Epilogue
Farkas
The hall is full.
I sit in the private box on the second tier, in the dark at the back, where the light from the stage doesn't reach. The seat beside me is empty. I'm the only person in the box. I've paid for this. I've paid for this for a long time.
The lights in the hall dim.
The orchestra is already on the stage. The conductor walks out and the applause rises and settles. He bows once, briefly, and turns toward the wings.
She walks out.
She's in a dark dress. The skirt is long and the bodice is fitted and there's a thin line of pale stitching at the seam where the fabric meets her shoulder.
Her hair is pinned up. The line of her throat is bare.
She's carrying the violin loosely in her left hand and the bow in her right and she's walking the way she walked across the parking lot toward me — chin up, eyes forward, no hesitation.
She stops at the front of the stage. She bows to the audience.
The applause is enormous.
She lifts the violin to her shoulder. She tucks it under her chin. The motion is the motion I watched her teach back into her body in a small room in Nebraska. The same motion. Her father showing her at five years old. The elbow. Like this, Jenny-ya. Like this.
She nods to the conductor.
The first note comes.
It's the Massenet. The Meditation from Tha?s. The piece her father stood up for in the auditorium when she was seventeen. The piece she played from memory in her bedroom on a Sunday afternoon when she didn't know I was watching her from the ledge. The piece I gave her the page back for.
She plays it the way she hasn't played it before.
I've heard her practice this for the last year.
I've heard her teacher in Budapest work her through it again and again.
I've heard her play it slow, fast, with her eyes closed, with her eyes open, with the page on the stand, with the page set aside.
I've heard her play it like a musician with a piece she's about to play in public for the first time in years.
She's playing it the way she hasn't played it before.
Her bow is steady. Her shifting is clean.
She comes to the cadenza in the middle — the high climb that used to defeat her — and she takes it like someone who's waited years for the chance.
She doesn't stumble. She doesn't slow. The high notes rise in the hall above the orchestra and they hang in the air and they do what Massenet meant them to do.
I can't move.
There's a pain in my chest. It isn't a pain I've known before.
It's the pain of being too small to hold a thing.
It's the pain of a body that was built for a thousand years of nothing and is now full of something that has nowhere to go.
I press my hand against the long scar on my sternum through the fabric of my coat.
The shape of her hand the day she laid her palm flat against it.
She comes to the final passages. The orchestra falls back behind her. The accompaniment thins. It's only her now — the violin, the long sustained line at the top of the piece, the last slow descent through the heart of it.
The room is completely still.
She holds the final note.
She lets it go.
The silence afterward is total. The hall holds its breath. For one long suspended second no one moves, as if any sound would break the thing she's just made.
The conductor turns toward her.
The applause begins.
It builds. It rises. It doesn't stop. People are standing. The whole hall is standing. The conductor takes her hand and lifts it. She bows. She bows again. The flowers come out from the wings — bouquets tossed to the stage from the front rows.
She doesn't look at the audience as the others do.
She looks up.
She looks up at the second tier. She finds the box. She finds the dark at the back of the box where I'm sitting. She can't see me. She knows I'm there.
She smiles.
I've seen this smile only once before, and only secondhand — drawn out of another mind, a girl on a stage years before I knew her. I never thought it'd be turned on me. It's mine now.
She gives the smile to me. She holds it. The applause around her continues. She doesn't look away.
I don't move. I can't move. The pain in my chest is so much that I don't know what to do with it. I think I'm crying. I haven't cried in millennia and I don't remember what it feels like and I think it's what's happening to me.
She lifts her hand to her heart. The applause continues, and it doesn't stop. I sit in the dark of the private box and I watch her. And I think. Of a thousand years of endless days and empty nights. Of nothingness.
I've been many things over the years. Some better than others. But this… This is the greatest thing I've ever been. I am hers.
Thank you for reading!