The Accompanist

A FABLE ABOUT THE HARDEST TUNE THERE IS

There was once a creature with strings for a torso, so the only way it could speak was by playing.

It had not always been that shape. Something had happened to it — nobody in the harbor town remembered what, and the creature could not say, because “what happened” is the hardest tune there is.

People came to it anyway. They asked it questions the way you ask the sea: not expecting an answer, expecting to feel different afterward. A fisherman asked whether to sell his boat, and the creature played something with a long ebb in it, and he kept the boat. A girl asked whether her friend across the water still thought of her, and the creature played two notes, close together, over and over, and she went home and wrote the letter.

The schoolmaster disapproved. “It tells them nothing. They hear whatever they want to hear.”

“They hear what they need to finish,” said the innkeeper. “That is more than most of us manage with words.”

One evening a child asked the question nobody else asked.

“What happened to you?”

The creature was still for a long time. Then it raised its hands to its own chest and played — and the tune began in one shape and ended in another, and the space between was the answer.

“I don’t understand,” said the child.

The creature played the two notes again, close together, and this time they meant neither do I. They sat together until the harbor lights came on.

The moral, in two notes: some questions can’t be answered, only accompanied.