Metempsychosis, M.A. (3)

One thing she promised herself not to do was to fall asleep before she returned upstairs. There is still quite a lot to do, she insisted: clean the viola, dust the shelves, but most of all, she still needs to write a letter for her beloved niece, Kora, to whom she leaves all she owes, the only person she regrets leaving and upsetting. If she dozes off, she risks missing her deadline, and one thing Johanna Dorn has never missed in her entire life, is a scheduled commitment. Her German mother and Austrian father instilled in her a deep respect for punctuality and an uncompromising code of conduct from an early age. To miss a meeting with death would be an unforgivable breach, even though she would be the only one to take such an unforgivable transgression into account.

She got up from the step with difficulty.

'At least I came to terms with my past selves,' she pondered, unsure whether she thought of it only a short while ago, and proceeded to find the cloth for polishing the instrument proudly occupying the middle of her salon. If only she could play it one more time. If only she could find the energy to sit at it, raise the bow and play her beloved Marais. She knew she won't be able to accomplish such a demanding task. Even cleaning it for the last time might be too big an ask.

Holding on to the walls and bookshelves, she carefully pottered to the utility room, selected a cloth used only for the purpose of dusting the viola and went back to sit in front of the instrument. It was her very first purchase, made for the extra money that was left after she got the impressive Josefstadt apartment nearly fifty years ago, quite spacious and generously lit for Viennese standards, to which later on, from her earnings at The National Library, she eventually added the adjacent loft, now entirely occupied by hundreds of plants she gradually brought from her botanic missions across the continent.

The debilitating nausea came back, interfering with her sense of balance. Before she could do the job, she decided to get up again, went to the kitchen and drank more water. This last day has proven to be much harder than previously thought. But cleansing her body before tonight's event had two good reasons. One was purely hygienic and pragmatic. She did not want to have in her stomach any solid leftovers that could find their way out onto the surface preferably left clean for the arrival of the collectors. She also believed that renouncing food should make the procedure somewhat easier, almost natural. She asserted that by progressing from weakness to permanent sleep, even though accelerated by poison, she will avoid reverting from it and changing her mind at the last minute. She will eventually get so weak she won't be able to think of anything else but the task at hand. The tiredness will encourage her to do it, she hoped. But now, that she sat before her viola, the memories of acquiring the instrument came flooding in. She recalled how on the day of the funeral, she had a sudden epiphany. Walking back from the cemetery, she promised herself, that she will purchase quality viola da gamba, an instrument of which the full-bodied sonorities she loved most, regardless of the price.

'Why should my innermost desires hunt me forever as “morbid abstractions” - why can't I turn them into concrete realities instead? Now that I will finally move out and live on my own, nourished by my very own essence - now is the time.'

It wasn't long before she realized the pledge. The flat saw the viola's arrival on the very same day she moved in – a beautiful over three-hundred years old viola began its new life together with the new owner. And when she opened the box, she laid on the floor next to it examining and scrutinizing its seemingly perfect body for hours, then gradually making her first attempts not as much to play as to befriend the unique piece, which to her, unlike some people she encountered had its own unique personality. She knew that with the price she paid for it, she would most certainly drive her parsimonious father to an early grave - that is, if not the fact he was already deep inside it. The purchase was a gesture of post-mortem defiance. Was it also a compensation for his loss? Was it a replacement? She cleaned it ever so gently, remembering that if not father's death, she most likely would never be able to get it. So much for mortality.

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