Finally, when I felt ready, I rose from the bench. On the Getreidegasse, I saw my brother tilt his head up toward my window. He waved a hand at me. I smiled at him, then headed downstairs.
The air was warm today, the breeze ruffling the curls of my hair. I made my way to where my brother stood alone. When he heard my footsteps against the cobblestones, his eyes lit up and he ran at me, wrapping his arms around me in a tight embrace.
“Woferl,” I said, laughing. “You are such a child, to run at me like that.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I will miss you. I’ll write you letters, of course, and tell you everything that I see. You will feel as if you are right beside me.”
I smiled at him. He had been growing steadily all winter, his limbs turning thin and awkward. Pockmarks lingered on his face from the smallpox, forever prominent, but through them I could still see the face of a young boy, at once too naïve and too mature for his age. “I will look forward to them every day,” I said. I touched his cheek. “Tell me everything, Woferl. Even what you eat for breakfast.”
He laughed. Behind him, Papa and Mama conversed in lowvoices with the Hagenauers. They were financing part of this trip, and I could tell in Papa’s gestures that he was thanking them for their continued generosity. Again, our rent was delayed. It was our endless state of being, teetering on the balance scale of the world, hoping always for better tidings.
“You will be safe here, with Mama?” Woferl asked. He stepped closer to me so that the others would not hear him.
I had told him, after he’d begun his recovery from the smallpox last autumn, what had happened to the kingdom on that night in Olmütz. That the kingdom was consumed by fire, that it was gone and had been rebuilt, and that we shouldn’t talk about it anymore. He had taken it all in stride, as if the end of my imagination of it was the end of his as well. Since then, I had not been visited in my dreams. Neither, I think, had he, although he did not speak of it. There were no more visions of edelweiss growing on sheet music, or silhouettes of faery creatures waiting in our music room. There was no more magic permeating our lives, aside from the magic of the real world. Of music, his and mine, real and true.
“We will be safe, I assure you,” I told him.
Woferl looked down. “Promise me you will write me too, and tell me everything. Send me your compositions. I hope you continue to write them down. I swear to you that I will not let them end up in our father’s hands.”
“I will send what I can.” I opened my arms to Woferl and hugged him tightly.
Woferl’s voice sounded muffled against my dress. “I’ve never been without you,” he murmured.
I held him to me for a long time, savoring his embrace, and said nothing.
When Woferl finally released me and climbed into the carriage, I walked over to stand with Mama and said my goodbyes to my father. He patted my cheek and touched my nose with the tip of his finger.
“Be good, Marianne,” he said to me. “Take care of your mother.”
I nodded. He had stopped calling me Nannerl as soon as I’d turned eighteen. “Have a safe trip, Papa.”
He smiled at me. Something sad lingered in his eyes.
For a moment, I wondered if he regretted leaving me behind, that he had also regretted what he’d done in Vienna, that forces outside of his powers made him act as he did. I thought for an instant he could see something in me, and he wished he could have created more with it.
Then it was gone, as always, and he leaned in to kiss my forehead. “I will write to you and your mother,” he said.
I stayed at the music room’s window long after their carriage had vanished down the Getreidegasse. I sat until the sun had shifted the shadows in the room and my mother called for me to join her. Only then did I rise, smooth my skirts, and leave.
Before I did, I stared out the window one more time and remembered the Kingdom of Back as I had first known it, with its upside-down trees and white sand beach, the little path and the wayward signpost. I remembered that first blustery day in autumn, ten years ago, when it had appeared in my dreams. I thought I could see it again now, a ghostly image imprinted over the Getreidegasse’s wrought-iron signs and balconies, the faded castle rising up behind the buildings like a forgotten cloud.
It was the temple of my youth, the representation of so much that I had hoped for. Perhaps it had always existed and wouldalways exist, ready for the next little girl to make a wish.
I did not imagine Hyacinth in the kingdom. I had long ago forgotten what he looked like.
Later that evening, I put away my old music notebook and my broken pendant, storing them in a place where I would not look every day.
TWENTY-THREEYEARSLATER
SANKTGILGEN, AUSTRIA
1792
In February, as I rest in Sankt Gilgen with my husband and children, I receive a familiar guest from Salzburg who is coming to speak about Woferl’s childhood. He arrives on a sunny, cold afternoon, right as I am braiding my daughter Jeanette’s hair.
I have been expecting my guest. When my husband greets him at the door, he walks in with his usual air of merriness, shaking his hand before turning to me. He is slower now, his bones more brittle. Still, though, he is energetic in the way that he brushes leaves from the velvet of his justaucorps, and turns to smile at me.
I smile back, help Jeanette off my lap, and curtsy to him. “It is good to see you, Herr Schachtner,” I say. “Thank you for coming. I hope you’ve been well.”
