Music for Wartime

EXPOSITION

[TAPE #2: 4 MINUTES, 13 SECONDS]

Would a glass of water be possible?

June the fourteenth. The theater on

The rumors we heard — on entering the theater — were thus: That Sophia Speri had refused several opportunities to leave the country, that she remained maniacally insistent on completing this final concert. That her husband had divorced and disavowed her, that he had fled. [Unintelligible.] I don’t know, mind you, if this — it was what they said.

Yes.

We heard a man say, “Ah, if she’d been a clarinetist, she might have run through the hills with her instrument. But she’s married to the beast with ivory keys. She’d sooner cut off her own arms than run to a refugee camp in with no pianos.” We did not engage him in conversation. This was heard in passing.

Remember, please, that it was dark.

I believe that everyone in attendance understood the gravity of the situation. The invitations were secret, the hall was blackened. No one uttered her name. I made note of this.

I don’t recall. There — the only further talk was of the music, the sheet music.

That her brother had smuggled it into the country.

This is only what the woman was saying, a woman’s voice in the dark. That he had [unintelligible] the trick by reprinting each sheet of the piano score, along with mismatched lyrics to folk songs, confident that the border police could not pick out the tune. That the piece was thought unperformable by only two hands, a sort of composer’s joke, you know, that it required at least three hands, with one pianist sitting on the other’s lap.

I wish to add that this story cannot be true. Our border police, like all fine citizens, surely recognize our nation’s traditional songs.

Yes, she did.

The information, the story that we overheard — and again please remember that we did not take part, ourselves, in the — the story went that she’d been unwilling to trust a duet partner and had worked her own nail beds bloody.

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.

Within thirty seconds. A minute at most.

Ourselves?

Again, it had not been ordered. I imagine we each felt, in that moment, that we could be of greater service to alive than dead.

Yes, even with the — please do understand, sirs, that I cannot recall a note of the music. It was complicated, not a child’s ditty that lodges in the ear unbidden.

I could not. Not a note.

Had we been instructed to do so, we would not have hesitated to end our own lives on that very stage.

I believe so. Not to unhear music, but to forget it. Are they not the same?

The only way a lost tune, a truly lost tune, may return, is if one happens to hear it again. Surely you don’t wish to suggest that our new President could permit such an oversight as to allow a second performance of the—

I apologize most meekly.

But this was precisely my point.

We wrapped her in the black cloth that was shaped to cover the piano.

In the wings of the stage.

It seemed fitting.

No, we did not.

In that moment? I was not trying to recall the music in that moment. I was committed to my duty.

I swear to you that it does not. You could chop us open from head to foot, you could pull our hearts from our chests, and you would not find the notes.

I trust to your wisdom, kind sirs. I beg you fervently. I . I pray.