The soloist Page 8

  From what we'd heard in court that day, Zen sounded something like my student's sect. Enlightenment, salvation, finding your "true self"—it all sounded too grandiose, hopeful and vague at the same time to be believed. I couldn't understand how anyone could walk into a building, see a bunch of shaven-headed Caucasians dressed in robes, hear them chant in Japanese and not want to tiptoe as quickly as possible back outside to safety.

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  Things went both well and badly during KTjng-hee's

  second lesson. No sooner had the boy and his mother

  gotten through the door than Mrs. Kim thrust the

  exercise book I'd given Kyung-hee in front of me, made an

  unpleasant face and said, "Too easy! Kyung-hee already

  good, why you want him do this?"

  "Because, Mrs. Kim, it's necessarv^ if he wants to become great. He's good now, but he'll never be great if he doesn't pay attention to the basics."

  "Eh.^" she grunted, frowning at me as if I were the one with the language problem. "This too easy," she repeated in a shrill voice, waving her plump litde hand dismissively and planting herself on the couch in the studio. She crossed her arms in front of her and glared at me.

  No wonder Kyoing-hee never says anything. What child would dare express himself around a parent like that? For the first time, I felt sTnpathetic toward the boy rather than just annoyed by him. As he rosined his bow I tuned his cello for him, and saw that on the back of his cello he had placed a tiny sticker with an Asian character written on it. "What's this?"

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  I asked him. He looked at me from behind the thick lenses that made his eyes look the size of nectarines.

  "That means cat," he said in a tiny voice.

  "Cat, cat," Mrs. Kim echoed. "Always cat!" She finished her thought in Korean, but Kyung-hee didn't appear to be paying any attention to her.

  "Do you like cats?" I asked partially to defy his mother.

  He nodded. "Cats can see at night."

  "Yes, that's true. And they're excellent hunters. Have you ever seen one catch a mouse?"

  He shook his head, looking at me expectantly. At least he was looking at me.

  "Well, they creep up, very silently, until they're very close to their prey. Then they freeze, just like a statue, and wait for exactly the right moment, and then ..." I mimed the action of hunching up motionless, then bursting out of hiding. "They jump, just like they were shot out of a gun! It's pretty exciting."

  He actually smiled and I saw his teeth for the first time. I felt as if I'd just caught a glimpse of the Holy Grail. Not wanting to lose the momentum, I picked up my bow and said, "You know, that's exactiy the kind of feeling you want to have when you begin a great piece. Watch me."

  I drew the bow and held it over the strings and froze, gathering energy for the first note. Then I let go and dug into it—high C on the A string, then tumbling down to the low C string at the bottom. It was the initial phrase of the third Bach suite. "You see?" I asked, hoping he would figure out that even a simple line could lead one to a world of musical images and emotions, "That last C was the mouse! I burst out of the woods, chased it down and caught it! Can you try?"

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  He froze like a little kitten, with an unintentionally comical look of determination on his face. Then he pounced, unfortunately hitting the thin A string so hard that it snapped. His face fell as if he had been shot; he went pale and his body turned stiff, as if he were going into shock.

  ''Aiyo," his mother yelped, and then bolted up, leaned over him and scolded him, repeating the same phrase in Korean over and over. He hung his head and seemed to tune out; it was as if he were trydng to make his body as small and unobtrusive as possible, and then make his soul disappear. Mrs. Kim shook her head in frustration and said to him in English, for my benefit, ''You don't listen to teacher! You don't do like teacher do! How we going to pay for that if you breaking it.> Daddy very angrv^ when he gets home."

  I know that it's best not to interfere with students and their parents, but I could not restrain myself. "Mrs. Kim," I said, struggling to keep my voice under control, ''your son is a cellist—an extremely talented cellist, and he may one day be a great and famous cellist. But he will never be anything if you don't let him make mistakes. Cellists break strings—it happens all the time. There's no way to avoid it. It isn't your son's fault—I asked him to play that way to try to help him!"

