A fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – as he has maimed a human being, so shall he be maimed.
Emor Leviticus 21:1
The greatest piece of music ever written in the history of the universe is of course the Bach Double Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Surely, you of all people understand this. No one has played the first violin part so fluidly, so daringly, or so passionately, and I have heard many, many perform it. But you, the luminous Lydia Nyland, surpassed them all when you were just seventeen years old. I, your humble admirer, Randall Dornbaum, had the honor to play the part of your second violin with the High School of Music and Art Baroque Ensemble. For those fifteen minutes my soul had reached its highest spiritual potential. It could be matched but never surpassed. Such is the tragedy of perfection.
And now, sixty years later, here you are, miraculously crashed like a fallen angel into the same assisted living center that I am chained to. Any fool might say that this could only happen in fiction or a daydream, but you are here and I am here. This is not a one-in-a-million chance. This is certainty. It is what my father called bashert. Orchestrated by G_d. When you first saw me, I had hoped you’d recognize me almost as quickly as I recognized you. Of course, you haven’t changed. Not in your essence. Your hair is gray; of course there are wrinkles. But that soft chin made to nestle into your instrument is unmistakable. You are like the Double Concerto itself. One can hear it on a modern digital recording… the Isabelle Faust is a very good one… or on a scratchy 78 performed by Fritz Kreisler. The surface imperfections mean nothing. The heart will always be Bach.
And yet, you looked past me as though I were just some forgettable old man. No, that’s another part of what makes you who you are. You looked past me as though I were just some forgettable teenager. The same look of sixty years ago. When I told you my name, there was no flicker of recognition. But when I mentioned the Bach, of course that’s when your eyes opened like blossoming orchids.
And yet, you abandoned it all? I am the one who went on to Juilliard, and you went on to Binghamton? To study chemistry? I have always wondered how the world would be different today had you pursued your gift. It is perhaps the fantasy of a sentimentalist to suggest that 9-1-1 would have never happened, but surely many savage breasts would have been soothed had you been there with your instrument. Something, however small, in the gentle fabric of time would have been mended, and how might that have rippled onward today? A butterfly effect with unpredictable consequences. A healed world? Maybe not, but surely you agree that we need every balm available.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be your tour guide. There’s so much here that Water Gardens has to offer. Mary, the hospitality director, has given you the company tour, but you really need to see the place from the perspective of the inmates. I exaggerate. It’s really very nice here. The athletic program will keep you alive for five more years than if you just sat on your behind all day. Your heart condition limits your activity? Well, don’t let me come between you and your doctor, but every day on your feet is a godsend. There are regular game tournaments, from Settlers of Catan (are you up for negotiating?) to everyday stuff like Scrabble and, God help us both, bingo. Not a game for intellectuals! As far as music… well, I hope you have a set of headphones because the listening events tend to be centered around… wait for it… Kenny G, Christopher Cross, and all similar manner of easy listening yacht rock. I know. Pathetic.
I will do my best to find that careful balance of walking in your footsteps, but with just enough distance that you don’t see me as being cloying, or God forbid, a stalker. Because I know what you’ll do. You’ll walk right through me. In these years I’ve sometimes wondered if you even heard me play that night. Were you listening? Were you just playing a glorious solo and graciously permitting me to float alongside you? But then I remind myself that music is not made that way. It is made together. It is made by souls that have united for that moment of performance. I felt it. Feelings don’t lie.
Allow me in these weeks to tell you things about me; and perhaps you’ll reciprocate. In sixty years, we have a lot of catching up to do! The string department at Juilliard is not a friendly place. You’ve got twenty of the most talented violin students in the world all thrown together in a cage match. We are very cordial with each other. In the orchestra we play together like one voice. But when the baton comes to rest, every one of us remembers that we’d gone from being a superstar at home to suddenly becoming so ordinary. Maybe one of us will become a concert soloist. A concertmaster here and there. A few positions with major orchestras. And after that — what about the “me’s?” There are a lot of Randall Dornbaums, and for each one at Juilliard there are twenty more at lesser schools. We play in regional orchestras, but they don’t have full seasons. Maybe a recording session here and there. I wasn’t even a junior when I realized that I would never ever in my lifetime again perform the Double Violin Concerto on a recording or at any venue more glamorous than… the Water Gardens. That’s if they had an orchestra, which they don’t. They have Christopher Cross on a tape loop along with Toto and the Pina Colada song guy.
