‘Chaconne’ by Susanne Stich

On the way out, Frieda turns the radio dial from the news to the classical station.

‘Chaconne in D minor for solo violin,’ the presenter says.

The dog watches from his bed as Frieda stops in the doorframe and listens. A minute later, in the passenger seat of the car, she pictures the cottage kitchen she and her husband are pulling away from, the boiled egg she had no time to eat, the violin spilling between windows and walls, the dog closing and opening his eyes. Rain drums the windscreen, the wipers go at speed, the headlights hit the sign saying Trá – Beach. A few yards on, a horse appears in the same gleam, a barbed wire fence holding it back in its field by the lighthouse. Chris switches on the radio for more news coverage, wildfires in the southern hemisphere, politics stuck in a rut, a virus in Asia. Frieda rolls her eyes but turns her head, so he won’t see it. They’ve bickered enough this morning; no teabags left, a pint of milk spilt as they collided by the sink. Another year just begun, more travelling at the crack of dawn, the start of a new decade on top. It might not be London or Dublin they’re bound for, but it’s still a commute. Over the years they’ve tried all kinds of things. And this is it, their compromise, the result of a long and winding road.

Now she is silent, imagines her dog listening to Johann Sebastian Bach. Recently she read a blog post about kennels where dogs listen to classical music all day because it relaxes their nervous system. And here it is, a small flash of joy over this change in routine, the day her dog will be having, home alone in Inishowen. She’s tempted to tell Chris how this joy is part of a bigger story. A dog listening to classical music, the vagus nerve, etcetera. But no, explaining the muddle in her head to him, cheek by jowl in the car, work looming: no, it’ll have to wait.

On the radio someone now talks about floods in Wales. Last night, watching the news, Frieda cried when a report showed rescue staff helping people trapped in their homes. A frail, old woman had crawled up a carpeted staircase, a Chihuahua by her side, its snout white with age. Frieda takes a deep breath, looks out at Lough Foyle.

They pass through Moville and Muff, reach Derry at eight, crawl along Strand Road, negotiate roundabouts and lights. Chris drops her off across the street from the office. Despite the quarrel in the kitchen they kiss, a quick, staccato staple of thirteen years’ routine. She pulls up the hood on her waterproof coat, pauses before crossing the road. When she finally cuts across the two lanes of traffic, a young couple enter her office block under a large white umbrella, and a colleague she hardly knows approaches from the opposite direction. Frieda chitchats with the colleague. In the lift to the fourth floor, the air in it warm and stale, she notices that the tip of her left pump is covered in a fine layer of dirt. In the office Frieda hangs up her coat, settles at her desk while the computer starts up, her desktop wallpaper showing a turquoise lake bordered by mountains glistening in the sun. The picture disappears as soon as her 365 tabs take over the screen: Email, SharePoint, Teams.

‘Isn’t the rain awful?’ another colleague says. ‘If only it were snow.’

Frieda gives a soft nod, doesn’t engage in conversation. She opens a blank document, types the word seven times in the one line. Chaconne. She adds line breaks, assembles the words in one vertical, left-centred row before spreading them across her screen with the tab button. Chaconne. She’s heard the term before but hasn’t the faintest idea what it means. And yet, placing it across the page, like splashes of paint, almost makes her smile, reminds her how two weeks ago, Christmas and New Year’s Eve finally over, in the small upstairs bedroom in their home by the lighthouse, she held all her belongings close to her heart while Chris sat downstairs reading.

‘Does this bring me joy?’ she whispered, time and again as she picked up item after item.

Mortified that Chris might mock her, she didn’t tell him about this peculiar kind of clear-out, didn’t mention the Japanese woman she’d seen on Netflix; how, hands clasped, smiling like a child, the woman knelt before piles of clothes, household items, photographs.

Frieda zooms in on the last Chaconne, changes the font, Avenir Black Oblique, makes it bold, and pictures the dog listening to music. At this stage, the Bach will long be over. The station’s playlist is predictable. She sometimes tunes in when cleaning the house. At one point or other the dog will hear Mozart, some Händel, Chopin maybe, and probably Beethoven.

This is a cry for help, the Swedish girl writes in her book. Frieda spotted the tiny volume near the till in the charity shop in Derry where she had just dropped off a large box of books after the clear-out was finally complete. In a way the purchase of another book seemed absurd, but it’s been in her handbag since.

