Dissonance - Softcover

Lenard-Cook, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939650119 ISBN 13: 9781939650115

Verlag: Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

When Anna Kramer, a Los Alamos piano teacher, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a woman she does not know. Hana's music, however, soon begins to uncover forgotten emotions, while her journals, which begin in 1945 after she is released from a concentration camp, slowly reveal decades-old secrets that Anna and her family have kept buried. Dissonance is a quiet and dramatic novel that offers great emotional urgency and wisdom. It is bold in its scale, placing readers at different eras-in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and in the scientific world of Los Alamos, New Mexico. With extraordinary sensitivity, the author unfolds the story of a woman musician inheriting the "score" of another woman's life, reconciling its themes of self-discovery with the processes of self-discovery in her own life, and, finally, freeing imprisoned memory.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lisa Lenard-Cook is the PEN-short-listed author of the novel Coyote Morning, the writing guides Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir, and The Mind of Your Story, as well as numerous trade nonfiction and ghostwritten books. Her short fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Rosebud, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a faculty member at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Taos Summer Writers Conference, and a 2014 featured writer at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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""Dissonance" . . . is bold in its scale, placing us at different eras in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and in the scientific world of Los Alamos, New Mexico. . . . Few contemporary novels challenge the reader's conscience as Dissonance does. . . ."--Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop

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Dissonance

A Novel

By Lisa Lenard-Cook

Santa Fe Writers Project

Copyright © 2016 Santa Fe Writers Project
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-939650-11-5

CHAPTER 1

The piano is unique among instruments for its double stroke. The player touches a key, C, let us say, and the key's depression moves a hammer onto a string: Do, says the piano. Or, the player may strike a number of keys simultaneously: C, E, G, and then the piano will sound a C-major chord.

In the 20th century, composers have moved to more dissonant chord constructions. The listener balks. But it is, in its way, a fitting metaphor for what this century has wrought.

My name is Anna Kramer, and I am a piano teacher. Monday through Friday afternoons, from three-thirty until six, I entertain children in various stages of their movement toward adulthood with the mysteries of the instrument. My Steinway Grand sits in a plant-filled room with good, filtered southern light, and in winter as the shadows lengthen, the plants etch mottled patterns across both the keys and the faces of the young students. The keys are white and black; the students are white — Anglo, as we call them here — and the shadows are a translucent grey that border on an illusion. When the shadows surrender to the dark, I turn on the single focused light above the music stand, its glare causing momentary blinking in the student. "Again," I say, as if I have not noticed the darkness, as if I have not noticed the way a sudden spotlight can startle a living creature into stillness.

"Again," I say, and the student's eyes move to the top of the sheet of music, to the opening refrain of Für Elise or the Moonlight Sonata. I am traditional in the music I choose for my young students. The dissonance will come soon enough, with or without me.

My husband is a nuclear physicist, as was my father, though my husband is Jewish, which my father was not. My father, Leon Holtz, was a Major General in the United States Army, and, during World War II, he was in charge of what went on here in Los Alamos. My father was among the men who pored over a map of Japan and decided: Hiroshima, Nagasaki. My father was proud of his work and the way he performed it. My father was proud that his decisions helped end a war that had already gone on far too long. Is it only I who now wonders at his ease, at the facility with which he touched that map and said, "There. And there"? Is it only I who sees her own existence as a counterpoint to those other lives? Survivor's guilt, I have heard this called, though I have not suffered as those true survivors do. No. I am only the progeny of the man who made certain few of them did.

We have no children, my husband and I. When I was a girl, there were air-raid drills, and we sat cross-legged under our desks with our heads down, hands knitted behind our necks. I did not think that I would see adulthood, when I was a girl, and so I did not consider children a possibility.

Of course, it is possible that my sterility is a result of growing up here in Los Alamos, but nobody knows for certain. But my husband and I do not have children. The closest I can come is my students, who, of course, are not really mine at all.

My husband's name is Paul Kramer. His parents, of whom only his mother is still alive, were in Auschwitz together, though they somehow did not know each other at the time. After Auschwitz, both emigrated to Buffalo, New York, where my mother-in-law, Rose, had a second cousin, and my father-in-law, Isaac, an old friend from the town where he had been raised. Buffalo is where Paul grew up, and I met him at a party in Ithaca years later. I was his roommate's date.

The mailman rang the doorbell; the letter was registered, return receipt, and he needed a signature. It was from a law firm in Albuquerque, and something about it kept me from opening it right away. I made a cup of tea, and when it was ready, I took it and the letter to the kitchen table and sat down.

I slit the envelope carefully with a knife; it seemed to demand it. Inside was a Notice to the Heirs of Hana Weissova. The name set off an odd humming, distant, but no recognition. I read on.

To the pianist Anna Holtz Kramer, of Los Alamos, New Mexico, I do give, devise, and bequeath my journals and my original music scores, to use as she shall see fit.

I skimmed the rest of the gives, devises, and bequeaths, but that was all. I read the other names: a sister, Raja Weissova BenTov, in Haifa, Israel; a godson, David Stone, in Albuquerque. Hana Weissova. I heard the humming again, an aria perhaps. But I couldn't place the name.

I dialed the number on the letterhead and asked for the lawyer who had signed the letter. I agreed to drive down to Albuquerque on Saturday, when an estate sale would be occurring at Hana Weissova's home. The lawyer gave me directions. I hung up and made another cup of tea.

The drive to Albuquerque still thrills me, though there's much more traffic now and the interstate is completed all the way from Santa Fe. The land on either side of the interstate is painted in muted pastels, and changes according to the time of day. Distances are different, infinite even, and the emptiness is at once startling and soothing.

Midway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, an outlet mall sprawls where there used to be a stuccoed bar sheltered by cottonwoods, the latter the place we always stopped when I was a girl, for Cokes and to pee or to just stretch our legs. The building's still there, boarded up, and I worry, absurdly, that one day when I drive to Albuquerque it will be gone.

Do buildings leave some essence behind when they are no longer there? Certainly people do: My father speaks to me every day, his voice unchanged, still directing my life from his command post. My mother appears in gestures of my own: hair brushed off a cheek; legs crossed twice, at both the ankle and the knee; or a certain bend to the fingers as they come down on the Steinway's keys, a touch that the piano translates to music, and for which the child yearns.

The boarded-up bar was still there; I drove by about 10:30 that morning and traffic exiting for the outlet mall backed up in the right lanes on both sides of the interstate. To the southeast, clouds curled over the top of the Sandias, and to the west, the sky over the Jemez was a dull and uniform grey. The air smelled of cold and snow, and I closed my vent, something I do not like to do. I tuned the radio to KUNM; they were playing Sousa marches, which I ordinarily avoid but which somehow seemed appropriate to the weather. A half-hour later, I exited the interstate at San Mateo and went into a coffee bar in a strip mall to clear the freeway buzz — and perhaps the Sousa — from my head.

While I drank a cup of hot tea, I read the letter again. I unfolded my Albuquerque map, which I'd brought in from the car, and looked up each of the street names. Albuquerque, except for its very old center, is a planned city, easy to navigate once you've memorized the main roads, set at one-mile intervals from the western volcanoes to the eastern mountains and from the Air Force base in the south to Sandia Pueblo in the north.

The estate sale was in the South Valley, where the majority of horror stories on the nightly news took place (all New Mexico television stations are based in Albuquerque, its largest city), and, except for a visit to the zoo as a teen, I was certain I'd never been there.

I studied the map, looking for a route that might be relatively free of drive-by...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1939650119
• ISBN 13: 9781939650115
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland