A Certain Music Read online
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraphs
Dedication
PART 1 The Man in the Woods Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
PART 2 The Worker on the Factory Floor Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
CELESTE WALTERS is the author of playscripts for children and adults, novels and picture story books for young readers, texts on developmental drama and the writing of eulogies, and three books of whimsical verse for all ages. She has also written five highly acclaimed novels for young adults. Celeste has been a teacher, an art gallery director, a children's theatre producer and a university lecturer. Currently she divides her time between Melbourne and country New South Wales where she writes, cares for newborns and entertains groups at the University of the Third Age.
ANNE SPUDVILAS is a multi-award-winning illustrator of children's books and an established portrait painter who also works as a courtroom artist for the Melbourne media. Her first picture book, The Race, was awarded the Crichton Award for Illustration and Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Honour Book. In 2000 she won CBCA Picture Book of the Year for Jenny Angel, and her latest picture book, The Peasant Prince, has received the NSW and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award and CBCA Honour Book. Anne lives and works in Melbourne.
A
Certain Music
Celeste Walters
illustrated by Anne Spudvilas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A Certain Music
ePub ISBN 9781864714173
Kindle ISBN 9781864716443
Original Print Edition
A Woolshed Press book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by Woolshed Press in 2009
Text copyright © Celeste Walters 2009
Artwork copyright © Anne Spudvilas 2009
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.
Woolshed Press is a trademark of Random House Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Author: Walters, Celeste
Title: A certain music / Celeste Walters; illustrator, Anne Spudvilas
ISBN: 9781741663334
Target Audience: For children
Other Authors/Contributors: Spudvilas, Anne, 1951–
Dewey Number: A823.3
Cover and internal design and typesetting by Sandra Nobes, Toucan Design
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia
The child isn't like other children. Whether this is because of some intellectual or emotional difference, nobody knows. Of course, one day they will. One day they will give the condition a label, a particular code mark. But this is 1823. In consequence, after much muttering and musing and shaking of heads, she is simply pronounced odd.
Neither do they know – how can they – that this child will live for all time in every town and city of every country in the world where one might hear a certain music.
This is her story. A story that begins in the Vienna Woods.
for Rena
PART 1
The Man in the Woods
One
She was a child of nine who knew no friend. An all-watching child who viewed the play of others in the square; who read in their secret whispering descriptions of herself. She knew the reason for this. She couldn't follow the rules. She misinterpreted signals. Worse, she didn't know how to play. Everything she did was either too much or not enough. Whatever she did, it was wrong.
So she listened for other whispering and found it in the water that bubbled from the fountain, in the rustle of needles in the conifer beyond her window, in the distant call of the early morning vendors as they set up their stalls in the market place. And she would wander further from the small cottage by the granary, to where the wind roams free and where the trees grow tall and tight together. And it was there that she came upon a tree whose ladder-like branches rose up and up.
The tree stood in the Vienna Woods, together with the maples and the elms, the beeches and the oaks. Now, settled high in a fork of its branches, she could hear the whispering of early morning, see the carts trundling into the marketplace, the raggedy boys with hoops scooting behind their turning wheels, trace with a finger the distant ruins of Rauhenstein still cloaked in mist; follow the mayor bustling his way to the town hall as the clock struck the hour.
Soon sunlight would streak from the heavens, like the picture in her Stories from the Bible. With sunlight would come people, walking and talking and laughing, and calling each other by name. The morning would become a different colour and shape, and mask the sounds of silence.
Then on one particular day something broke the silence. The child looked left and right, and behind her. The sound was sharp, made, perhaps, by some animal. But what? And a strange looking creature had appeared out of nowhere and was striding along a path. It was a man. His head was down as though he was searching the ground for something; his hands were behind his back. The child eased into the fork of the tree. The man veered off the path and took another leading in her direction. She eased further into the fork. Now she could see him clearly. The man was small and rugged. His hair was the colour of the maple leaf in autumn and it grew wildly from his head in a tangle of curls. His clothes were shabby, his boots muddy, and around his neck he wore a rag. His unfastened frockcoat, long and blue in colour, billowed behind him as he walked. He reminded her of the stunted waterb
irds with the blue-black wings that roam the lake. Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head. The man's face was red, his skin pock-marked. He stood beneath her tree and stared into the sky. Still staring, he started to move his hand up and down, then brought it to his lips and began to tap with one finger ...