She saves and closes the document before joining a meeting about 2020’s company targets. It turns out the couple from under the umbrella are visiting funders from Belfast, the woman in a yellow suit, a small bird tattooed in light ink along her wrist, the man’s hair spiked with wax, eyes turquoise like Frieda’s desktop lake. Their presentation relies heavily on brightly lit visuals of office environments. In between, words glide past like bad dreams. Ideation. Disruption. Core competencies. Every now and again Frieda stares at her dirty shoe. She holds her diary and pen close to her chest so no one can see her doodles.

It is time to rebel, says the Swedish girl.

As a child, Frieda dreamed of playing the flute, the piano, and yes, the violin. And while her parents didn’t have any spare money to pay for lessons, she could have pushed more. There might have been a way, and maybe it would have got her to a better place than this office, this town, this Tuesday morning. The young woman in the yellow suit, who looks like she’s barely out of college, keeps talking in her no-nonsense voice. She surely would have pushed more. Frieda pictures her kickboxing, juicing greens and beets, sees versions of her in offices across the globe, not yawning once, standing strong, talking. Like crowds in a Brueghel painting, employees gawk at the woman, their expressions a mixture of resentment and envy.

The meeting drags until noon when canapés are delivered by a local café. A small crowd gathers around the visitors, the CEO at the helm. Frieda talks to the caretaker instead, tells him about the dog’s change in routine.

‘Sounds lovely,’ he says. ‘I wish I was lying in a basket listening to music.’

Outside, the rain has eased, and, after a third canapé she doesn’t like the taste of, Frieda grabs her coat, heads down the metal staircase at the back of the building. On the city walls she strolls under leafless trees, her lips dry with winter cold. Half an hour later, back in the office with most of her colleagues still on their lunch, she finds an old tin of lip balm in her desk drawer, applies it so thick she checks in her make-up mirror it doesn’t look ridiculous.

‘Always remember, work is a game,’ Chris likes to say to her.

As a boy he wanted to be Einstein. It was one of the first things he told Frieda, and it drew her in, brought her to Ireland, the beginning of the long and winding road. In the end, Chris found a stable, vaguely science-related job, and, rather than complain, he succumbed to it, with the same mix of wit and rationality he applies to most things. But how can anything be a game when an old dog lies waiting for Frieda in a cottage in a remote part of Donegal while floods and fires happen elsewhere? She steps into the niche on the far side of the room, sinks into the relaxation chair, where employees are invited to sit for fifteen minutes during the day to nap, read or meditate. It’s a corporate thing. Not many make use of it. People are too cynical here. Frieda doesn’t usually remember about the chair. Today she caresses its grey velvet armrests, leans back for a few seconds, struck by how wrong this feels, how far from joy. At the first conspicuous sound she returns to her desk. She knows the acoustics of this place like the back of her hand, the door handles pressed down in other parts of the building, followed by voices and steps. Her chair moment will be captured on CCTV, but nobody views these recordings unless there’s a serious reason. Two colleagues enter the office space, engrossed in conversation about their mobile phones. Frieda opens a spreadsheet, deletes a cell, inserts a column elsewhere. The rain gets heavy again, turns to hail, lashing against the window like uncooked rice. It doesn’t take long until everyone is back from lunch. Some sip at takeaway coffees, talk about Love Island, nod and laugh. Numbers start to dance on the screen. Frieda misses the colleague who used to sit next to her and recently quit, another woman in her forties, who, like Frieda, often felt a heaviness in her stomach first thing in the office.

‘This hellhole,’ they used to joke.

It hardly helped. There are thirteen people in the office today, all staring at their screens, fingers hitting keyboards. On a whim Frieda pictures herself in period costume. It’s her sense of humour, and maybe it’s the thing that has kept her alive within these walls. She laughs to herself, but makes it sound like a cough. Memories ping through her head, of colleagues walking out midday over emails from management, vowing not to set foot in the building again, new people starting the same week, oblivious, smiling constantly. She reaches for her headphones, searches YouTube for Bach’s Chaconne and presses play on the first video that comes up.

