The Memorist (21 page)

But she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t speak because she was remembering. Remembering something she had forgotten. Or something she’d never known.

The music was inside of her now. It lifted and soared and crashed and then built up again to yet another crescendo, bringing with it images of another time and place that made no sense to her. A place unlike anywhere in Europe that she’d ever seen.

Margaux saw a hot sun and a wide river. She felt a deep sadness, and saw many women weeping around a blazing fire, all of them wearing robes, not gowns. Mountains towered over the landscape.

Then the scene vanished and Margaux saw Beethoven again, staring at her with a disconcerted look in his eyes. She noticed the way the sun was shining in the windows. There was something important about the light, as if it were shining to show her something. She followed one beam, watched dust motes dancing. There was knowledge in the gleaming. Years and years of knowledge collected in the energy that was coursing through her. More than she needed to breathe, she needed Caspar with her now so she could tell him about this amazing discovery of his and the power it held. More than anything she wanted her husband to share in this painful yet excruciatingly beautiful truth about light and time and circles and repetition, and who we are and why we are here.

“What is it, Margaux?” Beethoven asked. “Why does the music affect you so?”

But she couldn’t tell him. She was still inside the light, traveling on the vibrations of the dissonant song Beethoven had coaxed from the ancient flute. She was remembering back in time.

Indus Valley, India—2120 B.C.E.

S
tealing from the dead was a crime, stealing the dead themselves was a sin, but her desolation was stronger than her fear of the punishments, so Ohana hid behind the trunk of the tree as the sun set the river on fire, shielded her eyes and waited for the funeral service to end.

The combined cacophony of lapping water, bells clanging and cows mooing couldn’t cloak the widow’s bitter wailing; Ohana’s painful reminder that she had no right to be here at Devadas’ Asthi-Sanchayana ceremony, that there was no one she could turn to for solace, that her mourning was the last secret in a series of secrets she would have to keep.

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.

Baden, Austria
Tuesday, April 29
^th
—4:20 p.m.

M
eer 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.

Tuesday, April 29
^th
—5:06 p.m.

A
s 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 Sebastian 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.”

Baden, Austria
October 18
^th
, 1814

A
t 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.