That was the first time I ever saw the Kingdom of Back.

THE WAKING DREAM

I spent days sitting before the clavier after that first dream, trying in vain to find the perfect melody I’d heard. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to sound quite right.

“What is it that you keep playing over and over?” Woferl asked me whenever he came to watch me practice.

“Just something I heard in a dream,” I told him.

He looked thoughtfully at me, his eyes wide as if searching for the melody too. “But the notes are not the same, are they?” he said.

I still don’t know how he knew, except that he must have guessed by the frown on my face. “No, not the same,” I replied. “Because what I heard in my dream wasn’t real.”

Weeks passed, then months, and soon my memory of it blurred. My attempts turned scattered, the tune shifting until it became unrecognizable. Eventually, I let myself believe that maybe it hadn’t been such a perfect melody after all.

The seasons drifted from ice to rain to sun to wind. The hills that hemmed in Salzburg became white with snow, then green with new buds, then orange and gold, then white once more. My mother fixed my dresses as I grew. I began to hear murmured conversation between my parents at night, about how soon I would no longer be a child, about marriage and what prospects I had, how they would fill my dowry chest. Outside, the New Year’s rifles fired and the star singers visited our door, slapping their arms against the Christmas cold, their voices warm with good cheer. Here and there, I’d catch a snippet of music in the streets that would just barely touch the edges of my memory, reminding me of something from a faraway dream.

Papa continued my lessons as I aged, filling the notebook he had bought me with menuetts, and I continued to practice the pieces. No more guests came to listen to me. Most days I was glad for it. The clavier was my cocoon of a world, my haven. In here, I could listen to my secrets in peace. But at night I lay awake and replayed the music in my mind, my thoughts circling the wish I’d spoken from my heart.

In my dreams, I was haunted by the way my father leaned away from me after a lesson, the weight of his disappointment that I couldn’t grasp what he was offering me. I wondered what it might feel like to fade into the air one day. Whether my father would notice it. There was only so much time before I would leave childhood behind and he would stop teaching me entirely.

One morning, when Papa finished his lessons with me and I closed my notebook carefully, Woferl climbed onto the clavier bench beside me and reached his hands toward the keys. He had grown too, although perhaps not as much as a boy his age should. His eyes still looked enormous in the small, plump set of his face, and when he turned toward the music stand, I could see his long lashes against his cheeks, haloed in the light. He was a fragile child, both in body and health. It made me want to curl my arm protectively around his shoulders.

“Woferl,” I chided gently. “Papa does not want you to play yet.” My father said he was too young, his fingers too small and tender to press the keys properly. He did not want him to damage his hands. For now, selfishly, I was glad to keep music lessons something between only my father and me.

Woferl seemed to stare through my notebook, his eyes yearning for somewhere far away. His lashes turned up for a moment as he looked at me. “Please, Nannerl,” he said, scooting closer to me so that he pressed against my side. “Can’t you teach me a little? You are the best player in the world.”

He had been asking me this for weeks, climbing onto my bench after Papa had left for the day, and each time I had turned him away. But this morning, his expression was particularly coaxing, and my mood was light, my hands warm and sure against the keys.

I laughed at him. “Surely you don’t think I’m better than Papa,” I replied.

When I looked at him again, he seemed serious. “I promise I won’t tell.”

Whatever a promise meant to a small boy. Still, the sweetness of his face made me surrender.

“You are too far away,” I said at last. “Let’s move the bench closer, ja?”

Everything about him illuminated. His eyes, his smile, his posture. He let out a soft squeak under his breath as I drew him close to the clavier, then helped him position his fingers against the keys. His hands looked so tiny against mine that I held them in my palms a beat longer, as if to protect them. Only when he made a sound, pushing me to move aside, did I release him.

“This is a chord,” I said, stretching my own hand out beside his. I played a harmonious trio of notes for him, each key spaced one out from the next, at first all together, then one after the other.

He watched me in fascination. He was still small enough that he had to use two hands to play it properly, the thumb of his left hand holding down the lowest of the three notes while two fingers of his right hand tapped out the middle and highest notes. E, G#, B. He listened curiously to it, tilting his head this way and that at the sound.

I smiled and played another chord. He followed my example.

This was when the first sign appeared. I don’t think that anyone else could have noticed it, not even Papa, who never had the patience to see these things.

When Woferl pressed down on the keys, one of the notes that he struck sounded very slightly out of tune.

He frowned, then played it again. Again, the note came out at the wrong pitch.

I leaned toward him, about to tell him that the string must need tightening. But the frustration that clouded his gaze made me pause. He pressed the key a third time, thinking that it might fix itself, and when it didn’t, he hummed the right pitch in the back of his throat, as if he couldn’t understand how the same note could be correct in his mind and incorrect outside of it.

I knew, in that moment, that he had a remarkable ear. Sharper than our father’s, sharper than Herr Schachtner’s. Perhaps even sharper than mine, at least at that age. Already he understood the sound of perfection.

I now think this was how he first learned that the world was an imperfect place.

“Very good, Woferl,” I said to him.

He paused to give me a relieved smile. “You hear it too,” he said, and in that moment, I felt the warmth of his presence in my world, a second soul who understood.

We played a few more sets of chords before Woferl finally leaned away, looked from the clavier to the window’s golden light, then back to me. “Can you tell me a story?” he asked absently.

So, he was in a whimsical mood. I glanced toward our parents’ bedroom, as if Papa could still hear us even though he had left hours ago. Mama had gone with Sebastian to the clothier. No one else was home.

“All right,” I said, and closed my eyes to think of something.

I still don’t know why it returned to me then. Perhaps it was the chords we’d played together, which still seemed to hang in the air. But there, in the darkness, I found myself hearing the achingly pristine music from my dream years ago. The memory resurfaced of a beautiful young face that I couldn’t quite recall. Of waking with my hand outstretched before me, yearning to stay longer.