Six days a week Joseph Steiner went to work in the butcher shop carrying, as always in his shirt pocket, a tattered photo of his wife and children that had been taken years before when he was a young, aspiring violinist for the New York symphony orchestra. Steiner worked for Samuel Goldberg, an ageing gentleman who had owned the butcher shop since the end of the Korean War. Goldberg, with his trembling hands and stigmatic left eye, was a relic, a widower, and his voice wheezed when he talked to his customers.
Not that Steiner himself looked like a young man anymore. He was thirty-eight years old, had a teenage girl, Sarah, and a wife, Rosa— together they shared a cramped brownstone apartment on the east side. Each morning, when he passed in front of the glass butcher’s case which displayed the fresh meats and fish, Steiner paused to take notice of his reflection: the high forehead lined with worry, the narrow brow, his dark, resolute eyes filled with dread. The future worried him. And that is why he continued to work long, hard hours for Goldberg. For Steiner was haunted by what could have been.
“Why do you hold on to such a dream?” Goldberg asked each day without fail, referring to Steiner’s unfailing hope of returning to the orchestra.
“A man has to have hope,” Steiner explained to his employer as he had many times before, gazing at his own hands. “I play the violin. My fingers can still make the instrument sing. They are valuable.”
“That they were once valuable, that I can see,” Goldberg said. “But now you are no longer a great violinist. You are a butcher. A man who cuts meat. Why do you waste time on such empty dreams?”
Steiner never answered. How could he share with Goldberg the essence of his emptiness, his wishful, unwavering hope that he might be able to play the violin, someday, in a great orchestra? Ah, these were indeed his wild dreams.
“You value your hands,” Goldberg chided, handing Steiner a ten inch cheese knife, “and yet you work with such sharp instruments?”
Steiner hung his head in shame, angry for having succumbed to the temptations of the flesh. He had not planned on getting Rosa pregnant before they were married. At that time he was still working frantically at his music, honing his skills on the violin, memorizing movements and entire symphonies. He was an up-and-coming violinist earning a name, a reputation for himself. But Rosa’s pregnancy had cut his promise short. He had been forced to take a job to support his new wife. Then the baby came. And then all was lost. He had been a butcher ever since.
“You still play the violin, yes?” Goldberg asked over the steady hum of the meat slicer.
“I play,” Steiner answered, rubbing his scalp with a meat-reddened palm. “But I am not young anymore. I have lost some of my agility. You know?” He wiggled the fingers of his left hand at the old man.
“What about your family?” asked Goldberg, taking hold of Steiner’s fingers. “Do they still believe in your empty promises?” He patted the rippled photo in Steiner’s pocket.
“There is always hope,” Steiner replied, refusing to answer for his loved ones. “I will get back to the orchestra. With practice. Someday soon. . . when I have more time.”
The old man smiled his teeth a jagged row of garlicky smelling roots. “Here you work for me twelve hours a day, six days a week. When is this that you have time to practice? Why is it that you worry at all?”
“I’m not a butcher,” Steiner shot back. “I’m a concert violinist. I studied at the university, under great teachers. I have an education.”
“So why then, with such learning, you work for me?” He elevated Steiner’s left hand, palm up, the exposed fingertips sticky with ground beef fat, the skin crisscrossed with delicately fine cuts. “For this you spent time in the university?”
Steiner tired of explaining the realities of the modern world to the old man. Nevertheless, he would try again. “There are no jobs for musicians. The arts are drying up. The market is saturated. The competition for chairs is keen.” He waved off Goldberg with a flick of his hand. “Ah, you can’t imagine!” Steiner picked up a fresh knife and began to scale a pile of stinking fish on the countertop. He made fine fillets, threw the guts, glistening and slimy, into a bucket on the floor.
“I know life,” Goldberg continued, refusing to give Steiner the last word. “My family, they suffered in the great war. And my dear wife. . . may she rest in peace. . . was once a song in my heart. I know about such life!”
Steiner felt both sympathy and anger toward the old man. “So you have suffered. Who has not? All I’m saying is that I’m a musician, not a butcher.” As soon as he spoke, Steiner wished he could recall the words.
