And it was there, in Croatia, in the place he'd always lived, the only
place he'd ever known, that he lost the only woman he'd ever loved. A casualty
of war, she was there and then was gone, in the split second of a gunshot's
staccato pop, echoing in his head long after his beloved's body had landed in
the dirt.
He’d gotten lost after that, in the gloomy forest of a grieving mind,
where he wandered alone in search of light.
Occasionally, he heard the sound of sobbing and directed his footsteps
in its direction. Without thought or
feeling he performed manual operations that quelled the sobs. And continued wandering in that desolate wilderness.
He
sat near a window most days, unseeing and devoid of hope, as time passed like a
silent parade he neither saw nor heard.
He no longer knew whether or not he was a good man, whether or not there
were any good men. He didn’t think about
whether there were things he ought to be doing, and if so, what those things
might be. Why should it matter? Outside his window, leaves tumbled along in
the breeze, meaningless, directionless.
Did
his life hold any more meaning than these?
What matter which direction he tumbled?
Then came the morning
when something reached his ears from the silent parade of time, a melancholy
strain that wafted as if on the breeze, through his window, into his ears, and
from there, into the heart fallen dormant so long ago in the middle of that
gloomy forest. The heart awakened and he rose to his feet, like Lazarus raised
from death. He followed the sound as one
enchanted until he reached its source, and what he found proved the instrument
of his awakening.
He returned home with an acquisition, or rather, a gift. Each day thereafter, he sat by his window, pushing
and pulling a horsehair bow across four catgut strings. Clumsy and ignorant at first, but becoming
more and more adept with each day that passed, he began making a kind of music
that only he could make. He invited it
into his life and his heart accepted it.
And the source of the sobbing he’d mechanically appeased after his wife’s
death, his small companion in bereavement, whom he had somehow kept alive since
then, caring for her while in a stupor of perpetual grief—this small companion
appeared before him as never before. He who
was blind was now made to see, his ears made to hear, and his heart to beat.
They stood at the window together, making the kind of music for which
life is worth living.
D.E. Sievers
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