Cleaning up Glitter

Winter Journey

Laura Canon

She had always supposed she could go back to Rosenau.  Rosenau was lilac bushes and muddy streets and ships that sailed through the middle of the village.  The ships had been huge; Amalia had run along the street to see them pass, like something from a fairy tale, ships moving on dry land.  Actually, it was a canal.  Actually, much later, they were not towering ships but coal barges, bringing ore from the mines, although she remembered them as being as big as ocean liners.  And the candy roosters, sold in the village shop, the enormous thick candy roosters, that you could only get in Rosenau, were hard and tasteless, barely candy at all.

Her family had gone to Rosenau every summer, on a railroad line which passed along the edge of the Hungarian plain.  Horses and peasants, tiny bent figures, moved in the immense yellow landscape, and the dry smell of hay would come in the train windows; flecks of straw stuck to the nap of the seats up and down the car.  Although possibly this memory was wrong as well, possibly it was mixed up in her mind with descriptions from the stories of Count Tolstoy or other Russian writers, men whom her father revered and whose works she took to reading when still very young.  Reading them, the train carriage swaying, such descriptions came out of the page at her, although the characters in the books were always saying or doing things she did not understand, and the stories always seemed to end too soon, with a single line of dialogue or a sudden departure, when Amalia would have liked them to go on, to have more descriptions of things like haying.

The house itself was some distance from the village.  The Carpathians, dusty and blue, were visible on the horizon.  Grapevines on wooden frames climbed the hills and there were many small mineral baths in the area.  Her parents often went to these, on a jaunt of a day or two, without her.  During the long evenings in the house there was not much to do except watch moths or nameless, long-legged insects crawl up the walls.  Outside, she could play with the farm kittens who, like ghosts, would only become visible in the dusk, when they snuck around the porch steps and jumped about at the edge of the lamplight.  If she was inside she helped Miss Dukes, her English governess, unwind yarn, while her mother, if she was home, read to them.  There were always enormous hanks of yarn to be unwound, in enormous, endless tangles; it never occurred to Amalia to wonder why it was so tangled or why there was so much of it.  It was one of those adult mysteries, that yarn was purposely sold tangled by the makers, perhaps, who felt it was beneath their dignity to unwind it for the consumer.  In Amalia’s mind it was connected with princesses in fairy tales who were forced, for some small sin such as snooping or trespassing, to spin for an old witch.  Perhaps everyone in the world had a certain amount of spinning or unwinding to do, as part of the natural order of things.  She liked unwinding it, anyway, the soothing process of untangling the chosen strand, winding the short, newly-free section until it tightened again, then undoing the next tangle, advancing bit by bit.  The larger the ball grew the more reluctant she was to leave off to go to bed; she always felt she was on the verge of untangling it with the next motion.  It would have greatly simplified things to cut the yarn where the tangles were the worst, but Amalia was afraid to suggest this because it had been drilled into her that any kind of shortcut or avoidance of a difficult task was dishonorable.  The yarn had the peculiar quality of seeming to absorb whatever they talked about, or whatever book Amalia’s mother was reading aloud, so that Gulliver’s explanations of English customs to the Houyhnhnms became a certain section of blue-gray yarn; the strange expressions Gulliver used were there at Amalia’s fingertips as soon as she touched the yarn the next night.  Likewise, as the amount of yarn diminished and the balls – often a second one was started, from the other end, with the expressed hope that by meeting in the middle they would shorten the task – grew larger, the passage of the story itself was marked; the days of Gulliver, seemingly shot through with an 18th century light, associated in with a certain kind of silver pattern, and distant harpsichord music, dwindled, to be replaced by something more to her mother’s taste, a novel by Heinrich Mann, for instance, the yarn now holding its dreary descriptions of small-town life.

In spite of this evening camaraderie, the single thing Amalia remembered about Rosenau was being alone.  She walked, hands behind her head, along the edge of the garden, making a row of footprints in the yellowish earth:  she created it painstakingly and then destroyed it, began again, and then erased them, the whole time thinking about what her parents might be doing and waiting for something to happen.  The footsteps were to her a way of marking that something had happened, they were a story, a record of certain events, which she took a great satisfaction in wiping out, undoing the story, so that it would be forever known only to herself.  Then she would lie down under a tree and read, with the intention of making herself sleepy.  Eventually, shutting the book, she would put her head upon it, and fall into a kind of whiteness which was not like sleep at all, lacking any dream or thought.  She thought that this state was a kind of death, that perhaps – again, like a fairy tale heroine – she had the ability to journey towards the land of death and come back from it.  