Why did you give it up? I am thinking to myself now… I’m embarrassed to say something as trite as “we could have made beautiful music together” but it’s true! And you gave it up for chemistry! Do you not realize that it is the absolute one-hundred-eighty-degree opposite of music? Formulas that work according to rules and equations with absolute reliability. Chemistry has blending. That’s true. I suppose that music and chemistry share that. But how can you not appreciate the fact that chemistry engages with every ingredient known to humankind except the most important one? The human soul! I know you have one. And yet, when the baton came down that night, yours seemed to fly away. It surely must be like one of those parrots that accidentally escapes into New York City. A beautiful bird of tropical colors, flapping its panicking wings in a land of grey concrete and steel. Lost, frightened, hungry. Never seen by its owner again until maybe found dead in their apartment building’s dumpster. I should feel sorry for your loss, but I only can see what’s been left behind: a sad, drifting apparition, tragically separated from its soul, lacking even the healthy appetite to search for it.
The next weeks seem like… a reverse déjà vu. You know that feeling when nothing special has happened and yet you sense that you’re repeating a moment from the past? That’s a regular déjà vu. You seem to be actually nice to me. Not inviting but at least accepting. You won’t join me at my table for lunch, but you smile with apparent generosity if I join you. You talk to me as though I’m a human who has a heart. These moments all have that mystical tingle of a déjà vu, but with an awkward reversal. The things that are really happening in the present are what seem unreal. The memory of the past is unmistakably real. My life in the present is the dream state. When I have my rude awakening, I am in the past, the reality of being ignored for decades. Perhaps with a little more work I will be able to persuade you to join my dream and come to sit with me for a coffee or cocktail of your own volition.
A step of progress? You have chosen to tell me about yourself.
Apparently, you were as talented at your trade in chemistry as you were on the violin. You wanted more, so you continued to get your doctorate at the University of Illinois. And then it was onto Dow Chemical in the beautiful cultural Xanadu of Midland, Michigan. I’ll bite my tongue. I don’t have to remind you that your former employer was the company that made napalm, the cocktail of flaming goo that America used in Vietnam. Just think, had it not been for my student deferment I might have been called upon to drop this fine elixir on hapless villagers, and we would have ironically shared a cocktail while remaining separated by thousands of miles. Thankfully, that war was over by the time you sold your soul, and you instead got to develop such masterpieces as artificial turf and superior golf ball cores. And just as you became one of the first female senior managers there, you found the time to fall in love! Gavin Cahill. Gavin Cahill. Gavin Cahill, Vice President of Industrial Sales. Gavin Cahill, who did not look through you as you looked through me. But Gavin Cahill, whom even you, with your X-ray vision, could not see through. He was everything I’m not. Muscular and square jawed and sandy haired with an adorable streak of red. Frat boy. Serious and driven for success. A lover of… well, he’d be right at home here if he were still alive. Jackson Browne and Jimmy Buffett and the Doobie Brothers. When you live in a cultural wasteland, you learn to love what’s available. Tragically alcoholic. It took eight years, but it had to happen. He decked you. Oh, my Lydia, had I been there to protect you… I’d be outclassed. I have no illusions. He’d have decked me too, and three times harder. I’d have been out cold on the floor, unable to change your fate in any way. But had your life been different… had your life’s choices been driven by your heart and not solely by your intellect, then I could have protected you. Then you would not have had to endure that brute for the next ten years, too entrenched in your wasteland both at home and at work to move on. Then finally, like a lost parrot, he too flew into the urban jungle. Sitting behind the wheel of his Ford Bronco with a little too much alcohol in his blood, he performed a barrel roll into the Tittabawassee River, and was found in a dumpster. A dumpster in Midland, Michigan.
Perhaps I should not have taken you out on a ledge by encouraging you to tell your story. I see it has agitated your frail heart as you race into your purse for your life-saving pills. Do you know what game they don’t permit to be played here? Jenga! The game where you build a wooden tower and then remove blocks one by one until finally the whole stack tips and crashes and spreads debris across the table and onto the floor. I used to think they forbade it because it was unfair to those of us with unsteady hands. But I believe that they don’t allow Jenga because the game reminds us of our own frailty. I see the panic in your eyes as you reach for your pills, your hands trembling as they race to twist off the bottle cap and transport that tiny lozenge of life to the moist space under your tongue. May I help you? Allow me to hold two capsules for you and I will endeavor to be with you when you find yourself in need. You can be my angel of music; I can be your Guardian Angel. Alright then. I suppose you are right. You can take care of yourself, as you have done for these sixty years. I dare not remind you that not all of your choices have been as perspicacious as they seemed in the moment.
