Source of Inspiration
by Martin Westlake
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 1
The woman waiting on a railway station platform was wearing a long, bright red dress with white gym shoes, a floppy white hat, white gloves and large, black-lensed sunglasses. The station consisted of one platform with a small shelter and a ticket machine. Dense pine forests rushed down to the single railway line. The urgent laugh of a woodpecker’s alarm replied to the rolling burr of a nutcracker. It was springtime in the Engadine.
The train arrived on time, and the woman flagged it down. A man stepped onto the platform. He was wearing a white Panama hat and a raffishly crumpled white suit. He was handsome but very pale, and he had bags under his eyes. He was carrying a small suitcase on wheels and a large backpack.
The woman waved. The man waved back tentatively. She walked up to him. ‘Mr Onizuka?’ She offered a hand, which he took delicately. He bowed stiffly from the waist.
‘I’m Frau Bubeck, Alruna Bubeck. Everybody calls me Al. As you know, we like to keep on first name terms at the Foundation.’
The man bowed again. ‘And I am Kage. It’s spelt K-A-G-E in English, but it’s pronounced Kej.’
‘Welcome to Airns, Kage!’
‘Thank you... Al,’ he said a little hesitantly.
‘Let me show you to the car.’
The train drew away with a shrill whistle.
There was only one car, a khaki green utility vehicle, parked on a rough gravel apron. Kage put his bags in the open back and then climbed into the cab beside Alruna. He belted up. She smiled at him as she turned the starter key.
‘Am I the first?’ he asked.
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you’re pretty much the last. Of course, some of the Fellows were already here. One came by bus, and the others all came directly by car.’
After climbing steeply, the road wound along the flank of a river valley with the waters far below to their right. The way was narrow, the forest crowding in. When Kage looked to the right, he had the impression he was flying above the gorge.
‘That’s quite a drop,’ he said.
Alruna laughed. ‘You’re going to get very familiar with that river.’
‘Is that the Inn River?’
‘That’s right.’
‘If you don’t mind my asking, Al, where does your name come from? I’ve never heard it before.’
Alruna threw back her head and laughed.
‘Nobody’s heard it before,’ she said. ‘Goodness knows what my parents thought they were doing.’
‘Is it German?’
‘Yes, old German. It means “somebody who keeps a secret.” Not bad for a housekeeper, don’t you think?’ She looked at him over the top of her sunglasses, and he involuntarily jumped a little in his seat.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘perhaps I should have told you, but now you have seen for yourself. Yes, I am an albino. That’s why I’m wearing all these clothes. My skin doesn’t get on with the sun, even when the sun isn’t shining.’ She giggled.
Alruna drove firmly. She clearly knew the road well. ‘Did you have a good trip?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Kage. ‘All went well.’
‘Did you get some lunch?’
‘I had a sandwich on the train.’
‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she said abruptly. ‘To tell you the truth, we were a little surprised you still decided to come.’
Kage bowed his head. ‘I thought very hard about it, as you can imagine,’ he said. ‘In the end, I decided that spending time away from Japan might help.’
Alruna nodded understandingly. ‘A change of environment.’
Kage nodded.
They rounded the shoulder of a particularly steep mountainside, and the road suddenly began to swoop down in a series of hairpin bends to a river plain. Below, they could see a complex of white and yellow stucco buildings with verdigris copper roofs.
‘That’s the Foundation,’ said Alruna. ‘You’ve read the brochure?’
‘Yes,’ said Kage. ‘Typical European decadence.’
Alruna laughed. ‘You mean all our disused spas?’
‘Yes.’
‘This one might have continued, but for the landslide. Do you see it?’
She stopped the car by the side of the road. The two got out. She pointed down to the former spa complex.
‘You see, all the accommodation and the treatment rooms and everything else were on this side of the river. But the whole point of the place, La Buvetta, is on the other bank where, alas, the mountainside slipped and still threatens.’
‘A shame,’ said Kage, ‘it’s a beautiful building.’
