Kept Close
Every violinist owns a mute, and most of them lose it. It is a small thing, a little comb of wood or rubber that slides onto the bridge and holds the strings back from their full voice. Sekar's was ebony, worn pale at the edges, and she had kept it for nineteen years, through four violins and three orchestras and one marriage.
Her first teacher had told her something about it that she had not understood for a long time. Con sordino, he said, does not mean quieter. It means closer. You are not taking the sound away from the listener. You are asking the listener to come nearer.
She started practising with the mute on the year they moved into the flat, because the walls were thin and Bayu went to bed early. He worked with wood, restoring old doors and cabinets for people who could not bear to throw them away, and he came home smelling of it: cedar shavings, beeswax, the dust of things older than either of them.
He said he liked the muted violin better than the real one. It sounded, he said, like someone playing in the next room of a dream. He would fall asleep in his linen shirt with the window open, his tasbih on the bedside table, thirty three beads of Kupang sandalwood that his father had given him. After evening prayer his hands smelled of them, a warm, milky wood that stayed on his fingers long after he had put the beads down.
Bayu has been gone for two years now. Sekar still practises at night, and she still puts the mute on, although there is nobody asleep in the next room to protect. She has never explained this to anyone. It is not the kind of thing a person can explain without sounding as though they need looking after.
The shirt is still in the wardrobe. The tasbih is still on the bedside table. Some nights, before she plays, she opens the wardrobe door and stands there for a moment, not quite touching anything.
In March the orchestra played a slow movement marked con sordino from beginning to end. At the bar before it, forty string players reached for their mutes at once, a small dry clatter across the stage, and then the hall changed. The sound did not disappear. It went soft and veiled and slightly darker, like a voice speaking into a shoulder.
From her chair Sekar could see the front rows. People were leaning forward. Nobody had asked them to. The music had simply stopped reaching for them, and so, without noticing, they had gone to meet it. She played the whole movement with her eyes almost closed, and when it ended she understood her old teacher at last.
That night she took the linen shirt out of the wardrobe and put it on. It was too big in the shoulders. The collar still held something, wood and warmth and the faint sweetness of skin, though less than last year, and much less than the year before. For a long time she had been afraid of that, of the day it would be gone entirely.
She wore it while she practised. She wore it to sleep. By the end of the month the collar smelled of her as much as of him, and she found that she did not mind. Nothing had been taken away. It had only moved closer, the way the music does when the mute goes on.
The house made that closeness into something you can wear. Dianthus, genêt, gnidia and neroli are the flowers pressed into linen, their brightness softened by the warmth of the person who wore it. An orris and olibanum co-distillation with cedarwood, opoponax, labdanum and oakmoss is the evening prayer and the workshop: incense held in fine wood, balsam on the hands, a damp and earthen shadow. And Mongolian deer musk tinctured in Kupang sandalwood, with Merauke and Sumatran oud dust and fermented vanilla over the Imperial Sandalwood Base, is the inside of the collar: the milky wood of the beads, the warmth of skin, a sweetness that has soaked into old timber and decided to stay.
She stopped trying to keep his scent.
She wore it until it was close enough to be hers.
Restraint is not distance. The quietest voice in a room is often the one everyone leans toward, and what we stop holding too tightly has a way of staying near.