Winter in their country made its first impressions through sensations and mood, rather than through temperature. People found themselves suddenly worried about money. You might abruptly feel guilty about friends you had neglected or betrayed. These things would give you a chill. A shiver of loss would quake through your body.
Sofia and the Goose were on a road that cut through an empty field. She felt that it might begin to snow soon.
It was always mysterious when it snowed in her country. It never seemed to actually be cold enough during their winters for it to snow. People chose to attribute the snow to things other than the weather. They thought it had to do with church bells ringing. If a woman called out too loudly for her child in the street, it might start to snow. The silence after a parade sometimes caused it to snow. It was said that hares turning white caused it to snow and not the other way around. Poets were blamed for causing the snow. It was said that when a poet wrote something destined to be immortal, it would start to snow.
A girl appeared out of nowhere, dressed in a pretty black tailored wool coat and patent leather shoes. Her clothes were quite well preserved. Her shoes weren’t even scuffed at all. Her hair was tied to the side and held up with a barrette. And a curl dangled down the side of her face. Sofia had seen girls and women in different places all over the country in the days she spent wandering. None of them had done up their hair. They did not have the time or the inclination to do their hair up prettily. No, this was a hairdo that had been attended to by a mother’s fingers.
The girl looked as though her eyes were permanently dilated. She had witnessed something so horrific, it had caused her to go into shock. But she had not recovered. She was in a permanent state of shock.
Her breath was so heavy that the puffs of air coming out of her mouth were as large as a small cloud. And for a moment, her face was temporarily obscured. She was nothing but a little body with a cloud for a head. They waited a moment for her to stop panting and the cloud to disperse.
“My name is Ewa. I am so cold. I can’t do anything to keep myself warm. Even though I keep moving. I feel so cold. Like ice. I can’t even feel the tips of my fingers. Can I have just a little bit of your heat?”
Of course, Sofia and the Goose were cold too. But she had made the argument that she was more cold than they were. They suddenly felt ashamed of not feeling colder. And they felt they had no right to complain about being cold. She asked Sofia if she could put her hands under her coat. So Sofia undid her buttons and opened her coat. Ewa quickly thrust her arms into Sofia’s coat.
Her hands were freezing to the touch. It was as though her hands were drawing in all the warmth from Sofia’s body. Sofia felt what it was like to be a corpse. She looked out at the world with frozen eyes. They were eyes that could witness the world but couldn’t make any emotional assessments about it. She was left with a much simpler palette of emotions with which to experience the world. This was how the dead saw the world. It was as though her heart had turned from a glowing piece of lava into a hard rock. Her mouth tasted like ashes.
Ewa’s cheeks began to flush. Her lips turned red, as though a coat of lipstick had been put on them. Sweat appeared on her forehead, dampening her hair. It was as though she were a teapot and had been filled with boiling water. Ewa looked delighted and pulled her arms out. Sofia felt her body revive.
“I need to find my mother,” Ewa said. “We were separated only five minutes ago. I was holding her hand and then she was gone. We were leaving our apartment. She told me to wait for her. Then there was a crowd of people, and we got mixed up with them. And I don’t know where my mother went. I’m trying to catch up with her, but I don’t know where she is. But she can’t be far.”
Sofia and the Goose turned their heads, looking all around them. There was emptiness in all directions as far as the eye could see. Wherever her mother was, she was most certainly far away.
“What evidence do you have that she is close?” Sofia asked.
“I heard her.”
“Was she calling out to you?”
“No, she was singing. My mother loves to sing. Everybody hears her singing when she takes a bath. She even knows how to sing opera. My mother has the most beautiful voice. It is more beautiful than an opera singer’s.”
Sofia doubted this very much. She had actually been to the opera. She knew that opera singers needed years of training. You couldn’t simply be an opera singer while you washed the dishes. “How can you possibly hear her singing from here?”
“I can hear her singing when it snows.”
