by M. J. Rose
Yesterday, two men on their way to morning prayers had found Devadas’s body by the riverbank, the flies buzzing around her lover, already attracted by the pool of blood that seeped from his head gashes. Other than Devadas’s brother, Rasul, who pressured the lawmakers for an investigation, no one seemed to care who the killer was or how to find him. The two brothers, instrument makers by trade, had been labeled as heretics for claiming certain music played on their flutes and drums could heal and soothe. They were a threat to the old customs and much reviled in the town. And now one of them was dead.
As the wailing intensified the wind picked up, and Chandra, Devadas’s wife, gasped as some of her husband’s ashes blew on her. Stunned, she stopped sprinkling his cinders with milk to touch the powder on her cheek with her fingertips. A fresh tear fell from her eye, leaving a track in the dust.
It was hypocritical the way these women were carrying on. Devadas’s wife had exiled him from her home a year before because of his rebellious ideas. His own father had called both his sons insurgents. Yet now they were all prostrate with grief.
While the women continued to wet down the pyre, a second, more violent, gust blew ash into Devadas’s eldest daughter’s face and she coughed as some of the debris got in her mouth. She spit once. Twice. A third time. If it had happened to her, Ohana would have accepted the ash gratefully as if it had been a sacrament.
“Now the water, hurry,” Devadas’s elderly mother admonished, talking her three granddaughters through the next step of the ceremony. “Hurry, before the wind blows him away.”
Once the girls emptied the second jug and there was no water left, Chandra took up the scarred wooden staff and sifted through the muddy mixture separating the bones from the ash. Like a ragpicker the older daughter collected the bigger, wet cinders—the residue of his flesh and muscle and sinew—filling an earthenware bowl with them, and his youngest daughter picked up the bones that were no longer hot.
From her hiding place, Ohana watched Chandra take the bowl and throw the ashes into the rushing river while the others gathered around the bones and waited. Even though they were not supposed to show grief, all but the old woman continued wailing.
“He is traveling by the Path of Light,” Devadas’s mother admonished. “Many tears,” she said, “burn the dead.”
Each of the seven women tied the fruit of the brhati plant to her left hand with a deep blue thread the color of the night sky and a red thread the color of flowing blood, then one by one they stepped up onto the stone pyre, wiped their hands with apamarga leaves, then closed their eyes and stood in a circle, swaying to the river’s music.
“Arise hence and assume a new shape,” the matriarch intoned. “Leave none of the members of your body. Repair to whichever place you wish—may Savita establish you there. This is one of your bones; be joined with the third in glory; having joined all bones be handsome in person; be beloved of the gods in a noble place.”
As the women washed Devadas’s bones one last time, Ohana shivered remembering the feel of them, covered by muscles, pressing against her body. It was wrong that they were allowed to mourn him in the open and she had to hide in order to honor him.
Chandra filled a terra-cotta urn with the bones and then took it over to the sami tree. Stretching, she hung the urn from the highest branch she could reach.
Finally, the women left.
Ohana watched them growing smaller and smaller in the distance until they were gone. The sun slipped below the horizon. The moon would not rise for hours. A gray wash settled over the evening as the air chilled. The water still lapped the shore but the bells were silent and the women’s crying was too far off for her to hear anymore. This horrible day was at last over. The death ceremony was almost complete, except for one last visit when, two days from now, the women would return to take down the bones and bury them.
Knowing she was veiled by the twilight, Ohana crept up to the tree, reached into the urn and felt all that was left of her lover, this calcified measure of one man. Her hand came out clutching what she’d come here to get. Smooth and pale, the bone glowed almost incandescently in the evening light. Then, holding it close to her breast as if it could speak to her, as if it could save her, as if it could offer solace, she crept away into the lonely night.
Chapter 53
He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.
—Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Baden, Austria
Tuesday, April 29th—4:20 p.m.
Meer sat at the piano in Beethoven’s apartment, her fingers resting on the keys, feeling the music’s reverberation. She was so cold but that didn’t matter in the face of trying to figure out what had happened. Time had just warped back on itself twice. She’d been sitting here as Margaux—on the day Margaux had first heard the flute music and disappeared inside of it—and then she’d remembered a more distant past. Had she just glimpsed not only one previous life but two, centuries apart?
Music had been the trigger but Meer couldn’t remember the actual song—only the sense of it.
“Did you recognize it, what I was playing?”
Sebastian looked at her, confused. “You weren’t playing, Meer. Not anything that resembled music. You played a C note. Three times. And then you just sat there with your eyes closed for twenty, thirty seconds.”
“No, I was playing. I could hear it.”
He shook his head. “Just the C. You’re shivering so badly. Let me get you—”
Margaux had found the memory song and played enough of it on the piano for Beethoven to have figured it out and played it for her on the ancient flute. It had worked, had stimulated her memory of an even older story about a man whom she had been desperately in love with, who had died, whose bone she had stolen.
