Page 75 - Vol V. #8

“But... what are they doing?” he asked me. I left him staring, dismayed, at my invitation as the orchestra abandoned its clapophony and made its way through in a flurry of arms and instru- ment cases, herded through corridors by puz- zled guards.
The tastelessness of the palace’s main hall awed me into silence. The walls were lined in layers of crumbling stone and poorly-pointed brick, and hanging in alcoves like game trophies were icons of dead soldiers and politicians, the president’s onetime friends.
The surroundings were meant to inspire silence, but silence cannot be worked onto eleven year- olds. In a raucous confusion, we descended on the stage area, and began the business of unpacking and tuning, the arrangement of seating.
“Idismissed the geniuses early.
They were talented, but too jaded; they would ruin the song by rendering it too perfectly.”
“But where is N?” I asked, struck suddenly by the absence of one of the clarinettists; a dumpy
kid with honey-coloured hair and freckles, and obsessive green eyes, her clarinet was to have soared, or, in her case, barged, in and out of the second verse to underline the tune. Nobody knew or cared where she was, apart perhaps from the boy flautist I deputised to play her part, who looked at it in panic.
“Where is the audience?” a child asked me. It was a better question.
“The musicians always arrive early,” I assured her, but I sensed our audience around us, eyes follow- ing us from apertures in the walls, like those of the president himself in that wretched portrait with which L had cursed us all.
But where was the artist, and who was the father of her child? Her masterpiece lay behind a curtain on one side of the room. I resisted the urge to wander over and take a peek.
The audience entered during the second run- through of the song. It was a crowd of function- aries in suits and uniforms, and at the sight of
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