Violin Read Free Page B

Sitting on the floor, my legs crossed, still all filled up with the dream and the strictness of Karl’s voice—“Not that way!You don’t understand. Stop it!”—all filled up with this, I caught the scent in the house that meant his body had begun to rot.
    I knew that scent. We all know it. Even if we have not been to morgues or battlefields we know it. We know it when the rat dies in the wall, and no one can find it.
    I knew it now … faint, but filling all of this whole house, all its big ornamented rooms, filling even this parlor, where St. Sebastian glared out from the golden frame, and the music box lay within inches. And the telephone was once more making that click, time for the lie, click. A message perhaps.
    But the point is, Triana, you dreamed it. And this smell could not be borne. No, not this, because this wasn’t Karl, this awful smell. This was not my Karl. This was just a dead body.
    I thought I should move. Then something fixed me. It was music, but it wasn’t coming from my disks strewn on the floor, and it wasn’t a music I knew, but I knew the instrument.
    Only a violin can sing like that, only a violin can plead and cry in the night like that. Oh, how in childhood I had longed to be able to make that sound on a violin.
    Someone out there was playing a violin. I heard it. I heard it rise tenderly above the mingled Avenue sounds. I heard it desperate and poignant as if guided by Tchaikovsky; I heard a masterly riff of notes so fast and dexterous they seemed magical.
    I climbed to my feet and I went to the corner window.
    He was there. The tall one with the shiny black rock musician hair and the dusty coat. The one I’d seen before. He stood on my side of the corner now, on the broken brick sidewalk beside my iron fence and he playedthe violin as I looked down on him. I pushed the curtain back. The music made me want to sob.
    I thought, I will die of this. I will die of death and the stench in this house and the sheer beauty of this music.
    Why had he come? Why to me? Why, and to play of all things the violin, which I so loved, and once in childhood had struggled with so hard, but who does not love the violin? Why had he come to play it near my window?
    Ah, honey babe, you are dreaming! It’s just the thickest yet, the worst most hypnagogic trap. You’re still dreaming. You haven’t waked at all. Go back, find yourself, find yourself where you know you are … lying on the floor. Find yourself.
    “Triana!”
    I spun round.
    Karl stood in the door. His head was wrapped in the white cloth but his face was stone white and his body almost a skeleton in the black silk pajamas I had put on him.
    “No, don’t!” he said.
    The voice of the violin rose. The bow came crashing down on the lower strings, the D, the G, making that soulful agonizing throb that is almost dissonance and became in this moment the sheer expression of my desperation.
    “Ah, Karl!” I called out. I must have.
    But Karl was gone. There was no Karl. The violin sang on; it sang and sang, and when I turned and looked I saw him again, with his shiny black hair, and his wide shoulders, and the violin, silken and brown in the street light, and he did bring the bow down with such violence now that I felt the chills run up the back of my neck and down my arms.
    “Don’t stop, don’t stop!” I cried out.
    He swayed like a wild man, alone on the corner, in the red glow of the florist shop lights, in the dull beam of the curved street lamp, in the shadow of the magnolia branches tangled over the bricks. He played. He played of love and pain and loss and played and played of all the things I most in this world wanted to believe. I began to cry.
    I could smell the stench again.
    I was awake. I had to be. I hit the glass, but not hard enough to break it. I looked at him.
    He turned towards me, the bow poised, and then looking right up at me over the fence, he played a softer song, taking it down so low that the passing cars almost