The Nightmare

63

It was light outside when Axel woke up on the day he would lose everything. He and Greta had not shut the curtains. They’d fallen asleep together in the bed and slept the entire night.

Axel slowly got up and looked down at Greta, who slept with a completely calm face and the thick blanket crumpled about her. He walked to the door and stopped next to the mirror and looked at his naked seventeen-year-old body for a while. Then he continued into the music room. He closed the door to the bedroom softly and walked over to the grand piano. He took his violin out of its case and tuned it. He put it to his chin, went to stand by the window, and looking out at the winter morning and the snow being blown from the roofs in long veils, he began to play Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane from memory.

The piece begins with a sorrowful Romany melody, slow and measured, but then the tempo begins to increase. The melody echoes faster and faster in upon itself as a blistering, split-second memory of a summer night.

It’s an extremely fast piece.

Axel was playing because he was happy. He wasn’t thinking. His fingers ran and danced like eddies and ripples in a stream.

Axel started to smile. He was thinking of a painting his grandfather had in the salon. His grandfather had said it was the most apt and glowing version of Näcken by Ernst Josephson. As a child, Axel had loved the legends surrounding this mystical being whose violin music was so beautiful it lured people to their deaths, beautiful deaths drowning in the pool.

At that moment, Axel felt that he was just like the Näcke, a young man surrounded by water as he played. Except Axel was happy. That was the greatest difference between Axel and the Josephson painting.

His bow leaped over the strings at amazing speed. He didn’t care that some of the bow’s taut hair broke and danced in the air with the music.

This is how Ravel should be played, he thought. Not exotically but happily. Ravel is a young composer, a happy composer.

Axel let the final notes resonate in the body of the violin and then seem to whirl away like the light snow on the roof outside. He lowered his bow and was about to bow toward the snow outside when he realized that someone was behind him.

He turned and saw Greta in the doorway. She held the blanket around her body and her eyes were dark and strange as she looked at him.

Axel frowned at her stricken expression.

“What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. She swallowed loudly. A pair of large tears began to run down her cheeks.

“Greta, what’s the matter?” he asked, insistently.

“You told me that you hadn’t practiced,” she said in a monotone.

“No, I… I…” he stammered. “I told you that I learned new pieces easily.”

“Congratulations.”

“What are you thinking?” he said, aghast. “It’s not what you think!”

She shook her head.

“I can’t believe I could have been so stupid,” she said.

He set down the violin and bow, but she was already closing the bedroom door behind her. Axel snatched up a pair of jeans he’d left hanging on the back of a chair and pulled them on. Then he knocked on the door.

“Greta? May I come in?”

There was no answer, and with that, a black clump of worry settled in his stomach. In a little while, she came out of the bedroom fully dressed. She didn’t even look at him as she put her violin in its case and gathered up her belongings to leave him alone.

The concert hall was full. Greta was the first to play. When she saw him, she looked away. She wore a blue velvet dress and a necklace with a heart pendant.

Axel sat alone in the dressing room and waited with half-closed eyes. It was absolutely silent. Only a small sound could be heard behind a dusty plastic fan guard. His little brother came into the room.

“Aren’t you going to sit with Mamma?” Axel asked.

“No, I’m too nervous. I can’t watch you perform. I’ll just sit here and wait.”

“Has Greta started yet?”

“Yes, it sounds good.”

“Which piece did she choose? Was it Tartini’s violin sonata?”

“No, something by Beethoven.”

“That’s good,” Axel muttered.

They sat together silently and said nothing more. After a while, there was a knock at the door. Axel stood up and opened it. A woman told him that he would be next.

“Good luck,” said Robert.

“Thanks,” Axel said. He picked up his violin with its bow and followed the woman through the hallway.

Great applause sounded from the audience. Axel caught a brief glimpse of Greta and her father as they hurried into Greta’s dressing room.

Axel walked close to the wings and had to wait through an introduction. When he heard his name, he walked into the center of the spotlight and smiled at the audience. A murmur arose when he announced his selection, the Tzigane by Maurice Ravel.

He put his violin to his chin and lifted his bow. He began to play the sorrowful introduction and then sped up the tempo to the impossible speed. The audience seemed to hold its breath. He could hear that he was playing brilliantly, but this time the melody didn’t sparkle. His playing was no longer happy. It was as if he had become the Näcke, with a hectic, feverish sorrow. Three minutes into the piece, the notes were falling like rain in the night, and then he began to purposefully skip a few. He slowed, played off-key, and finally broke off the piece completely.

