In the River Darkness

by Marlene Röder

  First Intermezzo

  How long can a person survive in ice-cold water?

  Not very long, whispers a voice in my head. It seems like I’ve already been stuck in this hole in the ice for hours. As if my “not very long” will soon be at an end.

  But I don’t want to die yet!

  Pull yourself together, I order myself. Stay calm, very calm, otherwise you’re as good as dead! Try to hoist yourself up on the ice . . . that’s right, farther, a little bit more . . .

  It doesn’t work! I just don’t have any more strength. Gradually, it’s becoming clear to me that I’ll never make it out of here on my own.

  What an idiot! Why didn’t I think of it earlier! Any normal person in my situation would scream for help. Someone will hear me, then they’ll come and finally get me out of here. Save me!

  Adrenaline shoots through my body, hot and vital. I open my mouth. . . . I’ve never screamed for help in my entire life, but now I’m going to do it. Now I have to do it.

  “Help!”

  I’m going to be at home, lying in my warm, cozy bed . . .

  “Help, I fell through the ice!”

  . . . and drink hot chocolate. With a hot water bottle at my feet. Soon, soon . . .

  No one comes. Why doesn’t anyone come, where are those idiots? Are they all deaf, dammit? They’re sitting inside all warm in front of the television while I’m out here dying a miserable death!

  “Please, help me someone, help!” I implore the air, the bare willows, the sky. “Why won’t anyone help me?” My voice cracks. I’m hoarse, but I continue yelling. If I’m screaming, I’m not dead! I scream until I can only manage a croak, until there’s nothing left inside me except emptiness.

  I try to fill it with something warm. Exhausted, I close my eyes and imagine lying on the pleasantly warm wooden dock on a summer’s day. The sun paints circles on my stomach. My tongue tastes of cherries . . .

  And for a split second, I’m almost there. Warm and happy.

  But then the moldy, stale smell of the stagnant winter river fills my nose. The feeling turns to dust and disintegrates in the air and cold.

  What remains is only the cutting certainty: no one will come to save me. We broke our blood oath. This is the punishment. I’m on my own now.

  My face is wet; I think I’m crying.

  “Help me,” I whisper, but the sluggish gurgling of the river drowns out my words.

  Desperately, I try to bring summer back into my head.

  L’ESTATE

  SUMMER

  Chapter 7

  Mia

  Today I was in good form: I made the bow dance over the strings, made the cello purr, and sing, and cry.

  At first, you feel your way from note to note, stumbling, trying hard to do everything exactly right. Like a hiker laboriously making her way up a steep mountain path, you slave away at it . . . and then suddenly you’re at the peak. There you are, and there is the music. And in that moment you belong together. You look down at the landscape of sound spread out below you and recognize that it’s your own personal landscape, the one inside of you.

  Only then, when your hands just do what they need to, when you reach that dream-like state where everything else blurs and becomes meaningless. When the bow is practically an extension of your hand and you don’t know anymore where your instrument ends and you begin, then you’re really making music.

  Every movement is the only right one at exactly the right moment. My body dissolved. I wished I could play into eternity. Then life would be tolerable.

  When the piece came to an end and I lowered my bow, I still felt slightly dazed. To clear my head, I stepped over to the open window and drew deep breaths of the air that smelled of summer. I admired the leaves of my cherry tree, moving like green silk in the June breeze.

  The tree stared back at me.

  I blinked. But there was no doubt—through the tangle of branches, two eyes glittered back at me!

  “Aaaaaaaaaahhh!” I yelled, stumbling away from the window.

  The thing in the tree screamed, too. Then I heard breaking and splintering as it fell through the tree branches toward the ground. “Ooww!” It sounded bad.

  Holding my cello bow in front of me like a dagger, I crept back to the window and peered outside. Under the cherry tree, in a hail of leaves and unripe cherries torn from the tree, lay Jay! He flailed his arms and legs like a beetle that’s fallen on its back.

