The Soloist (7 page)

Looking at my notebooks and seeing in my childish handwriting the excitement I felt during each of my lessons, I grew angry with myself for being so selfish and not rejoicing in Kyung-hee’s talent as any music lover should. Once someone came into the dressing room backstage after one of my concerts and rudely asked von Kempen if it ever bothered him to see such a young student get so much attention. The old man stood up from his chair (it was always painful for him to stand, but he insisted on such formalities) and said, “Sir, I assure you it is an honor and a pleasure to teach this boy, but even if it was not, it would still be my responsibility to do so. How I feel about it is entirely irrelevant.” I wanted to have that kind of dignity, but it did not come so easily to me.

The next day Judge Davis began the trial by introducing the two lawyers, starting with the accused man’s counsel, a public defender named Anna Doppelt. She wore a meticulously pressed gray business suit, no jewelry except for a pair of small gold earrings, and her hair was fastened straight back with a dark barrette. She seemed to be wearing no makeup, but could have used a bit here and there; she had thin lips and dry-looking skin. She appeared to be about my age, in her mid-thirties, or maybe even younger. Her desk was covered with large but orderly piles of yellow legal pads with writing all over them. In spite of appearing overworked, she seemed eager to get on with the trial.

“And representing the state,” the judge said, sounding a bit friendlier, “the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Jack Graham.” Mr. Graham was an older man, probably in his late fifties. He was somewhat overweight, wore a pair of reading glasses, and his tie didn’t quite match his shirt. He had a pleasant, friendly look to him. From the way the judge introduced him, I suspected that they had worked in the same courtroom before.

Next the judge read twelve names off a computerized list,
and twelve prospective jurors from our group rose to take seats in the jury box. The rest of us stayed in the gallery. The judge announced that he would now initiate a procedure known as the voir dire, or “telling the truth.” He explained in a rapid monotone that the men and women in the jury box would answer a series of questions, displayed on a large sign in the front of the courtroom, to see whether they were fit to be the jurors of the case. The first three questions were fairly predictable: name, occupation and marital status. The last questions surprised me: each juror had to state the occupations of their spouses and grown children, and had to describe any prior jury-duty experience in painstaking detail.

When one man mentioned that he worked as a janitor at the L.A. Times building, Judge Davis interrupted him to ask what newspapers he read. Had he read anything about this case? No. The judge interrupted another juror, a frightened-looking older woman who mentioned that her husband had been a police officer, to ask if she had ever been the victim of a crime. When she answered that she had been mugged once, only blocks away from this very courthouse, several people laughed quietly and Ms. Doppelt glanced at Judge Davis, who appeared to stifle a grin. He thanked the woman without further comment and moved on to the next prospective juror.

When all twelve had answered the printed questions, the judge invited Ms. Doppelt, the defense attorney, to voir dire the jury. She centered one of her yellow legal pads in front of her, took a deep breath and went down the line, asking questions for nearly two hours. I noticed that she scrutinized those jurors who seemed overly conservative or religious. When she finished, Mr. Graham, the prosecutor, did the same thing. He seemed especially wary of people whose work
had even the most tenuous association with psychiatry or psychology. When all of the questioning was finished, Judge Davis invited the prosecutor to begin the next procedure. Mr. Graham nodded and gestured toward the juror sitting closest to the bench, a former schoolteacher who had once been a social worker, and said, “Thank you, Your Honor. We would like to thank and excuse juror number one, Mrs. Berger.” She was led away without any comment from the judge and replaced with someone from the gallery. That person, a Mr. Lenahan, answered the questions on the printed card, identifying himself as a retired police officer. He was interviewed by the two lawyers and was promptly dismissed by Ms. Doppelt. Another juror was called to the box, went through the questioning procedure and was allowed to stay.

This went on all morning, past lunch and into the afternoon. Among those dismissed was a woman who admitted she had read about the defendant in a tabloid magazine article titled “Zen Monster Kills Guru,” and had already made up her mind that the defendant belonged behind bars for what he did. From this interview I deduced that it had been a cult murder. The woman who had been mugged near the courthouse was sent home, as was a man whose wife worked at a hospital, had been assaulted by a patient there and had had to see a psychologist as part of her therapy before returning to work.

After Mr. Graham dismissed a young woman who had recently finished law school, Judge Davis read my name from his list. By this time everyone involved was looking tired of the selection process. After I had answered the printed questions, Ms. Doppelt raised her head from behind a pile of documents she was studying and asked me if I knew about
the case from reading the papers or hearing about it otherwise. I said no. “Mr. Sundheimer, if someone had, let’s say, an epileptic fit, and during his seizure he killed someone with a blow of his hand, do you think he should be punished for that?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no.”

“Why not?” she asked, nodding slowly.

“Because … I should think he had no control over it—over his movements, I mean.”

“In other words,” Ms. Doppelt suggested, “he didn’t intend to kill anyone, right? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes … I suppose that was what I meant.…” She made me nervous; I couldn’t tell if she was pleased by my answer or only setting me up for an embarrassing dismissal.

