The Last Rectangle Read online

  4.

  We left the concert in one bunch and were faced with a line up of police men, armed heavily and staring aggressively. They were looking for trouble. Schubert had been wonderful. We were all breathing his melodies. I stared one policeman right in the eye and he cocked his machine gun. Alone, I was bundled into a cold little truck and taken for interrogation. Why was I humming someone else’s tune? Do you deny that Kafka has influenced you and that you have memorized his stories by heart? Don’t you know there is a new intellectual property right law? Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. I admit my mistake but I cannot return anything. Every word I speak belongs to someone who stole it from someone else. Does this make me less guilty? Stealing stolen property is still an offence.

  5.

  You walk along the street. You see someone walking on the other pavement. They are wearing a shirt like yours, but one that is back home. They may walk like you or carry their books like you do. You imitate them, trying to steal back what they took from you. They cannot see you so you do not succeed. You change your walk and you shift your books around but the image sticks. You are torn apart by a concept crossing the street in both directions much like a flame would light across a track of alcohol.

  6.

  Things I’ve stolen, I want to return. I want to off load everything and restart. I have not had a single night of peace since I started.

  Quartet Afternoon

  I painted my face chalk white. The clown smile was a red crescent, large and turned upwards. My eyebrows were azure blue, but I did not put a ball on my nose. I put on my black leotards, carried my skateboard under my arm and went hunting on the south side of our main street.

  I looked towards the northern end of the street and I could see the wide humped shoulders of Beethoven. He was walking northwards with a monkey perched on his left shoulder. He paused every now and then to look at the goods inside shop windows. Every now and then, he would take out his blue sketchbook and write down a tune that came to his mind. It took me a while to get to where Beethoven was. I whizzed on the skateboard winding my way between the people who were walking casually on the wide pavement.

  I now followed him and hummed tunes that I knew he would hate. He stomped his foot in anger and ordered his monkey to jump at me but the beast wouldn’t. He may have liked the tunes. I poked a stick at Beethoven, particularly when he took out his sketchbook. I stopped humming. I sang loudly all the awful techno stuff that I knew and I hated because I knew, or at least hoped, he would hate too. Three times, he would stop in the middle of a melody line in desperation and snap break his pencil in two. I followed him into different stores where he bought more pencils. In each store I sang along with the piped music but in a different key. I whizzed past him several times making bomb diving noises almost knocking him down and unsettling his composure.

  He finally stopped walking and in a very uncharacteristic gesture, held out his hand and asked for peace: whatever you want, but would you please stop annoying me? His monkey hopped around his feet and watched the scene with interest. Obviously this had never happened before. I suggested he buy me a coffee or a beer. He chose beer, but insisted that it be German. How about Austrian, I said, thinking of Der Keller? He accepted, which worried me as I knew Austrian bars were noisy. But then he was deaf. On the way to Der Keller, we passed a CD shop. I suggested that we leave the monkey with the owner who was my friend. After all, I was a prime customer. Beethoven accepted, nodding his head in full trust to the shop owner who was already capitalizing on the great man’s presence by waving customers into the shop. As we left, the monkey was already hopping up and down the counter, signing autographs. Beethoven did not give him another thought.

  We walked along the street until we reached a major crossing. Beethoven looked to his right first and walked on, a dangerous move, as all cars were coming from the left. I pulled him back just in time to avoid a swerving truck. The jolt made him drop his sketchbooks. As I hurried to pick up the scattered pages, two or three of them blew away and were swept by the little stream going into the sewer hole. He stood upright while people walked by. He took his time re-arranging the pages. Some were wet so he dried them on his trousers.

