After Story: Hundred Years Melody

-Part 3-

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I was in the music room the next morning practicing the first movement before I was even very much awake. The sun was just coming up, and I still had my pajamas on. My lesson wasn't for three hours yet.

I even hit two wrong notes. And the actual notes in this concerto aren't even hard ones. When you hit a wrong note, you're likely to hit another one pretty soon because your concentration is interrupted: You can't help hearing the wrong note you've just played. It echoes in your head, and it jostles things around inside you.

ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto. Maybe it was watching Ryuuji Hyuuga's arm that pushed me out of bed so abnormally early in the morning. Or maybe it was that I was so glad to see yesterday end.

No matter what I did with the concerto that morning, no matter where I was in it or what kind of bowing I was using or anything, there was Ryuuji Hyuuga right in my way, with his perfect bowing arm and his notes.

When I walked into Uncle Asto's house, Aunt Naruko gave me popovers and peach jam. "We had a kitchen full of peaches from my friend in Tokyo, and the only thing to do was make jam. Take some home with you, Wiena-chan. Sit down for a minute and eat one, won't you, honey?"

I put my violin case and music case on one chair and sat on another one. She pushed everything about an inch closer to me than it already was: popovers on a plate, jam, butter knife, napkin. I spread jam on one of the popovers.

"Well, I'm on my way to work. Have a good lesson, Wiena-chan~~," she said sweetly, "Oh, and by the way, darling. Remember the French composer Chausson? Your friend Ruby sang such a lovely song of his at the concert.… He died of a skull fracture from riding his bicycle into a stone wall, poor man." And she walked out of the room.

Chausson probably died way back in the nineteenth century when they hadn't invented bicycle lights yet.

I got my hands washed and went to the music room. Uncle Asto was waiting for me, he wanted to hear some scales first, the ones with seven sharps and seven flats. And Kreutzer no. 40, a whole page of trills. Then the concerto, start to finish. As usual, he played the piano version of the orchestra part. During the cadenzas, he turned around and watched me.

Like skiing, you're doing two things at once: the thing you're doing right that instant and the thing you'll be doing in the next instant. You look at the face of somebody who's just finished a ski race and you can see how all those instant events have been going on, overlapping each other. It's adrenaline. And other things.

It's a kind of alertness that comes on you, as if somebody has turned on all your lights inside. Sometimes it can get almost too bright in there.

At the end, he turned sideways on the piano bench. "Wiena-chan, I'm concerned," he said. He folded his hands in his lap. Then he unfolded them and spread them on his legs. Then he scratched the back of his head and then he put his hand back on his knee. He was silent long enough to give me time to think, and I didn't know what to think about. I didn't know any question to ask in my mind, so I didn't know what answer I was supposed to be looking for. I'd just played the concerto without a kink, without missing a note, and I had the good tired feeling of finishing it well, and he was concerned.

"Have you any idea what I'm concerned about?" he asked, looking up at me. And not smiling. He evidently meant he was Concerned.

I hung my violin and bow down straight in my hands. "No."

"I'm wondering if you're remembering whose concerto this is," he said, and looked at the piano keyboard, then back at me. He took a deep breath. "I'm wondering if you remember that a young boy—a teenager—in 1775 … Wiena, I'm wondering if you—I sense an aggressiveness—" He stopped. "Not that we don't want any aggressiveness—" He stopped again. "It's a fine line, Wiena, you know that. But I think I hear coming into your performance a spirit more of attack than—You're beginning to sound like a string tuned too tightly.…" He looked straight up in the air. "What is it I mean?" he asked the ceiling. He looked back at me for a long time. "The word is 'embrace,'" he said, finally. "In moving ever closer to Mozart—which you're doing very well—verywell, Wiena-chan—In moving closer, you're beginning to—I don't like saying this—" He stopped again. "You're almost on top of him." He looked at my feet, and then said in a very soft voice, almost hard to hear, "Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto."

He leaned his elbow on the keyboard, on G and A and B above middle C, forcing them to play together, and leaned his forehead on his hand. As if somebody'd hurt him. G and A and B hummed.

I was worse than afraid. Worse than shocked. Worse than horrified. What must Mozart have felt? There was some terrible thing I couldn't name whistling inside me. I felt my eyes bug out, and I tried to look at nothing but air in the room. I saw rosin dust in it. The tip of my bow was on the floor, holding me still.

Upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.

"Look at me, Wiena-chan," Uncle Asto said.

I didn't even try to. I looked at the edge of a music stand across the room. Things that had been so arranged in me a minute ago were clashing into each other. I suddenly understood what Ruby meant—the floor sliding out from under you without warning.

"Wiena-chan, I think this is the first time I've ever hurt you?"

I didn't know the answer. It didn't matter.

"Come here," he said.

I stood with my eyes on the corner of the music stand. Stainless steel. There are millions like it. In China they wouldn't let anyone play Mozart or Beethoven for years when the government changed; they put people in closets and took away their instruments.

"Please come here, Wiena-chan."

I lifted my bow tip and took two steps forward.

He took hold of my right hand, around the frog of the bow. He held it loosely. His eyes were steady and serious, as if they wanted to keep me company. "The heart of the matter is…" He looked down at his hand around mine and the frog of my bow. "Is … is tenacity. We'll change our direction slightly, take what might be called a detour. We'll move in on the center of this concerto … in a slightly different way. Brahms's 'Lullaby.' Any key you like. Just play it for me. Play it exactly the way you feel right now."

I backed away from him. I closed my eyes and looked at what I saw inside my eyelids. What I saw was a little baby, sick and terrified and whimpering. It was in a corner of a room, wrapped in a dirty little blanket in a box or a basket, and the paint was chipped off the walls. I played the "Lullaby" with my eyes closed.

When I opened my eyes, Uncle Asto had his closed. He was nodding his head slowly. "Yes," he said. "There it is. There is what you can do when you are inside your instrument, Wiena-chan. Indeed."

I didn't say anything. I wondered who the baby was. I was perplexed and ashamed. Doing something good with Brahms and doing something so horrible with Mozart was closing my head in. A question kept putting itself in me: How? Just that one word. How?

"We aren't going to have any more conversation with Mozart-san this morning," he said. "Instead, come tomorrow morning, an extra lesson—" He reached up and picked up his little brown schedule notebook from the top of the piano. He looked at it, moving his mouth around. "Yes, tomorrow morning, ten o'clock." He snapped the notebook shut. "We're not going to undo anything. We can't." He laughed. "That's a proven historical fact." I kept looking at him. "We'll—well, we'll take a detour…"

(◕ω◕✿)

I stood on Uncle Asto' porch. Uncle Asto said, "Don't punish yourself, Wiena-chan. I mean," he looked out at the lawn in front of his house, "not any more than you have to. You need both hands free for the work we have to do; and you won't, if you have a birch rod in one of them."

I tried to smile at him. It wasn't much of a joke, and he knew it.

"And part of the fault here—a great part of it—" He looked past me, over my shoulder. "It's mine. We talk too much about 'mastering' music. Every time you turn around, someone is concerned with mastering a piece. I do it myself." He lowered his voice and looked straight at my face. "Great music isn't something we master; it's something we try all our lives to merge with. Indeed."

I didn't really see Uncle Asto's face. I saw Ruby as she sang the low, soft notes in her concert, and I saw Trouble Ojii-san as he danced his old-fashioned dance on the grass. Then I looked out past them, and Uncle Asto was saying good-bye. I said good-bye and went down the steps.

I walked home. My violin case banged against my leg in regular rhythm. Some leaves were turning yellowish. My skin felt bad, all over me. Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto. What a horrifying thing. Unthinkable. Don't think about it. Elephants. I tried walking with my eyes closed, but I slipped off the edge of the sidewalk, so I opened them again.

Merge with. Not master. It felt so absolutely strange, because I knew that anyway. I'd always known it, in my stomach. I'd committed a crime by forgetting it.

I thought of the thing I'd told Ruby about: crying under Papa and Mama's bed when I was a little kid and found out that the music wouldn't just automatically come out of the eighth-size violin.

On the kitchen table was a package addressed to me from France. It had all kinds of post office stickers on it, Express Mail and Insured. My great-grandmother Marie gets my birthday late. I didn't want a gift. Didn't deserve a gift. Nobody was home. I put my violin case and music case on the floor and sat down and stared at the brown wrapping paper.

Then I stared at my violin case on the floor. Then I stared out the window at a hummingbird on the feeder. Suba-chan rubbed the side of her head against my leg and walked to her water dish and began drinking. I listened to her tongue going in and out and picking up water, reflexively.

When you think about how many millions of words old people have written, it's no wonder their handwriting gets a little bit jerky. I looked at my great-grandmother's.

Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.

The package was soft, maybe she was sending me a sweater, for my birthday present. I didn't want a sweater; I wanted to undo my crime against Mozart. I got a pair of scissors and cut the tape on the package.

There were several layers of wrapping, then pink tissue paper with a pink envelope that said READ FIRST. The flap wasn't sealed, it was tucked in. I opened it.

Dear My Beloved Wiena Namikaze,

The gift I am sending you would have been for your tenth birthday, and I hope you would carry it proudly on that occasion but you have a liberated family who have forgotten already in two generation. We are lucky to have a connection, to break such a thing is not understandable.

Here is your gift from my love for you so far away thousands miles.

Your great-great-grandmother Wiena was born in the turn of the century, 1900, in Suprasl. This was a shtetl I saw once. There are stories from this place. Poor people, tailors, bakers, and animals all went back and forth on the roadway. Her rabbi was the son and also the grandson of a rabbi. When she was a child she had geese to tend and there is the picture of her with her straw broom and her favorite goose. You know the picture. Where her family lived the field went up on a hill and the morning light came into their house, a blessing.

Then she married and became my mother and soon my father took her to Bialystok. I was born in 1921, and my sister in 1925 who died in childhood. My father played a wooden flute and my mother sang to us. She tried to sing the fever out of my sister and was unsuccessful. I remember her voice. She could sing like leaves falling from off a tree. She also made rich breads and cakes, and even today the smell of some certain kugels makes me unable to speak.

I saw black armbands when I was 13 years old. I asked what they were and my father replied they were a tribal symbol. I didn't want tribal symbols, I wanted a pink dress for my birthday which I did not get. There was hunger and disease and we as well as our neighbors were frightened. Punishments for being Jewish were meted, small ridicules and then larger ridicules. My father's partner in business had his beard cut off by a soldier's bayonet. It was this savagery in joking that frightened us all.

In the year 1939 I was 17 years old. My parents told me one day I was to pack my things to go on a trip to visit my father's uncle in Paris. Of course I did not want to go so far away on a train all alone without the language, but they insisted. Uncle Jacob is a jolly man, they said, with luxuries, a radio, and there are movies just down his street in Paris. Uncle Jacob would take me to a school to learn to typewrite while I visited him. His wife I would like, a berrieh, a live wire, and his grown-up children, my cousins, would be my friends for my visit. This would be a vacation for me from the bad life in Bialystok, and they taught me some words to use in French. "So how about it?" "Some milk in the coffee, please." "I am a nice girl."

With these words I got on the train unwillingly. My father and my mother sent me with blessings and kisses with their arms around me, I will never forget. I believed them about my "vacation" because I wanted to believe them. In Poland we did many things for that reason.

I never heard my mama's and my papa's voice again. I never felt their hand. We believe they died at Treblinka, but one can never be sure.

My mother Wiena had soft arms and her weary eyes were tender with imagination. In the photograph you sent me at my birthday, I see some sameness in your eyes, Wiena Namikaze. The gift I am sending you have seen in the picture you have on your wall of my mother Wiena as a girl with her broom and her goose. It came in my satchel. I did not know it was in my satchel; my mother tucked it inside. Only later I understood this was her final good-bye to me.

A memory is a thing you always have. But it is about a thing you cannot get any more of.

You will be all your life this connection with Bialystok and Suprasl. This gift is only for you. You are the one with the name of my mother, Wiena. I wish you the dreams and not the nightmares.

When you visit me again you will play your violin for me and we will walk in Louvre and I will tell you the stories. About the "birdseed" that Uncle Jacob put on the window ledge of the apartment and I thought he meant to grow birds. And about my little friend Broche in Bialystok, how she and I peeked at the bride on her wedding morning. And I will show you how my mother Wiena made her cakes.

Now care for this tribal symbol I am sending and with it my great love across the many miles.

Kiss your mama and papa and your brother Boruto for me.

Grandma Marie

I read the letter twice. Then I stared at the pink tissue paper and ran my hand over it and listened to the crinkles. I was almost frightened to look inside.

I'd spent the whole summer of my twelfth year doing the wrong thing, trying to be more important than Mozart, and I didn't even know it. And now my great-grandmother was trusting me to be the connection with Bialystok and Suprasl. To take care of this tribal symbol.

Maybe if I'd been all Jewish, or even all Gentile, I'd have known what to do. But I was not and I sat at the kitchen table not even able to unwrap pink tissue paper.

How hard to do the most natural thing. Suba-chan could walk to her water dish and lap up the water, Mozart could write five violin concertos when he was nineteen years old, Grandma Wiena could have her photograph taken with her favorite goose and her broom and her purse, these were natural things to do. I could unwrap a package if I tried.

I stared at the paper.

I saw in my mind a young girl with a satchel getting on a train for a vacation, knowing how to say "So how about it?" in a foreign language, and I saw arms hugging her, and I saw the black of the armband and I saw something horrifying. It was a thirty-nine-year-old woman with weary eyes doing the most unnatural thing in the world. She knew she would never see her daughter again. And she sent her away on a train, blessing her and kissing her. To save her life.

To go against everything you think you know. To do something you must do because you must do it. It's an unnatural thing, and you do it anyway.

I reached for the package. My fingers went very slowly, lifting off the layers of pink tissue.

