The violin
Anika’s grandfather kept his violin in a case under his bed. The case was black and scratched, and the clasps squeaked when you opened them.
“I played this on the ship that brought me to Australia,” Dadu told her. “Every night, for six weeks. It was the only thing that stopped me feeling homesick.”
When Anika was nine, he put the case in her arms. “It is yours now,” he said. “My fingers are too stiff to play, but yours are not.”
Anika was delighted — until she tried to play it. The bow screeched across the strings like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. Her dog, Pepper, got up and left the room.
For weeks, every note came out wrong. Her fingers ached. Twice she put the violin back in its case and announced that she was giving up. Both times, the next afternoon, she opened the squeaky clasps again.
Slowly, the screeches turned into notes, and the notes turned into tunes. By winter she could play the song Dadu used to hum while he cooked, a gentle, rocking tune from the village where he grew up. Her teacher helped her write it down, because nobody had ever written it down before.
On Dadu’s eightieth birthday, the family squeezed into his small lounge room. Anika lifted the violin to her chin. Her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath and began to play.
Halfway through, she looked up. Dadu’s eyes were closed and there were tears on his cheeks. Anika almost stopped, but her mother gave a tiny nod, so she kept going.
When the last note faded, Dadu opened his eyes. “For sixty years that song lived only in my head,” he said quietly. “Now it lives in yours.”