[59] Beyond the reach of the senses

That first month, I’m always almost telling her, ‘Emma, there was a time …’ But I never do. Better neither of us. Our first summer, she’s always asking me about day-to-day things, soaking them in, but about before we met, she has only ever asked me one question: What was I doing the hour before I saw her the first time? It’s one of those questions that how you answer matters more than what. I’m glad it was a simple one, actually: it’s an hour’s walk from the scenery workshop to Gus’s studio, which means I spent the hour walking from there to Gus’s studio. No mysteries there, sorry, little one. (‘Little one’ – she isn’t … she’s almost as tall as me. But I made her smile the first time I called her that, grimly but still …) She was planning to stay, and her asking was her way of signalling me that – she wanted to be sure what the first line of the rest of her life was supposed to say. Sharp one, her. No fear of me at all I could see. Or she was terrified but had learned to defend herself from fear. After we met, the people who knew her from before used to treat her as if she was out of control, but I’m telling you, I never saw it, until I started to hear bits of her story from other people. That’s when I knew that she was only at peace around people she’d met the year we ourselves met.

Her grandfather helped us a little, with a cabbage or a bunch of carrots, a bowl of soup, a roof out of the rain. You’re hungry and wet, he loves her, you take it. A month or so after we met, I began to understand that whatever strength she had when we met, it flowed from one place, only one. From the one part of her world that she was glad of the way it is. How do people learn to love? One day I’ll have to ask him. Strange, though, she didn’t meet him until a few weeks before she met me, and that must say something about her.

It grew cold outside. A gardener’s shed behind a hunting lodge wouldn’t do any more. So we walked back down to the city, and I took a bath in her grandfather’s zinc horse trough and went to see Roller. The next day I was painting backdrops for Don Carlo. There were always people to help me as long as I kept producing – that was unspoken. And while I was starting with Roller again, Emma stopped at the Flöges’ shop. When I met her in front of the Marzipan that evening, Emilie had cleaned her up and untangled her hair, and she had afternoon work modelling dresses again. Not many women were thin enough to wear the sisters’ clothes, or had the colours for them, but Emma was, and she had, well, she knew how to walk in them. Nothing spoken. She might not have had much nerve, but she always knew how to lead with what she had. We’d stepped back onto the world. That’s what I do. I can’t speak for anyone else. Sometimes you vanish so that you can reappear again. You have to burn yourself up and shape something from the ashes.

Gus hadn’t returned from the salt lakes. While I waited, I spent the mornings painting scenery, the afternoons drawing, and evenings at some coffeehouse, catching up with people, showing Emma around corners of the Inner World she didn’t know. I’d never seen her in the city before, and I was flattered, I’ll tell you. I liked the looks she got on the street, her beauty and the way she carried it. Meanwhile, the room we were borrowing from her grandfather for the winter was in the loft above his stable. There was a note under the door a week later, addressed to Emma. We were supposed to meet her brother Emil the next morning at ten, at his café, the Griensteidl.