The Miracle Bow

Last week, a small bundle turned up in the river Rhine. Made of burlap and held together by string, it was found bobbing on the surface of the water like a buoy, midway between Mülheim and Deutz, near the Mülheim bridge, on the banks of what people in Cologne dismissively tag the schäl sick—the inferior, wrong side of the river.

A couple found the bundle while out for a romantic stroll. They only had to pull on the string to open it. Inside, glued to the bottom, they found a solid block of some pitch-black substance. When they rubbed it, their fingers came back sticky. They also found the bones of some living thing, and from their size sensibly deduced that these remains belonged to a squirrel or, as the bones really were quite tiny, a mouse or a rat. It was clear to them what must have happened: the poor animal had crawled into the bundle in search of crumbs and had never made it back out. The bundle had become a trap. In its mindless confusion the animal had thrashed about, looking for a way out, only to draw the string tighter and tighter until it had suffocated.

The couple, however, did not throw the bundle away, as others might have done, paying the curious thing no further heed. Instead, they took it to a police station, where they received thanks, walked away, and never thought of the incident again.

I could have told them the significance of their find, of course. Without a single glance, I could have said who was in the bundle, and that it was not a squirrel at all but Sebastian Krill, the former first violinist of the Krill String Quartet, and for the last five or so years, until his disappearance two months ago, the concertmaster of Cologne's revered Gürzenich Orchestra.

I also could have explained the size of the bones.

I had arrived in Cologne around the same time as Krill had. He was just starting out at the Gürzenich, having moved to the Rhineland from Stuttgart, and I, after a tedious search for the right place, had finally opened up my shop on the Stolbergerstrasse, incidentally, only a few houses down from the building where the Gürzenich used to rehearse.

There was another early connection between Krill and myself: for both of us, Cologne meant a second chance. While my workshop on the Stolbergerstrasse followed on the heels of an ill-conceived and, ultimately, disastrous first attempt on the outskirts of Lübeck, Krill had been concertmaster at the Stuttgart Opera for almost a whole year, even though after just two weeks it had been obvious to everyone—Krill included—that things were not working out. However, he obstinately kept at it, as was his wont, refusing to accept that anyone, let alone a good number of his colleagues, might hold such different views on everything from simple bowings to the right phrasing for Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. A special kind of stubbornness was so deeply ingrained in his character that he never was able to overcome it. In fact, barring the rarest of circumstances, he never even suspected its existence.

Cologne was kinder to him than Stuttgart had been. It seems an insensitive observation, knowing that Cologne was also the city that would later witness his undoing, but there was no mistaking the inspiration it gifted to Krill in those first few years. And even if tragedy struck in the end, it is still my firm belief that the city had nothing to do with it; it never brought evil down on Krill, but instead poured all it had into stemming the tide for him until it could stem it no longer, and the banks of the river overflowed with a tremendous, pent-up violence that carried poor Krill off as though he were nothing but a leaf.

But that was still a long way off when I first met him, on a sunny day just before Carnival. He entered my shop, and from behind some boxes, I could see him looking around quizzically at the disorder before him.

Finally, he spotted me and smiled. It was a warm smile, full of optimism.

“There you are,” he said. “I didn't see you at first. Sebastian Krill's my name.”

I smiled, too, and shook his hand.

“I saw your sign out front,” he said almost apologetically, pointing outside.

“Oh, yes, yes. Well, do forgive me for all this.” I made a gesture. “As you can see, I've barely gotten started.”

I remember the sunlight coming in at such an odd angle that you could see the dust motes dancing merrily on the old parquet floor. It is one of the many small things I remember about that day. Krill wearing a hat is another one. I remember thinking how rarely you saw anyone wearing a hat anymore and how it was really a symbol of times gone by, of simpler times even, though of course we only perceive them as simpler on account of those times already having been lived through and handled by stronger and better persons than ourselves.

Krill had a case slung over his shoulder. In marked contrast to the hat-wearing, the case was a modern affair, made of carbon fiber. From its size and shape, I could tell that Krill was a violinist.

“How can I help you?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I've come for an opinion, you see.”

He put the case down on a table in a corner of the workshop and extracted one of the finest violins I had ever had the pleasure of laying eyes on, a Guadagnini, beautifully preserved and covered with a varnish of such intensity that the instrument before me gave the impression of being on fire, and it had nothing to do with the sun coming in at an odd angle that day and everything to do with this highly unusual instrument with which Sebastian Krill had walked into my workshop. I was speechless and professed as much.