The purse was smaller than in the picture. It was purplish velvet; it had probably once been the color of grape juice. There were places where the velvet had worn thin. It had embroidery on it. Someone had embroidered pink-and-white flowers and green leaves on the velvet. They were faded, very pale. It had a strap, to hang on a girl's arm. I held it on my lap. Then I held it against my face to feel the softness. It smelled like lavender and mothballs. I stood up and hung it on my arm. I walked around the kitchen with my arm bent, with the purse hanging. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Grandma Wiena had tucked it into her daughter's satchel and sent it to France.

I looked at the purse in the mirror. "Welcome to Konoha," I whispered to it. And I swung my head to the east, toward Paris, and said, "Thank you, Grandma Marie."

I held the purse against my stomach.

My great-great grandmother. Wiena.

Dead at Treblinka.

I felt a homesickness. For what? Something I'd never seen. I didn't even know what it was. Grandma Marie was inviting me to be something—forcing me to be something nobody else had ever even mentioned. I didn't know how to be it. All I knew was that there was a homesickness. I stared at the purse on my arm in the mirror.

Then I took it back to the kitchen table and laid it on its tissue paper. I stood there looking at it. Then I picked up the whole thing, the outside wrapping and Grandma Marie's letter and the sticky tape and all of it, and took them upstairs to my room. I put them on top of my chest of drawers where Suba-chan wouldn't sit on them. I looked at the flowers embroidered on the velvet. Hundred years ago? Somebody had used a real needle and real thread thousands of miles away in Poland, embroidering those flowers while geese waddled up the hillside.

Five minutes later I stood in the doorway of the music room and looked at my violin as I took it out of the case. It's Italian. And my bow is French, but it has a new thumb guard, and that's American. The scarf I wrap around the violin inside the case has a tag that says Taiwan. The rosin is American. So are the strings.

On my mother's music stand was a piano sonata written by a Japanese composer.

Hiruzen Sarutobi was Japanese.

The white horsehair in my bow is from Poland.

I rubbed the back of my violin against my stomach. How to unlearn my wrong Mozart? How did I get started doing it wrong? I looked down at the side view of the bridge and strings. Mozart looked at the same side view when he held his violin that way. I was ashamed.

I sat on the sofa where I'd carried on with Ruby and I held my violin and bow on my lap. Ruby had a dead daughter she always remembered. Trouble Ojii-san went around looking for his lost Waltz Tree or a Waltz in Three. Somewhere I'd lost the Mozart concerto I loved and had put something else in my head instead? I saw Ryuuji Hyuuga's arms moving in the corner of the rehearsal room. I saw Mirai-san's head jerk instantly around to watch. I saw Kaori in Inaba Ridge with her broken fingers, saying Mozart could make you forget your problems. I saw Anya dancing with Trouble Ojii-san in Midoriya Park. I pictured Ayane visiting her father's grave.

I stood up, walked to the middle of the room, not near the piano, just out in the middle of the room, and I closed my eyes and looked inside for something to start me. If Ruby was right, and the music was in there all along, maybe a better music had been waiting inside me—waiting to be played. The idea sounded ridiculous.

Grandma Wiena's purse was lying on its pink tissue paper in my bedroom. I went upstairs and got it and carried it flat, on its paper, held out in front of me, downstairs and laid it on the sofa in the music room.

I went over several sections of the concerto and repeated and repeated them. I tried playing some parts with the mute. I played all three cadenzas faster and then slower. There wasn't any method in what I was doing. I was just wandering around the concerto, like a tourist, trying to make it look different to myself.

While I played the third movement, I looked now and then at the embroidered flowers on the velvet purse lying on the sofa. Peaceful little flowers, growing up the purse and bending back and forth. Little faded pink-and-white petals brushing against their pale green leaves.

There wasn't even any grave where my mother would be able to put flowers for her great-grandmother. Not even any date when she died. She had become just a blank. A nothing.

I went to the dining room and sat down at the table. Boruto says the world is an insane asylum, and he's absolutely right.

A-n-n-i-h-i-l-a-t-e.

My violin was made two hundred years before Grandma Wiena sent her daughter away on a train. Pieces of wood and some glue. The Konoha Art Museum has a wooden Chinese horse from the third century B.C. When Ayane was in her horse period we used to go to see it all the time. Save a wooden horse for twenty-three centuries, but kill somebody who had a pet goose and straw broom and a velvet purse and two daughters, one of them dead.

There was no word for how angry I was.

Ruby. No wonder she got strange. And Trouble Ojii-san. His whole life of lost things.

Losing things. That was what the whole world was about. Why bother to get born in the first place?

I went back to the music room. When Itzhak Perlman's wife was pregnant, André Previn wrote two songs for the baby. They didn't know if it would be a boy or a girl, so he wrote "Noah" and "Naava." I looked through stacks of music on the shelves and found them. I played "Naava." It's a perfect song for a little girl.

The Sarutobi Competition was five weeks away. I asked myself: Wiena, are you going to play it? If it had been five minutes away, of course the answer would have been no. Wiena, I said to myself, you do what you say you're going to do.

And I'd told Trouble Ojii-san I'd help him find his lost song. I had no idea how I was going to do it.

I looked at Grandma Wiena's purse on the sofa, I closed "Naava" and put it back on the stack of music, and I took out the Mozart. I would read the notes, like a beginner, and I would start all over again.

It would be like learning a new language. I stood in front of the music stand and read the top of the page: Mozart. Concerto no. IV in D Major. K. 218. "So how about it?" I said, out loud. Like a beginner, I felt my way up the fingerboard to the first note and made myself read every single note, not letting my brain or my fingers run ahead. I tried to listen to the concerto as if I'd never heard it before, but it was impossible to forget.

Remember everything you know and forget it simultaneously, so you can invent a new thing. The divine inspiration of the NBA.

I couldn't unlearn the concerto. But I could unlearn my wrong attack on it. If I could find exactly the spots where my arm was going wrong. Those spots were in my brain. Where in my brain? I looked at Grandma Wiena's velvet purse on the sofa.

I called Anya. She had her verdicts. Ryuuji Hyuuga was a class-A jerk. He was Neek for his show-off manners; it didn't matter if he was good-looking or not. "Arrogant" was one of the words on her summer list, and Ryuuji Hyuuga was arrogant. It was partly that he's a genius prodigy in violin, but he was still arrogant. If anybody could find Trouble Ojii-san's lost song it had to be me; I knew more music than anybody. His story was the saddest one she'd heard all summer. Uncle Asto was the one to blame for my Mozart problems. He was the one who told me to say "ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto." And it was no wonder I'd played too aggressively after spending a whole rehearsal with Mr. Genius Prodigy Celebrity Jerk Hyuuga; it was my anger coming out. And I was lucky to get such a symbol in the mail, and it was going to bring me good luck.

"But it's a symbol of—it's a symbol of terrible luck. My great-great-grandmother was dead at Treblinka. And I'm alive and what am I even doing to deserve it?" I said.

She didn't say anything for a little while. Then she said, "You're finding a lost song for a lost soul, Wiena-chan. I'm gonna call Ayane-chan."

They both showed up in less than an hour. The velvet purse was still lying on the music-room sofa on top of its tissue paper.

"I'm afraid to touch it," Ayane said. "It's a holy thing. I'm not even a little bit Jewish." She stood very still on the spot where my mother had rocked Ruby. Japanese people do ancestor worship, and it makes them feel different about their dead ones.

Anya and I looked at each other and laughed. "You're everything else," Anya said. "And I'm not Jewish, either."

"Not everything else," Ayane said.

They read Grandma Marie's letter. Ayane ran her hand very lightly over the flowers on the purse. "Holy cow," she said.

Anya was walking around looking at my mother's plants. She said, "Wiena-chan, is this purse a burden?"

I looked at her. "Maybe if I'd gotten it when I wasn't already feeling guilty. Maybe then it wouldn't be."

She walked around some more, taking her big, long steps.

Ayane said, "That Hyuuga jerk called you a page turner, didn't he?"

"Yep."

"Don't you think you played the concerto the way you did just to show him you're more than a page turner?"

"But I must've been going in the wrong direction with it all summer."

Anya said from behind a big plant with huge leaves, "Because your teacher told you to. He's the one who said Mozart doesn't want you to be a 'fraidy cat and all that. Look: it's not your fault. And your great-grandmother with no grave isn't your fault."

(◕ω◕✿)

When I got to my lesson, Uncle Asto was wearing a sweatshirt that had Alfred E. Newman from Mad magazine sitting at a harpsichord and saying, "I'm into nuances."

"Good morning, Wiena. My conscience tells me I was not as nice with you yesterday as I might have been. Are you angry with me?"

"No," I put my violin case on the floor and started to open it. I was squatted on the floor, and I realized that wasn't true. I looked down at the latch under the handle of the case and then I looked up at him. "Yes, a little bit."

And then of course I felt terrible. Uncle Asto stoops a little bit, his posture is kind of slumped.

"Tell me," he said. He was standing right above me.

I turned around and got the rosin out of the violin case. I unfolded the felt cover, looked at the ridges in the rosin, and got my bow out. I heard him moving away, and out of the side of my eye I saw his shoes walking backward. I stayed in the squatting position and rubbed my bow back and forth across the rosin.

"Beware the boomerang," he said.

I folded the rosin cover closed, put it in the violin case, and picked up my violin. I stood up. I still had my back to him. I thumbed the strings.

I turned around. He was sitting sideways on the piano bench, facing me. "Remember 'ME: Wiena Namikaze. I'M playing this concerto'?" I said.

"Indeed."

"Well." I didn't want to say the rest of it. It would be accusing him of something.

"Indeed," he said again. He nodded his head three times.

I had the urge to shrug my shoulders, and I resisted it.

"Do you feel that that—announcement of yourself—do you feel it's affected your relationship with the concerto in any way?"

"Of course. It's obvious."

"Tell me what things you feel have been affected."

"My notes are clearer."

"Indeed. I would say that almost every note in your Mozart is utterly cloudless. Good, Wiena-chan. In some cases, ruthlessly clear."

I suddenly saw the back of Ryuuji Hyuuga's head in the corner of the rehearsal room, and his shoulders, and I heard the same notes again. "In fact, that's what's wrong," I said. "Probably. I was so determined to get unscared, and I went around doing what you said—announcing myself—and I went over the top. I upstaged Mozart. Like you said. And—I should've been saying, 'HIM: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. HE wrote this concerto.' Not 'ME, I'M playing it.'"

Uncle Asto kept looking at me. "Anything else, Wiena-chan?"

I saw the Hyuuga shoulders and arms and back of the head all moving again, with the corner of the rehearsal room behind them. I saw him playing facing the cinder-block wall. "And I think somebody should've told me. I'm surrounded by musicians, and nobody tells me anything."

"Told you what?" I could almost see Uncle Asto's face and the Hyuuga bowing arm at the same time.

"Well, told me I was getting too—'ruthlessly clear,' you said. Maybe it happened as far back as the concert with Yuugou-san in Inaba Ridge. Maybe even before that."

He just kept looking at me. No change on his face.

"And I think somebody should've told me about the finals long before June. If I was to have this—this huge—responsibility, somebody should've told me." A little glimpse of great-great-grandma Wiena's embroidered flowers came into my head and then went out again.

He looked at me, still listening. He was concentrating, I could tell his mind wasn't wandering. He scratched the back of his head and said, "And where would we be, today, if—one—someone had told you about the finals right in the middle of your softball season? And, two—if someone had been able to use a seventh sense or something of that sort—and told you you were getting just the smallest bit—this much"—he held up his left thumb and index finger, about a centimeter apart—"just this much more aggressive than was necessary—perhaps just one eyelash out of place in the portrait of the concerto…"

I saw in my mind the newspaper review of Ruby's concert, "bold intimacy."

I tuned my A string and kept on looking at him. Nobody ever tells you when you're just beginning to make your mistakes. Nobody ever warns you that early.

"Do you know somebody named Ryuuji Hyuuga?" I said. The words felt strange coming out of my mouth in Uncle Asto's house.

A little light bulb went on in his face. "New in town. Yes…"

Then Ryuuji Hyuuga was taking lessons from Uncle Asto. He stood there in that same room and played for Uncle Asto and listened to Uncle Asto encourage him and analyze him and criticize him and—They made jokes together in that same room. Aunt Naruko fed him popovers and peach jam. He came straight from Aspen into their house, by radar. Every time I walked in, I was moving through the same air Ryuuji Hyuuga had breathed out. He had the pattern on the rug memorized the same way I did. And he'd win the competition, of course.

"… Yes, yes … He played for me once.…" Uncle Asto said.

Ryuuji Hyuuga didn't take lessons from Uncle Asto. He didn't have the rug memorized. He went back out of the room, sucked right out the keyhole.

Uncle Asto and I stared at each other.

"Is there anything else?" he said.

Ryuuji Hyuuga played for Uncle Asto once, auditioning for lessons. Uncle Asto didn't take him. I saw Ryuuji Hyuuga's back and shoulders; I saw his bowing arm moving in the corner of the rehearsal room.

"And Grandma Marie sent me her mother's purse from Poland, she disappeared to Treblinka—" I'd opened my mouth and it had started coming out. "She wants me to be the connection with—" It was ridiculous, the embroidered flowers on the velvet purse when Hitler was a boy trying to get into art school … "I'm named after her, Wiena, she was a child in a shtetl and she was annihilated—and I have her name and now I have her purse and I'm supposed to be a symbol of something—" There was no earthly reason for me to tell my violin teacher my family history. "And Grandma Marie, the daughter she sent away to New York—" I saw the wind blowing on the boat dock and Wiena knowing she'd never see her daughter again. "She was twelve years old and she found the purse tucked in her satchel when she was already out to Paris, her mother sent it along with her—" I saw the hands unpacking the satchel. "Maybe it was like a code symbol, maybe little Marie knew it and maybe she didn't—" I saw hands in gray mist waving at a boat leaving a dock. "And she never saw her mother again. They think she went to Treblinka, nobody knows for sure. Her mother. Wiena." I heard my voice get very soft. "And I have her velvet purse with embroidered flowers in my bedroom. It came in the mail yesterday."

I remembered Boruto saying everything doesn't have to be a matter of life or death and my mother saying everything does have to be.