“Good,” she said at last, looking at the other jurors as well as at me. “Let me just point out here that the law states that a person who is too sick—mentally sick—to form the intent to kill cannot be convicted of murder. He or she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, then committed to an institution for treatment and held there until deemed fit to return to society. Does anyone here disagree with that? Does anyone think that’s being too lenient?”

No one raised a hand. She seemed satisfied with my answers and turned the questioning over to the prosecutor. Mr. Graham stood up to stretch his legs, looked at me and smiled. His glasses were the old-fashioned black-rimmed type, and I noticed when he stood that his shoes needed polishing. He was an extremely charming man. He spoke gently, with a Southern accent, and used expressions I’d never heard before; during one interview a woman seemed to be giving contradictory answers to his questions about her occupation, but instead of getting angry he smiled and asked,
“Ma’am, I just want to make sure we’re reading out of the same hymn book here—when you’ve finished with jury duty, will you be going back to selling merchandise over the phone or to writing novels?” I’ve always liked Southern English; it has a more musical cadence than the other varieties. I believe that all of us in the jury box wanted him to like us.

When he came to me, Mr. Graham leaned back in his chair, adjusted his glasses and asked if I knew anything about or had any impressions of foreign religions, such as Buddhism? No, except that I presumed it involved meditation. Did I have any religious beliefs that would make me feel uncomfortable hearing about Buddhism or would make me unable to be objective about the concepts of a foreign religion? No.

He asked about my education, so I mentioned that I’d been tutored privately in Europe while studying music.

“Do you give concerts now, Mr. Sundheimer?”

“Recently I’ve been teaching more than concertizing.”

When I told him where I taught, and that I offered a music-theory course along with my tutorials in cello performance, one of his eyebrows rose up suddenly. “Really? Is your theory course difficult?”

His question caught me off guard. “Well … no,” I stammered, “not if the student has taken the prerequisites.”

“Forgive me for asking,” he drawled, “it’s just that one of my daughters goes there and I’m trying to help her find a course to bring her grades up.”

The sound of laughter erupted in the gallery. I was too nervous to realize it was a joke until it was too late for me to laugh or even smile. Then Mr. Graham asked about my parents and close relatives. Any history of mental illness that I was aware of? No. Did I think that mental illness excused
a person from any responsibility to society? Before I could even begin to think about that one, the defense attorney objected that the question was designed to prejudice the jury, and the judge agreed, instructing me not to answer.

The prosecutor showed no signs of annoyance and looked as if he might have been finished with his questions, but then he cocked his head to one side and asked, “You made a record, didn’t you? When you were just a boy.”

I answered that I had. I’d actually made several records, but since most of them were out of print, I didn’t mention them.

Mr. Graham nodded with recognition and, after a moment’s pause, indicated that he had no further questions. I had passed my test.

The first thing I did when Kyung-hee and his mother arrived was to ask him to try sitting in the little fold-up chair I’d bought for him over the weekend. It was just the right size, although I seemed more excited about it than he or his mother did. I wanted him to learn to sit properly. You cannot control the cello with your feet dangling above the ground. He had to learn how to use his legs to move the instrument as he went from string to string.

I’d been wondering how he would respond to my suggestion that we start from scratch. For the first half hour, all we did was discuss how to hold the cello without using the left hand for support, how to rotate it from side to side easily, and how to use gravity rather than arm strength to give the bow stroke its power. The purpose behind all good technique is to find the optimal balance of musical force and muscular relaxation. Like most cellists with poor training, he was as stiff as a board when he played.

I was pleased to see that he didn’t show any signs of impatience. On the other hand, he didn’t necessarily show signs of comprehension, either. He did whatever I asked him
to, but that frozen expression of his—the slightly open mouth, the eyes never seeming to look at anything in particular—gave me the disturbing feeling that he might be obeying me mechanically without really grasping the underlying principle. I pulled my French edition of Pablo Casals’s autobiography down from the shelf and read aloud one of his better-known quotes: “
Dans la vie il faut montrer du caractère et de la gentillesse.”
I translated it as “In life, one must show both strength and gentleness,” and I explained that as cellists, we try to apply this theory to our playing.

I asked Kyung-hee if he understood why it was important to be gentle as well as strong. He didn’t answer or even look at me. Thinking he might not have heard me, I asked the question again. This time, after a long pause, he managed to nod stiffly.

“Can you tell me why we try to play that way?” I asked. He obviously heard me, but this time was either too nervous or too confused to answer. “I mean,” I tried again, speaking in as friendly a manner as I could, “can you think of a time where you had to be gentle rather than strong?”

“Yes,” he said at last, without elaborating.

“Would you tell me about it?”

After another long silence, he finally said, “If you try to hold a cat hard, it goes away. But if you hold it soft, it stays there.”

“Yes, exactly,” I said, encouraged that something had come out of him. “That is why we—”

“Mr. Douglas has a black cat,” he blurted out, interrupting me. I felt a twinge of annoyance. When I was a child, I never dared interrupt an adult, much less a teacher. I think if I had interrupted von Kempen, he would have died of
shock. Still, I wanted the boy to loosen up and express himself more freely, so I stifled my reaction. “Does he, really?” I asked.