“So, what’s wrong with your arm?” I asked.
“I think the wrist, it is broken. And there is much pain. But no more breaks.”
His face looked pale and old against the green upholstery. I crossed my arms and looked at him accusingly. “I didn’t hear any bells.”
He tried to smile, but grimaced instead, as though the effort were painful. “I have been a musician for many years. It is natural for me to hear things that you are not yet capable of hearing.”
“Well, I didn’t see anything either.”
“No, Rose. You would see nothing. Through the science—or the magic—of its inhabitants, the bottom of the island always appears the same color as the sky.”
Was that true? Or was he just a crazy old man, trying to kill himself in an especially crazy way? I kicked the chair leg, wishing that he had never come to Ashton, wishing that I had never heard of Orillion, if it was going to be a lie. I stood up and walked over to the photograph of Otto Lilienthal.
“You know,” I said, my voice sounding angry, “it would be safer to go up in a balloon instead of a glider. At a fair in Brickleford last year, I saw an acrobat go up under a balloon and perform all kinds of tricks hanging from a wooden bar.”
“Yes, you are right, it would be safer. I spent many years in my own country studying with Count von Zeppelin, the great balloonist. But your acrobat, he cannot tell the balloon where to go, can he?”
“No.” I turned to face him again. “But at least he doesn’t fall out of the sky and almost kill himself.”
He turned away from me and stared up at the ceiling. “But your idea is a good one, Rose. I must consider what it is I did wrong. Will you bring me those papers upon the table?”
I walked over to the table, lifted the stack of papers, and brought it over to the sofa. “What is this, anyway?” I asked.
Meister Wilhelm took the stack from me with his left hand. “These are the papers my friend Otto left me.” He looked at the paper on top of the stack. “And this is the letter he wrote to me before he died.” Awkwardly, he placed the stack beside him on the sofa and lifted the letter to his nearsighted eyes.
“Let me read it to you,” I said. “You’ll make yourself blind doing that.”
“You are generous, Rose,” he said, “but I do not think you read German, eh?”
I shook my head.
“Then I will read it to you, or rather translate. Perhaps you will see in it another idea, like she of the balloon, that might help us. Or perhaps I will see in it something that I have not seen before.”
He read the letter slowly, translating as he went, sometimes stumbling over words for which he did not know the English equivalent. It was nothing like the letters Emma and I were writing to each other while she stayed in Raleigh. There was no discussion of daily events, of the doings of family.
Instead, Otto Lilienthal had written about the papers he was leaving for his friend, which discussed his theories. He wrote admiringly of Besnier, the first to create a functional glider. He discussed the mistakes of Mouillard and Le Bris, and the difficulties of controlling a glider’s flight. He praised Cayley, whose glider had achieved lift, and lamented Pénaud, who became so dispirited by his failures that he locked his papers into a coffin and committed suicide. Finally he wrote of his own ideas, their merits and drawbacks, and of how he had attempted to solve the two challenges of the glider, lift and lateral stability. He had solved the problem of lift early in his career. Now he would try to solve the other.
The letter ended, “My dear Johann, remember how we dreamed of gliding through the air, like the storks in our native Pomerania. I expect to succeed. But if I fail, do you continue my efforts. Surely one with your gifts will succeed, where I cannot. Always remember that you are a violinist.” When he had finished the letter, Meister Wilhelm passed his hand, still holding a sheet of paper, over his eyes.
I looked away, out of the dirty window of the cottage. Then I asked, because curiosity had once again triumphed over politeness, “Why did he tell you to remember that you’re a violinist?”
Meister Wilhelm answered in a tired voice, “He wanted to encourage me. To tell me, remember that you are worthy to mingle with the citizens of Orillion, to make music for them before the Monument of the Muse at the center of the city. He wanted—”
Suddenly he sat up, inadvertently putting his weight on his right hand. His face creased in pain, and he crumpled back against the seat of the sofa. But he said, in a voice filled with wonder, “No. I have been stupid. Always remember, Rose, that we cannot find the right answers until we ask the right questions. Tell me, what did the glider do just before it fell?”
