Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 11: The Song

It might have been ten, perhaps even eleven o’clock, before we made it to bed. The sun was up by then and outside everything was a sparkling white.

Nothing moved. Cars still huddled under the massive quilt of snow, the odd bus too, all waiting for the city to get its emergency gear back in order. And no one was out on the streets — not that I could see anyway, not even the odd person walking the dog.

Nothing. Nothing to soil the whiteness. A perfect Christmas Day.

I fell asleep on top of my bed, too tired, or too lost in thought, to undress.

And now I dream: about the Northern woods, about the organ music I surely must have dreamed in the first place. About a small forest lake, silver and black in the light summer night, a mist shifting across the surface and among the reeds along the shore, as if looking for something. Forest noises near and far: a cuckoo’s call, way off in the distance, though loud; and again. And a deer perhaps, it’s the rustle of one, but I don’t see her; then the cuckoo’s call again, not sure what it says, but it carries well on the cool air and very much belongs in this still night.

If there are people about, they are sleeping. Young girls, perhaps, here for the summer with the livestock; cows, white and black, and white and brown, all content to chew and dream their cow dreams all night, dotting the dewy meadow from the cottages all the way down to the lake.

And I dream about the melody, so perfectly played on the organ, so alien to my Indian ears, and so unbearably beautiful.

:

I stirred awake and looked right into Harriet’s eyes. She was sitting next to me watching my face, hers not a foot away.

“You were dreaming,” she said. “Your eyes were moving underneath your eyelids.”

I looked at her for several moments before I remembered where I was and who was this woman looking down at me.

“What?”

“You were dreaming,” she said again. “What did you dream about?”

I didn’t have to think about it, for I had not left it yet. That song.

“About that song,” I said. “That organ melody.”

“Yes,” she said and nodded that she understood perfectly.

“And about the forest, and about the mist on the lake.”

She nodded again. “That’s what I’ve come to tell you. Though I didn’t want to wake you. I remember where I heard that song.”

I came fully awake. She leaned back in her chair and I rose on my elbow, the better to see her.

“When I was a little girl in Stockholm, I used to sneak into churches.” She looked up at me: was I listening? Oh, yes.

“We had quite a few of them where I grew up. Seems like we had one in every block, but that’s probably memory playing tricks. Sometimes I’d sneak in to warm myself, sometimes to rest, but often to hear the music.

“Sometimes there would be choir practice, or the cantor would be practicing the organ. You know, the psalms for the coming Sunday. Sometimes there were violins. A string quartet or something. I seemed to have a knack of walking in on of music.”

She paused and looked down at her hands. I don’t think she saw them though. I think she saw churches, long-time-ago churches. She faced me again.

“One day, I forget which church, it may have been the Sofia Church, I sneaked in as usual and sat down in one of the back pews; and I had just begun to thaw a bit when the organ began to rumble, almost like an earthquake at first, a distant quake, about to start but not arrived yet. Just breathing, the organ just breathing a little, gathering air to sing its song. For just a few heartbeats, this breathing, but so unearthly. Then the warm but almost ghostly reed of the melody rose from this breathing and my eyes filled with tears although I was not at all sad.

“Then I filled with a million little shudders as every cell seemed to notice a new song, a higher reed, the midsummer’s night and the mist and the sleeping cows in the meadow, and the cuckoo far away and I think I just vanished for the duration of the song, which seemed to last and last and fill the church from far beneath it in the frozen dirt all the way to high above it into the stars, and still he played this song, hands and feet, I could hear him move by the organ somewhere above me, soles hitting the wooden keys by his feet, fingers hitting and clicking the many keys meant for more hands than we have, and still he played and still I had ceased to be.

“When he finally stopped — and it was like a distant thunder rolling even farther away — I did not move. I could not move. It was as if God had spoken. Then a small door opened to my right and this man — he was tall and wore glasses, and his hair was gray in places, but I don’t think he was very old — this man stepped out, working his fingers into gloves against the cold outside.

“I asked him if it was he who had played, and he startled a little at seeing me but said, yes, it was he who had played it.

“What was it? I wanted to know. What song was that?

“It was something he was working on, he had not finished it yet. Did it have a name? I asked. No, not yet. But he would probably name it after what it was, after what had inspired him, he said, an old psalm, and old psalm from the mountain pastures.

“It sounded like a psalm, I told him.

“Yes, it is a psalm, he told me, though not an official one. You wouldn’t find it in our hymn book. More like a folk psalm. Then as he finished pulling his gloves on he told me more about it.

“He had first heard it in Dalarna, up north a bit from Stockholm, where he had heard it sung now and then in his home church. He’d only been a child then, he said, but the melody had never left him, and now he was working it into this composition of his. And, he added, he had been told that the melody had come down to the village from the mountain pastures.

“I told him that I thought it was wonderful, and that he didn’t have to work on it anymore, it was done, surely. I had never heard anything like it.

“Then he smiled for the first time — he wasn’t so used to smiling is what I thought — it was, what’s the word? As if he was trying it on. Not at all sure it would fit. And a little sad.”

“Tentative?” I suggested.

“Yes, tentative. That’s it. He had finished pulling on his gloves by now and said, ‘Well, thank you, young lady. I’m glad you like it.’ And then he left.”

Then she added, eyes still back on the years, “I asked Mauritz about it once, about beautiful music for organs, if he knew of any, anything like an old mountain pasture psalm, or of any organists, but he didn’t know. He didn’t much care for organ music. Or for any music.”

Harriet fell silent now, and left me looking at sleeping cows, some still chewing now and then on some final remnant of clover. Again, the cuckoo called from somewhere far away as my room began to make its way back.

“How come…,” I began. But when I saw that she didn’t hear me, I said nothing more.

Then she sat up again, took my hand and held it to her cheek. “How I wish I could have been your mother,” she said.

“But you are,” I said.

“No, Nachiketa. I may be many things, but a mother I am not.”

“I saw the cows, too,” I said.

She nodded, but did not reply. Still clutching my hand.

© Wolfstuff