They looked down on the two lead-covered domes standing at either end of a long, glassed-in colonnade. Like some orangerie transplanted from Potsdam or Paris, it stood just a few yards away from the riverbank.
‘All sorts of royalty have been guests here,’ Alruna continued, ‘walking from one pump room to another, tasting the different waters. Even the Czar himself. Several times!’
‘Can the waters still be drunk?’ Kage asked.
She shook her head. ‘It’s all strictly off bounds now. You see how they’ve walled off the bridge?’
‘Is it so dangerous?’
‘The geologists think so.’
Alruna drove up to the central, white-stuccoed building and parked the car in front of the main entrance.
‘Welcome to the Foundation,’ she said.
Kage opened the car door and heard a roar as if a high-speed train were approaching. ‘What is that noise?’ he asked from the rear of the car, lifting his bag from the trunk.
Alruna giggled. ‘That’s the river, the Inn,’ she said. It runs over rapids between here and the Buvetta.’
‘It’s quite a noise,’ he said.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Alruna. ‘Once you’ve been here a while, you won’t even notice it anymore.’
She turned and Kage followed her into the cool, marble-floored interior. ‘I’ll show you your room first,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll give you a quick tour of the facilities. As you know, all the Fellows have dinner in the communal kitchen in the evening, so you’ll meet everybody properly then.’
She took a key from a hooked board on the wall and led him up a central staircase to a light and airy corridor.
The Foundation had been refurbished with the proceeds of a massive philanthropic donation, and it was clear that no expense had been spared. The décor was spare, but not spartan. There was still a sense of an institution, Kage thought, somewhere between a clinic and a university residence.
His room was on the far side from the river and looked out over a broad and well-kempt lawn edged by freshly planted flowerbeds. Much to his satisfaction, there was a firm mattress on the bed, placed in one corner of the room. A table and chair stood under the window.
The wifi connection worked well. A simple, centrally placed carpet covered most of the floor, leaving the original parquet flooring visible around the edges. All the facilities — the bathrooms, mini-kitchens and laundry rooms — were on the river side of the corridor, and all the bedrooms were on the other side, away from the water’s roar.
Alruna opened a bathroom window, and Kage heard the rapids and saw La Buvetta close up for the first time. It was a simple building, beautiful in its symmetry and sparse decoration, enigmatic with its darkened, dusty windows.
Afterwards, Alruna showed him back downstairs to the communal rooms; the kitchen was a huge, high-ceilinged room with an old-fashioned range against one wall and modern appliances lined up against the other. Then a games room with a table tennis table in the middle; a kit room for boots and skis and snowshoes in the winter and a ‘relaxation room’ for yoga and stretching.
The rest of the ground floor was taken up with exhibition spaces and a concert room. The Foundation was open to Fellows from all branches of the arts. The only condition for the generous fellowships they received was that they should, in one way or another, display the fruit of their fellowship before they left.
Writers could read extracts, plastic artists could display their work, musicians could perform. Kage, a pianist and a composer, was enthusiastic about the concert space. The developers had clearly brought in a good sound engineer, and the acoustics were excellent.
‘It’s a shame about the river, though,’ said Kage.
Alruna let out another giggle. She kept her sunglasses on indoors, Kage noticed. ‘I tell you,’ she said, ‘you’ll get used to it. In the past, some of our Fellows have even incorporated the sound into their works.’
Next, Alruna showed Kage to his ‘composing space’, as she called it. The room was on the ground floor on the river side of the building. She led him down the stairs to what, she explained, had been part of the ‘treatment level’ of the spa, where guests had once been wrapped in special sheets and hosed with the bitterly cold Alpine waters.
As part of the restoration, the treatment rooms had been transformed into creative studios for the artists and the musicians. Kage’s studio was massive, with a grand piano in the middle of the room and a broad desk against one wall. A door led to a small storeroom next door, no doubt intended for musicians’ boxes and equipment. But the most striking feature was a series of long triple-glazed picture windows looking out over the rapids of the River Inn, to the Buvetta on the far bank.
