Anna Maria reached for her vinegar water. ‘Of course.’
Mama and I walked back home in silence. My heart was beating hard.
‘Do you think that woman is different?’ The words rushed out of me with a strange breathlessness. I wanted to say that I had felt seen by Anna Maria in a way that made me feel valuable. She seemed interested in me.
My mother flapped her hand at me. ‘She is very nice.’
‘She’s more than that,’ I said. ‘She seems –’
‘Nice is enough for any woman,’ Mama interrupted, and that was the end of the conversation.
I remember that in the days after our meeting I kept Anna Maria’s words on my tongue like a sacrament.
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.