“You mean, as long as someone remembers me, I will live, entire?”
Thistle watched me. “Do they love you?”
I thought of Josef, and of Käthe. “Yes.”
“And how long do you think their love will last, when all trace of you that ever was is gone, when their rational, waking minds tell them you don’t exist, when it would be easier to forget you in the face of reason?”
I closed my eyes. I remembered the strange half-dream of a life granted to me by Der Erlkönig when Käthe had been first taken from me. It had been easy, so easy to slip into that version of reality, a reality where my sister did not exist. But I remembered too the wrongness of it all, that despite all evidence to the contrary, the hole in my heart could only be explained by her absence. I thought of Josef then, and my heart clenched with fear. My baby brother, the other half of my soul, had gone on to bigger and better things. It would be so easy to forget me in the midst of all that fine company. But the piece of a dream returned to me, sheet music open on a stand. Für meine Lieben, in Lied im stil die Bagatelle, auch Der Erlkönig.
I opened my eyes. “Their love will last as long as they draw breath,” I said fiercely.
Thistle scoffed. “So they all say.”
We fell into silence. I could still hear that damnable faraway violin, but Thistle seemed oblivious to its strains. I picked up a strawberry from the salver and brought it to my lips, savoring its scent, the hint of summer sunshine beneath its red sweetness. I took a bite, and its flavor burst over my tongue, flooding me with memories. Me and Mother making strawberry jam as Constanze baked a cake. Käthe’s lips pink with contraband sweets. Josef’s fingers sticky with sugar, leaving marks across the neck of his violin that took ages to clean off.
And with a start I realized I recognized the music that played in the distance. A queer, haunting little tune, almost like a bagatelle.
It was mine.
And the violin was Josef’s.
I cast aside the remnants of my meal and walked to the klavier. Thistle remained with me, a little homunculus hovering over my shoulder, pesky and persistent. I shooed her away, so she sent my papers flying out of spite. I gave her a pointed look, but she stared back mulishly until I mouthed I wish. With a harrumph, she snapped her fingers, and my notes and papers immediately arranged themselves into a neat pile beside the klavier.
But instead of continuing work on the Wedding Night Sonata, I sat down and played the piece I had called Der Erlkönig, accompanying my brother from another world, another realm.
As long as the world above remembers you.
My music. Of course. All things on this earth and beneath it passed away, but music was immortal. Even if I was dead to the world above, a part of me would live each time my music was heard.
Thistle brought the salver of strawberries and set it atop the klavier, bright, red, and tempting. I ate every last one, grateful for the little sweetnesses that remained to me.
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
When I awoke, it was with Josef.
I stood in an unfamiliar room, beautifully appointed and richly furnished. My brother sat at a writing desk in a nightshirt and cap. The hour was late, and the candles burned low beside him. His fingers, ink-stained and dirty, were wrapped around a quill, laboriously scratching words onto paper.
“Dear Liesl,” he said.
A letter. Josef was writing me a letter.
“Six months since I left home, and still no word.” He paused, waiting for his hand to catch up to his words. “Where are you, Liesl? Why do you not write?”
Sepperl, Sepperl, mein Brüderchen, I am here, I said. But I was once again voiceless, mute and silent.
My brother lifted his head, as though he could sense my presence. Josef! I cried. Sepp! But his eyes went dull a moment later, and he returned to his letter.
“Mother sends letters by the week, and Käthe writes by the hour, but of you, and from you, there is nothing.”
I watched my brother struggle with the quill. A bow had always looked so natural in his hand; Josef wielded it with such delicacy, his wrist loose, his movements fluid. But the quill was strangled in his fingertips, the motions of writing and transcription awkward and strange. I wondered then if this was not part of the reason my brother had always preferred that I take dictation in his rare fits of composition—because he could not write.
I staggered back. My brother could not write. He had learned his letters at Mother’s feet like the rest of us children, and he could certainly read, but Papa—obsessed with the makings of another little Mozart—had taken Josef away, making my brother practice the musical alphabet instead.
Josef dipped his quill in the well and touched the nib to paper—careful, slow, and deliberate. His letters were ill-formed and childish, and I saw that he hadn’t even learned to join them properly into up and downstrokes.
“I ponder the reasons why you keep silent, and none of them make sense. It is like you are a ghost, a shade. It is like you don’t exist. But how can that be so? How can you be a ghost, when I hold the proof of your existence in my hands?”
He glanced to the side. The piece I’d named Der Erlkönig lay open in a portfolio on a low table, my handwriting stark in the flickering candlelight.
“Wherever you are, I hope you knew the moment I released your music into the world, when I played your Der Erlkönig piece in public for the first time. I wish you had seen the faces of the audience. They were transported”—he scribbled out the word—“transformed by your music. I wish you had heard their cries of Encore! Encore! It wasn’t me they were cheering, Liesl; it was you. Your music.”