The Unnamed Violin

“My dear, it’s a long story.”

“That’s good,” I muttered, settling on my other side, burying my nose in her shoulder.

“… The master of the castle turned out to be a musician who had spent his entire long life alone. He had built his castle himself, and he had taught the five-petal white lily to sing with the power of his mastery. Worldly destinies did not concern him – he was far from the ordinary vanity of human lives. People did not understand him, and he did not try to understand them either. He despised them for their insensitivity and bad taste, he despised them for what they—”

The princess could not understand why there was no kindred spirit who could understand the genius hermit: he was talented, smart, and probably handsome … The princess immediately asked about the stranger’s appearance, and the little bird looked around in fear. Seeing the sparkle in the young princess’s eyes, it answered: ‘He can never be like other people. Everyone who has ever seen him died of horror. You are the only one who survived meeting him … Because you have not seen him.’

The little bird had barely finished speaking when a roar was heard behind the door of the princess’s room – and the walls shook from the terrible sound. The little bird quickly flew away … But there was more than just rage in that cry – there was pain and despair in it.

The princess was frightened, but immediately understood that the stranger would not harm her. Whoever this mysterious inhabitant of the castle was, he would not hurt her. If he wanted to, he would have done it long ago … If she herself would not provoke him.

She had a plan: to pretend to be asleep and see who was bringing her food – what to do, such is the curious nature of a woman. That same night, when the door to the room opened, the princess could not distinguish anyone’s footsteps, could not see anything except complete darkness. She sat up in amazement – and at that very moment something stirred the air, as if by the wind, a black shadow slipped through the doorway, and the doors closed again with a lock.

The night visitor did not utter a word, but the princess knew that it was the master of the castle.

The next night, the princess again intended to lie in wait for the stranger, pretending to be asleep, but in the morning she suddenly discovered that the door to the room was not locked. She went wandering along the corridors, she liked everything in his house, she did not count the minutes and hours of the walk – and did not even remember that there was a world beyond the castle walls, and did not think about escaping. Then she found herself in the library.

The princess loved to read, she decided to collect books for her room. On the large oak table lay ancient manuscripts and treatises, and the princess knew their language.

They spoke of a curse that befell the master of the castle. He was an ugly monster, made by the creator for the shining star, the center of the universe, as a creator without a human form, but with a human soul. Until the end of his days, he was forced to drag out his existence in solitude … So that’s what the little bird was talking about!

Someone’s strong hands grabbed her and dragged her out of the library, a terrible voice screamed at her, scolded her for daring to leave the tower, shook her like a rag doll, but she looked with wide-open eyes at—

“The monster? Was it scary?” I whispered, instinctively pressing closer to Mom.

It seemed to me that all the shadows of the universe now surrounded us in the room, and the dim light of the nightlight did not dispel the thickening obscurity.

“No, dear, she did not see the monster …”

“How so?”

But she only sighed, hugging me tighter, continuing, “… The princess saw nothing – they were standing in the dark, and the shadow hid the one who was in front of her. She could only see his amber eyes. And that saved her then.”

He locked her in the tower room again, carefully checking all the locks, and she fell on her bed and burst into tears. She could not believe his cruel fate, the curse that could not be broken.

But the monster didn’t know that the princess had read the book.

“Mom …”

It seemed to me that she was crying, and I raised myself up on my elbows in fear to meet her gaze, but when she looked at me, there were no tears in her eyes.

But she was sad – like that unhappy princess from the tale.

“Mom, did she stay to live in the castle with the monster? Why didn’t she run away?” I asked after a pause.

“Why would she run away?”

“Well, but …” I was puzzled why she didn’t understand – it was so obvious. “But he’s a monster. How can you know that there’s a monster roaming around somewhere, and even keeping you locked up, and still go to the library as if nothing had happened?”

She laughed quietly, patting my shoulder.

“He didn’t hurt her … It’s all her fault, she wanted to steal the lily from him. Isn’t that right?”

I nodded gloomily, still not understanding anything.

“But why did he keep her? He could have eaten her, cooked her, I don’t know … Why would he need her?”

