The Stolen Read Free

hates my own playing. It is as if she’s become ashamed of me. I don’t understand any of it…
    Matthias glanced over ruefully at the flute resting on the music stand in the corner of the study. He daren’t pick it up so early in the morning. Music was his way of sorting the chaos of a world he often didn’t understand into pristine patterns that would fill the air and float about his head like iridescent butterflies. Once he played to his wife; now he played alone furtively. There was one refrain he liked to play over and over. A dozen notes melded together to make the beginning of a poignant melody. He couldn’t even remember where he had heard it. It certainly didn’t exist in any of his scored music, and yet he had the feeling he hadn’t invented the tune, but that somehow it was embedded in his memory. It had haunted him as long as he could remember.
    He glanced back down at the page.
Even in death his wife would not miss the progress of their only child growing up. The letters themselves were a conduit to an imaginary world in which Marie continued to live, and their lives spun on as before, untouched by tragedy. After finishing them, Matthias would burn each page as if reducing the paper to carbon was the alchemy of sending them into that invented afterlife. A pointless ritual, he knew, but he kept writing anyhow.
    The thirty-eight-year-old physicist had woken an hour earlier wrestling with the atomic structure of another alloy. He’d lain there with a half-formed equation of elements dancing like cartoon characters on a music score, tantalisingly just out of reach. After a while he’d given up and come to the desk to write the letter. It had been four in the morning. Time does not flow evenly, he observed with a small ironic smile, but stutters forward, like life, like entropy. As if in answer, outside a lone bird started a thin, doubtful piping.
Perhaps he too is uncertain dawn will come,
Matthias thought to himself,
yawning.
    Beyond the jagged sentinels of the fir trees, the lights of Küsnacht had begun to switch on, one pinprick of yellow after another. Matthias stretched his exhausted muscles, then glanced over at the clock. Five… The lonely hour, the chasing-mortality-away hour, his wife used to call it, her attempt to excuse her habit of waking and pushing her warm body into his – a prelude to making love whether he wanted to or not. Covering his eyes with his hand, he tried to press his spinning brain back into an equilibrium, away from memories. It didn’t work; the void Marie had left was always there no matter how many times he tried to fold his mind over it. When she’d died so suddenly, the epiphany he’d experienced – that he had never been truly vulnerable with her – had been one of his greatest regrets. Her death had made him realise that it had always been a fear of loss that held him back. But he’d lost her anyway and now he was in real danger of losing his daughter.
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    Every clock behind the heavy plate glass read the same: five o’clock.
Gadjé
time. The non-gypsy world was divided up into digits and scribbles Yojo didn’t understand, and didn’t care to. In his world it was seasons, the moon and the rising and falling sun that marked the hours and the years. He looked across at the elegant brass plaque set discreetly to the side of the large oak door. It was simple: a square divided into triangles. To anybody else it was merely a company logo, a cleverly devised symbol that suggested antiquity and a trustworthy quality that was beyond price. To Yojo it suggested something else entirely. He glanced down the cobbled lane. He had chosen the ghost hour, when the Niederdorf would be empty, to come to the small, exclusive showroom. When he’d walked down Bahnhofstrasse, one of the most expensive shopping malls on the planet, it had been absolutely silent except for a single pealing church bell;