Krill smiled. “It's a beauty, isn't it? I can't believe I'm saying this, but I believe I need to replace it. The tone just isn't what I want.”

I bid him play for me, which he did, and after two or three minutes I told him that honestly, I could find no fault with the tone.

“Golden,” I said, “is what comes to mind. It looks like gold and sounds like molten gold. What more could you want?”

Krill laid the violin down on its silk blanket.

“A golden tone isn't what people want these days,” he said without looking at me. “They want power. Raw power. It's the only thing that satisfies their hunger.”

“Do you mean audiences?” I asked him, still entranced by the Guadagnini's luminous sound and slightly mystified how someone who was able to produce something so profoundly moving could only a moment later dismiss his own creation so harshly. But I did not know Krill then as I know him now.

Krill shrugged.

“Audiences, colleagues, record companies. They're all the same, aren't they? They all want the raw power. But it doesn't really matter, because it's not their fault, either. It's the same thing everywhere. Not just in music, but in all things. The world doesn't run on beauty. It runs on power. And if you want to succeed, you need to adapt.”

I said nothing for a moment, but looked down on the floor where before the dust motes had been so alive, and where, now, nothing moved.

“Could I see the bow?” I asked.

Krill handed it to me, and I turned it over a few times in my hand. It was light. Extremely light. A good bow, but not the work of a master craftsman, and far from that of a true artist.

“With light bows such as this,” I said, looking at Krill, “you really need the best you can get. This isn't that. You're lucky to own a violin that would sound good even when plucked with a toothpick.”

I returned the bow to Krill.

“Might I suggest you start looking for a new bow, Mr. Krill, instead of a new violin?”

He looked at me as if the thought had never entered his mind.

“A new bow will offer me only a slight variation of the one I have, won't it?” he asked. “I thought I had made myself clear: I don't want a simple upgrade. I want something entirely different.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Wait here,” I said, and went off to the back of the workshop, returning a moment later with three slim cases. Opening the first, I said by way of introduction, “Now this is a slightly heavier model than yours, mind you. No one quite knows who made it. It doesn't bear a stamp.”

I offered the bow to Krill, who looked at it with mild interest.

“There are theories, of course,” I went on. “It could be by Lamy. But then again, the tip is just a bit off for Lamy. Personally, I'd say it could be a Voirin. But why don't you just try it. If it fits, it doesn't matter who made it. And if it doesn't, same thing, really.”

Krill fidgeted with the bow for a moment before putting it on the string and starting to play. It was the same piece he had played before, something by Bach, but I hardly recognized it the second time around, so distracted was I by watching Krill struggle with the bow. It was astounding: everything Krill ordered the bow to do, it seemed to do the complete opposite. He ordered a smooth legato; it appeared intent on jumping off the string. He wanted to play spiccato and, honest to God, the bow never left the string once. The longer it went on, the more painful it became to watch. Frustration began to show on Krill's face and he finally put an ounce too much pressure on the bow; it bucked like a wild horse, and both rider and horse landed in the mud.

“Thanks, I suppose,” Krill said, handing the bow back to me with barely concealed distaste, even something like fear. It was clear he had never had an experience like that with a bow before, and very likely had never imagined that a supposedly dead piece of wood could have a strong will of its own. I had witnessed similar scenes a few times, though never quite like that before. Patting the bow on the frog appreciatively, I put it back in its case. I knew that a headstrong bow like that, coupled with just the right kind of performer, equally iron-willed and intent on the same things, could certainly make a marvelous marriage. With some luck, maybe that person would walk into my shop one day.

“Don't even fret about it,” I said, turning back to my slightly shaken visitor, while opening the second of the three cases. “Give this one a try instead.”

Krill held out his hand. I gave him the bow, a Nicolaus Kittel, and I swear that when his fingers closed around the frog, I heard the sound of two magnets locking together. Krill gasped as if an electrical current were racing down from the tip of the bow to the frog and onto his right arm. Mild shock registered on his face, but as he felt the weight of the bow in his hand, something must have felt remarkably right. There are such instances when a performer meets the perfect bow and from the very first contact, it becomes not just an extension of his body, but also an integral part of it. As I looked at Krill handling the Kittel, I was filled with certainty that I had brought about just such a meeting. For Krill, the Kittel was like a limb he had lost and now regained.

