The Symphony of the Sinking City

The sea took Aderra the way age takes a face: not all at once, but feature by feature, so slowly that for a long time you could pretend nothing was happening, and then all at once you could pretend nothing else. First it took the low districts by the old harbour, the fish markets and the tanneries, and the city told itself those had always been half-drowned anyway. Then it took the Street of Clockmakers, and the lower seminary, and the public baths where Vesna Vey had learned to swim as a girl seventy years before, and the city told itself the people there had wanted to leave. And then, the year the last sea-wall began to weep at its joints and the engineers stopped promising and started apologising, it became impossible to tell oneself anything at all, and Aderra began, in earnest and in sorrow, to die.

Vesna Vey was eighty-one years old and had conducted the Aderra Philharmonic for forty of them, and she had buried, in those forty years, two hundred musicians, a city, and a husband, more or less in that order, though the husband and the city had gone so nearly together that she sometimes confused their funerals. Aleksander had been the city's composer the way she had been its conductor — its other half, its left hand — and he had spent the last decade of his life writing the thing that everyone in Aderra now simply called *the Symphony*, as though there had never been and would never be another: a vast, strange, five-movement work for the drowning of his city, four movements of which he had finished before his heart stopped one grey morning at his writing desk with the pen still in his hand. The fifth movement he left blank. Not unfinished in the ordinary way, with sketches and crossings-out; blank, deliberately, a single page bearing only a tempo marking in his beautiful slanting hand and four words beneath it: *to be completed by the water.*

She had understood him at once, which is what forty years of marriage and music is for. He did not mean it as a metaphor. He meant that the fifth movement of the Aderra Symphony was to be played by the sea, in the act of taking the concert hall — that the orchestra would perform the first four movements as the water rose through the streets, and would still be playing, would play the held final chord of the fourth movement, when the flood came through the doors of the Hall of the Mariners' Guild and into the orchestra pit and up over the music stands, and that the sound of the city's last building filling with the sea would be the fifth movement, the only ending the work could honestly have, written by the only composer with the authority to end it. It was the most beautiful idea Vesna had ever heard and also, she had known even as Aleksander first whispered it to her, a thing that would require someone to be sitting in that hall, playing, when the water came.