Blue Self-Portrait

in fact just five minutes after stepping inside the Kaiser Café he’d already begun to yawn, ten minutes in was out of commission and quite kaput, and yet here we are in the underground car park and I’m picking on his car, I have to make some comment about his car being unworthy of a world-class pianist, as if all that I’d said before in the Kaiser Café hadn’t been appalling, about music in general and the pianist’s playing in particular even though I haven’t the first notion about music in general, and as for the pianist’s playing in particular here I go even now critiquing it from every angle, not only the music performed by the pianist but also that composed by the composer, the pianist being both pianist and composer, I am a pianist first and foremost and yet foremost and first of all I am a composer, the pianist said one day to all within earshot, indeed the pianist did have a talent for composing that not every pianist is blessed with—and the composer a pianistic virtuosity to which few composers may lay claim, both gifts united in a single person, in the perfect bodily and spiritual harmony that alone could justify the general and nevertheless exceptional title of musician; I am, above all a musician, the pianist said, it isn’t my profession but my condition, yet in spite of his condition I held back a mere hair’s breadth away from explaining to the pianist how to play the piano and to the composer how to compose. In the car park right now, I’m inspecting his vehicle, inside and out, the state of the bodywork, the ergonometry of the seats, I’ve estimated its resale value and underestimated all other values, sat in there ready to ride shotgun though minus the gun, broadcasting my observations about his car, unworthy as it was of a world-class pianist, it’s no good, however clearly I see it coming I always end up slagging off anyone and everyone precisely when tête à tête with a very particular someone, I brazenly sabotage all chance of a future as if I didn’t know that what’s said is said, retraction is out of the question, it is definitively too late.

It’s the same every time. Every time I vow I won’t let it happen again and every time it happens. If I was the pianist, I’m sure I would have got on my nerves, a girl who has just apologized for talking too much and then motormouths slap into another clanger: my car, to boot. You can’t know what kind of bond unites a driver and his car, impossible at first sighting to grasp the often complex and very personal rapport between driver and car; the nature of the car says something about its driver and the driver likewise about the car, any car salesman will recognize the highly sensitive nature of this complex relationship but I in my bulletproof girlhood, unsullied by all mechanical considerations and without regard for the mechanic’s expertise, boldly I attack, no quarter given, the subject of his car upon which it turns out that the pianist attaches immense importance to the old banger and loves it truly and feels that he and it are only whole when they’re together. He drives his car on ex-GDR roads, on these roads of the former republic that are still complete chaos, he crosses the still deeply sorrowful countryside, this once-upon-a-time republic still effectively lying fallow and as good as medieval, a pure pleasure, superreal elation, oh the deep, deep joy of the driver driving free, independent, wealthy with all the possibilities, why should he give a damn about notions of relativity and me telling him without the least respect for his perhaps terribly personal and intimate relationship with his dreadful old banger that God alone knows one can’t go round in such an old rust-bucket when one is a pianist and a world-class one at that. He’s obliged to accept it, the appellation world-class pianist, simply forced to swallow the irony in that title and to face the fact that for me, Miss Bulletproof herself, knowing nothing of the dynamics of pleasure, a car like his must be the object of jocularity, even ridicule, while for him nothing of the sort, reigning Miss Immortal, I trample anti-commercial values without restraint and deny the possibility of any attachment so deep, so powerful, so authentic, to this car and no other, as to be practically in the pianist’s DNA, when the same pianist was just the other week driving this very banger (though world-class in his eyes) through the fields and copses of that erstwhile republic, heading for Neuhardenberg Castle, in other words, he was touring about the open country, joyously driving in the sub-sublime and frozen landscape of the Brandenburg backwoods, at the far edge of reunited Germany and a mere ten unlucky kilometers from Poland, a Brandenburg castle then a Prussian one then Nazi then Communist and then returned to its heirs and state-subsidized into a space of high unified German culture, the superbly restored castle of Neuhardenberg as described in the leaflet, the hallowed place to which the pianist was driving at the wheel of that altogether world-class car the company of which alone could make him whole, to see the exhibition “Music and the Third Reich.”

Invited to the private view, he was clean-shaven and his hair brushed but not over-brushed, the nonchalance of his hairstyle a style but nonetheless not an affectation, knowing as the pianist did the difference between style and affectation not only in the artistry of his playing, in particular, but also in his art of life, in general, the art of living with hair at ease and the art of playing with moderate pedal-usage, was driving on those still-chaotic roads and through the relatively medieval countryside, that smooth, masterful driving, not overusing the pedals, as the driver so the pianist, both gauging their pedaling just right, I