Violin Concerto in C Sharp Minor, Op. 2

By: Nathaniel Kenny

 

On only his first hour on I-490, the silence burst into metal in Anders’s mouth. He imagined the blood dribbling down his lip, staining his uniform, pooling at his feet, filling his car. He needed something else, someone else’s words, some other noise; there was too much allowance in the quiet for his teeth to find the soft flesh of his inside lip. But he didn’t dare touch the radio. He felt that hearing a song jut through the static as he spun the dial would tighten his cells, squeeze them like grapes, juice him of his cognition, and the Bluetooth in his car had broken four months ago.

          Anders saw a silhouette framing the highway ahead, a person with a stuck-out thumb by the grey snowbanks, and soon he was pushing empty water bottles off of the passenger seat as the hitchhiker climbed into the car. He saw the man look at his name tag. The man said his name wrong: “Like, The Simpsons? Flanders without the ‘fluh’?”

Anders said it right, with an ahn and a soft sh at the end. “It’s Swedish,” he said.

“Cool. I’m Lonny,” the man started, as Anders pulled back onto the road. “This is really cool of you. Did you just get off work?”

“Kind of, yeah. Where are you going?”

“Wherever. Wherever’s west. You?”

Anders mulled over his answer. “Home,” he landed on.

Lonny laughed. “You commute to work at a gas station?”

“Oh, no, I live in Kingston. But home’s in Rochester.”

          “Damn. Okay. You’re going kinda far.” Anders could see Lonny’s eyes scan him and his QuickChek uniform, up and down, from his peripheral. Lonny scoffed. “And you didn’t, like, want to change?”

The words came out quickly: “I got told at work that my father died.”

          Just as quickly, something became different about Lonny. Anders knew why the words had burst from him: so that Lonny would feel bad about scoffing, about that momentary judgment. Anders had only gotten the call an hour and a half ago, and he was already wielding it

as emotional leverage against a stranger. What was wrong with him? Anders started chewing on the inside of his lip again, mining for more iron, as Lonny baked in the awkward silence.

          Suddenly in the car was an E. He looked over to see that Lonny’s elbow had bumped the door’s console, and air was whistling through the crack in the window, in an E, and Anders knew he needed other words now. He needed to wager conversation, fill the car with something else, something other than the note, other than the blood. Lonny had already put the window back up, but the note continued to peal in Anders’s head, singing in his skull, clear as glass.

“This is, um, strange,” Anders started, “but I was wondering if you would be comfortable with... like...”

Lonny looked over at Anders. “Is this about to get freaky?”

“Oh, God, no. I was just wondering if you’d be okay just... talking. Like, about whatever you want. To just talk.”

“Oh. Okay.” Anders glanced at Lonny and felt lucky; Lonny’s eyes didn’t betray any judgment, only surprise. “No preference?”

“No.”

“Well, I saw a movie in this guy’s house last week that was cool. I think it was about, like, these guys who were trying to rob a bank. Could I use your phone to look it up?”

Anders nodded. Lonny grabbed his phone out of the cup holder. “I think it was, like, seventies...”

 

Anders didn’t play in the yard when he was a kid. He thought that—maybe even realized it—as he stepped onto the front porch of the house he grew up in. The doormat by his feet said välkomna on it. The door was unlocked. He stepped inside.

         There was a note sitting on the foyer table, where Anders could recognize his aunt’s handwriting, jotted down in Swedish: Have some space. We’ll be here at 5:00. His phone said that it was 4:33. A neighbor’s garage door opened, and Anders could faintly hear the whine from inside. It was a B flat. He drove deeper into the house.

        The cognitive gap in Anders’s childhood became even more evident as he drifted slowly through his childhood home. He expected to be overwhelmed by visions, with recollections of jumping on the furniture, meals at the dinner table, watching movies under blanket forts. He

couldn’t remember anything like that. The absence haunted him.

         He reached the door to his father’s room, which was open. Nothing seemed to have changed about it. That gramophone was still perched on the dresser, and beaten records with yellowed sleeves were still stacked around it on the floor. Its pockmarked cone hunched over the

records, a vulture presiding over its bones. He caught all the names he expected: Mahler, Berlioz, Holst. And Berwald, of course. Berwald in spades. Anders simply looked in, not crossing the threshold of the doorframe. Stepping into his father’s room felt, and always had felt, like a

transgression.