I stared at him, puzzled. “It dipped to the right.”
He waved his left forefinger in the air, as though to punctuate his point. “Because it lacked lateral stability!”
I continued to look puzzled.
He waved his finger again, at me this time. “That is the problem Otto was trying to solve.”
I sat back down. “Yes, well he didn’t solve it, did he?”
The finger waved once again, more frantically this time. “He solved it in principle. He knew that lateral stability is created with the legs, just as lift is controlled with the position of the body in the armrests. His final flight must have been intended to test which position would provide the greatest amount of control.” Meister Wilhelm sat, pulling himself up this time with his left hand. “After his death, I lamented that Otto could never tell me his theory. But he has told me, and I was too stupid to see it!” He rose and began pacing, back and forth as he spoke, over the floor of the cottage. “I have been keeping my legs still, trying not to upset the glider’s balance. Otto was telling me that I must use my body like a violinist, that I must not stay still, but respond to the rhythm of the wind, as I respond to the rhythm of music. He thought I would understand.”
He turned to me. “Rose, we must begin to repair the glider tomorrow. And then, I will fly it again. But this time I will fly from the top of Slocumb’s Bluff, where the winds are strongest. And I will become one with the winds, with the great music that they will play through me.”
“Like the Stormbird,” I said.
His face, so recently filled with pain, was now filled with hope. “Yes, Rose. Like Der Sturmvogel.”
Several days later, when I returned for dinner after a morning spent with Meister Wilhelm, Hannah handed me a letter from Emma.
“Did the post come early?” I asked.
“No, child. Judge Beaufort came back from Raleigh and brought it himself. He was smoking in the parlor with your papa, and I’m gonna have to shake out them parlor curtains. So you get along, and don’t bother me, hear?”
I walked up the stairs to my room and lay on top of the counterpane to read Emma’s letter. “Dear Rose,” it began. “Aunt Otway, who’s been showing me an embroidery stitch, asks what I’m going to write.” That meant her letter would be read. “Father is returning suddenly to Ashton, but I will remain here until school begins in September.” She had told me she was returning at the end of August. And Emma never called Judge Beaufort “Father.” Was she trying to show off for Aunt Otway? Under the F in “Father” was a spot of ink, and I noticed that Emma’s handwriting was unusually spotty. Under the b and second e in “embroidery,” for instance. “Be” what? The letters over the remaining spots spelled “careful.” What did Emma mean? The rest of her letter described a visit to the Museum of Art.
Just then, my mother entered the room. “Rose,” she said. Her voice was gentler than I had ever heard it. She sat down on the edge of my bed. “I’m afraid you can’t continue your lessons with Meister Wilhelm.”
I started at her in disbelief. “You don’t want me to have anything I care about, do you? Because you hate me. You’ve hated me since I was born. I’ll tell Papa, and he’ll let me have my violin lessons, you’ll see!”
She rose, and her voice was no longer gentle. “Very well, Elizabeth. Tell your fa
ther, exactly as you wish. Until he comes home from the Beauforts’, however, you are to remain in this room.” She walked out, closing the door with an implacable click behind her.
Was this what Emma had been trying to warn me about? Had she known that my mother would forbid me from continuing my lessons? But how could she have known, in Raleigh?
As the hours crept by, I stared at the ceiling and thought about what I had read in Lord Rutherford’s book. I imagined the slave ship that had been wrecked in a storm, and the cries of the drowning slaves. How they must have wondered, to see Orillion descending from the sky, to walk through its city of stucco houses surrounded by rose gardens. How the captain must have cursed when he was imprisoned by the citizens of Orillion, and later imprisoned by the English as a madman. He had raved until the end of his life about an island in the clouds.
Hannah brought my dinner, saying to me as she set it down, “Ham sandwiches, Miss Rose. You always liked them, didn’t you?” I didn’t answer. I imagined myself walking between the belltowers of the city, to the Academy of Art. I would sit on the steps, beneath a frieze of the great poets from Sappho to Shakespeare, and listen to Meister Wilhelm playing his violin by the Monument of the Muse, the strains of his Sturmvogel drifting over the surface of the lake.
