The Lullaby for Unfinished Rooms
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The house had been empty for eleven years, but when Elena turned the key, the lights were already on. Nothing was out of place but the decor. Romania was more natural than the Paris she left behind, she said.
The sounds changed as she spoke, pale images were fusing into her words – cicadas, and the leaves of spruce trees; the melancholy voice of the river that shallows at night. Standing in the courtyard, miles away from the sea, she suddenly felt as if she were there again, with the fishermen and Mozart’s music drifted by on the wind, and the castle with its thin walls and tiny window grilles. The room fell silent, an old photograph clung to the back of her mind.
Elena threw open the windows to air the rooms of the ancient house. "The electrician came and disconnected the sockets. The last people left in such a hurry that they left a lot of things behind. Now that I’m here, I have the time to deal with it all, but I feel distracted. We are so similar. " She showed me a picture of her mother, who died when the girl was four. "I was very close to her. She was beautiful, I look a lot like her. My hair is black too. It is the same thought, every time I see her. "
Seeing this intense image, I climbed the stairs to the upper floor and there I found an old grand piano, my father’s, on which my mother used to play. She was twenty years old when she had me and she had not been able to have another child after that. Or perhaps she didn’t need one, just as I don’t need my daughter. I played Chopin, the preludes, the nocturnes and the ea6lesque. But my hand moves like water in slow motion on weightless planks, and what I once knew is gone. Butterflies dance around the room, their blue and orange wings whir like blades.
“It’s funny, that-“ she suddenly said. “My childhood in Romania. I was often alone, even in the evenings, even after my parents had died, and television had not come to town. The old house and the people in it didn’t talk to me, just like now. I’m used to that feeling, somehow. It’s very boring, I must say.” She stopped talking and apologised.
I wrote a lullaby for her to bring along back home. She has to hold on to it like a satellite, I think, she whispered. The lullaby would follow her to the bed every night.
Now that night is gone, and she brought my lullaby home with her. Last time I saw her over skype , I heard nine people singing together: my mother too. She came to sing for Elena, the daughter she never knew, but who grew up in the same old house, born too early, left alone, but to come out the other side talented and strong. My mother was singing for Elena because she wasn’t able to be here on earth, but she somehow returned for that evening, settled again, listened to the piano and to her daughter in Romania. It was the end of the lullaby and reaching the end she heard her somehow.
When the earthly journey becomes too much, look for your paradise this way-
the tune, the magic, one more time,
the song.
sleeping sound.
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Limini's debut novel, The Little Book of Questions, is forthcoming. A collection of his short stories will be◆ About the ending
❧ About the title