Violin (44 page)

The violin was gone.

The sack in my hands was empty.

21

T
HERE WAS
no point in calling Antonio’s attention to this, that the violin was gone. Our bodyguard had come with the van.

I held the sack as if it contained my violin. We rode down the mountain in silence. The sun came pouring through the open windows of the lofty green leaves, it threw down sanctifying shafts on the road, and the cool air touched my face.

My heart was brimming, but I couldn’t name the feeling. Not completely. Love, oh, yes, love, love and wonder, yes, but more, something more, some fear of all that lay ahead, of the empty sack, fear for myself and fear for all those I loved and all those who now depended upon me.

I thought dim rational thoughts as we sped through Rio. It was near dark when we reached the hotel. I slipped out of the van, waving to my loyal men, and went inside, not even stopping at the desk to see if there was a message.

My throat was tight. I couldn’t speak. I had one thing to do only. That was to ask Martin for the violin we carried with us, the short Strad we had bought, or the Guarneri, and see what happened.

Oh, bitter small things on which the fate of a whole soul hangs and with it the whole universe known to that soul. I didn’t want to see the others. But I had to see Martin, had to find the violin.

When the elevator doors opened, I heard them all shrieking and laughing.

For a moment I couldn’t interpret this sound.

Then I crossed the hall and hammered on the door of the Presidential Suite.

“It’s Triana, open up!” I said.

It was Glenn who pulled back the door. He was delirious. “She’s here, she’s here,” he cried.

“Darlin’,” said Grady Dubosson. “We just put her on the plane and brought her down, soon as they stamped that passport.”

I saw her against the distant window, her small head, her small body, a tiny waif of a being, Faye. Only Faye was that small, that delicate, that perfectly proportioned, as if God loved as much to make elves and small gentle children as he did to make grown things.

She wore her faded jeans, her inevitable and characteristic white shirt. Her auburn hair was cut short. I couldn’t see her features in the twilight glow from the window.

She ran into my arms.

I closed my arms around her and I held her. How very very small she was, perhaps half my weight, so little that I might have crushed her like a violin.

“Triana, Triana, Triana!” she cried. “You can play the violin. You can play. You’ve got the gift!”

I watched her. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to love,
wanted to welcome, I wanted a warmth to flow from me as it had come with the light to Stefan on the road in the forest. But for the moment I only saw her small bright face, her pretty gleaming blue eyes, and I thought, She is safe, she is not dead, she is in no grave, she is here, and she is unharmed.

We are all together again.

Roz came booming over, throwing her arms around me, lowering her head and her voice. “I know, I know, I know, we should be angry, we should scream at her, but she’s back, she’s all right, she’s been on some dangerous adventure, but she’s come home! Triana, she’s here. Faye is with us.”

I nodded. And this time when I held Faye, I kissed her thin cheek. I felt her small head, as small as a child’s head. I felt her lightness, her fragility and also some terrible strength in her, born of the black water of the womb, and the dark house, of the stumbling mother, of the coffin lowered into the ground.

“I love you,” I whispered. “Faye, I love you.”

She danced back. How she loved to dance. Once when we’d been separated and all came together in California, she had danced in circles and leapt in the air just to see us all united, the four of us, and so we were now, and she frolicked around the room. She leapt up on the wooden coffee table—a trick I’d seen her do before. She smiled, her small eyes flashing brightly, her hair red in the light from the window.

“Triana, play the violin for me. For me. Please. For me. For me.”

No contrition? No apology?

No violin.

“Martin, would you get the other instruments? The
Guarneri. I think the Guarneri is strung and ready to play and there’s a good bow in the case.”

“But what happened to the long Strad?”

“I gave it back,” I whispered. “Please don’t argue with me now. Please.”

Grumbling, he went out.

Only now did I see Katrinka, wrung out and red-eyed, sitting on the couch. “I’m just glad you’re home,” she said in a raw and tortured voice. “You don’t know.” How Trink had suffered.

“She had to go. She had to wander off when she did!” Glenn said in his gentle drawl. He looked to Roz. “She had to do what she did. The point is, she’s home. She made it.”

“Oh, let’s not do this tonight,” said Roz. “Triana, play for us! Not one of those horrible witches’ dances, I can’t stand another one of those.”

“Aren’t we the critic!” said Martin, closing the door. He had the Guarneri violin. It was the nearest to what I had had.

“Go on, play something for us, please,” said Katrinka in her broken voice, her eyes dazed and hopelessly hurt and relieved as she looked at Faye.

Faye stood on the table. She looked at me. There seemed a coldness in her, a hardness, something that could not say that she had any care for us, something perhaps that said, “My pain was greater than you knew,” the very thing we feared when we had called morgues in dread and given out her description over phone lines. Maybe it was only “My pain is as great as your pain.”

Here she stood alive.

I held this new violin. I tuned it quickly. The E string was very slack. I wound the peg. Gently. This was not as
fine as my long Strad, not as well kept, but it had been very well restored, as they said. I tightened the bow.

What if there is no song?

My throat tightened. I looked at the window. In a way, I wanted to go over there and just look out at the sea, and just be glad she was here, and not have to learn yet how to say it was all right that she’d gone away, or talk of whose fault it was, or who was blind, or who didn’t care.

I’d especially like to
not
know whether or not I could play.

But events such as these have never come to me at my choosing. I thought of Stefan in the forest.

Goodbye, Triana.

I tuned the A string, then the D and the G. I could do it now with no help. In fact, I’d been able to arrive at near perfect pitch even from the beginning.

It was ready. It had responded to me this much, and I remembered from the day it was first shown to me, played for me, that it had had a lower, more lush sound than the Strad, a sound that was a little akin to the large viola, and perhaps it was larger. I didn’t know such things about this kind of violin. The Strad had been the object of my love.

Faye came to me and she looked up.

I think she wanted to say things, but she couldn’t, any more than I could. And I thought again, You are alive, you are with us, we have a chance to make you safe.

“You want to dance?” I said.

“Yes!” Faye said. “Play Beethoven for me! Play Mozart! Play anybody!”

“Play a happy song,” Katrinka said, “you know, one of those pretty happy songs you play.”

I know.

I lifted the bow. My fingers came down rapidly, pounding away on the strings, the bow racing, and it was the happy song, the gay and free and happy song and it came unstintingly and bright and fine out of the violin, so fine and so loud and so new in my ear from this change of wood, that I almost danced myself, pivoting, dipping, turning, yanked by the instrument, and only dimly out of the corner of my eye seeing them dance: my sisters, Roz and Katrinka and Faye.

I played and I played. The music poured forth.

A
ND THAT
night, when they slept, and the rooms were quiet, and the tall willowy women for sale walked the boulevard, I took the violin and the bow and I went to the window in the very center of the hotel.

I looked down at the spectacle of the fantastical waves. I saw them dance as we had danced.

I played for them—with surety and ease, without fear and with no anger—I played for them a sorrowful song, a glorious song, a joyful one.

The End