The House of Silence Read Free Page A

couldn’t sew while she was recovering. Now what will you do? the neighbor lady asked her in a whisper when she thought I couldn’t hear. At first mother began to cry—but then she said: As soon as I get better, I’ll find something;the girl needs me strong. And that was how Mother thought up our work at the dump.
    Bach consumes me. Mark always looks me straight in the eye to tell me to start the first note, my job; the first note has always been my job since Mother died. She didn’t die then; she couldn’t afford to yet; she still had to raise me. She died a few years later, when I was already teaching at the conservatory and was no longer cleaning apartments—because for a while I cleaned like she did. By then our trips to the dump had stopped. There were ladies who looked for women to clean their apartments at the other end of the city, and they wanted you to work by the hour, a few each day. You would arrive there and do everything: iron, wash dishes, clean bathrooms. Then you’d pick up the kids after school and take them to the park for a little while.
    I cleaned apartments and I played the violin.

Maria
    Mrs. Anna made sure to put down her violin case so that it rammed into my legs. I guess she does that to make me complain, but I’ll never complain about not fitting into a taxi because of a violin, even if it’s the Stainer. She does everything in her power to make my life impossible. I suppose she does it so I’ll leave. She doesn’t know that I can’t leave now; I have to stay, because I have a job to do.
    I made a mistake and threw the good violin into the trash. I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know how it happened—because, really, he was the one who made the mistake: Throw out the violin that’s on the chair, he told me. I grabbed the violin that was on the chair and I threw it out. Now that I’m so slow to do anything, now that I drag behind as we walk to the taxi that will take us to the theater with the strange name—like everything in this city—I think of how quickly I grabbed that violin, and I went and threw it into the cart with all the trash. I was singing, since I was out of the house and he couldn’t hear me. And I went back to the house singing, calm as could be. Now when I think of it, my hairstands on end. Especially when I think about what Mr. Karl said.
    He noticed a few hours later, when it was already time to go to sleep. Where is my Stainer, he said, because that was a violin that had a name and its name was Stainer, which was quite a mouthful. At the time I thought it was a very pretty name, but surprising for a violin. After a moment of shocked silence, I answered: Sir, you told me to throw it out. Then he was the one who was shocked. After looking at me incredulously, he let out: What are you saying, Maria? I told you to throw out the broken violin. He had a note of desperation in his voice, but I had no intention of letting myself be intimidated: No, sir, you told me to throw out the one on the chair, and that’s the one I threw out. Then Mr. Karl began to say O, mein Gott, O, mein Gott, and he kept saying mein Gott , looking all over for the other violin until he found it beneath the piano. He lifted it up with both hands and said, this is the violin to be thrown out. Petrified, I looked at the violin that wasn’t even a violin anymore because it was like inside out. Mr. Karl held it up in front of my face and told me: This is worthless; I left it out in the sun, and look. And I looked at it and it looked strange, like deformed, as if someone had sucked the lids from the inside. The truth is, if I hadn’t been feeling such terror and regret, I would have burst into laughter at that ludicrous situation and that funny-looking violin.
    Where is it? he said suddenly, meaning the good violin. He placed the destroyed instrument back where he had found it. In the trash, in the cart, I already told