Page 30 of Hunger

The room doesn't answer.

"Thank you for the rosin."

The room doesn't answer.

I turn over onto my side, away from the window. I close my eyes.

I'm tired. My fingers hurt, my arms hurt, my neck hurts. My body is the body of a person who has used itself for the first time in months.

I sleep.

I sleep better than I have in years.

* * *

Farkas

I climb the wall at eleven.

The light in her window is on. The curtain is drawn but I can see the warm yellow of the lamplight bleeding around the edges. I wait on the ledge and listen.

She's playing.

The sound comes through the glass thin and rough and beautiful. A scale, the same scale repeated, the notes ugly at first and then less ugly.

I stand on the ledge in the dark and I listen.

I've heard music in a thousand cities. I've stood in cathedrals while choirs sang and in fields while shepherds played pipes. None of it touched me.

It's touching me now.

She finishes the scale and starts again. The notes are still rough but the rhythm is steadier, the bow finds the string more cleanly. She's remembering. The shape of who she was three years ago is coming back into her body one stiff finger at a time.

I close my eyes on the ledge and listen.

I don't work the latch. The music is hers.

She plays for a long time. I lose count of the scales. She moves to other things — exercises, intervals, a few measures of a piece I don't recognize. Her playing strengthens over the hour with the slow, sure return of skill to a body coming back from a long layoff, the trained things returning in waves. Her bow grows steadier. Her intonation finds its center.

There's a knock from somewhere beyond the wall. A muffled voice. The music stops.

I open my eyes.

The light in the room doesn't go off. I hear her moving inside, the soft rustle of an instrument being put away, the case closing.

I should go.

I don't go.

She moves around the room. The light goes off.

I wait on the ledge for another minute, then let myself in.

The room is dark.

She's on her back in the bed, her face a pale shape in the dark.

I close the window behind me. I take three steps from the window into the deeper shadow of the corner by the dresser, and stand still.