Uncle Asto was leaning forward on the piano bench as if he was watching a movie. "Yes," he said. "Hmmm. Indeed." He nodded his head slowly up and down.

I looked down at my violin. "And when I got the velvet purse in the mail I already felt guilty—I already felt terrible about what I'd done to the concerto, and—Now…"

Over the top of his glasses Uncle Asto looked at me with his middle-aged eyes, he raised both eyebrows and his handsome face looked somber. "Yes," he said. "This is the great horror. Indeed."

I felt my own eyebrows go up.

"Wiena. The things," he said. He turned his head, looked at the piano keyboard, then looked back up at me. "A purse. A razor. Sometimes a picture. A button. A teaspoon." He nodded his head slowly. "This is what it is."

And I suddenly remembered Trouble Ojii-san dancing, the first time I saw him, when Papa's quartet was playing, and the wind was blowing a little bit, and Trouble Ojii-san was moving in the small circles. I just saw him for an instant in my mind.

Uncle Asto and I looked at each other. Between us I saw Ruby and my mother rocking back and forth on the music-room floor, my mother humming into her hair. And there was Ryuuji Hyuuga in a corner, playing with his face to a wall. And great-great-grandmother Wiena waving her arms at a train in gray fog.

My mind gets too busy sometimes, and I have to put everything back in the places they came from, Ruby and Trouble and my brother and everybody. You don't have time for everything. You just have to push things back out of the center so you can do what you're supposed to do. I switched my bow over to my right hand where my violin was and ran my left hand through the top of my hair.

"Wiena Namikaze, we are going back to this concerto," Uncle Asto said. "And we are going to hold it in our hands and care gently for it, knowing what we know." He looked at me, breathed in and out, and turned to face the keyboard.

I wiped both hands on my skirt and got ready to play. We stopped about a dozen times and at the end Uncle Asto sat silent. Then he said, "Indeed. Two youngsters. Each with so much locked inside."

He looked at me for almost a minute. The last three notes were still going in my head. "Wiena, have I told you the story about the hammer and the stone?"

"No."

"One day in Italy, a man was hammering and hammering on a piece of marble. A young boy sitting on a wall asked him, 'Why do you keep hammering on that stone?' And Michelangelo said, 'There's an angel inside this stone, and I'm trying to let it out.'"

I looked at him and nodded my head, trying to keep my face partly closed. It was exactly Ruby and the Flower Music in the Flower Garden.

"Perhaps we need to hammer a little more lightly on this concerto; perhaps the angel will come out more willingly if we use your most personal touch."

(◕ω◕✿)

Four days later I answered the phone early in the morning.

"Wiena-chan, I'm glad you're home. I need you to turn pages? I mean tonight? I'm terribly sorry, dear—so little notice, you know? Things happened. You'll do it, I hope?"

It was the red-haired woman, the pianist who talked in questions. "Indoors this time, eight o'clock in Sakuragaoka Junior High School? Will you be there by seven-fifteen?"

I said I would.

"Besides the trio, we're adding a violin and viola for a quintet? We have a new violinist, a very exciting young player. We'll do that splendid Brahms, and a Mozart and a new piece?"

I told her I'd be there.

I lay on the floor in the music room, looking at the Green Violin painting. All the people and the animals in the painting are reaching toward the music. And there's that flying man at the top, with the smaller man waiting to catch him when he falls. And the green man just keeps on playing. His feet are kind of tapping. And his shoes don't match. I hadn't noticed that before. Or maybe I'd noticed it but I hadn't thought about it. Like Trouble Ojii-san's shoes.

I got my bike and went out riding. Ten thirty-eight in the morning, nobody could complain that I was going to be kidnapped.

I went toward Namekujihime Spring Park, which has rhododendrons and ducks. Did I want to win the competition? Did I even want to play it? Ryuuji Hyuuga would win it. What about Mirai-san from the Youth Orchestra? And Kaori Miyazono? And the other people, whoever they were? What did the judges want?

The main path in the park leads downhill and across a bridge. As you pedal over the bridge you hear the boards making a sort of low drum sound. When I was little, we used to come here for picnics. Once I rode my tricycle across the bridge and the boards said, "Tug-a-lug, tug-a-lug," and the whole family called the park Tug-a-lug Park for a long time. That was years ago. Boruto was beginning to enter elementary school and he was wearing his uniform.

I got off my bike and stood and watched the ducks, in groups, in families, scooting across the pond, going somewhere, all of them on their way to something. Probably just more food. Maybe adventures. If you're a duck, just swimming around a log is probably an adventure. They were just going places, the same places over and over again, places on the pond. They seemed to be going so smoothly but all the time their feet were paddling hard underneath. They were going where they had to go. For who knew what reason. Just going and going places.

On the far side of the bridge, I put my bike against a tree and sat on the edge of the grass and looked at the water.

All the questions in my mind suddenly seemed like a quiz.

Do you want to win the competition?

Yes

No

Maybe

Why did you select the answer above?

Do you want to lose the competition?

Yes

No

Maybe

Why did you select the answer above?

Why did you say yes to playing the competition in the first place?

To please Pyrrha Nikos

To please Uncle Asto

To please your parents

To prove that you're good

Other—if so, what?

Are you sure?

Do you really love Mozart enough to go through all this torture?

Is it really torture?

Are you doing it for great-great-grandmother Wiena even though she's already dead hundred years ago?

And what's wrong with that?

I jumped. I'd said that last thing out loud—very loud—and a little girl ran away and hid behind somebody, maybe her mother. I saw her red socks jump across the grass and I heard my echoes in the air. I turned around. She was hanging on her mother, staring at me. I stared back at her. I could see just part of her face. She was holding a piece of torn bread for the ducks, holding it in her fist. She wasn't even three feet tall.

I said it again, inside my head: What's wrong with that? What's wrong with doing it for great-great-grandmother Wiena who had a goose and a broom and a purse and went to the gas chamber? I was still staring at the little girl with the red socks. I looked at her hand with the torn bread in it. Would Grandma Wiena e even care? She and I were named the same name and would she have any way of knowing about the Mozart, and if she knew, would she care?

I stopped staring at the little girl and looked down in front of me at the dirt. An ant was walking along with all its legs busy. I could smush that ant and just quietly go on sitting there. The little girl in the red socks could walk right over and put her foot down hard on the ant and kill it.

Nothing matters, I heard myself say in my head.

And I instantly saw in my head Mozart sitting down with his quill pen writing the middle part of the second movement. And I saw Ruby with her mouth open just slightly, singing the softest of her soft notes at the concert, her red dress quivering, and I saw Trouble Ojii-san dancing with Anya and their feet swinging and kicking on the ground.

I looked out across the pond, all dotted with ducks, like notes on a page. I said in my head, Everything matters.

The little kid and her mother walked on to another part of the shore. I watched the ant move about an inch before I stood up and got on my bike and rode the long way home.

When I come home I got mail from my mother saying Konoha TV had called and wanted to know if I'd be willing to be interviewed as one of the Sarutobi finalists on the Saturday morning of first September weekend, the day before the competition. On TV. It was the show "Hello, Konoha," and the producer said all the finalists were being invited. I was supposed to call her back and tell her whether I would or not.

My mother purposely hadn't given her opinion on the message.

It would mean I'd find out who the other finalists were a whole day before I had to play.

I put my phone back into my pocket and opened the refrigerator door, took out a peach, rolled it over and over and over in my hand, leaned over the kitchen sink, looked out the window at a hummingbird at the feeder, bit into the peach, felt the juice dribble down my left arm, and decided I would go to the TV studio and be interviewed.

I got to Sakuragaoka to turn pages just when the pianist was walking in the door. She showed me the fastest turns, and then I went backstage to wait. The cellist, a man I'd seen in the Symphony but didn't know, came in and started tuning up. We said hi to each other. And then the violinist from before came, with a violist. I'd just sat down on a wooden crate when in walked Ryuuji Hyuuga all dressed in black-and-white concert costume, with a violin case.

He nodded hello at the other people, and said, "Well, Namikaze." And then he bent over to put his case down and get his violin out.

The added violinist, a very exciting young player, about to play the splendid Brahms, was Ryuuji Hyuuga.

The pianist said, "You know each other?"

"She's a hot page turner," Ryuuji Hyuuga said, and stood up, tuning his D string as he moved.

"Oh, I know that?" she said, and laughed. "She's a professional?"

As a matter of fact, Ryuuji Hyuuga didn't really know what he was talking about. He'd seen me turn with my right hand, but not with my left. You don't use your right hand in front of a pianist's face. And in an orchestra you turn from the bottom of the page; when you're only a page turner you turn from the top. All the same, it's timing. I looked at him and then turned around.

While they played, I thought about playing chamber music. Of all the fun things to do sitting down, it must be near the top of the list. Of course I'd played duets and trios and some quartets; Uncle Asto gets his students together with other kids to do it once in a while, and sometimes kids from the Youth Orchestra get together and play. But to do it for your whole life, like the Beacon Quartet, to play chamber music as a career—the way somebody else might play basketball or work in a bank—I sat and wondered how that life would be.

When they got to the quintet I heard Ryuuji Hyuuga play. He was better than I'd even thought before. Second violin isn't as hard a part as first, but in a quartet of all professional people it has to sound perfect. As far as I could hear, it did. The page turner isn't supposed to turn around and watch people play, so I just listened. Ryuuji Hyuuga's notes came humming over my shoulder, and they sounded smooth and round and like little waves of water.

While they bowed to the audience, I tried to be invisible, of course.

When I got home, in one way I didn't want to go near my violin: I was horrified by the idea of upstaging Mozart. And in another way, I wanted to spend the whole night playing. I was in bursts of energy, and I played through two or three Dancla études, seeing pictures of my life go by in layers: going to lessons; watching rain drip on leaves outside the music-room window when I was a little kid playing little songs; seeing the hand-prints of everybody in my whole first grade on the classroom wall and laughing and splashing at a big white sink with the other kids as we washed off the paint we'd dipped our hands in. I played Kreutzer no. 38 and remembered a picnic we'd had when Grandma Kushina visited us. I remembered skipping along a trail holding her hand.

I spent about an hour on the third-movement cadenza of the Mozart before I went to bed. When it's going well, it can sound like beads falling down a string.

While I was waiting to go to sleep, I told Grandma Wiena I'd be playing the Mozart for her in a few days. Anybody walking by on the street could have told me I was doing an insane thing, lying in my bed promising a corpse I'd play a Mozart concerto for her. They could tell me the last thing this great-great-grandmother needed—alive or dead—was a Mozart violin concerto. They could say I was being disrespectful of the dead, and they could say I was being impractical, and they could tell me I was trying to rely on something supernatural to help me win. They could accuse me of trying to bribe the spirits.

In the incomplete dark I lay and looked at the outlined hump of the purse on top of my bureau and talked to Grandma Wiena. If I kept it to myself, nobody could tell me I was crazy or impractical or immoral.

The Wiena I was talking to was the one in the picture, the one with the goose and broom.

And I kept seeing Ryuuji Hyuuga sitting behind me and to the right on the stage, his fingers going like hummingbirds on the strings, his sound in some places like rough silk, the kind Ayane has in her family from being partly American.

And I saw, too, Trouble Ojii-san's feet dancing, pointed outward, away from each other, in unmatched shoes. I looked at the hump of great-great-grandmother's purse against the wall and listened to Suba-chan giving herself a bath.

I set the alarm clock for 6:00 A.M. and went to sleep.

(◕ω◕✿)

I woke up two minutes before the alarm was due to bleep. I was ready to talk to my great-grandmother Marie. I grab my phone. It was 9:00 A.M. in Paris.

"Hello." Already I missed her. Her voice has a tone that says, This Is the Way Things Should Be Done, Trust Me. "My dear Wiena! You've had your breakfast so early?"

"No, Grandma—"

"The strawberries are blooming already in Japan? I saw on TV you had eighty-three degrees yesterday; it will be hot today, too."

"Strawberries are past now, Grandma. Peaches are on. I got great-great-grandmother Wiena's purse, I want to … I want to say thank you.…"

"You'll take good care?"

"Oh, yes—of course. I'm. In fact, it's—Well, it's—Oh, Grandma—"

"You're telling me something?"

"Yes. I am. Grandma, I'm playing a violin competition. And the purse is—Well, I'm thinking of Grandma Wiena when she had her goose and her broom and her purse. In the picture. And that's the way I'll play the competition."

"Such a tragedy, there's no word. My dearl Wiena, you'll play with other children? In a contest?" She wasn't listening completely.

"Well, not exactly children. It's a Mozart concerto."

"And there is a prize?"

"Grandma, the others are all older than I am. I'm the youngest. Yes, there's a prize. But I'm not thinking about that. It's to get through the competition—Grandma Wiena's purse. I decided to play the Mozart for her."

There wasn't any sound on the other end of the phone.

"Don't tell anybody, Grandma?"

Another silence.

"This is your offering, Wiena."

"Yes. That's what I mean."

More silence.

"This is your kaddish. Yom Hashoah."

I didn't understand so I didn't say anything.

"Such a goyishe family. Your prayer for the dead, your remembrance for her."

"Yes," I said. "Say it again?"

"Kaddish. Yom Hashoah. When will you come to see me, Wiena? Such a big girl, I hardly know you."

"Are you inviting me, Grandma?"

"We'll go to the museums, we'll go in Parc Monceau, of course I'm inviting you. Rosh Hashanah?"

Vaguely, I thought it was sort of in October. "I'll ask my parents."

"They'll find excuses. School. 'She should be playing her Mozart.' Childhood is short, you could skip Mozart a little, tell them that, Wiena. Come see your great-grandmother. We'll bake cake together, I'll tell you more stories of Grandma Wiena."

"I'll ask, Grandma. Thank you for inviting me."

"Oy, thank you for calling me and saying thanks. You made my day, my dear Wiena."

"And mine,."

"Keep cool, the television says it's hot where you are. Eat your breakfast."

"I will, Grandma."

"You're being a good girl?"

"I think so. I love you, Grandma."

"I love you. You carry her name, Wiena."

