And without hesitation my father, from behind me, sang, “Deer and wolves that no one sees,” and we both laughed and the sour feeling which had filled die Hütte left.
After a few false starts, I added, “There’s no suitor left for me, oh alaya bakia.”
There was a pause while my father thought, and in a rush he sang, “Still it’s better to be free,” and laughed again. “Hang on,” he said as I started to play the whole thing through. He snatched a stick of burned wood from the fire and wrote our new verse on the wall above the piano table. We sang the whole song together, as loud as we could, until the sound filled the cabin. I imagined the music bursting out of the door, bouncing off the mountain, flying over the river, spreading out through the trees on the other side, and even crossing the Great Divide. If there was anyone else out there in all that blackness, a solitary note might flit through infinity and land on a shoulder to find its way inside that person’s head.
I gave myself to the music as if it possessed me, consumed me, letting the tune go off in a different direction, my fingers running up and down the clunking keys. Singing with me in harmony, my father drew five long horizontal lines on the wall in front of the piano table, the treble clef, and five more lines below with the bass clef curled upon them.
“Key? What’s the key?” he asked frantically, seemingly worried that if he didn’t put it down fast enough it would be gone.
I stared at him.
“What key is it in? How many sharps, how many flats?” he continued.
“I don’t know. I’m just playing.” It was like shouting over the roar the river made after the winter thaw, but speaking stopped my music. “It just came out,” I said, slumping on the stool.
My father sagged too. We looked at the empty bars he had scrawled. The lines jumped and wobbled where the charcoal had followed the grain of the wood. They were unequal distances apart and sloped at such an alarming angle that any notes placed upon them would have tumbled downward, bumping into each other until they formed a heap of sticks and balls at the bottom. My father rubbed the back of his arm across the charcoal, smudging the lines, turning the wall and his arm grey. He lifted the knife from his belt and scored the lines into the full length of the plank. He did the same to the plank below and the one above, carrying on up the wall as high as he could stretch. I sat and watched, fluttering my fingers in a trill, on the keys.
“OK, play it again.” My father listened with his head cocked.
He tried to catch the first few notes, scribbling them down onto the wall, but he couldn’t keep up with my playing and singing as the music ran away with me again. In the end he sat on the bed and watched. This time I just kept going, singing and singing, until I stopped playing, picked up the piece of charcoal, and leaned across the piano. I hesitated; I could play my scales and read La Campanella, but it was another thing entirely to translate the music in my head to black notes on a wooden wall.
My father came over and took the piece of charcoal from my hand. He drew notes until the stick broke. He filled up the bars with a music that he had in his head, and it was my turn to sit and stare. I fetched him another stick and he carried on filling up the wall with lines and dots, music that I couldn’t follow, sounds that jumped and scratched and weren’t music at all. I replaced him on the bed, watching the sweat trickle down his face while he drew manically, rubbing out, rewriting each note until the whole wall above the piano became grey. I bit my nails, worrying about the noise trapped inside his head.
I fell asleep to the scratch of charcoal on wood and my father’s snatches of melody. When I woke in the night with him sleeping beside me in the airless room, I climbed over him, my old nightie sticking to me, and stood on the rug. The door was still open, and the light from a full moon illuminated the walls of die Hütte—all of them filled with notes, unintelligible words, lists, lines and arrows connecting passages, as if I stood inside the pages of La Campanella, rewritten by a manic hand.
Outside, our world was still, scented with warm vegetation and a trace of stove smoke. The moon showed the trees and the mountain and the grass in muted shades of their daylight colours. At the back of die Hütte I crouched over our toilet hole to pee. When I wiped myself there was a smear of dark blood across the moss. I held it up to the moon to get a better look, frightened that something had cut me between my legs without me knowing. At the same time I smelled the smoke again and understood in a rush which made my heart falter that the smell of smoke wasn’t coming from die Hütte but from the trees. I walked toward the rock forest at the back of the clearing, sniffing, trying to follow the smell with my nose, but it had drifted away. Without warning, two huge rushing shapes jumped out from the trees, bounding in great leaps. I cried out, but just as soon as I realized they were deer, they had crossed the clearing and were gone into the forest on the other side. Then the smell came again, faint, but distinctive. Burning.
Dropping the moss, I turned and ran back to the cabin, aware of wetness between my legs, under my patched nightie.
“Fire!” I shouted as I ran. My father had rolled over onto his back but hadn’t woken. I shook his shoulder. “Fire!” I shouted into his face. He had black smudges across his forehead and I saw that his hands and his chest, too, were sooty.
He cracked open his eyes. “It’s the stove, Punzel,” he said, his words slurred with sleep. “Come back to bed.”
“No, there’s a fire in the forest. I smelled it.” I pulled the cover off him and saw that he was still wearing his trousers and socks. He sat up, yawning. I pulled on his hand to try to give him some urgency. The black rubbed off on mine.
“OK, OK,” he said. He was still pulling on his boots while I already had my moccasins on and was hopping in front of him, trying to hurry him up. We went outside and stood in the clearing where the land rose, our noses lifted, breathing in. The smell came again. “How full are the buckets?” he said.
“I don’t know; one full perhaps, the other half full.”
“Get the spade.” I watched his face as he spoke, and in the moonlight I thought I saw the flicker of a smile cross it before he said, “I’ll bring the water.”
The dark line of trees was two-dimensional, a silhouette, but we knew our way in. I walked behind my father into the forest, carrying the spade. It might have been like old times, but the man’s back I followed was thinner, less jaunty. I imagined the bird’s nest on the shelves in die Hütte crackle from a lick of flame which curled around the feathers, turning them brown, crumbling them to ash. The toothbrushes buckled and melted, dripping off the shelf, and Phyllis’s hair fizzled and lit up around her head like a halo. I thought about going back to die Hütte and scooping all I could carry into my arms and running with it down to the river—horse-head stones in my pockets and pine cones tucked into my hair. But in my imagination I saw myself stop at the water’s edge and look down into the dark, unable to go any farther.
I carried on walking behind my father. “What are we going to do, Papa?” I said.
The bitter smell in the air was stronger now—I could taste it, too, harsh in the back of my throat. The only noises from the forest were the sticks snapping under our feet. Whatever we were walking toward was silent. He didn’t answer.