The Russian violinist - Short Story

Literary Review, Fall, 2003 by Ellen Visson

She was playing the violin outside. Her sharp chin leaned on the pubis of her instrument like the tenderest of lovers. Full breasts floated buoyantly between her arms. Her body swayed as though under water, while her feet appeared planted in the ocean's bottom. Exotic shells and artifacts lay about those feet--naked but for high-heels and blue nail polish. The sandals, held on by pink-glitter straps, were no longer vulgar. They glowed like those mysterious sea creatures living so far beneath the surface of the ocean that they generate their own light.

"Ice?" My wife had noticed the direction of my glance. Her eyes glinted, amused beneath their folds of white skin. The sun's slant illuminated them from within. Her raised brow, carefully penciled in auburn, highlighted her acuity.

"I'm fine."

"I can see."

"Though perhaps I will." I held out my glass.

Even her bow seemed to drift over the strings, as with a current. Beside her was her guitarist, a man thirty years older with the creased smile and downward sloping eyes of a heavy drinker. He was as accomplished at innocence as he was in guitar; and he was an excellent guitarist. They spoke together only when they chose their repertoire. Otherwise their eyes never met. It was the whiskey hour. The clients of the hotel were pleased with the communication of their instruments.

Next was It's a Wonderful Life, which was true. My wife and I lived in the most peaceful country in the world, and the easiest on the eyes. We had settled in Switzerland. We seldom left, and the turmoil of the world never pierced the membranes of our adopted borders. Too many organizations--clandestine or otherwise--kept their money and headquarters in this neutral country. Switzerland remained a quaint land, hermetically sealed in a bottle adrift upon the globe's troubled waters. We were like Noah, and our life span appeared as promising as his.

During the flash flood of the sixties, both of us had observed the world we knew being swept away. That is when we made our mutual decision to reside upon the Swiss Riviera. And here we have been at peace--first a semi-retired and finally, a retired couple. Comfortable. Reserved but Polite. Our love had never been passionate, the kind that combusts leaving only a trash heap behind. Thus it evolved. Were we still in love? I thought so. My wife thought so. Therefore I suppose we were.

The violin's drone melted across the flowers. More was next. That also was fitting. I sipped my whiskey and squinted my eyes at Lake Geneva glimmering through the weeping willow, forlorn enough for my maudlin mood. It was autumn. She had been playing the violin all summer at the Hotel du Lac. I had not really wanted more ice but needed to reassure my wife that she could still be useful to me. Surprisingly it worked, for she now leaned back in her chair with her glass and appreciated our view with me.

Before us extended a panorama of glaucous waters rimmed by foreboding mountains. The mountains were in another country. The first snows had already stained their peaks white. I ran my hand across my own hair. The comparison was not lost. My wife smiled from the side of her mouth but remained looking straight ahead.

A commotion had begun on the lake. One mile out a fishing boat had dumped entrails into its wake, and gulls were warring over churning waters. Their screams reached us on the breeze just as Moon River flowed into my ears. I turned from the gulls to concentrate instead upon a pair of swans beneath the willow. Beating the water with their wings, they lifted their bulks into the air and poised upon their tails. Even the violin and guitar could not drown out the noise. Soon they were planing above the water, the rhythmic swoosh swoosh of their wings merging with the distant gulls. My wife preferred watching the gulls.

Despite her fascination with bullfights and other bloody spectacles, my wife is a lover of lost dogs. She also collects stray children whose ages can fall uncomfortably close to her own. She claims to be cursed with a sensitivity that no distraction will allay. She has, she states, sympatheia. She has this with the most despicable murderer as well as any bourgeois. She even shivers, she says, in the slipstream of any being who overtakes her along the quay, as the residue of the life that has just passed flows across her skin. She is, she professes, cursed with the disability of discerning unhappiness and moral confusion in others.

My wife claims that shards of shocked and frustrated love clash and jangle in each of us. They are ready to pierce us and others at the slightest provocation. We are shocked from the moment those contractions begin their nasty work of pushing us out of the womb and shattering our universe. We are frustrated even before our first screams of protest bring such joy to our battle-torn mothers and their relieved obstetricians. And from then on, only the distraction of helping others (she claims) allows us respite from the inner tearing which took place when the placenta first began its process of detachment. I myself am skeptical. I navigate around the shoals of such analyses, with their promises of ultimate peace. I swim past, eyes and ears shut, as I would any other touchstone lying at the bottom of any theological ocean.