A/N: Hey so it's been like six years since I've written any other Hetalia fic but as it turns out I'll never be over this pairing.
Anyway, hello! Thank you so much for clicking on this fic! As you can see, I'm back on my bullshit writing songfic angst! I wrote this as something of a companion piece to/sort-of rewrite of my very old fic, "Repülj." If you have not read it, good. I wrote it when I was thirteen and I'd like to think I've improved since then. It's certainly not necessary to read that piece in order to understand this one. Still, if you're curious, go for it!
About the music lyrics used in this work: "They Can't Take That Away From Me" was created by George and Ira Gershwin. It's a super sweet, charming, jazzy old song that I found to be perfect for this darling old married couple. If you want to check it out, I definitely recommend the version by Ella Fitzgerald. Also, there is a brief mention of a real Hungarian folk song in this piece. (I just can't resist using these songs-the music and the language is so heartbreakingly gorgeous.) The song is "Regen volt soka lesz" (please excuse the lack of accent marks) and you should DEFINITELY check it out. An English translation of the lyrics is here, if you're curious: songbat /./ com /archive/songs/hungarian/regen-volt-soka-lesz
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this fic, and I would very much appreciate any comments or reviews you may have! Please enjoy!
"Our romance won't end on a sorrowful note,
Though by tomorrow you're gone;
The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote
The melody lingers on."
"You're lucky, my dear," he said, keeping his eyes on the pothole-ridden road, "that I did not leave you to rot along with the rest of them."
Is that not what you've been doing for the better part of two decades? Were it not for the ache that had sunk into her muscles like a stain, she might have spoken the thought out loud, but not now. Not after the fighting had just barely ended. She kept her head held staunchly up, chin thrust out, refusing to slouch in spite of the exhaustion that tried to lull her into the comfort of the leather passenger seat. She never had gotten out of the habit of standing at attention anyway. Her eyes remained fixed on the road, so that she didn't have to look at Russia and so that she didn't have to look at herself in the rear-view mirror, with the half-moon shadows under sunken eyes and the dry skin as bruiseable as an apple. For the moment, she could pretend she hadn't grown so weak—that her lips, set into a grim line, were not cracked and bleeding.
She would have preferred to be back in prison right now, with the rest of her people arrested in the final days of the revolt. Let her be back behind bars with them, not in this gray car on the way back to the tiny gray house that she had been forced to call home for the last sixteen dismally gray years, a prison itself, one without her people and with the ancient radio that spewed nothing but Red propaganda. She wanted to stand by them still, united by the bruises from the buffeting of Soviet police, marking them all as part of one tribe, one heritage, one mission.
But instead she had been "released" under Russia's supervision. Exceptions were always made for people like them, cruel exceptions.
Russia reached over a large, gloved hand to brush at some blood forming a crust on her temple, but she swatted him away. Maybe he thought you could win over people the same way you tame a feral dog, offering it a stroke and a bone now and again, but she wasn't about to pin back her ears for him. He hadn't earned the right to be tender with her. And anyway, something about it would feel perverse. Erzsébet had only ever allowed one man to touch her in that way, had only ever associated that kind of touch with the memory of uncalloused fingers reverently tracing the outline of her jaw. She would not allow those recollections to be marred by association with Ivan Braginsky. That, at least, he would not rob from her.
The nation behind the wheel glanced over at her when she fended him off. Then, after driving for another minute or so, he flipped on his turn signal, pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, and put the car in "park." He turned his whole body to face her, and she saw him squinting slightly, as though attempting to read a sign in a language he barely knew. Then, with no warning other than the split-second quivering of his right hand, he slapped her hard enough to turn her head ninety degrees, so quickly that a sharp pain bloomed in her neck from whipping her head around too quickly.
It was just pain. It was just pain. The continued battering dulled into a background ache as she slipped away into her own mind.
"The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The memory of all that,
No, no, they can't take that away from me."
With her belly against the warm soil and the heads of the tulips brushing her cheeks, she had been too deeply engrossed to notice his approach. She only became aware of his presence when he said, "My dear, I hope you know that I don't expect you to do the weeding yourself."
