A Greater Music Read Free

him? I wanted to comfort him. My love, everything’s alright. Just wait there and I’ll come right back. There’s a good boy, my love. But Benny couldn’t hear me and streaked away, passing beyond my sight. Then the incongruous figure of a postman dressed all in yellow joined the scene. He’d parked his bicycle by the side of the road and was pressing the doorbell, holding the letters in one hand. There’s no one home, so he’ll just stick the letters in the mailbox; just as I was thinking this, I felt the first stab of the cold water, piercing the top of my head and the nape of my neck and the rim of my ears. The next moment I felt the weight of the water pull me under, cold hands seizing me and tugging me down. The cold was lethal, and my limbs were rapidly becoming numb. I’d fallen into the water, I knew this perfectly well, yet I kept on mechanically lifting my feet up and down. I imagined that I was walking down a flight of stairs—stairs of water, which were rapidly extending downward as I placed my feet on the next step. Without needing to lookbehind me, I knew that they were disappearing as I descended, that the section I’d passed had already dissolved into the water. The thought suddenly came to me that “returning” is merely a word, not something referring to a real possibility. I was going to mumble that something had gone wrong, but my frozen lips wouldn’t part. Icy water had seeped in between them when I first fell in, freezing them into immobility after my initial cry of distress. Water bearing the deep chill of midwinter, water that pierces and penetrates warm winter clothes, cold enough to carry off my soul. A devil was stabbing me with an ice poker. When I broke the surface I’d felt a pain as though my lips had been gashed on sharp rocks, as though a bone had broken in my left side, so extreme that I saw fireworks flash in front of my eyes.
    This is a dream, the continuation of a dream, I thought. This is a dream, and since it’s a dream there’s no need for me to struggle. Because that’s the way it is with dreams, and because it was clear that, however much I struggled, my physical strength would be negligible at best. Yet I thrashed my limbs mercilessly all the same, and a bubbling sound escaped from between my lips. Although I’d stopped sinking, I was unable to free myself from my waterlogged coat and boots, which were weighing me down. Not much time had passed since I fell in, so the water had only come up to my forehead. I tried to swim, but I couldn’t get my body to move in the way I ordered it. Fear of suffocation was rapidly paralyzing me. Convinced that my heavy boots were what was dragging me down, I made a foolish attempt to remove them and got a mouthful of water for my pains. I floundered, choking, tried to float on the surface, tried again to remove my boots, and eventually I discovered myself thinking “this is a dream,” and letting everything take its own course as my body sank weakly into the water. How could I have fallen in? I mean, how could I be unwittingly wearing a warmcoat with two sweaters and a hat, woolen socks, jeans and rain boots? It hadn’t even been a minute since I’d fallen in, but it felt so much longer. My strength had faded, there was absolutely nothing I could do any more. I didn’t even have the strength to move my little finger. That was when the word death first came into my mind, as did the thought that I was lucky not to have been sentenced to death; somewhat incongruous given that, as far as I could remember, I’d never committed a crime that would warrant such a punishment. The mere mention of capital punishment was enough to send a shiver through me, as though I were undergoing some terrible humiliation. To me, capital punishment, administered in full accordance with an established legal system, seemed even more humiliating than a public flogging. Being