  “What . . . what on earth are you doing in my tree, you . . . you pervert!” I screeched as soon as I had recovered enough from my shock to make a sound at all. My voice cracked, and I could tell I was close to becoming hysterical. I was shaking all over.

  With a pitiful groan, Jay sat up and rubbed his back. “I’m not a . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” he stammered as blood flushed his cheeks red with indignation.

  “What were you DOING there, then, dammit?” At the moment, I had a strong urge to impale him with my bow.

  “Listening!” Jay blurted out. “I was just listening!”

  For a moment, we were both silent in our exhaustion. Slowly, I calmed down enough that I could look at the situation more objectively. I studied Jay, all scratched up, suspiciously—and had to admit that he didn’t exactly look like a lurking rapist. Crazy but harmless.

  I took a deep breath. “Maybe it would be better if you come up here so we can talk about this face-to-face.”

  I went downstairs to open the door for him, and Jay limped right behind me on the way back up to my room. His eyes swept the room with curiosity and stopped as soon as he saw my cello. He literally couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  “Do you like classical music?” I asked when the silence finally started to become too awkward for me.

  “I guess so,” Jay mumbled, without taking his eyes off the instrument. Good heavens, had the guy never seen a cello before? “But I don’t know much classical music. My grandma always listens to easy-listening music.”

  Apparently, the poor thing was growing up in a cultural wasteland!

  “Is that it?” Jay asked eagerly, “Your singing heart?”

  “Uh . . . that’s my cello, if that’s what you mean,” I replied, bewildered. Jay was a strange guy.

  His eyes asked me for permission before he touched it. Shyly, almost reverently, he stroked the instrument as if it were a living creature.

  I wanted to see what would happen—so I plucked one of the strings. I could see how the sound moved through his hand pressed flat against the wood, through his arm, and lit up his face.

  “I feel it right in here,” Jay whispered, placing a hand on his heart. His face registered a fervent wonder that until that moment I had only seen in young children. As if he had never learned to pretend or put on an act, to bury his feelings behind masks.

  Then Jay even laid his face on the glistening wood to feel the vibrations of the note as it faded away—without any shyness about acting like an idiot in front of me. Gaping in surprise, I stared at him as if he were a strange, exotic animal, fascinated by his apparent lack of self-consciousness as he followed his sudden impulses.

  “Please,” Jay said, looking at me as if I were a magician able to weave music with her bare hands, “please play something else!”

  I couldn’t help myself. I felt flattered. Even more, I felt electrified, swept up in his childish enthusiasm. “Okay, let’s see if you like this.” I put a CD in my CD player and settled into playing position. After hectically fumbling around and then finding the right notes, I pressed the play button on the remote control.

  My room had excellent acoustics. The notes dripped, surged, and bubbled from the bare walls. Jay stood in the middle of the room surrounded by the cascade of sounds. His eyes were closed, his arms slightly raised with the palms turned upward. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had suddenly stuck out his tongue to catch the sounds like snowflakes, to taste them.

  If someone else had done that, it would have seemed fake and absurd but not with Ja
y. It touched me deeply. I had never seen someone listen to music so intensely, practically bathing in it with his entire body. In fact, I had never met anyone like Jay.

  Only when the last bars of the piece had faded away did he open his eyes again. He said just one word: “Summer.”

  “You do know it, then,” I said, a little disappointed. “You’re right, it was “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. ”

  Jay smiled and shook his head. “I swear, I’d never heard of it before. But it sounded like when you’re sitting in a tree in June while the wind rustles in the leaves . . . just like . . . like eating cherries!”

  “Really?” I replied skeptically. Jay nodded his confirmation. “Do you play an instrument, too?” I asked curiously. “You seem to have a good feel for music.”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes we sing out there on the island, Alina and I. But not with music,” he added quickly. “Just spontaneously, for us. For the river and the grass and the kingfishers.”

  “Who is Alina?”