A jolt ran through her at the sound of his voice. She sprung to her feet and turned to face him, trying to scrape the dirt from her calves with the toe of her boot. "Oh! Yes, I...I know that. It's just that I saw the weeds in the bed, and I wasn't doing much of anything else, so..." In fact, she had been on the lookout for work to do, any kind of work. She'd been jumpy lately, full of nervous energy that ran down her veins like electricity all the way to her fingertips, and now that she had left her days as a servant behind, she couldn't even use chores in order to stave off fidgeting.
Roderich carried himself in the way that he always did, casually dignified-hands behind his straight back, but with arms held loosely, effortless. But she caught the way he nodded just a bit too quickly in response to her, head jerking. He wouldn't look her in the eye for long either. Instead, he turned his gaze to what was behind her, looking at the flowerbed. "I take it you like your gift, then?"
"Yes!" She sounded too eager, but it was an honest answer. "Yes, I love it, Herr Össt-Roderich. And may I ask who told you my little secret?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Surely someone must have told you that tulips are my favorite." She meant to sound playful and sing-song, in the hope of loosening up her tight nerves, but it might have just come across as mentally unstable.
"Oh," he said. He seemed focused on a cloud of gnats a little ways away, flitting in and out of sight in the hazy late-day sun. "You did. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't remember it. That is to say, you told me quite some time ago, so it would be understandable if you didn't. I remembered it shortly before the wedding." She watched him swallow. A little shine of sweat had developed under his eye, in spite of the fact that he'd been standing in the sun for scarcely three minutes. When had she ever told him that she liked tulips? It must have been ages.
"Well, it was very kind of you regardless. A wonderful wedding present."
"Good. I'm glad you're enjoying it."
"Yes."
The air between grew thick with the dizzying scent of flowers and their own, tense silence. Erzsébet turned to stare at some ranunculus and tried to keep a grip on her anxiety. It hadn't been like this when she was working under him. Roderich had told her things-sometimes strange things, apropos of nothing, while she was doing her sweeping in the study and he sat at his desk barely looking at her. All at once, half an hour into this stillness, he'd say something absurd, like a story about the time he'd accidentally baked one if his antique rings into a torte and hadn't find out until he chipped his tooth on the ruby. These were things, she knew, that he told no one else, and he could count on her to laugh with him rather than at him. Slowly, he told her more, his concerns and frustrations, as they stood in the rooms with tall windows in the quiet evenings. She had listened when he spoke, always. Very rarely, she had listened to his silence, too, the pauses in conversation that he took to hold back tears.
But that was before. Needless to say, she was glad to have some independence, but it changed things, left her on shaky ground. It was one thing to voice grievances to a servant-granted, she wasn't much for keeping quiet about her own opinions, and she had learned long ago that he wasn't the type of boss to correct her for speaking out of turn. Nevertheless, in the weeks since they'd been married, her mind and throat had gone to cotton when he was around when she would have spoken freely before. What do you say to someone you've spent centuries getting to know and understand but had never quite been equal to? What do you say when you don't know what he thinks of you, but you can imagine precisely the way he balances his hat a bit sideways on his head so that it floats on his hair? When you know that he prefers wide-lipped cups so that he doesn't make a slurping noise when he drinks his last few drops of tea? She wondered if the new person bringing him his tea knew that.
"Do you ever miss being a wanderer?"
She snapped her head up to look at him. "What? When I was a child, you mean? Why would you want to know about that?"
"I just wondered. I always..." His brow wrinkled at a stalk of crabgrass, then looked back up at her. "Well, I don't suppose I ever told you this, but I...when we were both young, I really quite admired you."
She felt herself starting to smirk and caught her bottom lip between her teeth. "You were afraid of me, if I recall correctly."
He chuckled-a sound that was low and quiet but warm, as though a sweet note had been struck on a cello string in his chest. "One often comes to appreciate the things that frighten them. But yes, I admit for some time I thought you were a witch."
"Did you?!" She couldn't remember the last time she'd received a better compliment.
"Or convinced that you could fly, at the very least. You'd come charging through the field out of thin air, and by the time I saw you, you'd have already knocked my off my feet. I was sure you'd made a deal with some demon and had a little pair of wings under your cape."
Erzsébet raised an eyebrow, speaking through her giggles. "And who says I still don't?"
"That's quite a good point!" he laughed, and then, slowly, stopped laughing. He glanced up at her, and she marveled at how, even now with all his regality, he managed to look boyish, with an expression on his face that could almost be mistaken for guilt. She had to beat back a momentary but insane urge to pat him on the head. "Do you ever wish you could go back to that time?"