In the fork of the tree the child's foot was stuck. As she tried to wrench it free, a branch cracked. The man turned. He didn't seem to register seeing a child in a tree. It was as though he was looking at her but through her to something else, something deep and far away. Now he was scrabbling in his pockets. The child watched as he took out a thick carpenter's pencil and a notebook and started filling the page with strange markings. From time to time he'd stop, move his hand backwards and forwards across his chest. And scribble on.
Now from this way and that came hurrying and scurrying and laughing and calling. As a giggling trio pounded across his path, the man let out an explosion of words, raw and terrible ...
There was only one the watcher in the tree could hear clearly as, his frockcoat ballooning behind him, he raged back in the direction from which he had come.
The word cruel.
Two
In narrow streets by the granary are the cottages where the poor people live. Those who work in factories, who thresh the grain, or those who, for a few Kreutzers, tinkle away on their barrel organs or perform conjuring tricks in the square.
In one such dwelling the child swished a broom over a stone floor. From time to time she'd hear the clip-clop of hooves and go to the window, and watch the cart taking grain to the granary creak up the hill. She put away the broom, pulled up the coverlet on her trundle bed, patted it straight, propped her doll against the pillow, and with a flick of her sleeve, brushed dust from the small chest of drawers that held her clothes. On the bench in the kitchen was a note. The child read, 'Collect eggs from Frau Weiss.' She stood on a box, reached to the mantel and took money from a jar. With the Kreutzers in the pocket of her pinafore, she clipped the door behind her, and set out.
Even before she reached the end of the street she could hear the rustic tumult of the market. Her pace quickened. Her wariness also. If her mother were a home mother and not a working one she would watch where her child wandered and frown and shake her finger and warn her of the charlatans and swindlers who lurked at every street corner.
She hugged the coins in her pinafore tighter. But the colours and sounds of the market were so rich and wonderful no imagining was needed to conjure them up.
She ran towards it, thinking if she were lucky a puppet show would be on in one of the caravans parked near the column.
In the square she wandered from one excitement to the next, pausing at a man in yellow with performing dogs who sat and begged and shook hands and bowed to much applause. Further along a man and a woman waltzed together to a tune played on a squeaky fiddle. And the sound joined with other sounds; with the calling of hawkers with their trays of trinkets and of vendors selling sausage and cheeses and fruit.
And as she circled, the child was aware that others were circling too, were calling her name, were jumping out from behind things to mimic her lisp.
'Yeth yeth yeth,' they crowed.
And she smiled, hoping they would smile. But they never did.
She hurried towards Frau Weiss and the eggs.
'And one extra for you,' the woman said.
'Danke, Frau Weiss,' the child replied and handed over the money.
'The child's turning into a street urchin,' remarked a woman on the next stall who sold cheese.
'What can the mother do?' hissed back the other. 'He drinks ... '
'Poor wretch.'
'Useless bum ... Eggs! Fresh eggs! Eggs laid today!'
The child's ears were sharp. She didn't wait for the next puppet show but hurried away, leaping, as she went, out of the path of a coach being driven at high speed. On past the workhouse and along the darkening network of narrow streets she ran, clutching the eggs in her pinafore with care. A man was moving along the street towards her. They both stopped in front of the small paling fence with the wooden gate.
'Eggs,' she said, opening her pinafore.
Her father smiled. He took her hand but his look didn't reach her eyes. Those who mocked her had the same look. That of a guilty thing ...
Three
They talked together by the rustling conifer, away from the child. When they came inside her mother looked older, her father, unhappy. Eggs were eaten in silence and the world grew dark.
In her trundle bed by the window the child feigned sleep, listened with ears pricked to the muffled sounds that came from the big bed. From time to time her mother would cough hard and long and spit into a handkerchief. 'The fibres get up your nose,' she'd laugh. Though how fibres could get up your nose was a mystery to the child, regardless of what work in the paper-making factory her mother was doing.
'You should never have left the forge...' her mother was saying.
'Bad company –' she heard her father mumble.