  “Alina and I . . . we . . .” Jay broke off and tried to put his words together again. Thoughtfully, like someone trying to build a tall tower out of building blocks, he continued. “She taught me to sing. How to imitate the call of a kingfisher. And of course how to swim. . . . One day she just threw me into the river, and that’s how I learned. Alina taught me all of that, all kinds of things that are important!”

  Jay’s eye, the green-brown one, gleamed. He leaned over toward me, as if to share a secret with me. “She’s my best friend . . . she is . . . she’s everything to me!” he whispered. “Alina is my whole world. And I’m hers.”

  I didn’t know how to react to this declaration. “That . . . that must be nice,” I replied lamely.

  Jay nodded soberly. “But it’s different from your music. May I . . . may I come again and listen?”

  “You’re welcome to but I’d prefer if you told me beforehand. Maybe knock on the window or something so I know you’re there. And we also have a front door with a doorbell.” I was gratified to see that he blushed. “And I have another request,” I added. “Sometime I’d like to come and hear you singing. That’s only fair, right?”

  Jay chewed on his lower lip awkwardly and thought about it. “Good,” he finally answered after a long pause, “it’s a deal!”

  He insisted on shaking my hand.

  I watched him as he trotted home with a stack of my best classical music CDs, which I had loaned him. Encounters of the third kind, I thought, and for some reason I had to laugh.

  The next day, I had no reason to laugh. That was the day I found the dead pike in my room.

  It had probably been dead for a few days already, at least judging from the smell. Its long body had been torn open and the guts were strewn across my floor. The fish’s mouth with its pointy teeth seemed to be twisted into an evil grin.

  I ran down the stairs to get my mother. She was as horrified as I was.

  “Peeew, is that a stench!” she groaned and pulled the tail of her shirt over her face as she stared at the remains of the fish in disgust. There was concern in her voice as she asked, “Are you having trouble with the kids at your new school, sweetheart? Is there anyone you think might do something horrendous like this?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t have any enemies, if that’s what you mean.” That sentence sounded like something that had wandered out of a mobster movie and into our lives. It scared us both.

  “Someone probably threw the fish through the open window,” my mother murmured. “Don’t worry about it, Mia. I’m sure it’s nothing but a stupid stunt pulled by some country bumpkins.” It was clear to me that she didn’t quite believe what she was saying.

  I didn’t, either.

  The dead fish was a warning, I was sure of that. And I also knew exactly where the warning came from. But what had I done to draw the attention of the shadow that was lurking around the Stonebrooks’ house?

  “It really has to be a prank, doesn’t it?” My mother studied me carefully.

  For a moment, I considered telling her about the fish cadavers in the neighbors’ yard, and the footprints between the rows of vegetables in their garden. But the Stonebrooks apparently hadn’t thought it necessary to inform the police yet. What good would that have done? At most, they could have filed a complaint against unknown persons. After all, there was no evidence. Nothing but a few dead fish.

  I nodded weakly. “Yeah, Mom. It’s definitely just a dumb prank.”

  It took me hours to clean my room. The stench of decay hung stubbornly between the walls, clung to the clothes in my closet.

  But that wasn’t all. It was little things. My hairbrush lay in a different place. Some of my CDs were scratched and only played shrill, dissonant melodies that hurt my ears.

  Two of the strings on my cello were broken. I held my instrument in my arms for a long time and stroked the smooth, red-brown wood to soothe my nerves.

  Nothing truly terrible had happened. The strings were easily replaced. Maybe I was slowly getting paranoid? It could just be a series of coincidences.

  But deep inside I knew that someone had secretly been in my room. I could feel it. A presence was like a blight that defiled everything. My white walls were contaminated, as if they had become murky. The shadows from the branches of the cherry tree flitting across them seemed threatening now.

  I looked outside at my tree. For a good climber, it wouldn’t be difficult to get into my room by clambering across its wide branches. But if there had ever been wet footprints on the stone path in our yard, the sun had long since made them disappear.

  I didn’t say anything to my parents to keep from worrying them even more. But from that day on, I always kept my window shut when I wasn’t in my room.

