This Shared Dream (62 page)
She looked around. “Oh, I think everything’s under control. Go ahead and sit down; I saved you the front row.”
A sheet of newspaper skittered down M Street as the wind picked up. Distant thunder rumbled from the west. Jill stepped to the podium to introduce Lev.
“Most of you know Lev Koslov, who has translated the poems of Rosa Hadntz. Rosa, a medical doctor, perished in a concentration camp in early 1945. Dr. Koslov has also written a short biography, which appears at the back—” She stopped.
Eliani Hadntz and a wizened old man carrying a violin walked in the door. And—was that—
“Wink!” Bette and Sam rushed to embrace him as Lev said, “I would like to introduce you to Eliani Hadntz, Rosa’s daughter, who has honored us with a surprise visit. I hope you will do this reading for us, Eliani.”
Zoe’s eyes were wide, and widened farther when Eliani winked at her.
Her long, curly hair was white, and she had not worn her red lipstick. She wore a long, multicolored skirt and a white blouse and was spare, almost thin. She looked around for a second, and then moved a low stepstool from behind the counter, stepped onto it, and smiled. “I need a little extra height.” The audience laughed lightly with her; the ice was broken.
“My mother was, like myself, a medical doctor, but wrote poetry all her life. During her last year, she lived in Budapest, before an unanticipated Nazi crackdown captured her in its net. I, unfortunately, was not there at the time.” Her voice was somber. “I was unable to help.”
Zoe and the old man stationed themselves a few feet from Eliani. Wink, in full fedora regalia, extracted a cornet from the duffle bag he’d dropped by the door, and stood on the other side of Eliani. Jill had a glimpse of the wild spatter of colors on the sheet music Zoe set on the stand. Arabelle rose unobtrusively, stood behind and between Zoe and the old violinist, and the music commenced, low and haunting.
Eliani began to read, her deep, rich voice filled with pain and love:
E
LIANI, 1944
i
my daughter, visiting me in Budapest,
brought a gypsy violinist
she rescued from the Nazis.
his music flowed
fluid as her long black hair
fluid as her mind in childhood.
she told me of her thoughts:
how the brain is a series of tree and root
linked in quantum chorus
singing with light and thought: how the roots of trees themselves
mirror their sunlit branches
partaking of dark minerals—
crystals, like our own memories—
while their leaves
devour the sun; how each of us
are mirrored
in some elsewhere,
still growing
while we, here in Pest, are changed to
sudden spears of light
that pierce the night sky
as bombs explode,
or when we fall in droves
like the Ukrainians,
twenty-four thousand in one day
into
one
large
grave
whose name is Europe.
ii
I bind wounds.
Set bones.
Cut skin in thin red lines.
Yank an arm and set the shoulder free;
Make them live;
Pronounce them dead.
My daughter draws; thinks; writes
in a back room
away from the surgery.
She seems younger now that her father has died
of a broken heart
when his own mother ceased writing from besieged St. Petersburg.
She helps sometimes
when I can’t find a nurse
and says things like
“Mother, don’t worry.
I am fixing everything.
there will be a better world.”
To have her here,
In this world,
while war rages,
is like a light surrounding me.
She cuts gauze,
removes a bullet,
comforts a child without a leg, and without parents,
Her hands as practiced as mine
while the gypsy down the hallway plays unceasingly
driving me mad.
When she leaves,
I live only
for her return.
Jill was surprised at how Wink’s cornet could wind so solemnly through and punctuate so perfectly the wartime milieu. Apparently, he could read Zoe’s music. Arabelle turned a page.
Eliani continued. She read poems that pulsed with deep happiness; poems of impatience; poems of depth and intensity, poems which Jill regarded as the work of a genius. Zoe’s music skirled, gypsylike; gardens and tranquil city streets, piney mountains, a clear pellucid lake and a child: all were induced in their turn, floating through Jill as if she were there, herself. The storm loosed suddenly in a great silver burst. Rain bounced from the pavement; thunder echoed long-ago, distant canons. Eliani raised her voice a bit, and the spell was fully woven when she finally finished, half an hour later, to great applause.
She nodded. The musicians stood still, their instruments at their sides.
Eliani Hadntz concluded, “I have been working for the cessation of war my entire life, along with a wide circle of colleagues, close friends, and my beloved husband, long dead. I believe that we can move from the terrible waste, pain, and tragedy of war, which I hope will someday be seen as only a stage in the growth of humanity. I have let go of many parts of myself in the process. And now I have done the final letting go.
“Some of us have opened a peace center, on P Street, and all of you are welcome to visit; I will leave information. Please thank our musicians, thank Dr. Koslov for his masterful, perfect translation, which is a work of love, and Jill Dance, for offering us this opportunity to be here tonight.”
After a standing ovation, Hadntz and Koslov signed books, all of which sold immediately. After a few skirmishes among customers, Jill raised her hand and shouted, “I can have more by Thursday for whoever wants to order one.”
“I will sign the others when they arrive,” Hadntz promised. Jill looked at her, surprised. Hadntz smiled. “I am thinking of staying, at least for a while. I think your parents are too. We all need to catch our breath. It has been a long, long war.”