  We walked northwards till we reached Der Keller just in time for lunch. Beethoven observed that the Austrian and the Lebanese flags were the same. I told him he was wrong. The red, white, red stripes in the Lebanese flag are in the ratio of 1:2:1 whereas the Austrian flag is made up of 3 equal stripes. “Och ja, that’s why the Viennese are so good at waltzes”. A long laugh followed, by Beethoven alone. I said: so how come you are so flippant about space when a microsecond delay in a trill would anger you? He looked back at me with a look meant to remind me that we had an agreement to stop the annoyances. He found a seat and sat down quietly. A lovely waitress was serving us. She had black hair, white skin and freckles all over her bare shoulders. She had a charming smile, tender lips and grayish blue eyes that were set far apart. She walked with an ultra-feminine sway. As she wiped the table top and rearranged the cutlery and crockery, her breasts surged outwards against her blue dress. He was dazed. She disregarded him completely or at least pretended to. She bent over the table again, giving him another peek. He asked her for a dark beer which they did not have. He was trying to impress her. Then he opted for a carafe of white wine which they did have. He gulped the whole thing down before she left the table and asked for another. He was still trying to impress her. The waitress went back to the bar as Beethoven stared at her very delicate walk.

  He broke the silence by asking me how old I was. I said 33. He said that at 33 he had mostly lost his hearing. Was he making parallels, I asked. No, he said, just being plain self-centered. The waitress had just come back and had heard the word “old”. She asked him how old he was. He said he was 36. She let out a little mean chuckle. I quickly pulled out a biography of his that I had in my bag and started flipping the pages to flash his pictures at him. We stopped at one which showed him with ruffled hair, looking angry, ruminating and pale. I wanted to impress the waitress on his behalf and indicated that the picture in the book was of the man ordering one carafe after another. The waitress compared it with the original. She said that it looked nothing like him. But she was drawn in. She did not leave. He stared at his own image - what an ass I must have been, he said. How is it I made such an impression on people? Who painted this monstrosity? Do you really think I am so constipated? My face is so pale I look like you with your clown make up. Don’t people know that none of these stories they tell about me is true? The waitress said I’ve never heard any stories about you. Tell me one. I said stories don’t come from nowhere. Nothing comes from nowhere. Look at your early music, it all comes from Haydn. I was bent on annoying him though he was paying for the drinks. He decided to kill me gently. And I presume you prefer Debussy to my music, a Frenchman? I said yes, one for one, Debussy broke more rules than you did. I was winning. He went white in the face, as in his picture and gulped the whole carafe again. He shouted at the top of his voice: noch eine Carafe, bitte, but not for this clown! I was relentless. Brahms’ middle period was less confused than yours. Brahms had no middle period, he said. His work was old even at 20. Men have periods, the waitress asked? Yes, he said, don’t we labor and give birth to great works? Another peal of laughter. Again, on his own. I still did not hear any stories about you, the waitress said.

  With most of the customers gone and the lunch period about to end, she sat next to us, elbows on the table, now looking more fascinated than fascinating. He decided to ignore her and went on talking about music. She responded by shaking and laughing at all his remarks. But tell me a story about yourself. I have a monkey, he said, one that knows how to dance. That’s not a story, she said, that is an item of information. All right, I will make it into a story: One day, I went into a shop and wanted to buy a clown outfit, like our friend is wearing here. They did not have one, so, I bought a monkey. A long detour
at annoyance. It succeeded a little not because he called me a clown but because it distanced the waitress from me. She snatched the biography I was still holding and leafed through it. It says here that when Schubert visited you once, you corrected a couple of notes in one of his sonatas? Franz? Ja, that was his name. Yes that is true and to this day, I feel bad about it. Those were beautiful sonatas. No one can sing like he does. I wanted to show that I was the boss. He had a lot of respect for me and did not reject the corrections. I think the sonatas are better without my corrections. The question remained, who was the boss: the one who made the corrections or the one who intelligently accepted them?

