Bonjour tristesse

Morning. I open the newspaper. First page, summary, I see Maestro Rostropovitch’s picture. So, new concert in Tokyo these days? A closer look at the picture gives me the explanation about this picture: Maestro passed away. As Sagan said, bonjour tristesse.

I remember… More than three years ago, did my very best to try to see that sir when I was an intern (you-know-where). It was like a game. My boss challenged me: “you have an hour. Where’s Rostropovitch? He plays that day in Tokyo, that’s all I know...” The mouse took up the challenge. Thirty minutes later, after calling the three most important concert halls and producers in Japan, I got the piece of info!
Maestro was affiliated to XXX producer (known for taking regularly care of Russian artists, hence a communist persuasion), will perform at YYY concert hall in Tokyo, and is staying at ZZZ Hotel from that day to that day.
I really wanted to meet him. I am a musicians’ daughter, after all. So, I was pretty happy to hear that Maestro was willing to meet my boss for a lunch, but had a little demand: to have an interpreter that speaks English, French, and Japanese.
Strange but true, guess what. I did not know that many people in the office that could do that… so I marched proudly to the office, with my best weapon, Maestro’s demand… which was my free ride ticket to be at the meeting. Unfortunately, the lunch was cancelled owing to a last minute private concert at the Imperial court…

The mouse thought it over and over… and managed at last to have that meeting at my boss’s office. Let’s elude that cancelled dinner at the big boss’s, which let my boss, her assistant and myself have one of our biggest laughs, a memorable one, at the office. I did not know that a big boss could compare himself with… a doormat.

The meeting, had it. I saw him, the great man who drew his cello that day in November 1989 to celebrate the Fall of that Wall. I talked to him, he hugged me, with all the well known Russian style warmth. I remember his sparkling eyes, his kindness, his jokes. We laughed when the Maestro played the player’s role, to pick up my boss, in a “come on in my datcha, so that I let you know about my Russia…”, or when he looked at me with a witty smile and declared: “this cute girl looks like a mouse”. I had it, his signature, for my sis, who used to play a bit of cello, on a Bach cello partitas, so that she gave up killing the partitas and our ears… Well, one of the best remembrance of my internship. I saw a page of History, a page of music history. A moment of magic in my internship. I even managed to hear a bit of his cello, in the far away, when I was talking to his producer…
Maestro, thanks for coming. Rest in peace…

My stay in Japan was unfortunately stamped by sad events. Death, illness. Until now, I believed in myself that I could have been, that I could have had the power to be a doctor, because I was strong enough to bear the other’s sorrow. I just had a denial of this. My eyes used to avoid scenes of sorrow. When sorrow knows at your relatives door, when cancer eats away a relative’s life, my eyes cannot avoid seeing sorrow. I had to hold back my tears, and keep on smiling. Listen to the other’s pain, share the pain. A mandatory step towards adulthood, understand how life is fundamentally unfair. Destiny looks like a Russian roulette. Thanks God, my grand parents in France and in Japan embody health…