Elise arrived promptly at seven in the morning. She stood in the doorway and spoke with Roderich, but her eyes were pinned on Yao, who waited on a desk. She was a tall woman in dark boots, with hair the color of Roderich's piano tightly knotted on her head. Her face was pale and had the cold look of stunning intelligence. She walked towards Yao and said something in German.
After several repetitions, Yao came to understand she was saying "My name is Elise."
Yao repeated the phrase back, saying "Yao" instead of Elise. She nodded.
"Good."
She sat down across from him and taught him verbally until Yao thought his mind would snap under the strain.
So it continued for a year. The seasons melted into one blur of waking and learning. Yao began, then, to speak the language fluently, despite the struggles of his accent.
One evening as he read aloud from a children's book Elise had given him, the child passed by the doorway. The child stopped and stared, rocking on her heels. She kept her hands behind her back and her soft amber eyes focused on Yao curiously, as young children are prone to do. Yao felt his neck prickle with the power of the stare and tried not to look over. Elise noticed and let out a long sigh.
She stood and walked to the child. She dropped to one knee, to be at eye level.
"Feliciano," she said. "Why are you here? You should play or do your errands." Elise commanded the language with immense eloquence, delicately pronouncing the hard sounds and barely whispering the soft ones. Her features were sharp. At profile, which is how Yao saw her in the cold winter light, with a sharp wind punctuating her sentences, her nose and chin seemed to curve to greet each other. Her lips were soft and large, the kind made to speak.
"I am listening, Aunt Elise." Feliciano said.
Yao perked up. He hadn't heard the child speak often. Now, at a closer distance, he heard a distinct accent and something boyish. Perhaps he had misjudged the child's gender.
"You've listened. Now do you think you can go?" Elise asked, rising, indicating that she was finished with the conversation.
"I have a question!"
"Yes?"
"Why do we speak differently from you?"
"You mean why do we have accents?"
For her sharpness and stunning brilliance, Elise possessed an almost unearthly patience.
Feliciano nodded.
"That is because our throats and mouths are different. Those of one culture do best to speak their own language." Feliciano's eyes widened. "However, with proper training and enough practice, their mouths can develop the proper shape eventually."
"Thank you, Aunt Elise." With that Feliciano scampered off, skirts flying.
Elise returned to her seat, primly tucking her dress under her. She placed her fine, ivory-colored hands in her lap as gingerly as one might set a glass on a table. She nodded at Yao to continue reading. Yao did so, but his mind detached from the story, a piece of thread falling from fabric. He wondered how long it had been since he last spoke Mandarin out loud. He thought in his native tongue often, so not to forget, and wrote in his complex scripture for practice.
"That's enough." Elise said.
Yao nodded and shut the book. In his new, expensive clothing he felt constricted. He sat up straighter and bettered his posture. His hair had grown even longer. Elise and Roderich had expressed great disapproval, saying a man should not wear his hair in such a feminine way. Elizaveta refused to cut it, however, saying it would be better for when he learned how to dance.
On days Elise did not come, Yao listened to Roderich play his instruments. Once Elise decided he had been trained enough they would start the dance tutoring.
Roderich, unlike Elise, loathed waiting. He was impatient and eccentric, but he knew that he wasn't ready yet either to have his music play for a dancer.
"Yao?"
He looked at Elise. The broad windows shivered in the storming wind. A thousand suffering hands drew across the glass, screaming laments. Snow swirled, catching in the trees and earth. Everything had been painted white, save for a tint of blue along the horizon's rim.
"Yes?"
"Tell me where you lived before."
She often conversed with him solely for the purpose of giving him practice. Now her motives seemed different, as if she wanted genuinely to know.
"I lived outside of Moscow in a rural home." Yao explained. "I lived with my benefactor, a rich soldier, and his two sisters for some time."
"How was it?"
"It was…" Yao reclined in his chair and gazed out the window. He searched for the right words, sighing deeply. "It was a time of great joy and of great sorrow."
Elise waited for him to continue.
"I met people there who I came to love. I met people I want to see desperately again. I met someone who I fell deeply and terribly in love with, something not totally unlike a novel romance. Then I had to say good-bye. I knew it wouldn't last very long. I've been torn away from homes as long as I could remember."
"Where were you born, then?"
Yao sighed deeply. His past life had faded to nothing but a picture floating in the backdrop of his mind, a sliver of nostalgia. He tried to remember, and the first image that came to mind, shimmering like the first star at night, was his mother…
She had a round, soft face with dark eyes and perfectly curved eyelashes. Her eyebrows rose when she smiled. He remembered her watching him from a distance. He saw a hand gently run down her neck, causing her to shiver. He was playing near the pond, through rocks across its surface and watching them skid. He giggled and called to his mother, asking her to watch as the stones glided across the glittering surface.
When he turned around the memory burned up into ash. Something went wrong, making him blind with fear, and leaving him without recollection. Whose hands were those? And what did he remember after that?
"Yao?"
"Sorry, I was having trouble remembering. I was born in China and I lived in a nice place with my mother and father."
"Do you remember them?"
"I recall my mother but not my father. The past is a very messy, disorganized place for me."
"It is for me too."
He asked to hear her story.
She nodded. "I need to tell it anyway." She brushed her hair from her cheeks. He noticed a braid that ran along the back of her head, decorated with a pale violet flower. She was a beautiful woman, although as tough as stone, she reminded him of Natalia.
"I was born here in Austria and I grew up with a blind father." She explained, just as Roderich began to play the piano in the opposite room, taking Beethoven's For Elise to practice, fitting the situation remarkably well.
Elise's father lost his sight the same night she was born, causing him to tragically never see her face and lament on the note constantly. Her mother died in child birth a year later for a still born. Her parents were not wealthy but they were well-educated. Fate had dashed them with a stroke of misfortune, bringing them to poverty when their bank was destroyed. Her mother had taught at a school and with her death the income dwindled. Her father's loss of sight cost him his job. He could only live off his savings and the pity money from outer family.
However, he loved his only child greatly. He brought her a tutor so she could learn to read and, when she was old enough, he asked her to describe her features. She did so, each morning, and she added what she had done to her hair. Her father began to smile when she did this, trembling with grief and happiness.
As Elise grew older and vainer, she began to describe herself as an ugly witch. When she reached a point of such intense disgust, her father struck her cheek, lightly, and she couldn't breathe for that moment. She stared at her father, at the twin scars over his eyes from a laceration of the night she was born, and wept for the first time since she was a child.
In many regards, Elise was fortunate. She had a tutor to teach her all she needed to know, and she easily earned a career by teaching the German language. She earned enough to sustain her father.
Yao turned to look at her expression. It remained unchanged. Her dark eyes followed his. "How did he lose his sight?"
"He fell and cut his eyes."
Yao winced in empathy.
"Curiously, I don't have any fear of blades or knives or anything of the sort." She said. "I do have a fear of fire, though." She needn't say more. She rolled her sleeve up and showed her underarm to Yao. It was discolored and charred, but the scar was nothing new. Yao nodded. He had a distinct feeling that he had once seen worse.
Elise turned her blue sleeve down and replaced her hands in her lap. She looked out the window and clamped her lips shut. Yao wondered if she told her story to anyone else. Then again, Yao seemed to possess an ability to draw a person's character out, as with Natalia. He recalled the day at the lake, suddenly. He could smell it, he could see Natalia walking across the surface, telling him he knew nothing about her and that he shouldn't pretend. Her hard eyes focused on him and he could only have a faint impression of her pain. Now he could see the same in Elise.