…See her there, among the perpetual crowd, moving through the routines of check-in, security control, departure lounge.  She’s an attractive woman, with her stylishly cropped, reddish brown hair, her clearly delineated features, and large, nearly transparent green eyes. She cuts her way through the airport’s bland spaces with some impatience, her slim tall figure clad in jeans and short leather jacket, her head bent slightly as if to avoid notice. But there’s something about her that attracts notice nevertheless: perhaps it is a certain concentration of expression, or of being; perhaps it is the pale, light-absorbing eyes. What cannot be seen, as she pauses to buy her bottled water, or look round some insipid airport shop, is that she’s filled with a force of expressive meaning, a power of significant sound that enlarges the space within her to an immeasurable degree. Intimations of Schumann and Beethoven are always just below the surface of her mind and at the tips of her fingers, ready to emerge. She’s trailing a comet’s tail of music, a repertory of beauty and shaped feeling and strenuous human effort. She’s barely conscious of it, this lived history of the soul; but it is always within her reach, almost audible in the stray motifs, rhythms, musical suggestions that inform her movements, and speak to her as eloquently as any sentences.

What she cannot see fully is herself, as she cuts her way through the old-new world, or as that world cuts through her. She does not discern the vectors of power within which she is held, or the currents of strife and change that may pass through her too, for good or ill. After all, the world through which she travels doesn’t yet have a shape, and she is a new kind of creature in it. The forces pressing on her from within blur her own outline to her vision. She doesn’t yet know what the music inside her is driving her towards; she is on the border of herself; of the present.

***

She closes the book on her lap, and thinks, this is only a transitional passage. The passage one hardly hears, the neutral arpeggio meant to get you from one theme to the next. She straps herself into her seat, wills herself into a kind of inner immobility. She thinks, only seven hours... The great machine rumbles and churns, and then crescendoes into unnatural speed. Even through the shield of the airplane, something runs down her spine like the uncanny: a power of velocity and sound that could crush her in a mini-second. Then the stunning artifice of lift-off; the swoop above Long Island Sound; and as they leave it behind, the unending expanse of the resistless sky. She stares at it for a while, the vast blue space with no shape or horizon. Somewhere beneath the white noise of the airplane, phrases of Schubert rise up from within, with their lovely, fluent motion.  Scraps of music, scraps of thought. To anchor herself, she reaches for her briefcase – the touch of sleek leather is a kind of reassurance; she is, among other things, a person with a sleek leather briefcase – and looks through the folder with her schedule. An anticipatory excitement simmers, the lit-up excitement of the tour ahead. A string of city names extends itself on the page with a still glittering allure: Paris, Sofia, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Budapest, Barcelona... Magical metropolises, her generation’s fantasy of worldly adventure. What is Sofia doing in that awkward place, though, and why didn’t Anders get her Moscow or Rome? She thinks, how strangely arbitrary, and does it mean she is slipping, that the big cities will stop wanting her. That might happen, she knows, through some imperceptible elision, one never knows how or when. She peruses the file for the name of her Paris minder, and notes that it is Rougement. Well, that’s nice. He has been around forever; he will cushion the first moments. There are some publicity materials in the folder, and she looks at a photo of herself briefly and with some dissatisfaction. It was taken three years ago, and she didn’t like it in the first place, its staged pose or the smooth fake flow of her hair on which the publicity people insisted.

She feels the attention of the man in the next seat turning in her direction. He is corpulent in a forceful, packed way, and he is staring at her quite intently.