Mom now didn’t hide her condescending but kind laughter. Leaning her forehead against mine, she said, “My sweet, he simply fell in love with her.”

“Fell in love?” I gasped in surprise. “Can monsters really love?”

“Of course they can … They love much more than people, they put everything they have into this feeling, because they know that this love is all they have, one and for life.”

I hemmed disbelievingly, but was in no hurry to free myself from her embrace.

“But wait, does he really think that she can love him too? He is—”

She looked at me strangely – straight in the eye – but I just squirmed in the blanket in bewilderment.

“He is what?”

“A monster.”

Her gaze fell somewhere on my knees bent under the blanket. When she looked at me again, I was overcome by the feeling that I had said something wrong.

“What do you think, one can’t love a monster?”

But I said the truth! One can’t love a monster – and everyone knows it! A monster is a monster, and nothing can be done about it …

I felt uneasy under Mom’s watchful gaze, but I still hadn’t got this strange thing about love.

When she spoke again, her voice had softened, “Victor, when you grow up, you’ll understand … There are things that can’t be judged by their appearance alone – by the shell they’re enclosed in. You can’t look at the wrapper and not see the contents.”

I wanted to say something in my own defense, but she didn’t let me object.

“Do you want to know what happened next?”

I nodded slowly – I really did, but I wasn’t sure that I comprehend everything completely. What a strange tale …

I allowed myself to be wrapped in a blanket and peacefully closed my eyes, feeling the arms hugging my shoulders.

“… The monster made sure that the princess did not leave the room anymore. She had to think he was not nearby, and sometimes it seemed to her that he really was not there – and it was just an endless dream.”

The white lily no longer sang to her in her dreams. Life seemed to have left the princess, because she felt lonely … without him.

If the princess had managed to read those ancient scripts to the end before the monster found her in the library, she would have learned that the curse could be broken … But she couldn’t know that – she already knew more than she was supposed to.

The days dragged on endlessly, and the nights even longer. The princess tried as best she could not to fall asleep, to at least catch a glimpse of a shadow creeping towards her in the night, to at least once feel the pleasant breath of wind from a black cloak … But she did not remember how she fell asleep, and when she woke up, she saw a fresh breakfast on the nightstand.

One night, the cunning princess decided to sleep next to the door, expecting that as soon as the master of the castle appeared in her room, she would immediately wake up and talk to him. She just wanted to apologize for her behavior – and nothing more.

Everything turned out as she had designed: he had not expected that, having entered the room as a silent shadow, he would stumble over the snoring princess. Before he could figure out anything, she woke up and spoke to him. She tried very hard not to frighten or anger him. She asked him to let her out of the room at least occasionally and promised that she would not try to escape.

Luck was definitely on her side: after a week, the monster sometimes opened the door to the room, then he began to come to her and bring books, a little later they began to talk about these books. The princess liked to talk to him, he no longer avoided her – she even sometimes thought that he smiled at her witty jokes. As before, the princess could not see him – he was always hidden by a shadow.

And she never once remembered that he was the monster.

Days and months flew by … The garden of paradise had already faded, and the bright leaves had turned yellow, then fallen, the earth was covered with a white blanket, and it came off with time. Spring was opening the first buds on the renewed trees in the garden, the princess was looking out the window. She did not dream of seeing the spring sun again – she was ready to marry the darkness, if only— If only to stay with him.

She thought that she had long ago become boring to him – sometimes it seemed to her he would gladly throw her out of his castle, but the word given once on that summer day in the garden held him. She felt how tense he was sometimes when talking to her, and how he wanted to run away as soon as possible, just not to see her … She was offended that she did not interest him at all.

One night at dinner – for they dined together every night, with a long, gloomy dining table between them – the princess asked him to sing to her. She knew the voice she had come to love, the voice of the five-petal white lily that sang to her in her dreams, was his voice.

He refused. He explained that he was simply not in the mood, and that he would definitely sing to her some other time, but the princess realized that he was lying.

The princess thought he simply didn’t love her.

