Berlin · The Long Way Down to Morning · Pulse Beat
In Berlin it rained in a way that was not like the monsoon. It did not fall; it hung. The conservatory was an old building with a staircase that sang when you walked on it and four hundred practice…
In Berlin it rained in a way that was not like the monsoon. It did not fall; it hung.
The conservatory was an old building with a staircase that sang when you walked on it and four hundred practice rooms, each the size of a wardrobe, each with a piano, a stand and a window painted shut. Anika took a room on the fourth floor and played in it nine hours a day.
Her teacher was Professor Lindqvist, a thin Swedish woman with silver hair cut like a helmet, who stopped her at the first lesson, halfway through the opening bars of the Mendelssohn, and said, "You play like someone who has been told she is lucky."
Anika did not understand.
"You are frightened," said Lindqvist, not unkindly. "You play every note as if it might be taken back. It is beautiful and it is terrified. We will teach the terror to leave."
It did not leave. It learned instead to be useful. By the end of the first year she was the best technical player in her class, and she knew precisely what fear could be made to do for a girl who could not afford to fall.