Eyes downcast, Goldberg hacked at the bloody flank of beef. “In such a world as this, you have still such a dream for you hands?”
“My hands are valuable,” Steiner replied firmly.

Goldberg’s eyebrows expanded upward and his old eyes gleamed under the white florescence of the lights overhead. “So you then are a good violinist?”
“I could be,” Steiner answered dryly with resolution in his voice, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. “I could be and I will be.”
Goldberg shook his head in disbelief, flicked a switch and began stuffing beef chunks into a shredder with his palsied hands. “You are now a butcher,” he said. “But you wish to be a violinist. May God grant you the desires of your heart.”
When he returned home after nine p.m., Steiner was exhausted and went immediately to the sofa in the cramped, dusty apartment and lay down. Rosa brought him a steaming bowl of rice topped with pieces of chicken and green vegetables. She kissed him softly upon the forehead. “You work too hard,” she whispered.
“Where is Sarah?” Steiner asked, opening one eye to gaze upward at his wife–her long, black hair streaming down upon her shoulders, her green eyes lovely and nurturing.
“She’s at the library tonight, studying for a test,” she answered.
Steiner, despite his setbacks and dashed hopes, felt overwhelmingly blessed. He had a wonderful wife and a studious, obedient daughter. And Steiner knew that, if not for Rosa’s additional income (she worked as a secretary for a small business firm), he would be unable to support them on his meager salary. This realization filled Steiner with a deep love for his wife and a constant sense of urgency: he must practice the violin more fervently, earn more money, do more for his family. He was not doing enough!
Steiner lay still on the sofa as his wife caressed his temples and then, after some minutes, he arose and ate his dinner, the rice having gone cold around the edges of the bone white plate. “Do you want more?” Rosa asked him from the tiny kitchen as he finished the last piece of chicken.
“No,” Steiner answered wearily. He studied the silence of the apartment as Rosa busied herself with the dishes and a pile of suds. When he was certain that his wife was not watching, he padded off to the bedroom and, taking down the violin case from the shelf in his cramped closet, opened the latch and removed his instrument–a violin of some age and average tone, with untuned strings and a bow which, much to his surprise, still retained much of its resiliency.
Steiner sat on the edge of the bed and quickly tuned up, his fingertips aching from lack of practice and a long day of work. And then he began.
From memory—a memory which had served him well over the years and had remained alive to the forms of music, the nuances of rhythm and tone—he began to play Brahms’ Violin Concerto, a piece he had known by heart, had auditioned with, and had loved from his youth. Surprised by the nimbleness of his fingers, Steiner played the piece with a depth of feeling and a reawakening of his soul. The notes, sharp and crisp, welled up from his instrument, the haunting melody, as it seemed to him, reverberating within the limitations of his body and his meager circumstances.
As Steiner finished the Concerto, Rosa, smiling, entered the room. “You remember,” she said happily, but cautiously, feeling out her husband’s mood.
“How can one forget what is timeless?” he answered.
“It sounded marvelous.”
“You think?”
Steiner had not practiced in three weeks. His days in the butcher shop had wasted his energy, unnerved him, and Goldberg’s constant harassment left him foul and cross when he returned home, unable to make the mental leap from butcher to violinist, from meat hacker to artist.
“If only I had more time,” Steiner muttered, examining the furrowed imprints that the strings had etched in his fingertips. “I need more time.” As he said the words he realized how deeply he longed to play, what he would be willing to sacrifice for an opportunity to play in the orchestra. Be he needed practice.
“Play it once more,” Rosa said. Steiner rubbed his fingertips across his shirt, still stinking with the scent of rancid fish, and began again, the melody welling up, as it seemed, from the symbiosis of his hands and the violin, a harmony of wills. Yes, he was improving. He felt this as he played and the joy of the music itself lifted him beyond the limitations of earth.
