ANTHROPOPHAGI

1 1 1 R A N T H R O P O P H A G I L E S L I E E P S T E I N 1. Ernst Barbako√ went to the Cambridge Public Library, the branch on Pearl Street, every weekday morning as soon as the doors were open. Also Saturday afternoons. That was where the librarian, whom everybody called Miss Virginia, had posted his advertisement for piano lessons, the one with the quote from Toscanini: ‘‘This is how God plays the piano.’’ At the bottom, in brackets, it said, Leave replies with librarian; and these Miss Virginia duly collected and handed over to the tall, hunched musician, who sat at one of the tables reading first the newspaper and then the same blue-spined book, which turned out to be a journal kept by a Romanian Jew. What she noticed first was how, once he took o√ his hat, his hair, matted down on the crown of his skull, slowly started to rise. After an hour or so, it had pu√ed up to match the popular idea of a wild conductor – or, for that matter, Arturo Toscanini, whom she had looked up on the library’s computer the day after the newcomer had asked her to post the ad. The day after that, she learned his name, not from the computer and not from the man himself but 1 1 2 E P S T E I N Y from an elderly lady who always took out three books a week, two novels and a biography. She whispered to the librarian, ‘‘That man is a famous pianist. When he was a little boy. I saw him. I heard him. In Tel Aviv. Ernst Barbako√.’’ It gave Miss Virginia a pang, trying to imagine the child prodigy – a tuxedo? slicked down hair with a part? – and seeing him now in his half-buttoned cardigan and with the swollen and gnarled hands that struggled to turn the pages of his book. And those ears! The way he absent-mindedly pulled on the rubbery lobes. On a whim she looked him up too, but all she got was a doctor on Long Island and a partner in an accounting firm. She tried to place his accent, though he said little more than ‘‘Good morning, Miss Virginia,’’ when she had greeted him with ‘‘Good morning, Mr. Barbako√.’’ It was European, but also like that of the Israelis who lived one floor down in her building, and like that of the woman who claimed to have attended his concert when he was a boy. Haphazardly, a little dreamily, she invented a story: Holocaust survivor, refugee, hidden by – well, by a Polish pianist. He would have heard Chopin through the floorboards. Then, at her desk, or even at her kitchen sink on Magoun Street, she would laugh at herself and let the nonsense dissolve. Later on, when she had learned that part of this castle in the air was true, it made her feel that she, too, had known him as a boy: the hair with pomade, a sti√ white collar. After a month he asked her to take down the notice. ‘‘No more lessons, Mr. Barbako√?’’ ‘‘I have, my dear Miss Virginia, too many pupils.’’ His sweater, she saw, was buttoned the wrong way. She forced down the impulse to redo it herself. Instead, she turned her head away while he fumbled at the leather knobs. ‘‘I charge them unheard-of sums,’’ he said. ‘‘Fifty dollars. From one woman, one hundred dollars. Still they ask me to come.’’ He stu√ed his arms into his overcoat, and his newspaper and his book into his satchel, which was hinged, like the sort of gadget doctors used to carry in the movies. Then he set o√ on foot, though the wind was chill and a few snowflakes were tumbling in the air. That night she went back to Toscanini on the computer, not at the library but on the laptop by her bed. There it was, his name, at the bottom of the discography: Brahms Second Piano Concerto, A N T H R O P O P H A...