The Line Between

But there are cellos and cellos, and the absence of the Fabregas made all the difference in the world to us. That poor pawnshop DeLuca meant well, and it held its pitch and played the notes asked of it as well as anyone could have asked. Anyone who wasn't used — no, attuned — to the soft roar of the Fabregas, as our entire orchestra was attuned to it. It wasn't a fair judgment, but how could it have been? The sound wasn't the same; and, finally, the sound is everything. Everything. All else — balance, tempo, interpretation — you can do something about, if you choose; but the sound is there or it isn't, and that bloody ancient Fabregas was our sound and our soul. Yes, I know it must strike you as absurd. I should hope so.

Progorny gave it his best — no one ever doubted that. It was touching, poignant, in a way: he seemed so earnestly to believe that the mere possession of that peerless instrument would make him — had already made him — a musician equal to such a responsibility. Indeed, to my ear, his timbre was notably improved, his rhythm somewhat firmer, his melodic line at once more shapely and more sensible. But what of it? However kindly one listened, it wasn't the sound. The cello did not feel for him what it felt for Andrichev, and everyone knew it, and that is the long and the short of it. Musical instruments have neither pity nor any notion of justice, as I have reason to know. Especially the strings.

Whatever Progorny had paid him for the cello, it could not have been anything near its real value. And Lyudmilla grew worse. Not that I ever visited her in her sickbed, you understand, but you may believe that I received daily — hourly — dispatches and bulletins from Andrichev. It very nearly broke my peevish, cynical old heart to see him so distraught, so frantically disorganized, constantly racing back and forth between the rehearsal hall, the doctor's office, and his own house, doing the best he could to attend simultaneously to the wellbeing of his wife and that of his music. For an artist, this is, of course, impossible. Work or loved ones, passions or responsibilities … when it comes down to that, as it always does, someone goes over the side. Right, wrong, it is how things are. It is how we are.

Yes, of course, when I look back now, it was remiss of me not to go to Lyudmilla at the first word of her illness. But I didn't like her, you see — what a sour old person I must seem to you, so easily to detest both her and your hero Mr. Sigerson — and I was not hypocrite enough, in those days, to look into those ingenuous blue eyes and say that I prayed for the light of health swiftly to return to them once more. Yes, I

wanted her to recover, almost as much as I wanted her to leave her husband alone to do what he was meant to do — very well, what I needed him to do. Let her have her lovers, by all means; let her sing duets with them all until she burst her pouter–pigeon breast; but let me have my best cellist back in the heart of my string section — and let him have his beautiful Fabregas under his thick, grubby, peasant hands again. Where it belonged.

Mind you, I had no idea how I would ransom it back, and reimburse Progorny (sad usurper, cuckolded by his own instrument) the money that had gone so straight to Lyudmilla's physician. And kept going to him, apparently, for Lyudmilla's condition somehow never seemed to improve. Andrichev was soon enough selling or pawning other belongings — books to bedding, old clothes to old flowerpots, a warped and stringless bouzouki, a cracked and chipped set of dishes — anything for which anyone would give him even a few more coins for his wife's care. Many of us bought worthless articles from him out of a pity which, not long before, he would have rejected out of hand. I wonder whether Sigerson still has that cracked leather traveling bag with the broken lock — I think the motheaten fur cloak is somewhere in my attic. I think so.