The Hand

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 2: The Hand

The left hand is the violin hand. The right hand holds the bow, draws the bow, controls the pressure and the speed and the angle of the bow against the string, and the right hand is important, the right hand is essential, the right hand is the hand that produces the tone, the quality of the sound, the singing that separates the competent from the transcendent, but the right hand is not the hand, not the hand that every violinist thinks of when they think of their hands, not the hand that carries the identity of the player in its tendons and its muscle memory and its particular, trained, cultivated capacity for movements so fine and so fast that they exist at the boundary between voluntary action and reflex, between the intention and the execution, between the thought of the note and the sounding of the note, which in a trained violinist is no gap at all, which is instantaneous, which is the hand thinking in sound.

The left hand. The fingers of the left hand press the strings against the fingerboard to change their vibrating length, which changes the pitch. This is the fundamental mechanism. This is what a beginning student learns in the first lesson. But the fundamental mechanism is the beginning of a complexity so vast and so refined that a violinist can spend forty years developing the left hand and still discover new capacities, new subtleties, new ways of pressing and releasing and sliding and vibrating that produce sounds no one has heard before, sounds that are the unique signature of that hand on that string on that instrument in that room in that moment, and the moment is unrepeatable, and the unrepeatability is the art.

Nadia's left hand. She sat in the room above the workshop on her first evening in Cremona and she held her left hand in her right hand and she looked at it. The hand looked normal. This was the cruelty of it, or one of the cruelties, the particular cruelty that compounded the loss with the appearance of wholeness, because the hand looked like a hand that could play, looked like the hand that had played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D major at the age of nineteen in a performance that had made the audience at Severance Hall rise to their feet, not in the polite standing ovation that audiences give to promising young artists but in the involuntary standing that is pulled from the body by the force of the music, the standing that says: that sound changed something in the room, that sound changed something in me, and I must stand because sitting is no longer adequate to the thing I have heard.

The hand looked normal. Five fingers. A thumb. The knuckles slightly enlarged from years of practice, the fingertips calloused from years of pressing steel and gut and synthetic strings against an ebony fingerboard, the nails cut short in the fashion of all string players, cut to the quick on the left hand and left slightly longer on the right, a difference so small that only another string player would notice it but that marks the player as surely as a collar marks a priest. The hand looked normal and the looking was a lie, not a deliberate lie but the lie of surfaces, the lie of the visible, the lie that the body tells when the damage is not in the structure but in the signal, not in the bone and tendon and muscle but in the neural pathway that connects the brain's intention to the finger's movement, the pathway that in Nadia's case had been disrupted at a point so specific and so invisible that no scan could find it, no surgery could repair it, no therapy could retrain it, because the disruption was not a tear or a break or a lesion but a reorganization, a scrambling of the signals that the brain sends to the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand, a scrambling that the neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic had called focal dystonia and that Nadia called the end.

Focal dystonia. She had learned the term the way one learns the name of the thing that has destroyed one's life, which is to say unwillingly, which is to say completely, which is to say with the total attention of a person who must understand the mechanism of their own undoing. Focal dystonia is a neurological condition in which the brain's motor cortex, the region that controls voluntary movement, reorganizes itself in response to repetitive, highly trained movements, and the reorganization disrupts the fine motor control of specific muscles. It is not pain. It is not weakness. It is not paralysis. It is something worse than all three because it is the corruption of precision itself, the loss not of the ability to move but of the ability to move correctly, the loss not of the hand but of the hand's training, and the training was the thing, the training was twelve hours a day for twenty years, the training was the Tchaikovsky and the Brahms and the Beethoven and the Bach and the Bartok and the Sibelius and the thousands of hours of scales and arpeggios and etudes and exercises that had built the neural pathways that the dystonia had dismantled.

She could hold a cup. She could write her name. She could button a shirt. She could type on a keyboard, turn a doorknob, peel an orange, do every small task that the world requires of a hand. She could not play a trill. She could not execute a vibrato. She could not shift from first position to seventh position with the speed and accuracy that concert performance demands, could not move the fourth finger independently of the fifth, could not produce the controlled tremor of vibrato that gives a sustained note its warmth and depth and living quality, the quality that separates a note played by a human from a note played by a machine, the quality that is the violinist's signature, the violinist's voice, the thing that makes the violin an extension of the body rather than an object held by the body.

The loss was specific. The loss was total. These two facts did not contradict each other. They coexisted in the way that a crack in a foundation coexists with the house above it: the house stands, the house functions, the rooms are habitable, the walls hold pictures, the roof repels rain, and the crack is in the foundation, and the crack means the house is not sound, and the not-soundness is invisible from the street, and the invisibility is part of the cruelty, and the cruelty is not malicious but structural, which makes it worse, because malice can be fought and structure can only be endured.