Afterwards Rosa left him alone and returned to the cramped living room where she wrote two letters. She pulled two plain envelopes from the pile of correspondence they had received in the last week and licked a stamp for each. She noticed that there were bills in the pile: vouchers for electricity, clothing, a charge account with a high interest rate, and for gas. In addition, Rosa had had a minor operation on her foot a month before and the doctor’s bill had just arrived, a sum that, if paid in full, would drain their meager savings account.
She placed the stack of bills on the table so her husband would be certain to notice them. Then, taking her two letters in hand, she announced, over the high-pitched strains of her husband’s violin, that she was going down to the corner to mail the letters. After it was apparent that he did not hear her, she gathered her scarf and stepped out, closing the door in the winter air.
Three days later, Goldberg was at it again. “You see my hand?” The old man shook his palm in Steiner’s face.
“Yes,” Steiner said dryly.
“These are the hands of an experienced butcher, not a violinist!” Goldberg’s hand, while palsied and unsure of itself, was also ugly in its uncompleted form. The ring finger of his right hand, a thick, cigar shaped protrusion, was a mere stump, cut off below the second knuckle. And the index finger of his left hand, while twisted and stiff, was bereft of any nail. “Both accidents,” Goldberg said. “Caught in the meat slicer this one! And the other, lost by the cleaver!”
“I watch my hands carefully,” Steiner assured his employer.
“Such care a butcher does not need,” Goldberg added, pointing to the spinning meat slicer in the corner. “Is it not true you work for me, you cut the meat?”
“Perhaps,” Steiner told him. “But I must think about the future. I hope to do better.”
Goldberg was taken aback by this reference to the lowliness of a butcher’s life and he scowled. “For this I pay you to do such work?”
“I’m sorry,” Steiner apologized. “I meant nothing personal.”
“Ahhgg,” Goldberg snorted as he stuffed chunks of gristly beef into the grinder.
Out front a brass bell tinkled over the door and a large woman, a regular customer wrapped in a bright green shawl, entered the butcher shop. Her face, round with love and affection, seemed to hang below her chin, and her cheeks, the hue of pink roses, were a gift of the cool winter air. “Mister Goldberg,” she said jovially. “I have such good news from my son. He is getting married next month to a fine girl whose father, God bless him, is a rabbi. For this I come by to tell you and to buy some fish which I will take to my daughter’s tomorrow.”
“Ah, Mrs. Fleishman, such wonderful news,” Goldberg wheezed, hoisting his palsied hands into the air. “I give you some nice fish, the kind which I know you like, right away.”
Steiner, knowing that Mrs. Fleishman always purchased mackerel, began placing the fish onto the white butcher paper and wrapped them quickly. He handed the stinking package to Goldberg who weighed it, marked it with a red oil pencil, and handed it to the customer, leaving his soiled fingerprints on the white butcher paper in blackened whorls. Goldberg shuffled across the greasy wooden floor–cracks filled with the odor of meat particles and bone chips– and rang up the purchase on the cash register as he received the money from Mrs. Fleishman. “Your son, may he have many happy years of marriage,” he said caringly.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Fleishman said, placing the package in an elongated leather purse which held a multitude of personal items. “I come again next week, if the weather, it don’t get too bad.”
Goldberg nodded and watched as his customer exited the shop, the brass bell tinkling again with its nerve-jarring annoyance.
“That woman,” Goldberg told Steiner in his usual gossipy fashion, “she will never quit believing in her son, even though he is such trouble to her. He is the Fleishman who burned down his dead father’s business seven years ago. This, I’m sure, you read about in the papers.”

“I don’t remember,” Steiner answered, going down into the meat case to bring up a thirty-pound slab of Swiss cheese for slicing.
“That it was all over the newspapers I don’t have to tell you,” Goldberg continued. “The police, they say it was arson. The son, he burned down his father’s business. . . a business his father, may he rest in peace, he builds with his own hands. He burns it down to collect the insurance money. That is the kind of world we live in, Mister Steiner. Where a son betrays his own dead father for money but he don’t get punished. This I can tell you.”
Steiner did not pause in his work, but continued slicing the Swiss cheese, pushing the hefty slab back and forth through the slicer as the rounded folds slipped through the blade and piled neatly on a sheet of wax paper. He sighed and tried not to listen to the philosophical ramblings of his employer, who loved to discover a lesson, a meaning, in every customer’s life.