        The door to Anders’s room, his old room, was closed. He had never remembered it closed; his father had insisted, so that he could hear what his son was working on. Oh, but there was a spark. A remembrance. This must be it now. He felt like Howard Carter, slinking through the cobweb ridden pyramids, only to find it here, Tutankhamen’s laden tomb, untouched in all the years. All his childhood memories must be stashed in here, rich in their lucidity, vivid in their feeling. He turned the doorknob, cracking the seal.

       The walls were beige. Anders remembered when men had come to paint it that color, as a suggestion from the psychologist his father had hired. “Calming, focusing,” she’d said. His twin bed sat in the corner, nicely made. Past third grade, he couldn’t have slept in that thing for more than six hours at a time. His music stand stood stalwart by the window. How many reams, Anders wondered. How many dead trees had fluttered across it? How many square miles of forest did he raze with the boxes of sheet music his father had ferried home? On the other side of the window was his dresser, and atop it was a gallery of trophies whose spires were their own forest. Framed medals also hung, filigreed with bowstrings and G clefs behind the glass. And of course, his dusty canvas violin case leaned on the base of the dresser, below it all.

This room was a tomb in other ways. Anders simply stood there, inundated by it.

A voice, speaking in Swedish, floated down the hallway.

 “Anders? Are you here?”

          Bright, strong. The overtones started on an A, on the fifth, and then arpeggiated up a D major chord—D, F sharp, A—on the last three syllables, but the entire D major scale seemed to flutter behind it, every wrinkle of noise in key. Anders sucked in a breath. Aunt Ebba appeared at the door. She smiled, and the edges of her eyes crinkled with a sadness behind her horn-rimmed glasses. Anders wasn’t sure what his face was doing.

She took a single step into the room and looked around. 

“How does it feel?” It was in E now, rallentando, jumping down into E flat at the end.

Anders also looked around. “I do not know,” he said. The Swedish was heavy on his tongue.

“You really did come quickly.” Diatonic this time, as she glanced away from his face.

Anders looked down. He was still wearing his uniform, the green QuickChek apron. He quickly untied the back and pulled it off. 

“Sorry.”

“All that means is that you loved him, enough to have such blinders on.” She outstretched her arms. “Come here.”

          It took a strange amount of effort for Anders to step towards his aunt. There was a full few seconds between Aunt Ebba’s offer—command?—and Anders bridging the distance to receive it. She smelled like sandalwood. Anders wasn’t sure he believed her, about the love, the

loving. Maybe it was just semantics, a disparity in definition between the two, but Anders thought that that word, in either language, didn’t belong in his mouth.

         Aunt Ebba broke away from the hug, keeping her hands on Anders’s shoulders. “The others were behind me. I thought it would be nice to be together, here, for an early dinner. We can eat some junk.”

That made Anders smile. “Oh, he would be mad.”

“He certainly would be.” Ebba’s hand caught Anders’s cheek. Her hand was soft, her eyes still crinkled. “Come help me set the table.”

 

Anders was halfway through folding the napkins alongside his Aunt Ebba when another Swedish voice came from the foyer, a bellow. 

“We have arrived!”

          It was thunderous and grandiose, its timbre low, and seemed to soak the air. Uncle Lennart came into the dining room carrying two large plastic bags full of KFC branded paperboard, his face strung with a smile.

“Anders!” he shouted. “Take these so I can hug you!”

         As Anders stood up, a third voice cut in. “Anders is here?” It sounded clean and ringing, like tapping a knife on a wineglass. Aunt Annika stepped out of the foyer with a molded paper cup carrier in each hand. 

 She beamed. “Anders, oh, darling!”

          “Hello Lennart. Hello Annika.” Anders took the bags of KFC and quickly had his arms pinned to his side by Uncle Lennart. Aunt Annika placed the drinks on the table.

          “How have you been?” Lennart said, pulling away to let his wife give Anders the same hug.

“Alright,” Anders said, through Aunt Annika’s hair. “It is good to see you all.”

          Annika broke away and moved to take a seat. “Even on such an occasion, it will be nice to all be here together.” She began folding the napkins Anders had not gotten to. Lennart lowered himself into a seat next to her.

         A final voice came from the foyer, accented by the slam of the door. “Hello, hello, hello!” Small but with a sway, softly resonant. Uncle Roine came in carrying two six packs of lager with a cigarillo in his mouth. “My favorite nephew!” he cooed.