She, choking from her tears, told him everything she had thought about on dark nights, languishing alone in her tower … She screamed that one cannot always live the way he lived, fearing the light only because the light sometimes burns.

She confessed her love to him, and he stood there, not saying a word.

‘No, you can’t love me,’ he finally muttered.

It was as if he didn’t hear her. He looked at her, she begged him to let her stay with him. Suddenly he came up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and his amber eyes were glowing, but she wasn’t afraid. He wanted to scare her, but the princess wasn’t afraid of the monster.

‘Now I’ll prove to you that you’re lying to yourself,’ he whispered and stepped into the light.

“Oh,” I blurted out, and I realized that I had been clutching the blanket tightly, waiting for the end of the story.

My legs twitched involuntarily in an attempt to escape, but in Mom’s arms I was not afraid of any monsters.

In response to my silent question, she only smiled softly.

“… The princess, as before, did not see a monster in him. Everything we have imagined for ourselves – true and untrue – is stored in our heads. Vision is selective, and we see what we want to see. The princess did not want to see a monster in him – and she didn’t … You just have to want it.”

“But the curse is now broken? The princess fell in love with the monster – he became a man?”

Mom sighed, pressing her nose somewhere on the top of my head.

“Does it matter? She loves him even as he is … No, the curse never went away, and he remained … the monster. But for her, he was the most beautiful man in the world, because when you love, you don’t sight anything except what you want to sight,” she paused for a moment, weighing her words. “Yes, Victor, fairy tales don’t always have an obvious ending – and not necessarily with wonders. Isn’t it enough that they met and were happy?”

24. Being Sick Is Bad

I woke up from the alarm clock in a cold sweat. The glowing rectangle of the phone was tearing at the opposite side of the bed, I was reaching out to touch it. My body wouldn’t obey, I was trying to dig the phone out from under the sheets – just to make it fall silent.

Finally, I turned off the alarm, threw the device aside – and it was lost again somewhere in the blanket.

The sleep retreated, but an unnatural heaviness remained, it was difficult to breathe and swallow, my throat was swollen. My head was splitting, my bones were aching, and I only groaned, burying my nose in the damp pillow. I pulled my knees to my chest, covered myself with a blanket, it was sometimes cold, sometimes hot.

I drank whiskey last night, but I couldn’t remember how much. Now I felt lousy – but not because of a hangover.

Being sick is bad, I concluded mentally, coughing.

In my first year of vagabondage in Vienna, I tried, it seems, all the options for sleeping – from huts and abandoned buildings to a cardboard box. I chilled all parts of the body possible, I spent about a week in delirium, which seemed like an eternity, a real journey to hell – with nine circles, like Dante. I sincerely thought that I would die and not survive the winter … Only a couple of years later I learned that the bad trip with hallucinations had a name – pneumonia, and that hobos survive alone much less often than in groups – since a warm body nearby at least warms up somehow.

I didn’t remember names and nicknames, I was rarely used as a warm body, but over the course of a year I learned where and how often shelters and meals were organized for the homeless, and where one could warm up next to a burning barrel on which someone was roasting a stinky rat.

I have only heard scary stories about cannibalism. No one has ever been eaten in my presence – only beaten or fucked. I ran fast, even when my bladder was full and it was painful to defecate because of the cold.

There were moments when I regretted running away – and bit my fists to keep from screaming from the despair rising from my empty stomach to my throat like phantom vomit. I ran away because I couldn’t stand the harassment of teenage bullies, more often – of defenseless little ones, less often – of me; I didn’t understand the strange logic of caretakers who refused to make complete human beings out of children, and not aggressive but submissive zombies.

They needed us to go for walks on schedule and finish our lunch to the last crumb, to be quiet on command, like trained dogs – and, if necessary, to get loose from the chain, so that we could then get a knock on our backs.

We were not tortured or beaten, no one cared about us. We were left to our own devices.

