Violin

Chapter 13

The vestibule of a great house. The undeniable ornament of the German Baroque, gilded wood, two murals facing each other, a man, a woman, in powdered wigs.

Stefan had gained entry, his hands tucked inside his coat, and still spoke sternly in Russian to the guards, who were confused and unsure about this well-dressed man who had come to pay his respects.

"Herr Beethoven is here? Now?" asked Stefan in this sharp Rus sian. A divertissement. The guards spoke only German. At last one of the Czar's private men appeared.

Stefan played it to the hilt, without remo ving his bandaged hands, making a deep Russian bow, the cape falling around him on the tiled floor, the chandelier above lighting the dark, near monastic figure.

In Russian, he said, "I have come from Count Raminsky in St. Petersburg to pay my respects." His confidence and bearing were perfection. "And also to convey a message to Herr van Beethoven. It was for me that Herr Beethoven wrote a quartet which was sent to me by Prince Stefanovsky. Ah. I beg you to allow me a few moments with my good friend; I would not at this hour disturb the family, only I was told that the watch was all night, that I might call."

He was on his way to the door.

A great formality descended on the Russian guards and was imme diately adopted by the German officers and the wigged servants.

The servants trailed after the guards, then hastened to open doors.

"Herr Beethoven has gone home some time ago, but I can escort you to the room where the Prince is laid," said this Russian official, obviously in some awe of this tall imposing messenger. "And I should perhaps wake..."

"No. As I have already explained, I would not have them disturbed at this hour,"

said Stefan. He glanced about the house as though there was nothing in its regal dimensions that was familiar to him.

He started up the steps, the heavy fur-lined coat dancing gracefully just above the heels of his boots.

"The young Princess," he said glancing over his shoulder at the Russian guard who hastened to follow. "She was my childhood friend. I will come to call upon her at the proper hour. Only let me rest my eyes upon the old Prince and say a prayer.

The Russian guard started to speak, but they had come to the proper door. It was too late for words.

The death room. Immense, its walls replete with the gilded white curlicues that make the rooms of Vienna look so much like whipped cream; soaring pilasters with gilded tracery; a long row of outside windows, each deep in its rounded arch beneath a gilded soffit, its counterfeit in mirrors opposite and far at the end double doors such as those we entered now.

The coffin lay on a great curtained dais of rich gathered velvet, and a woman in a small gilded chair sat on the dais right beside the coffin, her head bowed in sleep. The nape of her neck showed a single strand of black beads, her dress was the high-waisted Empire style but in strict black mourning.

The whole bier was heaped and surrounded by exquisite bouquets of flowers.

Marble jardinieres held sprays of solemn lilies and dour roses in profusion all about the room, becoming part of the engulfing decoration.

White-painted French-style chairs were set out in rows, their solemn damask upholstery of deep green or red, in sharp contrast to the clumsy German-made white frames. Candles burned, singly and in candelabra and in the great chandelier above, a massive thing of gold and glass not unlike that which had fallen in Stefan's house, all crusted with beeswax, pure and white.

A thousand flames fluttered timidly in the quiet.

To the rear of the room, a row of monks sat, saying the Rosary aloud in Latin, sotto voce, and in unison. They didn't look up as the hooded figure entered and made his way towards the coffin.

On a long golden couch two women slept, a younger dark-haired woman with Stefan's sharp features, her head against the other woman's shoulder, both of them dressed in rich black, their veils for the moment thrown back. A brooch loomed on the elder's neck. Her hair was silver and white. The younger stirred in her sleep as if arguing with someone but didn't wake, even as Stefan walked past, though some distance from her.

My mother.

The unctuous Russian guard didn't dare to stop the imperious aristocrat who boldly came to the dais.

Servants at the open door stood blind, as if they were waxen dummies in their pre-Napoleonic blue satin and pigtailed wigs.

Stefan stood before the dais. Only two steps above, the young woman slept, in her small gilded chair, one arm in the coffin.

My sister Vera. Does my voice tremble? Look at her, how she mourns him.

Vera. And look into the coffin itself

Our vision took us close. I was flooded with the scent of flowers, deep intoxicating perfume of lilies, other blooms. Candle wax; it was the sweeping swooning scent of my little Prytania Street Chapel of childhood, that capsule of sanctity and safety in which we knelt with Mother at the ornate rail, the rich gladioli on the Altar far outshining our little bundles of lantana.