The concert hall was silent.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and then he walked off the stage.

The audience clapped politely. His mother got up from her seat in the audience and followed him. She stopped him in the walkway.

“Come here, my boy,” she said as she put her hands on his shoulders.

Then she stroked his cheek and her voice was warm as she said, “That was remarkable, the best interpretation I’ve ever heard.”

“Forgive me, Mamma.”

Her face stiffened, seemed to pull in on itself. “Never,” she replied, and she turned away from Axel and walked out of the concert hall.

Axel went to the dressing room for his coat, but he was met by Herbert Blomstedt outside the dressing-room door.

“That was remarkable, my boy,” he said in a very sad voice. “Until you began to pretend you could no longer play.”

The house reverberated with silence when Axel returned home. It was already late at night. He trudged up to the top-floor apartment, in through his music room, and then to his bedroom. He shut the door behind him. He still heard the music in his head, how it had sounded until he began to drop notes, slow the tempo unexpectedly, break off the piece in the middle.

He had stopped. Over and over he had stopped.

Axel let himself down on the bed and fell asleep with his violin case beside him.

The next morning, he woke to the sound of the telephone.

Someone walked across the dining-room floor. It always creaked.

A moment later, there were steps on the stairs. His mother walked right into his bedroom without knocking.

“Sit up,” Alice commanded.

Axel was frightened the moment he saw her. Her face was still wet from her tears.

“Mamma, please-”

“Be quiet!” she says in a low voice. “I’ve just gotten a call from your principal-”

“He’s unhappy with me because-”

“Can you be quiet!” Alice yelled.

He stopped talking. She held a trembling hand to her mouth. New tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“It’s about Greta,” she finally was able to say. “She committed suicide last night.”

Axel stared at her and tried to understand what she’d said.

“No!… Because I-”

“She was ashamed,” Alice says. “They said she felt she let everyone down, that she should have practiced more. You promised to help. I knew it, though, I knew. She never should have come here, she… I’m not saying it’s your fault, Axel, because it isn’t. She was disappointed in herself because when everything was riding on her playing, she couldn’t deal with it, and she couldn’t bear that-”

“But, Mamma, I-”

“Be quiet,” she said. “All of this is over.”

Alice left. Axel got out of bed in a gathering fog. He swayed, but steadied himself. He took his beautiful violin out of its case and banged it violently against the floor. The neck broke and the bridge flopped over under the loose strings. Axel stamped on it and pieces of wood flew in all directions.

“Axel! What are you doing?”

Robert rushed into the room and tried to stop him. Axel pushed him away. Robert fell on his back against the wardrobe behind him, but he started back again.

“Axel, so you messed up, so what?” Robert said. “Greta did, too. I met her in the hallway and she’d also… everyone-”

“Shut up!” Axel screamed. “Don’t ever say her name to me again!”

Robert stared while Axel continued to stamp on the wooden pieces until there was nothing left that resembled a violin. Robert then left the room.

Shiro Sasaki won the Johan Fredrik Berwald Competition. Greta had chosen the easier Beethoven piece, but she’d been unable to play it perfectly, a demand she had made upon herself. As soon as she’d gotten home, she’d locked herself in her bedroom and must have taken a huge amount of sleeping pills. She’d been found in bed the next morning when she’d been missed at breakfast.

Axel’s memory sinks away as if it were a forgotten life down in the depths of the sea. He looks at Beverly. It’s like Greta’s big eyes looking back at him. He looks at the cloth in his own hand and the liquid on the table and the shining intarsia with the woman playing the erhu.

Light slides across the curve of Beverly’s head as she turns to look at the violins hanging on the wall.

“I wish I knew how to play one,” she says.

“Let’s take a class together,” he says, gently smiling.

“I’d like that,” she answers in all seriousness.

He sets the cloth down on the table and feels the terrible exhaustion inside his body. The recording of the piano’s echoing music fills the room. It’s being played without a damper and the notes flow dreamily into one another.

“Poor Axel, you want to sleep,” she says.

“I have to work.”

“This evening, then,” she says, and gets up.