Into the night the bewildering conversation flowed. They fabricated poetical fictions about the other world. The mysteries of their sympathies, concerns, and sorrows perplexed me, yet the girls had a wellspring of empathy for matters outside our knowing. I was anxious, however, to have them go away, so that I might practice my writing. But the girls lingered until the fire collapsed into embers; then they nestled under the covers together, where they continued their discussion, pondering the fate of the writers, their subjects, and their intended readers. I would have to wait to use the pages. The night became bitterly cold, and soon all twelve of us were huddled together in a tangle of limbs. When the last of us wiggled under the mat, I suddenly remembered the day. “Merry Christmas!” I said, but my greetings brought only derision: “Shuddup!” and “Go to sleep.” During the long hours before dawn, a foot hit me on the chin, an elbow knacked me in the groin, and a knee banged against my sore ribs. In a dark corner of the pack, a girl groaned when Béka climbed upon her. Enduring their fitfulness, I waited for morning, the letters pinned against my chest.
The rising sun reflected against a blanket of high cirrus clouds, coloring them in a spectrum that began in brightness on the eastern edge and fanned out in soft pastels. Branches of the trees broke the sky into fragments, like a kaleidoscope. When the red sun rose, the pattern shifted hues until it all dissipated into blue and white. Up and out of bed, I savored the light growing strong enough for drawing and writing. I took out my papers and pencil, put a cold flat stone in my lap, and folded the mortgage statement into quarters. I drew a cross along the folds and made panels for four drawings. The pencil was at once odd and familiar in my grasp. In the first panel, I created from memory my mother and father, my two baby sisters, and myself, full-body portraits lined up in a straight row. When I considered my work, they looked crude and uneven, and I was disappointed in myself. In the next panel, I drew the road through the forest with the deer, the woman, the car, Smaolach and Luchóg in the same perspective. Light, for example, was indicated by two straight lines emanating from a circle on the car and extending outward to opposite corners of the frame. The deer looked more like a dog, and I dearly wished for an eraser on the yellow pencil. In the third panel: a flattened Christmas tree, lavishly decorated, a pile of gifts spread out on the floor. In the final panel, I drew a picture of a boy drowning. Bound in spirals, he sinks below the wavy line.
When I showed my paper to Smaolach later that afternoon, he took me by the hand and made me run with him to hide behind a wild riot of holly. He looked around in all directions to make sure we were alone; then he carefully folded the paper into quarters and handed it back to me.
“You must be more careful with what you draw in them pictures.”
“What’s the matter?”
“If Igel finds out, then you’ll know what’s the matter. You have to realize, Aniday, that he doesn’t accept any contact with the other side, and that woman . . .”
“The one in the red coat?”
“He’s a-scared of being found out.” Smaolach grabbed the paper and tucked it into my coat pocket. “Some things are better kept to yourself,” he said, then winked at me and walked away, whistling.
Writing proved more painful than drawing. Certain letters—B, G, R, W—caused my hand to cramp. In those early writings, sometimes my K bent backward, S went astray, an F accidentally became an E, and other errors that are amusing to me now as I look back on my early years, but at the time, my handwriting caused me much shame and embarrassment. Worse than the alphabet, however, were the words themselves. I could not spell for beans and lacked all punctuation. My vocabulary annoyed me, not to mention style, diction, sentence structure, variety, adjectives and adverbs, and other such matters. The physical act of writing took forever. Sentences had to be assembled nail by nail, and once complete, they stood no better than a crude approximation of what I felt or wanted to say, a woebegone fence across a white field. Yet I persisted through that morning, writing down all I could remember in whatever words I had at my command. By midday, both blank sides of the paper contained the story of my abduction and the adventures as well as the vaguest memories of life before this place. I had already forgotten more than I remembered—my own name and the names of my sisters, my dear bed, my school, my books, any notion of what I wanted to be when I grew up. All that would be given back to me in due course, but without Luchóg’s letters, I would have been lost forever. When I had squeezed the final word in the last available space, I went to look for him. Out of paper, my mission was to find more.
? CHAPTER 7 ?
At age ten, I began to perform in front of ordinary people. In appreciation of the nuns who allowed me use of the school piano, I agreed to play as prelude to the annual Christmas show. My music would usher the parents to their seats while their children shed coats and scarves for their elf and wise-man costumes. My teacher, Mr. Martin, and I put together a program of Bach, Strauss, and Beethoven, ending with part of “Six Little Piano Pieces” in honor of Arnold Schoenberg, who had passed away the year before. We felt this last “modern” piece, while not overly familiar to our audience, displayed my range without being overly ostentatious. The day before the Christmas show, I went through the thirty-minute program for the nuns after school, and the choices brought nothing but frowns and scowls from beneath their wimples.
“That’s wonderful, Henry, truly extraordinary,” the principal said. She was the Mother Superior of the gang of crows that ran the joint. “But that last song.”
“Schoenberg’s?”
“Yes, very interesting.” She stood up in front of the sisters and paced to and fro, searching the air for tact. “Do you know anything else?”
“Else, Mother?”
“Something more seasonal perhaps?”