She turned from him to watch dandelion seeds swirl in the sun like summer snow. "I think," she began slowly, "that not long ago, I would have said yes. Of course, I still love the steppes and the wind and the horses. That won't ever go out of me. And I...I don't think I can lie about wanting to be feared. Of course I want others to know what I'm capable of. If the sound of my laugh makes them soil their best trousers, good." That earned a snort from him. "But back then, people respected me for nothing else other than being a good fighter. When I became weaker, they did what they would with me, now that they didn't fear me. I was never respected as a person, and certainly they never saw me as a woman..." She caught herself trailing off and tore her gaze away from the lawn that was the same electric green of her eyes. "And anyway, I rather like having a home now that I didn't have as a nomad."
Roderich stared, eyes slightly widened. "Your home here, you mean? In Austria?"
She grinned. "Here, in Austria-Hungary." And the way his chest began to expand with joy as he took in a breath, the way he stood almost on his toes as he leaned forward towards her, made him seem that he might just up and float away at any moment. His unbroken gaze, now full of wondering, was enough to make her grow warm and turn away. Absently, she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and smudged dirt from her hand onto her cheek.
Instantly, Roderich pulled out a handkerchief and took a step and a half toward her, then stopped, balancing on his heel. "May I...?"
Many decades ago, he had asked her the exact same question in the exact same way. She had come back from battle, fighting for him, and he had been the one to point out the streak of blood on her face, smeared pink in places by the droplets of sweat that had run through it. He'd come to her in the aftermath of the fight to thank her for her service, then asked if he could wipe the grime from her. She had been shocked, though in hindsight, she shouldn't have been-he had always noticed the small details, so careful. Just as she did now, she had allowed the touch of his uncalloused fingers on her face, shuddering as the silk cloth stroked her as gently as a breeze. After the scratch of the battlefield's grass and the bite of the blade, it had nearly been enough to make her cry.
What she hadn't done back then was to lean into his palm, almost nuzzle it with her cheek like a cat. She hadn't put her hand over his before he could pull it away, nor had she coaxed him to linger, regardless of how much she had wanted to back then. Now, she did. She stroked his long, slender fingers with her own, trying to read the lines written in his skin like Braille.
His lips parted in surprise, and then, seeming to realize that his expression looked stupid-stupid, but oh, so sweet, and visible to no one but her-he closed his mouth and put his free hand in hers. "Erzsébet-"
"Erzsi," she said. "Please."
He dipped his head, partly out of politeness and partly to hide a spreading grin. "Erzsi...we haven't always been kind to each other. I haven't always given you what you deserve, and for that-" He paused, thinking again. She had always loved that, the way he so carefully laid out his words in a neat row in front of him before he spoke. "I can only ask that you forgive me, and to trust that I'll never make you feel caged again. But if-if you would still like to stay by my side, not only as nations, but as life partners-"
"Yes," she said with a soft gasp. She could not get enough of the delicious air. "Yes, I would like that very much."
He brought her hand up to his chin while looking into her eyes all the while, only breaking his gaze at the very moment when his lips brushed her knuckles, slowly closing his eyes.
"That fucking rat bastard."
"You don't have to do this, Feliks."
"The hell I don't. Beating on you like that." The words came out simmering. "I'll kill him one day, Erzsi, I swear to God. Here." He brought over the ice that he had double-bagged and handed it to her. She placed it over the tender lump on her cheek that had forced her left eye half-closed as it swole.
"Not like I wasn't expecting it, after what I pulled," Erzsébet mumbled. "I'm sorry. I said I'd pave the way for your revolt, too."
"Don't you dare apologize to me, hon." He sat on the bed beside her and tugged at brittle locks of hair, which had turned so light that they were in danger of going white. She could remember a time when his hair had been smooth, vibrant as buttercups, shining in the sun. It hadn't looked that way since before the war, though. In spite of its warmth, something about his smile looked fragile too. Lips which had always been thin and delicate now seemed unhealthily pale, covered in skin as dry and breakable as rice paper. It seemed to require no small amount of effort to lift them into a grin, even after a decade. Not that she was doing much better. "You really were fab, you know. You scared that bastard when you ran off, you really did. He went ape when he finally figured out he wasn't untouchable."
