The Double

The Bach double concerto is a conversation between two violins, and the difficulty is not technical.

The difficulty is that neither part leads. They pass the subject back and forth for twenty minutes, and if one player insists on being heard, the whole thing collapses into noise. It requires the two people playing it to want the same thing at the same speed.

Yun had known this before she opened the score. She read it anyway, twice, at her kitchen table, at two in the morning, as though the notes might have rearranged themselves into something safer.

The first rehearsal was awful.

Not badly played — both of them were incapable of playing badly, in the way that some people are incapable of whispering. It was awful because they were both so careful. Ilse deferred. Yun deferred back. The subject passed between them like a plate neither wanted to be caught holding, and by bar forty the tempo had drifted so far apart that Ilse stopped.

“This isn’t working.”

“No,” Yun agreed.

“You’re waiting for me.”

“You’re waiting for me.”

Ilse’s bow came down. She turned, properly, for what Yun realised might have been the first time in four years — not the profile, not the back of the head. Her whole face.

“I have been first chair since we were eighteen,” Ilse said, “because I sat down in it before you did. Not because anyone decided anything. You know that, don’t you?”

Yun did not know that. Yun had built an entire interior architecture on the assumption that someone, somewhere, had decided something.

“That isn’t the same as it being wrong,” she said.

“No.” Ilse looked back at the score. “But you play the descent better than I do. You’ve played it better than I do for two and a half years, and you’ve never once taken it.”

The rehearsal room did its silence again.

“Take it,” Ilse said. “From bar forty. Don’t wait for me.”

Yun lifted her bow, and found her hands were not entirely steady, and could not have said which of the last four years was responsible for that.