EXCERPT FROM “THE INHABITANTS”

Excerpt From "The Inhabitants"

When, during one of their runs, Hannah and her teenage daughter Mira heard the music beckoning from the next street over, it was already late into the summer. The sound hummed toward them like a soft interruption.

The string instruments beckoned. They followed the sound the way they followed the ground, tentatively, then with dedication, as if it were a tangible thing, a rope to grasp and pull themselves forward, or maybe one which wound itself around their wrists and yanked their yielding bodies toward its other end. Entranced, they ran slowly, the music delivering them to its makers. A gathering riddled the grass of a plain house. Ten or fifteen people, some on the lawn and others on the curb across the street. In the center, two folding chairs, and their occupants, the musicians. A violin lay trapped under the chin of the man in the first seat, and a massive cello submitted to the woman in the second, her splayed legs encasing the wooden body in her embrace. He shook a bow between the fingers of his right hand and she shook one in her left. He wore coral khaki shorts and she wore her hair cascading in sheets across her shoulders.

The whole affair seemed liminal, uncertain of how it had emerged—impromptu for the audience drawn out by the curious music, but deliberate, pre-arranged, for the musicians. A middle-aged couple, one accustomed to innovating interesting ways of occupying their time because their children had by now grown and fled from them. The music billowed with a sharpness, like the movement of a curtain jutting upward and cinching to a crease, a precipice that loomed high above its gaping slope—before suddenly plunging downward, flattening first into the slow roll of hills and soon all the way back to a quiet ripple, but the imprints of the previous motions remained, the traces of the crease lurking long after the curtain had straightened out again. This audible, visualized motion was the strings’ doing. The violin and the cello paired beside one another, their strings a lull of vibrating steel, a series of drowsy low notes inhaling upwards into a tremble, a trembling, a quivering, then a shaking, then a seizing, then crying crying crying, screaming out those final high notes when the bow struck the strings at its most desperate of angles.

An odd array of noises, for a residential street in the evening. None of this looked like the backdrop of a concerto. But the musician-neighbors seemed only aware of how tightly they gripped their instruments so they might squeeze out the perfect sounds, no matter the incongruity between those sounds and their surroundings. And the audience-neighbors stood, mesmerized by the talents of these amateurs who mimicked professionals, this house and this lawn and this cracked curb reminiscent of all the accouterments of some old concert hall, perhaps an opera house with plush seats, the one in Paris let’s say, its ceiling painted by an immigrant artist who wanted to render an image in colors, something of red, yellow, blue green black that wheeled around in a circle and now matched their sky as it melted with the setting sun.

They shouldn’t have been surprised at the effect of the performance, for didn’t they, like everyone else, know that the only function of the violin was to convey a state of longing? To inject something invisible into the atmosphere, the pulsing instability of their thoughts, the jagged polygraph of their breaths?

The two of them succumbed to something slow but anxious, a recollective state of mind, one which lacked articulable thought, in the way the mind lies dreaming inside the body. It was the perpetual condition of listening to music, voices which overwhelm you so totally that you believe all you have ever done and all you will ever do is hear this, that your life will only be sound, even if the sound only rings on repeat inside your head.

The violin, the violin, the music heavied their eyelids, there was a cello too but they heard it less. They became more and more aware but less and less alert, overstimulated into lethargy. They blinked. Mira’s gaze fell upon a tree with pink fruit—pomegranates, small ones that would fit within two cupped hands, growing a couple months out of season, but nevertheless already ripening into the red of an infectious blush. Hanging upside-down on this neighborly tree was the fruit they associated with their holidays, with the Jewish new year, a time of joy for the promise of another beginning yet a time of unspoken wistfulness for all that had gone wrong in the months prior. Mira began to taste the memory of pomegranate on her tongue; the real violin notes bled into the conjured tastes of the fruit. The borders between senses folded into one another until everything coincided, her perception lost in what was liminal.

Hannah spent those transitory minutes captured by the sight of another human. The music’s melancholy scratches and slices had already unsettled her into complacency when she saw K. Her Nazi. The man with piercing blue eyes and a name wracked with a field of consonants. The man who claimed his family hailed from Argentina, one of the “far away” places to which Europe’s suspicious characters had kindly run after the war. The man who Hannah trained in his medical studies, who always seemed disingenuous, disinterested when he looked at her and when he cared for patients, as if he were thinking about more important things than the ailing people in front of him. At the concert, too, with a slight smirk toying with his mouth, he gave the impression of being unsatisfied, of being elsewhere, drawing in that elsewhere to meet him on this lawn, the physical spot he could not leave because he had come of his own volition.