She kept a journal but grew to dislike it.  She was aware too often of writing carelessly, blunting putting down mere events, along with complaints about the heat and her brother’s absence.  She did not write about unwinding the yarn or the farm kittens or making the row of footprints:  she did not see how such things could be written down, for once she held the pen she felt obliged to put down the first thing done that day (usually breakfast), then the second (usually skipping directly to lunch), and so on.  Over time she also began to think that it was not proper to write about an event unless she had traced its origin for several days or weeks, giving the diary warning, of sorts, that they were going to the Plattensee; if she did not she would exclude the entire trip as not a fit subject for the pages.  Once this happened, she felt free to exclude almost anything.  In short, the diary became a kind of friend she could not trust – like many of her subsequent friends would be – something in which to confide only the things she wanted it to know.  She disliked the girl the diary knew as careless, loud and stupid, but she could not see how to change its depiction of her.  Even then the future was dark, the shining surface of a bowl of water in which nothing could be foretold; she had the constant feeling that she was developing into a monster, not like other girls, that horns and scaly armor had already begun to grow.  In the end, though, she was not a dangerous monster, more of a pathetic remnant, the last of her kind, fit to be shut away somewhere out of pity, or sold to a circus. 

Finally Wilhelm, her brother, arrived.  He usually spent part of the summer with school friends, traveling around Greece or hiking in the Alps.  Wilhelm had a long, narrow face and a small mustache; he was sensitive to the sun and often arrived with red blotches on his face and neck.  Striding up from the station cart he would duck his head under the low branches of the pine tree in front of the house, laughing, taking Amalia’s and his mother’s hands, telling them of adventures – how they had almost missed the last ferry or had gotten lost and spent a summer night outdoors.  It was also true that at dinner he sometimes sneered slightly at things their parents said, repeating them with a questioning intonation, murmuring who told you that? while looking over at Amalia.  Their beliefs, he seemed to say, were backwards and incredible.  Yet his love for them was deep and disrespect so distant it was unknown; the sneering was more part of the restlessness he felt at Rosenau, even down to the way they all looked at him, waited for him, all summer long.

Every night as long as he was there their mother played the piano and he sang.  She preferred modern music, especially Mahler, but he liked the older songs, lieder by Schubert, for instance.  The lamp above the piano shone on her hands as she picked her way among the keys, her face expressing a certain concentration in interpreting these songs, which evoked for her a world of open German roads, murmuring streams and springtime flowers.

The last song would be “Der Leiermann,” the finale of Schubert’s Winterreisse, a song in which the hero, at the end of his journey, sees a village beggar playing the hurdy-gurdy.  Their mother’s fingers would imitate the tune of that instrument, and Wilhelm, standing very still, would sing, in a quiet voice:

There behind the village

Stands the hurdy-gurdy man

And with stiff fingers

He plays as he can.

The village dogs growl at him, his bare feet slip on the ice, his bowl is empty, details sung with a slight hesitation, as if the hero, tired as he is, is nevertheless pierced to the core by the sight of the old man.   The song made the silences within it, the pauses, louder; the audience – consisting of Amalia and her father, Miss Dukes, and anyone who had been invited over to listen – would sit uncomfortably, paralyzed, barely able to swallow or breathe, waiting for Wilhelm to grasp the notes again, to pull them out of nowhere.  Amalia was always aware that the song, which consisted of only twenty lines, was over nearly as soon as it began and that the most beautiful part was about to come, when her brother sang the last verse:

Whimsical old man

Shall I go with you?

Will you play your music

For my songs?

In spite of the word whimsical, she was always horrified at the hero realizing his own fate in the ragged old man, yet at the same time feeling a compassion which enlightens him and resolves his lonely journey.  The family, as they listened, were caught between the tenderness in her brother’s expression and the sadness of the song.  What was the sadness for?  That her brother might leave them, that they had already lost a part of him, even if they had not foreseen the war?  Or was it just some note of the infinite that often steals into music, making even respectable people like their parents wring their hands, dissatisfied with life?

When the Hotel A was still the Hotel A, but after the war, Count Berchtold, the former Foreign Minister of Amalia’s country, and Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador, met on a gravel path in its garden.  Or so Amalia heard; the story spread rapidly and was told with great excitement, so that she pictured the other guests in the hotel lingering nearby deliberately, expecting that this chance encounter must produce something memorable.  One of them was commonly blamed for starting the war, the other had publicly opposed it, predicting the disasters to come.  But what could they have said?  How could any words have been offered?  Both knew what the other had said, the causes had been dug into over and over, maybe they felt instead that it was all water under the bridge, something that could no longer be helped.  Amalia herself did not particularly blame them.  She regarded the war as something foretold from the days when she had been unable to write in her journal, unable to see who she was.  No one in those days had been able to see who they were.  In that sense the war had been a miracle, a reprieve, it was not worth pursuing how it started, it might just as easily have been in Mexico as in Serbia, if that was the way fate intended to play it.