Sadness. Oh, heart, such sadness.

But I could think of nothing but this before me. I was with Stefan in this attempt, and petrified with fear. The hooded figure quietly climbed the first two steps of the dais. I couldn't bear the heat of my own heart. No memory of mine took first place over this hurt, this harm, this fear of what was to come, of cruelty and shattered dreams.

Look at my father. Look at the man who destroyed my hands.

The corpse looked cruel, but only in a faded dried-up insignificant way, his Slavic features more evident in death, angles hardened, cheeks deeply grooved, nose falsely narrowed by the undertaker perhaps, lips too reddened with cake rouge and turning down, without the breath of life to make them give the quarter smile he'd worn so easily before he was ever angered or brought to this.

Very painted, this face, and his body was excessively dressed with furs and jewels and colored braids and velvet, sumptuous in the Russian style where everything must sparkle to express value. His hands with all their rings lay like dough on his chest, holding a crucifix.

But there beside him lay nestled in the satin the violin, our violin, against which Vera's sleeping hand dangled.

"Stefan, no!" I said. "How can you get it?" I whispered in our vigilant darkness.

"She is touching it. Stefan."

Ah, you fear for my life as we watch this old tableau. And yet you won't give me my violin. Now watch me die for it.

I tried to turn away. He forced me to look. Rooted in the scene, we would be spared nothing. In our invisible form, I felt his heartbeat, I felt the tight wet tremble of his hand as he turned my head.

"Look," was all he could say to me. "Look at me, during the last few seconds of my life."

The hooded and cloaked figure mounted the last two steps of the dais. He stared down with glazed weary dark eyes at the dead Father. And then from beneath his cloak he reached with his thumbless bandage of a hand and scooped up the instrument and the bow, to his chest, quickly bracing it with the other maimed hand.

Vera woke.

"Stefan, no!" she whispered. Her eyes moved sharply, from left to right, a warning. She motioned desperately for him to leave.

He turned.

I saw the plot. His brothers came from the doors of other chambers. A man rushed to pull away the screaming Vera. She reached out for Stefan. She shrieked in panic.

"Murderer!" cried the man who fired the first bullet which struck not merely Stefan's chest but the violin. I heard the wood splinter.

Stefan was overcome with horror.

"No, you will not!" Stefan said. "No." Shot after shot struck him and the violin.

He bolted. He ran down the center of the room, as they pumped their bullets into him.

Bullets came now not only from the fancy dressed gentlemen but from guards, bullets shattering into him and into the violin.

Stefan's face was flushed. Nothing stopped the figure that we beheld. Nothing.

We saw his open mouth gasping for breath, his eyes narrowed, the cloak streaming out behind him as he ran down the staircase, the violin and bow safe in his arms, no blood, no blood, save that which oozed from his hands, and now look!

The hands.

The hands were unbound and whole and had no need of bandages. They had once again their long and perfect fingers. They clutched the violin tight.

Stefan bowed his head against the wind as he passed through the front door-I gasped. The doors were bolted and he had not even seen. The crack of guns, the screams, rose in a grating splash of dissonance and then faded behind him.

Down the dark street he sped, feet pounding the shiny uneven stones, only glancing down to see that he had the violin and bow safr in his hand, then giving the run all of his young strength until he had left the cobblestoned center of the town, running, running.

Lights were a blur in the dark. Was it fog that wreathed these lanterns? Houses rose up in unrelieved blackness.

Finally, he stopped, unable to go any further. He rested against a chipped and peeling plaster wall, the cloak fallen back to cushion his head, his eyes shut for a moment. The violin and bow were safe and unscathed in his pale fingers. He took deep breath after breath, and glanced frantically to see if anyone came to follow.

The night was without echoes. Figures moved in the dark but they were too dim to be seen, too far from the lights above occasional doorways. Did he notice the mist that curled along the ground? Was it common for winter in Vienna? Clumps of figures watched him. Were they to him only the tramps of the city night and nothing more?

Once again, he fled.

Only when he had crossed the broad bright Ringstrasse with its string of lights, and its utterly indifferent late-night crowds, and sought the open country, did he stop again and for the first time look down at his restored hands, his hands unbandaged and cured-and at the violin. He held it up by the light of the dim lamps of the city against the welkin to see that the violin was whole, unharmed, not so much as scratched. The long Strad. His. And the bow he had so loved.

