The Memorist

Chapter 53

He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Baden, Austria

Tuesday, April 29^th-4:20 p.m.

Meer sat at the piano in Beethoven’s apartment, her fingers resting on the keys, feeling the music’s reverberation. She was so cold but that didn’t matter in the face of trying to figure out what had happened. Time had just warped back on itself twice. She’d been sitting here as Margaux-on the day Margaux had first heard the flute music and disappeared inside of it-and then she’d remembered a more distant past. Had she just glimpsed not only one previous life but two, centuries apart?

Music had been the trigger but Meer couldn’t remember the actual song-only the sense of it.

“Did you recognize it, what I was playing?”

Sebastian looked at her, confused. “You weren’t playing, Meer. Not anything that resembled music. You played a C note. Three times. And then you just sat there with your eyes closed for twenty, thirty seconds.”

“No, I was playing. I could hear it.”

He shook his head. “Just the C. You’re shivering so badly. Let me get you-”

Margaux had found the memory song and played enough of it on the piano for Beethoven to have figured it out and played it for her on the ancient flute. It had worked, had stimulated her memory of an even older story about a man whom she had been desperately in love with, who had died, whose bone she had stolen.

“Why are you lying?”

“Meer, you weren’t playing any music. I wouldn’t lie. Think of what the memory song might mean to me. To my son.”

The cold was pervasive. Standing up, she walked past him, past the girl at the desk. With the same strange assurance she felt when she sat down at the piano, she strode down the hall as if she knew exactly where she was going. The small bedroom contained a single bed dressed with a thin, coffee-colored blanket, a chest of drawers, a basin for water and a coat hanging on a hook. Without any trepidation, Meer lifted the heavy wool coat off its hook and slipped her arms into it. This coarse garment was warm. Warm enough to stave off the shivering that, despite the weather, overwhelmed her.

Stuffing her hands into the pockets she found a small hole in the left one. Reaching down, holding the hem by the corner, she scrunched up the material so her fingers could get to the bottom where a coin had been trapped between the lining of the coat and the outer shell. They always fell there, she thought, smiling to herself. But there was something else stuck in the lining, too. The nib of a pen, stained with dried black ink.

What was she doing wearing Beethoven’s coat? The young girl who sold tickets would call the police if she found out someone had disturbed the exhibition. Meer felt guilty; working in a museum herself she knew how sacrosanct every item was. Taking the coat off, she hung it carefully back up on the hook.

Everything was the same as it had been before she’d come in here except for the strange idea that taunted her now: she’d once worn this coat as a disguise to hide from someone who’d followed her.