“Why are you lying?”
“Meer, you weren’t playing any music. I wouldn’t lie. Think of what the memory song might mean to me. To my son.”
The cold was pervasive. Standing up, she walked past him, past the girl at the desk. With the same strange assurance she felt when she sat down at the piano, she strode down the hall as if she knew exactly where she was going. The small bedroom contained a single bed dressed with a thin, coffee-colored blanket, a chest of drawers, a basin for water and a coat hanging on a hook. Without any trepidation, Meer lifted the heavy wool coat off its hook and slipped her arms into it. This coarse garment was warm. Warm enough to stave off the shivering that, despite the weather, overwhelmed her.
Stuffing her hands into the pockets she found a small hole in the left one. Reaching down, holding the hem by the corner, she scrunched up the material so her fingers could get to the bottom where a coin had been trapped between the lining of the coat and the outer shell. They always fell there, she thought, smiling to herself. But there was something else stuck in the lining, too. The nib of a pen, stained with dried black ink.
What was she doing wearing Beethoven’s coat? The young girl who sold tickets would call the police if she found out someone had disturbed the exhibition. Meer felt guilty; working in a museum herself she knew how sacrosanct every item was. Taking the coat off, she hung it carefully back up on the hook.
Everything was the same as it had been before she’d come in here except for the strange idea that taunted her now: she’d once worn this coat as a disguise to hide from someone who’d followed her.
Chapter 54
Tuesday, April 29th—5:06 p.m.
As she and Sebastian hiked up the hill and into the densely wooded mountains, everywhere Meer looked she saw another postcard image: a herd of goats grazing in a glen, a rough-hewn stone wall and a scenic overlook dangerously hanging above a thirty-foot drop, offering an expansive view of the town below. The vista was exactly how she’d imagined it earlier when Sebas
tian first mentioned Baden.
“You can look all the way out there but no one can look up and see you,” he said softly.
Meer was surprised to feel his hand on her shoulder.
“You’re getting too close to the edge. The overhang is unprotected. People have fallen.”
“Death in the Vienna Woods,” Meer said. “Johann Strauss would be distressed.”
“Especially since the waltz was known as the flight from death. But there’s been more than enough tragedy here for someone to write that version, too. Mayerling’s not far. You know about that?”
She shook her head.
“The Archduke Rudolf of Austria and Hungary and his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, committed suicide a few kilometers away at his hunting lodge. He was married and she was only seventeen. The building’s a convent now but locals say the lovers’ ghosts haunt these hills.”
“My father wasn’t kidding when he said people are preoccupied with death in Vienna. That’s not the first time you’ve brought up ghosts. Do you believe in them?”
“I never wondered about ghosts or life after death before Nicolas—” he broke off and checked his watch. “We should keep going. There’s only about an hour of good light left.”
As they walked away from the overlook Meer veered right as Sebastian took the left.
“No, it’s this way,” he called out.
“Can’t we take this route?”
“I don’t know that way. This is the main trail. I don’t want to get us lost.”
“We won’t get lost.”
“How do you know that?”
Meer shrugged. “Can we just see what’s this way?”
They climbed for a few minutes more, and after another turn in the road, arrived at a small yellow, three-walled hut. An almost life-sized wooden Jesus affixed to a large cross hung on the back wall behind a rough stone altar flanked by statues of Mary and Joseph.
Meer stared at the shrine in the middle of the woods as if it were an apparition.
“I’ve seen this place…” she whispered as she walked into the shadows of the structure, knelt down and ran her hand along the edge of dirt where the ground met the wall. Closing her eyes, she tried to see backward through time again, but couldn’t. She had no idea what this place might once have meant to her. Even so she kept running her hand over and over the dirt as if she would be able to divine some message from the ground.
“Meer, what are you doing?”
She turned to Sebastian to explain and saw a deer run by, followed by a buck. Their hooves cracked small branches and crumbled layers of dried leaves.
Sebastian asked again: “What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure but I think—” Her voice had dropped in register and was as low as the dark blue-greens of the conifers casting shadows all around them. “Margaux…helped him…she helped Beethoven hide the flute and the music. I think she might have hidden one of them here.”
Chapter 55
Baden, Austria
October 18th, 1814
At a brisk pace, Beethoven strode up the pathway toward the gardens outside the hotel. As he walked and talked he kept rolling and unrolling the score he held. Margaux was amazed at his stamina. She knew his stomach and head hurt. His energy level was low and he’d complained about being tired.
“I have written much music that has made me proud. But that was when I was younger. Now I know how much more the music needs to do. I have given up so much. Even made a deal with my God to forgo all earthly riches, a wife and children, if only I could go on creating the music.
“I have lived up to my side of the bargain but God has not lived up to his. The struggle to create has not gotten any easier. If anything, only more and more obstacles are thrown my way. And now this music from the Devil that you’ve brought to me out of your dreams and that ushers forth such dangerous visions… I won’t unleash this on anyone. I can’t.”