"Yeah?" Slowly, she began to smile herself. When she had run away, there had been very few things that she regretted to leave behind, but her best friend was certainly one of them. "Were you following along with the revolt on the news?"
Feliks scoffed. "Yeah, but they just fed us the same bullshit they always do. Something about how everyone who chose to fight the Soviets on your side was a fascist and a Hitlerite and-"
"Feliks! He'll hear you!"
"Oh, come on, man, he's not here right now. And even if he was, I don't care what else he does to me at this point. I've had worse than that borscht-sucking lunatic. Did you know I'm still not allowed to use metal knives in this house? You're not the only one who's spooked him, Erzsi." That, miraculously, drew a giggle out of her. "Anyway, like I said, you should still be proud of what you did. If nothing else, you gave some of your people the chance to get out and go west. They're free now. That counts for something."
"Yeah...I suppose you're right." She thought of them all, her citizens, her children, streaming across the border out of their home, with her standing back and watching as the last of them left, her staying behind to fight as they filled the refugee camps in Traiskirchen and Graz and it had been years since she had cried, really sat down and cried, but now all of a sudden she felt hot pressure like a bubble expanding out of her chest and into her throat and she couldn't even speak now and slowly she crumpled in half so that her head was in her lap and her eyes were pressed against her fisted hands but the tears just kept coming, because unlike blood they couldn't be stopped by applying pressure.
"Erzsi?!" She felt Feliks shift, panicky, beside her. "Hey, hey, it's okay. You're alright, just tell me what's wrong, okay?"
"Feliks...I..." Her voice sounded squeaky as she sputtered into her hands like a child.
"Yes, Węgry, what is it?"
"I...I saw him," she choked out. "H-he was s...standing at the border crossing. I think he saw me, too."
"Who? Who did-" And then he stopped, realizing. "Oh. Oh, I see."
"He looked...exactly the same as before. He didn't have any grey hair."
"No, I guess he wouldn't."
"I've found grey hairs. On me."
"Austria hasn't had the stresses that we've had," Feliks whispered.
She took in a shuddering breath. "I always...I always said it'd be enough just to see Roderich one last time, but now that I have..."
"I know how you feel," he said, and she knew that he meant it. She had always seen the way that Feliks would watch a certain Lithuanian's back with longing as the latter exited a room, even staring at the doorway once the man was out of sight, as though he could will his soul to get up out of his body and follow. He, too, had lost a husband, ages before Erzsébet had, and decades of forced separation had taken their toll, even now that the two men lived in the same house. Feliks took a deep breath. "I think you should try to forget."
"I can't forget."
"I know. But it's either try to put it aside or live in the past completely. We can't afford to do that now."
The radio in the room crackled quietly with the sound of Prokofiev.
"The way you hold your knife,
The way we danced 'til three,
The way you changed my life,
No, no, they can't take that away from me."
Her belly ached from laughter as Erzsébet realized, not for the first time, that she was a terrible influence on her husband.
"You are simply out of your mind, Mr. Edelstein!" she gasped out between giggles as Roderich, grasping her hand, ran through the servant halls of the palace.
He turned suddenly, his shining black shoes squealing against the polished floors as he dragged her into the kitchens, caught her in his arms as she came through the door, and brought her to his chest, still heaving a bit from his exertion. "My darling, if it's madness to leave a party full of nobles from the last century with more money than sense, then by God, I don't want to be sane."
She giggled into the velvet of his deep blue waistcoat, tailored to his body's smooth, nearly feminine curves. The gold buttons felt cool against her flushed cheek. "Kedves, this isn't quite what I had in mind when I said I wanted to go somewhere more private."
"We'll be quite undisturbed." He brushed a wild lock of hair from her face, and even this he handled gently, holding it against his palm as though it were a lovely butterfly that had landed there. "The servants have already finished with serving and cleaning up the dinner. They should have no cause to come down here."
Still grinning, she took his hand and walked with him to the bench that sat by the furnace. "Well, I can't say I'm not pleased that you took my advice and slipped out."
"All of my favorite bad decisions are inspired by you, darling."
"How rude!" She gave his arm a playful slap. "I have only ever made good decisions in my life, sir!"
"You made the right decision in coming down here with me, I'll say that."
"And how's that?"