So Prince Karl faced Count Berchtold, on the path visible from Amalia’s window later, when the Hotel A was no longer a hotel, with these things on their minds, each perhaps thinking the other might speak of them.  Or maybe not.  For later Amalia heard other versions of the story, that it was not Berchtold but Count Hoyos, not him but General Conrad, or that it did not happen at the Hotel A, but at a different hotel in the South of France.  Nor did anyone agree on what they said, if explanations and apologies were made.  One version is that they did not speak at all, just lifted their hats to each other, like two gentlemen, and passed on.

This was the version Amalia came to believe.  

There were days when Amalia thought upon waking, no, not today, not another day.  Days could be passed placidly, reading or studying, though within them were moments when the skein of her thoughts, stretching out to touch something she was hardly aware of, drew back, as if burned, and the hours would go by and she would only have the burned feeling, without being able to remember what had happened.  Some days so little happened that she wanted to go out and throw rocks at people.  There were also long strange times when every action was performed under a sort of surveillance, a waiting for something to come back, when she felt she could not act like herself because she would get in trouble when it did come back.  Amalia supposed all these things were grief, though she had thought until then that grief was tears and weeping.  She wanted badly to get to the point of being like other people who grieved, the saintly ones who smiled when they spoke of their dead, who kept their rooms perfectly preserved, their memories pure.  She wanted this but she did not know how to get to such a place.  She tried instead to pretend that she had this, but it was too painful; she still woke in the mornings aware of her feet curling in, reluctant to move, wanting something to carry her away.

The worst thing you can do with the dead is to bring them back to life in your own life, to conduct them through it as if on a tour, to ask them to judge what they see, the changes you have undergone, the things you could not help doing, ask them to be the measure, the level, of the rise and fall of it.  What pitfalls did you find?  What chains? So Beatrice asks Dante, when they are reunited in Purgatory, that you would cast away all hope of moving onward?  

Miss Dukes lived in London.  Amalia had last seen her on August 3, 1914, reaching out a gloved hand to clutch Amalia’s arm, before being pushed aboard the last train to England.  In London she taught French, or more rarely German, to girls whose fathers would fund such skills in their offspring, keeping the girls in line by throwing the romance of the language around them like a net.  She did not feel sorry for herself.  She thought her life had been quite interesting, better in some ways than whatever the girls she taught had to look forward to.  After the war she had sent letters and food packages to Amalia and her parents, and they had resumed exchanging Christmas gifts.  In Amalia’s mind she endlessly untangled yarn in her flat in London, although in fact her crooked hands, swollen with Heberden’s nodes from arthritis, could no longer maneuver knitting needles.

On the bus, waiting on Kensington High Street, glimpsing the sunshine and grass in the park, going home again, another day gone, Miss Dukes often hummed the piano part of “Der Leiermann” to herself, never venturing the vocal part because she knew her voice quavered, but with Wilhelm’s voice still in her head, along with a picture of how his narrow face expanded, became almost handsome, as he was moved by compassion of the hero for the old man.  Amalia, too, though she could no longer hear the rest of the song in her brother’s voice, could hear quite clearly the last few lines:

Whimsical old man…

Shall I go with you?

She did not know that Miss Dukes hummed on the bus and thought of Wilhelm, nor did she tell Miss Dukes about this last sound of Wilhelm in her mind, because it was not the sort of thing either could write in a Christmas card.

When Amalia was a young woman, after the war, everything was different.  She knew the people she had always known, but she knew people also like Christina Andreoli, who was married to an Italian businessman but had taken up with a White Russian.  It was during a time when nearly everyone had a White Russian, before they became somewhat boring.  It was the White Russian, who was named Platonoff or Platonov, depending on your preference, who knew about the Beloved, and so one day Amalia and Christian took a taxi deep into the 14th Arrondissement and climbed to a set of rooms above a rug dealer’s.  The rooms were not furnished, except for a wooden chair in the middle of the floor.  The Beloved was sitting in this with his head bowed.

He was short and completely bald, with an old-fashioned waxed mustache.  Amalia’s father would have said, a touch of the Jew, for his skin was darkened, sun-tanned and toughened across his hands and face.  In fact, he resembled a mendicant wanderer from one of Tolstoy’s stories, and possibly he actually was one, for his life in Russia was the subject of mystery, warranted or not.  It was only known that his wife, at the very least, had been killed by the Bolsheviks.  Everything was lost, he explained to Amalia once, now we start over, and so the Higher Way began again, now, at just the right time for the dawn of the Fourth Age.