Of course Hannah’s recent fixations on K would eventually manifest the man in the flesh, so close to her home. Ever since her revelation about K’s Nazi parentage, thoughts of K taunted Hannah: specters, visions, inklings of disquiet—he hovered around the edges of her attention, springing forward at any oblique reference: articles on far-right extremism in the military, books about the migratory patterns of former state leaders, news of cemeteries vandalized with swastikas. The obsessions swarmed her. She watched K get into a blue Volkswagen one day after work; whenever she saw one on the highway, she wondered if it was him. She noticed a man at Target with K’s blond hair; she trailed him through the aisles before he finally turned and it wasn’t him. Recently, a friend told her that K lived only a few blocks away; Hannah had twice “gone on a walk” that conveniently passed his home. From the sidewalk, she peered inward but saw nothing but a staircase ascending until it faded into darkness.

Hannah and K occupied the same spheres, worked in the same building, walked past the same trees and the same cars and the same houses each day. Though she barely spoke to him, Hannah understood now that she and K shared one landscape. Her landscape, which this man had invaded. A real-life (child of a) Nazi lived in her backyard, making his livelihood from Hannah’s mentorship. His presence infuriated her. The audacity of this K, to inhabit her thoughts, her streets, the sites of her story! She was the one who ran; murderers stayed put with their governments. K lacked even the decency to arrive on her doorstep as a German—he’d rinsed himself of his origins with a childhood in a third country, a third culture, a third language.

Now, in the outskirts of her daily run, here he stood again, broad shoulders and an angular head jutting up from the tall plane of chest, torso, legs—a hulking cross, dwarfing anyone who drew near. Where Hannah sprouted wrinkles, youth clung stubbornly to his face, his hairline, his entire image, his features refusing to reconcile themselves to the passage of time. Aging—the process of reaching the present by moving out beyond the years that chiseled us. As Hannah watched K listen to the music with such nonchalance, as if impervious to the violin’s lament, her usual feeling towards K was overtaken by the feeling always lurking untouched beneath it, an exasperation soaked in fright. Why must this man keep reappearing?

Eventually, K turned to go, raising his hand at an angle, a small wave to the couple, a goodbye salute. At this, Hannah reconvened with her daughter.

“Mira.” Her name was a hiss seeping out from her mother’s teeth. A line to reinsert the boundary between senses and categorize Mira back into herself.

“It’s K. The Argentinian Nazi. He’s on the left, watching the show—except, he’s leaving.” Hannah grabbed her daughter. “Let’s follow him.”

The run resumed itself. The dirge of the violin trailed them like a stream of tears pouring forth as their strides revealed their intention. They followed as K yanked open his car door thrust one leg inside curled the rest of his body to meet that leg slammed the door shut. His car, the blue Volkswagen, it revved its engine it zoomed it curved away from the curb it zoomed. He was in the car so his motions sped they sped all at once. Why he had driven

when he lived so close, why he had deliberately attended this performance when the rest of the audience appeared spontaneous, Hannah and Mira could not fathom the answers but they had no time for questions, the music was fading and they chased him in silence.

They chased him past rows of houses, homes with perfectly-mowed lawns, and homes overrun by shrubbery, and homes with no greenery at all, their lots plastered over by the cracked cement of sidewalks and driveways; onward past box hedges, oak trees, azaleas blooming, shady patches and sun-scorched ones, a scenic route yes a density of pretty things, they chased him past variety but registered none of it, registered only the image of his car retreating into the maze of streets paved before them. He never went more than twenty-five miles per hour, but to them he careened across those streets. He sat pumping the pedal while sitting inside an automated sheath of metal; they pushed through the air unprotected, all their muscles raging, not merely a driver’s single foot. They fled towards him in sync, hurrying fluidly, hurrying organically, hurrying strong. The running was difficult but simple because now they knew how to do this, this action they called running, now that they had practiced, well, now that Hannah had instructed them to practice, now slipping through their fingers if they ever became brazen enough to grasp at it, look at it, think about it, now only ever the idea of what could not be contained, now a violence taunting the impossibility of the present with the inevitability of the past. Now was only ever forward or backward, never that point where feet touched ground. They were on foot, so while they ran, ran, sprinted with an uncontained velocity escalating by the second, each step headed towards a new place yet enumerated a drawn out sequence of behinds, compounding and compounding, expanding and expanding, an infinite series of individual nows stacked up against each other, another note penciled onto the bar of sheet music, another meal cooked to perfection yet left uneaten, another photograph propped up on a bookshelf, another question shored up from an earlier era and rewritten into the screenshots of their moment, another soccer ball kicked and another sports game lost to a stray invective, another friend smiled and waved at until forgotten, another necklace clasped around an unsuspecting neck, another wave crashing along the great expanse of contiguous ocean, another child conceived and carried and cast out from the birth canal, upon which there was always another storm to prepare for, another pair of candles to light, another text message or news notification or video clip or some other form of memory sauntering out from the fray to laugh in cahoots with the real world playing out in front of us. They ran through each punctuation along their line of everything.

MADELINE CANFIELD B’24 does not listen to music when she goes on a run.