The rain was over. Steam rose from the street, water dripped from the trees, and the sun emerged in one bright beam, turning street, trees, cars, and unheeding pedestrians, on their way to a restaurant or heading home from work, into moving, living gold.
Chapter the Last
T
HE GIRL WAS, PERHAPS,
fourteen. She was tall and thin and almost purple, the color of a glowing, beautiful aubergine.
Her hair was cropped short, and zigzagged in a pattern that caught the soldier’s eye, as he stood there in the center of the village with his machine gun trained upon the girl, her parents, her aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters—indeed, the whole village was before him and his cohorts, shaking, sobbing, and pleading.
Her movement, as she reached into the large, baggy pocket of her dress, was slow, almost dreamlike, and yet it was so swift that his eye could not really follow, nor could his finger pull the trigger nor his mouth open to utter the rote words of terror he had so often used before and which would make them fall down begging while he smiled.
He did not see what was in her hand when she pulled it from her pocket. He supposed, in those very long seconds, that it would be a small pistol, useless in her situation. As they stood there, poised for the usual drill of rape the women, kill the men, subjugate the children—the same thing that had happened to him and his family three years ago, when he had begun his training as a killer—he did not have a very long time to remember what happened next.
It seemed to him that she drew forth moving pictures, which moved very swiftly indeed. And then as in the pictures, the entire village let forth a scream and rushed him and the other soldiers that were part of his band.
Instead of pulling the trigger, as he had done thousands of times before (although very few villagers had ever challenged them, believing to the last that they would be killed if they did so, which was true—but it was also true that most would die anyway), he felt in brief amazement his hands drop, as if he had been inflicted with a fast-working virus that rendered his muscles uncooperative. But no, it was his very mind that refused to fire, as he was rushed, pummeled, beaten with sticks and shovels, and very nearly killed.
As he lay on the ground in deep pain in front of the small concrete-block school, he saw children gather around him. They stared down with curiosity on their faces.
“Is he dead?” asked a boy. The soldier felt a vicious, hearty kick in his left side, and pain shot through him.
“Na,” said the girl with the dress that had the deadly pocket. She knelt and looked into his eyes. “You want to know what happened, soldier boy?”
He made a strangled sound; he decided that blood must be pooling in his throat. It tasted like blood, thick and iron-tinged.
“When you were training, eh? With those video games? There was a fast sequence slipped in. A subliminal image. You saw it a thousand times. It is in the opening sequence. Too fast for you to realize you even saw it, eh? It is called neural linguistic programming, a new and powerful kind of it, precise. It works on your brain, on your mirror neurons. Your mirror neurons cause you to imitate what you see others doing. At first, the imaging was not precise. Now it is. We can do things with it. Eh? You understand, boy-man?”
He tried to shake his head, no, but could not. She continued in her soft, inexorable voice, that voice that sounded like the voice of his dead sister, whom he had so loved. He had not heard a soft woman’s voice in years. The only sounds women made now were pleading wails, sobs, whimpers, shrieks.
This girl’s voice might be soft, yet it was somehow sharp and hard as a razor, drawing tracks of oozing pain through his brain. Maybe that, he thought, was what his mirror neurons were. Pain places, places that had locked down and shut, a series of doors closing, closing, closing, releasing him, he had thought, into manhood, which meant killing with no pity.
“So when we resist, you cannot kill us.” Her dark eyes held very little. No contempt, no fear, no anger, no sense of vindication or revenge; not even satisfaction. They were pure, dark pools observing him. But she did speak a few words of hope. “You are lucky. You are still alive. These very angry people have killed all of your soldier brothers. If you survive, you will be sent to the UN rehabilitation center. Maybe you, like myself, can come back here as a teacher.”
He looked a last question at her. She nodded. “Yes. I was like you. A child soldier. The UN saved me. And maybe they can save you. I don’t know.”
She paused for a moment, then said, “But I hope so.”
Grace Note
Z
OE STEPPED OUT
of the door of Halcyon House, one hand in Grandpa Sam’s, on her way to Arabelle’s for a violin lesson, and stood on the porch looking out at the bright garden.
Things had changed. It was like she had had wings before, but they had been curled inside her. She had not even known about them.
Now, she was held aloft by colors, which were sounds. The thoughts and dreams of others had colors, and their colors tinged her wings and gave them strength. Her wings were even strong enough to hold aloft her parents, Bitsy, Abbie, and Whens, and even her Grandpa and Grandma. Even her new friend, Aunt Eliani. She felt their heavy past, but it supported her instead of pulling her down. It was a new way of thinking, a new music that she could write and play. This all took only a few seconds, a few notes, to think.
“Ready?” asked Sam.
“I think everything is music,” she said.
“I think you’re right.”
Also by Kathleen Ann Goonan
In War Times
T
HE
N
ANOTECH
Q
UARTET
Queen City Jazz
Mississippi Blues
Crescent City Rhapsody
Light Music
The Bones of Time
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THIS SHARED DREAM
Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
All rights reserved.
Edited by David Hartwell
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Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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