After it had grown dark, I heard the bang of the front door and the sound of voices. They came up the stairs, and as they passed my door I heard one word— “violin.” Then the voices receded down the hall.
I opened my door, cautiously looking down the hall and then toward the staircase. I saw a light under the door of my father’s study and no signs of my mother or Hannah.
Closing my bedroom door carefully behind me,I crept down the hall, stepping close to the wall where the floorboards were less likely to creak. I stopped by the door of the study and listened. The voices inside were raised, and I could hear them easily.
“To think that I let a damned Jew put his dirty fingers on my daughter.” That was my father’s voice. My knees suddenly felt strange, and I had to steady them with my hands. The hallway seemed to sway around me.
“We took care of him pretty good in Raleigh.” That was a voice I did not recognize. “After Reverend Yancey made sure he was sacked from the orchestra, Mr. Empie and I visited him to get the money for all that bamboo he’d ordered on credit. He told us he hadn’t got the money. So we reminded him of what was due to decent Christian folk, didn’t we, Mr. Empie?”
“All right, Mr. Biggs,” said another voice I had not heard before. “There was no need to break the man’s spectacles.”
“So I shook him a little,” said Mr. Biggs. “Serves him right, I say.”
“What’s done is done,” said a voice I knew to be Judge Beaufort’s. “The issue before us is, what are we to do now? He has been living on my property, in close proximity to my family, for more than a month. He has been educating Mr. Caldwell’s daughter, filling her head with who knows what dangerous ideas. Clearly he must be taken care of. Gentlemen, I’m open for suggestions.”
“Burn his house down,” said Mr. Biggs. “That’s what we do when niggers get uppity in Raleigh.”
“You forget, Mr. Biggs,” said Judge Beaufort, “that his house is my house. And as the elected judge of this town, I will allow no violence that is not condoned by law.”
“Than act like a damned judge, Edward,” said my father, with anger in his voice. “He’s defaulted on a debt. Let him practice his mumbo jumbo in the courthouse jail for a few days. Then you can send him on to Raleigh with Mr. Biggs and Mr. Empie. Just get him away from my daughter!”
There was silence, then the sound of footsteps, as though someone were pacing back and forth over the floor, and then a clink and gurgle, as though a decanter had been opened and liquid were tumbling into a glass.
“All right, gentlemen,” said Judge Beaufort. I leaned closer to the door even though I could hear his voice perfectly well. “First thing tomorrow morning, we get this Wilhelm and take him to the courthouse. Mr. Empie, Mr. Biggs, I depend on you to assist us.”
“Oh, I’ll be there all right,” said Mr. Biggs. “Me and Bessie.” I head a metallic click.
My father spoke again. “Put that away, sir. I’ll have no loaded firearms in my home.”
“He’ll put it away,” said Mr. Empie. “Come on, Biggs, be sensible, man. Judge Beaufort, if I could have a touch more of that whiskey?”
I crept back down the hall with a sick feeling in my stomach, as though I had eaten a dozen green apples. So this was what Emma had warned me about. I wanted to lie down on my bed and sob, with the counterpane pulled over my head to muffle the sounds. I wanted to punch the pillows until feathers floated around the room. But as I reached my door, I realized there was something else I must do. I must warn Meister Wilhelm.
I crept down the stairs. As I entered the kitchen, lit only by the embers in the stove, I saw a figure sitting at the kitchen table. It was my mother, writing a note, with a leather wallet on the table beside her.
She looked up as I entered, and I could see, even in the dim light from the stove, that her face was puffed with crying. We stared at each other for a moment. Then she rose. “What are you doing down here?” she asked.
I was so startled that all I could say was, “I heard them in the study.”
My mother stuffed the note she had been writing into the wallet, and held it toward me.
“I was waiting until they were drunk, and would not miss me,” she said. “But they think you’re already asleep, Rose. Run and give this to Meister Wilhelm.”