Annika stood back up to take the beer. “He is your only nephew, Roine.” She turned to bring them to the fridge.

        “But even out of all the nephews in all the world, he is my favorite.” Roine took Anders’s face in his hands and squeezed a little, breathing past the cigarillo. “You look sallow. I hope you are eating good.”

“I am, Roine,” Anders said, turning away to place the plastic bags on the table. His eyes stung a little, from Roine’s smoke.

Uncle Lennart pierced a straw into one of the drinks. “How is your work, Anders?”

         “It is good.” The questions were properly beginning. Anders wondered how long it would take them to get to the real one, the one they really wanted to ask, to dig up the inky blackness that bubbled like an oil deposit under their words.

“Ebba told us you left work like lightning,” Annika called from the kitchen. “I hope your bosses understand.”

“Send them the obituary,” Lennart said between sips. “E-mail. So they know you are not a liar.”

           Ebba stood and moved next to Anders. She began helping him pass out the food. “We should not talk about his work right now.” She turned to smile at Anders. Her eyes crinkled in the same way as before. “Let us just be together, for the night.”

          “We must begin the night, then!” Annika swayed back into the dining room. She hoisted up a cutting board topped with brimming shot glasses, a bottle of vodka in her other hand.

          Lennart, Roine, and Ebba all cheered, and each moved to grab a shot. Ebba passed one to Anders. Their joy seemed dissonant to him, as bright as it was. Ebba had only called him five or six hours ago. He knew they would still gather, still have to eat, but like this? Their smiles didn’t

seem to belong in this place, either. This whole house was a tomb.

         “To Antons,” Aunt Ebba said, raising her shot. “Skål.” The rest of them all repeated after her, and made eye contact, one by one, in tradition. “Skål” (an A), “Skål” (an A flat), “Skål” (a Csharp). Anders did the same. It felt like all of their gazes fell on him at the same time.

They all threw back the shot glasses, and clunked them, rim down, on the dinner table.

Lennart sucked his teeth. “So, Anders,” he started. “Are you going to play?”

         And there it was. The key to their joy. Anders smiled in spite of himself, seeing the looks Ebba and Annika shot at Lennart. “You have wanted to... ask me this whole time?” he said, ostensibly in jest, but with something sharper underneath, because he knew what the answer was, he wished he didn’t but he knew.

         Roine pulled another cigarillo from his shirt pocket, the other dying in the ashtray in the center of the table. “Well, he would have wanted it, Anders. I am sure you know that.”

       “But he... he died only today.” Anders put his face in his hands. His tarnished Swedish was quickly lagging behind his intended meaning, aided in no way by his vodka-stung tongue, which felt fat in his mouth. The feeling scared him. “Can you let me sleep first? Sleep on it?”

“Oh, Anders.” Annika looked to her husband, to everyone else. The glances they exchanged were loaded, swollen, most pointed at Ebba. “You have told him wrong?” Annika said, pointed at Ebba, too.

 

       “How did that feel?” Ebba asked, an F sharp wilting down to an E. They stepped off the porch of the funeral home and started walking towards their cars, Anders now caught up with the arrangements.

       Anders didn’t answer. He imagined the tubes or pliers or scalpels, whatever morticians used, sinking slowly into the cool and greying mass of his father’s body. Did they take out the bones? No, Jesus, why would they. What did they do with what they did take out, though? Was

his father’s heart lying, ruptured and unbeating, in the dumpster out back? The taste of metal returned. Anders imagined the mortician sticking one of the tubes into his mouth and sucking all the blood from his body from the gash on his inside lip.

Ebba took out her phone. “I think I am going to head to the store, so we can make Some—”

“Can I ask a question, Ebba?”

A moment passed. Ebba glanced at Anders, and then scanned the parking lot, looking for her car. “What is it?”

         “I... I guess...” A chill blew past. Anders broke into English. “I just don’t... I didn’t want a scene, or something. I know it’s been a while. But that doesn’t mean you should have, like, kept it from me. He was in the hospital. You should’ve told me as soon as he had it. You

should know when your dad’s in the hospital.” He realized that there wasn’t a question in what he had just said. He didn’t care.

        “He...” Ebba started. She stepped into English, too, the ground uneven to her. Her syllables wobbled and lurched. “It was stupid of him. He did not listen to the doctor and thought he would heal and get better. But when he did not, he made us promise to not go bothering you.

