Crack: Cantabile 4--

Elias turned. His eyes were the color of old piano keys, yellowed and cracked. "If I play it, the note will hear itself. And once heard, it cannot be unplayed."

The second note followed, and the third. They did not form a melody. They formed a landscape —a frozen lake in the instant before it gives way. Each note was a hairline crack spreading outward, branching, seeking the weakest point in the ice. Cantabile 4-- Crack

Outside, on the Danube Canal, the ice was beginning to break. Elias turned

"The crack," he whispered, not turning. "It's coming." And once heard, it cannot be unplayed

Not the Elias Varga of now—the stooped, half-blind man with ink-stained fingers. He saw the boy of seven, standing in the rubble of Budapest, 1956. He saw his father's hand, still holding a broken cello neck, protruding from the collapsed stairwell. He saw the silence that had followed the shelling—a silence so complete that he had spent the rest of his life trying to fill it.

"I remember," he said. "I remember what came before the silence."

"Play it for me," Ilona said. It was not a request. She had heard him play the first three Cantabiles —each one a study in how a line could bend without breaking. The first was a river finding its course. The second, a feather riding thermals above the Stephansdom. The third, a woman's name repeated until it lost all meaning.