Read Strange Sweet Song Online
Authors: Adi Rule
Strange Sweet Song
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CONTENTS
One
I
F YOU HAD BEEN THERE
that night, the night it happened, you might not have even noticed. The strings and woodwinds shone fat and glossy in the concert hall’s perfect humidity, and the brass instruments sparkled in the gentle light of the chandeliers. The music itself shimmered as well, lighting up dark places people hadn’t even known were there.
You might not have noticed the small movement. It fluttered the fading sunlight stretching in through one of the high, arched windows that encircled the room like a crown. You would have been staring at the orchestra, or at the polished floor, or at the blackness inside your closed eyelids, as the music swirled around you. Had you opened your eyes or broken your fuzzy-glass gaze and looked up at the fluttering light, you would have seen the silhouette of the crow. But you wouldn’t have heard it, because the crow didn’t make a sound.
At least, not at first. It alighted on the ledge of the little window and folded its wings, flexing its toes as though it meant to be there awhile. Some of the windows still held their colorful panels, but the crow had chosen one through which tendrils of ivy had pushed their way, dislodging the glass with a long-forgotten drop and shatter.
The crow seemed comfortable, somehow, and not just because it was a crow adorning a remote Gothic hall surrounded by dark pine trees; not just because St. Augustine’s was a natural place for a crow to be. It seemed to be
listening,
cocking its head and stretching its black neck as far into the room as it could.
At intermission, the grand piano was wheeled onto the stage, black and sleek and curvy. The crow looked at the piano with one eye and then the other and ruffled its wings. As the audience applauded, a middle-aged woman lowered herself onto the bench and placed her hands on the gleaming keys, stretching and bending her fingers. The crow twitched its own knobbly gray feet experimentally.
Then the conductor waved the orchestra to life again—a romantic piano concerto, well-known to the concertgoers, who settled in their seats and breathed.
When the woman at the piano began to play, when the first smooth, icy notes reached the small, broken window in the ceiling, the crow froze. It stared, its dingy feathers raised just a little. It was listening again, but now it listened with its whole body. As the concerto progressed, the crow remained utterly still. It might have been a stone gargoyle, except there was something too bright about its eyes. They were fixed on the woman’s hands.
If you had looked, then, into the crow’s eyes, if you had been a ghost or a puff of smoke and had floated up to the ceiling to look deeply into those shiny black eyes where the brilliant white keys were reflected, you would have seen a despair bigger than those eyes could hold, bigger than the hall itself.
And you would have heard the faintest hiss—an ugly, crackling hiss, as different from the pure, clear tones of the piano as it could possibly be. You might then have noticed the grubby beak was open very slightly. And you might have realized with a start that the crow was trying to
sing
.
But perhaps you
were
there. Perhaps you already know this story.
Two
S
ING DA NAVELLI STARES ACROSS
the moonlit quadrangle and up the snowy mountain that watches over the campus. A porter unloads baggage from her father’s Mercedes. Just inside the doorway to the dormitory, a haggard young man in gray academic robes speaks to one of her father’s secretaries. She is finally here, counted among the select few.
Dunhammond Conservatory. European prestige tucked away in New World mountain wilderness, surrounded by its own black forest. A scattering of mismatched buildings huddle in the shadow of St. Augustine’s, the famous Gothic church synonymous with musical greatness. Until her first visit, this spring, Sing had seen St. Augustine’s only in magazines. Now she is here to sing, in the place that has produced the brightest stars in classical music for a century and a half.
She drifts away from the yellow lights of campus toward the chilly northern woods. Not too far, not too deep, just the shadowy, crackling edge. The mountain snow tingles her nose as she peers into the twisted darkness.
Quand il se trouvera dans la forêt sombre …
She finds herself humming an all-too-familiar aria.
