CYRILLE FLEISCHMANN
243
him. But it was a nice day, and he was having an adventure. He got up from
his folding chair and took a few steps toward the leader's wife.
"Madame, all the same I'll take a cup of coffee for the honor of drink–
ing with you."
He cleared his throat, adding a little anxiously:
"You . ..you. . .don't ever put any...ham in your coffee, do you? My
doctor doesn't allow it."
As she poured coffee into a paper cup, the leader's wife said:
"Oh no." Then, disturbed: "I don't think so. Does your wife usually put
ham in her coffee?"
Guitterman almost choked. What kind of a
fix
did I get myself into
with this coffee? He thought for a moment, and smiling broadly so he
wouldn't lose face: "No, Madame, my wife doesn't put ham in the coffee
because I'm... a widower!"
"Oh, excuse me!"
He went back to his folding chair. On the platform, the other musicians
had joined Izzyk Gilleski.
Guitterman was at the foot of the platform. He put down the newspa–
per he'd taken out of his pocket when he finished his coffee, got up from
his chair and made up his mind to listen closely.
He was surprised.
It
was louder than he'd ever heard. Louder than the
band of the Garde Republicaine in the Place des Vosges, when there was
still a bandstand in the Place des Vosges.
The president made every effort to follow that strange rhythm. The
whole world vibrated around him. There weren't only young people there.
Guitterman was the oldest at the foot of the platform, but there were peo–
ple of forty, fifty, the age of his own children.
Automatically, without realizing it, he began to ,beat time with his right
foot. Within half an hour,just as at the circus of his childhood when the
trapeze artists threw themselves into the void and were caught at the last
moment, he followed the music, lost it, and found it again.
Guitterman was in a little circus, he was in a painting, he was some–
where else.
He beat time, his own time. Forgotten was his mission to look after
Izzyk; forgotten, his worries, the whole world ouside of this music that was
not music but something else. A sentence came back to him. Gilleski had
said something like:
" It's better than music, it's life!"
Guitterman closed his eyes and, beyond what his arthritis would allow,
he gave himself up to that life.
Translated from the French
by
Avriel Goldberger