‘You can open the windows, if you want,’ said Alruna, demonstrating her point by opening a window. Immediately, the room was filled with the incessant roar of the river.
Kage smiled. ‘I suspect I’ll compose better with them closed!’
Alruna giggled. ‘You never know,’ she said. Then, promising to see him for dinner in the evening, she left him.
* * *
Kage had brought down his backpack with him, and this he now proceeded to unpack: tablet, charger, professional laptop, battery bank, portable mini keyboard, fast drive, USB hub, cables, earphones — noise cancelling, thank goodness — all the electronic paraphernalia that modern composers used. Once the backpack was empty, he put it on a shelf in the storeroom and closed the door. Then he sat at his desk and set up all the equipment.
Once he was ready to go, he joined his e-mail account and worked his way through his messages. It was eleven in the evening in Tokyo, and he had a full day’s traffic to read and reply to. People were still sending their sympathies, and each of these messages had to be treated with great respect.
He was thinking about how to best express himself in a message to one of his former teachers, when he heard a dull thud come from the storeroom. He got up, crossed the room, opened the door and flicked on the light switch. His backpack was on the floor just in front of the door. What he had heard, he realised, was the bag hitting the door. It must have fallen off the shelf. He shifted the bag back on the floor underneath the shelf, turned off the light and closed the door.
The rush of the river rapids started to get under his skin. He put on his earphones, and that helped a lot. By seven, his inbox was almost empty. He got up, stretched, and took off the earphones. The rapids roared again in his ears. He crossed over to the windows and was about to open one when he heard a dull thud again coming from the storeroom.
He crossed the room, opened the door and turned on the light. His backpack was on the floor again, just in front of the door. The room felt cold and clammy, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He looked around the storeroom, but there was nothing to see. It was a small room with a set of slatted wooden shelves on one side. He left the bag where he had found it, turned off the light and closed the door. He locked his studio door and walked slowly back up to his bedroom.
* * *
Those gathered in the communal kitchen for the evening meal were, Kage considered, a typical mixture of introverts and extroverts, of purists and hedonists. The introverts replied politely enough but they didn’t stay long at the table and mainly kept out of the conversations. The purists ate nuts and vegetables and fruit and drank water.
Alruna sat at the top of the table and introduced Kage to the other Fellows. There were twelve of them altogether, including Kage himself. Kage sat down and naturally began to talk with his immediate neighbours. Giulia Fiammetta was a pretty young Italian author, using her time at Airns to revise an already mostly written novel. She had the natural curiosity of her trade. Because she was an author, she had no studio, just her room on the first floor.
Ha-joon Kim was a middle-aged Korean artist specialising in sound sculptures. As he explained, he spent a lot of his time in the mountains and the forests, bringing back sounds captured with sophisticated recording equipment, which he then worked on in his studio, neighbouring Kage’s studio in the basement. He was one of the introverts.
Barbara Steiner, on the other hand, was an outgoing Austrian photographic artist with an infectious laugh. But, like Ha-joon, she spent a lot of time in the mountains and the forests.
Finally, Jacek Cieczko was a young Polish artist who specialised in fine line drawings that were, he explained, abstract yet organic.
The first part of that first evening for Kage consisted of polite talk about each other’s projects and activities. Kage explained that he had come to write the third movement, in sonata form, for a four-movement symphony. There was a lot of sincere curiosity about the composing process and the architecture of a symphony.
Kage sensed that the other Fellows had been briefed by Alruna about his wife, Syuuto, and he was grateful for that. Giulia radiated warmth and tenderness towards him, which was in line, he was to discover, with her character. Ha-joon, Barbara and Jacek were more reticent, changing the subject to brighter topics whenever the conversation risked veering towards the personal. He learned, nevertheless, that Giulia was single, that Ha-joon was married and that Jacek had a boyfriend back in Krakow.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Martin Westlake