Sofia was not sure this was her mother singing. It was not exclusively in Elysia that people claimed they could hear singing in the snow. It was a common experience. In other countries, they had scientists who were able to explain these auditory hallucinations. But it was impossible to dismiss the sounds people heard in the Elysian snowstorm as figments of the imagination. A person would not say, I heard a vague sort of singing. Instead, they described it as such: There were two baritone horns playing while a xylophone tinkled out a tune and a chorus of maybe five or six sang.
“Let’s quiet down,” Ewa said. “And if we are absolutely quiet, it will begin to snow.”
She made a little O out of her lips and placed her index finger over it. They all quieted down to listen. Everything quieted down around them too. As though everything in the country suddenly heard Ewa’s request that they needed to be quiet. It was as though her tiny finger over her tiny mouth had as much power as a great magic wand.
And there was a silence. For snow to come, everyone has to listen for it. Everyone is listening so hard that there is no sound left to listen to. It is the sound of a blank page. It is the sound of time standing still. It is the sound of death. It is the sound of grace. It is the sound of silence. The only sound that existed in the whole world was Sofia’s breathing.
And then the snow began to fall. Sofia was amazed. Ewa could do anything she wanted with her finger. She could point to a hare and turn it into a man who wouldn’t know where he was from.
“Do you hear it! It’s coming from that direction,” Ewa declared, pointing in a direction they could not really discern. Neither Sofia nor the Goose heard anything. “I’m going to follow it. You must come with me! Follow my mother’s voice with me! And we will walk to school together with our books in our hands. And we can go skating together. And skate figure eights and all sorts of other moves that make us look so silly and pretty. And when we’re done skating, we will sit and drink hot cocoa.”
The Goose leaned against Sofia’s leg, as if warning her to stay put. The girl ran off. They watched her hurry off until all that was left of her were footprints in the thin layer of snow.
They stopped talking because the snow had suddenly begun to fall more heavily. And Sofia tried to hear what it was that Ewa heard in the snowfalls. She strained to concentrate and pick apart all the noises the wind was making. Then she thought she heard singing. There was the sound of a children’s choir coming from the branches. The trees were known to play tunes from different times. These could be a choir of her contemporaries. Or children from three hundred years ago.
“Do you hear the singing coming from the trees?”
“I hear nothing at all.”
“It’s too pretty to bear.”
“You’re hearing nothing but a memory.”
Even when there were no bombardments, Clara and Sofia slept curled up in each other’s arms. When the heat shut off, her mother’s large bedroom became too cold to sleep in. It became her habit to sleep in Sofia’s bedroom, which had been her bedroom when she was young too. Every time Clara entered the room, she acted as though she hadn’t been inside it for decades. “Oh, hello!” she said to a small wooden lamb on one of the shelves. “Long time no see.”
It made Sofia tremendously excited when her mother came into her room to sleep in the evening. She never took it for granted. But each night she trembled with anticipation, waiting for her to come.
“I can’t sleep,” Sofia said in the dark one night.
“I could never get to sleep when I was a girl. I think it was because I was afraid of going to sleep and missing out on something. I don’t know what. But I was always chasing things in life. Something that was just out of my grasp. My mother would sing me lullabies. She knew a hundred of them. I thought they were ridiculous later on. But there was a time when I must have truly loved them. Because I asked for them.”
“They calmed you down, like warm milk,” Sofia suggested tentatively.
“Yes.”
“Can you sing one of the songs to me now?”
“I won’t get the words right. And I can’t sing them the way your grandmother did. She sang as though she had written the songs herself, and they were about her. Fascinating, really.”
I planted my heart outside your house. And an apple tree grew there. And you bit into my heart every day. And your lover, your sweet pretty lover, came and bit into my heart. And your children bit into my heart, my one heart, and all my hearts.
Sofia sat in the dark silence. The echo of her mother’s words hung in the air. She had heard her mother humming to songs on the radio or in the bath. She seemed to catch jovial jingles in her throat. Her mother was the type of person who sang when she was happy.
But this song was dark. Each word dropped like a tea bag into hot water. Then it would steep, and darkness continued to spread out of it.
She felt so content, it was troubling. She felt as though she might die from pleasure.