"Because I'm about to do this." All at once he caught her up in his arms, hands around the small of her back as he squeezed her against his chest. She screamed with laughter, then clapped a hand over her mouth out of fear that she'd give them away but still could not stifle the wild giggles bubbling up out of her. Roderich fixed her with a devilish look before he dove in and planted fast, sloppy kisses all over her neck. She tangled her fingers in his hair and tried to press him even closer, wanting more than his all, and she smiled until her cheeks ached and then kept on smiling. This was hers alone. Nearly anyone seeing him in this state would think him drunk or otherwise compromised, but she knew the truth. He was intoxicated by life alone, by her. Tucked safely away from the eyes of others, he was liberated. Only she got to see him freed.
She leaned her head as back as far as she could, proffering her entire neck to him so that she could bathe in his kisses and his attention. In this vulnerable position there was power. She relished the ability to enchant him with a look or a pose.
Her eyes caught a glimpse of the tiny, cracked kitchen window behind her. "Oh, Roderich, look at that!" He paused, and she turned around, still wrapped in his embrace, to watch the white flakes fall. They were small and bright, as though the pinpricks of stars had drifted down from the night sky to fall softly to earth. "It's been such a warm winter, we've hardly had a good snowfall this season. Isn't it lovely?"
"Beautiful." His lips moved against her ear, and she shivered despite the warmth of his breath on her skin.
"I've missed the snow. It makes the whole world look so soft and fresh."
"It does make for a peaceful scene. Almost makes one forget it's falling on a world still full of trouble."
She turned to press her cheek to his. "Don't think of that now," she murmured. "That's no attitude to have going into the new year. We should try to be optimistic about those troubles ending."
A small, sad smile took shape on his face. Suddenly, his eyes looked tired. "As usual, my darling, I think you'll have to have optimism for the both of us. I've been around too long to believe that we'll ever be truly carefree."
Erzsébet chuckled softly. "And I haven't? Remember, I'm older than you, kedves. I know that there are always new problems to replace old ones. But believing that we could do something to help now...that's the only way I can keep from despairing about it."
"You are..." Breaking off, he touched his lips to her temple, slowly this time-he was feather-soft, careful but still no less passionate than when he was kissing her wildly before. After a moment, he pulled back and finished, "...the most stubborn woman I know." She snorted, laughing, and he grinned as he brushed a strand of wheat-brown hair from her face. "It will never cease to amaze me, Vögelchen, how you rage so wonderfully against the darkness."
She leaned against him and closed her eyes and thought, as she often did, of how easy it would be to simply melt into him and never be apart from him. In the ballroom a floor above them, she heard the band strike up again, as the sound of violins filtered down from the floorboards and fell down on them as gently as the snow. "That's a Ländler," she said dreamily.
Roderich unwrapped his arms from around her and stood. Her momentary disappointment turned to delight when he offered his hand to her, half-bent in a bow and smiling gently. "Shall we dance?" After all this time, he was still as courteous as he had been on the day that they had been married, and it made her giggle as she took his hand.
They managed even in the small space of the kitchen. Moving slowly around the counter, they orbited around one another in the dance, two stars tethered to one another by the pull of gravity and spinning together through space. Even when they were nose to nose, she ached to bring him closer.
"Do you have any wishes going into 1913, then?" he asked as they turned.
"Well, of course," she said in a teasing tone. "But don't think I'm going to tell you that easily, Mr. Edelstein. If you tell someone your new year's wish, it might not come true."
"Well, mine is the same one that I have every year. I don't mind telling you."
"Oh? What's your wish, then?"
"To grow old with you. And before you give me that look," he added quickly, apparently seeing the way her eyes widened, "I'm well aware of how rarely people like us get the chance to grow old at all, but it's the only miracle that I would ever ask for. It would be my honor, Erzsi, to spend as much time with you as God sees fit to grant me, and to watch you become a more beautiful woman by the day. To...to know that you would be by my side even at the end of my life, even when I'd grown weak and ready to collapse, to have you there at the end...I couldn't describe how grateful I would be."
She rested her head against his chest and let out a long breath. Growing old together...it was such a human concept. There was no guarantee that they would ever get the chance to become elderly, let alone doing it side-by-side. Humans aged with time; nations aged with experience. Political movements. Revolutions. War. These were the things that shaped countries, made them grow and change. She had seen nations scarcely a few decades old go through enough strife to age them as much as countries that had been around for centuries. Only the shifting of the world beneath their feet would allow them to grow old, if the earth didn't swallow them up while they were still young.