  While the cherries slowly ripened on the other side of the glass panes, I tried to forget the whole thing. It worked pretty well, and that was mainly thanks to Alex.

  Chapter 8

  Alexander

  The smell of freshly mown grass and ozone filled the air, and the riverbanks were pink with blossoming spring herbs. In the June sunshine, I strolled past Mia’s house on my way to meet up with the guys at the bridge. Suddenly, a cherry pit skittered across the dusty path in front of me.

  “Hey, Alex!” a voice called.

  I looked up and saw Mia sitting in the crown of the tree. If my grandmother had been sitting on that thick branch, I could hardly have been more astonished.

  “What are you doing up there?” What an idiotic question! Cherries dangled from her ears, juice ran down her chin. She looked downright cheerful! That’s a word I would never have expected to associate with her.

  “I’m following a friend’s suggestion,” Mia replied, peering down at me. “Eating cherries is supposed to feel like music.”

  “And?”

  She plucked a dark red cherry from its stem with her lips, closed her eyes, and chewed thoughtfully. “Mmm . . . yeesss.”

  “Will you throw one down for me?” I called, opening my mouth wide. From among the leaves came a sound that sounded awfully close to a giggle. Then a cherry landed on the path, three steps in front of me. Somewhat bruised, but still perfectly edible. I popped it into my mouth. “You missed—amateur!”

  The second one hit my shoulder, the third even landed on my nose. Mia was a quick study. “Not bad. But wouldn’t you rather come down from there? Then you might even get one in!”

  “Nah. Not really,” Mia grinned. The sun shone through the leaves and glistened on her hair. The coloring was slowly growing out, and you could see that her natural color was a warm chestnut.

  The sight of Mia perched up there reminded me of a children’s riddle that Grandma annoyed us with every summer: “A young girl sits in a tree wearing a red skirt. In her heart is a stone. Now what can that be?”

  “That’s easy! A cherry!” Mia laughed.

  “Wrong, it’s you!” I teased her. “With a stone heart that won’t soften enough for you to come
down and share your cherries with me! Alright then, I’ll climb up to you.”

  I started climbing up the tree, which wasn’t so hard. The smooth bark felt like warm skin under my fingers. While I swung from branch to branch, a bombardment of cherries rained down on me. The fruits burst on my body and left blotches on my T-shirt and bare arms. Small, blood red marks. Like tiny wounds.

  And then, finally, I reached her branch. I think we were both surprised by the sudden intimacy. Our faces were almost touching; out of breath, we stared at each other.

  I studied her face: the pale, delicate skin; the narrow nose; her dark brown eyes with the long lashes. Her softly curving lips. From her earlobes dangled her shell earrings. My heart was pounding in my chest. “You have thousands of freckles,” I finally said.

  That was the wrong thing to say! Mia’s face, still warm from the exertion of throwing, began to set in its old, familiar, closed expression. Like water freezing over. It made me cold to see it happening.

  “If you can’t get one in now, you’re totally blind,” I said quickly to counter it, squeezing my eyes shut and opening my mouth as absurdly wide as a wide-mouthed frog.

  Then I felt Mia very gently place a cherry on my tongue. The full sweetness exploded in my mouth.

  The ground was no longer firm. The wind rustled in the leaves of the cherry tree. Everything around us was in swaying motion, as if the two of us were alone on a green ship. Like somewhere on the high seas, I thought. It must feel exactly like this.

  Shadows of leaves trembled on her face. Oh, God, I wanted to kiss her.

  And then, I had no idea how it came about, but I did it. I kissed Mia!

  Immediately, I felt her body stiffen.

  Oh, no, I had misread the signs! You blew it, Alex, you idiot!

  I wanted to pull back from her and frantically wracked my pathetic brain for apologies, when I noticed it. Her tongue tentatively nudged me, made the acquaintance of mine. She tasted like cherries, a little bit like chocolate, and buried underneath that, very faintly, of Mia.