this haunted place? But then, who am I to ask that? I had come back, had I not?
I lighted the first candle I found in the old prima donna’s dressing room. Open pots of paint were scattered everywhere, and there were many discarded costumes on the hooks. All the rooms I passed were full of cast-off clothing, forgotten combs and brushes, withered flowers still in the vases, powder spilled on the floor.
I thought of Eleni and the others again, and I realized that the faintest smell of les Innocents lingered here. And I saw very distinct naked footprints in the spilled powder. Yes, they’d come in. And they had lighted candles, too, hadn’t they? Because the smell of the wax was too fresh.
Whatever the case, they hadn’t entered my old dressing room, the room that Nicki and I had shared before every performance. It was locked still. And when I broke open the door, I got an ugly shock. The room was exactly the way I’d left it.
It was clean and orderly, even the mirror polished, and it was filled with my belongings as it had been on the last night I had been here. There was my old coat on the hook, the cast-off I’d worn from the country, and a pair of wrinkled boots, and my pots of paint in perfect order, and my wig, which I had worn only at the theater, on its wooden head. Letters from Gabrielle in a little stack, the old copies of English and French newspapers in which the play had been mentioned, and a bottle of wine still half full with a dried cork.
And there in the darkness beneath the marble dressing table, partly covered by a bundled black coat, lay a shiny violin case. It was not the one we’d carried all the way from home with us. No. It must hold the precious gift I’d bought for him with the “coin of the realm” after, the Stradivarius violin.
I bent down and opened the lid. It was the beautiful instrument all right, delicate and darkly lustrous, and lying here among all these unimportant things.
I wondered whether Eleni and the others would have taken it had they come into this room. Would they have known what it could do?
I set down the candle for a moment and took it out carefully, and I tightened the horsehair of the bow as I’d seen Nicki do a thousand times. And then I brought the instrument and the candle back to the stage again, and I bent down and commenced to light the long string of candle footlights.
Gabrielle watched me impassively. Then she came to help me. She lit one candle after another and then lighted the sconce in the wings.
It seemed Nicki stirred. But maybe it was only the growing illumination on his profile, the soft light that emanated out from the stage into the darkened hall. The deep folds of velvet came alive everywhere; the ornate little mirrors affixed to the front of the gallery and the loges became lights themselves.
Beautiful this little place, our place. The portal to the world for us as mortal beings. And the portal finally to hell.
When I was finished, I stood on the boards looking at the gilded railings, the new chandelier that hung from the ceiling, and up at the arch overhead with its masks of comedy and tragedy like two faces stemming from the same neck.
It seemed so much smaller when it was empty, this house. No theater in Paris seemed larger when it was full.
Outside was the low thunder of the boulevard traffic, tiny human voices rising now and then like sparks over the general hum. A heavy carriage must have passed then because everything within the theater shivered slightly: the candle flames against their reflectors, the giant stage curtain gathered to right and left, the scrim behind of a finely painted garden with clouds overhead.
I went past Nicki, who never once looked up at me, and down the little stairs behind him, and came towards him with the violin.
Gabrielle stood back in the wings again, her small face cold but patient. She rested against the beam beside her in the easy manner of a strange long-haired man.
I lowered the violin over Nicki’s shoulder and held it in his lap. I felt him move, as if he had taken a great breath. The back of his head pressed against me. And slowly he lifted his left hand to take the neck of the