APH Austria - Songfic - Mandy (AusHun)

I remember all my life
Raining down as cold as ice.
Shadows of a man,
A face through a window cryin' in the night,
The night goes into
Morning just another day;
Happy people pass my way.
Looking in their eyes,
I see a memory I never realized how happy you made me.

    I look up from the table I have set up next to my grand piano. I almost react to a noise, a sound of a crashing thundercloud in the sky above my apartment. I look out the window, past the long lavender curtains. The clouds are a blackened grey and still shedding water at a rate so grand, in my younger days I would have believed God was flooding the earth. I think to remember the last time it rained this hard. I am suddenly reminded of each time it has poured so while I felt how I do today. The correct word to describe my emotion today most likely does not exist in the languages I am familiar in. And they say the Germans have a word for everything.

    I feel not quite empty. Rather unfulfilled. For the past hour or so I have been attempting to perfect the last two measures of this sonata, to no avail of course. I push the table next to my beautiful black piano aside, and stand up, stretching my legs for the first time in hours. For many that would be an odd and stressful feeling. To me it is the norm.

    I straighten my shirt collar as I pick up my feet and half-shuffle into the kitchen, hearing my loafers hit the tile floor. Perhaps some tea will do me well, I think. I open the cabinet above the stove where I keep the tea bags. The power has been out for a while now and it only adds to the gloomy feeling I am experiencing. My mind wanders away from me when I am not at the piano, and it has drifted back into memories of the days that have passed that were nearly identical to this one. The only difference, I find, is my age.

    One of the earliest occurrences of these days, that I am thinking of now, was… long before I married her. I had a much smaller harpsichord back then. I remember sitting for hours, waiting for someone to come to the door of my, much smaller then, house. Even to just knock to tell me they had declared war on me would have been absolutely fine. Any sort of… contact I suppose.

    I have finished making my tea, and I find myself taking the whistling teapot off the gas-powered stove. I reach for a teacup hanging on the rack nearby, and quickly pour myself a dark one. I slowly walk back into the living room, taking a seat on the sofa that never gets used for purposes other than this. I am not the man I once was, I suddenly think. I look into my teacup suddenly. Where did that come from, I think silently. I am an echo of the great man I had potential to be long ago. What changed that… I try to stop my thoughts, for I know where they are going.

    She did, she changed that. After she left I was never the same. I was a shell. I am a shell, rather. I realize for the hundredth time that I don’t remember who I once was. A drop of water falls into my dark brown liquid. I look up suddenly to check if the roof is leaking, and my eye stings. I quickly move my opposite hand to rub my eye. I am crying.

    The clock strikes midnight, and for the next few minutes I allow my eyes to shed several teardrops onto my hands and sleeves. Silently. There is no loud sobbing or bawling when I cry. Over the centuries I have trained myself to not even sniff. I only let tears run down my face in a silent solitude.

    I blink, and look out the window. The clouds are still there, but they are now a much lighter shade of grey. I blink again, and look at the clock. I have slept through the entire night, still enough to keep the now cold tea balanced on my knee with my hands. I watch the semi-frosted glass panes for a long while, I don’t know how long. I see the rain has reduced to a mist. It is no doubt chilly outside, and I soon notice that my hypothesis has been confirmed. The couple that passes down my street each morning on their walk is bundled up in long coats and hats and mittens and the necessities of a Viennese stroll in March. The man is smiling. The woman is laughing. Every day for a year and a half they pass by my ground-level flat, even sometimes in the summer when I’m watering flowers outside or something. They say “Hallo” to me and I say “Hallo” to them… but I’ve never known their names. And I know in fifty or sixty years when they are dead and I am still the same… I will still never know their names. But every day the same sight – the man is smiling. The woman is laughing. I try to remember the last time someone made me laugh like that… and my mind is a blank. I only remember one time long ago, probably eighteenth or nineteenth century perhaps, I was walking with her to… somewhere, it isn’t important now. I remember she made a funny face, told a joke, some trivial thing, and I laughed.

    I knew it… it is always her.

    Oh Mandy well,
You came and you gave without taking,
But I sent you away.
Oh, Mandy well,
Kissed me and stopped me from shaking,
And I need you today.
Oh, Mandy!

    My mind jumps to a time long after we had divorced. It was probably in the fifties, I imagine, as I remember the clothing I was wearing. My house had been rebuilt after the wars… and I remember thinking very much how I wished for her to come to the door and let me… shake her hand, at least. I shake my head. I had always wished for more than that… and one day during our marriage she had kissed me. It was right before… God… I remember. I put my head in my hands, resting the teacup against the arm of the sofa and my knee. Before the treaty with Prussia…about Silesia… that whole business… I sigh. I remember entering the room and being so nervous… close to the point of fainting. What if Gilbert was going to promise revenge… or walk in there with a knife ready at my throat… I began to suggest the possibility to her and she merely looked up at me and gently rested her lips on mine. Only for a moment. One of the most comforting moments I can remember ever having experienced.