How I try to shake you from your complacency, Lydia! Do you not see what we share? We shared the music, of course, a crystalline moment, but only barely less important – we share frailty! Today, of course, you are frail of body. Anyone can see your difficulty walking, the way your head shakes, and your desperate dependence on your heart pills at the slightest imposition of stress. But your true frailty goes back sixty years to the time when you lacked a firm grip on your soul and let it abandon you. I too am frail. Oh, I have clung to my soul, yes, but out of desperation not joy. My music, however pedestrian, has been the one thing that has kept me alive these years. But I lacked a firm grip on you, and let you abandon me.
Come to my room. I need to show you my violin. Oh, yes, it is a very special violin. Not a Stradivarius by any means – those are reserved for the privileged few who find wealthy benefactors who provide their precious “investments” on loan to those they deem worthy. It is just an ordinary student violin, the one I played in our duet. Think of the memories it brings back. Of course I’ll let you hold it. Yes, come in. So basic, and yet doesn’t it feel magnificent? No, this isn’t the instrument I used as a professional. They’d laugh me out of the most irrelevant regional orchestra if I ever auditioned with this. I had a fine instrument, but I sold it to help raise the money so that I could afford to live in this place. I’ll tell you though, this old student violin… it ain’t bad. I replaced the strings just last week, brought it back here, placed it under my chin to tune, and oh, the tears flowed so freely I feared that I would wash the varnish completely off and leave nothing but the bare wood. Do you see that little stain right by the chin rest? It’s as new as yesterday.
Allow me to play it. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? Does it bring something back in you? Can you hear your own first violin part weaving in and out of my own supporting lines? Dancing, flying, filling the room. Say nothing, Lydia. I see in your eyes that you hear the same thing that I hear. The marvelous, holy, sounds of not just my playing, but of two violins expressing things that no words have yet been invented for. We both hear it. The entire ensemble supports us. Our hands no longer need us. They play on their own. Our violins float in mid-air. They play themselves and leave us to unite like beings of pure light. No clothes. No flesh. We merge just like the music. We have become the music. And whatever terrible forces that have prevented me from telling you of my love for you have become irrelevant because we have forever become one and the music says only one thing, of how I love you and have always loved you.
May I ask, beg, plead with you for a simple gesture? Take my violin. It is yours. When I saw you hold it, I knew it had returned home. Play a line. A measure. A note. Even if you don’t remember the concerto, even a single note coaxed out of the key of D minor… your natural tremor can serve as an artifact of your beautiful vibrato. No, Lydia, I don’t need my violin. This most intimate part of me has continually yearned to sing just one more song, but it needs direction from the proper mistress. I am putting it on the table, Lydia. I will never touch it again. It is yours, even if it remains there for eternity, or until we both expire and some orderly discovers it and tosses it into some indifferent dumpster.
I upset you, my Lydia. You are coughing. Your chest is heaving. Your arms sputter violently as though you’d been thrown into a pool of quicksand. You reach for your purse to try to pull in your lifeline, because I know that your precious heart pills rest inside, as eager to come to your rescue as you are eager to be rescued. I am holding onto your purse and you cannot have it.
We hear about Biblical justice. “An eye for an eye.” But what about the human heart? How do we seek justice when a heart has been crushed by indifference? Your heart, too, must be crushed. I see your hands wave; you pound at your chest; you look at me with pleading eyes, but the time has come for you to feel, however briefly, the same loss of heart that I have lived with for sixty years.
You lunge at me. Your eyes bulge with panic. You breathe with the shriek of an out-of-tune clarinet, and then, finally, you fall back onto your bed, pounding at the mattress as though it were an abandoned timpani, and then all movement stops. The conductor’s arms are at rest. The concerto is over.
This is the moment when I see the horrifying truth. You’ve fallen on your back. Your right hand has landed by your ear and formed an angry claw. Your left hand has landed by your heart. In your last moment on Earth, you have died… playing the violin!
Oh, Lydia, your soul has returned! It has taken sixty years but your wandering ghost has sought to reunite with its soul at last. Was it me who called it home? Could it be that we could have played the Bach Double Concerto yet one more time but for my anger and impatience?
As I plotted my justice, I did wonder what alibi I could use to escape punishment, but now I see that no alibi is necessary. I will make full confession. The world will know that I murdered you in a most heinous way and I will plead to get the death penalty so that I may leave this world and reunite with you at the first possible moment. Perhaps God will punish me as well. Perhaps I will need to serve out His justice for millennia. It does not matter. I will bear it with dignity, knowing that your soul has been briefly suppressed but is ultimately inextinguishable. I will bear it knowing that someday in our afterlives, we will reunite. I will be there with my violin, and you with yours, and the angelic orchestra will accompany us together in one more performance. It is our destiny.
Another story about a violinist
More on the biblical portion Emor