She touched his arm so that he would look at her and be able to read her lips. “Where are we going?”
“I need to think.”
“Why did you bring the music? You’re not going to do anything to the score, are you?”
He ignored her questions and all she could do was struggle to keep up with him. Margaux was alarmed. Although he’d been able to work out the complete memory song, she couldn’t remember any more than those first three notes.
Passing through gardens, they continued climbing the hill into the woods and were deep into the forest by the time they came to the small chapel with the crucifix, rough-hewn stone altars and statues of Mary and Joseph.
Sheltered from the wind, Beethoven opened the score and read it over. “I don’t know what to do with this unearthly music,” he muttered. He was still studying it when the storm came upon them without any warning. A fierce wind blew the rain in, splashing the score, making the ink run.
“Put it under your coat,” she shouted, and mimed to his coat pocket in case he couldn’t hear her over the thunder. But he didn’t see her, was too busy looking around…searching. Suddenly he rolled the score into a tight cone and wedged it in the narrow space between Christ’s body and the wooden cross.
“It will be safe here at least until tomorrow,” he told her as a new crack of thunder reverberated through her. Lightning lit up the forest and through the sheeting rain she thought she saw someone out there watching them, but couldn’t be sure.
Was it Beethoven’s secretary, Schindler? Had he followed them there? Was it Toller? No, she was no longer in the past. She wasn’t Margaux anymore.
Meer was staring at a man wearing a dark mask and pointing a gun at her.
Chapter 56
Baden, Austria
Tuesday, April 29th—5:39 p.m.
The terror coursing through her made it almost impossible for Meer to speak. The man holding the gun wore a dark slicker, its hood up. Frantic, she looked around for Sebastian…and then saw him on the ground, unmoving, lying behind the altar beneath the crucifix.
“You’re going to wind up like your friend over there unless you give us what you found up here.” The man whispered the words harshly in a thick German accent but she understood every syllable.
“What did you do to him?”
“Your friends, your father…we can keep going with this game, hurting everyone you know and love until we get what we want.”
“My father? Is he all right?”
“For now, yes. But how he winds up is up to you.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “What you want is there.” She pointed to the cross.
“Get it.”
It was only four steps to the crucifix. Reaching up, feeling between the wooden body of Jesus and the flat surface of the cross, Meer’s fingertips found what felt like the edge of a sheaf of paper. She’d been searching in the wrong place before. It wasn’t buried in the ground. It was up here. She pulled it out.
Insects had eaten through the paper, mold had attacked it. Only a few random marks and the nauseating stench of rot were left. Meer lifted her head up toward the hut’s roof to escape the overwhelming scent. Drops of rain came through the cracks in the two-hundred-year-old structure, hanging for a second and then falling, one and then another splattering her on the forehead and cheeks.
Was she really holding what had once been Beethoven’s score of the memory song, written in his own hand? He’d gone to so much trouble to convince everyone he’d never found these notes. No longer here to protect what little of his work was left, she could do it for him. Moving her hands a half inch, she positioned the score under the rain that dripped through the cracks in the ceiling.
The few still viable marks blurred as the rain fell and the ink ran.
The man in the ski mask grabbed the disintegrating clump out of her hand and looked at it. For one second he wasn’t focused on her and that second was enough for her to run.
Chapter 57
Tuesday, April 29th—5:56 p.m.
In the teeming rai
n, the forest had become treacherous and it was impossible for Meer to get her bearings or recognize any landmarks as she ran. All she knew was that she had to keep descending, and if she could manage that she’d find her way out of the woods. She had to get Sebastian help.
She tripped on tree roots, vines and twigs but she kept getting up and soldiering on down the mountain all the while listening hard, knowing that just because she couldn’t hear her assailant over the sound of the rain didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
Did the man in the slicker want her or just the papers? Was she actually getting away or did he know the forest so well he was waiting for her up ahead? Was her running putting Sebastian in more danger? If the man had taken off after her, maybe she should double back and help Sebastian?
A burst of lightning illuminated her surroundings for a brief second at the same time her foot hit a patch of mud. Sliding, she reached out for a root or a rock, but found she was clutching at nothing but air—and was still falling.
Finally, Meer grabbed hold of an exposed root. She lay in the dirt, tasting it, smelling it, for what seemed like a long time. All she knew was that no one stood over her, there was no gun poking her in the side, no one was screaming at her to get up and move. Finally, she accepted that if someone had been following her, they would have found her by now. Her legs, arms, chest and back all ached.
Crawling to the base of a pine tree about five feet away, she used the trunk to stand up. She was in pain but Sebastian needed help.
Except what was the best way to help him? Go back up to him or head down to the town and get the police? She wished she knew how badly he’d been hurt. Unsure with every step that this was the right solution, she started back up toward the hut.
She’d only been moving for a few minutes when she saw the glow of a searchlight through the trees to her right.