He looked up, and back at the city he'd left. From the rise where he stood, the city gave its dim winter lights warmly to the lowering clouds. He was confused, elated, astonished.

We became material. The smells of the pine woods and the cold air, scented by distant chimney smoke, surrounded us.

We stood in the wood not far from him, but too far to ever comfort him, that Stefan of over a hundred years ago, standing there, his breath steaming in the cold, holding the instrument so carefully, his eyes peering towards this mystery he'd left behind.

Something was horribly wrong, and he knew it. Something was so monstrously wrong that he was caught in angst without end.

My spirit Stefan, my guide and companion, gave a soft moan though the distant figure did not. The distant figure held its vivid color, held its vibrant materiality, but it examined its clothes for wounds. It examined its head and hair. Intact, all. Here.

"He's a ghost, he's been since the first shot," I said, "and he didn't know it!" I sighed softly. I looked up to my Stefan and then at the far figure, who seemed the more innocent, the more helpless, the younger only by countenance and lack of poise. The specter beside me swallowed and his lips were wet.

"You died in that room," I said.

I felt such a piercing pain within me that I wanted only to love him, to know him completely with my soul and to embrace him. I turned and kissed his cheek. He bowed his head to receive more kisses, pushing his cold hard forehead against mine, and then he gestured to the distant newborn ghost yonder.

The distant newborn ghost examined his cured hands, his violin.

"Requiem aiternam dona eis Domine," said my companion, bitterly.

"The bullets shattered you and the violin," I said.

Frantically, the distant Stefan turned on his heels and began a trek through the trees. Again and again he glanced back.

"My God, he's dead but he doesn't know it."

My Stefan only smiled, his hand on my neck.

A journey without a map or destination.

We followed him on his crazed wanderings; this was the hideous fog of Hamlet's

"undiscover'd country."

I was gripped in a fierce chill. In memory I stood by Lily's grave, or was it Mother's? It was in that suffocating monstrous time before grief begins when everything is horror. Look at him, he's dead and he wanders and he wanders.

Through quaint small German towns with sloped roofs and crooked streets, he moved and we behind him-both of us bodiless again or anchored only in our shared perspective. He walked across great empty fields and into the light forest again. No one saw him! Yet he heard the rustling spirits gathering: he tried to see what moved above, below, beside.

Morning.

Coming down into the main street of a small town, he approached the butcher's stall, spoke to the man, but the man could not see or hear him. He touched the cook on her shoulder, tried to shake her, but though he saw his gesture plain enough in some deep conflict between will and fact, she sensed nothing.

A priest came in a long black cassock, bidding good morning to the early shoppers. Stefan grabbed hold of him, but the priest could not see or hear him.

He was wild, watching the milling village crowd. Then solemn, trying desperately to reason on this.

Now, with greater clarity, he saw the dead hovering near. He saw what could only be ghosts, so broken and fragmented were their human shapes, and he stared at them as a living being might, in terror.

I squeezed my eyes shut; I saw the small rectangle of Lily's grave. I saw the handfuls of dirt strike the small white coffin. Karl cried, "Triana, Triana, Triana!" as I said over and over, "I'm with you!" Karl said, "My work's undone, unfinished, look at it, Triana, there is no book, it's not done, it's-look, where are the papers, help me, it's all ruined.

No, go away from me.

Behold this figure staring at the other shades who come as if drawn by his sheen.

He feared; he searched their evanescent faces. Now and then he called out the names of the dead he had known in childhood, beseechingly, and then with a twisted frantic look, fell silent.

No one had heard this noise.

I moaned, and the figure beside me held me tight, as if he too could scarcely bear the sight of his own stranded soul, vivid and beautiful in his cloak and shimmering hair, in the middle of a crowd no more or less brilliantly tinted than himself that couldn't see him.

Deliberately he grew calm. The tears hovered, giving his eyes that great lustrous authority that motionless tears give. He lifted the violin and looked at it. He put it to his shoulder.

He began to play. He closed his eyes and gave himself to his terror in a mad dance that would have drawn applause from Paganini, a protest, a lament, a dirge and, slowly, opening his eyes, as the bow moved, as the music ripped through us, he realized no one, no one in the square of this town,no one anywhere near or far could see or hear him.