To respect your words. But after some time, we could not stand it. So, I called.”

        Anders looked away too. They stood right next to each other, both staring into the middle distance. Anders wasn’t surprised by the stoicism. He could imagine his father in a hospital gown, pushing doctors and their needles off of him. The promise, however, was unexpected.

“Can I go get something?” Ebba said, still in English. She seemed to have spotted her car.

Anders stared at her, through her. With no answer, Ebba walked away.

          Three days. Three days, his father had been in the mortician’s freezer. What had he done in that time, on that day? Restocked the cigarettes, while his father’s aorta burst. Got dinner at McDonald’s, when brain death occurred. Laid in bed on his phone, as rigor mortis set in. Anders

wished Ebba had called earlier, just so he could have hung up. But what a horrible thing to think.

What a horrible, horrible thing.

         And then Anders saw Ebba coming back towards him, passing through the cars, with a glossy, brand new violin case in her arms.

Anders looked past her and spotted his car. He breezed past his aunt. Ebba called after him, in Swedish. “It’s your father’s funeral, Anders! He loved you! You loved him! You have to play for him!”

“You shouldn’t have bought that,” Anders said. He pushed the Swedish back into the corner of his brain.

“We thought it would get you playing again, Anders. It is a gift. You have a gift. What is a gift that you do not give?”

Anders climbed into his car and drove away.

 

The sun was setting, and Anders was surprised to see a notification that wasn’t from one

of his aunts or uncles.

hey Ned Flanders this is lonny ty for dropping me off !!

do u want to go get drink tonite ?

when i was in ur car and stole ur phone i remembered ur number lol

cool if not bc of dad stuff

i hope this is you actually idk if i remembered it right

sorry if it isn’t

but if it is though

The last message was a hyperlinked address.

 

Anders covered his ears. “Can we go outside?” he half yelled.

         Lonny looked up at him, tipping back his glass and taking a swig. They were playing some whomping outlaw rock here, and a slide guitar hurled javelins into Anders’s eardrums. Lonny started to stand.

        They found a seat near one of those outdoor tower heaters, which was loud enough that Anders could no longer hear the music from inside. Anders didn’t have a drink. Lonny leaned back in his seat. “So, how’s dad stuff?” he began.

“The funeral’s in two days.”

“Hm. Sorry, man.” Lonny swirled around the remaining inch or so of his beer. “Would you be okay if I, like, asked you questions about it?”

Anders sighed. “Whatever, man.”

“Were you cool with him? Your dad?”

“I don’t know. I thought I was for... most of my life.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why do you care?”

           Lonny put up his hands. “You listened to me go on about couch surfing for, like, four hours, man. I thought you’d want a shot. You came here, too.”

Anders looked at Lonny. “Well, they want me to play violin. Like, in the church.”

“That sounds cool as fuck.”

Anders laughed. Lonny grinned. “What?” he said. “I can’t even hit a drum right. I’d just miss. That is cool.”

“I just...” Anders ran his fingers through his hair and caught a knot. There was something disarming about Lonny, and open. He smacked his lips. “That was all of me, for a time. That was all I was.”

“A violin player?”

         “Violinist, yeah, when I was younger. They wrote, like, articles about me. Nothing really bigger than around here, but everyone in a certain circle knew who I was.”

“Where’d that go, then?”

         “I was... there was gonna be this big show with an orchestra I was in, but I was gonna be a soloist. It was a Berwald concerto, who is a Swedish composer, by the way. All the orchestra would be behind me, and I’d do my thing out front, play the solo.” Anders shifted in his seat. “I

couldn’t see him, but I knew my dad was down there with the rest of my family, and the whole packed house. And that was around the time where I was starting to get these, like, thought clots.

        Like, they’d just get stuck up there. What if this, what if that, you’re gonna mess up, you’ve never done anything right. I started to get one as soon as the conductor started counting in, and—

”

“You flubbed it?”

          “No. I played it perfectly.” Anders nearly felt the stage lights again. They were like atomic bombs, radiating his face, sloughing off his flesh. He remembered how every instance of himself had felt so tight. That was normal for being on stage, for having the instrument in his hands, but that time, it had persisted. “They were so proud. I got flowers on the way to the car. And then,after we got home, my dad had to call me an ambulance at three in the morning because I had an ischemic stroke in my sleep.”

“Woah.” Lonny’s posture flickered. “Man, that’s...”

