10

She was unsurprised to see that the manuscript was called The Teardrop Method. It was a series of interconnected stories involving a cast of characters that moved in and out of each others’ lives, some of them taking centre stage for a time, and then drifting away into the background again. Krisztina read through the prose, and found a passage about the torch singer they’d both orbited. She recognised phrases she’d seen written on billboards and in newspaper articles that had called to her. The words that constituted a lifetime. Where Krisztina would use music and pare the words away to tell the story of a life, Rebeka had the rhythm of language, the ebb and flow of sentences and paragraphs and pages. It was exquisite. It was the same way out of the darkness of loss and pain and creative famine. Krisztina couldn’t begrudge her that, but if people were being murdered for their stories, then she must. She had only taken the stories that the natural end of life suggested. She’d never taken the life.

It was the final story that made Krisztina put the manuscript down and step away from it. She opened the doors to the balcony and felt the cold air streaming up off the Danube. She breathed it in, gripping the railings with white knuckles. The river surged below her. She stayed like that for a while, and then returned to the manuscript’s final story. She turned on the lights and drew the drapes, poured herself a brandy. She couldn’t stop her hands shaking.

It began: Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city… She read an account of her tryst with József; the steam and heat of the coffee house, the squalor of his apartment, Krisztina waking to find József standing on the balcony’s edge, the song that his life gave her.

The girl came out onto the balcony where Krisztina was shivering, watching the snow flake out of the pale sky… Krisztina was meeting Alice again at the record company’s release party for her first record; their brief time together was sympathetically described until events led to the accident in Batthyány Square and the resultant days in the hospital. It had been the beginning of the end of Krisztina’s first life.

In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one… And the beginning of the next.

“I can’t play it all,” Krisztina said. “I don’t hear the whole song.” She paused, stumbling on the next words. They were too hard to say, to admit to. “I think I have to wait until you’re gone.”

Alice’s song, and the ballerina’s, the woman on the run from an abusive husband, and the man who lived on the edge of a lake with a house full of clocks; the boy on the streets reducing to selling his body for money; the old man who might have been a refugee from the Cold War…

And then the torch singer: But it had been taken; taken by the fugitive stranger. Krisztina read it. Re-read it. Rebeka Stróbl, describing Krisztina’s life in prose, describing her encounter with the author of the prose. She felt a rush of vertigo. She flipped through the pages to see how it finished. How your life finishes, she thought, and had to sit down.

Someone knew… was where the text ended. There, Krisztina had begun to receive the news clippings from whom she was certain was Rebeka Stróbl. It ended before the song began, before she began to uncover information on Stróbl and Lejeune. What it meant, Krisztina assumed, was that both parties were at the same point on their creative paths. The song and the story were both unfinished. Lejeune had told her to leave the city, to escape before his psychotic wife came for her story. But how could she now her life was starting again? Finally she was moving away from the loss of Alice, making reparations in her relationship with her father, making a record again, moving on… How could she simply walk away?

She returned to the balcony and stared down into the Danube. How could she simply walk away?