When children were sick, they were disliked by the caretakers for being a nuisance, and by the children for keeping them from sleeping by coughing at night. Those who were sent to the infirmary – when they were really bad – were said to never return, and terrifying stories of their appendix getting removed right in our nurse’s office were told about them. I was afraid that my appendix would become inflamed – since I believed it wasn’t my appendix that was being removed, but half my intestines and something else on top.

I dreamed of running away for as long as I could remember. I never entertained the idea of being adopted, because every day we were told, ‘Who needs you, you snot-nosed brat? Even your own mother abandoned you.’ I dreamed that once I left the orphanage, I would instantly be free – and my own boss.

I was naive. It seems that the hardest thing for me in adult life was not fighting off street thugs and hiding from the police and social services, but taking responsibility for myself.

I didn’t want to go anywhere, I kept staring at the dark ceiling. Outside the windows, the dim sky was already beginning to clear, but I couldn’t see it – the thick curtains hid the morning light from me. I realized with disappointment that I had played enough – and I was not at all eager to return to the office.

I dialed the office number with some difficulty and, holding the receiver to my ear, listened to the long, sharp beeps. Calling the reception was easier than looking for someone’s contacts and texting in chats.

The office plankton enthusiastically discussed gossip, TV series, football, and love affairs, they imitated authorities, hated each other and at the same time grinned in a welcoming smile. I kept to myself, only occasionally exchanging phrases in the kitchen with Riedel, who gave me recommendations on each dish from the vending machine, and Frei sighed sympathetically when I was once called a Satanist – because he, too, was called a Satanist.

Secretary Kathy, fortunately, left me alone.

I was tormented by thirst, but I could not bring myself to get out of bed. I began to feel sleepy.

“Martha Thompson Design Studio, good morning.”

“Kathy, hi, it’s Victor.”

“Victor!”

“I’m sick, I won’t come today.”

“What happened?”

An alarmed voice slashed across my eardrums, I pulled the phone away from my ear.

“I’ll be fine tomorrow, so don’t let them get their hopes up …”

My throat was sore, as if I’d eaten sharp river sand. I swallowed.

“Let me come to you?”

“No, it’s not necessary. Thank you. See you tomorrow, Kathy,” I hastened to reply and hung up.

There was no reason for her to come, besides, I looked pathetic.

Why can’t I control objects with my mind? I sighed resignedly, closed my eyes, ready to do anything for a sip of water. I hoped that I would be able to fall asleep again, and then the thirst would subside. I fell into oblivion, but woke up from a sore throat and an annoying cough.

The room was dark, I didn’t know how much time had passed since the alarm went off. It seemed like a week had passed since I’d been in bed, unable to get up or even go to the bathroom. I threw off the damp sheets, trying unsuccessfully to lie down comfortably, so that nothing would hurt or ache.

For some reason I wanted to cry, I clenched my teeth until my jaw hurt, and my mouth tasted salty of blood from my bitten lips.

In strange visions myself and the black shadow were mixed, I saw with his yellow eyes through the darkness, I could hear what others were not allowed to hear … Then I returned to the room, to the bed, all wet with sweat, without the strength to get up.

For some reason, I suddenly remembered Kaftzefoni I had met the day before, he was acting as if nothing had happened. The musicians obviously didn’t suspect anything, according to their version, I simply went to the dressing room earlier than usual, and then quietly left the club and went home – so that no one would see my broken face. No one could know what happened then – not even Baphomet, who saw Mr. Mask.

Didn’t they sense something was wrong, didn’t they notice something strange? If Baphomet didn’t recognize my yellow-eyed stranger as the violin thief, then it must have been someone else?

This can’t be! Mr. Mask is the only contender for the role of the villain, ready to get the violin at any cost.

I still had no idea how I would explain the disappearance of the instrument.

Turning over onto my stomach, I weakly punched the pillow. I wanted to pull off the T-shirt that was stuck to my body, but at first I only jerked irritably in the sheets. After a while, I finally threw the T-shirt aside and covered my head with my hands.

I curled up in a fetal position to keep warm, I didn’t have the strength to pull the blanket up.

“Mom …” I muttered through my sleep for some reason. “Please.”