"I know, Grandma."

"Come see me, okay."

"Yes, Grandma."

"Such a girl. Good-bye, Wiena. Kiss the others for me."

"Of course. Good-bye, Grandma."

With most people, you end a conversation and there's something you should have said or they should have said, it's not a complete conversation, there's more, and you walk away with things left not finished. With Grandma Marie, there were thousands of things we both could have said, but we almost didn't have to. I had the feeling she could understand without everything being said.

I took toast and orange juice to the music room. Outside the French doors a brand-new spiderweb hung swaying on a rosebush, all glistening with water drops. I went to the living room and got my mother's magnifying lens from the dead-bug collection and looked at the web through it, moving the lens back and forth as it swayed. Suddenly I wanted to be a little kid again, just thinking a spiderweb is so pretty, just thinking about the designs of the little thready lines in it. I wanted to go back down inside my childhood and not know the things I knew now. I stood there looking at the web for a long time, watching it sway back and forth.

I had to practice the Youth Orchestra music, and I went straight through the program, then went back and worked on the parts I'd marked with x's.

My parents were almost reverent about the purse. They acted as if it were a museum piece. My father kept nodding his head, and my mother kept saying "Oh, my. Oh, my."

My mother and father said you could fill a book with stories about stand partners, and my mother mumbled something about inviting Neji Hyuuga and his wife to dinner "sometime."

(◕ω◕✿)

I turned pages for four more concerts, tried to unlearn the concerto and learn it again, which of course I couldn't do; and Ayane and Anya and I started going swimming in the pool at the university where my father teaches, where it didn't cost us any money because we go in on my father's card. When we were in the pool, we played being the three Rhine Maidens from the opera by Wagner where they sing underwater, trying to protect their precious gold. We went singing and gurgling underwater being Rhine Maidens for four afternoons before we got tired of it.

I didn't tell anybody exactly about my conversation with Grandma Marie. I just said I'd called her to say thank-you.

My parents went away for three days, and Boruto and I were in charge of each other. I mainly practiced, and he had two of his band friends over one day and they worked on the new song they're making together. My parents had said I could invite Ayane and Anya in self-defense, and everybody except Anya ate so much pizza we felt sick.

I went to two more Youth Orchestra rehearsals, and I turned pages for people, and I practiced. I watched the days go by, and I knew I was going to honor my agreement with great-great-grandmother Wiena, and I knew it might be an insane thing to do.

And most of the time, even sometimes when I was swimming with my friends, what was walking along through my mind was the terrible way I was playing the concerto.

While my mother and father were away, a thing happened. It was late afternoon after I'd practiced for hours, and I was sitting in a slanted sprawl at the dining-room table holding Suba-chan on my stomach, feeling her just begin to dig me with her claws and then pull back. Dig, retreat, dig, retreat. I was sort of counting out the rhythm of her claws, and she was kind of humming along in an in-and-out purr. I was tired from practicing, and we were just hanging out on a summer afternoon not doing anything. My eyes closed.

I don't know what made me open them. In the middle of the table was a cartoon of me, playing my violin like some kind of madwoman and wearing an animal skin slung around me, and my feet were wheels. Sweat was pouring off me, and I had an insane look on my face. None of that was so strange, Boruto drew it. What was extremely weird was that I was huge, like an Amazon, and the violin was so tiny it looked as if I'd break it any instant. And an auto mechanic was standing there with a wrench in his hand saying, "When your violin overheats, check your head gasket. You may need your whole head replaced."

It was an insulting picture. And at the same time a bell was ringing in my head. That was what Uncle Asto meant. Very slowly, I began to put some pieces together. An Amazon on wheels, wearing an animal skin—she could crush the tiny violin. She was in a frenzy.

I heard again in my mind, "Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto."

I stared at the cartoon. It was horrible.

I stood up, Suba-chan leaped down, I went to the music room and got my violin and bow, I took them to the downstairs bathroom where there's a big mirror, and I started playing. Little sections of the concerto. Bits from the third movement, a longer bit from the second, part of the cadenza from the first. I watched myself.

And I remembered a thing that Ayane thinks is so ridiculous at school: the athletic coaches talk about how the team is going to give 110 percent. I watched my arms. Uncle Asto has always told me I have to be in partnership with the violin. I'd gone beyond that. Way, way beyond. Boruto was right. That was what Uncle Asto meant. Almost on top of Mozart.

I was a combination of angry and relieved. I stood in the bathroom and let the tears spurt right out onto the counter. I'd been trying too hard. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, holding my violin and bow. I would play the Sarutobi finals for Grandma Wiena, just the way I'd promised. But I'd make changes. I had to. When you think about it, it's the most obvious thing, and I should have realized it weeks before: trying too hard to play Mozart well would be like driving a car through a rose garden, or ironing a silk dress with a very hot iron, or cutting a lace doily with a chain saw, or—or like having a marching band play Brahms's "Lullaby."

After that afternoon, every time I went to the music room, I could feel the changes. The concerto didn't get any easier. The notes were still the same notes, but I gave myself permission to—this was the most surprising thing: I gave myself permission, down way deep in me, not to try to be Ryuuji Hyuuga.

And I didn't tell anybody about it. Not anybody.

With the finals three weeks away, Uncle Asto turned sideways on the piano bench and said to me, "I think our work together is getting somewhere. I think you're finding your way. When was the last time you listened to a recording of this concerto?"

"Maybe a week ago," I said. "I just simply stopped, I'm not sure why." I realized that I'd silently given myself permission not to try to be Anne-Sophie Mutter or David Oistrakh too.

"Good. I wouldn't advise you to listen to anyone else until after the finals, Wiena-chan."

"Is there ever going to be an after-the-finals?"

He laughed. "I understand. Yes, and your school will begin again and we'll have only one lesson each week again. And we'll do a different concerto.… Indeed."

It was hard to imagine, but I knew it was true.

"And this week you should have new strings. They'll have just about the right amount of time to adjust before September."

I don't think I would have admitted to anybody that the practicing was getting easier. It would seem as if I were cheating. If it doesn't hurt, it's not doing any good: that seems to be what we're supposed to believe.

I almost laughed as I tuned and retuned and retuned my new strings, listening to them getting used to being played.

I turned pages for two more concerts, both pianists.

(◕ω◕✿)

This weekend meant I was supposed to be on TV. I watched the show a couple of times to find out what it was. A man talked to people and made jokes. It was like other shows.

Ayane and Anya helped me decide what to wear. It included a shirt of Anya's and Ayane's socks.

My mother took me to the studio very early in the morning and said she'd pick me up at 10:05 A.M., after it was over. "Don't worry about being on TV, it'll be all right." I gave her a look. She smiled, "I'm a mother. I'm supposed to tell you it'll be all right."

She got berserk when I went bike riding but a television interview in front of thousands of people was going to be all right. I got out of the car and went into the building. Somebody told me to take the elevator to the sixth floor. I pushed the button and waited for it. Then a man come rushing down the hall and said to take the other elevator, they'd had some trouble with this one. Then he said No, take this one after all. There was a tall lady in a lace collar standing just outside the elevator. I told her who I was. She shook my hand and said, "Congratulations." I didn't know what for.

"You're a bit—no, I guess you're not late, we don't have everybody quite yet." We were walking down a narrow hallway. She turned left suddenly, into a doorway. I followed her. It was a big room with couches and chairs and a vending machine and bright fluorescent lights, no windows. "Just have a seat," she said, and walked out.

A brown haired girl was sitting on a leather couch, and Mirai-san was on a chair next to her, and a cute freckled boy wearing serious glasses and a green shirt was across from her. Ryuuji Hyuuga was sitting on the corner of a table, away from the others, flipping the pages of a magazine. I stood in the doorway. The room smelled like paint thinner.

Mirai-san didn't look surprised to see me. She said, "Hi, Wiena-chan. I had a feeling you'd be here." Her eyes shifted instantly to Ryuuji Hyuuga and back. She almost didn't look at him at all, it was so fast.

"Hi," I said. I started to say hi to Ryuuji Hyuuga, but he was staring into the magazine. I walked over and sat on the couch.

"This is Izuku," she said, pointing to the boy in the green shirt. "He's from Tokyo. And this is Yukari. She's from Kyoto. This is Wiena. She's from Konoha."

I said hi. Out of the corner of my left eye I could see Ryuuji Hyuuga's hands stop moving on top of the magazine. I turned a little bit toward him and said a part of a hi. It was just kind of an "h" hanging in the air. He nodded his head at me. Then everything went quiet. He started flipping magazine pages again.

Mirai-san smiled and slid around on her chair, shifting her legs into a different position. Yukari said, "I thought there were going to be six."

"There's one more coming," Mirai-san said. "I think." Then she was quiet. So was everybody else. Fp, fp, fp, went the pages of Ryuuji Hyuuga's magazine.

"They probably want us to get acquainted," Mirai-san said. "That's probably why nobody's here."

There was more silence. I looked at the four pairs of shoes I could see.

"I mean nobody official," she said.

Ryuuji Hyuuga started to swing one leg back and forth in the air. His pants moving against the table made a very slight sound. Izuku uncrossed his arms and crossed them the other way.

"Is anybody else as nervous as I am?" said Yukari. Everybody laughed a little bit, nervously, except Ryuuji Hyuuga. His leg made just a slight pause in the air and went on swinging.

Mirai-san said, "I don't know. How nervous are you?" We laughed nervously again. Then nobody said anything. Uncle Asto was right. I was definitely the youngest.

"Very," said Yukari.

"Is it about the competition or about being on TV?" Mirai-san asked.

"I'm not sure. Maybe they're equal." She had beautiful hair.

"I'd much rather play for people than talk for people," Mirai-san said.

"Me, too," said Izuku. He looked really plain. I tried to imagine him playing the violin, but it was easier to picture him mowing a lawn.

Yukari was talking. "… and so my teacher said I had to call every club and house in town—and it's a real little town. I had to volunteer to play for everybody till I got over my stage fright.…" Mirai-san and Izuku were laughing. "And—you know—some of the groups have all the same people in them, and—" Yukari stopped and held her left hand up, counting very fast on her fingers. "I can't believe some people had to listen to the same Bach sonata six times. It's embarrassing."

Everybody was laughing except Ryuuji Hyuuga.

"And the last movement of the Mozart." We laughed again. "And a lot of them didn't even like classical music to begin with.…" she said.

I thought of mentioning the beta-blocker drugs Ruby had told me about. But they made you see hallucinations. And another thing: I've had quite a bit of experience being the youngest, and it teaches you to be kind of quiet.

Mirai-san asked, "Did the project work? Are you so afraid now?"

"Not so," Yukari said. "Not so afraid. My bow doesn't shake anymore. I guess you could say it worked."

"You showed up here," Izuku said. He had a slow, drawly voice. We all looked at him.

The lady in the lace collar hurried in again with a bundle of papers, and Kaori Miyazono was behind her. "Here, fill these out," she said, kind of nudging Kaori into the room and handing us each a long sheet of paper and a pencil. Then the lady left the room.

Kaori came over to me all excited. She didn't wore her swirly glasses this time. "Wiena-chan~! A familiar face! Boy, am I relieved! This place is full of strange-o's. They sent me to the freight elevator—they're all these really vague types—all these people saying, 'Someone will be with you in a minute'—And I'm late to begin with because I was listening to the end of The Magic Flute in my car. Don't you just love that opera?" She flopped down on a chair.

"Hi," I said. She was wearing a flowered dress, and this time she didn't wore her swirly glasses. She look even prettier without her glasses. "How's your hand?" I asked.

"My hand? It's okay. Not perfect." She held out her right hand and flexed her fingers. "Why does it smell like paint remover in here?"

Everybody except Ryuuji Hyuuga laughed.

Mirai-san introduced herself to Kaori and told her who everyone was. I looked at the paper we were supposed to fill out and tried to imagine each person in the room playing the Mozart concerto.

The paper was a questionnaire. How long have you been playing the violin? Why did you choose the violin? What are your chief interests besides music? What is your favorite subject in school? Do you have any pets? What is your advice to young people today? How do you see yourself ten years from now? Some words were crossed out and retyped. I think it was a first draft.

A very short, skinny man wearing a huge wristwatch that wobbled around on his arm hurried in and collected our papers but left the pencils. He said we'd be going to the studio in about four minutes, and said, "Just relax." He hurried out.

Kaori said, "They set a terrific example around here. They're all so relaxed they're gone—till we have to do something, then they get all tense."

We laughed. "What did you say for 'advice for young people today'?" Mirai-san asked us.

"Never play a violin sonata for a Karuta Club in a lumber town," Yukari said.

"I said twenty-three hours of TV a day is too much," Mirai-san said.

Everybody except Ryuuji Hyuuga was laughing.

The skinny man walked in again and hesitated in the doorway. "Well, I see you're all having fun. That's the bottom line here at Konoha TV, having fun. They're ready for you on the set."

In the studio we stepped over big thick camera cables. They sat us in chairs; they wanted the oldest first, and we had to sort ourselves out. I was last, of course. We were very crowded. The skinny man said to us, "Folks, meet Anko Mitarashi. He'll chat with each of you, it'll be fun. Just be yourselves."

Anko Mitarashi was wearing makeup. "We always tell you to just be yourselves with thousands of people watching," she said. She was smiling but not really looking at us. She was skimming our questionnaires, and she looked as if she was holding her breath.

Suddenly the whole studio lit up with bright lights. A man with headphones and a cord hanging from him said, "STAND BY!" Then the whole studio audience clapped, and a man shot his arm straight down through the air. Anko Mitarashi said, "These are the six finalists in the second annual Hiruzen Sarutobi Competition. The competition is limited to young people from all around Japan. The maximum age is twenty-one, and these young people were selected from a field of eighty-five violinists. Let's get right to the music makers. I don't think I've been surrounded by so many geniuses since I flunked third grade." She laughed. A camera moved to aim at Mirai-san.

"Our first finalist is Mirai Sarutobi. She played the violin since she was six, she teaches violin students herself, she's concertmaster of the Konoha Youth Orchestra. She's nineteen years old and enjoys tennis and hiking.… Tell us, Mirai-san, which do you like more: hiking or playing the violin?"

