The Kingdom of Back(11)
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Several minutes later, Papa hurried out of our flat on his way to Herr Schachtner’s home. He was in such an eager mood that he had to return to grab his hat, which he’d completely forgotten.
I stayed quiet as Woferl and I prepared to accompany Sebastian down to the Getreidegasse for bread and meat. My brother hummed the tune under his breath while I helped him into his coat. When I listened closely, I could tell that he knew far more of the piece than he’d played.
“When did you learn the first page?” I finally asked him as we stepped out of our building and into the street. It was a brisk, busy morning, full of the music of carriages and conversations.
Woferl made me lean over to hear his reply, so that I walked awkwardly with my body tilted sideways. “When we saw the flowers.” He kept his eyes on Sebastian’s back. “When they were growing on the first page. Did you like it?” he added in a hopeful voice.
This couldn’t be the answer, and I was so humored that I laughed. The edelweiss in my notebook had been a daydream. “You mean, you remembered the notes from yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Just from the few moments I kept the page open?”
Woferl seemed puzzled by my shock. “Yes,” he said again.
I looked at him again. “Woferl,” I said, “you could not possibly have remembered the entire piece from our session. How could you? It was too long. Now, tell me the truth, Woferl—I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to. Did you take my notebook and hide it somewhere?”
He shook his head, sending his curls bouncing. “It was not too long,” he insisted. His eyes turned up to me in frustration. “I don’t need to take your notebook to remember the music.”
What Woferl said could not possibly be true. He must have practiced at another time, when no one else was around. Even if he hadn’t taken my notebook, he must have stolen peeks at it when I wasn’t looking. But his words were so sincere, so absent of his usual mischief, that I knew he wasn’t lying.
He huffed. His breath floated up in the air and faded away. “Besides,” he said, “we both know who stole it.”
I thought again of the fireflies that had floated in the darkness of our apartment, then the midnight dream of the boy in the music room. He had spoken so clearly to me. I’d seen him tuck my notebook under his arm and throw himself from our window against a silhouette forest. Even Woferl remembered.
The skin on my neck prickled. Last night was, of course, nonsense. But this time I did not laugh at the thought.
“You are very talented, Woferl,” I said to him after a long pause.
It was what he had been waiting all morning for me to say, and he brightened right away, forgetting all his frustration with our talk. His hand tightened in mine. My other hand rubbed at the glass pendant in the pocket of my petticoat. Acknowledging my brother’s playing frightened me less than the thought of last night being anything more than a dream.
The Getreidegasse was still wet today from a cleaning, and the air hung heavy with the smell of soups, carriages, horses, and smoke. Hohensalzburg Fortress towered over the city’s baroque roofs, a faded vision today behind a veil of fog. Farther down, where the streets met the banks of the Salzach, we could hear the splash of water from the butchers hunched behind their shops, cleaning freshly culled livestock in the river. Everything bustled with the familiar and the ordinary. Woferl and I blew our warm breaths up toward the sky and watched them turn into puffs of steam. The clouds looked gray, warnings of snow. Several ladies passed us with their faces partially obscured behind bonnets and sashes. One of them carried at her hip a fine, pink-cheeked boy swaddled in cloth.
I watched her and tried to picture myself doing the same, hoisting a child in my arms and following a faceless husband down these uneven sidewalks. Perhaps the weight of carrying a child would damage my delicate fingers, turning my music coarse and unrefined.
We reached the bakery. Sebastian ducked his head under the wrought-iron sign, greeted the baker affectionately, and disappeared inside. While he did, I turned my attention to the end of the street, squinting through the morning haze to where the trinket shop stood. I half expected to see a shadowy figure standing there already, a tall, willowy creature with his glowing blue eyes, my notebook tucked under his arm.
“Let’s go,” I whispered to Woferl, tugging his hand. He needed no encouragement, and slipped out of my grasp to go skipping toward the shop, his shoes squeaking against the street.
The trinket shop was a familiar sight. Woferl and I liked to stop here often and admire the strange collections of figurines behind its windowpanes. Sometimes we would make up stories about each one, how happy or sad they might feel, how old they were. Herr Colas, the elderly glassmaker who owned the shop, would humor us by playing along. Some of the trinkets were thousands of years old, he’d say, and once belonged to the faeries.
Woferl blew air at the window and left a circle of fog on it. The circle began shrinking right away.
“Woferl,” I scolded, frowning at him. He stared back with big eyes.
“Do you see the boy in there?” he whispered, as if afraid to be overheard.
I bent down to study the trinkets. Some had colors painted on, deep-red dishes and gold-trimmed butterflies, blue glass pendants like my own, crosses, the Virgin Mary. Others had no color at all. They were simply glass, reflecting the colors around them, reminiscent of the faery lights we had seen in our flat. My gaze shifted from them to the shop beyond.