“This bow has been in my family for three generations.” An older man stands in a music shop holding a violin and bow. A younger employee in a waistcoat faces him closely. The exchange includes, “That’s not just any old bow,” followed by, “You can’t just walk in here with that.”
A brief line in the middle is indistinct. The employee then says, “You’re mistaken. Now leave.” Other people watch from among the instruments. A woman in a long black dress approaches as the older man continues holding the violin. The clip ends before she speaks clearly or establishes the instrument’s history.
The story continues:
The woman asked the visitor to sit down. “Would you show me the bow?”
He laid it across his knees. Near the end, where a hand had gripped it for decades, the finish had worn away. His grandfather had played with it at dances. His father had used it in a small orchestra. He had used it mostly in a kitchen while his wife chopped vegetables and told him to try that passage again.
His name was Anton. He had brought the instrument because his granddaughter was ready for a full-size violin. He wanted somebody to check it before he gave it to her.
The employee looked embarrassed. “I thought you were saying it was valuable.”
Anton considered that. “I was saying who’d played it.”
The woman examined the bow and explained what attention it needed. Anton took a small notebook from his coat and wrote down the cost. He’d already set money aside. He was far more interested in whether it could be ready by Sunday.
That afternoon the employee telephoned him. He’d found a faded name inside the violin case and wondered whether it should be cleaned away. Anton laughed so loudly that the phone crackled.
“Leave that. My father wrote it because I kept lending the case to a boy who played accordion. We were fourteen.”
On Sunday Anton’s granddaughter opened the case at his kitchen table. She ran a finger over the name, then carefully lifted the violin. Her first attempt at a scale frightened the cat off a chair. Anton assured her the cat had always been a poor judge.
Months later she returned to the shop with a loose string and a school concert program. The employee recognized the case immediately. This time his first question was what she’d been playing.
She showed him the program. Her grandfather’s name was printed beside hers. They were performing a duet. The employee asked if he could come.
At the concert he watched Anton count his granddaughter into the piece with a tiny movement of his bow. She missed a note, recovered, and grinned. He could hear other players who were more polished. When the duet ended, however, he found himself remembering the kitchen Anton had described, the vegetables on the chopping board, and somebody asking him to play that bit again.