  Oh, the Monkey, shit, we had to get the Monkey. The shop owner would have milked the occasion thin and would now be wishing he’d never let that beast inside his shop. Anyhow, it was time the shops closed for the afternoon break and Beethoven did not want the Monkey locked inside the shop. The waitress heard all this, so she deposited all her earnings, took off her apron fast, tossed it over the counter and walked out with us. I carried my skateboard under my arm. We walked fast and it was the first time that I noticed Beethoven had a gait. He had a walk that was like no walk you’d ever seen. Rather than repeat his bodily motion every cycle of left and right footsteps, Beethoven had a gait that required a 4 step cycle. Beethoven’s body leaned forward on the right foot down, then back up a little and to the left. The next time the right foot came down, he did not repeat the lean forward but had a casual twist of the torso, leaning forward on the left now, then back up again, ready for the right foot all over again. By the time we reached the shop he was in the middle of a cycle, on the second left foot step and I could tell it had upset him to leave his gait unresolved. A red sign said “Closed” so we knocked on the door and the Monkey came up behind the glass and recognized his master. He ran amok, jumping up and down, hobbling over the counters and shrieking. Some guard came out and quickly opened the door to let the beast out. He looked at Beethoven and said: keep your animal away from here. Cultured people visit this place and listen to music. I stepped on the monkey’s tail who let out a fierce yelp and bit Beethoven on his shin. From then on, Beethoven’s gait switched to our own normal two step. Could it have been an earlier bite that had doubled its cycle? I had to get him back into his 4 step cycle. We walked on till we reached a crossing. I signaled with my head forward and he lunged into the street only to be knocked down by a speeding bicycle. I looked on with hope. He got up, as I watched, with the help of the waitress and with the monkey fretting all around him. Sure enough my hope was answered. The gait reverted to its original 4 step cycle.

  By this time, the waitress had been won and she was holding on to Beethoven’s arm and silently walking by his side. The four of us walked on. He took out his blue sketchbook and quickly wrote down a series of notes. I peeked over his shoulder and recognized the rondo theme from the third movement of the violin concerto. I feigned ignorance and asked him if this were a tune he wrote to give as an exercise to his little nephew. That look again! We cannot go for another beer, he said. I simulated the theme by dancing around him, waving my arms up and down like a butterfly. The Monkey did the same. He broke another pencil and kicked the Monkey. I quickly held the Monkey back to avoid a change in his gait. The monkey quieted down. All the time, the waitress was silent, getting closer and closer to Beethoven.

  Take me to listen to some music, he said. Just up the street, a turning to the right would take us to the University. I knew the Music Club was not far from the North Gate. We reached the Club but the listening room was locked. I had a difficult time getting the key from the librarian who must have been bothered by the white chalk on my face. She insisted that both Beethoven and I first become members. I paid for Beethoven and said I paid more for the membership than he was paid for his late quartets. I insisted on getting my money’s worth by commissioning Beethoven to compose up to 20 notes for me. He can choose any set of themes but that he should on no account repeat a theme nor introduce trills. That was not funny.

  But the Monkey cannot go in, the librarian said. So I ran outside with the Monkey. At the back of the Library, there was a vast lawn with a tall dark green tree right in the middle. I used a long rope to tie him to the tree. He started running around it and soon wound himself so tightly that he could not move anymore. Quickly, he found out how to run around in reverse and loosened himself. He started climbing all over the tree. I left him there.

  We went into the listening room. As we stood examining the CDs on the shelves, the waitress fumbled in her pocket and produced a little piece of paper. She started reading without decorum, addressing no one in particular:

  I am like the wings of a dove,

  Full of magic and charming love.

  I am like the top of a tree,

  Full of mystery and of spree.

  Beethoven stared at her, long and hard. Maybe he had just noticed that she was with us now. That is no good he said. It annoyed her a lot. She fumbled in her bag and brought out the biography that I had forgotten in Der Keller. She waved it in the air and said: you did not write the Fidelio libretto! A Frenchman wrote it and someone translated it for you! I sensed the tension so I intervened. She is right, you know. Maybe you should listen to her poem. It is not a poem, she said. I was telling him about myself. Beethoven had completely missed her aim, he who could not take his eyes off her when she was serving us. Again, he did something uncharacteristic. He reached out with his hand and stroked her shoulder, very tenderly. She calmed down quickly. He was getting through to her. And why do you describe yourself in such distant terms? She understood and changed her words:

  I am the wings of a dove,

  Full of magic and charming love.