He hesitated just slightly before putting the Kittel on the string, as if afraid the same thing might happen as with the first bow, that the piece of wood might throw him and that before he knew it, he might find himself lying face-down in the mud again.

But this encounter was of a different order altogether. Back was the golden tone, and in spades, crisper and more beautiful than before. The bow did everything that Krill wanted. He only had to think of a phrasing and it materialized. It was as if Krill were at the helm of a sports car, one of those vintage sparkling Italian types that read your every thought and where you only had to think left for the car to follow perfectly the curve of the bend.

And something else happened. The bow appeared to draw out the sound in a manner that produced the oddest effect on me. Suddenly, it seemed as if time itself were slowing down. I can think of no other way to describe it. I had never experienced anything like it; it was exhilarating and deeply unsettling at the same time.

After what felt like an hour but was likely no more than five minutes, Krill put down the bow.

“What a nimble thing that Kittel is,” I said, when he remained silent. “It fits you like a glove.”

After a moment, he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “It is nimble, isn't it?”

He looked at the bow in his hand and, just like that, I knew that it would remain in my shop. Yes, it was plain to see that Krill and the bow were kin, and yes, the tone it produced was not of this world, and yet it was still what Krill would have called a variation of the old, even if an utterly superior, barrier-breaking one. He did not have to say it. It was in his eyes when he looked at the Kittel. That golden tone was a dead thing to him. He had buried it a long time ago and, with it, that part of himself that was once attached to it.

Lately, I have thought much about responsibility. About where my responsibility as a seller of these rare items begins, and where it ends. There is no denying it: it was in my hands to change the course of history, at least for this one customer, and the thought has crossed my mind that it could have happened before, perhaps many times, but that I had been too preoccupied at the time to notice, or worse, too selfish, looking only to make a sale, to close a deal, fully ignoring the deadly peril at stake for the person at the receiving end. The peril of the wrong instrument.

Then again, the issue becomes more complex at second glance. Krill was not the hapless victim, and I was not his corrupter for forcing that black hole of a bow on him. Krill came to me that day. For that I was not responsible, nor was I for the disdain he held for his former sound, which had set him on his hunt for a new bow in the first place. You see, he had already been courting disaster. Something in his biography had precipitated that move. Only I had not known what it was.

If that sounds like an attempt to defend the indefensible, it is not meant as such. My regret is something I have to live with, and I do not shun the blame, nor make light of it in any way. But it is staggering to see all the countless steps that led Krill to my workshop that day, and to my handing him that third, fatal bow.

That train of thought always has, as its next destination, the whole weight of human impotence in the face of that great wall of water we call history, and how frail we all are when it comes bearing down on us with all its might, undoing in a fleeting second what has taken us a lifetime to build. It is a sign of the ineffectualness of our thinking that we still perceive it as a short moment, turning a blind eye to the fact that for every one of us, that supposedly briefest of moments had been centuries in the making.

There is a case to be made that this particular bow had been destined for Sebastian Krill from the moment Peccatte put the finishing touches to it, sometime in the year 1860; perhaps even before that, when he selected the wood. Who is to say that it was not meant for him by the time some worker in the Amazon delta happened to stumble on that tree and judged its wood a perfect specimen to be shipped to Europe, for use in Peccatte's workshop? And that tree, when it was just a seed in the ground—was it not already a violin bow, in simmering potential if not actual fact? We all heap up possessions big and small, hoarding objects because we think that when the time comes, those objects will act as a dam against that wall of water rising on the horizon. And when that moment is finally upon us, we look on helplessly as all our earthly possessions fall away and we stand before that cresting wave as naked as the day we were born.

Sebastian Krill, I have no doubt, met his wall of water that day in my workshop, and its name was Dominique Peccatte.

“Now, that one sure looks interesting,” Krill said.

A moment before, I had opened the latch on the third case, taken out the bow, and tightened it. Krill stood ten feet away. What he saw could not have amounted to much of anything. I was blocking most of his view. He could see the tip, for sure, and perhaps a third or so of the upper part of the stick, but even that ought not have been enough to justify his reaction. For Christ's sake, the man was on tiptoes and craning his neck.

I ask of you, why that sudden change? The first bow had put him on the defensive. The second had turned him morose. With the third, it was an absolute mystery. In hindsight, though, is it not obvious what had happened? The bow had been calling out to him! It had called out to him before Krill had even had a chance to hold it himself, when it had still been in my hands.

