Come Dance With Me

4 Anneliese Newman

22 January 2003. So. Now I have ninety-two years, that is how it is. The years lie one on top of another like a wobbly stack of plates. All of these plates have on them life-pictures and thought-pictures amd on the topmost plate I sit. When the stack topples, down I come and I am dead. The plates are all shattered, the pictures scattered in little sharp-edged pieces. Where will those little pieces go when I am dead? Maybe to people who are not dead; they will find pictures and bits of pictures in their heads and they won’t know what they mean, any more than I do with some of the little pieces in my head. Look, here is the moon, here are mountains, here is the sea, here are two sphinxes.

Why did I like to sing ‘Herr Oluf’ to my son? I think much about the Erlking’s daughter, how she appears not always the same, is not always to be recognised. I thought he might hear not in the words but in my voice that the Erlking’s daughter is what pulls you away from where you thought to go. From where it seemed you were meant to go. And maybe you want to go with her, maybe she brings you not to Death but to something new. Maybe if Herr Oluf had gone with her he would not have ridden home dead. Sometimes I talk nonsense, this comes of living too much alone.

That man I ran away with, that tenor. Schlange, Schinken, Schwenk. Peter Schwenk. Maybe now he is dead, not everyone lives so long as I. Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, he was Belmonte in the Susquehanna Opera production and he promised me I should one day be Constanze but I never rose above ‘Turkish woman’. Not a good man, really, not a nice man but I left my husband and my children and went with him. Now I am here in this place that stinks of old women and I have little pieces of pictures in my head, yes? What is the world but little pieces of pictures and who can see a whole one?