*
It had probably not been a wise move to buy the clavichord. For one thing, it cost a small fortune. And they didn’t have a fortune of any size to spend. Also, Rodney had stopped playing professionally ten years earlier. After the twins were born, he’d stopped playing altogether. To drive all the way down to Hyde Park from Logan Square, and then to drive around and around looking for a place to park (Hyde Park, went the joke, you can’t hide and you can’t park), and then to unpeel his U. of Chicago ID from his wallet, holding a thumb over the ridiculously out-of-date photo while waving it at the security guard, in order to gain admittance to practice room 113, where for an hour, on the battered but not untuneful university clavichord, Rodney would work through a few bourrées and roundelays, just to keep a hand in—all that became too difficult after the kids were born. Back in the days when Rodney and Rebecca had both been pursuing a Ph.D. (back when they were childless and super-focused and surviving on yogurt and brewer’s yeast), Rodney had spent three or four hours a day playing the department clavichord. The harpsichord next door had been in great demand. But the clavichord was always free. This was because it was a pedal clavichord, that rare beast, and no one liked to play it. It was a speculative replica of an early-eighteenth-century clavichord, and the pedal unit (which some lead-footed student had stomped on pretty thoroughly) was a little funky. But Rodney got used to it, and from then on the clavichord was like Rodney’s own personal instrument, until he dropped out of the program and became a father and took a job on the North Side giving piano lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
The thing about early music was nobody knew quite what it had sounded like. Disputes about how to tune a harpsichord or clavichord constituted a good part of the discipline. The question was “How had Bach tuned his harpsichord?” And nobody knew. People argued about what Johann Sebastian had meant by wohltemperiert. They tuned their instruments in a historically likely manner and studied the hand-drawn schematics on the title pages of various Bach compositions.
Rodney had intended to settle this question in his dissertation. He was going to figure out, once and for all, exactly how Bach had tuned his harpsichord, how his music had sounded at the time, and, therefore, how it should be played now. To do this, he would have to go to Germany. He would have to go, in fact, to East Germany (Leipzig) in order to examine the actual harpsichord on which Bach himself had composed and onto whose keyboard (so it was rumored) the Master had written his preferred markings. In the fall of 1987, with the help of a doctoral grant—and with Rebecca on a Stiftung at the Freie Universit?t—Rodney had set off for West Berlin. They lived in a two-room sublet near Savignyplatz featuring a sit-down shower and a toilet with a shelf. The leaseholder was a guy named Frank, from Montana, who’d come to Berlin to build sets for experimental theater. A married professor had also used the place to entertain his girlfriends. In the flannel-sheeted bed where Rebecca and Rodney had sex, they encountered miscellaneous pubic hairs. The professor’s shaving equipment remained in the tiny, malodorous bathroom. On the toilet shelf their feces landed high and dry, ready for inspection. It would have been unbearable if they hadn’t been twenty-six and poor and in love. Rodney and Rebecca washed the sheets and hung them out to dry on the balcony. They got used to the dinky tub. They continued to complain about, and be entirely grossed out by, the shelf.
West Berlin wasn’t what Rodney had expected. It was nothing like early music. West Berlin was completely irrational and unmathematical, not stiff but loose. It was full of war widows, draft dodgers, squatters, anarchists. Rodney didn’t like the cigarette smoke. The beer made him feel bloated. So he escaped, going as often as he could to the Philharmonie or the Deutsche Oper.
Rebecca had fared better. She’d become friendly with the people in the Wohngemeinschaft one floor above them. Wearing soft-soled Maoist shoes or ankle bracelets or ironic monocles, the six young Germans pooled their money, swapped partners, and held deep-throated conversations about Kantian ethics as it applied to traffic disputes. Every few months, one or another of them disappeared to Tunisia or India or returned to Hamburg to enter the family export business. At Rebecca’s urging, Rodney politely attended their parties, but he always felt too scrubbed in their company, too apolitical, too blithely American.
In October, when he went to the East German Embassy to pick up his academic visa, Rodney was told that his request had been denied. The minor diplomat who relayed this news wasn’t an Eastern Bloc functionary but a kind-looking, balding, nervous man, who seemed genuinely sorry. He himself was from Leipzig, he said, and as a child had attended the Thomaskirche, where Bach had been the director of choir and music. Rodney appealed to the American Embassy, in Bonn, but they were powerless to help. He made a frantic call to his advisor, Professor Breskin, back in Chicago, who was going through a divorce and was less than compassionate. In a sardonic voice he’d said, “Got any other dissertation ideas?”
The lindens along the Ku’damm lost their leaves. In Rodney’s opinion, the leaves had never turned orange enough, red enough, to die. But this was how autumn was handled in Prussia. Winter, too, never quite got to be winter: rain, gray skies, scant snow—just a dampness that worked its way into Rodney’s bones as he walked from church concert to church concert. He had six months left in Berlin and no idea how to fill them.
And then, in early spring, a wonderful thing had happened. Lisa Turner, the cultural attaché at the American Embassy, invited Rodney to tour Germany, playing Bach, as part of a Deutsche-Amerikanische Freundschaft program. For a month and a half, Rodney traveled through mostly small towns in Swabia, North Rhine–Westphalia, and Bavaria, putting on concerts in local halls. He stayed in dollhouse-size hotel rooms full of dollhouse knickknacks; he slept on single beds under wonderfully soft duvets. Lisa Turner accompanied him, seeing to Rodney’s every need and taking particular care of his traveling companion. This wasn’t Rebecca. Rebecca had stayed in Berlin to write the first draft of her thesis. Rodney’s companion was a clavichord, made by Hass in 1761 and, then and now, the single most beautiful, expressive, and finicky clavichord Rodney’s trembling, delighted hands had ever touched.