One of the older girls spread a rumor that the nuns were all ghosts. They never seemed to age, nor did they seem to eat or sleep. These were strong pieces of evidence. On the dissenting side was the fact that they couldn’t float through walls, and when they struck us, their hands were sharp and fleshy. They also had living relatives who sometimes came to visit. One such person was Sister Katerzyna’s brother, Tomas. He played the viola in the Belgrade symphony orchestra, and he had narrow cheeks and orange freckles splotting his ears. About half of the girls were desperately in love with him, and the other half found him repulsive. I was in the former camp.
I think I would have been in love with anyone who played music for me. I was so lonely, so lonely I could feel it in my throat, so cold that my hands burned. When Tomas played the theme for us, Sister Katerzyna was upset. The song is too dark for little girls, she said. She may have been right—Tomas’s bow quivered with every note, angry and sharp. But when he played that song for us, something rose in me that I did not know I was powerful enough to summon. It throbbed, thrashed against the bars of my rib cage like a feral dog, throttled my lungs till I could scarcely draw breath. I crushed my arms to my chest so I wouldn’t flail out and strike something. I bit my lip so I would not scream.
Years later, there came a night when I could not fall asleep because of the rain pummeling the roof. It fell in thick sheets, like waves on an unstable shore. A strange panic clenched at my chest. I tried to shift its weight, but it only seeped down further, pooling in the basin of my stomach. I huddled by my record player and fiddled with the knobs and needle until the dormant disc inside crackled awake.
I had never heard the song before. A quiet piano clinked under layers of deep male vocals, rich and clean. I didn’t know most of the words, but I made out something about love and blue eyes. I pretended Tomas was the singer. I pretended we were in a room alone and he was singing it just to me. I pretended the spinning disc was the Earth. I pretended I was its moon.
