ABSTRACT
He has a child’s face, we are told, and its changing expression confirms our
suspicion that although he is here, seated at the grand piano in a fashionable
Berlin bar, he is utterly lost in his thoughts, his dreams, his memories. Playing
the merest ‘murmur’ 1 of music to accompany the hum of conversation, shifting
seamlessly from one melody to the next, his hands and fingers move effortlessly
over the keyboard as if they have a life of their own, as if wholly independent of
the man’s middle-aged, rather corpulent body. The pianist plays absent-
mindedly. Yes, he is certainly here, but he is also, unmistakably, ‘elsewhere’.2