'You were weak.'
'I'm sorry.'
Her mother went on. 'A clerk's pay is hard to live on, but with mine and the few Kreutzers you get at the tavern we could manage, just. But now ... '
'I'm sorry.'
'They will not get away with this ... '
'It was my fault.'
'It was. But they knew what they were doing –' There came another bout of coughing and spitting. The child pulled the coverlet over her ears. She didn't want to hear any more. This was a place of love. Her mother and father loved each other and they loved her equally. But another face of the world had been brought in ...
Suddenly she heard the mattress creak. Her mother was getting up, had taken her shawl from the doorknob and was creeping out.
'Where are you going?' came from the bed.
The only reply was that of the door being shut.
From her trundle bed, the child, eyes watching and wide, stared from the window into the night. Like a genie who pops from a bottle to cast a spell, so the moon, now full, had cast a spell over the night and stamped the world in silver. Silver flowers in silver pots spilled from silver windows. The rooftops, and trees beyond, Herr Neumann's dog asleep at his door, the filigree of fruit trees – all shone in silver. And above the tree-tops, stars twinkled in a silver sky.
It was magic. She would have sneaked outside, but eyes from the big bed were awake and watching.
She studied fingers resting on the sill that had turned silver and listened for her mother.
Four
The woman whipped the shawl around her head and took off. She reached the marketplace, now bare of traders, stalls and caravans, of all but the column with its shimmering star and cross of gold. She hurried through the square, and along streets where shadows leered with menace in the moonlight. As she turned a corner she could see an orange glow and, as she got closer, hear the hum of noise. She pushed open the mitred door and entered into a haze of smoke, and the smell of bodies and cheap wine.
The tavern was filled with men mostly but woman too joined in the laughter and the banging of fists on tables. Someone on the stage was attempting to sing.
'Hey, over here.'
'No.'
'Uppity, eh?'
She pushed ahead. The man behind the bar wore a rag around a neck thick as that of a bullfrog.
'Next?'
'How dare you –' Her voice was trembling.
'What?'
'You knew his weakness yet you paid him in wine ... ' Her voice was getting stronger, clearer. People at the bar were staring.
She went on, her sound strong now, 'Shame on you ... You get the wine cheap and the more he takes the less you pay and you ply him with more so you can pay him less; no more than you would pay a dog to do tricks ... '
Suddenly the whole place had become silent.
'Shame on you.' The woman swung around. 'Shame on all of you for you know him, but you watched and said nothing. Yet you listened. Oh yes,
you did that. For who among you can quote Schiller and Goethe as Otto can? None of you. And you know it. You know it as you know his weakness, and you did nothing. Shame on you – on all of you...' The woman broke into a fit of coughing. She staggered towards the door as bodies parted to let her through.
'He wanted it!' yelled the man at the bar.
On the street, the woman sobbed. She drew her shawl tighter and started back. At the corner she heard the sound of footsteps behind her. She went faster. The footsteps went faster, were catching up.
'Wait!'
Her heart was thumping inside her chest, but she turned and saw, coming closer, the man who had opened the door as she fled.
'The army is recruiting,' he said. 'In the wars against Napoleon we lost many. The pay is good and –' he paused, 'there is discipline.'
The woman stood in the watery glow of a gas lamp and hung her head.
'Otto is a lucky man,' he added.
'Oh?'
'To have a woman like you.'The man gave a quick bow and walked back along the street.
In the cottage by the granary the child heard the gate click open. She pulled the coverlet up and fell asleep.
Five
The day was the colour of butter. Perfect for being with someone whose hand you can hold and hear street musicians play melodies you tap your feet to.
When they got to the cafe in the Kaiserstrasse the players were having a break.
They sat outside and ate cake. The child dropped crumbs.
'The birds will thank you,' remarked her father. He pulled his seat closer. 'I am going away,' he said.
The child turned, questioning with her eyes.
'You shall be very proud of me. You can tell everyone that your papa is in the army, that he wears a jacket with gold buttons. He looks very handsome in his jacket with gold buttons and –' the man breathed deeply, 'he is happy for he is serving his country which he loves and making his wife and his daughter proud which makes him happier, for he loves them best of all.'