The blue trumpet

From the very moment he spotted the trumpet in the window he couldn’t forget it. He did not waver – he had to own it – affordability came second. But when he pushed open the door of the small basement shop he was still cleaned out ... money wasn’t free.A small blue-tinted woman minded the abundance of the small room with semi-blind neatness and didn’t notice his ill-concealed indignation at a sparse layer of dust. He cautiously tried to blow it away, then to brush it off with a corner of his T-shirt. All in vain. The dust seemed to be firmly attached and the woman only seemed to be interested in some ugly little jewellery which she was arranging in various patterns in blue velvet-lined trays.With unaccustomed sensitivity he depressed the valves one by one and found them as light as if they were part of his fingers, and when he put the trumpet to his lips and blew a note, it was not he who played. That tone came from somewhere else. Once again, and then the octave and the octave above that. Until it sang its way under his skin.He looked at the woman out of the corner of his eye, and for the first time she looked up from behind her thick-lensed mother-of-pearl rimmed spectacles. Did he see a smile on her lips, or did the blue confuse him? Feeling a little shy about his lack of imagination he played a fragment of an old nursery song. It was the only thing he could think of.There he was in a small, dark basement shop, he was sure of that, but he had not noticed the colour before. Nor where the light was coming from, so filled with life. The trumpet had regained some of its lustre, as if the dust had melted away, but little by little he stopped wondering. Now the woman looked steadfastly at him as she arranged the last pieces of jewellery.For a moment he thought of the approaching spring and continued playing the interrupted melody. The shop shattered like glass and dissolved around him. Blue. Deep like the sea. High, like the sky. Blue. And the sun got an extra glow.Down by the harbour, in the town and in the country, people unbuttoned their longings and for a short while they again became what they once had been.