The crack widened.
Elias's face had gone white. Sweat beaded on his forehead, not from exertion but from listening . He was not playing the music; the music was playing him, using his hands as its instruments. His mother's violin hummed with a warmth that contradicted the coldness of the notes—the warmth of a body falling through ice, still alive, still reaching.
Outside, on the Danube Canal, the ice was beginning to break. Cantabile 4-- Crack
In the third minute, the silver string snapped. Elias caught it with his teeth, held it taut, and kept playing with his mouth and his left hand alone. The sound changed: became wetter, more intimate. The note that could not exist now existed, and it was hungry .
This is what I was afraid of, Elias thought, but the thought was not his own. It belonged to the music. The music was afraid of itself. The crack widened
Ilona lowered her hands. The room was dark except for the gray light of a Vienna dawn pressing through the grimy window. The rug was covered in debris. Elias sat on the floor, cradling the neck of the Guarneri like a scepter.
"Maestro." The voice belonged to Ilona, his landlady's daughter, who brought him bread and sometimes stayed to listen. "You haven't eaten." He was not playing the music; the music
But the Cantabile 4-- Crack began with silence.
Not broke— shattered , into a constellation of splinters and silver wire and varnish flakes that hung in the air for a full second before falling. In that second, Elias heard the note whole: a Cantabile that was also a requiem, a lullaby that was also a scream.
He set the bow to the strings.