Closures and openings
How do I begin to put into words my feelings about that time? Such a fullness and intensity in my emotions, such peaks and sudden downs, such expansiveness and then contraction. My memory of Hardi at ninety-two, dealing with his grief at the loss of my mother whom he had loved for the twenty years of their marriage and looked after in declining health for many of those. His previous wife had been an invalid for forty years; what a lifetime of caring and devotion he had lived in this one.
Dear man, I see him sitting with me at the dining table in my room-in-the roof, sharing the experience of producing hundreds of copies of Calling in the Light. We made them ourselves, burning the CDs one by one on my small Mac laptop. The cover was created from a digital photo taken of a corner portion of Ashot’s painting, which had returned to Thonon with us from Moscow the year before. The photo contained three little energetic beings, almost stylised angels with wings and their ‘mouths’ open. In the actual painting they were hardly visible, but in the close-up their presence was very effective, given the title. Hardi’s task was to feed the artwork into the plastic cover, place the CD in and snap it shut. He did this slowly, mindfully, with concentration. We were in a quiet meditative and peaceful space together, and I am pleased that I still have the short video I made while he was doing this.
It was a special time, and we were deeply connected. While my mother was alive, he would say to elderly residents in the lounge if I played at the retirement village,
‘Come and sit closer to the piano. The music will make you feel better!’ and pull his chair up close to me. He had a deep wisdom, a knowingness and when he looked at us with his sparkling blue eyes, I had a sense of the greatness of his soul.
Ronald arrived soon after my mother’s passing, and we had a couple of weeks together, experiencing the Cape winter. A film he insisted we should see was As it is in Heaven. What a gift to me at this time. What a gift to humanity, this generous masterpiece! Watching it was cathartic, and I allowed my tears to flow freely. I noticed Ronald was allowing it too. I have watched this film several times, and each time it has the same heart-opening effect.
Yes, emotions. A roller-coaster of emotions when I returned to Thonon two weeks later in time for Ronald’s birthday. We stopped at the lake for a fresh fish meal at one of our favourite restaurants on our way home from the airport. It was a glorious summer day, and the summer stretched out ahead of me with a couple of exciting projects, including an improvisation music festival in Switzerland and a visit to Turkey in September to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Rumi’s death/birthday.
I can still see the scene and can feel the feeling even now, as we arrived at the bottom of Rue du Funiculaire and parked, seeing no available space near our building.
A young blond boy, possibly eleven or twelve, bounded up to Ronald and affectionately greeted him, reaching up for a double-cheeked kiss. And with this simple and innocent gesture, I knew. I knew, just as I had known almost ten years before when I had joined Ronald in Bosnia and when I had seen the interaction between another young blond boy and him. I knew that the mothers of these boys had come into my life during my absences from Ronald’s.
I felt nauseous as I recalled the scenes, which I had denied prior to my leaving for Cape Town. This boy’s mother clearly flirted with Ronald as he arrived from Geneva by boat and walked through the park back home. I could see this from our windows looking out over the lake. It was stereotypical French seduction at its most blatant, and I had dismissed it. But clearly the flirtation had become more serious. What was difficult for me was that I could not ignore it, as she lived with her son in the ground-floor apartment of our building and had moved in recently. This was too close for comfort. A barrier had been breached.
At some level I had known that these were the risks and consequences of our life, with so much time spent apart. Of course, the signs had been there for some time. But there was still this love, this complicity, this friendship and what was happening seemed so brutal. It was the harshness of the reality and the truth which I was now forced to confront, which sent me reeling. I had just buried my mother and now knew that it was no longer possible to avoid the inevitable. At some point we would need to bury our marriage and find a new form for our relationship.
It appears to be a universal principle, however, that we only get taken to the depths of what we can survive and grow from. However painful at the time, the paradox is always there in the potential for Soul-making. And the fact that I had enrolled for an improvisation festival in Lausanne for the following week, gave me a blessed breathing space in which I could allow my feelings to settle.
The festival took me away for a week, and I was able to stay with the organiser’s family in a little Swiss village in the countryside of canton Vaud, driving through the fields in the early morning sunrise each day. In a daze, I attended a series of masterclasses with a small group of young music students – proteges, who were being offered extra inputs during their holidays. There was also a handful of people from other countries. I soaked these inputs up like a sponge, thirsty for everything on offer. I was certainly the most ‘mature’ participant and to the persons offering the masterclasses I might also have appeared the most appreciative and enthusiastic.
The first day was a percussion workshop ‘rhythm sur table’, and we sat in a group around tables with Katya Olivier. Beating out rhythms with our hands and fingers. She intuited that I was from South Africa, when unknowingly I started tapping out a particularly complex rhythm and she looked at me questioningly.[1] The second workshop was an organ masterclass with Rudi, a masterful organist who had transcribed Fratres, a powerful orchestral work by Arvo Pärt, for the organ alone. This was amazing and I was transported when Rudi played a large part of this, one of my favourite orchestral works. Then when each ‘student’ sat at the organ, and it was my turn, I felt my feet intuitively reach for and move across the pedals. I had removed my shoes and with my bare feet feeling the wooden slats, there was a familiarity, a knowingness.
One day we had a glorious full improvisation workshop where each student had an instrument and we worked around a middle-eastern theme. This venue was in an old church, which housed an eclectic collection of musical instruments and I found an old small organ in the minstrel gallery, which I used as my ‘voice’ in this co-creation. The energy in this group of talented young people was vital, enthusiastic, inclusive and I felt no inhibitions as I allowed my own creativity to blend and merge with the music we were making together.
Then, finally, the piano masterclass was held in a larger auditorium as the families and friends of the young virtuosos were present. I listened full of admiration to the talent and skill being demonstrated and then it was my turn. I hesitated for a moment. But only for a moment and then stepped up onto the platform and was seated at the longest piano I have ever sat in front of, its huge black body stretching out before me. I went into my space, my quietude, and breathed slowly, deeply, as my hands and fingers found what they were seeking. At the end, when my consciousness had returned to the stage, and I was back in my body and looking up at the faces, the piano professor from Geneva asked in French, ‘Madame, where do you wish to go with your music?’
I was still silent, feeling the vibration throughout my body. I placed my palms together in front of my chest, as if in prayer, and lifted my hands slowly above my head pointing upwards. He nodded and said simply, ‘Well, Madame, carry on doing exactly as you are doing.’ I nodded in return, left the stage and the festival, and took the boat back to Thonon. The sun was setting behind the Jura and the cobalt color in the waters of the lake was deep and soulful. I felt full of gratitude.
I had been deeply nourished during these days. My soul had played joyfully for a week, I was in a different space emotionally and my heart was very expansive and open. I believe the music I played on my return was laced with these emotional layers and had a powerful and healing impact on both Ronald and I as we moved into these uncharted waters between us… facing the question of how to navigate the next phase in our relationship, if we no longer had a marriage.
[1] I later had the opportunity to work with her privately, when she crossed the lake to spend a full day with me and my piano in Thonon. Sadly, the recording of this precious session was not usable.