The Music of Erich Zann

The CampfireThe openingFree

I've looked everywhere for the street. I've studied every map of the city. I've walked every neighborhood. I can't find it.

But I lived there once. For months. When I was a poor student in Paris, studying metaphysics, I lived on a street called the Rue d'Auseil.

It was a very strange street. Very steep, on a hill, so steep that in parts it was steps instead of pavement. The houses leaned over it. They were old and tall and crooked. And at the top of the street was a high wall, covered in ivy. And nobody I ever met could tell me what was on the other side.

I rented a room on the fifth floor of an old house. Above me, in the attic, the only room higher than mine, lived an old German man named Erich Zann.

He was a viol player. A musician. He played in a cheap theater orchestra at night. And he could not speak. He was mute.

And he played music, alone, in his attic, late at night.

I'd never heard music like it. It came down through the ceiling. Weird, wild, beautiful. Harmonies that didn't sound like anything else. I listened every night.

His was the only window on the whole street, the landlord told me, that looked out over the top of the wall at the top of the hill. From his window, you could see what was on the other side.