Fifty Contemporary Writers by Bradford Morrow

Author:Bradford Morrow [Morrow, Bradford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6386-8
Publisher: Conjunctions
Published: 2013-12-12T23:34:00+00:00

From The Prague Sonatas

Bradford Morrow

… we are in the situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light at the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light at the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties.

—Franz Kafka

The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1917

ALL WARS BEGIN WITH music. Her father told her that when she was nine years old. The fife and drum. The marching songs, sung to the rhythm of boots tramping their way to battle. The bugle’s call for an infantry to charge. Even the wailing bassoon sirens that precede bombardment and the piccolo whistles of falling bombs themselves. War is music and music is war, he said, his breath sharp with garlic from their evening stew and mulled wine. He was frantic with the truth of his idea.

The girl looked up from her pillow and said nothing. She had no siblings, and her mother was already dead of the influenza that was sweeping across Europe like a scythe. This soldier father of hers, in peacetime a devoted piano teacher at the local conservatory, was all she had left. She knew she needed to remember what he said even if she didn’t really understand. She did her best to focus on him, a raving blur in her candlelit room, more a mad dream than a man, his voice melodic if a little slurred. Not just the outset but the end of war is music, too. Dirges of the defeated will always be played in counterpoint with the fanfare of victors. The screams of the fallen are the second measure in the symphony opened by the crack of gunshots. Think of it as God’s duet of tears and triumph, from the day war is declared to the day the surrenders are signed.

Why do people fight wars? the girl asked.

Because God lets them, he answered, suddenly quieter.

But why does he let them?

He thought for a moment, tucking the wool blanket under her chin, before saying, Because God loves music and so he must abide war.

Don’t go back, she pleaded in a voice so faint she herself hardly heard the words. He traced his fingers over her forehead, moving her fine brown hair away from her face so that he could see his daughter better. When he kissed her forehead, she could smell the vanilla and cinnamon she’d mixed in with his wine. And that was how she would always remember him, there where he stood by her bed, her papa, whispering his good nights, this wisp of a man in his tattered uniform and thin boots, with coal-bright eyes and a deep tenor voice that never failed to convince the girl of whatever puddings came into his head. She fell asleep lullabyed in the arms of a song she had heard some men singing on the village road in a language she could not understand.

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