Music for Wartime Read Online Free Page A

violin sounded like after twenty years’ silence. As rough and raw as a dried-out throat.
    Again suddenly he was back in the music, picturing the notes on the page, and he heard his part come out all wrong—not wrong just to him, but audibly wrong to everyone in the room. He waited a beat to rejoin on the right note, but found it was like a train he’d missed. Radelescu glanced at him, then seamlessly picked up the melody. He turned so Aaron could see his fingers on the strings. Aaron copied him until he got back the stream of things himself, and Radelescu returned to floating between the structural notes and motifs of the other three string parts.
    Looking out at the gathered faces, Aaron saw that they were all smiling indulgently, that it was no consequence to them whether he flubbed his part or not. He realized they did not see him and Radelescu as two musicians, but saw Aaron as youth personified, a living example of what the old man had lost. They were thinking,
He has his whole life ahead of him
. They were thinking,
Oh, how he must be inspired now to work for the things Radelescu lost
. They were thinking,
Lucky American boy, he does not know suffering
.
    Aaron kept playing, but not as well as before. He took no risks with the tempo now, but tried to stay steady and count.
    His father had moved out to the front of the crowd, and it was easy for Aaron to read his mind: He was giving a gift. Maybe this was all a gift to Aaron, something he felt his son would understand more as he grew older and treasure as a memory—or maybe it was a gift for Radelescu, a younger version of himself returned to the master teacher. Aaron saw in his bright eyes and the clench of his jaw how his father was willing together the old and the new. The ghosts flew over his head like kites.
    Aaron could not stand his father’s face like that, and he looked away, but not in time. Nausea flooded him, stronger than that day in Bonn, and the flow of the music was utterly lost. He shook, and the bow flailed loose in his hand.
    In an instant he realized two things, and the first of them, most starkly, most obviously, was the core of the guilt in his father’s face: that his father was not simply lucky, but had
looked
to leave Romania, had left early for Juilliard on purpose, had left behind his family and girlfriend, his teacher—not in order to study, but in order to save himself. And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with getting out? It was the same thing Morgenstern must have done, moving his piano across town, never walking by the jail, and even Radelescu had saved himself in that little building, from the gunshots that killed the women, from the trains that drove the men back and forth across the country until they all died from heat. Except escaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn’t save themselves.
    But the second and more devastating thing was this: These were not divine revelations available only to Aaron. They were common sense, floating for anyone to see, more tangible and opaque than any ghost. He’d missed them simply because he lived here in America and now in the present—and the air was filled with things he would keep missing forever unless they happened to hit him, sudden and accidental as an errant knife.
    It was when Radelescu stopped playing and turned with concerned eyes that Aaron began to cry like a much younger child. He was tired like he’d never been, and the wet chill of a fever washed unmistakably over him, and the room was a storm-tossed boat. When he sank to the ground he felt hot urine on his leg and ankle. He still gripped the violin in his left hand and the bow in his right, remembering somehow not to let them drop.
    His father was above him, touching his hair and forehead, first saying, “No matter, no matter,” then whispering words like an incantation: “May this be the worst you ever feel.”
    Behind him, among the drunken guests,