When he finds himself in the dark forest …
When she was little, music was her nanny when her parents were gone, which was most of the time. Sure, various starched, soap-smelling women bustled around, but it was music that raised her, folding around her like a blanket—fuzzy or spiky or cold or sweet and warm. It sparked her, calmed her, made her want to get off the velvety floor and look out the window. Sing da Navelli is more music than words, inside.
Chatter from the campus drowns out the song in her mind. People are taking care of her registration, checking in, all those little details she has never had to worry about. Then it will be official. No more mediocre high school ensembles. She will spend the last of her teen years with her peers—those young musicians destined to attend the best universities and build careers like fireworks, explosive and brilliant. She is finally going to sing for real.
How can something so wonderful fill her with dread?
It would be better if Zhin were here. Zhin, Sing’s first almost–best friend, who loves the violin almost as much as the soap opera world of classical music. She looked out for Sing at Stone Hill Youth Music Retreat this past summer—can it have been only a few weeks ago? They even got to do the opera together,
Osiris and Seth
. Sing loved the elaborate set with the big lotus pillars. Zhin loved the battle scene with all the shirtless baritones.
If Zhin were here, she would tell Sing what she can’t quite tell herself:
You are good enough. You belong at Dunhammond Conservatory. You deserve this.
The voice in Sing’s head won’t say these things. It says,
Not yet. Something is missing.
But it offers no insight when she tries, every day at the piano, to perfect her imperfect voice.
She heard some of the other singers through the wall at the spring auditions; they were good. Very good, but not out of her league. Now, across the gravel driveway, Sing hears her father speaking.
He
wouldn’t let her come to DC if he didn’t think she could be good enough.
It’s just that, in her family, “good enough” means “the best.”
Her parents could have named her Aria, or Harmonia, or Tessitura, or a hundred other clever names that would have alluded to her ancestry. But they weren’t for her, these names that roll or sparkle or play or simply proclaim,
I am normal!
No, it was Sing. A name and a command.
“Sing, must you wander off? It is time to go in.” Her father is suddenly there, speaking in that calm, unwavering voice, more used to command than leisure. Instead of his native Italian, he speaks to her in English, her language. Her mother’s language. “You must get to bed as soon as possible, but do not sleep too long tomorrow. When is your placement audition?”
It is a quiz. He knows the answer already. “One o’clock.” Her voice feels small here, at the edge of this great forest.
“So you must be awake and singing by when?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Exactly. Eat a good breakfast. Go over your piece tonight, but don’t overdo it. It is there, eh?” He taps her head lightly. “You know it very well. I have heard you sing this vocalise one hundred times, eh?” Sing nods. Her father looks back toward campus. “It is a shame we are so late in arriving. I would like to see Maestro Keppler—I so much enjoyed his interpretation of the
Little Night Music
last spring. He has not aged one day since I last saw him! And I have not the opportunity to speak with my old friend Martin.”
It’s just as well he won’t get to speak with DC’s president. Sing already feels her father tugging on the invisible marionette strings of her budding career. The conservatory’s brand-new theater is evidence of his sudden interest in philanthropy toward his alma mater.
“I hope they have chosen a suitable opera for the Autumn Festival.” He puts an arm around her shoulders. “Something Baroque, eh,
carina
? That would be lovely in your voice. I would like to hear it.”
Something Baroque,
she thinks.
Something safe. Something technical and stylized.
But in her mind she keeps hearing a different melody, a sweeping, wailing one that was born of this very forest almost one hundred fifty years ago.
Quand il se trouvera dans la forêt sombre …
“This is where Durand wrote
Angelique,
” she whispers, and is surprised to have said it out loud.
Her father’s arm stiffens. “Yes, certainly it is. This is a beautiful place to write an opera.
Vieni,
it is time to go in.”
Sing hesitates, gazing into the dark forest, Durand’s dark forest. Angelique’s dark forest. She is unable to turn away.
After a moment, her father speaks in a heavy, quiet voice and calls her by a name she hasn’t heard in years.
“Farfallina,”
he says, “I leave tonight. But please promise me to stay always on the campus. They say this forest is dangerous.”