"Jack Womack - Audience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Womack Jack)

"You just played it," I said.
He nodded. "In a different country. Let us go on." The next cubicle held a black telephone, its sleek
skin unblemished by touchpads, screen, or dial. Two short, tintinnabulate bursts shattered the moment's
stillness as unexpectedly as a mandrake's cry. "It's for you," the curator said.
When I lifted the receiver to my ear I heard a woman, speaking with a voice infused with a
semblance of life. "Rhinelander Exchange," she said, pronouncing each syllable with equal emphasis.
"Number, please."
"Cities were divided into Exchanges," the curator said as I hung up. "While the operator made your
connection, you'd hear a musical passage chosen to best represent the Exchange dialled. My wife lived in
Endicott before we married, and whenever I'd call, I'd hear passages from Messiaen, awaiting her hello."
"That's remarkable."
He smiled. "After we married we lived in Hansa, and friends listened to Webern until we answered.
I should now make a point concerning historical accuracy. Your immediate experience notwithstanding,
the telephone would of course have rung only if someone called you. My exhibits merely approximate a
sound's original context."
"The operator's accent was the same as yours," I said. "What is your native language?"
"Lost," he said. "I should say, it's been years since I've had need to speak it."
"I've never heard such an accent before."
"And now you have," said the curator, passing through a doorway into another dim room. I
followed. Though I didn't see precisely where tile supplanted the flooring's wood, I felt, before I heard,
the transformation underfoot. In the centre of the room was a small round table; on the table's marble
top, an antique coffee grinder and porcelain candelabra holding a single, slender candle. He pulled one of
two wrought-iron chairs away from the table, scraping the legs across the tile with the sound of many
fingernails drawn along a blackboard.
"Sit," he said, lighting the candle; its wax crackled and snapped as the wick caught fire. As I sat,
raking the other chair's iron over that ceramic floor, the curator shut his eyes, sealing himself against all
distractions, and listened as if to a wombed heartbeat, his look assuring that, by dint of concentration, he
would suck the sound dry of vibration before it could decay.
"Before they closed them all, my wife and I went to the cafes every evening, along with everyone
else. We were quite social, once," he said, spinning the grinder's crank. "The waiter ground the beans at
your table before preparing your coffee. We sat for hours, eating and talking and listening to music. Most
establishments employed musicians, that their harmonics might lend melody to the crowd's drone. None
of the songs was ever recorded. Transcriptions were on occasion made, but afterwards, all were
effaced."
"Why?"
"Because we loved them," he said. "As the evening drew on, the older patrons went along their
way, leaving behind only younger couples still uncertain whether each best suited the other. At midnight,
at the hour conversation settles into the whispers of those making love with words, the oublovium player
came forward to take her solo."
From a bag hidden beneath the table, the curator withdrew a wooden cylinder, turned with the
symmetries of an hourglass. Leaning the blunt upper end of the instrument against his collarbone,
crooking one arm around its mid-section, he placed the lower, open end in his lap. Then he lifted from his
bag the oublovium's apparent bow, a thin rod no longer than the oublovium itself, its form reminiscent of a
dandelion, tipped not with seeds but with a ball of fine wire. Inserting its tuft into the opening, the curator
slid the pole along unseen strings within the instrument, rolling the rod's length between his fingers as he
drew it in and out. The notes produced bore the closest affinity to those of a harp, played at impossible
tempo with a multitude of hands.
"I could as well sit at a piano and strike at the keyboard with my elbows," he said. "Anyone could
make such trifling motions as these, but there were few virtuosi. Women, solely, mastered the oublovium.
No one plays it today. I doubt that anyone would recognize it if they saw one."