The Nightmare

71

In the Mosebacke Etablissement’s restaurant, Disa and Joona are sitting across from each other. Sunshine fills the room through the enormous windows looking out over Gamla Stan, Skeppsholmen, and the glittering water. They are just finishing a lunch of fried Baltic herring with mashed potatoes garnished with lingonberries. They pour the last of the light beer into their glasses. In the background, on a raised platform, Ronald Brautigam performs on a black grand piano. The violinist, Isabelle van Keulen, is finishing the last stroke of her bow, her right elbow lifted.

The last note of the violin trembles, waiting for the piano, then finishes with a high, shivering sound as the music ends. After the concert, Joona and Disa walk out of the restaurant and onto Mosebacke Square. They pause for a moment, facing each other.

“What’s all this about Paganini?” she asks. She pats Joona’s collar into place. “The last time we were together, you talked about Paganini, too.”

He gently catches her hand.

“I just wanted to see you-”

“Just so we can argue about you not taking your medicine?”

“No,” he says seriously.

“Do you take it, then?”

“I’ll start soon,” he says a bit impatiently.

She says nothing more, meets his eyes for a second, then sighs and suggests they keep walking.

“At any rate, it was a very pleasant concert,” she says. “Somehow I felt the music fit this soft light here, outside. I’d always thought Paganini was… well, you know, like a tightrope walker. Actually, I did have the chance to hear Yngwie Malmsteen play the Caprice no. 5 once at Gröna Lund.”

“Ah, in the days when you and Benjamin Gantenbein were going out.”

“We’ve just become Facebook friends after all these years.”

They walk to Slussen hand in hand and head down Skeppsbron.

“Do you think you could tell what music a violinist is playing just by the finger positions?”

“Without hearing it, you mean?”

“On a photograph.”

“Maybe. Perhaps you might get pretty close… it depends on how well you know the instrument,” she replies.

“How close? How exact?”

“I’ll ask Kaj if you think it’s important,” she says.

“Who’s Kaj?”

“Kaj Samuelsson. He works in the music history department. He was a good friend of my father’s and I used to practice driving with him.”

“Can you phone him now?”

“Sure,” Disa says, and then raises her eyebrows slightly. “You’re not kidding. You really want me to call him this second.”

“Yes,” Joona says.

Disa drops his hand and pulls out her cell phone. She scrolls through her contact list and then calls the professor.

“Hi, Disa here,” she says. “Am I interrupting your lunch?”

Joona can hear the sound of a man’s voice coming from the phone. After a little small talk, Disa says, “By the way, I have a good friend here with some questions for you.”

She laughs at something he says and then she asks directly, “Can you tell which note a violinist is playing… no, not that way… just by looking at the fingers?”

Joona observes Disa who listens, frowning. From Gamla Stan, he can hear the distant strains of march music.

“All right,” Disa says. “You know what, Kaj, I think I’ll just hand you over to him directly.”

She hands the phone to Joona without saying a word.

“Joona Linna,” he says.

“Ah, Disa talks about you a great deal,” says Kaj Samuelsson. He sounds relaxed.

“A violin has only four strings,” Joona begins. “Logically, there are only a limited number of notes that can be played.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“The lowest note is the open G,” Joona continues calmly. “And somewhere there must be the highest note that-”

“Yes, good reasoning,” the professor says. “In 1636, the French scientist Mersenne published the Harmonie universelle. In that work, he posits that the best violinists can play one octave higher than the open string. This means the range can be from G to third E, which gives us altogether thirty-four notes in the chromatic scale.”

“Thirty-four notes,” Joona repeats.

“But if we go to musicians in the modern era, the range is greater due to new fingerings,” Samuelsson continues. He sounds amused. “And you can begin to count on reaching third A and have a chromatic scale of thirty-nine notes.”

“Keep going,” Joona says, watching Disa, who has gone off to look at some odd, jumbled-looking paintings displayed in a gallery window.

“However, when Richard Strauss expanded Berlioz’s Grand Treatise on Instrumentation and Modern Orchestration from 1904, fourth G became accepted as the highest possible note that could be reached by an orchestra violinist, which means forty-nine notes.”

Kaj Samuelsson laughs to himself at Joona’s impressed silence.

“Actually, we have yet to reach the highest possible note,” the professor explains. “And in addition, we now have flageolets and quarter tones.”

Disa and Joona are now strolling past a newly built replica of a Viking ship docked at Slottskajen as he speaks. They’re nearing Kungsträdgården.

“What about a cello?” Joona asks impatiently.

“Fifty-eight,” Samuelsson replies.

Disa is giving Joona a vexed look and points at an outdoor café.

“My real question is, if you were to look at a photograph of four musicians-two violins, one viola, and one cello-and if the image is clear, would you be able to tell, just from the placement of their fingers on the strings, which piece they’re playing?”

Joona hears Kaj Samuelsson mumbling to himself on the other end.

“There are so many alternatives, thousands…”

Disa shrugs and keeps walking without looking at Joona.

“Seven million combinations,” Kaj says at last.

“Seven million,” Joona repeats.

There’s silence on both ends of the phone.

“Yet on my photograph,” Joona goes on, his voice stubborn, “you can clearly see the fingers and the strings so that many alternatives could be eliminated immediately.”

“I’ll gladly take a look at your photo,” the professor replies. “But I would not be able to guess the notes, it’s just not possible and-”

“But-”

“Imagine, Joona Linna,” the professor continues happily. “Imagine you’ve actually figured out the approximate notes… How will you be able to tell from all the thousands of string quartets out there-Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart-which one is the correct composition?”

“I realize it might be impossible,” Joona says.

“Seriously, it is,” Kaj replies.

Joona thanks him for his time and goes to Disa, who is sitting on the rim of a fountain waiting for him. She lays her cheek on his shoulder as he sits down beside her. Just as he’s putting an arm around her, he remembers Robert Riessen’s words about his brother: If not even Axel could figure it out, no one can.