Music for Wartime (24 page)

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.