She had noticed it first in the autumn of her twenty-fifth year, during a rehearsal of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra's young artist program. The fourth finger of her left hand. A passage in the third movement, a rapid sequence of notes requiring the fourth finger to move independently and precisely, a passage she had played hundreds of times, a passage that was in her hand the way her own name was in her hand, automatic, unthought, the product of so many repetitions that the repetitions had ceased to be repetitions and had become the thing itself, the movement inseparable from the intention, the finger inseparable from the note.

The fourth finger hesitated. Not much. A fraction of a second. A listener would not have heard it. The conductor did not notice. The concertmaster, seated three feet away, did not turn. But Nadia felt it in the way that a pilot feels a vibration in the airframe that no passenger notices, the way a surgeon feels a resistance in the tissue that no observer sees, the feeling of the expert who knows the machine of their own body so intimately that any deviation from the expected is not merely noticed but understood, and the understanding is immediate, and the immediacy is terror, not yet, not on that first day, but the seed of terror, the premonition of terror, the knowledge that something has shifted in the deep machinery of the hand and the shifting cannot be undone by will or practice or hope.

She practiced. Of course she practiced. She practiced the way she had always practiced, with the rigor and the discipline and the focused, systematic intensity that had taken her from a promising student at the University of Minnesota to a young artist with the Cleveland Orchestra, a trajectory that her teachers described as exceptional and that she described, privately, as the work, because she did not think of herself as talented, did not think of talent as a useful concept, thought of the work as the thing that made the sound and the sound as the thing that mattered and the mattering as the reason for the work, a circular logic that sustained her through the years of eight-hour and ten-hour and twelve-hour practice days, the days that were not endured but inhabited, because the practice room was not a punishment but a home, the only home she had ever fully occupied, the room in which she was most completely herself.

She practiced and the hesitation grew. The fourth finger. Then the fifth finger. The hesitation was not pain. She wanted it to be pain because pain has causes that can be treated, pain has therapies, pain has drugs, pain has a relationship to damage that makes it comprehensible, but the hesitation was not pain, the hesitation was the signal arriving late, arriving garbled, arriving at the finger in a form that the finger could not execute with the precision that twenty years of training had made instinctive, and the instinct was failing, and the failure of instinct is a particular kind of horror, the horror of the body betraying itself, the body undoing what the body had built, the builder becoming the demolisher and the demolisher working from the inside, invisible, inexorable, patient.

The neurologist was named Dr. Elaine Chen. Her office was on the ninth floor of the Cleveland Clinic's main campus, a building of glass and steel that looked out over the sprawl of the medical complex, and the view from her office was a view of institutional competence, of resources marshaled, of the best that modern medicine could offer, and the best that modern medicine could offer, in the case of focal dystonia in musicians, was not much.

Dr. Chen was kind. She was direct. She was knowledgeable. She had treated other musicians with focal dystonia, including a pianist, a flutist, and a guitarist, and the treatment outcomes ranged from partial recovery to no recovery, and the factors that determined the outcome were not fully understood, and the not-fully-understood was the medical profession's way of saying that the brain does what the brain does and the brain's reasons are its own, and the ownership is not negotiable.

She said the word dystonia and the word entered Nadia's body through her ears and settled in her chest and stayed there, a weight, a stone, a thing with mass and density and the particular heaviness of a word that changes the future, which is the heaviest kind of word, heavier than any note, heavier than any chord, heavier than the fortissimo that closes the Tchaikovsky concerto with an orchestra in full cry, because the fortissimo ends and the word does not end, the word stays, the word is a condition, and a condition is a companion, and the companion is unwanted, and the unwanting does not make the companion leave.

Botox injections. Retraining therapy. Sensory motor retuning. Dr. Chen laid out the options with the care of a physician who understands that options are not the same as solutions and that the distinction matters. Nadia tried the retraining. She sat in a room with a therapist and she performed exercises designed to rewire the neural pathways, exercises that were the opposite of violin practice, exercises that required her to slow down, to decompose movements that she had spent twenty years making compound, to separate the fingers that she had spent twenty years training to move in coordination, and the separation was a different kind of practice, the practice of unlearning, the practice of taking apart the thing she had built, and the taking-apart felt like dying, not the quick death but the slow one, the death that comes in increments, in the daily loss of the thing that made the life a life.