  I couldn't tell whether Mrs. Kim was furious with me or stricken with embarrassment. She walked stiffly back toward the couch and sat down slowly, fixing her eyes somewhere in the middle of the floor.

  The rest of the lesson was a disaster. Kyung-hee had totally withdrawn; he didn't even answer yes or no to my questions, merely shrugged. On the other hand, when he played his exercises for me I could see he'd made good progress.

  Which left: me even more confijsed than before over what to do about him.

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  The next state's witness was the policeman who had first arrived at the scene and taken Philip Weber into custody. He was a young man, with a regulation mustache, of course, and all business. He never smiled, never paused to think about his answers or choice of words, didn't look at anyone but the attorney examining him, and said "sir" in almost all of his responses to the prosecutor's questions. Still, his testimony, in spite of his formulaic attempts to make it sound like objective fact and nothing more, let you know that he thought Philip Weber was a self-absorbed deviant who knew exactly what he was doing that day.

  "Did Mr. Weber seem in control of himself when you arrested him.>" the prosecutor asked.

  "Yes, sir, he was completely in control. The suspect did not resist arrest. He was not agitated."

  "Did he speak to you at all after you had read him his rights?"

  "Yes, sir. The suspect spoke quite a bit."

  "What did he talk about.>"

  "The suspect talked about his philosophy. It all sounded like gibberish to me. He was saying that everything was an illusion, but then he asked if we could adjust the handcuffs because they were uncomfortable. Also, in the car on the way to the station, the suspect told me to avoid a certain street because of construction. He said we would be delayed."

  "Was he right, officer.>"

  "Yes, sir. We were delayed several minutes."

  I thought I saw the policeman's eyes dart uncomfortably as he said this; I think he was a little embarrassed.

  The state's last witness was the homicide detective who

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  had interviewed Philip Weber just after he was arrested. He was more of a bureaucrat than the officer had been; he didn't need to use paramilitar' terminology, nor did he sport a regulation mustache. He was black and seemed like a reasonable man, and I noticed that he looked at the defendant several times without any apparent malice or eagerness to see the voung man punished. I got the impression that this had been a relatively trouble-free case for him.

  ''Did Mr. Weber make a confession. Detective Wright.^" Mr. Graham asked.

  'Tes, he did.''

  "Had you read him his Miranda rights.^"

  "Yes."

  "And what did he tell you.>"

  "Well, he was ver^ cooperative. He acknowledged right off that he'd killed the man, and when I asked him, he said he didn't feel any remorse over it. He said that the killing was something between Zen masters, that us ordinary folks just wouldn't get it, and there wasn't much point in trying to explain it. He seemed to feel that the victim—the Japanese man—understood and wouldn't have minded. Philip claimed that killing the Japanese man was really the best way to put the victim's philosophy into action."

  "Did Mr. Weber say what that philosophy was.>"

  Detective Wright laughed and said, "Well, he tried to explain it to me, but I'm afraid it went over my head, me being just an ordinary guy, you know. It's all in my report— you might be better off reading it straight from there than rehing on my memor'. Overall, Philip seemed to be saing that the who
le Zen thing is about confidence. That if you have complete confidence in yourself, anything you do is all

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  right—that it's perfect, in fact. It all sounds great—all these cults sound great at first—until you see what they lead people to do."

  During the breaks I tried not to talk about the case, but it was difficult. Gary, the meter man, in particular, evidently couldn't bear to remain silent. He made it amply clear that he thought the whole thing sounded crazy; I did too, but hearing Gary talk you'd have thought the murder had taken place in a circus fiin house. I actually heard him snort a few times during the witnesses' testimony, as if he were squelching laughter; he told me that the image of a group of bald priests hitting each other with sticks struck him as being almost too comical to believe.

