The farmer stopped, grudgingly, and let them step in over the side rail.
Inside the cart a woman of about sixty, wearing a coarse woolly cap on her head and a black apron, was sitting on a sack of potatoes. She greeted them with a smile, and then her small, deep blue eyes rested on Milena and stayed there, the intensity of her gaze at odds with the rest of her rather ordinary appearance.
“Do you . . . do you know me, ma’am?” Milena asked uneasily.
“Acourse I knows you,” the woman replied. Then, very quietly, she began to hum a tune with her mouth closed. Her voice was unsteady, and it was hard to follow the melody, but you could tell that as she sang, the woman was hearing another voice, a beautiful one, and was trying to imitate it.
Milena got goosebumps. “That . . . that’s very pretty. Where did you hear that tune?”
The woman ignored the question and went on humming dreamily. It was as if, looking at Milena, she were looking inside herself at the same time, seeing her own memories. She was concentrating on every note.
“Who sang that song?” Milena persisted when she had finished.
“Why, you!” the woman said. “We had your records at home, we did. A shame it were . . . Oh, it were a crying shame what happened.”
The cart stopped just then. The farmer unhooked the chain keeping the tailgate in place and flung it abruptly back. “You two get out! We’re here!”
“Wait a moment,” said Milena. “I just wanted to ask this lady —”
“There ain’t nowt to ask!” said the farmer, pushing the woman toward the house. “I never should’ve took you two up. You clear out of here, quick!”
They spent the next two nights in ruined houses. The walls protected them from the wind and the cold well enough to let them snatch a few hours’ sleep. As soon as they were up, they went on walking north. Hungry as they were, they tried to save their provisions as far as possible. They drank the icy water of mountain streams from their cupped hands.
At midmorning on the third day, the mist suddenly lifted, and they were amazed to see the unreal beauty of the landscape surrounding them. Green moorland stretched out ahead, sprinkled with gray rocks and small, sparkling lakes. Far away the snowy peaks of the mountains rose to the sky. Sharp air filled their lungs.
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Milena. Words failed her and she couldn’t say any more.
“This is freedom,” Bartolomeo breathed. “What do you think of it now?”
“Oh — not bad!” she replied after a moment. “Let’s celebrate.”
She went up to a rock and sat down on it. When he was about to sit beside her, she pushed him away. “No, go farther off. Like that, yes.”
She straightened her back, put her hands on her knees, and took a deep breath.
“A poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree;
Sing willow, willow, willow!”
From the moment when she sang the first notes, the air around her seemed to be transfigured. Her pure voice spun invisible threads between earth and sky.
“With his hand in his bosom
And his head upon his knee;
O willow, willow, willow, willow!”
Milena sang effortlessly, her eyebrows drawn slightly together, her eyes closed. She didn’t open them until the last vibration of the last note had died away.
Bart, entranced, didn’t dare break the silence. His throat was tight with emotion.
“Did you like it?” asked Milena.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I liked it a lot. And I liked the little lines it gives you between the top of your nose and your forehead.”
“I know it does. They come as soon as I open my mouth to sing. I can’t seem to make them go away.”
He came over to her again and sat down on the rock beside her. “Where did you learn that song?”
“I feel as if I’ve always known it. I must have learned it when I was very small. From my mother, I suppose. I can understand that now. I know about twenty songs by heart, and I’ve always sung them to myself, first in the orphanage, then at the boarding school . . . always. I can sing them to myself in silence and hear them in my head. Sometimes I choose one and decide to sing it properly — I mean out loud.”
“What makes you decide to do that?”
“I don’t really know. The right moment. The right person.”
“I see — and was this time the right moment or the right person?”
“Take a guess!”
She took his hand as they started walking again. It was that evening that they decided not to go any farther.
The mountain refuge hut, in the shelter of a group of trees, stood just on the line reached by the first snows. The door was unlocked. The single room had a bunk bed pushed against the back wall, a huge fireplace, a table, two benches and a cupboard cobbled together out of rickety planks. They lit a fire and ate some of their provisions. Then they talked all night. They talked feverishly until they felt exhausted, and by the small hours of the morning, they had come to their decision.
Bart found a pair of rusty scissors in a drawer and sharpened them at length on a hard stone. Milena sat astride a wicker chair in front of the fire with her head facing the back of it and bent her neck, “Go on.”
Hesitantly, Bartolomeo slipped a heavy handful of blond hair between his fingers. “Are you sure? You won’t hold it against me later?”
“Look, I’m the one asking you to do it. We know we must go down again, and I don’t fancy having three-quarters of the population take me for a ghost. Go on, Bart.”
The first snip of the scissors gave them both a pang. After that Bart set to work as well as he could, sending locks of blond hair flying around them. Soon the feet of the chair were surrounded by a silky, golden carpet. When Milena had nothing left on her head but a short, untidy boyish haircut, he put the scissors down.
“All right?” he asked, going around to kneel down in front of her.
Milena’s face was covered with tears. “It’s hard,” she said sadly. “I’ve had long hair since I was four. About the age when I learned the songs. It’s as if you’d cut my arms off.”
“But your hair will grow again. Don’t cry.”
“What do I look like?”
“I don’t know . . . well, like Helen Dormann, maybe.”
She found the strength to laugh. Seeing her like that, her face tear-stained, her eyes reddened and her hair shorn, Bartolomeo Casal thought he had never seen such a beautiful woman in his life. A woman, he told himself, not a girl.
They took off their school coats, threw them on the fire, and watched them burn until there was nothing left but the charred buttons. Then they went out to the little lake nearby. It was perfectly circular, reflecting the deep green of the spruce trees surrounding it. The silence and calm were absolute.
“First to say ‘This is the first morning in the world’ has lost!” said Milena, laughing.
“This is the first morning in the world!” shouted Bart, and he raced for the bank. Stripping off his clothes quickly, he plunged into the icy water. He swam fast, churning up the water with his arms and legs.
“Come on! Come on in!” he called when he had reached the middle of the lake.
She hesitated, and then undressed too and went to the edge.
“Come on in!” called Bart again.
She couldn’t help it: she shouted out loud and flung herself into the water. It felt like having a thousand red-hot needles pierce her body. They met in the middle of the lake, choking, shaking with laughter, unable to utter a word.
When they were back on the bank again, the air seemed bitter cold. They ran to the refuge and piled the fire high with dry branches, all the logs that were left, and their own clothes, which they had carried back under their arms. The wood crackled, sending up sparks, and then the flames rose high. They pulled a mattress in front of the fireplace and slipped under the covers. Their skin, warm from the fire, was still cold in patches from the icy lake. Some drops of water were still running down Milena’s white back. They held each other close, kissed and embraced, amazed to find themselves here naked, body against body for the first time, without any fears at all.