25. Concert Is Tomorrow

By evening I felt better. When I washed my face, the same green-faced scrawny guy was looking at me from the mirror above the sink, and I made a fist-and-finger gesture at him. A real Little Raccoon and a pool – but he, unlike me, had made friends with his reflection.

I was sitting on the toilet, naked, shirtless, with my pants down to the floor, rubbing my face with my hands to stop nodding off, struggling to keep my eyes open, I regretted getting out of bed. I didn’t want to do anything.

When I pulled on my jeans and trudged into the kitchen, I found not only the chocolate bars I’d bought on the table, but also boxes of ready-made food – which were supposed to go into the refrigerator. The containers with their sad contents went into the trash can.

I turned on the kettle and sat down on the stool. Overcoming the desire to fall with my heavy head on the tabletop, I looked at my hands lying on my knees, listened to the measured gurgle of the boiling water. The scar on my right wrist, reaching almost to the middle of the palm, was almost unnoticeable …

The enchanted violin of the Architect! Nonsense.

The kettle boiled, emitting hot steam from its nose. I stood up and began mindlessly pouring water into a mug. I realized something was wrong when my hand involuntarily jerked away from the boiling water, which was already pouring out of the mug onto the table.

I slammed the kettle down on the countertop, rushed to the sink, and stuck my fingers under the cold water. I was getting sleepy again, and I leaned my hip on the countertop to keep from falling to the floor. I swung my hand thoughtfully, splashing everything around me, and fell into a trance, staring off into space. The icy water was soothing, and I kept my hands under the faucet …

Only when my head was under the stream, I suddenly came to senses, gasping for air. Not understanding what was happening, I jumped back.

I finally woke up.

As if through the thick walls, the sound of the phone was coming. I grabbed a kitchen towel and went into the room.

I looked at the screen, wiping my hair: it was Baphomet. Water was running down my spine into my pants, I picked up the phone.

“Hey, Victor,” he greeted me carefreely. “You’ve become quite impudent, don’t you think?”

I was confused.

“What’s the matter?”

Met laughed.

“The concert is tomorrow, and you haven’t come to the rehearsal even once. Is the Austrian count really so busy that he forgot about us?”

“Concert? What concert?”

I couldn’t figure it out.

“Met …?” I called out, confused.

“Dummy, I told you, the festival was moved to tomorrow. Did you forget? You’ve been strange lately … Come early so you can make it – we’ll discuss everything. At least don’t forget to take the violin.”

Before I could object, he had already hung up. How could I sing like this? And the violin … I had to tell him everything now! I sighed resignedly and threw the phone on the bed. Then I continued drying myself.

I have been with the demons for a year – since last fall. I tried to find something to do in New York related to music, I tried myself in different musical genres – to please those who listened to me in Manhattan speakeasies and basements of Queens and Brooklyn – but they responded more to appearance and presentation, and not to complexity and skill. No one needed experiments, I was asked to avoid academic tediousness, to sing softer, to look ‘sweeter,’ and I, on the contrary, wanted to develop in extreme vocals … I did not fit in with musical bands that performed metal, organized slam dancing at concerts – for them, I was too calm and melancholic.

Until I met the demons.

I was zipping up my guitar case at the bar counter and was about to leave the nightclub, as usual, without even approaching the manager to collect my ridiculous wages for the shift, when a man in a checkered jacket approached me.

“Can you do any hard stuff?”

I looked up at him, I didn’t even try to smile. There was a fascinated expression on his goatee-bearded face.

“I can,” I responded.

“I’m Kaftz.”

He extended his hand, I shook his palm.

“Victor.”

“I know.”

I assumed he would offer me a job at another club or bar, and I waited for him to continue.

“We need a vocalist, you have a special voice.”

Special, yeah.

“Like a chainsaw,” I couldn’t help myself.

Kaftz – I didn’t show that I was surprised by his name, which was obviously not his real one – was odd – I felt it in my gut, but, contrary to my premonition, I had no intention of running away.

“Something like that,” he laughed. “An angel and a demon and a cat in March. Do you write your own music?”