Mirai-san looked surprised. "Well, the violin, of course."

"I see, by the way, Mira-san, I noticed that you have the same last name with the person this competition is named for, are you related with him?"

"Yes, he's my grandfather."

"Can you tell us a little bit about your grandfather, Mirai-san. Don't make it too complicated though."

Mirai-san crossed her arms, looked down at her shoes, and then up again. "Hiruzen Sarutobi was born in Konoha. He lived the last years of his life alone in a mansion at Tokyo. He was married to French women. His music has kind of dark tones that come from somewhere, kind of mysterious.… And religious too. He wrote some concerto grossos, and…"

Ryuuji Hyuuga said, "And some unaccompanied violin suites."

"Right," said Mirai-san. "And he was working on a viola suite when he died."

"Which was—?" said Anko Mitarashi.

"On July 15, 1959," said Mirai-san.

"Is that so? And right here in Konoha, and I didn't even know anything about him. Just shows how we oftentimes don't pay attention to what's in our own backyard." She looked down at the pages. "Next to Mirai-san is Kaori Miyazono, seventeen. Kaori-san broke two fingers on her right hand windsurfing not long ago. Kaori-san, even a musical dunce like me knows that wasn't a very good break."

"Well, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. I had a concert to play and everything. But Wiena-chan stepped in and played the concert for me."

Anko Mitarashi looked blank.

"I think Mozart helped my fingers heal," she said.

Anko Mitarashi laughed. "Could you explain to the folks at home just what you mean?"

She looked at her. "Could you explain just why you laughed when I said that?"

Her left eye twitched. I've seen lots of people do that. It's the bottom eyelid; the skin of it jerks and you can tell it's something they can't control. She said, "People that aren't musical need to have it explained."

"Well, when you think about how he made such great music out of his pain—like the worse the pain, sometimes the better the music. Sometimes if you just sit still and let music heal you, you'll be—I don't know—you'll be okay." She looked around at all of us. "Help me, you guys," she said.

Yukari said, "It's true. It's always true." Mirai-san nodded. Ryuuji Hyuuga was staring at Kaori. I knew I could say something but my throat closed up, my larynx just eclipsed. TV makes a very big difference in what you can do. Izuku whispered to me, "The Requiem." I sat staring straight ahead. Mozart was working on his Requiem when he died, and it's very great music. It's a set of prayers for the dead, all in music.

Anko Mitarashi nodded her head at Kaori. "And sitting next to Kaori is fifteen-year-old Ryuuji Hyuuga. Tell me, Ryuuji-kun, how do you see yourself ten years from now?"

Ryuuji Hyuuga stared at Anko Mitarashi. Anko Mitarashi's eyelid twitched again. Then Ryuuji Hyuuga stared straight ahead at the camera and held perfectly still and said, "I see myself playing in Carnegie Hall. I can't tell you what concerto I'm playing. I can't see what it is." He looked back at Anko Mitarashi. I could see his shoulders get relaxed.

Anko Mitarashi smiled again. There was something mean in the way she smiled. "Tell me, Ryuuji-kun, how do you know that's where you'll be?" She winked at Ryuuji Hyuuga.

Ryuuji Hyuuga got rigid and looked straight ahead at the camera again. "Because. Because I can't see myself doing anything else."

I could feel everybody looking at Ryuuji Hyuuga and then looking away from him.

"Well, that's determination for you. We can all say we knew him when, can't we?" Anko Mitarashi's eyes went very fast down to the sheet of paper in front of her and up again. "Next is Yukari Koizumi, also fifteen. She plays guzheng. Yukari, what's a guzheng?"

She looked as if she was always having to explain it to people. "It's a Chinese instrument, very similar to koto but it has twenty one or more string."

Anko Mitarashi asked, "And how many guzheng teachers are there in your town?"

"One. My grandmother."

"So. The guzheng is a family affair."

"Well, sort of," she said.

Anko Mitarashi said, "Izuku Kamijou is fourteen. His favorite composer is—well, I've never heard of—I hope I get this right—Giovanni Battista Fontana. Who was he, Izuku-kun?"

Izuku's eyes got very big and then settled down. He crossed his arms. "Fontana was a seventeenth-century composer. He wrote a violin sonata and some other works. It's not certain when he was born. He died in 1630."

"That's very interesting, Izuku-kun. Thanks for the information. And last our youngest fiddler today is Wiena Namikaze, who's ten. Wiena-chan, I believe you have a pet with an interesting name. Tell everybody your cat's name."

"Suba-chan."

"Does Suba-chan like to listen to you practice?"

"Sometimes."

Anko Mitarashi looked around at all of us. "Kids, I'm going to admit something. The only thing I play is my iPhone. I never learned to read music. How would I learn to do it?" Nobody said anything. "I mean, all those little black dots, they're like a secret code—" She chuckled.

"Did you ever want to?" Mirai-san asked. A camera moved very fast toward her.

"It's best if you do it when you're little," Kaori said.

"I bet you're right," she said. "Well, tomorrow one of these fine fiddlers will be the winner of the Sarutobi Competition, and I want to wish all of you good luck. Stay with us. We'll be right back."

We got up to leave. Anko Mitarashi stood up and said, "Thanks, guys. Good luck." She was talking to all of us in general.

The tall woman from the very beginning, the one with the questionnaires, walked along with us to the elevator and said thank-you several times and good-luck several times. The elevator door opened and we all got in. It closed. We started down, nobody talking.

"What an incredible jerk. Jerk. JERK," Mirai-san said. She was in the back of the elevator. Everybody turned around.

"Oh, not completely," said Yukari. "When she asked about learning to read music—she was like a helpless little kid."

"That doesn't excuse her for being a jerk," said Kaori.

"It helps," Izuku said.

We laughed. The elevator stopped. The door didn't open. Izuku pushed the "Open door" button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing happened again.

"You think Anko Mitarashi's in charge of elevator maintenance too?" Kaori said.

We waited for something to happen. Kaori banged with her fist on the elevator wall. Izuku said that wouldn't help. Then she pressed the alarm button. We stood around looking at each other. I got the idea that the elevator was really stuck.

"Do you get the feeling nothing works around here?" said Kaori. "This is a very disorganized place."

Nobody said anything.

"The whole world might get blown up and we'd never know," Yukari said.

Agaim, nobody said anything. We all got quiet, and we stayed that way for a long time. We took turns leaning against walls. Only two people could sit on the floor at once. It wasn't a very big elevator.

Izuku looked around and said, "My music teacher is German, she always says, 'Is not moost be rooshing rooshing rooshing zeez notes because is coming an earthquake.…'" He said it very fast, accenting the words with a kind of sideways movement of his jaw. We burst out laughing, all except Ryuuji Hyuuga.

I suddenly realized we could be playing I'm Neek. We could play it if I didn't mention the name of it. "My music teacher wears sweatshirts with funny things on them," I said. I told them about "Dvořák alive! Terrorizes couple in Shinjuku!" and "The What Quintet?"

Mirai-san said, "I have this little tiny student, he says, 'All you make me play is E-flats, I'm gonna fwow up E-flats.'"

"My violin teacher doesn't trust anybody," Yukari said. "She thinks people steal things out of her house. One day she couldn't find this old wool skirt, and she said her maid stole it. And then once it was a kitchen pan."

We laughed and then got quiet again.

"Once she thought somebody'd stolen her toothbrush."

Izuku said, "Hercules got so mad at his music teacher he brained him with his lute." Everybody looked at Izuku. "Killed him," he said. We laughed and then we were all quiet.

Ryuuji Hyuuga kept himself away from us by not looking at any of us, not laughing, not doing anything but looking at the ceiling and the floor. He kept his hands hanging down at his sides. Once in a while his hands fisted and then unfisted. I'm not sure he even knew they were doing it.

After a few minutes Kaori said, "I don't see a single scared face in this whole elevator. Isn't anybody afraid we're gonna go crashing to the bottom?"

"That'd take care of practicing for today," Izuku said. "But we can't, really. There's a safety brake at the top."

"What do you mean?" asked Yukari.

"Well, an elevator works by a system of counterweights. They're supposed to regulate the operation, but in case there's a malfunction or an accident, the heavy-duty brake grabs ahold at the top and holds everything still. It's mounted on the shaft of the main lifting motor."

"What if there's a power failure?" Yukari asked.

"The elevator has its own generator," Izuku said. "It's driven by an AC motor; the lifting motor is on direct current; so is the generator."

"I bet you get A's in science," Mirai-san said.

"Or ride in lots of elevators," said Yukari.

"Nope. Never rode on one before," Izuku said. He looked up at the ceiling. Everybody looked at him. He shrugged his shoulders.

We were quiet again. "I wonder if they know it's not running," Yukari said. "Do you think anybody even knows we're here?"

Mirai-san said, "Who could care about six people stuck in an elevator with all the big important things going on in the world?"

Izuku said, "Somebody whined at Beethoven that one of his quartets was too hard to play. And Beethoven said, 'Do you think I care about your lousy fiddle when the spirit moves me?'"

"The spirit around here has moved them to get on with their business. They'll figure out something's wrong when they want to go home," Kaori said.

"I wonder if Dad's getting upset," Yukari said.

"And my mother," I said.

"My bike's probably towed away by now," said Kaori.

Everybody got quiet again. I looked around and tried to picture all of them playing the violin. Mirai-san and Ryuuji Hyuuga were easy; I'd seen them. But the others. I looked at the violin bruise on the left side of their necks and tried to build a mental picture from there. Yukari had a kind of way of standing that made a little bit of space around her. As if she was wearing some kind of perfume that sent waves out to separate her from unperfumed people, but I don't think she was wearing any. Izuku had huge, dangling, bony hands, and his brain was filled with all those different things, as if there were so many rooms up there—a room for elevator workings, a room for things Beethoven said to people, a room for composers most people have never heard of, a room for what Hercules did to his music teacher. Kaori was maybe the most mysterious; the way she was on TV, asking Anko Mitarashi why he'd laughed at her. I looked at her hands, which she was holding folded in front of the flowered dress; I couldn't picture her playing the violin any more than I could picture her windsurfing or riding a bike or dancing.

"You know, what's going to happen is, they're going to find us in about five thousand years," Kaori said.

Izuku nodded. "We'll look like the Easter Island statues."

Yukari said, "They'll wonder what these six sacred figures represented."

"—in a curious box that seemed to go up and down," said Mirai-san.

Yukari said, "I haven't even made a will. I wonder who'll get my gerbils."

Everybody laughed and shifted position except Ryuuji Hyuuga. The elevator was getting really warm.

Kaori pushed herself slightly toward him and said, "How come you don't talk to any of us?"

He closed his face and said, "I do." Then he looked past her at the elevator wall.

"No, you don't. We're all in this together—we're all supposed to compete against each other tomorrow, and we're all wondering what's going on, and we're all being very good sports about whatever it is—and you're hunkering over there like a cucumber—"

She stopped. She looked surprised. So did he. I think I held my breath. I think some other people did, too. She and he stared at each other.

"A cucumber?" he said. It was a question.

Yukari laughed first. Then Izuku. Then Mirai-san and I. I think we shook the elevator. I'd never be able to describe to Ayane and Anya the look on Ryuuji Hyuuga's face. If he really had been a cucumber, his skin would have wrinkled up for just a second and then smoothed out again. He looked as if he was hunting inside his brain for something he couldn't remember. He looked as if the word "cucumber" was going around and around in his head. The whole elevator was filled with laughter, and he was looking up at a corner where the ceiling and wall came together.

"Lighten up, Hyuuga-san," Izuku said. The laughing changed, got softer.

Ryuuji Hyuuga looked cornered. He stared at Izuku. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then he looked at the ceiling again.

Mirai-san said, very gently, "Ryuuji-kun, when did you know you were going to be a concert violinist?" Then she said, fast, "You don't have to answer.…"

Everybody was looking at him. His eyes were moving sideways back and forth. I held my breath again. "I don't know," he said. He looked down at the floor. Everything was quiet. That was evidently his answer. People started shuffling around a little bit; nobody said anything. Then he opened his mouth again. "It didn't come on me like a flash—from the eye of God or anything. I just—" He moved his weight from one foot to the other again and looked at his feet. I could hear everybody breathing. Ryuuji Hyuuga took a breath like a gulp, and said, "It's better than being a cucumber."

Everybody was still looking at him. Suddenly there was a sound of hammering somewhere in the elevator shaft. Everybody looked up. There was a very tiny bit of laughter.

Kaori said, "Ryuuji Cucumber, important figure in late-twentieth-century music—Sonata for Tossed Salad in G—"

"Suite for Elevator and Hammer in A Minor, his longest work—" said Izuku. The hammering went on. Everybody wasn't staring at Ryuuji Hyuuga anymore.

"You haven't heard my greatest piece, 'Serenade to a Talk Show Jerk,'" said Ryuuji Hyuuga.

We looked at him. It was an astonishing surprise. We laughed. He pretended for a couple of seconds that he hadn't said it; he tried to look down at the floor as if we weren't even around. There was more hammering. The elevator was full of laughter. Ryuuji Hyuuga started laughing as if he didn't want to but was doing it anyway.

I looked around. Six people with their private worries, all in competition against each other, people who might be hating each other, all laughing our heads off. Then everybody got quiet.

Yukari started clapping her hands. I didn't understand. Then Mirai-san joined her. Then Izuku. Then Kaori and I. Ryuuji Hyuuga looked flustered, as if he didn't get it. But he did get it, he'd have to be a moron not to get it. We weren't clapping because somebody decided to hammer on things in the elevator shaft.

By the time we got out of the elevator, the lobby was full of parents and flashing lights and TV cameras, and the woman in the lace collar tried to make an apology speech while we pushed out past her, and she sort of got shoved out of the way.

I'd decided I could get through the rest of my life very happily without ever being on TV again.

