The Schumann Proof by Peter Schaffter

Author:Peter Schaffter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459717237
Publisher: Dundurn Press

The Rover was in a visitors’ lot off to one side of the drive circling up to Léo’s condo. Pink granite boulders and a few low shrubs embellished the half-moon centre. The arrangement brought to mind Christian’s work in Caledon. A landscaper, an artist of the earth, his paint and canvas had been rock and tree, slope and plain, light and shade. He’d done Léo’s property first, then some of Léo’s acquaintances, then others. His creations were austere, beautiful and very much in demand. Who was tending them now that he was gone?

The rain had let up. A breeze from the south carried green, decaying odours from the lake. On a whim, I left the Rover where it was and walked to Craigleigh Gardens, four blocks away. The greyness of the evening, the early streetlamps shimmering off the rain-dark pavement, put me in a mood to sit by myself, out of doors, in the humid dusk.

After rain, Christian used to sit—often for hours, unmoving, impossible to speak to—beside a stretch of the Credit River running through Léo’s property. I never knew what transfixed him so completely in the spooling currents and doubted I could ever muster the intensity of sadness or peace that kept him rooted in one place for so long, but surely my frame of mind just then was something similar, however diluted.

The park wasn’t deserted, as I’d hoped. Some dog owners had brought their wards to frolic on the grass. The animals ran and skidded while their guardians conversed in a tight little clique. Periodically, a raincoated figure would break away from the group and zero in on a squatting mutt, plastic bag in hand.

I found a bench away from the activity, swiped water from the back, and sat with my shoes on the seat. The city’s background murmur, cotton-wooled by venerable oaks and maples, had a lulling effect. Without meaning to, I started turning over my conversation with Léo.

Ambition makes you uneasy.

He’d hit the nail on the head with that. In a world of my own making, the urge for fame would never outweigh the desire simply to do what you loved, and do it well. But I wasn’t as naïve as he imagined. I did understand that talent and ambition had to be allied, otherwise a person’s gifts frittered into—what had Elly called it?—dilettantism. The problem was, I couldn’t make the nexus in myself. I was indifferent about getting ahead, jockeying for my share of the spotlight. Worse, my apathy didn’t even have the decency to cloak itself in lofty moral precepts. Regardless of Léo’s crack about sullying my art, I didn’t judge people who were ambitious. I merely shied away from them.

“I’d expect you to insulate yourself from even considering that your friends might have been murdered because of someone else’s hopes for glory,” he’d said, and he’d gotten that right, too. Now that he’d planted the idea in my head, I couldn’t just ignore it. What if Ulrike had discovered that Mann was

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