Free A Greater Music by Deborah; Suah; Smith Bae Page B

them. I wanted to hear the music of the writing, just as M had in the old days. Joachim was the one who’d introduced us. I’d already been taking lessons from a German language tutor, alongside a Vietnamese girl whose vocabulary vastly outstripped mine, as she’d lived in Switzerland for several years. On top of that, our lessons were structured around the university entrance exam for foreigners that the Vietnamese girl was planning to take. I couldn’t care less about the university entrance exam and hated that kind of lesson, so I’d been thinking about taking a short private course, even though I couldn’t really afford it. But it was incredibly difficult to find a suitable private tutor, as private tutoring wasn’t common in Germany. Joachim had sounded fairly diffident when he first mentioned M, stressing that he wasn’t sure what she’d be like as she wasn’t a vocational teacher. According to him, M was a student at the language school and (this was his expression) absolutely off her head about music; the two of them had taken a maths course together. He left me in front of M’s house and headed off to school. At out first meeting I could barely understand her, confusedboth by her unfamiliar pronunciation and (to me) convoluted way of expressing herself. She was tall and androgynous, even beautiful, but seemed as though she would be strict. Before I had time to amend that first impression, and without so much as greeting me, M handed me a book and told me to read it out loud, adding that I should take care to pronounce the words properly whether or not I understood them. I glanced at the title but couldn’t make any sense of it, and when I opened the book and began haltingly to read, the passage I’d landed on proved equally incomprehensible. It’s a shame, but I can’t even remember what that book was, now—the first book in German I ever read, aside from a grammar textbook. My pronunciation was, of course, atrocious; I stuttered and often misread the words, couldn’t tell where I should pause and where I had to keep going, couldn’t get a feel for the rhythm, and mangled everything with my foreign accent. I can assert with complete confidence that M did not understand a word I read that day. It was our first lesson.
    Our subsequent lessons continued with the same format, of me reading aloud things I couldn’t understand and M trying to piece together the actual substance of the passages, the expression on her face constantly changing, shading into sadness, suffering, surprise, tedium, wistfulness, expressionlessness, defiance, rejection, desire. Once in a while M would ask me to repeat a certain passage. And so I read it again, still without understanding, struggling to pronounce the words clearly. What is this? I trembled with anger and need as I sat in front of M, unable to make any sort of emotional connection with what I was reading. The difference between understanding and not understanding was all too conclusive, like that between a rich man and a poor man, so I didn’t dare ask any questions for fear of revealing my ignorance. People Who Read Books makes me think of that time. The people I met andtalked with about books (in Germany, anyway) had all read People Who Read Books , so naturally M also had a copy; it’s possible that it was one of the various books I read sections from during our lessons. Of course this is just conjecture, not something I really remember. After I’d read a page, M would choose a particular word or sentence and launch into a lengthy explanation. One example was for the word “desolate.” “Do you know what ‘desolate’ means? You don’t? Of course, one could simply say, ‘when there is nothing visually arresting,’ but that would only be a very irresponsible and conventional definition. Something can be desolate irrespective of its visual appearance. The meaning is