Folio Two, Page Forty-Six (svegra mos droskron tal-pirh)
Sukua and I exhausted all of the climbing spaces in the ravine behind my house in the hour between school and my ksibja practice. As we scrambled down from the last tree, his fingers slipped down the thick bark and grasped at the reddened leaves. He looked like someone struggling to swim against a current. From my perch, I saw all of the hand- and footholds he had missed. He wouldn’t have made them even if I had pointed them out.
The bell tolled. I was late, but we were close enough to home that it didn’t matter. I quickly made my way down and checked to make sure the fall hadn’t hurt him. Sukua looked on the verge of crying when I touched his ankle, but he seemed fine as he walked along the ravine towards home.
Ksibja practice that day meant working through pieces for a performance Aunt Nikis had booked for me at the Midnight Garden, one of the upper-class mood bars out on the sound, thirty minutes away by train.
But today, I hadn’t practiced as I should have and the notes wouldn’t come. The fast-paced glissandos and complicated networks of fermatas and accents tripped me up so badly that I had to slow down, something that had never happened before. I set the ksibja down on the bare bed and cried.
Domìntar played through the section once for me and stood to look out the window. I remember looking through tears at the lines in her forehead as she stared at me. “Have they pushed you hard in your classes?”
I didn’t respond. She meant to say, And how is Tveshi treating you? Have they made any recommendations to hold you back in the class? At my age, I didn’t understand what that meant, only it upset most of the adults I knew except Domìntar. The family needed to prime me for a position in politics, and Aunt Nikis said that I couldn’t expect to gain respect without knowing the national language by heart. What could I have told her about the late night and my fight for survival? It seemed more comfortable to acquiesce to the more believable lie — although, truth be told, I had almost failed our last oral check-up.
She poured herself some fruit juice and drank thoughtfully. “I would never recommend falling behind in your classes, but you have talent, kid, and you’re coming to that time in your life when you have to choose between what you love and what everyone else wants you to do. You’re clever enough to make it work.”
“But why do I have to choose now?” It seemed like the right thing to say — what any other seven-year-old girl would say in the months leading up to group sorting. “Can’t I wait?”
“I don’t make the rules, the school does. Something about kids your age needing to gain more social responsibility and have a stable peer group.” She smiled at me. Domìntar’s husband was a child psychologist on a five-year shift in space, she said, and the language he used in his letters drove her mad. I often thought of their correspondence like little lessons they each gave, him telling her all of that about child development and her sending off chords. It didn’t make much sense otherwise. “Sorry, Misjo again.”
She clapped her hands in time with the beats while I played the passage again. It came more smoothly, and I only muddled the notes twice — but that was shameful and wrong, and I either got it or didn’t.
“Tell you what,” she said. “We have two days before the performance. You can play some of the staples — we’ll only add this one if you get it right.”
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