The Kingdom of Back(84)

I nodded. He had stopped calling me Nannerl as soon as I’d turned eighteen. “Have a safe trip, Papa.”

He smiled at me. Something sad lingered in his eyes.

For a moment, I wondered if he regretted leaving me behind, that he had also regretted what he’d done in Vienna, that forces outside of his powers made him act as he did. I thought for an instant he could see something in me, and he wished he could have created more with it.

Then it was gone, as always, and he leaned in to kiss my forehead. “I will write to you and your mother,” he said.

I stayed at the music room’s window long after their carriage had vanished down the Getreidegasse. I sat until the sun had shifted the shadows in the room and my mother called for me to join her. Only then did I rise, smooth my skirts, and leave.

Before I did, I stared out the window one more time and remembered the Kingdom of Back as I had first known it, with its upside-down trees and white sand beach, the little path and the wayward signpost. I remembered that first blustery day in autumn, ten years ago, when it had appeared in my dreams. I thought I could see it again now, a ghostly image imprinted over the Getreidegasse’s wrought-iron signs and balconies, the faded castle rising up behind the buildings like a forgotten cloud.

It was the temple of my youth, the representation of so much that I had hoped for. Perhaps it had always existed and would always exist, ready for the next little girl to make a wish.

I did not imagine Hyacinth in the kingdom. I had long ago forgotten what he looked like.

Later that evening, I put away my old music notebook and my broken pendant, storing them in a place where I would not look every day.





TWENTY-THREE YEARS LATER


    SANKT GILGEN, AUSTRIA


   1792



In February, as I rest in Sankt Gilgen with my husband and children, I receive a familiar guest from Salzburg who is coming to speak about Woferl’s childhood. He arrives on a sunny, cold afternoon, right as I am braiding my daughter Jeanette’s hair.

I have been expecting my guest. When my husband greets him at the door, he walks in with his usual air of merriness, shaking his hand before turning to me. He is slower now, his bones more brittle. Still, though, he is energetic in the way that he brushes leaves from the velvet of his justaucorps, and turns to smile at me.

I smile back, help Jeanette off my lap, and curtsy to him. “It is good to see you, Herr Schachtner,” I say. “Thank you for coming. I hope you’ve been well.”

He looks at me. How much has changed since that first blustery morning when he heard me play. I am married now, mother to three young children. As for Herr Schachtner himself, he has become an old man, bent from the world.

“Thank you, Frau Berchtold,” Herr Schachtner says. He bows to me. “How have you been keeping?”

“Well enough,” I say. “Better than before.” My words lodge in my throat for a moment before they come free. “It is slowly getting easier to accept Woferl’s absence.”

He gives me a sad smile and shakes his head. “Ah, I’m glad to hear it.” We stay silent for an awkward moment, the consequence of many years apart and the lack of my father’s presence. Papa would have known what to say.

Then Herr Schachtner clears his throat and reaches for a chair. “Let’s begin, then,” he says. “What is it that Herr Schlichtegroll needs to know?”

“He wishes to compile a biography of Woferl,” I reply, “and has requested some information from his early life. I would like to have another’s voice added to my own, so I thought of you. I’m sure you may remember some things about Woferl that I may have forgotten.”

Herr Schachtner nods. Some of his early energy disappears as he begins to think of my brother. “Very well,” he murmurs. He has brought with him a stack of papers, old letters and concert announcements, and he starts to sift through them. I bring over a stack of my own, and together we sit to pore over each one.

“Did you have a chance to speak to him before he died?” he asks me after a while, after we’d begun to compile a small list of anecdotes.

I look at him. “No,” I say. “I spoke to him once, several years ago, but I did not know of his illness last winter until he had already passed.” I pause there, suddenly uncomfortable with a topic that I’ve already needed to discuss on several occasions. I do not like to remember it. Sometimes I still wonder, on nights when the others have fallen asleep, what had ultimately caused my brother’s early death. Woferl had been in the middle of a composition shortly before he fell ill. I never tried to ask his wife what the composition was. I was too afraid of recognizing in it some familiar, ethereal sound.

Perhaps Woferl had always been the boy suspended between worlds, never meant to stay here for long.

“There are still masses, you know,” Herr Schachtner says. “All Salzburg mourns for him. I’ve heard of gatherings held in Vienna and Prague as well, attended by hundreds.”

I picture Vienna, a city once plagued with smallpox, now in silent mourning for Woferl. I wonder how grand his mass was, or if it was simple like that of his funeral. I wonder if Marie Antoinette, the little archduchess to whom Woferl had once proposed, would have attended his mass if the French had not imprisoned her in the Tuileries Palace.

Herr Schachtner and I trade stories, some that we both know, some that I have to remind him gently of. I recall how Woferl had picked out thirds on the clavier with me, and his little frown when one of the keys seemed out of tune. Herr Schachtner remembers his fervent composing, even at a young age, and the tears that would spring to his eyes whenever he was forced to pause. I bring out my old music notebook, now yellowing with age, and point out pages where Woferl had composed menuetts or where my father had written notes. When Herr Schachtner asks me about the page torn in my notebook, I simply shrug and tell him I cannot be sure what had happened.