So immensely strong was the pull it exerted on him. Previously, I said that I had felt an attraction between Krill and the Kittel bow, that I had heard a sound as of two magnets drawn together. I was mistaken. This was the true magnetic force. Only it was not the benign signal of one family member calling out to another, but more like a hawk using its willpower to hypnotize its prey. It was a cold, alien will that had Krill in its sights, and the moment I had taken it out of the case, it had locked on to him.

I handed him the bow.

“I've never even seen a bow like this,” he said, glancing from the bow to me and back again.

He was right. The bow was as black as coal, with purple streaks across the stick like gashes, as if it had very recently been used in a fight.

“That's because it's not made from pernambuco,” I explained. “This is ironwood.”

“It's heavy.”

“Ironwood generally is. Who knows why Peccatte used it. The best bows are usually all pernambuco. Peccatte must have seen something in that block of wood that gave him pause. The rest is a classic example of his work. Look at the dashing strokes. It's almost as if he had an hour to kill and just barely got it done.”

Or maybe he realized what kind of wood he was dealing with and stopped his work midway? But that is idle nonsense. Except for the unusual choice of wood, the bow looked every bit a Peccatte as his finest pernambuco sticks. And that is what I told Krill, too.

“He was not a patient man, Peccatte,” I said. “Not given to detail, no evidence that he enjoyed honing his craft. His was a more exuberant, almost violent approach. I have a theory; do you want to hear it?”

I could see Krill only wanted to put the bow to the test, but he said nothing, and I went on regardless.

“I believe,” I said, “that for true art, careful craftsmanship can never be enough. There must be will involved, too. All the knowledge in the world won't help you if you don't know how to apply your will. With some makers, you can see that they were able to draw out their will over a long period of time and spread it out in small doses until everything felt just right. In that way, they were able to work on a single bow for days, sometimes whole weeks, and it shows in the finished product. Great bows, of course, but they do tend to inherit a share of the carefulness that went into their making. With them, it becomes almost a timidness. Reliable, always so reliable.

“Now Peccatte, I believe he had a will of an ox, only he was unable, or unwilling, to use to it sparingly. He knew only one speed, and that was full throttle, all the time. A single movement of the will from start to finish. And that's how he churned out those bows, one after another, spending no more than a few hours on each one. As a result, you might be fooled into thinking them half unfinished, when in reality, they can do things no other bow ever could.”

On and on I went in the same vein. I could hear myself blubbering but knew not why. Why couldn't I just stop and let him play with that cursed thing? Did I, quite unawares, intend to break the spell the bow had placed on Krill by boring him to death?

Suffice it to say, I reached the end of my oratory. Released, Krill put the bow on the string, began to play—and what can I say.

There are bows, like the Kittel, where everything feels wonderfully right from the very beginning. There are also those that feel clumsy at first, and which make you work to earn their trust and discover their charms over time. And then, every once in a while, a bow comes along that begins clumsy and stays that way, because you are not meant to be the one handling it. Something in your system rises up to repel the bow, much as it would most any other intruder, in order to prevent the hostile intrusion from becoming a hostile takeover.

Krill's system did not sound the alarm that day. Neither did mine. His radar was not up and running, so entranced was he by the new sound he had discovered, on the raw power which he had been looking for and finally found, already savoring in advance, I imagine, the admiration it would garner him among his colleagues and peers.

All the more surprised was I when, shortly afterwards, he left my shop without the Peccatte, without indeed another word. He had a dazed look, however, that I will never forget, his eyes glazed over as if he were not really present at all.

I received his slightly frazzled call early the next morning. He sounded as if he had not slept at all. He knew it was a Sunday, he said, but would I agree to see him nonetheless, and sell him the Peccatte? He just could not wait until Monday, afraid someone might snatch it away from him before he could get to it.

I told him to come at nine. At a little after eight, I could see Krill from my third-story window, pacing back and forth before the door, stomping out cigarette after cigarette on the pavement.

And that might have been the end of it, for me, anyway. I might never have heard of Sebastian Krill again. Perhaps I would have read his obituary way down the road and half-remembered selling him a bow once. But never would I have connected the two events, the sale and Krill's death, or have imagined that it could have been my bow that killed him.

Several things intervened to keep me in the loop.

