Anne Rice - Violin

Look at these fine instruments, these musical miracles so brilliantly crafted that no one ever after, with all the technology of an electronic world, would ever match their perfection. Someone had stepped on that violin. Someone had crushed that viola, ah, sacred thing, broken.

And all this here to burn!

The chandelier swayed dangerously in the noxious mist as above it the entire ceiling visibly trembled.

"Come now!" said the other. Another man grabbed up a small violin, a child's instrument perhaps, and escaped from another sill, and another one with a high folded collar and bushy hair fell down on his knees on the herringbone wood floor, one hand on the carpet. He coughed, he choked.

The young Stefan, hair mussed, princely frock coat covered all over with tiny sparks, dying sparks of real flame, threw the bright wet cloth over the coughing man.

"Get up, get up! Joseph, come, you re going to die in here!"

A roar filled my ears. "It's too late!" I screamed. "Help him! Don't leave him!"

Stefan my ghost stood beside me, laughing, his hand on my shoulder. The smoke made a veil between us, a cloud in which we stood, ethereal and safe and monstrously set apart, his beautiful face not a day older than the other image, sneering down at me, but a poor mask for its own suffering, an innocent mask in a way for all its intolerable grief.

Then he turned and pointed to this distant and active image of himself, wet, bawling, being dragged from the room by two who had come in from the window, the lost one still groping in the dark, scratching at the carpet, I know, I know, you can't breathe. He was going to die. The one you called Joseph. He's dead, too late for him.

Dear God, look. A rafter had fallen between us.

The glass flew in splinters from the doors of the etageres. I saw everywhere the fiddles and gleaming bright trumpets left behind. A great French horn. A tumbled tray of sweets. Goblets sparkling, no, flaming in the light.

The young Stefan, irreparably tangled in the moment, fought his rescuers, reaching out, demanding to be allowed to save one more, one more from the shelf of the etagere, let me go!

He reached for one more, for this, this Strad, the long Strad; glittering glass swept off the shelf, as he pulled it with his free right hand, as he was dragged past it. He had it, and he had the bow.

I could hear my ghost beside me draw in his breath; was he turning away from this his own magic? I couldn't turn away.

A sudden crackling was consuming the ceiling above. Someone screamed in the great hallway behind us. The bow, Stefan had to have that too, and yes, the violin, and then a huge, muscular man, in fury and fright, took Stefan in his grip, and flung him over the windowsill.

The fire rose up, just like it had from that awful Avenue house when I was a child, that dark place of simpler arches and more pedestrian shadows, faint common American echo of this grandeur.

The fire fed and gulped and rose to make a sheet of itself. The night was red and brilliant, and nobody was safe, nothing was safe; the man in the smoke coughed and died, and the fire came closer and closer. The fancy gilded sofas near to us burst into flame, the very tapestry iguiting as if from within. All draperies were torches, all windows featureless portals to a black and empty sky.

I must have been screaming.

I stopped, still clutching the ghost violin, the image of which he'd just saved.

We were no longer in the house. Thank God for this.

We stood in the crowded square. How the horror illuminated the night.

Ladies in their long gowns scurried, wept, embraced each other, pointed.

We stood before the long blazing facade of the house, invisible to the weeping frantic men who still ran to drag objects to safety. The wall would come down on all those velvet chairs. It would come down on the couches thrown out, helter skelter, and the paintings, look at them, frames broken, smashed, great portraits.

Stefan slipped his arm around me as if he were cold, his white hand covering my hand which covered the violin, but not trying to tear it loose. He trembled against me.

He was lost in the spectacle. His whisper was mournful and carried over any envisioned tumult.

"And so you see it fall," he whispered in my ear. He sighed. "You see it fall, the last great Russian house in beautiful Vienna, a house which had survived Napoleon's guns and soldiers, and plots of Metternich and his ever vigilant spies, the last great Russian house to keep its own full orchestra, like so many waiters for the table, ready to play the sonatas of Beethoven as soon as the ink was dry, men who could play Bach while yawning, or Vivaldi with the sweat on their foreheads, rught after night, and all this until one candle, mind you, one candle touched a bit of silk, and drafts from Hell came up to guide it through fifty rooms. My Father's house, my father's fortune, my father's dreams for his Russian sons and daughters who, dancing and singing on this border between East and West, had never seen their own Moscow."

He pressed close to me, struggling, and clutching at my shoulder with his right hand, the left still over my hand and violin and heart.

"See, look around you, the other palaces, the windows with their architraves. You see where you are? You are in the center of the musical world. You are where Schubert would soon make his name in little rooms and die like the snap of fingers without ever finding me in my own gloom, I can assure you, and where Paganini had not yet dared to come for fear of censure. Vienna, and my Father's house. Are you afraid of fire, Triana?"

I didn't answer him. He hurt himself as he hurt me. He hurt so much that it was like the heat.

I wept, but then weeping with me now was so common that perhaps I should forget to take note of it here or anywhere else as we continue. I cried. I cried, and watched the carriages coming to take the grieving ones away, women in loose fur waving from the carriage windows, the wheels big and slender and delicate, and the horses noisy and unruly in the pandemonium.

"Where are you, Stefan? Where are you now? You did get out of the room, where are you? I don't see you, the living you!"

I was dazed, yes, but apart with him, and what he could point out were only images of things past. I knew it, but in my childhood such a fire would have had me helplessly screaming. Well, childhood was no more and this was a nightmare for a mourning woman, this was a thing for soft sobs and a crumbling within of all strength.

The icy wind whipped the flames; one wing of the house did fly apart, walls unhinged, and windows cracking open and the roof exploding with torrents of black smoke. The great bulk looked like a grand lantern. The crowd was swept backwards.

People fell. Screamed.

One last doomed figure leapt from the roof, a little cutout of black limbs tossed in the yellow fiery air. People cried out. Some rushed towards this tiny falling black stick-thing that was a man, a helpless, doomed man, only to fall back, driven by the gusting of the blinding blaze. The windows of the lower floor burst open into blazing flowers.

Another great shower of sparks caught us up, sparks touching my eyelids and my hair. I shielded the spectral violin. The sparks flew against us, heavy and stinking of destruction, as they rained down on all those around us, and on us, on this vision and this dream.

Break this vision. This is a trick. You've broken these lucid dreams before that folded you up so tight you thought you'd died and gone on. Break this one.

I stared down hard at the filthy paving stones. Reek of horse manure. My lungs hurt from the bitter air, the smoke. I looked at the high multistoried long rectangular palaces around us. Real, real, these Baroque fa~ades, and the welkin above, dear God, look at the fire on the clouds, this is the worst measure of its catastrophe-either that or one single victim, and how many had there been here. I breathed the stench of the fire in as I cried. I caught the sparks with my hands that died in the frigid wind. The wind hurt my eyelids more than the sparks.