching him, saw him go. Not anywhere. He did not move. He simply stopped being in the room, the way he had stopped being in every room Frederick had ever seen him in, at Potsdam and in Berlin and on the tarmac at Sky Harbor and in the doorway of the lounge in Palo Verde Hall under the poster about scorpions: he was a man in a dark suit in a chair by the wall, facing the door, and he was not there.

Dr Pike looked at him for a moment longer. Then she put her glasses back on, and turned round on the stool, and put her hands on the keys.

“From the top,” she said, a little roughly. “Mr Hanover, you stopped. Tenors don’t stop. It’s the one thing they’re for.”

---

They sang it four times more. Kessler sang the bass each time, exactly as he had sung it the first time, from under the floor, in German, without looking at the sheet; and Dr Pike did not stop playing again, though Frederick saw her hands go still on the keys for a moment, each time, at the fermata, and go on.

At a quarter past nine she gave them each a second sheet, a part-song, English, in four parts, about a river, for Thursday.

“Mr Kessler,” she said, at the door. “You’ll be bass on that as well.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll find you a tenor,” said Dr Pike, and looked at Frederick over her glasses, kindly. “Eventually.”

---

They walked back together, because it was the same way.

It was a hundred and one at a quarter past nine and the arcades were full, the shade striped across the paving between the pillars, and the students going along them in the shade in a stream, carrying coffee, and every third one of them said “Hey, Fred,” and went on. Nobody said anything to Kessler. Nobody ever did. He walked a pace behind Frederick and a pace to the left, which was not where he walked behind Alexander, but was where he had decided a man walked behind a King he was not responsible for, and he did not sweat.

Sam was ahead of them, under the black umbrella, which he held up over nobody in particular, so that the shade was anybody’s.

They got to the end of the first arcade, where it came out into the sun for twenty yards before the next one, by the fountain that did not work in summer.

“You never said,” said Frederick.

Kessler did not slow down.

“Sir?”

“That you sing. In two weeks. In the class. You sat there for two weeks, at eight in the morning, and listened to me count rests in fours, and you never said.”

They went out into the sun. It came down on them like a hand. Kessler walked through it at exactly the same pace as he had walked through the shade, a pace back and a pace to the left, looking at the next arcade, and the people in it, and the corner of the building beyond it, in that order.

“Sir,” said Kessler. “Nobody asked.”

---

He told Alexander that evening, at ten, in 312, when the box was long gone and the programme for Tuesday had a column of small ticks most of the way down it and Tyler had left at ten to six, as written.

Alexander was at the desk by the door with the Charter. He listened to all of it without turning round. He listened to the piano and the soprano and the tenor and the floor, and to the German without the book, and to the glasses, and to Dortmund, and at the end of it he did not say anything for some time.

Then he laid the pencil down beside the Charter, parallel to the edge of the desk, and turned round in the chair.

“Kessler sang,” he said.

“Bass.”

“In front of people.”

“In front of me. And Dr Pike.” Frederick thought about it. “And Sam, through the window. Sam heard it from the bench.”

Alexander sat quite still in the chair with his hands on his knees.

“I did not know that,” he said.

“That he could sing?”

“Anything,” said Alexander. He looked at the wall, through which, in 314, Kessler would be sitting at a desk by the window with the light off, facing the door, as he did. “He has stood behind me at every door I have gone through since the box began, and he knows where I am at every minute of every day, because I write it down for him.” He was quiet for a moment. “I know that he takes three sugars in his coffee. I know that because he gave me his cup once, on the Kreuzberg, in the snow.” He looked at the pencil. “I have never asked him anything that was not about the day.”

Frederick did not say anything.

Alexander turned back to the desk. He moved the Charter to one side, and took a sheet of the Neues Palais paper from the drawer, cream, with the small embossed eagle at the top, and began, though it was only ten o’clock and the light was not to be off until half past, to write the programme for Wednesday, which Frederick had not seen him do with the lamp on since the first Sunday.

Mittwoch, 6. September.

05.45. Rise. 05.48. Shower (allow 15).

He wrote down to seven, and stopped, and sat with the pen over the paper for a long time; and then wrote one more line, in the same upright hand that looked like a typeface somebody had made to see if it could be done, and blotted it, and laid the pen down.

Frederick, going past to the box by the door, read it over his shoulder, because the desk was by the door and he could not help it.

06.58. Kessler. Ask.