For one moment he faded. Holding the violin in his right hand and bow in the left, he brought these hands up to his ears and bowed his head, but as the color drained from his shape, he shuddered all over and opened his eyes wide. The air around him swirled with ever more visible spirits.

He shook his head; he brought his mouth back a3 a child might when crying.

"Maestro, Maestro!" he whispered. "You are locked in your deafuess, and I am locked out of all hearing! Maestro, I am dead! Maestro, I am as alone now as you are! Maestro, they cannot hear me!" He screamed the words.

Did days pass?

Years?

I clung to my Stefan, the guide in this murky world, shivering though there was no real cold, watching the figure walk again, and now and then lift the violin to his ear and play some frantic series of notes, only to stop in rank rage, his teeth clenched, his head shaking.

Vienna once more perhaps. I didn't know. An Italian city. It might have been Paris. I didn't know. The details of those times were too mingled in my mind from study and imagining.

He walked on.

The sky above became not so much a measure of anything natural but a canopy for an existence apart from nature, a great black fabric snagged with carelessly flung stars like diamonds on a mourner's veil. At morn sometime s, a lowering drape.

In a graveyard of rich tombs, the wanderer stopped. We were invisible again, close to him. He looked at the tombs, he read the names on them. He came to the tomb of Van Meck. He read his Father's name. He wiped the thick crust of dirt and moss from the stone.

Time was no longer fixed to the clock and the watch. He drew out his pocket watch and stared at it, and the face said nothing back to him.

Other spirits clustered in the uneven dark, curious, drawn by his firm movements and bright color. He peered into their faces.

"Father?" he whispered. "Father?"

The spirits shied away, as if they were balloons in the wind, tied on loose string that could be swept to right or left by one blow to the cords that bound them to the earth.

The full realization came over his face now. He was dead, most definitely dead.

He was not merely dead, but surely isolated from any other ghost like himself!

He searched the air and the earth for another sentient phantom-as determined, as full of misery. He found nothing.

Did he see it as my Stefan and I saw it now?

Yes, you and I see now what I saw then-what I saw, knowing only that I was dead, and not what it meant that I still walked on earth, what I might do in this wretched perdition-knowing only that I moved from place to place, that nothing bound me or constricted me or comforted me, knowing only that I had become no one!

Into a small church we wandered during Mass. It was in the German style but simpler from the earlier days before the Rococo had covered over Vienna. Gothic arches rose from these rosetted columns. The stones were large and unpolished. The congregation were country folk, and chairs were few, almost none.

His spectral appearance hadn't changed. He was still the sturdy polychrome vision.

He watched the distant ceremony on the Altar beneath the blood red canopy held by Gothic saints, starved, gnawed, venerable, and clumsily positioned there as stanchions.

Before the high crucifix, the priest raised the round white consecrated host, the magic wafer, the miraculously palatable body and blood. I could smell the incense. The tiny bells rang. The congregation murmured in Latin.

The ghost of Stefan looked coldly on them, trembling, as a man bound for execution might on the strangers who watch him walk to the gallows. But there was no gallows.

Out into the wind he went again, walking uphill, walking that walk that I imagine when I hear the Second Movement of Beethoven's Ninth, that dogged march. Up and up through the woods, up and up he walked. I thought I saw snow and then rain, but I didn't know. It seemed leaves swirled about him once and he stood in a shower of these yellow falling leaves, and staggered once onto a road to wave at a carriage that took no notice of him.

"But how did it start?" I said. "How did you break through? How did you become this strong tenacious monster that tortures me?" I demanded. In the blackness that shrouded us, I felt his cheek, and his mouth.

Oh, merciless question. You have my violin. Be still, watch. Or give me the instrument now. Haven 't you seen enough to know that it's mine, that it belongs to me, that I brought it over the divide and into this realm with my very life’s blood, and you hold it, so that I can't get it loose; the gods are mad, if they exist, that let such a thing happen. The God in Heaven is a monster. Learn from what you see.

"You learn, Stefan," I said. I clutched the violin all the more securely.

This brought only helpless need out of him at my side in the pitch dark where we hovered, his arms around me still, his forehead on my shoulder. He moaned as if confiding his pain, in a private code, his own hands covering mine, touching the wood and the strings of the violin but not seeking to pull it loose. I felt his lips move against my hair, finding the curve of my ear, and more so, I felt him pressed against me, urgent, trembling, unresolved. The heat inside me rose as if to warm both of us.

