Folio Two, Page Two (svegra mos roh)
Salus brought me boxes of formal clothes from the children’s boutiques in Galasu. I was swathed in rich fabrics embroidered with everything from fish to delicate nighttime flowers in silver and gold; my feet poked from stiff pant bottoms that had been sewn with layer upon layer of bells. My mother slipped stinging contacts into my eyes before we went onto the streets. I would have endured anything just to hold her hand on the train platform or sit across from her in a busy restaurant, the menu balanced on my small knees. I lived in paradise, and I wanted to remain in her shadow forever.
Shortly before my third birthday, she brought me to the opera for the first time. It was a performance of Arrowborn, a foreign epic adapted by a Menarki named Namkzra in 1756 Standard Count, only a decade before the Occupation.
It sounded ethereal. For the first half hour, I wanted to be among the women singing the choruses on stage in beautiful costumes. My thighs twitched in sympathy each time they leapt and bound through the sea of color-changing balloons.
I only noticed the orchestra at the end of the first act.
Bows flashed for seconds in the stage lights before vanishing. Bells strobed with sound. The ksibja players’ arpeggios tasted like sweet candy. The mókra flutes’ bass hummed in time with my chest.
From that moment until the show’s end, I remember nothing but the steadily increasing desire to dissolve into the sound. Leave it to my mother’s well-kept journals to illuminate some aspects of that live-changing night.
I don’t know why my mother insisted on the melodramatic language. Seeing the musicians definitely fixed me. All of them treated me well. One of them even positioned my hands on his ksibja and let me test the notes. After he placed my fingers in the appropriate positions, I began to play the melody of a dance from the first act. “It was supernatural,” my mother’s account continues, “and all because of that man.”
Last night, my daughter gave me the most terrible scare yet. After Hábara’s cancellation, I brought her to the opera with me because she seemed old enough and has always been quiet and well-behaved in public. For the first act, my child delighted in the dances and costumes. It was a beautiful experience at first, but then something happened.
I had requested some of Eràsis’s favorite foods to come to our private box between the acts. She would eat nothing. My child sat rigidly in her seat. Her eyes never strayed from the empty stage. Her little hands shook so fiercely that I took them in mine and begged her to tell me what was wrong. She only said “the music” over and over in a monstrous voice until I clapped my hand over her mouth. I decided that she had had enough music and tried to remove her from the seat. Eràsis has had such fits before, but she was always docile and seemed perfectly fine within hours. Last night, she fought me and dug her fingers deep into the skin of my forearm, drawing thin lines of blood.
As soon as I stopped trying to remove her, she became quiet again. I stopped the blood with a napkin as the lights dimmed. My daughter moved her eyes towards the musicians filing into their places. She remained fixated on them throughout the second act until the performance ended.
I thought that perhaps the music had frightened her, but she seemed very intent on finding the musicians backstage. As for myself, I hoped that seeing them would restore the sanity that she had lost during the show. Everything seems fine with her on the surface, but I can still feel that insanity lurking in her terrible eyes. We have an appointment with the neurologist tomorrow.
The neurologist thought that my brain seemed healthy. Several days after the appointment, my mother purchased a child-sized ksibja. She locked it in a cupboard at night and instructed her niece Anumë to take it from me at dusk. I would play it until dawn if she didn’t. The keys soon passed to the ksibja tutor who moved into my family’s house shortly after I turned three.
Anumë hated my mother’s elaborate gifts and displays of affection. “An illegitimate should remain in the shadows,” she whispered in my ear, “if no father can come to claim it.”
To this day, those words make me shudder.
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