(◕ω◕✿)

I was awake at 4:42 A.M., watching the clock. I did some exercises where you listen to the arches of your feet relax, and then you do the same with all the rest of you in small bits, all the way up to your hair. A Yoga lady on TV does them, and she has this very spiritual smile and an extremely superior attitude. Like we're mere earthlings and she's got an advanced spirit and we're all several incarnations behind. I lay in bed and practiced what she says in her perfumy voice, "Focus attention on the very center of your head. Feel yourself breathing in through your ears, out through your ears, in through your ears, out through your ears." The birds were getting up in the trees outside. She also says to "breathe out through your feet," but Anya says we have to draw the line somewhere.

I told Suba-chan that her name had been said on TV yesterday. She went on licking her thigh.

Pretty soon it would be over. By the time it got dark again I'd be eating dinner, and somebody would have won the Sarutobi Competition.

What if Yukari won first, Izuku won second, and Kaori and Mirai-san and Ryuuji Hyuuga and I were left standing there holding our bows?

Except that if Yukari really did have such terrible stage fright, something would probably happen. Her bow might bounce, she might forget something. So she'd be left holding her bow, too.

But Mirai-san was concertmaster of a whole orchestra; she had acres of poise, and she taught violin to little kids. "I'm gonna fwow up E-flats." I remembered being really little and having Uncle Asto play harmony with me when I played scales. Those were our little duets. When I was five years old playing my little screechy scales, Mirai-san was fourteen, probably playing Beethoven sonatas. She would logically win.

But then there was Izuku. Never rode in an elevator. Fourteen years old. His favorite composer, or one of them, somebody who died in 1630. Knew about Hercules and the lute. And Anko Mitarashi was so mean to him. Those things don't automatically make a good violinist, of course.

Yukari Koizumi. Her hands were graceful. Not that graceful-looking hands would automatically make anybody a better violinist. But she'd had so much public exposure too. So much mileage. Starting with her stage fright, and going around playing for all those clubs and churches. And she had that kind of exotic air space around her. Playing the koto would develop a whole different part of her brain. Wouldn't it? Maybe she had an advantage over everybody. Except Ryuuji Hyuuga.

While Ryuuji Hyuuga was flying all around the world, playing everywhere he went, Yukari had been going around Kyoto, Konoha, working on her stage fright.

And Kaori Miyazono. The beauty queen in my dream, the bespectacle girl in Inaba Ridge, and on television practically telling Anko Mitarashi she was a jerk, and so feisty in the elevator, getting Ryuuji Hyuuga to stop being a cucumber. She must have been desolate when she couldn't even practice because of her fingers. I think she loved Mozart more than any of the rest of us did. That would mean she'd play the concerto with more something than the rest of us would. What would it be? When you really truly love something—you do it differently. More of your blood beats into it.

But Ryuuji Hyuuga. Just the thought of him made me turn over in bed with a lurch, it was a reflex. I dumped Suba-chan on the floor in my haste.

I had a hunch he was the only one of all of us who really was determined to be a concert violinist. That was going to be his life. And he was good enough to be the "very exciting young player" in a piano quintet. At least for one concert. He probably was a prodigy.

I lay on my stomach and thought about my mother. I tried to imagine her being young and in school and being a prodigy. She probably was weird too. Geniuses are. There's a lot more going on inside them. More wires to get crossed. Maybe more blood going to their brains, or going there faster or something.

I turned my head to the right, and I felt Suba-chan settle beside my stomach, and the next thing I knew the alarm clock went off and it was morning.

Boruto was the first person I saw that day. He was standing in my bedroom doorway in pajama bottoms and a soccer shirt.

"You know you were on the late news?" he said.

"Get out of here," I said.

"Everybody tumbling out of the elevator. Your boyfriend Hyuuga and everybody. They made it look like a party."

I sat up in bed. "Nii-san, is that true?"

He nodded his head. "A different channel had it on. I forget which one."

I pushed the back of my head into the pillow and closed my eyes. I could hear him walking across the room. He sat on my bed. "You know what you have to do today."

I didn't open my eyes.

"You have to go for it. You've worked real hard. You deserve to have fun with old Wolfgang."

I kept my eyes closed and nodded my head.

"And it's not the end of the world."

I looked at the dress I'd decided to wear hanging on the outside of my closet. It was just a blue dress, medium blue with medium sleeves. I would put it on and go and play the competition and come home again. I looked back at Boruto. "Thanks," I said. He walked out of my room.

Play for great-great-grandmother Wiena. I'd promised her.

Play in my most personal way. Honor the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto. Let my own angel out. Give 100 percent, not 110 percent. Don't go all the way over the top. Remember everything I've ever learned and simultaneously forget it. The divine inspiration of the NBA.

At breakfast there was a big bouquet in my water glass with a note pinned to a zinnia leaf:

These were handpicked from several people's gardens who don't know they're wishing you good luck in the Great Wiena Namikaze Violin Performance.

Our great passionate love,

Ayane and Anya

P.S. We'd rather do Trouble Ojii-san's laundry than turn pages for that Hyuuga jerk.

P.P.S. Izuku-kun is so adorable!

I suddenly remembered the piece I'd played in the audition for the Prep Orchestra when I was a little kid. It was the second movement of a Schubert sonatina, and it was in D major. I looked into my glass of orange juice and could almost see the notes. There was a B-flat at the top of the right-hand page. I wore yellow socks that day, and Mary Janes.

Way back in June, I hadn't wanted to know what any of the other players looked like. Now I knew them all. I could picture them in their pajamas, I could imagine them drinking orange juice.

"Morning, everyone." My mother came walking through the kitchen with dirt all over her hands.

Boruto was right behind her, carrying gardening tools. They disappeared into the dining room.

"What do you think your mother going to plant next in the dining room?" my father sighed.

I didn't say anything. I picked a flower out of the glass and moved it to the other side of the bouquet.

If Grandma Wiena hadn't made her only daughter get on a train and go away forever so she'd never see her again, Mama wouldn't be walking through this house saying good morning to everybody today. Grandma Marie wouldn't have met Charles Schnee in the standing-room line at the Palais Garnier and they wouldn't have gotten married and had Grandpa Jacquess, and Mama wouldn't exist, neither would Boruto and I.

Mama came back through the kitchen carrying the gardening tools Boruto had been carrying, on her way outside. She came over to where I was sitting, and she held the tools way out away from me, and she bent over and kissed me on my neck, on the chin-rest bruise. "Everyone, good morning," she said to my neck. I put my arms around her neck. Naturally, she didn't know anything about the private arrangement I had with her great-grandmother's purse.

Everybody left. My father went off to bathroom, and I sat at the kitchen table.

My phone rang. "Wiena, my sweet one, this is your big day," said Ruby, all excited. I'd forgotten that even her speaking voice is so beautiful. It flows out. "Remember, what's down inside you, all covered up—the things of your soul. The important secret things. Are you listening to me?"

"Yes, I am."

"The story of you, all buried, let the music caress it out into the open. Promise?"

I didn't say anything. How could I promise a thing like that?

"You'll know when it happens," she said. "You can't make it happen. And remember the Celtics. I wish you love today."

"Thanks, Miss Ruby. You, too. You want to talk to my mother?"

"No, sillybones. I called to talk to you. Say hi to everyone."

I ate some breakfast. I stared at the hummingbirds outside the window. I went to the music room.

My mother walked in, sat down, waited for me to finish the Kreutzer Étude no. 39, and said, "Remember all day long today: You need to enjoy this. Enjoy, dear." And when my parents dropped me off at the building, Papa said, "You're now in a position to take delight in doing this thing, Wiena-chan. The concerto you can play upside down and backward—now go ahead and take delight in it."

"Wish me love," I said while I was getting out of the car.

"Love," said my mother and my father, almost at the same time.

I walked in the door thinking about Boruto warning me not to let it make me a crazoid. I could feel a buzz in the Green Room. And yet nobody was talking. Maybe it was the six violin cases in the room; maybe it was just all those same people who'd been stuck in the elevator together stuck here together again the very next day. Whatever it was, somebody could have plucked the air, the way you'd pluck a string, and it would have twanged.

There was a big bulletin board on the wall with blank white envelopes thumbtacked on it. We were each supposed to take an envelope. It had a number in it, and that was the order of playing. "These are jumbled. There's no order to the way they've been placed on the board," said a lady who was evidently in charge of us. She had a neck chain attached to her glasses, and she had a violin bruise on her neck. Maybe it was a viola bruise. "And where's Wiena Namikaze?"

"Me," I said. I whirled around from unzipping my case. That wasn't the answer to her question. But it was what came out.

She looked at me, almost as if she'd expected somebody else, and said, "There's a message for you on the board. Oh—and—everybody? Listen: There's a smaller number on the corner of your card. That's your practice-room number. You'll wait there till you're wanted."

I took a blank envelope, and on the opposite side of the bulletin board was a smaller one with my name on it in Uncle Asto's writing. I think I could get very old and be in a rest home and I'd still know his handwriting. My number was four. In the other envelope was Uncle Asto's note:

May you have great, great fun with this beautiful song today.

"One. How could they do that to me?" Yukari Koizumi stood at the side of the bulletin board, holding up her number.

"They had to do it to somebody," Kaori Miyazono said. "I really, truly, cross my heart, didn't want Number Six." She held up her card with the six on it.

Mirai-san opened her envelope, took out her number, and held it up for everybody to see. "How did they know two is my unlucky number?"

Izuku said to her, "You really think there's any such thing?"

She laughed. "I do badly at the second lesson of a new piece, I have terrible second dates with guys… Let's see what you got."

He held up his Five.

Ryuuji Hyuuga had taken an envelope off the board and walked away from everybody.

"Where are you in this thing, Wiena-chan?" Izuku asked me.

I showed him my Four.

"Let's see—" Mirai-san was looking around and checking us off with her eyes. "That means—Number Three is over there." She nodded her head toward where Ryuuji Hyuuga was standing with his back to us, flexing the fingers of his left hand. He looked as if he was probably staring at a wall. The rest of us looked around at each other. Mirai-san said, "I didn't know they'd use a screen. I mean, I hoped, but I didn't know for sure."

Everybody looked at her. "Really? Are they really? How'd you find out?" Kaori asked.

Mirai-san said, "The woman with the envelopes told me. They're using a screen. Someone insisted at the last minute. One of the judges. I don't know. It's very unusual."

It was a strangely happy moment right then. Five people, and another one over in a corner, all knowing more or less how long we'd have to wait to play, and knowing we could be really anonymous behind a screen—we wouldn't have to look at the faces of the jury. And nobody would have an extra advantage for looking perfectly poised.

We looked around at each other and made relieved faces. Even Ryuuji Hyuuga almost glanced out of his corner. I had probably more than an hour to wait in room 104.

Room 104 had a grand piano, and a piano bench, and a straight chair, and a window looking out on the street. I put my violin case on the floor and looked out the window. People were down there going along in their lives. I could come in last in the Sarutobi Competition today and it wouldn't make any difference to them. Hiruzen Sarutobi was already dead, and the winner of a competition named after him couldn't make any difference to him. Nuclear war could break out and we'd all be dead in a few days, and then nothing would make any difference anyway.

I pulled the piano bench over near the window and sat on the end of it, and I leaned my chin on the windowsill. People are always saying, "Don't sweat the small stuff," and then somebody always says, "It's all small stuff." I watched a little tiny kid being pushed along in a stroller on the sidewalk across the street. I could win a dozen competitions, and I wouldn't bring Ruby's baby back.

I could play an entire concert in Carnegie Hall and have Itzhak Perlman wish he could play like me, and I wouldn't take away Trouble Ojii-san's brain damage or find him his Waltzing Tree.

I could play the violin better than Anne-Sophie Mutter or anybody else in the world, and I wouldn't make the people who were dead at Treblinka live to ripe old ages.

The little kid in the stroller started crying and reaching out around the stroller for something to make him happier. I had three little groups of notes going around in my mind, and they wouldn't stop. I even heard them when the baby in the stroller cried. I'd probably played those little groups of notes five thousand times.

(◕ω◕✿)

I got up off the piano bench and squatted down and opened my violin case. "Everything doesn't have to be a matter of life or death." "Everything does have to be." "Why are you yelling at me?" "Because I love you." I breathed in and out the way the Yoga lady says to, and unzipped the pocket of my case where I'd put Grandma Wiena's purse. I laid it on the piano. I tuned my violin.

I played the cadenzas, all three of them. Then I did some stretching exercises. I rolled my neck around, I did some of Anya's ballet leg lifts, I swung my arms. I played D-major and A-major chromatic scales for a while. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what the embroidered design on Grandma Wiena's purse looked like. I tried to imagine somebody's fingers embroidering it in Poland almost a hundred years ago. That was still younger than my violin. I opened my eyes and found out I'd gotten everything right except one little leaf at the lower-right-hand corner of the design. I stared at the purse for a while. Nothing was in my mind; I was just staring.

Somebody knocked, and the lady from the Green Room said, through the door, "Wiena-chan, about twenty minutes, half an hour till you're on. Number Two broke a D string. May I get you anything?"

I opened the door and looked at her. I couldn't remember the words at first. Then they came to me. "No, thank you," I said. I stared at her. "Broke a D string?"

"Oh—she replaced it and finished the concerto. Don't look so worried. It doesn't disqualify her. Of course not. Of course not, dear. We'll let you know when it's time," she said. "You may leave your case and things here while you play." She smiled a little bit and went walking down the hallway. I watched her feet go up and down on the floor, and then I closed the door.

As I looked at the keyboard of the piano, my mind tried to empty itself; it tried to pour all my thoughts down a chute of some kind. I could feel them sliding away. Like a big balloon deflating, like a tank of something emptying. I felt my eyes bug out with the shock of it, and I saw my arms reach out to catch what was emptying out of me. I stood there looking at the space between my arms, and tried to find Mozart. I closed my eyes and looked for the first movement first; there it was, with its cadenza. Second movement. Third. They were there, with their notes in order, with Uncle Asto's blue markings on the pages.