I stared back at the wandering young spirit.

Snow fell.

The young spirit watched it and saw that it didn't touch his cloak or his hair but seemed to fly past; he tried to catch it with his hands. He smiled.

His feet made a crunch in the snow. Was this something he truly felt or merely a sensation he supplied himself through will and anticipation? His long cloak was a dark shadow in the drifting snow, the hood thrown back, his eyes blinking into the white soundless flood from Heaven.

Suddenly a ghost startled him-a filmy wanderer out of the forest, a woman in grave wrappings, evidently addicted to menace, but he fought her off. He was shaken.

Though he'd done it with one stroke of his arm, he shivered and he ran. The snow grew thicker, and it seemed for a moment I could not see him at all, and then he appeared, visible, dark, ahead of us.

It was the cemetery again, full of graves both large and small. He stood at the gates. He peered inside. He saw a wandering ghost drifting by, talking to itself like a mad human, a gossamer thing of snaggled hair and wavering limbs.

He reached out and pushed the gate. Was this fancy? Or was he strong enough to make this material thing move? He didn't test it beyond this but merely walked past the high pickets and down the wintry path where snow had not come yet but all the fallen leaves were crisp and red and yellow.

Ahead, a small group of human mourners gathered by a humble grave, its stone no more than a pyramid. They wept, and finally all drifted away but one, one elderly woman, who, walking off, found a place to be seated on the edge of a mo re richly carved monument, beside the graven statue of a dead child! A dead child! I marveled.

The dead child was marble and held a flower in her hand. I saw my daughter-but this was fleeting-there was no monument for my Lily-and this cemetery of another century-descended once more, with our wandering ghost staring at the distant mournful figure-a woman in a black bonnet with long satin strings, a woman in big full skirts, skirts of a later time than when Vera in her slim gown had rushed across a room to save her brother.

Did the ghost realize this? Decades had gone by? The ghost merely gazed on the woman and walked in front of her, testing his invisibility to her, and shook his head in thoughtful meditation. Was he resigned now to the utter horror of purposeless existence?

Suddenly his eyes fell on the grave round which the mourners had gathered! He saw the single name carved on the pyramid.

I saw it too.

Beethoven.

A cry came from young Stefan's lips that should have waked all from their graves! Once again, clutching instrument in one hand and bow in the other, he pressed his fists to his head as he roared and roared. "Maestro! Maestro!"

The mourning woman heard nothing, noticed nothing. She didn't see the ghost who flung himself into the dirt, digging at it with his hands, letting the violin tumble loose.

"Maestro, where are you? Where did you go? When did you die? I'm alone!

Maestro, it's Stefan, help me. Lay my case before God! Maestro."

Agony.

Angor animi.

The Stefan beside me quaked, and the pain in my chest spread like a fire in my heart and lungs. The young man lay before the neglected monument, among the flowers left there by the woman. He sobbed. He beat his fist upon the ground.

"Maestro! Why did I not go to Hell! Is this Hell? Maestro, where are the ghosts of the damned, is this damnation, Maestro, what have I done? Maestro .. ." Now it was grief, pure grief. "Maestro, my beloved teacher, my beloved Beethoven."

His sobs were dry and soundless.

The mourning woman only looked at the stone with the name Beethoven.

Through her fingers passed the beads, very slowly, of a simple black and silver Rosary.

The somber kind of Rosary used by nuns when I was a little girl. I saw her lips moving.

Her face was narrow, eloquent, her eyes half-lidded as she prayed. Gray eyelashes, scantly visible, gaze fixed as though she truly meditated on the sacred Mysteries. Which one did she see before her?

She heard no cries from anyone there; she was alone, the human; and he was alone, the spirit. And the leaves spread out yellow all around them, and the trees thrust weak bare limbs into the hopeless sky.

At last, he drew himself together. He climbed to his knees and then to his feet and he lifted the violin, brushing the dirt and bits of leaf from it. He bent his head in a perfect statement of sorrow.

It seemed an endless time the woman prayed. I could almost hear her prayers.

She said her Hail Marys in German. She had come to the fifty-fourth bead, the last Hail Mary, or Ave, of the last decade. I looked at the marble statue of the child beside her.