Still, their fates were bound together now. They were Austria-Hungary, the dual monarchy, indivisible. They were Roderich and Erzsébet, until death do them part, inseparable. Whatever happened in the future would happen to both of them, together.
For now, she only prayed that she would get her own wish: that no matter how many times they see one year give way to another, no matter how many centuries march by, she will still remember this night vividly enough to imagine herself back there. She tried to take in every detail-the gleaming of the snow that gathered on the window pane, the gold-tinted reflection of the flickering fire in a copper spoon, the soft popping of the old floorboards as they danced on them, and Roderich, her darling Roderich with his thin nose and his clear eyes and his long, solemn face softened by the kindest smile she had ever seen. She tried to remember most of all what it felt like to be so perfectly warm, something that had nothing to do with the furnace but rather seemed to be a feeling that rose up out of the core and radiated through every inch of her body.
Her eyelids flew open to face the darkness. Thrust abruptly into the waking world, it took her a few moments to remember that she was back in Russia's house. When she did, her momentary confusion and anxiety gave way to the same feelings of regret and humiliation that she'd had before. She let out a sigh as she slowly lay her head back on the thin pillow. Her eyes burned dully with exhaustion, and all she wanted to do was let them close forever. But she couldn't make herself go back to sleep-she was too aware of her still-racing heart. With every beat, the woolen blanket over her chest quivered slightly.
She had woken from a nightmare. In the dream, she had been back home at her own house, which had not really been her house, because there were far too many winding hallways leading to far too many rooms. The place shifted when she wasn't looking as though alive. More than once, she went up a staircase and came back down only to find an entirely different room from the one she left behind. Now and then, she would have a sudden moment of clarity and remember the way out, but she would forget it before getting anywhere near the exit, as though her mind itself were becoming a labyrinth hiding the secret to escape deep within. Some of the rooms had massive mirrors, just like the mirrors of the ballroom in the mansion that she and Roderich had shared, and she would see his reflection, beautiful as ever and entirely unchanged after so long, as though he were standing right behind her, though when she turned around he was nowhere to be found. She kept trying to go to him, while her hair turned gray and grew so long that she began to trip over it, while her skin began to sag grotesquely from her arms, while her legs became so spindly and weak that she began to stumble and then crawl.
She put her hands over her face. She had looked in the bathroom mirror before bed to find a few more lines around her eyes than there had been before. Turning her head from side to side, she had caught a glimpse of something shining at her forehead. It was a single silver hair.
"You shouldn't have told me what your wish was," she whispered, croaking, into the night.
Roderich had seen her before she had seen him. She had escorted a group of refugees to the Austrian border and watched frantically as they rushed over the road leading to the West, at once urging them on and trying to prevent a stampede. All at once, she had turned to look up and suddenly could not possibly turn away, because she was no longer aware of her body or the noise or the road or anything else in the entire goddamn world, because she felt her entire being floating weightless in space and tethered only to a pair of shocked violet eyes. He gazed at her from the other side of the invisible line dividing their lands, his slightly opened mouth filling with autumn wind. He had a lifetime of things to say and nowhere to begin. She knew, because she did too.
Everything in her had screamed at her to go to him, to run at him at full force and wrap her arms around him so tightly that no force on earth could break them apart again and kiss him all over until he was covered in her head-to-toe. They were magnetized. She had shuddered as he felt his pull, entirely irresistible. And yet, torturously, she had resisted. She had a people to protect. She had a revolt to see to the end. Soon, she had thought, once she succeeded in her rebellion, she could interact freely with the Western nations again, and then they could see each other for more than a moment. For the time being, she had simply taken in a shuddering breath. "Bis bald," she had told him softly, though she knew he couldn't hear. See you soon.
Only it wouldn't be soon. She had lost. She had failed her citizens and failed herself and failed her lovely, lovely Roderich.
"We may never, never meet again
On the bumpy road to love…"
He hadn't aged at all since the war, while she just kept on changing. How long before she changed into someone he didn't know? How much more did she have to age before they lost the chance to grow old together, because she will have done it on her own? How much longer would she have to sustain herself on memory alone? How much longer before those same memories didn't hurt to hold?
"The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off-key,
The way you haunt my dreams,
No, no, they can't take that away from me.
No, they can't take that away from me."
The music pulled her. It always had.