Firstly, Krill continued to haunt my shop. Every once in a while, he would show up for the little things every violinist needed: to buy strings, for instance, and other paraphernalia, or to have his violin looked after when the climate became inhospitable. Like many three-hundred-year-old instruments, his Guadagnini was easily affected by the elements, its health always a delicate thing. Many times over the next five years, it would be my patient, spending a day or two in my care, and I would do what I could to fix what minor ailment it happened to have contracted.

Once, I had it for two weeks for a slightly more complex procedure: to replace the fingerboard and to build a new sound-post, and in that space of time, I got to know that violin like my own child, marveling how closely related its psychic structure was to that of its owner. Like Krill, it reacted hyper-sensitively to the most miniscule of impulses from outside, something I discovered while working on the sound-post. If everything was just right, it was capable of the most wonderful things. However, the tiniest miscalculation on my part sent it into hysterics, to the point that it began to sound worse than a common student instrument. Hardly a decent sound would escape it then, and it would make me pay dearly for my blunder: it took me hours and hours to find the flaw in my work. That was another symptom of its condition, you see: it could be a terrible sourpuss. Instead of helping me correct my mistake, that violin was much more likely to stand back with arms crossed, refusing to pitch in even a little, while I toiled like a galley slave in order to satisfy its every whim.

Krill also came by occasionally to have the bow rehaired. The first couple or so times, I was glad to be reacquainted with the Peccatte. Krill always kept it in pristine condition, something I really can't say for all of my customers, many of whom I have to constantly berate to take better care of their instruments, feeling at times like a dentist lecturing his patients on dental hygiene (and like a dentist's advice mine, too, tends to fall on deaf ears).

Once, Krill asked me to recommend a different set of strings. He had gotten it into his head that the brand he was using failed to do any justice at all to the violin, or the bow, and that there just had to be something superior out there.

“Mr. Krill,” I said, “you're used to these strings. You know them inside and out. I know them, too. They're perfectly good strings. Reliable. With these, you know what you get. They'll never fail you.”

But there was that cursed word again. Reliable. And so I found a set of strings more to Krill's immediate liking. And he was right, if you must know. The new strings sounded much more powerful. Krill left my shop that day a happier man than when he had come in.

A month passed, then two, and Krill was back, fully panicked. The violin was all out of order, he said, and couldn't I do something about it?

He played for a few minutes in the workshop, and I confirmed his impression. The sound was strangely muffled, as if the room had been laid out with old carpets.

“Leave it here,” I said, “and come back in the morning. I will find the answer.”

He did come back in the morning, and I am sure that he spent the night worrying that it was all over for him, and that upon his return I would tell him that the violin was finished, kaput.

“Mr. Krill,” I said, smiling. “Cheer up. There's nothing wrong with the violin. Here is my diagnosis: a severe case of wrong strings.”

He looked at me, quite baffled.

“Wrong strings, you say? That's all? But they sounded so good.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “That they did. I was there when you tried them out, remember? But here's the hitch. These are by far the strongest strings you can find on the market, pressure-wise. Nothing else even comes close. And as it turns out, they were simply too heavy for your violin. I suspect that the sound was superb for a week or two, and only gradually diminished?”

Krill nodded. “Exactly right,” he said. “They brought down the house, at first.”

I smiled. How like Krill to keep the strings on for weeks and weeks, stubbornly insisting they go back to sounding the way they did in the very beginning and failing to see what was really happening. 

“I can imagine. But what you didn't see was that the pressure of the strings depressed the very wood of the violin, a little more each day. Once set in motion, that process can't be halted. Except, of course, by changing the strings back.”

“And it'll be fine now?”

“As good as new,” I said. “I promise. But not right away. How long have you had these new strings on? Two months?”

“Almost three.”

“Then it'll take three more, I'm afraid. Those strings weighed down on the wood, you see. They warped it. Now that the weight is off, it can breathe again. Move back to the old position. That takes time. Incidentally, exactly the same amount of time that the wrong strings spent on the instrument. That's the rule.”

To lift his spirits, I handed him a new rosin. It was black, like the Peccatte, and came with a small pouch fastened at the top with a drawstring.

“Free of charge,” I said. “These came in the store today. Specially designed for a powerful sound. Let me know if it works for you. If it does, I'll recommend it to other customers.”

Oh, the world of bows. Home to one of the last riddles mankind has yet to solve, and we are no nearer the solution than we were in 1860. If anything, we are farther away now than ever, far removed from the spirit that once imbued those cold sticks of tropical wood with life. The age of technology and its many wonders have done nothing to explain the magic contained in the very finest of bows, and there isn't a living master who can build a bow like that today. The most they can aspire to is a competent stick that will do what it's told. But these bows do not have a will, and they do not have life. The secret of building a living bow died with the Kittels and the Peccattes, the Tourtes, Simons, and Persoits, perhaps—who knows?—never to be discovered again.