Eight months. She did the therapy for eight months. The fourth finger improved slightly. The fifth finger did not improve. The combination of the two remained insufficient for concert performance, and the insufficiency was not a matter of degree but of kind, because concert performance requires not adequacy but mastery, not the ability to play the notes but the ability to play them with the speed and precision and expressiveness that transforms notes into music, and the transformation is the work, and the work requires the hand, and the hand was broken, and the breaking was invisible, and the invisibility made it harder to accept, because the hand was right there, attached to the wrist, connected to the arm, present and accounted for, normal in every way except the one way that mattered.

She left the Cleveland Orchestra's young artist program in March. The leaving was quiet. She did not make an announcement. She did not give a farewell performance. She packed her violin in its case and she carried the case out of Severance Hall and she walked to her car and she sat in the car and she held the case on her lap and the case was heavy with the weight of the instrument and the instrument was heavy with the weight of the career that the instrument had been the vehicle for and the career was over and the over was a word like dystonia, a word that settled in the chest, a word with mass.

She did not play for six months. The violin stayed in its case in her apartment in Cleveland Heights, an apartment she had chosen for its proximity to Severance Hall, a proximity that had been convenience and was now proximity to the place where she used to be the person she used to be, and the proximity was a different kind of cruelty, the cruelty of geography, the cruelty of living close to the site of the loss.

She researched violin making. She did not know why at first, or she knew why but did not admit the knowing to herself, because the knowing was too neat, too narrative, too much like the kind of transformation that happens in movies and memoirs, the injured performer who becomes the maker, the player who becomes the builder, and she distrusted neatness, distrusted narrative, distrusted transformation that arrived fully formed and gift-wrapped, because her experience of loss had taught her that real change is not neat, real change is the slow accumulation of days in which the thing you lost is still lost and the thing you will become is not yet visible and the space between the loss and the becoming is not a montage but a duration, and the duration is lived minute by minute, and the minutes are long.

But she researched. She read about the Cremonese school. She read about Stradivari and Guarneri and the Amati family. She read about the construction of the violin, the physics of the sound, the properties of the wood, the chemistry of the varnish, the history of the form, the tradition that had been passed from master to apprentice for five centuries in a city in the Po Valley that she had never visited but that she could feel pulling at her, the way a note that has been played and released continues to vibrate in the instrument, a vibration too quiet to hear but present, persistent, real.

She found Giovanni Ferraro's name in a book about contemporary Cremonese luthiers. The book was at the Cleveland Public Library, a large-format volume with photographs of workshops and instruments and the hands of makers, and Giovanni's hands were in the book, his hands holding a gouge, his hands shaping the arching of a violin's top plate, and Nadia looked at the photograph of his hands and she felt something move in her chest, not the weight of dystonia and not the weight of loss but something else, something lighter, something that she would later recognize as the first stirring of a different kind of wanting, the wanting not to play but to make, not to perform but to build, not to produce the sound but to produce the thing that produces the sound, and the wanting was quiet and tentative and unformed, like the first sketch of a design that would take years to complete, but the wanting was there, and the there-ness was enough.

Now she sat in the room above the workshop and she held her left hand in her right hand and the holding was the thing. The right hand cupped the left. The right hand's fingers wrapped around the left hand's fingers. The fourth finger. The fifth finger. The fingers that could hold and grip and press with sufficient force for every task except the one task they had been trained to perform with the highest precision, the one task that had been the purpose and the identity and the daily practice of Nadia Kovac's life from the age of four to the age of twenty-six, a span of twenty-two years during which the hand had been not merely a part of the body but the part of the body, the defining part, the essential part, the part that connected the person to the work and the work to the world and the world to the sound and the sound to the meaning, and the meaning was music, and the music was gone, and the gone was not metaphorical but neurological, written in the reorganized motor cortex, inscribed in the garbled signals, embedded in the hand that looked normal and was not normal and would not be normal again, because focal dystonia in musicians is, in most cases, permanent, and permanence is a word that sounds like a door closing, and the door had closed, and the closing was quiet, and the quiet was the worst part, because the closing of a door should make a sound, should have the decency to make a sound, but this closing was silent, and the silence was the injury, and the injury was the hand, and the hand was in her hand, and she held it.

The room was small. A single bed, a dresser, a desk, a chair. The window overlooked Via Palazzo, and through the window she could see the street in the late September light, the light that was golden and long and that fell on the cobblestones at an angle that made the stones look warm, as if the light were heating them, as if the day's last warmth were being stored in the stone for the night, a storage that was physical and real and that had nothing to do with metaphor, because the stones did hold heat, the stones did release it slowly through the night, and the slow release was a fact of physics and a fact of Cremona and a fact of September, and the facts were solid, and the solidity was a comfort, because facts do not require interpretation, facts do not require narrative, facts do not require the person experiencing them to make meaning from them, and the making of meaning was a task that Nadia was not yet ready to perform.