Stupid, stupid, coincidence, or his connivance that he had presented this scene thus to me, with that child in marble and a woman in black. And a Rosary, a Rosary such as Rosalind and I had once torn to pieces in a quarrel after our Mother's death, "It's mine!"

Don't be the vain fool. This is what happened! Do you think I pluck it from your mind, the disasters that twisted my soul and made me what I am? I show you who I am, I make up nothing. I have such agony in me that imagination means nothing; it's overwhelmed by a fate that ought to teach you frar and compassion. Give me back my violin.

"Do you learn compassion from this?" I demanded. "You who would drive people mad with your music?"

His lips touched my neck, his hand ground hard into my arm.

The young ghost brushed leaves from his fur-lined cloak, just as a human man might do, and watched in a daze as they fell to the ground. Again, he looked at the name:

Beethoven.

Then he reached down to gather up his violin and his bow, and this time, as he lifted the instrument to play, he began a familiar theme, a theme I knew with my whole heart, the first theme of music I had ever memorized, in my life. It was the lead melody from Beethoven's one and only Concerto for violin and orchestra-that lovely, lovely zesty song that seems too full of happiness really to be the Beethoven of the heroic symphonies and mystical quartets, a song even a talentless boob like me could memorize in one night, as I watched an old genius play it.

Softly, Stefan played it, not telling of grief, but only of tribute. For you, Maestro, the music you wrote, this sprightly melody for the violin written when you were young and before the horror of silence came down on you, and wrapped you away from all the world so that you had to make music that was monstrous in that vacuum.

I could have sung this melody with him. How perfectly it rose from the strings, and how the distant ghost let himself drift into it, body scarcely moving, winding in and out of the melody itself to take up orchestral parts and weave them back into the solo, just as he had done with another piece of music so long ago for Paganini.

At last he came to that part which is called the cadenza, when the violinist is to take two themes or all themes and play them together, when themes collide, intermingled in an orgy of invention, and this he let loose-fresh, and lustrous, and full of sweet serenity. His face was smooth with resignation. He played and he played, and gradually I felt my own body grow limp in my Stefan's arms. I felt myself understand what I had tried to tell him:

Grief is wise. Grief does not cry. Grief comes only long after the horror at the sight of the grave, the horror at the side of the bed, grief is wise, and grief is imperturbable.

Stillness. He had come to the end. The note hovered in the air, then died. Only the forest sang on in its usual muted song, of tiny organic instruments too varied ever to be counted-birds, leaves, the cricket beneath the fern. The air was gray and soft and wet and clinging.

"Maestro," he whispered. "May Perpetual Light Shine Upon You...." He wiped at his cheek. "May your soul and the souls of all the Faithful Departed rest in Peace."

The mourning woman, heavy in her black bonnet and huge skirts, rose slowly from her seat beside the marble child. She came towards him! She could see him! She suddenly reached out to him.

In German she spoke. "Thank you for that," she said. "Beautiful young man, and that you played it with such skill and feeling."

He could only stare at her.

He was afraid. The young ghost was afraid. He looked at her perplexed. He didn't dare to speak. She stroked his face with her hand, and spoke again.

"Young man," she said. "So blessed. Thank you for that on this day of all days.

I love this music so. And always have. Whoever doesn't love him is a coward."

He seemed unable to answer.

Politely, she withdrew, turning her eyes away to give him his privacy again, and she made her way down the path.

Then he called out: "Thank you, madam."

She turned again and nodded.

"Ah, and this day of all days, my last visit here perhaps. You know they move the grave soon. They will put him in the new cemetery with Schubert."

"Schubert!" he whispered.

He held in his shock.

Schubert had died young. But how could this disconnected counterfeit of a living man know such a thing, roaming in the ether?

It didn't need to be said aloud. We all knew this, all of us-the woman of memory, and the young ghost, and the ghost that held me, and I. Schubert the maker of songs had died young, only three years or less after his visit to the deathbed of Beethoven.

Transfixed, the young ghost watched her leave the graveyard.

"And so it began!" I whispered. I stared at the visible ghost, the powerful ghost.

"What drives this spirit to visibility?" I demanded. "I can take the woman seated beside the marble child, but can you see your dark and secret gift which can cross the divide of death? Do you? Have you ever looked at these lessons before?"

He wouldn't answer me.