Pulse

sticky and filling, so chose thelychees. And I decided not to tell her about that game from long ago, nor about that production of King Lear . And then I did momentarily dare a future, and thought that if we came back again sometime, maybe I’d tell her. I also hoped that she’d never played the game with Ben, and been handed a mozzarella.
    Just as I was thinking this, ‘Lara’s Theme’ oozed out of the speakers. We looked at one another and laughed, and she made a gesture as if to push back her chair and rise. Maybe she saw alarm in my eyes because she laughed again and then, playing along, threw her napkin down on the table. The gesture took her hand more than halfway across the cloth. But she didn’t get up, or push her chair back, just went on smiling, and left her hand on top of her napkin, knuckles raised.
    And then I touched her.

Harmony
    THEY HAD DINED well at 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room. M—’s intimates had sometimes been fortunate enough to have Gluck, Haydn or the young prodigy Mozart perform for them; but they could be equally content when their host seated himself behind his violoncello and beckoned at one of them to accompany him. This time, however, the lid of the klavier was down, and the violoncello nowhere visible. Instead, they were confronted by an oblong rosewood box standing on legs which made the shape of matching lyres; there was a wheel at one end and a treadle beneath. M— folded back the curved roof of the contraption, disclosing three dozen glass hemispheres linked by a central spindle and half-submerged in a trough of water. He seated himself at the centre and pulled out a narrow drawer on either side of him. One contained a shallow bowl of water, the other a plate bearing fine chalk.
    ‘If I might make a suggestion,’ said M—, looking round at his guests. ‘Those of you who have not yet heard Miss Davies’s instrument might try the experiment of closing your eyes.’ He was a tall, well-made man in a blue frock coat with flat brass buttons; his features, strong and jowly, were those of a stolid Swabian, and if his bearing and voice had not obviously denoted the gentry, he might have been taken for a prosperous farmer. But it was his manner, courteous yet persuasive, which impelled some who had already heard him play decide to close their eyes as well.
    M— soaked his fingertips in water, flicked them dry and dabbled them in the chalk. As he pumped at the treadle with his right foot, the spindle turned on its bright brass gudgeons. He touched his fingers to the revolving glasses, and a high, lilting sound began to emerge. It was known that the instrument had cost fifty gold ducats, and sceptics among the audience at first wondered why their host had paid so much to reproduce the keening of an amorous cat. But as they became accustomed to the sound, they started to change their minds. A clear melody was becoming detectable: perhaps something of M—’s own composition, perhaps a friendly tribute to, or even theft from, Gluck. They had never heard such music before, and the fact that they were blind to the method by which it came to them emphasised its strangeness. They had not been told what to expect and so, guided only by their reasoning and sentiment, wondered if such unearthly noises were not precisely that – unearthly.
    When M— paused for a few moments, busying himself on the hemispherical glasses with a small sponge, one of the guests, without opening his eyes, observed, ‘It is the music of the spheres.’
    M— smiled. ‘Music seeks harmony,’ he replied, ‘just as the human body seeks harmony.’ This was, and at the same time was not, an answer; rather than lead, he preferred to let others, in his presence, find their own way. The music of the spheres was heard when all the planets moved through the heavens in concert. The music of the earth was heard when all the instruments of an orchestra played together. The music of the human body was heard when it too was in a state of harmony, the organs at peace, the blood flowing freely and the nerves aligned along their true and intended paths.
    The encounter between M— and Maria Theresia von P— took place in the imperial city of V— between the winterof 177– and the summer of the following year. Such minor suppressions of detail would have been a routine literary mannerism at the time; but they also tactfully admit the partiality of our knowledge. Any philosopher