There is some solace to be found in that thought. Thank goodness for one thing that did not give up its mechanism so willingly when men came prodding it with their modern tools. Everything they had they threw at the bows, every machine at their disposal. I see those young fools hunched over their computer models all day, a bow lying there as if being screened for a tumor. And then they go and make a perfect replica, cloning it for all it's worth. And it never works.

When will they learn?

It is different for the players. For those capable of handling one of those magic sticks, there are still plenty of the old ones to go around. But they must be approached in the right way, and with the right kind of attitude, which is fear and trembling. No one teaches this anymore, with dire consequences every day. Instead, they prefer to preach the religion of confidence, pumping those poor boys and girls so full of pride and self-importance they believe themselves to be at the heart of the mystery, when in truth, every step of the way, it is a collaboration between the violin, the bow, and a divine spark that has to enter the fray, in the end, and give its consent.

I know now that there are bows in this world more powerful than anything you can imagine, bows only the strongest of players may possess without the risk of permanent damage.

Sebastian Krill did not belong to that select group of players. The Peccatte bow I sold him broke his will in a matter of months, slowly degrading him over the course of the five years of our acquaintanceship. It unstrung him worse than I ever could have imagined it possible for a bow to unstring a man. At first, it was only a gut feeling; later, the deterioration in health was visible even to the naked eye. Krill seemed to have lost weight; there were dark circles under his eyes, giving his face a skull-like appearance, and he constantly looked about in a harried fashion. His voice betrayed a man beset by illness. More than once did I ask him if he was alright, could I be of service, did he suffer from a nagging flu, from migraines? He never said a word, and spent not a minute longer in my workshop than necessary.

Last week, the police called on me. It was the day after Ash Wednesday, the streets still littered with crushed candies, flowers, and the shards of broken booze bottles from the Carnival festivities. It had rained overnight, and the sky was like a mirror image of the street, with scattered clouds here and there playing the part of the litter. I had heard talk of a break-in across the street the night of Weiberfastnacht, at a shop selling antique picture frames, of all things. But it turned out the two detectives, Schmidt and Rosenthal, had come for a different reason entirely.

I instantly recognized the pouch they were carrying. It was the rosin I had given to Krill as a present, two years prior.

“Your name, Mr. Wohlleber,” said one of the detectives, the one named Schmidt. He was the only one doing the talking, whereas the other one, Rosenthal, was silent the whole time. “It's on the bottom of this pouch.”

I nodded.

“I know,” I said, clearing my throat, which was suddenly clogged up and dry as bone.

“It was found on the banks of the river Rhine,” Detective Schmidt said. “There were bones inside.”

I felt like the floor was receding from me.

“Oh my goodness,” I said quietly.

They had brought a case folder from which they now extracted a bunch of photographs, laying them on the counter.

“These we received from the late Sebastian Krill's widow. We understand he was a customer of yours.”

“Yes,” said I. “For several years.”

Detective Schmidt eyed me dubiously.

“Did you know he was missing?” he asked.

“I...” I said, “No, I didn’t.” I hoped that my lack of surprise was not too obvious. “I knew he wasn't well. That much I knew. But missing... no, I didn't know he was missing.”

He looked at me sternly.

“What would you say Mr. Krill's height was, Mr. Wohlleber?” he asked. “Was he a tall man?”

An image of Krill appeared before my eyes, the day he had first entered my workshop, alive and well, and wearing that strange, old-fashioned hat.

“I suppose so, yes,” I said. “Maybe six foot?”

“Six foot two, in fact,” Schmidt said, before pointing to a different picture. “Now this we can't explain. Can you?”

The image showed a Sebastian Krill not only haggard and with almost cavernous eyes, but also visibly shrunken in height.

I shook my head no.

“Five foot three,” the detective said. “Mrs. Krill measured it out herself.”

He put a third picture on the counter.

“Four foot five,” he said.

And a fourth.

“Three foot nine.”

The fifth picture showed Krill standing next to his three-year old son Lucas, who stood at least four or five inches taller than his father. The boy smiled into the camera; Krill's own expression was pained.

