Music for Wartime (25 page)

Here is where I’ll stumble in my explanation. It was hypnotic. The music. The very reason it had been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of—

No, not our national borders. I mean the borders of the human heart.

If I might request more water . . .

I thank you for your patience.

I was saying, perhaps, that it prodded the heart with lust and ambition and false hope.

Around five minutes.

I cannot account for the discrepancy. I maintain, five minutes.

Like every star in the heavens had dropped a fine, taut string, and the stars had wrapped these strings around the earth. Like something our grandmothers used to sing.

Which is to say, it was wicked. To trick us, even us, in this way.

I understood it to be in F. I’m no musician, sir.

One of us moved.

I cannot say.

It might have been. Perhaps we all three moved as one.

[Unintelligible.]