“When it is the money people want, they will stop at nothing,” Goldberg continued. “This is why, may God bless me, it is better to be poor. That this is the case, I ask you to look around and see if it is not true.”
In his own mind, Steiner could imagine a dozen reasons why the son, if indeed he had committed arson, could have been justified in doing so–at least in his intentions. Money was not the only reason people made disastrous mistakes, acted in irrational ways. Sometimes there was love and passion involved. Sometimes there was dread and fear.
Goldberg excused himself and went into a back room to get more wax paper. While he was gone, Steiner worked the slab of cheese through the slicer with ever quickening pace and tried to hum the Violin Concerto over the loud roaring of the machine.
Steiner was staring at his wife in disbelief. Rosa, after a dinner of fatty stewed beef and fresh bread, informed Steiner that Sarah needed braces on her teeth.
“That’s what the dentist recommends,” Rosa told him again.
“Why? What is wrong with her teeth?”
Sarah sat at the table beside her father, a small-boned girl of fifteen with hazel eyes and dark, curly hair. She had her mother’s beautiful face and her body was beginning to blossom into adulthood. Sarah, listening intently to the conversation without interjecting her own opinion, sipped halfheartedly at a cup of apple juice.
“Her teeth are crooked,” Rosa replied brazenly while looking at her daughter. “She has inherited your bad teeth, your overbite. You’ve told me this a hundred times.”
“Dentists think everyone should have perfect teeth,” Steiner answered. “They think everyone’s mouth should look the same. Her teeth are pretty as they are.” Steiner reached over and caressed Sarah’s cheek.
“She needs braces,” Rosa stated again, firmly.
Steiner smiled and gazed lovingly at his daughter. “What do you think?” he asked her. “Do you want braces?”
Sarah nodded meekly, unwilling to say anything that might overwhelmingly affirm her desire.
“Then you get braces,” Steiner answered slowly. He watched as Sarah’s mouth bloomed wide, revealing two rows of large, unevenly spaced teeth that reminded him of his own unremedied smile.
“Thank you,” Sarah said happily.
Steiner put both palms on the table and thanked Rosa for the meal, a cornucopia of food which had filled him with peace and goodness despite his growing burdens.
After dinner, Rosa pushed a slip of paper into Steiner’s hand as he sat on the couch reading a magazine. Here was revealed to him the sum of money needed to finance his child’s braces and the payment plan which he would be forced to assume over a four year period of time. It was like paying for a car, and the thought of the ongoing financial burden quickly evaporated his peace and saddened him. He had no dental insurance and he knew that his days would prove to be even longer and more stress-filled than before. . . all for the sake of two rows of thin wire upon his daughter’s teeth.
Steiner rummaged through the pile of bills on the roll top desk. Rosa’s doctor bill was outstanding. There were other accounts, high interest rates, more incoming financial demands. There was no way in which he and Rosa could possibly get out of debt. They were going under and he knew it.
But he would say nothing. Dear God, he would spare his family such unhappiness. He wanted to give them so much more.
Later that evening, after Sarah had left the apartment to study at the local library, Steiner took down his violin and practiced, feeling at last the fading glory of his fingers, the departure of his youthfulness, the heaviness of time upon his body. He played slowly, majestically, passionately, as if all of the world’s sorrow had come crashing down upon the vibrating strings. The Concerto welled up, seemingly, from within him, flowed out of his heart across his fingertips. Closing his eyes, Steiner dreamed once more of the stage, the audiences he had once played before, the kind reviews he had never received. He was overwhelmed by the simplicity of his failure, the starkness of his meager existence despite the reality of his education and musical background.
Suddenly he stopped and examined the violin itself. How much could he get for it, he wondered? It was in bad condition–the finish having gone cloudy, the tone turned sour for lack of a human touch. The bridge was slightly bowed. Steiner placed the violin in the case and returned it to the top shelf of the closet, certain that no pawn shop or music store would give him a viable offer.