Very strange, my mind doing that. I picked up my violin and played the third-movement cadenza. It was there, solid, it hadn't gone off anywhere. I wrapped Grandma Wiena's purse in its tissue paper and put it back in my violin case. I went down the hallway to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was just a person in a blue dress standing in dim light in a public bathroom next to a towel machine. I turned around and went back to room 104 and sat down with my violin and bow in my hand.

The envelope woman came and got me, and we walked down the hall and then down the stairs and then through a heavy door. Suddenly the lights were very bright and the floor was very polished and there was a line of screens on my right. Several screens were lined up so the jury couldn't see any part of me, even my feet. The woman pointed to where I was supposed to stand. I went to the spot and stood. It was the place Ryuuji Hyuuga, Number Three, had just walked away from. I suddenly remembered Ruby in Wonderland getting smaller and smaller. I propped myself firmly on my feet, looked down at them; they were the same size they'd been five minutes before, and I knew I wasn't shrinking.

I decided to look at the vertical line down one of the screens.

A man's voice came from the other side of the screens: "Number Four, you may begin when you're ready."

I thumbed my strings and heard the D string a shade flat. While I was tuning it I closed my eyes and saw Grandma Wiena's photograph with the purse and the goose and the broom, and into my vision came a teenage hand with a quill pen in it, just at the edge of the photograph. Music being written. I listened in my mind for the rhythm and I took a medium-size breath and started.

The start was a good one; notes came up out of the violin on time, in time, things weren't blurred, it was fun. Through the notes, I saw Grandma Wiena shooing her geese up a slope with her broom in Poland; the notes went scooting along. It was strange: I was able to hear every note clearly, every group of sixteenth-notes, every little sforzando, and at the same time I was seeing a movie of pastures and the little house in Suprasl.

The second movement. How many times Suba-chan and I'd gone to sleep listening to it, with our arms around each other. I reached inside my body for the key change and the rhythm change and I felt for the gentleness of it. I saw Wiena, a little girl in a long white nightgown, climbing into her bed by candlelight, and I took a medium-size breath and played. The notes sounded like little flickerings of flame from the candle, little bright lights floating in a dark room. I played it for her to drop off to sleep in her feather bed with her braids spread out on the pillow.

The third movement, the Rondeau. If you turn on the radio just in time to hear this movement, you think it's such a happy thing, those alternating sections, dances. And yet, when you pay close attention, there's a kind of fragile sound—as if something's going to break somewhere but you don't know where. And little silences come up between the sections. I looked into what was going on in my mind and I saw the early morning waking Wiena up with the sun coming in, a blessing. I took a medium-size breath and began. She woke up in the sunshine and she was a real girl in a real house, and I could see the grass and flowers growing as she walked outside, and I could feel the solid ground under her feet, and during the cadenza she was scampering along, very happy. And I got so carried away with the little girl in the story in my mind that I played an E-sharp a little bit askew, my finger came down on it too sideways. But I was happy. I was happy with the sounds of Mozart coming up out of the wood, and as I moved toward the ending it felt right. The last three notes came out just the way I liked them, balanced, even, each one of them getting softer until the last one just skips away into the air.

I took my violin down off my shoulder. I was in Konoha, Konoha, and I'd just finished doing what I'd promised and feared to do. I was twelve yeas old, standing with my two feet on the floor and my arms hanging down. I might never even tell anybody about Wiena and her goose and her feather bed in my mind. A whole story of her had happened inside the music. I looked down at the scroll of my violin. It's like a seashell, as if there's such a story inside that you could never find out all of it.

A man's voice came from the other side of the screen. "Thank you, Number Four."

(◕ω◕✿)

The jury wanted to meet with us in the Green Room. The woman who'd been in charge of us told us to tell the jury our names but not our numbers, even though the winner had already been decided. "That's our policy. We want this to be the fairest competition in Japan," she said.

After we introduced ourselves, we sat all in a line. I sat between Yukari and Mirai-san, facing the jury, which was two men and two women.

One of the judges stood up. He was one of those round men you see in orchestras. A round head, and a round stomach and big hands. He was wearing a tweed kind of jacket, and he had frizzy white hair and grizzly white eyebrows. He sort of patted his stomach and said to everybody, "First, we want to thank you all. You'll each receive a video of today's performances. All six of the finalists have—at the very least—met our expectations, proving once again"—he laughed—"that not all of the fine student musicians are in the West. Each player has, in turn, brought members of the jury to the edges of their chairs. We would like to share with all the contestants our commentary and the results of this year's competition." He lifted the clipboard in front of him and then put it down again to explain some more.

"We've worked very hard to make the Sarutobi the fairest possible young musicians' competition. The screen, while it deprives us of the pleasure of watching you, does away with visual distractions. Likewise, we have no invited audience. It is our feeling that audience applause—much as all of you deserve it—has a slightly distorting effect. It can tip the balance, sometimes." He looked hard at all of us. "And so, even if we recognize some faces"—he looked at Mirai-san—"we truly don't know whose number is what." He smiled.

"Hiruzen Sarutobi would surely have been pleased to be here today. Those of us who remember him, with his beret and his pipe, almost feel that he is."

Then he lifted his clipboard again and began to read.

"Number One: A genuinely fluid performance, strikingly attentive to the musical fabric, sharply coherent phrasing, the melodies seem to bleed into the air.

"Number Two: Splendid command of the subtleties of the piece; even with the unfortunate interruption to replace a string—even despite that—the concerto flows out in a stream connecting the instrument and the listener in a series of crystalline moments.

"Number Three: Extraordinary combination of power and tenderness, extremely uncommon in young musicians; a sound that is radiant with paradox, gleaming in its coercion of notes into statements of art.

"Number Four: A staggeringly soulful rendering, almost ethereal shaping of the themes, portraying the simultaneous whimsy and tragedy of the Mozartean vision.

"Number Five: A pure, artless, supremely intelligent rendering, in which the buoyant surface of the music is at all times supported by an animated inner pulse.

"Number Six: The mature depth of this interpretation, the vigor of its treatment of the musical ideas, and the astonishing sense of kinship between composer and player—these constitute an almost magical effect.

"In short, ladies and gentlemen, there wasn't a clinker in the bunch." He smiled at us. I think he beamed.

We were evidently supposed to laugh. Most of us did. The other people in the jury looked around at us and smiled and shifted in their seats.

"And now, our decision. Young people, this job is never easy.…" He nodded at us as if he were saying yes. "This is always mysterious and exciting for the judges. Well. Here is the news. The second-prize winner, who will be the alternate in case the first-prize winner is unable to play in January—" He looked up and down the line of us. "Isn't this an awful moment, everybody?" He chuckled. Nobody said anything.

"Number Three."

Everybody went "Euuhh?" Just a little sound, not loud.

"Number Three, stand up and show us who you are," said the round man, cheerfully, looking down the line of us. He really didn't know.

Ryuuji Hyuuga stood up. He wasn't smiling. Or he was almost not smiling. He looked as if he thought there was a mistake.

A woman read from a list, "Number Three is Ryuuji Hyuuga. Ryuuji-kun is fifteen years old." Everybody clapped. Still he didn't smile. Mirai-san whispered, "He's mad." I looked at his mouth. She was probably right.

"Congratulations to you," the round man said. "Now, Hyuuga-kun, we want you to stay good and healthy until January, in case…" He laughed. Ryuuji Hyuuga didn't. He sat down while people were still clapping.

The round man said, "And the moment everybody's been waiting for, our first-prize winner, who is scheduled to play the concerto with the Symphony in January. We might say this is the performer who hit the ball all the way out of the park." He looked down at the clipboard and then pushed it against his chest again. "Number Six."

I felt Mirai-san and Yukari say "Oh…" together. I think I said it with them. Kaori Miyazono. I instantly felt a little tiny hurt inside, and I knew there was a part of me that had wanted to win. My hands started clapping, along with everyone else's, and I remembered that she was almost the age Mozart was when he wrote the concerto. And she loved his music so much, and she probably deserved the prize most of all. She stood up, grinning and gasping.

"My god," she said. "God. God. Oh, god." Her whole clumsiness suddenly looked gorgeous. I can't explain it. The flowers all over her dress were almost vibrating.

The woman said, "First-prize winner is Kaori Miyazono. Kaori is seventeen years old."

All the judges were standing up and everyone was crowding around Kaori. "Thank you, everyone, for a splendid afternoon," one of the women judges said. We stood up. I wondered how Yukari and Izuku and Mirai-san felt. I wondered if they'd counted on winning, if they'd spent the whole summer wanting to win.

Mirai-san and Ryuuji Hyuuga and I had just a little bit of time to get ready to play the concert in the park.

Mirai-san gave me a hug. "Well, Wiena-chan, we made it through this afternoon, didn't we? Can I call you Staggeringly Soulful from now on?"

Her hug felt good. I laughed. "You played crystallized moments," I said. "I don't even know what those are."

She whispered, "I don't either. Crystalline."

"Oh. Crystalline. Well, you played them."

People were moving and shuffling around; there was a sound of a lot of people talking and some laughing. Somebody hugged Kaori and her glasses fell off sideways. There were shoulders and violin cases and people hugging each other and shaking hands and a combination of smells almost like a locker room. Somebody called Mirai-san "Mirai-san Moments," and one of the women had Izuku backed into a corner and was telling him about her grandfather who made violins. Yukari came over to me and said, "Are you in?"

"In what?"

"In the fan club to come hear Kaori play in January. We'll all sit together and cheer." Looking at her, I thought about each of us going to our next lesson, picking out a new concerto to learn.

"Sure. Yes. Sure. Of course," I said.

We laughed. "See you then," she said.

Great-great-grandmother Wiena might have been a very old lady, very peaceful, sitting in a rocking chair somewhere.

My mother was waiting for me outside the building, sitting in the car reading a book. It was still hot. I got in the car. We looked at each other. I leaned against the seat and closed my eyes, and she started the engine. "The Inaba Ridge girl won first," I said. "Broken fingers and all." I wanted to spend the whole evening at home, cuddled up with Suba-chan, instead of playing a concert in the park.

"And how do you feel about that?" she asked. She put her hand on my knee. I opened my eyes and looked at it. It was a bug-saving hand, a piano-playing hand, a gear-shifting hand. Middle-aged, I suppose. She used to change my diapers with it. It went waggling up along beside her head when she was happy to see people. It was the hand she'd held tight to Ruby with. It was a France hand that had gone all the way to Japan to get to Konoha to have me.

"I feel okay about it," I said, looking at her hand. "Pretty much." She squeezed my knee and took hold of the steering wheel. We didn't say anything for a while.

"The alternate was all scowly and pouty. Guess who it is," I said.

"I don't know. Mirai-chan?"

"Mama, think. Think who wouldn't even be happy with second prize."

She drove along thinking. "I haven't a clue."

"My new stand partner."

She opened her mouth wide and drove along with it hanging there. "Oh," she said. She closed her mouth. "Well. How many judges?"

"Four."

"Well. Four judges can't be wrong. Good for him."

Papa was making Ramen and Boruto was garlicking the bread when we walked into the kitchen. Boruto had a pastry brush lifted above the loaf of bread, and my father was shoving noodle into the big pot of boiling water. They stopped and held still, nothing moved but the steam coming from the pot.

I told them the results. They looked at me.

"I'm fine," I said. "I played it well. You'll watch me on the video, they're sending everybody a CD." They were looking at me to see how I really felt. It hit me that the three people standing there in the kitchen might never want to hear that Mozart concerto again in their lives. I laughed. "I'm fine," I said. Their faces relaxed, and they went on getting dinner ready.

I wasn't exactly fine. I was tired, and I was disappointed, and I was happy for Kaori, and I knew that I knew my great-great-grandmother Wiena better than anybody would ever believe, and what I said was almost true: I would befine. I just wasn't exactly all fine yet.

I ran upstairs to put on my Youth Orchestra dress and had a one-minute hug with Suba-chan. My mother tied a big apron on me so I wouldn't spill Ramen soup on my dress and we had dinner in a hurry. Everybody was in a good mood, or seemed to be. Something was over. School would start tomorrow. Boruto and I would be running around early in the morning arguing over the bathroom. I looked at him across the dining-room table, and I thought about what an amazing coincidence it was that Japan and Europe had come together to get us hybrids, shoveling Ramnen noodle into our mouths.

For a moment during dinner, I stopped and closed my eyes and listened. Garlic bread being crunched, little clinks of forks on plates, the sound of somebody wiping a hand on a napkin. Slurps of noodles going into mouths. I opened my eyes. Mama was holding the basket of garlic bread toward me and she was staring at me. Little Wiena with her braids spread out on the pillow in her bed in Suprasl appeared for an instant, and Mama and I looked at each other, not interrupted by anything, and I said inside my head that this was my mother, and then I took the basket from her and we continued our dinner.

(◕ω◕✿)

Anya and Ayane had saved a place for my parents on a big blanket with exactly three rows of blankets in front of them. Even though my mother and father were full of Ramen noodles, I could see them munching on Anya's Healthy Nut Things.

Word had gotten around about the Sarutobi finals, and people backstage were calling Mirai-san "Mirai-san Moments," and I saw three people, two violinists and a clarinet player, try to congratulate Ryuuji Hyuuga on winning second place. Every single time, he pretended he was looking for something in his violin case or his pocket. He barely said thank-you.

Uncle Asto came around the end of the stage and we spotted each other and he put his left hand up like a sign. He came close and put both his hands on my shoulders. "Did you enjoy this afternoon, Wiena-chan?" he asked.

"Yep. I did."

"The judges were quite taken with you."

I didn't say anything.

"I spoke with one of them." He put on a quoting voice, very bass and harrumphing: "'That Wiena Namikaze. She's Weiss's daughter?' I said 'Yes, and my niece's as well.' 'Quite remarkable, Asto-san. But quite young.'" He leaned toward my left ear, and went on in a softer harrumphing voice: "'A most inspirational performance, Asto-san. Most inspirational.'" His right hand applied a bit of extra pressure to my left shoulder, and he said, in his own voice, "Almost as exciting as the softball play-offs, eh?" He stepped back to see my reaction.

