Dear Josef.
A letter. She was writing a frantic, hurried, panic-filled letter.
Liesl is gone. Liesl is gone. Liesl is gone.
Käthe ignored both her spelling and her penmanship in a rush to get down her words. Liesl is gon and no one rememburs her name. I am not going mad. I am not. I hav held the pruf of our sister in my hands, and I am riting nao to entrust it into yurs. Pubblish it, Josef. Play it. Play her music. Then rite me bac, rite Mother bac. Tell everyone that Liesl exists. That Liesl lives.
She did not even bother to sign her name. Then, holding the letter before her like a precious artifact, Käthe took one trembling, hesitant step beyond the Goblin Grove.
A strangled, inarticulate cry ripped through the forest. I jumped back as Käthe tore the foolscap in her hands, violently, angrily. She threw the pieces away and they scattered about her like falling petals. Bits of paper floated toward me, and I reached out to touch one, afraid I would pass through it like mist.
The paper was solid in my hand. I gathered them all, and tried to piece them together; a bit of a hand, the tip of a finger, the corner of a smile, the shine of an eye. I searched for me, for evidence of my existence, but there was nothing. Only blank, empty space where my name used to be.
The world grew dark around me. I covered my face, and wept.
* * *
The sound of a violin. My heart thrilled, recognizing its sweet strains, its exquisite emotional clarity.
Josef.
I removed my hands from my face. My brother and François stood before me, playing for an audience. As they finished together—in sync, in unison—the audience leaped to their feet. I could feel the applause but not hear it; I could see the cries of Encore! Encore! etched on their lips, but the room was as silent as a tomb.
After a cursory bow, Josef removed himself from the salon with an abruptness that bordered on rudeness. François said something placating to the confused listeners and then hurried after Josef. I followed them into an adjoining chamber, small, private, and intimate. François furiously gestured to the audience outside. The boys argued, François agitated and incensed, my brother curiously laconic and morose. Josef shook his head and said something that stopped the black boy short.
Liesl.
I did not hear my name, but I felt it, resonating in the chambers of my heart. Josef repeated my name, and François softened. He went to Josef and gathered my brother up in his arms. He let my brother cry, smoothing away his tears as I might once have done. Then François began to kiss him, but not as I would have done; with passion, with tenderness, with artfulness. I averted my eyes to give them privacy and drifted back outside, where my brother had left his violin, his bow, and his music score open on the stand.
Für meine Lieben, ein Lied im stil die Bagatelle, auch Der Erlkönig.
My heart gave a queer jolt, as though someone had reached into my breast and shaken it in their fist. My music. My brother was playing my music, not just for himself, but for the world to hear.
I smiled. I sat down at the klavier and ran my fingers over its shining ivory keys. I began to play a Mozart sonata, one Josef and I had practiced for ages when we were both little. Little by little, with each note I played, sound began to return.
Behind me, I could sense someone pick up the violin and join me in the music. I turned to face him and smiled, my pixie smile.
Sepperl.
He was as beautiful as ever, my baby brother, his golden curls shining in the light of some distant sun, his blue eyes large and bright. His face had lost much of its baby fat already, the angles of his cheekbones and jaw chiseled and sharp. We played together, just as we always had, but there was something different about his playing.
Sepperl’s music had always been crystal-clear, a bell-drop of a sound, exact and transcendent. His playing was of another world, a clarity that was almost ruthless in its precision. So, so beautiful. So ethereal. So otherworldly. But as he drew closer, the tenor of his playing changed. It grew warmer, more languid, more mysterious, more … human. My fingers faltered on the keyboard.
The music pushed me, prodded me, lifted me up. This was not Josef’s voice; it was mine. It was the voice I heard in my head when I composed, the voice I listened to when I was angry or joyful or sad. I squinted into the haze; was it not Sepperl after all? The figure playing the violin resembled my brother, but as he moved closer, I wondered how I could have made that mistake. Golden curls gave way to a silver mane, blue eyes to contrasting gray and green.
The Goblin King.
But was it the Goblin King? Or Josef? They resembled each other, though they looked nothing alike, the way the men in the portrait gallery Underground were individuals, yet were all Der Erlkönig at the same time. My hands slipped from the klavier. The violinist drew closer and smiled, pointed teeth and sly lips. His eyes faded from blue to gray and then disappeared altogether into the opaque, solid black of goblin eyes.
* * *
I awoke with a gasp. The remnants of a song broke apart, vanishing along with my dream. I was playing with someone—Sepperl? No, someone else. Someone tall and slender, someone who shaped the sounds inside me in a way that was utterly foreign and achingly familiar all at once. An unsettling realization stirred within me, but I did not want to think of it, to bring the revelation into the light and examine it. I chased it away, along with the remnants of sleep.
Despite the blazing fire that roared merrily away in my hearth, I was cold and sheened with sweat. I sat up in my bed, my body aching and trembling, as though I were recovering from a bout of influenza. I was thirsty and hungry, but moreover, I was painfully, desperately homesick. I wanted to call for my mother, have her bring me a mug of warm milk with herbs, wrap myself up in the soothing touch of her work-worn hands. Mutti, Mutti, I wanted to sob. Mutti, I am unwell.