Sturgeon, Theodore The Cosmic Rape

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backward in time to find me arriving there as an infant, and back and back through the orphanage and
everywhere else, until he sees me carried whistling out of the bomb ruins near Anzio.
�Perhaps he needs to find nothing more about me. He has found what no one else has known... I may
not have known it myself... the thread that runs through all I have done. Who could have known that
cutting the hard black hose by the bus wheel, stamping the old man s legs against the curbstone, throwing
the kerosene rags into the print shop all were... acts of... music?
�I moan and hump myself backward to the dark climbing space behind the wall, and fell scrabbling
down and backward to floor level. I press aside the loose plywood and stand shaking, aching in the room. I
am caked with dried sweat and dirt; cold, hungry, frightened. I hobble to the door, beginning to sob again,
that soft bouncing staccato. It frightens me more. The iron door is locked. I am still more frightened. I
shake the door and then run away from it and sink down on my knees by the bed, looking up, right, left,
to see what is after me.
�What could be after me?
�I look under the bed. It is there, the black leather cheek of the violin case. The violin is after me.
�Kill it, then.
�I put my hand under the bed, a thumb-tip at the bottom, fingertips at the top, just enough to hold, as
if the thing were going to be hot. I draw it out. It is not hot. The sound it makes, scraping along the rough
concrete floor, is like the last water shouting and belching down a drain, and when it stops I hear the
strings faintly ringing.
�I open a steel clasp at the side. Once I am running from someone and hide in a dark cellar; I go around
a heap of fallen timbers and back into a dark corner; behind me a rat squeaks once and leaps at me and, as
I duck, scratches my shoulder and neck and I hear its yellow fangs come together as it squeaks again:
squeak-click! all at once. Now in the dark silence the clasp of the violin case squeak-clicks just the same,
and I feel the same blinding flash of terror. I kneel limp by the bed, wait until the heart-thunder goes out
of my ears.
�I do not want to see this violin; with all my soul I do not, and like someone watching a runaway truck
bear down on a dog in the street, helpless and horrified, I kneel there and watch my hands lift the case and
set it on the bed, open the other two clasps, turn back the lid.
�Sheep gut, horse hair, twigs and shingles.
�I put out a finger, slip it under the neck, lift the violin up far enough to rest half out of the case, take
away my finger and look at it. It weighs nothing. It makes a sound as I lift it, like the distant opening of a
door. I look at the pegs, and they take my eye along to the scroll, down, up, around, around again, around
to spin dizzily somewhere down in the shining wood. I put my hands over my face and kneel there
shaking.
�Guido moves like the night wind Massoni said it himself. Guido is a natural thing like holocaust,
like hurricane, and no one knows where he will strike next. Guido fears nothing.
�Then why crouch here like a fascinated bird staring into the jaws of a serpent? The violin will not
bite. The violin is nothing to fear. It is mute now; it is only when it makes music that
�Is music something to fear?
�Yes, oh yes.
�Music is a pressure inside, welling up and ready to burst out and fill the room, fill the world; but let a
note of it escape and blam! the hard hand of Pansoni, the Corfu shepherd, bruises the music back into the
mouth, or clubs down hard on the nape, so that you pitch forward and lie with your mouth full of sand
and speckles of pain dancing inside the eyeballs. Pansoni can hear music before it is born, lying like too
much food just under the solar plexus; and there he will kick you before ever a note can escape. Be six
years old, seven, and tend the sheep in the rocky hills, you alone with the stones and the wind and the soft
filthy silly sheep; sit on a crag and sing all the notes he has crushed in his hut, and he will come without a
sound and slip up behind you and knock you spinning and sliding down the mountain.
�And in time you learn. You learn that to hum is to ask for that ready hard hand, to whistle a note is
to be thrown out into the cold night and to cower there until daylight without a crust to eat. You feel the
music rising within you and before it can sound its first syllable you look up and his bright black eyes are [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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