Below her, through the floor, she could hear the workshop. Not sounds of work, not at this hour, but the sounds of the building itself, the settling of old wood, the creaking of beams, the particular silence of a room that has been used for the same purpose for so long that the purpose has become part of the architecture, the walls holding the memory of every violin that has been made within them, every cut, every plane stroke, every coat of varnish, every string tuned, every note played to test the completed instrument, the room holding all of it in the way that a concert hall holds the memory of every performance, not in the mind but in the material, in the wood and the stone and the air.

She thought about Giovanni's hands. She had watched them for only an hour that afternoon, watched them move over the spruce plank on the workbench, and in that hour she had seen something that she recognized, something that she had seen in the hands of the great violinists she had studied and admired and aspired to equal, the quality that separates the technically proficient from the truly masterful, which is not speed or strength or flexibility but the quality of attention, the density of presence that the hands embody when the person behind them is fully engaged in the work, fully given over to the task, the self dissolved into the doing, and the doing is the thing, and the thing is the craft.

His hands were old. His hands shook slightly at rest, the fine tremor of age, the vibration that time introduces into the steadiest hands, a vibration that was the opposite of vibrato, which is controlled and intentional and beautiful, while the tremor of age is uncontrolled and involuntary and — not ugly, she thought, but honest, the body's honest admission that it is aging, that it is declining, that the hands that carved two hundred violins will one day stop, and the stopping is coming, and the coming is not a threat but a fact, and the fact is absorbed into the work, and the work continues, and the continuation in the face of the fact is the thing, is the courage, is the daily decision to pick up the gouge and set it to the wood and carve, and the carving is an act of faith, the faith not in God or in the future but in the work itself, the faith that the work is worth doing because the work is the work, and the worth is intrinsic, and the intrinsic does not require justification.

She released her left hand. She placed both hands on the desk. She looked at them. Two hands. Ten fingers. Twenty-two years of training in the left. Nothing yet in the right, nothing of the craft, nothing of the new work that she had come to Cremona to learn. The right hand was empty of craft and the left hand was emptied of music and the two emptinesses were different, the left hand's emptiness being a loss and the right hand's emptiness being a potential, and the difference between loss and potential is the difference between the past and the future, and the difference between the past and the future is the present, and the present was this room, this desk, these hands, this city, this apprenticeship that had begun that afternoon when she walked through the door and smelled the spruce and stood at the workbench and placed her hand on the wood.

The wood. She thought of the wood. The spruce plank on Giovanni's bench. The grain lines. The pale surface. The coolness of it, the dryness. The wood had waited seven years. The wood had been patient. The wood had undergone its own transformation in the attic, the slow drying that changed its acoustic properties, the loss of moisture that made it lighter and stiffer and more resonant, the loss that was not a loss but a preparation, the drying that was not a diminishment but a becoming, the wood becoming the thing it needed to be in order to produce the sound it was capable of producing, and the capability was latent, was hidden, was stored in the grain and the density and the cellular structure, waiting for the maker's hands to release it.

She thought about waiting. She thought about patience. She thought about the spruce tree in the Val di Fiemme that had grown for a hundred years or more before it was cut, and the plank that had dried for seven years before it was placed on the bench, and the violin that would take six months to build and a lifetime to play, and the lifetime that the instrument would outlive, because violins made in Cremona in the tradition of Stradivari outlive their makers and their players and their players' players, the instruments surviving for centuries, the wood continuing to vibrate, the sound continuing to develop, the voice of the instrument deepening and darkening and ripening over decades and centuries of playing, the instrument improving with age the way some wines improve, the way some people improve, the way some losses improve, if improve is the right word, which it is not, the right word is something else, something she did not yet have, something she would have to learn, something the workshop might teach her, or might not, because the workshop was not a therapy and the craft was not a cure and the apprenticeship was not a narrative of redemption but a practice, a daily practice, like the daily practice of the violin, which she could no longer perform, but a daily practice nonetheless, and the nonetheless was the thing, the word that connected the loss to the future, the word that said: and yet, the word that said: even so, the word that said: the hand is broken and the hand is here and the here-ness is enough to begin.

She turned off the desk lamp. The room went dark. Through the window, the streetlight on Via Palazzo cast a pale glow on the ceiling, and in the pale glow she lay on the bed and she held her left hand in her right hand and the holding was the last thing she did before sleep, and the sleep, when it came, was deep, the deep sleep of arrival, the deep sleep of a body that has traveled and is still, the deep sleep that is the body's way of saying: you are here, you have arrived, the journey is over and the work has not yet begun and the space between the journey and the work is this sleep, and this sleep is earned, and the earning is the arriving, and the arriving is the first thing you have done in this new life, and the first thing is enough.