The Beloved looked at them with large, dark eyes and reached out to take their hands.  The fireplace in the corner was as empty as the rest of the room, but a warmth flowed from his hands, which caused Christina and Amalia to look at each other cautiously.  And Amalia, for some reason, remembered something that had happened during the war: a nighttime return from a visit somewhere, shot through, as all wartime travel was, with anxiety – a winding road, the descent of a long hill in complete darkness, which was interrupted by the oncoming headlights of ambulances from the front, file after file of them, their lights so dazzling the chauffeur was forced to brake continually as the car swayed around the curves.  She lost all count of the number as they passed, heard only the cursing of the chauffeur, felt the car lurching as if it had left the road and was crossing an ocean of darkness.  She had thought then that death had come for her as it had for her brother and the men in the ambulances, that in the general lament for them she would go unnoticed, merely part of the sweepings.

She had no doubt that the Beloved knew what she was remembering, for turning to her, his hand now clutching hers tightly, he said:

“Mademoiselle, if you wish to succeed, you must lay a stone and travel on.”

And she remembered this, absorbed this.  Lay a stone and travel on. Christina said that it was all nonsense.  But she said this much later, in fact, too late.  For Christina was to be disappointed that the discovery of the Beloved did not bring her greater social benefit.  At first his modest yet real supernatural abilities, his gaze and his voice and his warmth, had astonished, leading to the belief that there must be more besides.  Then jealous people, small-minded ones who were disturbed by the idea of anything beyond their own amusement, began to complain that he smelled of garlic at some times and booze at others.  They also said his teachings were deliberately vague.  But even when Christina, shortly after her White Russian deserted her, sided with these people, it did not matter to Amalia.  She returned to the apartment above the rug dealer again and again until the lease expired, and when the Higher Way established its first colony, at the Hotel A, she moved into it with them.

She had been there often as a child, with her parents.  It was no longer the Hotel A, for the proprietor, whose nephew and heir had been killed in the war, had sold it.  It was far too big for the colony, full of cold, empty rooms upstairs, and endless salons and ballrooms, decorated with hunting scenes, downstairs.  But the Beloved, after walking around it twice counter-clockwise, said that once the Fourth Age began so many pilgrims would come that the Hotel A would not be able to contain them all.

She ran away twice.  The first time she was intercepted by Dr. Torrea before she was off the hotel grounds.  She could not tell them why she ran away, and it was months before once again, in the morning, she found herself walking through wet fields, the grass soaking her dress. She held no purpose in her mind, except to go down a small muddy road which led her to a train station.  The station itself was a local one, just a ticket office and a platform.  She did not know what country she was in, but it did not matter, because she had never been a great one for countries and she could speak enough of most languages to get by.  

She let the first train that arrived go by.  She had realized that it was not going where they said, it was just circling back around to the station again.  When the second train arrived she noticed that some of the passengers, those moving around her to herd their children onto the train, were looking at her.  But it was different for them; they were innocent (probably), and would be able to get where they were going.  In between trains it was quiet except for the sound of hammering down the track and the harnesses of horses jangling as carts went by.

Dr. Torrea found her after she let the third train pass.  She had begun to think that she might get on the next one, the sensation that she had to be careful was fading.  She said hello to him and let him hold her suitcase, which contained some folded underthings.  The next train came into the station.  Dr. Torrea stood beside her without moving.  She felt, when it was gone, that she wanted to be somewhere warm, and she turned and left with Dr. Torrea.  As a sign of obedience she lay down and the Beloved put his foot upon her neck, as she shivered on the floor beneath a painting of a Russian wolf hunt.  The Beloved’s bare foot was dusty, with the dust that was never swept from the empty salons and rooms of the Hotel A.

With the Beloved Amalia studied the Higher Way and the Law of Nine, the concept of eternal returning.  She lay awake, fighting hunger, for awareness of the body makes one more alive.  Men are born asleep, the Beloved said, and must wake up.  One winter morning she saw the Truth in a flock of chaffinches landing on a thorn bush.  Some of the disciples left, complaining of the Beloved, that the things he said could be interpreted in more than one way.  But this did not bother Amalia anymore.  She sat in meditation, often with no result, but once with a brief, blurry sense of peace, as if she were looking around at something, as if she had entered a room with something important in it.

© 2020 Laura Canon

About the Author

Laura Canon has published in Jersey Devil, Blue Lake Review, Scarlet Leaf Review and Eunoia Review, among others. Originally from Lexington, Kentucky, she lived in New York City and now lives in Henderson, Nevada with her husband and pet rabbit, Sophie, who can jump higher than Nijinsky. She considers herself one of those writers to whom nothing interesting has ever happened.