Solo Read Online Free

crouched behind Ulrich and operated his hands like a puppeteer, supporting the instrument and moving the bow, and Ulrich felt it was all much more difficult than he had imagined.
    He threw himself into his violin practice. Mealtimes and lessons became inconveniences, and all his other pursuits were forgotten. Lacking a teacher, he studied photographs of violinists to see how they positioned their fingers, and he invented exercises to make his movements more assured. When the Gypsies next came into town, Ulrich ran with his violin, and pestered them for advice and demonstrations. He studied their performance with the attentiveness of a fellow musician. By the time they left, he was confident that the mysteries of music would not resist him, and he would play his violin as well as any human being. He told himself, ‘I am one of them.’
    ‘Do you think that Father will allow me to take lessons?’ he asked his mother doubtfully.
    ‘I think when he sees how much progress you have already made on your own, it will be impossible for him to refuse.’
    ‘Really?’ Ulrich asked, unconvinced.
    ‘Why not?’ she said, with a hint of evasion. ‘Why don’t you give a concert for him when he returns? He will be amazed at what you have achieved.’
    Given his father’s love of all things Viennese, Ulrich decided to prepare a waltz that was often performed by the orchestra in the Shumenska restaurant opposite their house. He listened at the restaurant windowuntil he had memorised it, and then began to reproduce it on his own instrument. He practised it until every note was perfectly sculpted for his father’s return.
    On that evening, he set up the drawing room as a concert hall, with two armchairs for his parents, and an upturned chest as a podium. He put on a little black suit, and took a bow tie from his father’s dressing room. When his preparations were complete, he summoned his audience and sat them down. After a few vigorous swipes of his bow in the empty air, he began.
    Ulrich’s eyes were set on his father, who sat folded in one half of his armchair. He saw the lines gathering on his father’s forehead, and he watched the tips of his moustache rise to meet them. He thought of a stormy tangle of telegraph wires, and a flock of birds above the bars of lowered railway barriers. He thought of a set of photographs he had once seen in a bookshop, which showed the expressions induced in mental patients by the application of electric currents to the various muscles of the face. He thought of a day when he had posed with his parents in the sunlight for a photograph in front of the opera house in Vienna, the folds of his mother’s parasol ticklish against his bare legs, and his father said, ‘If only we had been conquered by the Austrians, and not by the Turks, we would have had some of this Enlightenment for ourselves,’ and Ulrich had wondered if he was talking about a kind of cake. He thought of anything but the music, and, in the middle of the waltz, a great buzzing filled his ears, and his playing simply tailed off.
    His bow caught a violin string awkwardly as he lowered it, and there was a catastrophic plink . And the family sat once again in a silence punctuated only by the funereal bark of the crows outside.
    His father seized the violin from Ulrich’s hand, and brandished it at his wife like a meat cleaver.
    ‘You bought this for him? Haven’t we talked about this before?’
    His anger raised him up, and he circled the room.
    ‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it!’
    As he threw the violin into the fire, Ulrich’s mother was already sobbing, and, when the sparks flew up with the impact, she howled with grief and ran from the room.
    Ulrich, still holding his listless violin bow, joined his father in contemplating the incendiary demise of his instrument. He noticed that the varnish