Violin Read Online Free

drowned it.
    A loud noise jarred me. Someone banging on the back door. Someone banging hard enough to break the glass.
    I stood there, not wanting to leave, but knowing that when people knock like that, they are bound to come in, and someone had caught on that Karl was dead, for sure, and I had to go and talk sane. There was no time for music.
    No time for this?
He brought the notes down low, moaning, loud and raucous again and then high and piercing from the strings.
    I backed away from the window.
    There was a figure in the room; but it wasn’t Karl. It was a woman. She came from the hallway, and I knew her. She was my neighbor. Her name was Hardy. Miss Nanny Hardy.
    “Triana, honey, is that man bothering you?” she asked. She went to the window.
    She was so outside his song. I knew her with another part of my mind, because all of the rest of me was moving with him, and quite suddenly I realized he was real.
    She had just proved it.
    “Triana, honey, for two days, you haven’t answered the door. I just gave the door a hard push. I was worried about you, Triana. You and Karl. Triana, tell me if you want me to make that horrible man go away. Who does he think he is? Look at him. He’s been outside the house, and now listen to him, playing the violin at this time of night. Doesn’t he know that a man is sick in this house—”
    But these were teeny tiny sounds, these words, like little pebbles dropping out of somebody’s hand. The music went on, sweet, and demure, and winding to a compassionate finale.
I
know your pain. I know. But madness isn’t for you. It never was. You’re the one who never goes mad.
    I stared at him and then again at Miss Hardy. Miss Hardy wore a dressing gown. She’d come in slippers. Quite a thing for such a proper lady. She looked at me. She looked around the room, circumspect and gently, as well bred people do, but surely she saw the scattered music disks and empty soda cans, the crumpled wrapper from the bread, the unopened mail.
    It wasn’t this, however, that made her face change as she looked back at me. Something caught her off guard; something assaulted her. Something unpleasant suddenly touched her.
    She’d smelled the smell. Karl’s body.
    The music stopped. I turned. “Don’t let him go!” I said.
    But the tall lanky man with the silky black hair had already begun to walk away, carrying in his hands his violin and his bow, and he looked back at me as he crossed Third Street and stood before the florist shop, and he waved at me, waved, and carefully placing his bow in his left hand with the neck of the violin, he raisedhis right hand and blew a kiss to me, deliberate and sweet.
    He blew me a kiss like those young kids had done in the dream, the kids who’d brought me roses.
    Roses, roses, roses … I almost heard someone saying those words, and it was in a foreign tongue, which almost made me laugh to think a rose by any other tongue is still a rose.
    “Triana,” Miss Hardy said so gently, her hand out to touch my shoulder. “Let me call someone.” It was not a question, really.
    “Yes, Miss Hardy, I should make the call.” I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. I blinked, trying to gather up more light from the street and see her better in her flowered dressing gown, very neat.
    “It’s the smell, isn’t it? You can smell it.”
    She nodded very slowly. “Why in God’s name did his mother leave you here alone!”
    “A baby, Miss Hardy, born in London, a few days ago. You can hear all about it from the machine. The message is there. I insisted that his mother go. She didn’t want to leave Karl. And there it was, you see, no one can tell you exactly when a dying man will die, or a baby will be born, and this was Karl’s sister’s first, and Karl told her to go, and I insisted she go, and then … then I just got tired of all the others coming.”
    I couldn’t read her face. I couldn’t even imagine her thoughts. Perhaps she didn’t know them herself in such a