Years earlier he’d played with a drummer he despised. The drummer rushed. Not dramatically. Perhaps three beats per minute over the course of a song. Nobody in the audience noticed. Lev noticed. Soon he noticed nothing else. Every concert became an investigation. Was he rushing now? There. Did you hear that? There again. Lev began placing his notes slightly behind the beat to restrain him, which caused the drummer to push harder, which caused Lev to pull harder, until eventually two professional musicians were dragging the same song in opposite directions while each privately blamed the other for destroying the music.

One night an old pianist sat in with them. Afterward Lev said, “That drummer is impossible.”

The pianist said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe? Didn’t you hear him rushing?”

“I heard you slowing down.”

“I was slowing down because he was rushing.”

“Yes,” said the pianist. “That’s what I heard.”

Lev became angry.

“You don’t understand.”

“No,” said the pianist. “But I noticed something.”

“What?”

“You didn’t play with him once all night.”

“I was playing with him for two hours.”

“No. You were playing against him.”

Lev didn’t speak. The pianist packed his music into a leather bag.

Finally Lev said, “What’s the difference?”

“When you play with somebody, you have to hear what they’re doing. When you play against somebody, eventually you hear only what they’re doing wrong.”

Years later, reading about Cambodia, and later still watching the terrible images from Israel and Gaza, Lev remembered that sentence. He knew nations weren’t bands and wars weren’t disagreements about tempo. People were murdered. Children were murdered. Hostages were taken. History contained real victims, real aggressors, real grievances and real crimes, and pretending everybody was simply misunderstanding everybody else would be obscene. But he also wondered whether hatred had a rhythm.

Perhaps it began with something real: an injury, a humiliation, a murdered relative, stolen land, an old injustice. Then another generation inherited the beat. Then another. Eventually nobody remembered who counted the song in, only that the people on the other side were monsters so whatever you did to them was no longer the same as doing it to human beings. That was the dangerous modulation. The enemy ceased being human. Lev closed the history book and picked up his bass. He played one note and let it decay until he could no longer hear it. For years he’d thought silence was emptiness. Now he wondered if it was simply music that had not yet chosen a side.