Violin Read Online Free PDF Page A

pull the tubes away, and pump the air with white smoke. Do not bruise my arms for I am not here, I am in the grave; and it is an angry rigid image of me that you intrude upon. Yes, you see the sheets are clean, I could have told you!
    Wind him up, wind him thick, thick in the sheets, it does not matter one whit—you see, there is no blood,there is no virulent thing that can get you from him—he died not from open cankers but he starved inside as those with AIDS are wont to do, so that it hurt him even to draw breath, and what do you have left now to fear?
    I am not with you or with those who ask questions of time and place and blood and sanity and numbers to be called; I cannot answer to those who would Help. I am safe in the grave. I press my lips to my father’s skull. I reach for my mother’s bony hand. Let me hold you!
    I can still hear the music. Oh, God, that this lone violinist would come through high grass and falling rain and the dense smoke of imagined night, envisioned darkness, to be with me still and play his mournful song, to give a voice to these words inside my head, as the earth grows ever more damp, and all things alive in it seem nothing but natural and kind and even a little beautiful.
    All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us.
    Fear won’t come here. Fear is gone. Jangle the keys and stack the cups. Bang the pots on the iron stove downstairs. Fill the night with sirens if you will. Let the water rush and rush and rush, and the tub fill. I see you not. I know you not.
    No petty worry will come here, not to this grave where we lie. Fear is gone—like youth itself and all that old anguish when I watched them commit you to the ground—coffin after coffin, and Father’s of such fine wood, and Mother’s, I can’t remember, and Lily’s so small and white, and the old gentleman not wanting to charge us a nickel because she was just a little girl. No, all that worry is gone.
    Worry stops your ears to the real music. Worry doesn’t let you fold your arms around the bones of those you love.
    I am alive and with you now, truly only now realizing what it means that I will have you always with me!
    Father, Mother, Karl, Lily, hold me!
    Oh, it seems a sin to ask compassion of the dead, those who died in pain, those I couldn’t save, those for whom I didn’t have the right farewells or charms to drive off panic, or agony, of those who saw in the final careless, dissonant moments no tears perhaps or heard no pledge that I would mourn you forever.
    I’m here now! With you! I know what it means to be dead. I let the mud cover me, I let my foot push deep into the spongy side of the grave.
    This is a vision, my house. They matter not:
    “That music, can you hear it?”
    “I think she should get into the shower again now! I think she should be thoroughly disinfected!”
    “Everything in that room should be burnt—”
    “Oh, not that pretty four-poster bed, that’s foolishness, they don’t blow up the hospital room, do they, when somebody dies of this.”
    “…   and his manuscript, don’t you touch it.”
    No, don’t you dare
touch his manuscript!
    “Shhh, not in front of—”
    “She’s crazy, can’t you see it?”
    “…   his mother is on the morning plane out of Gatwick.”
    “…   absolutely stark raving mad.”
    “Oh, please, both of you, if you love your sister, for God’s sake, be quiet. Miss Hardy, did you know her well?”
    “Drink this, Triana.”
    This is my vision; my house. I sit in my living room,washed, scrubbed, as if I were the one to be buried, water dripping from my hair. Let the morning sun strike the mirrors. Toss the peacock’s brilliant feathers out of the silver urn and all over the floor. Don’t hang a ghastly veil over all things bright. Look deep to find the phantom in the glass.
    This is my house.