"He is always making that racket," Ludwig muttered, not looking up from his papers. Though he looked composed as ever, there was a tension in his voice. There always seemed to be a tension to him nowadays-not just seriousness, because she had known him to be serious since he was a boy, but strain, as though he were always pulled taut. He glanced at her after a moment. "Will you be taking your leave, Hungary? I'll walk you out."
"In...in a minute," she answered slowly, staring straight ahead at the blank stretch of white wall before her. The sound of the piano wafted faintly from one of the back rooms like an intoxicating sense, working its way into the grooves of her mind and rapidly putting her into a trance. "I have to...I think I forgot something. And to Ludwig's credit, maybe because he was too preoccupied to understand or maybe because he understood, he simply nodded and did not question further when she stood and started to walk, as though she were being led, through the halls of his home.
She might as well have been blind. Everything around her suddenly seemed hazy, falling away from her, except for the crystalline music notes guiding her through the world by sound alone. Of course, she was aware that the Anschluss had happened two years ago. Of course she knew that Roderich lived with Ludwig now, and that by going to Ludwig's house to discuss her new alliance with him, she risked running into her ex-husband. But she had been sure that she could handle being in close proximity to him for a few hours. She had rehearsed beforehand what she would do if they happened to pass one another in the halls, the same thing that she had done in the few times that she had seen him since the divorce-a courteous nod in his direction, a brief paused spent in order to swallow the lump in her throat, and then that would be that. She had hoped it wouldn't even come to that, since they had no reason to see one another to begin with.
And yet, here she was, walking towards his music as though in a dream.
And there he was, sitting with his back turned to her. The room was lit by the late-day sun, which came in through the window and cast a square of light onto a dusty piano. It was out-of-tune-Ludwig had never had any interest in playing-and she was sure that it bothered Roderich to no end, but it wasn't as though he had had the chance to bring his own instrument from home. She stood watching, following those delicate musician's fingers touch each key deliberately and gently, as she had seen him do so many times before, as he had done to her, and suddenly she was not in Germany anymore. She was in Vienna, and there was no war looming, and she was wearing his wedding ring, or maybe it was even before the wedding on a quiet evening after she had finished her work and he had finished his, and she stood behind him as he sat on the piano bench and listened as she always did.
"You may as well come in."
Erzsébet jumped. He had not even paused in his playing when he spoke. A childish part of her wanted to turn and run, to not face him, but it was too late for that now. Her face growing hot, she approached him slowly.
Roderich finished the piece and then stared down at his lap. "You met with Germany, yes?"
"Yes."
"It went well?"
"I would say so."
And then, nothing. And this had always been her greatest fear, the worst-case scenario for this reunion, that absolutely nothing would happen. That all that time, over fifty years of marriage and many more filled with love and longing, had all been swallowed up by the passing of time with no trace remaining. That his love for her, the thing she used to consider fixed and sure as stars in the sky, had burned out and left nothing but smoke for her. She had the sudden urge to scream, to ask him to give her something, anything at all, to let her know that those years were not a waste to him, to either of them, that there was something more to it than political convenience and that everyone who said marriages between countries never lasted forever never said anything about the lifespan of love.
Just when she opened her mouth to speak, the piano sounded again. She recognized at once the tune he played. A Hungarian folk song, one that she had taught him well over a century ago. She had taught him by rote, her singing the melody and him listening to her every note, copying it on the piano. Something in her chest swelled painfully and wonderfully.
He played through the song once, hesitated, and then started again, this time trying to sing the accompaniment, searching unsurely for the right notes with his slightly croaky voice. She snorted. "You still can't sing."
He paused, looking down at the keys with one side of his mouth turned slightly upward. "That's why I always let you do it."
She stopped for a moment to listen for anyone nearby, then went to shut the door. He closed his eyes and began to play again, while she sang softly, partly to prevent anyone else from hearing and partly because her throat had begun to feel tight.
"Régen volt soká lesz, mikor az a nap lesz..." Long ago it was, and long will it be...Asong of loss and fate and doves' wings and a withered rose. His hands quivered, though they never missed a note. There was no reason they should have. They had done this same thing so many times before.
"Erzsi?" he asked after they had finished.
"Yes, Roderich?"
"I think that this-memories like this-are something we can't possibly lose, no matter what else they strip from us, and I'm grateful for that. I think we'll always have this, don't you?"
She smiled. "I know we will."