The Kingdom of Back(18)

But looking closer, I realized that the tracks our carriage had left behind looked like two long sets of lines in the dirt, unmistakably reminiscent of the kind that make up bars of sheet music. The shining blue rocks lay glittering across these lines, round notes winking at us in the afternoon light. My lips parted. I found myself humming the tune on the ground. The notes littering the path changed to music on my tongue, then drifted into the air and faded away. Woferl listened in wonder, his eyes fixed on the sight.

I looked over my shoulder into the forest. An uneasy feeling seeped into my chest, coating my insides and pushing against my ribs until I could hardly breathe. Was it simple coincidence that the wheel had come off from the side where Woferl sat? Coincidence that this happened right as I felt Hyacinth’s presence in our midst, after Woferl hummed his composition?

My brother still rubbed at his bruised forehead, although he made no more mention of it. Deep in the forest, the wind blew a tuneless song through the leaves, and in it I thought I could hear snatches of a voice I recognized all too well. Something quivered at the edges of my sight, a blurred figure. I knew that it would vanish if I tried to turn toward it.

I took Woferl’s hand and made him drop the blue rock. He uttered a sound of protest and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Let’s stay near the carriage,” I said, guiding us back toward where Mama stood. “They are nearly finished.”

And so they were. We began to board the carriage again, and when I glanced back at the rocks, they seemed quite brown and ordinary. The lines carved in the dirt looked more like carriage tracks this time. Only the whisper in the leaves lingered. Even as I shrank from the sound, it beckoned to me, tugging at my dress with an irresistibly coaxing song, the words almost comprehensible and yet completely foreign. As if spoken in a backward language.

You have not forgotten me. And I have not forgotten you.





THE SECRET PAGE



Two weeks later, we finally arrived in Vienna on a stormy Wednesday evening, with the rain pouring in sheets down the sides of our carriage. I held Woferl’s hand and waited in our seats with Mama as Papa helped the coachman bring our trunks inside the inn. My breath clouded in the air and drifted out into the wet world.

“Are you warm, Woferl?” I asked, pressing a hand to his forehead. His cheeks were pale, but at least his skin did not seem feverish.

My brother only stared at the inn. “The emperor lives in an awfully small house,” he declared.

The four of us stayed together in one room, Papa and Mama in the larger bed and Woferl and me in the smaller one. Papa had requested a clavier to be brought up to our room, so that we could practice for several days before seeing the emperor. We listened to our parents talk about how we were to deliver notice to the palace that we had arrived in the city, how Woferl and I should be presented. This was our first performance outside of Salzburg, and our reputations—as well as that of Herr Schachtner, who had arranged it all—depended on how this concert would go. As our reputations went, so would our fortunes. Everything needed to be just so.

“Woferl needs new shoes,” Papa said.

“Nannerl needs a new petticoat,” Mama added.

The more I heard them talk, the more my thoughts churned. I slept poorly that night. My nightmares fed on one another, visions of a clavier with no keys, in a room with no audience. Of my hands, cracked and scarred, unable to dance to the music in my mind. Applause in another chamber, far away from where I was playing.

The clavier came the next morning. It was a frightfully worn little thing, but Woferl clapped his hands in delight and immediately asked Papa for sheet music paper so that he could write down the concerto he was keeping in his head. He spent the rest of the day bent over pages scattered across the instrument, alternately scribbling and playing. When Mama finally had to pull him away so that he could eat something, tears sprang to Woferl’s eyes.

“Look at this child, Anna,” Papa said to my mother. “It’s as if you are tearing his heart from his breast.”

The sight of the paper tempted me too. Perhaps I could compose my own variation of the melodies that haunted my dreams and days—but, of course, I could not ask for such a thing. So instead I pretended not to notice as Woferl scribbled his notes down, smearing the ink across the page with the ball of his hand. When he went to play them on the clavier, I recognized them as the harmonies that he’d hummed to me in the carriage. They were intact, the very same measures.

He had told the truth after all. He remembered every bit of it.

Papa watched him with a bright light in his eyes. He seemed unable to speak, lest he interrupt his young son’s brilliance. If I had left the room and wandered away into the streets, I did not think he would have noticed.

Finally, after several hours, Papa left for the palace to make sure all our arrangements were in place. Mama had taken Woferl to look at the market that sprawled in the streets outside our inn. I was alone with the clavier, which sat unused and quiet.

I took a seat at it. The bench let out a loud creak. The keys looked yellow and scratched, the black paint nearly gone, and as I skimmed a hand across them, I noticed several notes sounded horribly out of tune. The highest E did not work at all. But it was still a clavier, and better than drumming my fingers on a wooden carriage wall. I opened my notebook, set it on the stand, and began to play.

I started with my scales and arpeggios, then transitioned to a menuett. My fingers warmed. I closed my eyes and finally let myself sink into this safe place. In the darkness appeared a rolling line, sloping upward and then back down like a painter’s brush, smooth and bright and liquid, a climbing trail of notes that floated into open skies. My senses grew heavy with their sweetness.