  I am the top of a tree,

  Full of mystery and of spree.

  Now I can see the magic and mystery of your love, he said. You are a hard man, she said. You only listen when you speak. Let us sit down, he said. She huddled up close to him. He gently grasped her hand, the one holding the poem and pulled it closer to him. He read the poem again. He told her how fortunate it was that when she removed those two words, she achieved a passionate syncopation in the rhythm. Her eyes sparkled. We all sat down around a conference table.

  We listened to a lot of music and all the while, Beethoven was looking out of the window. From where we were, we could see the Monkey on top of the dark green tree. At one point, we could not see the Monkey anymore and were worried. We all left the listening room and thanked the Librarian who took a quick and suspicious look, at the table and then back at our hands, to make sure we had not stolen any CDs.

  We walked around the Library and to the back where we saw a horde of students entertaining the Monkey. He was in his elements. We moved in and extricated the Monkey from the students and then untied his rope. I poked the Monkey on his back and he gnarled at me.

  Beethoven asked me, why did you annoy the Monkey? I said that I would annoy anyone. It brings out a change in me. It always worked for you, I said. You have annoyed princes, musicians and most of your family. Did I really annoy them, he asked? Yes, you did, so let us both go and annoy that couple over there. We walked with intent and sat a short distance behind the two who were already engaged in intimate embraces. He hummed a tune, loudly. The couple got up and moved away. We followed them and they ran. I thought he would burst out laughing but he did not. He got up and started walking back towards the waitress and the Monkey. She was holding my skateboard with her left hand and the hand of the Monkey with her right. The Monkey was quiet, waiting for his master.

  The lawn was so inviting in the late afternoon that in no time, Beethoven was on his back, with his arms folded under his head, staring at the clear blue sky above. The waitress immediately lay down beside him and put her head on his chest. I can hear music, she said. I cannot hear anything, he said. I sat down next to them. The monkey started poking me in the back hoping that I would sleep like his master
so he can lay his head on my chest. I stood up and walked around, anxious. The Monkey ran back and forth between me and Beethoven. After some time, the waitress stood up, attentive but not upset. She brushed down the grass from her dress and walked away, swaying a little. I followed. He’s closed, she said. I want open. Is that a question or an answer, I asked. She smiled at me and tilted her head. No one will ever know what that meant. I walked by her side. We walked around the lawn while the Monkey sat quietly next to Beethoven. We walked in larger and larger circles and said nothing. Although we were walking together and side by side, I was following. I burnt for her look. I burnt for her response. She sat down on the grass and lay back, like Beethoven, with her arms folded below her head. I lay down next to her and put my head on her stomach. It was heaving up and down, gently. I hear poetry, I said. You don’t hear anything, she said. She stroked my forehead. She tickled the nape of my neck. Then she clasped my neck from the back, firmly but not with strength. We slept until we heard screeching. The Monkey was being teased by the same students again. Beethoven got up. We got up. We walked towards the students and scolded them. Beethoven winked at me and said, they are annoying us, so we should befriend them. While deciding on which attitude to take, we did not consult the Monkey who bit one of the students on the shin. He screamed with pain while the others laughed. The Monkey was serious. They all left. Soon, they returned with a Policeman who ushered us all into his blue and white van and we went to the Police Station, right on the main street, but further up north from the turning to the University. He put the Monkey in a cell and took all our names down. It was the first time I had heard the waitress’s name. What is the name of the Monkey? Beethoven burst out laughing. The Policeman removed the Monkey from his cell and put Beethoven in it. I said that is useless, he is the only one who knows the name of the Monkey. He let Beethoven out and put me in the cell. Beethoven thought hard and could not come up with a convincing name. He whispered into the waitress’s ear: you can now play the role of Fidelio and rescue your lover. She came out with a name that no one had heard before. It went down into the Police Report. I was let out and we were made to compensate the student and warned: never let the Monkey off the leash again. We left as the afternoon was slowly creeping towards dusk.