The solo violin sounds like a moan, the Asian performer’s expression sharp and seething one moment, ethereal and childlike the next. Frieda is hooked. For a while she hovers between admiration and envy. Eventually she focuses her eyes on a smudge on the wall and just listens. At times the melody grates, then flows, like the river in the German city she grew up in: its opaque bottle green covering all manner of discarded things. Shopping trolleys. Bicycles. Suitcases. The Chaconne keeps turning into thought. The waters rise, and seven minutes on, halfway into the piece, they reach her kitchen, cause her to run home to Shroove. Up to her waist in water, she looks in from the outside, nose pressed against the window, the cottage suddenly a grotesque fishbowl. All kinds of objects have sunk, the egg and cup, the small silver spoon she bought on holidays in Bologna. Finally, she spots the dog. He is nowhere near his bed, looks as though he has wrestled with something enormous, his spine twisted, eyes bulging. Inches above him the radio bobs like driftwood. The water bowl, too, floats nearby. Min Kym’s violin weirdly soothing, Frieda turns toward the hills behind their house. The lake in the distance is frozen over like lakes used to be this time of year when she was a child in another country. People appear to be skating on it. She inhales, strains her eyes and realizes that nobody is skating. One by one, they break through the ice, strangers rushing from nowhere to help, then sinking, too, all kinds of bodies set to rot in dark water. Frieda wants to scream, but then she spots Chris. In his waterproof gear he has caught up with her, holding a pair of binoculars.

‘What’s going on?’ she says, her teeth chattering with the cold, ‘what the fuck is going on?’

He gives her one of his languid looks, reminding her of conversations they’ve had about the possibility of this, the turmoil and destruction. Her head is full of questions – will their insurance cover this, bring these people back to life, the dog – but she seems to have lost her voice.

Then, at last, the Chaconne is over. Frieda exhales and, despite not being the religious type, sends a prayer into the ether, quick and silent, like the kiss in the car this morning. Please, what to do with all this? Can anybody help?

It’s only Tuesday.

She presses her feet into the carpet, walks over to the window. From the fourth-floor office they have a view across the city. No sign of flooding anywhere. The sky above the distant hills of Inishowen almost looks bright, but Frieda’s restlessness remains. She takes a breath, pictures the dog doing what he’s likely to be doing, strolling around the table, drinking from his bowl, barking when crows peck at the chimney. And occasionally, while he dozes, a paw might twitch, an eye open and fall shut again as classical music trickles into his ears.

Listen to the scientists, the Swedish girl says.

Back at the desk more interpretations of Bach’s Chaconne queue in the video feed. It’s tempting, like a second ride on a rollercoaster. She selects Christian Tetzlaff’s rendition this time. There’s no video, just the image of a bearded guy cradling a violin. She minimizes the YouTube window, listens while checking the Teams app. When a colleague she manages appears at her side, asking about a spreadsheet from three years ago, she’s flustered, tears off her headphones. The Bach vaguely audible from her lap, she clears her throat.

‘Go to “Project Activity”, “Annual Protocol”, and there should be a folder called “Current Estimations underscore Historical”.’

The sound of her voice repels her, but the colleague, a man in his twenties in a bright blue turtleneck, seems happy, thanks her profusely and returns to his desk. What the hell are we doing here? Frieda thinks. What’s the point of all this? She looks around. The idea of a period costume suddenly seems stupid. Profoundly unfunny. She hits play again. Five or six bars on, she remembers the Swedish girl’s picture on the little book’s back cover, the hooded young person, dark rings under her eyes, the bright raincoat. It soon blends with a second image, the portrait of Bach by Haussmann that used to hang in her school’s lobby in Regensburg. For years she walked past the famous stout man in his Baroque wig, his cheeks ruddy, one eyebrow raised, a fleshy hand holding a piece of sheet music. She had no idea then that Bach’s life was haunted by bereavements and grinding work commitments to feed his large family. A few years later, one summer afternoon by the lakeside, a friend who studied music told her bits and pieces about the composer, and Frieda vaguely listened. They lay on the grass, her friend humming the Goldberg Variations. In the evening they cycled home, racing each other along the way, insects hitting their faces.

We must stop competing with each other.

We were told we can have everything.

Yet now we may have nothing.

The second Chaconne comes to an end. Frieda heads into the staff kitchen, boils the kettle. The hot water makes the teabag swell like a life jacket, its colour turning from pale black to chocolate brown.

To do your best is no longer good enough.

