As Sergei walked away, he listened to other tubas booming in the celebration parade a city stretch away -- ghostly sounds in a ghostly city, carried off on the cold November wind like dead leaves, crumpled newspapers, torn cobwebs -- while somewhere above them, somewhere else, the celestial music continued to play, undimmed, untouched, still out of his hearing yet drawing closer perhaps...Freed from his habitual brass weight, he found himself straightening, forcing his shoulders apart, filling with a lighter heart-beat. He thought he should feel at least a twinge of sorrow for his companion of so many years, for someone he had kissed scores upon scores of times, but he felt nothing -- or rather, he realized as he encountered his bedroom that night and saw the emptiness in the corner where the tuba had rested its weary coils for two decades, he felt an odd sense of relief, as if his life had become simpler, clearer, stripped of at least one lie.He told Anna he planned to keep it at the theater from now on. They needed the space.
from The Concert Ticket, an amazing novel by Olga Grushin
Interesting. I'm poking it, trying to think whether I understand his feeling. I am such a keeper. He feels no guilt, and seems not to anthropomorphize. Not much like me. Decades. Why would he have kept playing it all that time if it had caged him, pinched in his shoulders? Does heavenly music exclude tuba, I wonder? Or is it all some kind of metaphor. I have to assume that anyone named Olga would have to be writing in metaphor.
Posted by: Kristen | April 17, 2012 at 06:20 PM