I took the wallet from her. She reached out, hesitantly, to smooth down my mop of hair, but I turned and opened the kitchen door. I walked through the back garden, picking my way through the tomato plants, and ran down the streets of Ashton, trying not to twist my ankles on invisible stones.
When I reached the cottage, I knocked quietly but persistently on the door. After a few minutes I heard a muffled grumbling, and then a bang and a word that sounded like an oath. The door opened, and there stood Meister Wilhelm, in a white nightshirt and nightcap, like a ghost floating in the darkness. I slipped past him into the cabin, tossed the wallet on the table, where it landed with a clink of coins, and said, “You have to get out of here, as soon as you can. And there’s a note from my mother.”
He lit a candle, and by its light I saw his face, half-asleep and half-incredulous, as though he believed I were part of some strange dream. But he read the note. Then he turned to me and said, “Rose, I hesitate to ask of you, but will you help me one final time?”
I nodded eagerly. “You go south to Brickleford, and I’ll tell them you’ve gone north to Raleigh.”
He smiled at me. “Very heroic of you, but I cannot leave my glider, can I? Mr. Empie would find it and take it apart for its fine bamboo, and then I would be left with what? An oddly shaped parachute. No, Rose, I am asking you to help me carry the glider to Slocumb’s Bluff.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you going to fly it again?”
“My final flight, in which I either succeed, or— But have no fear, liebling. This time I will succeed.”
“But what about the wing?” I asked.
“I finished the repairs this afternoon, and would have told you about it tomorrow, or rather today, since my pocket watch on the table here, she tells me it is after midnight. Well, Rose, will you help me?”
I nodded. “We’d better go now though, in case that Mr. Biggs decides to burn down the cottage after all.”
“Burn down—? There are human beings in this world, Rose, who do not deserve the name. Come, then. Let us go.”
The wind tugged at the glider as we carried it up past the plateau where it had begun its last flight, toward the top of Slocumb’s Bluff. In the darkness it seemed an animated thing, as though it wanted to fly over the edge of the bluff, away into the night. A little below the top of the bluff, we set it down beneath a grove of pine trees, where no wind came. We sat down on a carpet of ne
edles to wait for dawn.
Through the long, dark hours, Meister Wilhelm told me about his childhood in Pomerania and his days at the university. Although it was August, the top of the bluff was chilly, and I often wished for a coat to pull over my dress. At last, however, the edges of the sky looked brighter, and we stood, shaking out our cold, cramped legs.
“This morning I am an old man, liebling,” said Meister Wilhelm, buckling the strap of the violin case around his chest. “I do not remember feeling this stiff, even after a night in the Black Forest. Perhaps I am too old, now, to fly as Otto would have me.”
I looked at the town. In the brightening stillness, four small shapes were moving toward Judge Beaufort’s house. “Well then, you’d better go down to the courthouse and give yourself up, because they’re about to find out that you’re not at the cottage.”
Meister Wilhelm put his hand on my shoulder. “It is good that you have clear eyes, Rose. Help me to put on the glider.”
I helped him lift the glider to his back and strap it around his chest, as I had done the week before. The four shapes below us were now moving from Judge Beaufort’s house toward Slater’s barn.
Meister Wilhelm looked at me sadly. “We have already said our goodbye, have we not? Perhaps we do not need to say it again.” He smiled. “Or perhaps we will meet, someday, in Orillion.”
I said, suddenly feeling lonelier than I had ever felt before, “I don’t have a glider.”
But he had already turned away, as though he were no longer thinking of me. He walked out from under the shelter of the trees and to the top of the bluff, where the wind lifted his gray hair into a nimbus around his head.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” I asked, raising my voice so he could hear it over the wind. Four shapes were making their way toward us, up the slope above Slater’s barn.
“The sun, Rose,” he answered. “She is not yet risen.” He paused, as though listening, then added, “Do you know what day this is? It is the ninth of August, the day that my friend Otto died, exactly one year ago.”
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 8