Back in December she read about righteous anger in a women’s magazine. It made her think how, when she was a child, in another century, both her family and teachers had her believe in authorities, hierarchies and following rules. On the other hand, when left to play in parks or gardens, she pondered the world from the perspective of ladybirds. Leaves of grass became small woods. Tiny things moved centre stage, claimed their autonomy. From this point of view there were no rules, no kingdoms. And still, her pondering didn’t overturn what was being instilled in her at home and in school, even if, as a university student, she thought so. So here she is now, in her office kitchen, living abroad, a working woman with regrets, saddled with a fury all her own, throwing a teabag into the compost bin, the new century well underway. This morning she was puzzled how the visitors had managed to arrive in the rain with their suits in perfect condition. Their seamless looks and manner made her angry, and then the anger made her blush. When she had to introduce herself, her heart went into a spin. She could hardly say her own name. When her heartbeat finally slowed, Frieda wondered what exactly she owes the young. Patience or impatience? Contemplating the future from their perspective, she felt guilty about the usual things: still eating some meat, flying to Germany to visit her ageing parents plus one annual holiday in the sun, buying too many vegetables wrapped in plastic because Sainsbury’s doesn’t have better options and she’s too exhausted to grow her own all year round. Poor excuses, a lifetime of. The young made her forget the good stuff this morning, the shared car and solar panels, the bedtime yoga and tidy drawers, the closest to a simple life Chris and her could manage. Chaconne she kept writing, in between doodles of flowers and dogs, Chaconne. Even now, in the late afternoon, she’s clinging to the term. Oh, to have a word without meaning. Nothing to do but love this word, regardless of the mistakes she keeps making.

As a child, when her mother prepared cocoa, Frieda used to listen to the sound of the spoon stirring the base of the saucepan. It sounded like a voice calling ‘Mama, Mama’. It was not a child’s voice, though, more like someone or something more fragile, more lost than anything Frieda could imagine. She never stopped hearing it. Even these days, if only she lets herself, she will hear it.

Lifting the teabag from the cup, it strikes her that someday those yet to be born might take exams about this year, this decade. They might be curious, just like Frieda was once curious about Bach. When it comes to the finer details of his life and times her knowledge is still thin. So what could she, Frieda, possibly expect future kids to want to know about commutes at the start of 2020, about the proliferation of canapés, anxiety and tattoos?

Back at the workstation Hilary Hahn’s interpretation of the Chaconne is up next. Frieda pictures the dog paw at her leg as she listens. It soon turns out that Hahn’s play isn’t as gentle as it initially seemed. Like the other performers, she doesn’t warn you about the painful parts in the Chaconne, the moments when it’s hard to believe that this music goes back to the 1700s.

I’m here to say, our house is on fire, the Swedish girl writes.

Sipping at her cup Frieda remembers the movie The Double Life of Véronique, which she loved as a teenager. It told the story of two young women who looked the same but didn’t know each other, one living in Poland, the other in France. Both were musical, had lost their mother early, and lived with a heart condition they were unaware of. One of them became a classical singer, but died young of a heart attack at the climax of a concert. The other somehow sensed this, the lesson of someone she didn’t know. She gave up singing, reflected more, became a teacher. Frieda watched the movie many times back then, empathizing with both characters, but secretly siding with the teacher. A matter of survival, pushing less. Today this safer approach seems like a waste, if not altogether wrong. How come something as affecting as that movie has lost its currency in her life, become an ache in her stomach, sometimes in her throat. And how come not a day goes past when she doesn’t fantasize about having the dog in the office with her? He’s no assistance dog, though. They won’t let him in. He’s a rescue, prone to chewing cables when stressed. And why wouldn’t he be stressed in here? This place is a hellhole. She closes her eyes, and an image of the dog mounting the relaxation chair with muddy paws has her on the cusp of another nervous laugh. Moments later a reminder pops up on her screen. A dataset needs to be analyzed. A timer is activated. Suddenly there is no choice. She’s shocked at how quickly she settles into work mode. Shortly after this, the CEO comes in as is his habit in the afternoon, telling everyone a joke. Like most of his jokes Frieda doesn’t find this one remotely funny. A fake smile freezes her face while she continues with her task and a few of her colleagues roar with laughter. On completion she shares the dataset review with an overseas colleague whose workday just began. Outside, the darkness comes quick. The cleaners arrive at 4:50 p.m. Just after five, on her way to the bathroom, she passes one of them in the corridor, a woman who struggles to open a bottle of bleach and starts cursing.

As she pees, palms pressed against her forehead, Frieda first feels sorry for the cleaner, then for the caretaker, and then for the horse leaning into barbed wire fence this morning. Even the woman in the yellow suit seems pitiful now, with Frieda knowing precious little about her, other than that at one point she must have thought to herself: Yellow, a nice colour for a suit. Most of all, however, at this stage of the day, Frieda feels sorry for herself. And for Chris, who, at any moment now, will get up from his desk in another part of town. Twenty minutes to go before the man she’s professed her love to will pull up outside on the curb. They’ve got this commute down to a T. She washes her hands, holds them under the dryer, remembering the clear-out.

