The House of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

and no mother. The violin wasn’t much, it was a beginner’s violin, and one day I told Anna that she had to buy another one, a grownup’s violin. I know, she said, impassive, curt, sarcastic. And that was it. She only broke her cool demeanor when she played, because she pursed her face in concentration. But then she went back to being herself: Anna the impenetrable, hard to understand and hard to interpret, an excellent and gifted student with a talent for playing fast passages at a lightning speed that I envied. But she didn’t put her soul into it, only her intellect, and that was precisely how she had approached Bach—with her intellect.
    When Anna turned eighteen, the maid stopped bringing her to class and she came alone. I already walked myself to school at seven, and it wasn’t nearby. After the disappointment with the violin that day at the beach, I had been left empty. I didn’t know what to do or what to pin my hopes on. I had never been drawn to dolls or toys, I was much more interested in the things we found at the dump—but after discovering the violin, it seemed I would never get that excited about any other find. And now I no longer felt I had the right to smile or to get my hopes up about anything.
    But I should have remembered that the girl in the book didn’t have a mother and I did. A few days later, at school, the music teacher sought me out—the one who would try to teach us to singsome songs to fill the musical requirement, in a time and place where there were much more pressing problems. She was a teacher no one ever paid any attention to, that teacher who went unnoticed and ended up giving us all a good grade in a subject that was so low on the totem pole that it was practically nonexistent. She came to see me with a smile and with eyes that invited hope. She sat down beside me, on a bench in the schoolyard, and said, I heard you have a violin; why don’t you bring it in. Suddenly, the world opened up for me.

Anna
    I keep running into that witch of a maid everywhere, and now I have to share a taxi with her. I made her sit between the violin and the door, but she never complains; she’s so perfect. The perfect maid, of course. Now she looks at the store windows as if she’d never seen anything like them before; obviously you can’t take her anywhere. But how could Mark even think to . . . And I bet she’s going to start crying when we begin the concert. For the moment, I’m holding Mark’s hand tightly, and I can tell that he is squeezing mine a little bit too, and smiling. Come on, Maria, I hope that now you can clearly see that there are some people who get what they want—and some, like you, who have nothing. And that Karl is already history.
    The time for tears is over. When we found out he was dead, we all cried, and I felt as if they had amputated something deep inside me. A part of me was ripped out violently by his death, despite what had happened just two days before when I knocked on the door of his hotel room. But now I’ve lived with the hole for so long, and with the passing years it’s finally gotten filled in.
    Dark years pass slowly. Light ones, on the other hand, fly by; there’s no way to catch them, you can’t dilly-dally. It seems as if someone is saying come on, hurry up, hurry up, you’re late.
    Mama was always late. Goodbye, my girl, I’m leaving; ay, don’t kiss me so much; you’ll get my dress dirty, she’d say to me when I clung to her skirt to keep her at home. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always done that, begged her to stay. But she never stayed, like light years, like the ones that fly by. My mother was a fleeting flash, an intangible being, some sort of angel you can’t touch or even be sure you’ve seen. You might have just imagined it. Take her to violin, she would order the maid. The violin was the excuse my parents had come up with to