The House of Silence Read Free

doesn’t seem that long ago; it seems that he’ll come back today, to tell me not to put so much of my soul into it. Well, if you don’t want me to put my soul into it, why did you ask me to play? I said one day, in exasperation. He looked into my eyes and replied, because it’s easier to take out a bit of soul than to try to add it in. And there are very few people who put soul into their music.
    If there was one thing I’ve always put in, it’s soul. Music made me cry. Of course, today, I’ll have trouble staying calm, but for many years the moment I started to play I was wiping away tears. I cried at seven years old, the day I brought the violin home with my mother’s permission, even though I didn’t even know how to properly hold the instrument, nor how it should sound. I looked again at the letters inside it, and I still didn’t understand them. I only understood the 1672, and I tried to remember the drawing of the girl who played the violin in the book. I tried to remember how she held it, and I lifted it to my shoulder before running the bow over the strings. The result was an electrifying sound, slightly flat but deep, a sound that enthralled me and left me breathless. I never understood how someone, in times of hardship, could throw away such a valuable violin. It had even been more or less in tune, and the bow’s strings were taut when I found that.
    Mother and I lived in an apartment that was just a bathroom, a kitchen, and a bedroom. All our belongings were there, piled up in a corner because there was no closet. But none of our things were as valuable as the sewing machine, which was our means of survival and the only thing Mother hadn’t sold when she’d had to leave the apartment where she’d lived with my grandparents until she was left all alone. A few years later, I was born. With the money she made from her sewing, she’d been able to rent that little place where I was born and grew up, and where I always had a bit of bread in the mornings and a small plate of food on the table at lunch and dinner. It wasn’t much, but every once in a while, the neighbors would give me a piece of compound chocolate, which at the time I thought was delicious. If I ate it now, I’d probably retch. Sometimes, Motherwas too busy working to eat, and she sewed and sewed while I ate my lunch or my dinner. If there was nothing left to sew, she cleaned. I watched her nervously work, with my mouth full, even though I quickly finished off my plate—which never really had that much on it to begin with. I would watch her until, one day, she fell to the floor before my very eyes. I screamed—I must have been five years old, and Mother was my whole world. I shook her a little bit: Mother, Mother. And she didn’t react. I had heard her hit her head as she fell, and I was so scared that I went running to look for the neighbors, the ones who sometimes gave me compound chocolate. I knocked frantically on their door, and I started to cry. When they opened up, I could only say, Mother is on the floor, I don’t know what’s wrong with her—in fits and starts, sobbing and hiccupping, terrified: Mother is on the floor with her eyes closed. I couldn’t get my brain around it; mothers aren’t supposed to fall to the floor. They had come in, both the man and the woman, and he had run to call a doctor while she tried to get my mother to respond. When the doctor arrived she’d been murmuring for a bit and asking what had happened to her. Then, they sent me out, but as they pushed me toward the next-door neighbor’s house, where there was a woman and her son whom I sometimes played with, I heard the doctor saying, this, ma’am, has but one name—and that’s hunger.
    The neighbors fed us for a few days. They didn’t have extra money, but the man worked—and, at least, they had enough to eat. Mother was so weak that she