‘Makes sense,’ Chris said when she told him.

There was no further probing of the thing she’d done. He seemed happy with less stuff in the house, and there was no need to explain any further. This, too, made Frieda joyful. And still, just like her, Chris has sorrows of his own. The social awkwardness that has haunted him since childhood, the worries about his younger brother, recently diagnosed with MS. Sometimes she can soothe him. Other times he stays uncomforted, watching the news late at night when she is long in bed, the bedside lamp switched off, her current novel about to slide off the bedside table and spook her in her sleep.

This morning in the kitchen, the news playing in the background, they drove each other crazy. Cheep-cheep they went, back and forth, like the birds surrounding their house, their digs entirely predictable.

There are other times, though, when the dog keeps running after a tennis ball, and Frieda will say, ‘He’d do that all day.’ ‘It’s the Retriever in him,’ Chris will reply, the exchange like another piece of music. The simplicity of the scene brings tears to Frieda’s eyes. How she has come to rely on it. This and so much more: the flash of the lighthouse, her husband and dog, vistas and waves.

‘One more listen,’ she tells herself.

Back in the office Isaac Stern is up next in the queue, a blurry black and white clip of a man in a suit who’s so engrossed in the Chaconne he keeps his eyes closed all the way through. It’s a grainy, frustrating watch. Frieda decides to open a new browser window. She wasn’t going to do this, but now she suddenly is, and it takes no time at all before this morning’s word is finally paired with its meaning.

A form consisting of variations based on a reiterated harmonic pattern.

In the other window Stern is pulling out all the stops, and for a moment Frieda’s ears twitch like the dog’s at an unexpected sound. There is no harmony in Bach’s Chaconne. On the contrary. In places it is worse than the news, strings ringing like fire engines on their way to a blaze. How could she leave her dog alone with this? If there’s one thing to glean from a pattern, it’s that there is always the possibility of chaos. This is how Chris would put it, based on some obscure mathematical formula Frieda wouldn’t attempt to understand. And Chris usually has a point. The final note hums and twists, a faint smile on Stern’s sweaty face as he opens his eyes and lowers the bow. Without the Chaconne, the office seems quiet as a tomb. Three of her co-workers still sit at their desks, but Frieda shuts down the computer, rises from her chair and walks out of the office like someone unchained. Descending that horrible staircase in no time at all, she nearly trips on the final step, but not quite. She exits the building, and it pops up in her mind, like another reminder: the thing she’s known for some time.

‘I’m resigning,’ she whispers, already rehearsing, absorbing the solidarity of invisible others, commuting home from different buildings in different places, hatching the same plan. It’s hard to picture her husband among them all the same.

‘But it’s a game,’ she can hear him say. ‘And we need to survive.’

Again, he’s got a point. She’ll need to be smart. There’ll be plenty to do. Prove to him which games are not worth playing anymore, no matter what. A mantra will be helpful, a single word. Inconclusive. Mysterious. Protective. She takes a breath, steps out into the air. There he is, behind the windscreen, parked in the usual spot, a tired smile rolling down his face. She runs across the street, opens the door, sinks into the passenger seat and they drive off. Chaconne, Frieda keeps thinking, all the way through the winter dark, steeling herself while Chris listens to the news and stops at the shop in Moville for milk and teabags. Chaconne.

When they pull into their driveway, there’s one small puddle. Inside the house all is dry. No cables have been chewed. The radio plays an orchestral piece. The boiled egg and breakfast crockery are still on the tabletop. Frieda slips out of her shoes. The dog stretches, presses his body into hers. Minutes later, the dinner warming up on the hob, she steps out the back door where the clear sky surprises her. The constellations look different from how she remembers them. They always do. The dog pees at blades of grass she cannot see, then reappears with a ball in his mouth. Seawater laps against rock. The lighthouse flashes. And the longer Frieda stands in the garden, looking up at the stars, she can hear the spoon stirring the pot of cocoa again. The memory of the Chaconne translates to one thing only then: a call for help, leaving her with no choice but to answer in her forty-something, non-tattooed way.

She goes back inside, all set to push and retrieve this time round, let chaos and pattern join forces.

‘Chris,’ she says. ‘I need to tell you something.’

From issue #17: spring/summer 2024

About the Author
Susanne Stich lives in Inishowen. Her work appeared in The Stinging Fly, Ambit, Winter Papers, New Irish Writing, The Pig’s Back and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize, a finalist in the IWC Novel Fair, and received bursaries from the Arts Council and Donegal County Council.