Bills, braces, doctor fees. He was surrounded by illness it seemed. Why had he remained healthy? Why wasn’t he also struck with some delicious malady to torment him further into despair? Steiner considered his situation and then repented of his horrible thoughts. After all, he had his health, he had his wife and daughter; he grew angry at himself for having such ferociously evil thoughts.
That night Steiner slept in short snatches of serenity, waking each time in a fit of anguish, cursing his fate. His body was wrecked by shortness of breath, as if awaiting a sentence of death, and he attempted to call out to his God in some silent, meaningful way, but no words were uttered, no prayers spoken, and he awoke before sunrise resigned to another day of work, his skin still reeking of pungent fish and spoiled meat. Steiner slipped his clothes on and then stood over Rosa while she slept, feeling rather odd and nervous as he watched the rise and fall of her breathing, the contour of her face, the lines of her body beneath the covers. It was dark, but he examined her loveliness as if for the first time, wanting to touch her so desperately, to be near her. After some moments he sighed, turned and walked away.
Steiner crept into the kitchen and ate a hardened bagel. Afterwards his teeth ached and his eyes watered, but he was resilient.
Going to the roll top desk in utter darkness, Steiner flipped on a light, located a key hidden beneath a pile of papers, and then opened a small locked drawer. Reaching inside, he removed a crumpled document, yellowed with age, and spread the page upon the desk: an insurance policy for his hands which he had taken on years ago when he was in his prime as a musician, a policy which paid fifty thousand dollars in the event of injury to his hands.
Steiner had, over the years, kept this one secret from Rosa. He had continued to pay the premiums on the policy (a nominal sum), hoping against hope that, one day, he might return to the orchestra. Folding the document into a square, Steiner put on his coat, turned out the light, and slipped silently into his daughter’s bedroom where he stood for long minutes beside her bed. Her hand—delicate and relaxed— was poised upon the mattress next to her head, soft fingers like petals blossoming from the stem of her wrist. He attempted to imagine her dreams—pretty thoughts perhaps, or wild, rambunctious escapades with boys twice her age. At last he bent down to kiss her lightly upon the forehead.
Steiner walked the five blocks to the butcher shop in morning darkness and was greeted by Goldberg as the old man was unlocking the front door, a sack of fruit in his palsied hand. Neither of the men said a word, but tipped their heads in morning greeting and entered the foul-smelling domain. Goldberg bent over, emitted a loud wheezing, and picked up the morning paper that had been deposited through the mail slot in the door. He dusted himself off, shuffled over to a table in one corner of the shop. Goldberg sat down, reached into the bag for a peach, and opened the paper.
Steiner removed his own coat and draped it over the meat rack near the grinder.

“More bad news, Mister Steiner,” Goldberg wheezed as he bit on the dry fruit. “A double homicide on the west side.”
Steiner did not respond. He pulled out a customer order slip and studied it. Then he reached down into the meat case and pulled up a large flank of beef, mostly bone and gristle, and began slicing the excess fat from the hind quarter.
“Hate, Mister Steiner,” Goldberg continued. “Hate and greed. This is what makes the world go round.”
Steiner did not answer. He studied the space between Goldberg and himself–a fair distance, well beyond the old man’s waning eyesight. Goldberg read the paper religiously. Steiner knew he would devour it from cover to cover before he would go to work on the large bucket of unscaled fish.
Steiner reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled insurance policy, laid it beside the chopping block. Looking back, he noticed that Goldberg was still reading his precious paper, his mind filled with thoughts of avarice and vice–his predominant understanding of the world. Steiner picked up a meat cleaver with his right hand.
“When God made the world,” Goldberg echoed, “I think he don’t stop to consider the possibilities for evil.”
Goldberg turned the page and examined the comic strips. He laughed in a series of spastic bursts. “Tell me, Mister Steiner, how in such a world as this, does a man find laughter?”
Steiner placed his left hand on the chopping block and spread his fingers like a blooming flower. He raised the cleaver.
Goldberg was still speaking when Steiner brought the cleaver down hard across the block.