A big, face-breaking smile came up out of me. I would never in the world tell him about the pictures of Grandma Wiena's childhood that I saw through the notes while I was playing the concerto. I might tell Grandma Marie.

"I'm very, very proud," he said. "I'm going to sit with your parents now. Have a good show."

Somebody came by and bumped my elbow on the way to the stage. I said, "Yes. Sure. Thanks, Uncle Asto."

He lifted his hand in his flat-handed wave and walked away. I walked up the steps onto the stage.

Ryuuji Hyuuga's chair was missing its little rubber thing on the bottom of one leg and didn't sit squarely on the platform. He tore off a corner of the music folder and folded it up and stuck it under the uneven leg. The chair still didn't balance. He got very frustrated with it and sat and muttered while we tuned up.

After some speeches about how wonderful it was that the Youth Orchestra could fill in while the Symphony musicians were locked out in the labor conflict, we started playing.

As usual, Trouble Ojii-san was dancing. The concert went along. People clapped hard, the breeze lifted the pages just enough off the stand so that I was using four clothespins. I put the Sibelius Valse Triste up and Ryuuji Hyuuga shook out his left hand, hanging it down beside his chair. He was still annoyed that the chair sat crooked on the stage, and he jiggled it forward and back a bit to get a firmer grip.

I slid my mute up and put it on the bridge. The instructions say "con sordino" and that means put your mute on. Ryuuji Hyuuga didn't put his on. I guess he'd forgotten. I pointed with the end of my bow to the words. He put his mute on instantly, without looking at it. He kept his eyes concentrating straight on the conductor. Ryuuji Hyuuga has very good peripheral vision.

The conductor stood very straight and still so that to the audience it looked as if he was just waiting, and he held up two fingers and turned them back and forth, and made happy and sad faces, to remind us of the double meaning, and we began.

I saw Trouble Ojii-san out of the corner of my right eye, and he was wondering how to dance with those first low plucked notes in the basses. He was waiting. I thought about how he was so good at waiting. In a way, he'd been spending his whole life waiting.

When we start playing the melody, using our bows, the suspense begins. Then there's a rallentando, a slowing down, and then at letter C there's an a tempo and the very strange silences begin. I don't know any other piece, of all the pieces I've ever heard, that has a silence like that. It's between the second and third beat of the waltz rhythm, and it makes you hold everything up in the air for a moment. Absolutely nothing happens. Like a huge question mark but nobody tells you what the question is. You have to figure it out by yourself.

That moment lets you think so much, your mind can go so fast in that little instant of no sound. You can imagine every question you've ever thought about: Why did Ruby's baby die? Why did Grandma Wiena get annihilated at Treblinka? Why did Ayane's father die in the volcano? How did Trouble Ojii-san get the way he is? Will anybody ever be in love with me? You can let it get your mind very overwhelmed.

What I began to notice was that Trouble Ojii-san got absorbed, too. He started dancing, then I saw him stop and stare at the conductor. His head was going up and down, in rhythm with the conductor's arms. Then he started dancing again.

But he kept stopping. Dancing then stopping, dancing then stopping. He stopped and looked up at us playing, then danced again, his same dance. Then he stopped and looked down at the ground, and then danced again. He kept doing that.

We finished playing the piece and people clapped and we stood up. I very fast put the next music on top. Out of the side of my eye I saw Ryuuji Hyuuga's leg jerk a little bit, then he almost backed into me. I looked down. Trouble Ojii-san was standing right below us. He had his veiny hands up on the edge of the boards of the stage. "Miss Wiena," he said.

I bent down in front of Ryuuji Hyuuga's legs to hear him.

"That there Waltz Tree," said Trouble Ojii-san in his croaky voice. Even in his old watery eyes I could see he had such happiness. They were shiny in the stage lights. "That there Waltz Tree."

"That's Waltz Tree?" I didn't take it all in at first.

"Yes sir, Miss Wiena, that there song," he said. He nodded his head up and down and kept doing it. "That song. Waltz in Three. That's the one."

Valse Triste. Waltz Tree. Of course. I didn't know what to say. I just hung there, bent over with my violin hanging down. Suddenly there were tears stinging my eye sockets. I tried to smile at him, and then I realized everybody had stopped clapping and the orchestra had sat down again and we were supposed to play the next piece. I scooted backward across Ryuuji Hyuuga into my chair.

We finished the concert and stood up for the applause. Ryuuji Hyuuga said, without turning directly to me, "That guy grabbed my pants. He actually grabbed them. Is he missing some marbles?"

I breathed in and out slowly before I answered him. "Not really."

(◕ω◕✿)

My parents and Boruto and Ayane and Anya were all standing beside my violin case on the platform backstage. When I walked around the corner they all started singing, to the tune of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow":

"A Most Inspirational Play-er

A Most Inspirational Play-er

A Most Inspirational Play-errrrr

Which nobody can deny.…"

Except that Boruto just held up his fingers making ditto marks instead of repeating the words three times.

While Ayane and Anya were hugging me, I said, "I'll tell you the incredible Trouble Ojii-san story tomorrow. It'll be something to do during lunch."

"Is it the kind of thing sixhth-graders talk about?" Anya asked.

"Trust me," I said.

(◕ω◕✿)

My mother wanted to come into my room and brush my hair before I went to bed. Even with school starting the next day. "Just a few minutes," she said. I was in my pajamas. We sat down on my bed, with my back to her. She began brushing.

It felt good, the sound and the feel of the long strokes down from my scalp all the way to the ends. "I've always loved the smell of my children's hair," she said.

"I probably smell like a crowded park full of greasy chicken."

"You smell wonderful."

"Miss Ruby called me this morning," I said. I told her about it, but not completely everything. Not exactly. I said she'd wished me love.

"Wiena-chan," my mother said, "Ruby is one of the finest, most profoundly loyal and loving people you'll ever want to meet."

We sat on my bed feeling sorry for Ruby for some minutes, listening to the sound of the brush going through my hair. Then she said, "You know what would make almost all the difference with Ruby?"

"What would?"

"Now, I don't mean anybody ever saves you—don't get me wrong. I don't mean somebody swoops down and lets you out of your own unhappy life. Not at all, not ever." She breathed in and out slowly. "That doesn't happen. But. Sometimes somebody can be a connection." I was carrying the secret of the velvet purse connection with Poland and Suprasl and Paris and the shiny, dusted radio for the opera, and Trouble Ojii-san and his found song and his happy old eyes shiny in the stage lights, and my mother and Ruby hugging each other on the floor, and my head was full of tumbling pictures of people doing things all invisibly connected with other people.

"Are you talking about Miss Ruby or what?"

"I'm talking about Ruby, yes. What would really help her would be one good man. A man of principles and fairness and—Not the kind that suddenly takes a hike when the going gets sticky. A persister. That's what I mean."

The most persistent person I could think of was Trouble Ojii-san. He must have been looking for Valse Triste for more years than I'd been alive. In fact, he was exactly what Ayane said about the bamboo. Bending without breaking.

"Somebody who'd appreciate her. Help her hold her pain. Wiena-chan, her pain's too much to hold all by herself." I could hear tears coming into my mother's throat. "Do you know, every time she sings she's asking—maybe asking the universe—oh, I can't say it exactly—Every single time she sings, she's giving her pain a voice, and she's asking what it means."

"Do you think pain means anything?"

The brush strokes slowed down but they stayed steady. "Yes. Yes, I do."

"What happened to the husband she had?"

My mother sighed a middle-aged sigh. "Oh, he was—I suppose you could say the grief was too much for him. It made him into a not-nice person. He ended up walking away and blame Ruby for evetthing."

I remembered Ruby in her elegant red dress, screaming.

"Well, what do you think pain's supposed to mean?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know," she said. She brushed rhythmically, not missing a beat. "I do know it connects the whole human species." More brushing. "I just don't know why."

We were silent again for a few strokes. "Wiena-chan, what in the world was your buddy Trouble Ojii-san up to when he leaned on the stage? What was he saying to you?"

For a moment, I had a feeling of the world so full of millions of people, all of them with their own secrets, and they were all so important. Everybody.

"Remember he lost his Waltz Tree?"

"Right. His lost song."

"Well, think. Isn't it obvious?"

"What? Isn't what obvious?"

And suddenly it was funny. "Mama, think. What were we playing?" And I got started laughing. My mother stopped brushing. Everybody and their secrets. Nobody could translate anybody else's secrets, they'd all sound meaningless if they tried. I was laughing harder and harder. It was a song about Death, about dreaming you weren't going to die, it was so tragic, and I was thinking of all the millions of secrets and everybody going along not knowing anybody else's.

I turned around on my bed to look at her. "Mama, what was on the program?"

She scrunched up her face, thinking. I bet people do that on the tundra, and in Africa, and in Siberia, as much as we do it in an electrified place like Konoha. Face-scrunching. A human sport. I watched her. The scrunches were moving around her face. Then her mouth opened wide. She said it really slowly, even with a little bit of the silence between the beats. "Valse Triste. Waltz Tree. Oh, Wiena." Tears came into her voice. "Oh…"

My mother was crying and I was laughing. I thought it was very strange for a moment, and then I realized it couldn't be the other way around.

"Wiena-chan," she said, "I admire you."

"You do?"

"I do. You're a person of empathy and drive and—" she thought for a second, "and courage."

"What's empathy?"

"Oh," she turned my head away from her and started brushing again. "It's not sympathy, that's different, but they're close. Empathy is when you can feel for somebody—not because you think you should, not because it'll make you a better person—but when you can feel somebody's feelings because you haven't closed yourself off from them. From those feelings in yourself. E-m-p-a-t-h-y."

"Mama, can I go visit Grandma Marie next summer?"

She sniffled. "What an inspired idea! Sure, why not?"

"And Miss Ruby too, at the same time?"

"Yes." This was the woman who wouldn't let me ride my bike in the neighborhood park, and she was going to let me fly to Paris. We got up off my bed, and she put my hairbrush on a chair. We kissed good night. She called me her Most Inspirational Daughter and left my room.

I wrote "empathy" on the clipboard. And I looked at my list.

tenacity

annihilate

ambivalence

sabotage

simultaneity

trauma

hinterland

pernicious

flippant

ominous

arrogant

empathy

I imagined that the first assignment I'd get in English class the next day would be to write an essay or make a collage demonstrating "mastery" of all the words on the list. They're always talking about mastery at my school. I put the clipboard on the floor.

Way last June, on the day Uncle Asto had told me about the Sarutobi finals, when he'd looked at me in a way I couldn't describe, it was empathy. That's what it was. And then later, he'd said people talk too much about mastering a song, but what's more important is to merge with it—I sat on my bed and told myself I finally understood what he meant.

I turned down the covers.

Under my pillow was a drawing picture from Boruto. It was a tree, and on every single branch was hanging a violin. The caption said, "Martin Luther gets a better idea." And in neat small letters, "Congratulations to the Most Inspirational Player in the Hiruzen Sarutobi Competition," and there was a figure of me playing the violin with my softball uniform on. This time he'd made me my normal size.

I turned off the light and turned on the radio.

I tried to visualize the Beacon String Quartet in the picture in Uncle Asto's studio. I thought of their second violinist, the one who'd tipped me over the edge to be willing to play the Sarutobi finals. I couldn't remember her name.

It was because of the Konoha Symphony lockout that Trouble Ojii-san had found his Waltz Tree. If Ayane hadn't danced with him upriver in the hinterland, we wouldn't have known his name. If Anya hadn't gotten the courage to ask him questions, I wouldn't ever have heard about his lost song.

But it had started with Ruby: "Why on earth doesn't somebody dance with that man?"

If my bow had landed with the hair toward me, I'd have ended up learning a completely different Mozart concerto, way last year. I wouldn't have ever met Yukari and Kaori and Izuku, and Ryuuji Hyuuga would have been just a stand partner who treated me like his servant.

Somebody else would have been a finalist in the competition, maybe might have won it. Somebody was right now probably angry and upset, not being in the finals. I wondered who it was. Boy or girl. Old or young.

I lay down and pulled Suba-chan under the covers. School would begin the next morning and I'd be exhausted. Somebody had requested "So What" by Miles Davis on the radio, the same record I have.

Kaori and Ruby and Trouble Ojii-san were all related, too. There was something between them, a thread. And Yukari Koizumi and Uncle Asto and Ayane and Anya and Izuku. There wasn't a single person I could think of who wasn't connected to a whole bunch of other people I could think of. I thought of the blind woman in the airport bathroom trying to turn the water on and not knowing the secret code. If she knew it, she could be more connected with everybody else. But she was connected anyway.

I looked at the green light on the radio.

"So What" ended and the announcer started to talk. "The next tune is a request all the way from Nagano, for Wiena from Izuku, George Gershwin's 'Embraceable You.'" My head went alert on the pillow and Suba-chan jumped. The song started to play. I sat up, like sounding some kind of alarm, and Suba-chan dove off my bed. The song went on playing, just a regular request by a regular person for another regular person. The music just played, right on the radio in the middle of the night, from a studio somewhere, and I was sitting up straight in my bed, and I discovered that my whole body, all my cells and everything, jumped open and stayed that way long enough for me to know it was happening, and then everything closed, my lungs and everything went back to the way they were, and I got out of bed and danced in my bedroom to "Embraceable You," and I smiled in the dark, and I was very proud. I put my hand on my heart and it was jumpity-jumping along, just a regular heart all excited.

"Embraceable You" is a very beautiful song.

It ended. And I suddenly knew why Trouble Ojii-san had reminded me of something vaguely, the very first time I saw him: the Green Violinist in the painting. Trouble Ojii-san didn't have a violin, he had a song inside, needing to come out, and his face was twisted, and he was raggedy and his shoes didn't match, and he was all alone in the open air, dancing and dancing and dancing.

Izuku. Requested a song for me. Such a beautiful song. In the middle of the night. It was romantic, a romantic thing to do, and I wasn't even embarrassed. At all. I stood in my dark bedroom and looked at the little green light on the radio and I smiled. I curtsied in the middle of my room and got back into bed.

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