  Whenever I could I found a chance to say a few words to Maria-Teresa, and a few times she initiated conversations with me. To my surprise, she and I were the only ones who didn't follow the general pattern of the men talking to other men and the women talking to other women. After being at the university for so many years, where faculty and students of the two sexes mix regularly, this pattern seemed almost quaint. The only other exception I noticed was that Rose, the secretary, and Dwight, who worked at the defense industry plant, occasionally talked. But that seemed to be because they were the only two blacks on the jury.

  After the detective's testimony the state rested and Judge Davis invited the defense to call witnesses. When Ms. Dop-pelt declined the opportunity, saying that the witnesses for the defense would have nothing to say if they couldn't discuss Mr. Weber's mental condition, the judge raised his consider-

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  able eyebrow once again, then shrugged and instructed the lawyers to make their closing arguments. I knew that public defenders were overworked and underpaid, but I always assumed they had to possess at least a certain degree of competence to represent clients in trials, particularly murder trials. Ms. Doppelt, however, hardly seemed to be putting up much of a fight.

  Mr. Graham went first. He approached us in his usual relaxed manner and briefly reiewed the testimony. He emphasized that the witnesses all described the crime in un-refuted testimony, leaing no room for doubt that the defendant intentionally killed Mr. Okakura.

  Ms. Doppelt, strangely enough, didn't even make a closing argument, which seemed shocking to me. With the evidence part of the trial over, the judge then gave us brief instructions about how to apply the law to the evidence and come up with a verdict. He reminded us that the crime of second-degree murder required that it be an intentional killing—not accidental—but did not require that Weber planned or thought about the crime beforehand at all. Even if the killing was entirely impulsive, it still counted as murder if the defendant possessed the intent to kill when he swung the stick. The custodian led us to our deliberating room, and we each chose a seat around a long oak table. I took a chair near a far corner, and Maria-Teresa sat down next to me.

  Dwight Anderson was the last person in the room. He took the one remaining chair, which everyone had avoided because it was located at the head of the table. No one wanted to be foreman. Dwight, who was heavyset and had an air of militar' discipline about him, didn't seem to mind. WTien he sat down, even'one naturally looked in his direction.

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  "As I understand it," he said, "the first order of business is to appoint a jury foreman. Does anybody want to volunteer?"

  No one raised a hand.

  "Has anybody here ever done jury duty before.^" he asked.

  The older Jewish lady, who was a retired practical nurse, said she had served on a jury years ago. Her accent made her sound a bit like my mother.

  "That makes you the most experienced, then," Dwight said. "I nominate you. Anyone want to second that.>"

  A few people murmured their approval. The tiny nominee accepted with a shrug, but asked Dwight, "What about you, mister.> You seem like you'd be better at it than me. I nominate you."

  He nodded pleasandy and asked for any other nominations or volunteers. No one spoke up, so he suggested we vote. He handed out some paper and pencils that the clerk had left for us, then said, "My name is Dwight Anderson. And your name is—ma'am.>"

  "Ruth Friedman."

  I figured that Dwight was going to be chosen because he was so obviously suited for it, so I voted for Mrs. Friedman as a kindness.

  Either six other people had soft hearts like me or a majority of our group didn't want to be led by a black man, because Mrs. Friedman won the vote seven to five. She looked surprised, but seemed resigned to it and said, "OK, so let's get it over with." She told us that in her other trial the jury cast a secret ballot first, and then reviewed the evidence as a group before voting again. So more slips of paper were passed out and we were instructed to write either "guilty" or "not guilty" on them.

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  Just before wc started, the housewife with the pharmacist husband, Mathilda Jencks, raised her hand and asked, ''But what if a juror is undecided? What do you write then?" There was something about her—an anxiety in her voice, a confused look—that made me think she was going to be a pain.

  ''It's good you asked," Mrs. Friedman responded. "If you're undecided, that's what you should write."

