Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

Three years. And that she had even stretched her hands on a contraption like the one Schumann invented. Have you heard of this? It destroyed his hands, Schumann’s. But then I suppose Sophia Speri understood this to be the last concert of her career. Perhaps she understood the risk.

No, sir. I misspoke. Those were the speculations of others in the crowd. They weren’t my — no.

Around sixty, though please recall that it was dark. The theater holds three hundred.

Among ourselves, only. The three of us.

No matches, no lights. It was a condition of entry.

She had memorized it, naturally.

I do not know.

Her footsteps. And then the sound of the bench, and of course the music beginning.

No one announced her.

We were — will you believe me if I say we were stuck to our seats? We knew that we ought to move, that to stay there any longer was foolishness itself.

Yes, sir. They had been clear and explicit. There was no confusion, either before or during the concert.

Here is where I’ll stumble in my explanation. It was hypnotic. The music. The very reason it had been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of—

No, not our national borders. I mean the borders of the human heart.

If I might request more water…

I thank you for your patience.

I was saying, perhaps, that it prodded the heart with lust and ambition and false hope.

Around five minutes.

I cannot account for the discrepancy. I maintain, five minutes.

Like every star in the heavens had dropped a fine, taut string, and the stars had wrapped these strings around the earth. Like something our grandmothers used to sing.

Which is to say, it was wicked. To trick us, even us, in this way.

I understood it to be in F. I’m no musician, sir.

One of us moved.

I cannot say.

It might have been. Perhaps we all three moved as one.

[Unintelligible.]

Exactly as planned, exactly as ordered.

We surrounded the piano, and removed the light from his hidden pocket.

We did not hesitate.

The audience — when the light appeared, yes, they saw her. They screamed, but I could not see which way they moved. I assumed most of them were leaving. Please recall that there was no light, except on Miss Speri.

She was beautiful.

I apologize, yes — I mean to say that she remained on the bench. That she continued playing.

Even as the barrel pressed a circle to her temple.

She did not drop a note.

An old joke for you, sirs, with a new punch line: What is black and white and red all over?

We remained, as instructed. On the stage.

and

Let us presume there were sixty, minus us three. But even if we had fired at them — into the dark, as they ran — we had between us only eight more bullets.

May I humbly remind you that those were not our orders?

Even allowing that it was ten minutes, ten minutes of music. The entire piece, the whole concert, would have been thirty.

One-third.

Yes, sir.

A fair amount, I grant.

For our slowness, I apologize, as we have apologized before.

Please let me repeat that it was not for us to fire on the crowd.