    My mind jumps again. The date is 1918. The first great war has ended. She is in what is our bedroom, packing a suitcase. It is a small one, incredibly so, especially considering many of the things of her culture she has around our house. My house. She did not take them with her when she left. She didn’t look at me. I remember being furious… not at her… I was disappointed… mostly with myself… for losing… I remember saying nothing to her. Absolutely nothing. I followed her down the stairs after she had finished packing. I watched long hair walk out the front door of our… my house… and I watched her get in the carriage. I remember crying as I am now… and I remember catching just a glimpse of her face. Just a glimpse was all I needed… to know that I had broken her heart. Even if our relationship in the eyes of the public was meant to be a political one… there was so much more in each tear I saw slip down her cheek as the door closed and the horses took her away from me.

I'm standing on the edge of time;
I've walked away when love was mine.
Caught up in a world of uphill climbing,
The tears are in my mind and nothin' is rhyming.

Oh Mandy well,
You came and you gave without taking,
But I sent you away.
Oh, Mandy well,
Kissed me and stopped me from shaking,
And I need you today.
Oh, Mandy!

    I rise from my seat, taking the tea cup and leaving it on the coffee table to take later. I know I must be able to take my mind off of the melancholy… I return to the piano. In the same state I left it. I shouldn’t find this odd… but I do. I pick up one of the pieces of staff paper I had been composing on the night before. It seems like I haven’t touched the paper in years… My own handwriting looks so foreign to me. I run my fingers through my hair as I read over the notes I have only recently placed. Almost aloud I curse, I scream at myself in my mind for how stupid and nonsensical this is. I feel myself turn into the ghost of Wolfgang risen from the grave, and scold myself for the terrible job I’ve done with this. I am impossible to please. I always will judge myself more than I judge anyone else. I begin to question my own abilities as a composer when I feel a hand on mine suddenly.

    I look from the paper and I see her face. I hear her voice comfort me, saying only my name in the gentle accent of hers. I feel a smile creep to the corners of my lips. She is here… she is right here and she is saying words of love and care… she always knows what to say and she always has… I reach forward to grab her arm. Suddenly she is gone. I take a step back. I have never hallucinated in all my centuries of life… and now… I have. She is a ghost of a memory I have of a similar situation… she could look at me and know I was silently criticizing my own work. Where is she now… I feel the tears well up in my eyes again… and fall onto the paper… sinking in and causing the paper to smear the ink in many places. For the past century of my life I have convinced myself that everything is fine. There is always that voice that comes back… reassuring me that it certainly isn’t. Nothing makes sense.

Yesterday's a dream
I face the morning
Crying on a breeze
The pain is calling
Oh Mandy
Well, you came and you gave without taking
But I sent you away oh, Mandy
Well, you kissed me and stopped me from shaking
And I need you today Oh, Mandy
You came and you gave without taking
But I sent you away oh, Mandy
Well, you kissed me and stopped me from shaking
And I need you

    I drop the paper. I dart for the kitchen, reaching my hand for my cell phone I have left on the counter. Another memory flashes in my mind. The counter vanishes in front of me, the cell phone along with it. I am suddenly in a time long before cell phones were even in the realm of possibility. Instead I see a hand, a fairly small one, slip into mine as I move my reach forward to grab what I thought was my cell phone. I look up, and see her face behind a thin white veil. She is smiling, not wide, but a pleasant little smile. Behind the veil I of course see her green eyes lit up with so much spirit. She is happy. And I feel the memory of being happy. I don’t feel happy… I am far from it in my current state… no… I remember being happy. I remember the both of us holding hands and feeling happy that we were about to be married… even if it was for political reasons in the foreground.

    I move her veil, draping it behind her head and leaning forward to kiss her. And she is gone. I know I will die before I am to kiss another. My knees bend beneath me and I sink down. My back drags along the kitchen counter, pulling my shirt out from being tucked into my trousers. I barely have a grip on my cell phone. My chest aches. Memories spill out onto the floor, along with my tears and the remaining composure I had left. She is gone. Every bit of everything that made me who I am… even music has escaped me. My torso is jolted with pain. Moving in any way refuses to make the pain subside. Every inch of me has turned into stone, all except my heart. My heart itself reaches out to the phone with my arm, slowly unlocking it.

    My tears that I have trained for centuries to be silent have betrayed me as well. I begin to breathe deeply and uncontrollably. My inhales and exhales are loud and I sound like a dying animal as I cry. I cry like a child, uncontrollably and without ceasing. As I open the contacts and scroll through at a painfully slow rate… I have no wish but to hear her voice. To touch her hand and maybe… before I die… kiss her lips once more. If she doesn’t pick up I suppose… I could just… my train of thought hits the wall of the train station. I will listen to her voicemail in a language I barely remember over and over and over again… The sobbing and heaving doesn’t stop as I press her name and hold the phone to my ear. I can barely hear the phone ring over my throaty crying. I almost don’t catch her answer.

    “Hallo, Roderich!” She says in her normally cheerful tone. She answers me the way she did years ago… but this time it is real. If I had died right then, I would have died content. And I nearly did.

    In the best Hungarian I have spoken in years, I sob. “Oh my god, Elizaveta… please…. Let me talk to you, I need you…”