Thea dances to her own music.
The words, intimating desire of the body, thrilled me. I had never danced before, had never seen anyone dancing, and did not know, truly, what it might look like in any conventional sense. But I did understand the impulse. In my childhood I had heard the fields thrumming with life and my body wanted to move in time with the pulse of seeds. As I grew older, some hymns filled me with a longing to sing with more than my voice; to envelop the harmony with my body. But back then I also believed my parents when they warned me that this was a yearning of the flesh which, like all such yearnings, could lead to distance from God. They told me this after church one day when Emile and Daniel Pfeiffer had apologised to the congregation for indecency. Someone had seen them dancing at a cousin’s wedding, and the pastor had been told.
It is hard to believe now, seeing from this height the valley’s crops and early vines squeaking into green and the chimney smoke spiralling into this glory of a day, that there was a time when the ground was unploughed. When the nights were adorned with firelight and the sharp echo of sticks clapping out footfall. I wonder what song this place sang then, when the people listening to it had not yet been moved on.
The Peramangk were the first people I ever saw dancing. Back, back, after my first winter here, when they came down into the valley from their settlements on higher ground, a large fire was seen at the edges of the land the surveyor had marked out for pasturage and singing travelled through the valley. The music was unlike anything I had heard before. It threaded itself under my skin until I felt sewn through with sound, and then it pulled me to its source. There was no one to see me go; the villagers did not leave their beds in deep night. As I drew closer to the fire, I saw that there were men dancing in its light, and the beauty and urgency of their movement was everything I had imagined dancing might be, their bodies shaped and held by a music that was closer to the sound I heard coming from the earth than any hymn of my homeland.
Now this valley is emptied of such things. The song of it has been laid over with discordance.
That I had danced more. That I had danced with her.
These are the regrets that plague me now.
I grew distracted about the house. A week of heavy rain made me restless and clumsy. Eggs were broken, milk poured over the floor instead of the pan, the gate left open, dirt tracked through the house. Mama despaired at my mistakes, and any attempt to reconcile after our arguments somehow ended up in greater hostility, such as when she offered to comb my hair one night after a day of bickering. It was a chore she knew I hated.
‘I wish I had your hair,’ I told her, as she pulled up a stool behind me and took the comb from my fingers.
‘You should be grateful for the hair God gave you.’
‘I wish I could cut it all off.’
Mama said nothing, but I felt a sudden, rough yank of the comb.
‘You’re hurting me.’
‘You’re welcome to do it yourself.’
I winced as the teeth dragged along my scalp. ‘I wish I had Matthias’s hair and he had mine. I’m so sick of being ugly.’
Without a word Mama went outside. She returned minutes later with my father’s iron shears and, before I realised what she was doing, took a lock of my hair and cut it close to the skull.
I spun around in horror.
‘I shall rid you of what you hate so much,’ she said. ‘Sit back. I’ll get the rest.’
I got up and ran to my bedroom, hand to my head, and cried for an hour.
When Mama eventually came to sit on my bed and told me that the next morning I should go to the forest to gather mushrooms, I was so furious I did not recognise it as the apology it must have been: she was giving me the opportunity to spend the better part of a morning wandering alone in nature. I believed only that she wished me out of the house.
I set out just past daybreak. The entire forest was shrouded in a thick fog that yawned in white, refusing to lift, and everything was still and muffled. Water dripped from branches and my skirt grew damp as I kneeled and, blade in hand, searched for telltale mounds lifting the carpet of needles. I breathed lung-deep, imagined that I exhaled dust. The relief of the forest was exquisite.
Suddenly I heard stick-break, the cracking of wood, and someone appeared out of the fog.
She was an apparition walking between hazy columns of trees, her outline growing clearer as she walked. It seemed, for one small moment, that we were underwater. I saw her breath stream as she heaved a crooked weight of kindling; I saw her through the cloud of my own breath and held it, the better to see her.
She looked up and, seeing me watching her, stopped.
I exhaled.
The air hung with water. Held its own breath as we regarded one another.
The girl freed a hand from her bundle of sticks. I watched as she raised it, uncertain, then lifted my own palm.
‘I thought you were a ghost,’ she said. Her voice was low. Unsteady.
‘I thought you were too.’
‘You scared me.’ She hoisted the bundle of kindling onto her hip and approached me through the fog. ‘I’m Thea.’
I remembered myself. ‘Hanne.’
The mist between us thinned as she drew closer. Her face was round, smooth-cheeked, and I saw that her hair was white-blonde, her eyebrows fairer than her skin. It looked, not unpleasantly, as though she had been dusted with flour.
Against the silence of the forest, her footsteps upon the twigs and needles sounded impossibly loud.
‘You’re not, then?’ She continued walking until she was standing an arm’s length away. I could see that her eyelashes were translucent, surrounding eyes that were deeply blue. Fathomless blue, winter’s blue.
‘What?’ Water dripped from the tree above me and fell inside my collar. Trickled down my back.
She smiled. ‘A ghost.’
I noticed then that, while her front teeth were small and neat, those next to them stuck out at an angle. It gave her a hungry, slightly wolfish look.
‘No. I don’t think so. Unless I died in my sleep.’
‘Maybe both of us died in our sleep, and here we are, two ghosts. Telling each other we’re alive.’
I laughed. For a moment I wondered if there could be truth in what she said. The mist had thickened, and with her white hair it looked as though she might suddenly be absorbed into the cloud about us.
Pain licked across my hand. I had unthinkingly closed my palm across my blade.
Thea placed her load of kindling on the ground and picked up the knife I had dropped, fingers careful around the handle. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’
‘Not much.’
She peered at my palm, creased with blood. ‘You should probably go home and wash it. Dress it with a little honey.’ She smiled at me. ‘At least I know you’re telling the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ghosts don’t bleed.’ She stooped to bundle up her sticks again.