“We found this, too,” the detective went on. “A receipt for a rehairing. It says here, twenty-five dollars. Issued the week after Mrs. Krill took this utterly remarkable picture of her husband.”

He looked at me.

“What do you normally charge for a rehairing, Mr. Wohlleber?”

“I'd say, eighty, eighty-five dollars.”

“And yet you charged Mr. Krill only the sum of twenty-five. Was it because he was such a loyal customer?”

Again, I shook my head no. I tried to speak up, but the words failed me.

I tried again.

“The bow was only a third in size by then,” I finally admitted. “I only charged him twenty-five, because it was so tiny.”

Neither the detective nor I said anything for a good while, or at least that is how it appeared to me. I could hardly keep on my feet, and it was all I could do to hide my weakness from my law-enforcement visitors. 

“I'm curious,” the detective said. “How did Mr. Krill, in his condition, enter your store, Mr. Wohlleber? He couldn't have reached the handle.”

“I opened the door for him.”

He nodded.

“I see. And opened it again when he left.”

“Yes.”

They showed me a last picture. Krill had shrunk even further, smaller even than the water bottle standing next to him for reference. On the back, in a scrawly, unsteady hand, was written Sebastian, Jan 25.

I want to go looking for the Peccatte. Nothing can be done for Sebastian Krill, but it may not be too late to warn potential victims before they can come under its deadly spell. I will not allow it to happen.

The Peccatte was not in the pouch along with the bones, so where is it? After the deed, did it somehow get out? Was it perhaps never in the pouch to begin with? And did it, as I strongly suspect, return to its original size after Krill’s death?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that it must have gone back to Mirecourt, where it was made. Perhaps, if I remain a free man after today, I will commence my search there, and if I don't find it there, I will continue on to Paris, where it may have gone to hide among the thousands and thousands of bows stacked in the workshops of so many fine luthiers, in the old quarters of that ancient city that is still the gatekeeper for so many unsolved secrets.

The detectives Schmidt and Rosenthal are convinced that I poisoned Krill. They believe I put the unknown poison in the rosin, and that Krill poisoned himself every time he played, breathing in the deadly toxin that rose up in the air from the bow.

What they do not have is a motive, or traces of any incriminating substance anywhere in the workshop or on my person.

So far I have remained silent, leaving the odious work of handling the formal court proceedings to my lawyer. His name is Schmidt, too, but no relation. A pleasant enough fellow, if very by-the-book. He could not stomach the truth any more than could the detectives.

And what, pray tell, is the truth here? That Krill cracked under the pressure of a bow several sizes too powerful for him? That from the moment they met, Krill no longer lived for himself and his family, but under the pitiless sway of Peccatte? That it was a form of suicide, since he must have known the bow was doing it to him, yet made no visible effort to get rid of it?

There are things in this world so strange that only those in the thick of it can understand them.

The coroner's report mentioned that rosin was found deep inside Sebastian Krill's bones, meaning that he had ingested it prior to his death.

The truth is much stranger even than that. In my mind's eye I see Sebastian Krill climbing into that pouch utterly alone, so far gone around the bend that he believes himself to be a bow in need of rosin.

The holding cell where I wait for my trial to begin is spartan, grey, with a tiny window that lets in very little light, and only in the afternoon. The rest of the time, the room is plunged into an eerie half-light that is not good at all if you possess an active imagination with a penchant for aimless wandering.

When I am not working on my statement, I imagine myself meeting Krill again for the first time and doing it all differently. The possibilities, I increasingly find, are endless. Maddeningly, they are endless. Often, even in my daydreams, I am helpless to avoid handing Krill the Peccatte, my own will no match for the forces guiding my hand. But I never do so without attempting to slip him a last-minute warning.

“That bow is a dictator,” I say to him, always half in jest. “It gives the order and off you march. The only question, my friend, is do you want to march, and where to?”

In my daydreams, I always call Krill friend.

And then, before I can stop him, he grabs the bow. Always, in my mind, Krill grabs the bow. Not once does he reject it.

Other times, though less frequently, I simply close the lid on the Peccatte case and choose a different bow, that day, to hand to Sebastian Krill. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of bows at my disposal, I simply choose not to hand him the death bow.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I hear myself saying a short while later, in the courtroom, while the multitude assembled there stare at me gravely. Before you stands a guilty man.

Mika Seifert is a concert violinist and writer, whose short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, the Antioch Review, Image Journal, Chicago Review, the Massachusetts Review, and World Literature Today, among other publications.