At last, it was time. They called Marie and her page-turner. I was expecting to be weak at the knees with my teeth chattering like a metronome, but instead the calm that washed over me seemed to come from the furthest reaches of outer space, as though I was wholly absorbed in the peaceful passing of time.

In the hall, I could see Dad next to Haisam and Lucky Luke. Darth Vader was sitting between Marie’s parents. The jury was on our right, set back a little.

Marie seemed to be on another planet. Her eyes were wide open as though she’d been hypnotized.

Gradually, the public quietened down and silence spread out over the room like a blanket. There was a pause. Marie was holding her bow a few centimetres above the strings. I held my breath. I glanced quickly over at Dad, then at Haisam, who was spilling over his seat. I saw him raise his big hand, almost imperceptibly, for my eyes only. Everything that is unsaid between human beings was concentrated in that little gesture. And in the short pause before the bow crashed down onto the strings, all my memories came rolling back to me, in a massive pile-up. Marie, alone on the road to the village. Marie on the ghost train. The toffee apple. Marie in the dust with her heart full of grief. Marie’s eyes. Marie counting her footsteps.

The music rose above the heads of the audience and floated around the room, intense, ethereal and limpid. I turned the pages from time to time for the sake of appearances. Even with my musical ignorance I could tell that Marie was playing in a different way that day, dangerously, almost losing control, as though on the edge of a void. Together, she and I had also journeyed across a dark void during the course of the year. Now and then, the bow slowed down and it sounded as though the music was climbing a steep slope, straining, almost running out of breath; and then suddenly the notes would cascade down over the other side of the crest, in a frantic stampede.

My heart began to beat double fast because I felt that the slightest thing could bring Marie down. I could see her profile. Her face was shining slightly and her hair was flying in all directions.

And then she struck the strings hard with her bow, three times. There was silence again. The sunlight at the end of the labyrinth. Very slowly, very carefully, Marie lifted the bow away from the cello. We could still hear the flowing melody swirling around us. It felt as though the music’s last echoes were fading away along with the last traces of childhood, as the thunderous applause broke out.