Love Begins in Winter Read Free Page B

weight of what will happen.
    The water in my bath is cooling. I can see a version of myself in it. My eyes ascend to the window, then through it. They find the river and follow it. Quebec City was taken from its ancient people by the French when William Shakespeare was about my age. My hotel room overlooks the St. Lawrence River. Chunks of ice slip by with the current. Quebec women once set out hard rods of corn on planks of wood on the river’s bank. I can see their cotton-white breath and their gray teeth as glimmering fish are spread across barrels. Their aprons are wet. Frost has dusted white the rich brown earth. The ground is hard as stone. Cold has cracked their hands. They laugh and wave to children on small boats drifting. Clouds churn in the eyes of the fish.
    I like my room here at the Chateau. It overlooks part of the river but is directly over a park. In the park there are trees stripped by winter and blackened by rain. I can’t stop thinking of the early settlers of the 1600s. The smell of wet leather. Stupid horses not doing what they’re told. Babies crying. Wet wood. Ice on everything, ice cutting through the body. The earth too frozen to bury the dead. And nothing will grow. A few frozen berries dot the woods like eyes. New foods are tried but result in sickness.
    I must have fallen asleep in the tub. I awake to a light tapping on my door. I don’t answer and hope the person will go away. Tapping again. Perhaps my cello is ready to come up from the hotel vault they assured me exists. I find a towel, open the door, and thank the bellboy with some money. He asks if I want breakfast, then says it was an honor to carry my instrument. He walks away whistling. I think the staff like me. Two chambermaids think they heard me practicing in my room before my concert yesterday, but it wasn’t me. It was Pablo Casals. I was playing one of his old recordings, a Toccata in C Major by J. S. Bach. They were shuffling outside the door. I made it louder. When it finished, they clapped. I should write to Bose and tell them their speakers are a success.
    Most people never get to hear this music. Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us. Bach wrote the Cello Suites for his young wife as an exercise to help her learn the cello. But inside each note is the love we are unable to express with words. I can feel her frustration and joy as my bow carves out the notes of the mild-mannered organist who saw composing as one of his daily chores. When Bach died, some of his children sold his scores to the butcher; they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany, a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
    I open my cello case and smell my grandfather. I pick up the instrument and run my fingers tenderly up and down the strings. In each note of music lives every tragedy of the world and every moment of its salvation. The cellist Pablo Casals knew this. Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.
    I am staring at the fireplace in my room, holding my cello. I think of my parents again. My father doesn’t listen to the music I record, but he sometimes comes to my performances when I’m in Tours or Saumur.
    In my cello case is a mitten that belonged to the baker’s daughter. I keep it in my pocket when I play. We sat next to each other in class. Her name was Anna. She had freckles and held her pencil with three fingers and a thumb.
    Winter strips the village of my youth, but in spring the parks fill up again with children learning how to ride bicycles and not doing what they’re told.

II
    T O SEE HIM IS a miracle. He stands at the fountain and gently raises a hand. Then birds swoop down from trees and perch on his shoulders. Some hover, then drop into his hands like soft stones. Children cry with joy. Parents