  We all scribbled away and handed our slips to Mrs. Friedman to count, rd written "guilty" because there really was no choice. I wondered, though, if it would get more complicated during the second phase of the trial. When Mrs. Friedman had counted them all, she grinned. "Eleven guilty, one undecided."

  I think ever'one tried not to look at Mathilda, but she sighed and said in an exasperated tone, "Well, so much for the secret ballot."

  "Let's not worry about it," Mrs. Friedman said, "there's no rules about how this has to go, so ... in the other trial I was in we reviewed the evidence; everybody did it together, we went over all the main points. That was a complicated trial. This one, it's not so complicated. . . . Who wants to start? Mathilda, you want to tell us what you're thinking?"

  "I don't see the direction we're heading in here . . ." Mathilda said nervously. "I've just heard the evidence myself, and it's not obvious to me that everything is out in the open here."

  An embarrassed silence followed. My guess is that everybody was thinking what I was thinking, which was Uh-oh. Mrs. Jencks appeared to be having difficult}' either thinking or expressing herself clearly. The responsibilitv' lay with our foreperson to break the silence. She shrugged and asked,

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  "Well, do you want us to go over the evidence? What would make you comfortable?"

  "Frankly, right now I'm feeling a little pressured! IVe been painted into a corner that I didn't necessarily want to be in."

  "There's no reason, dear. There's no hurry here, is there? You take all the time you want." It was nice of Mrs. Friedman to say that, but the truth was, we couldn't do anything until Mathilda decided she was ready to talk.

  We all sat quietly staring at the table, until Mathilda said, "I'm not saying he isn't guilty. I'm just saying I don't think he's been proven guilty. I mean, they never went into the question of what kind of man he was, I mean the leader of their cult, the Japanese man who was killed. What if he was someone like that . . . what was his name? Tom Jones? The one who made all those poor women and children drink that awful poison in Guyana? If somebody had killed that monster before he did his evil things, would we call that murder? Or Hitler?"

  The comparisons were so out of line that no one seemed to want to try to tangle with her. At last Mrs. Jencks, looking even more exasperated than before, shook her head and blurted out, "Well, if you're all so sure he's guilty, I guess I must be missing something. Whatever you say—if you say guilty, that's fine."

  A more idealistic group might have encouraged her to stand by her sense of doubt for at least a few minutes more, but we accepted her surrender without hesitation.

  "Good—it's unanimous, then," Mrs. Friedman confirmed. "Shall we let the judge know we have a verdict?"


  We nodded, hoping to get back into the courtroom before Mrs. Jencks had any second thoughts. As we found our seats in the jury box, I noticed that the defendant was looking

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  closely at each of us. When his eyes met mine I started to look away out of habit, but then thought, Why not look back if he's going to stare at me? So I returned his gaze, feeling a bit queasy again, as when Vd held the murder weapon. His face looked like a baby's; he was utterly relaxed, and stared at me with benign curiosity. After a few seconds he lost interest in me and looked at Maria-Teresa. She actually smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  When the time came, Mrs. Friedman stood up and handed the verdict forms to the bailiff, who passed them to the judge, who then gave them to the clerk. After this oddly calming ritual, the clerk faced the courtroom and read in an even voice, "We the jury find the defendant guilty of the charge of second-degree murder." The pale young man sat with his back straight and his eyes closed, and showed no reaction. Neither of the lawyers looked at all surprised. It was only when I noticed the group of relatives of the murdered man whispering to one another and nodding with satisfaction that I was reminded that we weren't deciding whether to fine someone for parking illegally. Their response was controlled, though; they certainly knew that the killer could still be found insane and therefore acquitted in the second half of the trial.

  Again I looked at the defendant. It was still almost impossible to imagine him committing the crime. He looked so passive and resigned. He had just gone halfway toward spending a long time, maybe the rest of his life, in jail, and he didn't seem affected at all. It was a maddening, incongruous sight, and I didn't know what to make of it. Was he faking.^ Was he really out of his mind.>