I had been playing for fourteen years and had never thought of sound as something that could end. I played, that was all. I got up in the morning and made coffee, Najjar powder with cardamom, and took the violin from its case, and Zaatar climbed down from the case because Zaatar slept on the case, and Zaatar was the cat, the building's cat, meaning nobody's, meaning mine. I tuned up and set the violin on my shoulder and my shoulder knew that weight and the weight was the first sound of the day, before the bow, before the string. I played in the conservatory orchestra, second row, third stand. The orchestra existed because a French program had decided it should exist and the conductor was a Frenchman called Morel who smoked Gitanes even during rehearsals, in the sense that he stepped out every twenty minutes and came back smelling of Gitanes and nobody knew where he bought them because you couldn't find Gitanes anywhere anymore, like many other things. The tinnitus had started in March, after the night they hit the southern suburbs and the apartment windows shook for forty seconds and my mother called from the mountains and said come up here and I said I'm fine and she said at least the cat and I said the cat's fine and the next day the windows were intact but in my ears a thin whistle had stayed, continuous, like a bow held still on the fourth string that nobody was playing. The doctor said it wasn't the explosion, it was chronic exposure, the orchestra's decibels, fourteen years without protection. I knew he was right and I knew he wasn't entirely right because the whistle had arrived that night and not another and the body knows when something begins even if the doctor says it had already begun before. (The body is right. The charts are right. It is not the same right.)

The doctor worked in a hospital twenty minutes by taxi when the road was open and fifty when it wasn't and you never knew when the road was open and the taxi cost more than the visit. He had me step into the booth and put on the headphones and I pressed the button when I heard the sound and sometimes I pressed when there was nothing because the whistle in my head and the test tone blurred together. He looked at the chart. "High-frequency loss," he said. "Nothing serious for now." He opened a drawer and took out a small transparent plastic box, the kind you keep buttons in. Inside were two orange plugs, silicone, molded. "Wear them during rehearsals," he said. "Not during concerts, during rehearsals." I took the box and put it in the pocket of the violin case and the box stayed in the pocket for three weeks. (Now I know that three weeks is how long it takes to convince yourself something isn't needed.)

I lived on the third floor of a building in the neighborhood near the port and the doorman was called Walid and he kept my mail when I didn't come down for days and the mail was phone bills and letters from my mother who still wrote letters by hand because she said letters arrive even when the phone has no signal and she was right because sometimes the phone had no signal for hours. Rehearsals were in a ground-floor hall of a building that had once been a cinema and was now the conservatory and you could still see the cinema: the seats had been removed but the floor had the slope and the slope meant the strings sat lower than the winds and the winds played from above and Morel said the slope was an acoustic advantage and I thought Morel said that because he couldn't say otherwise. The tinnitus during rehearsals was worse than at home because at home there was the fridge and there was Zaatar and there was the noise of the street and the street noise was constant, the horns and the generators and the voices and the sirens, and the noise covered the tinnitus, pushed it under, and during rehearsals the street noise was gone and there was the orchestra and the orchestra was loud and after the orchestra there was silence and in the silence the tinnitus was everything.

I tried them on a Tuesday, the plugs, at a dress rehearsal. I opened the box and took the right plug and pushed it into my ear and the world changed. Not the way it changes when you close a door. The way it changes when you lay a cloth over a crystal glass: the sound is still there but muffled, deadened, a sound that is no longer the sound. The first violins played underwater. The oboe came in on the third bar and I didn't hear it come in and not hearing the oboe's entrance is like missing a step going down stairs. I played twenty minutes like that and then pulled it out and the sound came back and the tinnitus came back with it and the two sounds were there together, the orchestra and the whistle that didn't exist, and I played between the two. (I should have persisted with the plugs. I know. But the right sound and the protected sound are not the same sound.)

One Thursday in March, during the rehearsal of the third movement, Morel stopped the orchestra and said "winds, piano" and I heard the whistle and the whistle was louder than usual and my hands were on the strings and the strings vibrated and the whistle was above the strings and I opened the box and took the plug and put it in my left ear and the second violins vanished and the oboe became a noise and my violin was the same but the orchestra around my violin was gone, there was a wall of cotton wool with sounds coming through at random like lights behind a curtain. I took the plug out. The sound came back. I put the plug back in. Outside, beyond the cinema windows, the noise arrived. It wasn't a truck. We all knew it. Morel said nothing. Nobody said anything. The floor shook and the music stands trembled and I had the plug in my left ear and felt the tremor with my right and with my left I felt nothing and for one second the silence in the plugged ear and the noise in the open ear were the same thing the tinnitus did every day, one ear in the world and one ear outside the world, and I thought maybe the plugs weren't the problem, maybe the problem was that I already had one ear inside the war and one inside the music and the two couldn't hear each other. Morel waited for the shaking to stop and said "from the top" and I took the plug out and set it on the stand next to the metronome and we started again from the third movement and outside an ambulance passed and the ambulance was fast and the adagio was slow and I played the adagio and heard the ambulance and heard the tinnitus and the three sounds were one inside the other like three boxes and I was in the smallest box.

That evening the doctor called. The loss had progressed. The left worse than the right. "The plugs," he said. "No," I said. "Why." "Because it isn't the same music." Silence on the other end. Then: "You know that in five years you might not hear the difference between an A and a B flat." (I knew. I didn't answer. I'm not someone who answers things she already knows.) That night they hit the suburbs again and the windows shook and Zaatar jumped off the case and ran under the bed and I sat in the kitchen chair and the fridge hummed and the windows shook and the tinnitus was there beneath everything else and I thought that the tinnitus and the shaking windows did the same work: a sound that sits under other sounds and doesn't leave when the others leave.

In the morning I got up and made coffee and Zaatar was back on the case and Walid was in the courtyard sweeping the glass from a window that hadn't held. I went down and said "good morning" and he said "good morning" and said nothing else and I said nothing else. In my jacket pocket the plug box was closed. The conservatory was fifteen minutes on foot and I walked and the shops were raising their shutters and the shutters made the sound of shutters and the generators made the sound of generators and beneath all the sounds the tinnitus made its own.