“That’s strange. She’s usually pretty accurate. Apologies for bothering you. Have a good flight.”
The dog owner walks away as if they’re not on the same flight. Mona looks back at J and barks one final time.
J has no idea whether the man is joking with him or not.
Germans are very hard to read.
On the flight to Frankfurt, J is seated in front of someone who kicks his seat incessantly. He assumes it’s a young child, but when he finally gets a look, he finds it’s a surly teenager. He feels he cannot ask the girl’s mother to calm her daughter down at that age. So he lets himself be kicked, and he is frustrated that the plane doesn’t have wi-fi, because how else is he supposed to look up whether dogs can actually be taught to smell cancer? He tries to distract himself by assembling tomorrow night’s DJ set on his laptop. These songs are supposed to put him in the mood for love, not despair, but at this point he’s not sure the two are separable.
There is a note waiting on his bed when he gets into his hotel room in Leipzig. Absurdly, he hopes it’s from V—every now and then when he was on tour, she’d consult his itinerary and do that, ask the hotel to leave a message on his pillow. Usually it was something remarkably embarrassing, which would cause him to get no shortage of strange looks when he checked in—Darling, I thought you were going to bury the body before you left. It’s not fair that I have to do it. OrI seem to have lost my diaphragm—you didn’t take it again, did you? I keep telling you—it’s not a coaster. OrI’m the woman you met last night at the show. My husband would like to have a few words with you.
Of course, the only person who knows where he’s staying is Imogen, and that’s exactly who the note is from. She apologizes that she won’t get to see him before the wedding—she and Carl are doing things “the old-fashioned way” and she won’t be getting to the church until the last possible moment. She says the priest will tell him when he’ll be playing the song and says that there will be anarea in the sacristy for him to change and set up, away from the choir.
You’ll be the final song on the program,she writes.Think of it as us having the last word.
J finds it hard to sleep that night. It is like that dog is still barking at him. Barking and barking and barking.
He wakes up disoriented, out of sorts. The sun has risen, but the sky hasn’t fully caught on to the fact. It is going to be a dreary, dismal day.
Just past noon, J puts on his suit and walks to the church. It is only as he nears it that he fully appreciates that he’s about to play at a site where Bach and Mozart once played. Of course, if you count the choir, tens of thousands of other people have also sung there over the centuries. But how many have played their own songs?
The church itself more than lives up to its history. On the outside, it looks like an alpine lighthouse has fallen into a more traditional cathedral from time immemorial. The sanctuary inside is striking in its simplicity—a white skeleton of pillars ribbed in red at the top as the ceiling soars.Toccata and Fugue in D Minoris playing as he walks up, as if to remind everyone of all that the walls have absorbed over the years.
A crowd has already gathered, speaking both British-inflected English and German. J feels a little silly flagging down an usher and asking to be directed to the priest...but that’s what he’s been instructed to do. The usher just shakes his head, and at first J thinks it’s a refusal, but then the usher points to another usher who explains after J introduces himself that the first usher doesn’t speak English. J is then ushered into the back corridors of the church, ultimately landing in the sacristy. In the rooms around him, J can hear the choir gathering, tuning themselves. A string quartet bows in the distance.
About twenty minutes before the service begins, a man who has to be the priest comes into the sacristy and nods at J. J nods back, and wonders if the priest, too, only speaks German (as well as Latin, presumably). He is an older man, very serious looking, with sharp features and small round glasses.
“You must be the singer,” the priest finally says, almost dismissively.
“I am, yes,” J confirms.
The priest calls out a name, and another man pops into the doorway.
“This is the organ player,” the priest says.
“Hello,” J greets.
The organ player nods back, then looks to his boss.
With as few words as possible, the priest says that he will signal J when it is his time to sing. There will be no mic, no amplification. J’s song will see the wedded couple out of the church at the end of the service; J must keep singing until the last person has filed out.
The priest doesn’t ask J if he has any questions. Instead, he dismisses the organ player, then turns away from J and puts on his vestments.
“So why did you become a priest?” J asks. In a sacristy, he imagines this amounts to small talk.
“For the love of God,” the priest answers. He almost sounds sarcastic, but because the priest is German, J can’t tell if he’s being mocked, if the concept of religion is being mocked, or if this is just a very straightforward answer.
The answer is so fiercely punctuated that J figures this will be the end of their exchange. But then the priest, with his back still to J, asks, “Why do you sing at weddings?”
J has a usual answer to this, but he tries to make it more elaborate for the priest.
“Singing at weddings make me feel like a kind of midwife,” J replies. “It’s like I’m delivering these people, like babies, into the next phase of their lives.”
He has to imagine neither Bach nor Wagner gave this particular answer. But, in fairness, he’s not sure they ever played weddings.
At first, J doesn’t think the priest has heard, since his answer gets such a lack of response. But then, fully vestmented, the priest turns and says, “Yes...and like a midwife you stand at the middle of life, but still on the side. You observe and study but you don’t really participate.”
When J finds himself at a loss for a response, the priest humor-lessly nods once and leaves the room. About two minutes before the start of the service, an altar boy comes over and leads J to the spot where he’ll wait. Not in the middle of the service, but on the side.