          “Yeah. It is. But I don’t even really care about that. What I do care about was my Aunt Ebba grinning as she wheeled me out of the hospital after a month and a half of therapy, right as I was beginning to speak in full sentences again, to find the whole rest of my family standing

there with fresh sheet music.”

Anders stewed.

“Well, man,” Lonny said. He knocked back the remainder of his beer. “I don’t think you owe them anything.”

“I don’t know.” Anders looked exactly nowhere. Lonny’s glass came back down onto the table with a soft clink. It was a B.

 

Clothes were out of Anders’s mind until the morning of, when he found that the only thing fit for a funeral in his childhood closet was concert black. He lifted it, telling himself that it would not still fit him, but he knew how little his body had changed since those last few performances. They were the only clothes he had left in his closet when he moved out, and they were still here now. He had already told Ebba and all of them no, he would not play, and that’s final, but he knew that wearing this would be as good to them as showing up at the wake with an instrument already in hand, as good as opting in. But his only other options were the old, worksite-stained clothes Roine had loaned him, and his QuickChek uniform. So, two hours later, he walked into the church with his fingers locked along the side of his father’s casket, wearing the same attire that had closed in on him, sealed him, that had marked him to wake up in the middle of the night with his left arm dead and his tongue curling and snapping behind his teeth. He could see Ebba smiling back at him from the front row.

         Anders and the others set the weight down on the steel truck between the pews. Roine and Lennart were there, sweating, along with three other men. Anders recognized them from conservatories and cheese tastings, their hands that had clapped on his back. He had not spoken

to them, nor them to him. The priest instructed them all to unfold a cloth and lay it over the casket, and after, Anders moved to sit in his place, next to Annika. Her hand found his shoulder. Anders looked ahead.

       The priest said some words, and they stood up, and they sat back down. Then, the priest made some motion to the room. “I’ve been told,” he said, glancing all around, “that in lieu of eulogizing, we have some sort of performance.”

       Anders shifted his vision just enough to catch Ebba at its edge. She reached towards her feet and pulled out from under the pew the glossy case she had held so closely in the parking lot of the funeral home. She perched it on her lap and undid the clasps.

      “Nephew?” It was Lennart’s voice, on the other side of Annika. It sounded small. Anders turned, finally, to see Roine, Annika, Lennart, and Ebba with their eyes on him, what he already knew. Ebba turned the case to face him. Inside, a violin gleamed, expecting.

       Anders stood. The voice in his mind told him it was to leave, but he found himself only turning to the back of the church. The only people here beside his aunts and uncles were the three other pallbearers. The men looked at him with empty gazes. He had not registered the quiet

of the room; Anders realized he had thought that the pews behind him were full, brimming with attendees, and he remembered now how dark an audience had looked under those lights, how a crowd could look like a void when it was distinctly the opposite. How what looked like nothing

was, in fact, everything.

       Anders’s cells seemed to rapidly expand, latex bloating with water, as the absence that had haunted him for the past week, suddenly became a presence. All the words that Anders’s aunts and uncles had ever said to him were floating above their heads in a cloud, every praise

and every demerit there in vapor, and he felt that his father’s ghost was in those words. A last grasp and gasp at life, at his family, at his son. Anders looked at the nearly empty church, and back into the eyes of his family and their music, the orchestra that had wreathed him now bereft of their soloist. The presence spoke: You are all we have.

 

The sidewalks were buffeted by snowbanks shellacked with the recent freezing rain, and Anders walked between them in a fog of his own breath, cast in moonlight. He was massaging his hands not for the cold, but for the feeling of the strings that still stuck to his fingers. It had persisted through the service, to the procession, to the graveyard. Anders walked, and walked, as his mind burned against its walls.

       A noise caught him. It was a buzz, this low screech of a noise. Anders stopped. He looked and found an open window, up on a second floor. Through it, came the note. More followed, stilted and harsh. There was... an A? Or was that a C? A few more came. An E flat?

      Anders could see, through the window’s curtains, plastic stars stuck to the ceiling. It was a child’s room. A child was up there, practicing scales on a violin. Anders couldn’t actually see anyone, but he could tell. That is what it had sounded like at the beginning. The kid continued,

on and on. The notes that tumbled out onto the sidewalk were so wrong, so inexact. So borderless. So young.

      Anders simply stood there and listened. Listened to the only noise in the world.