In My Heart There Rings A Melody
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It is late. The sun has gone down behind the mountains, and all the stars are out. We are walking through an old town, a city that was once very grand but is now in ruins; it’s hard to tell how old the buildings are or if they were made before this country was taken over by our enemies or not.
It may be only fifty years since these walls went up for good, but they seem older because of what happens when you get used to seeing people coming back again and again to do things to them. This house seems like something you might find anywhere at any time, but it also reminds me of my own home.
I think: My father built a place just like this one day in his shop with wood from trees on our property, and he would have loved to live here with my mother someday soon after we got married. Now my parents’ land and their house lie under the enemy’s rule, and so many other good places are lost to us forever, too.
The sky above is full of bright lights, as though someone had spread glitter all across its surface, but none of them seem real. They’re more like reflections than actual light sources. All those shining points give everything an ethereal quality—even the buildings themselves, which are mostly covered with dark gray mold.
When you stand still for a moment and look around, you can see that some parts of the city shine brighter than others. It’s as though someone is holding back the darkness here, but it will come back when that person moves away again.
The ground is littered with broken glass and scraps of clothing, and even though there aren’t enough people left in the city to keep it clean, I know why they leave such trash where it lies: Someone who is afraid of being seen is always sure to hide his eyes.
If you walk into a room and don’t see anyone watching you, then it means nothing happened between you and your fellow travelers. So it is everywhere I go. It doesn’t matter if there are thousands of people hiding in every building; the ones they are most careful about keeping hidden are the children and the young adults, and they never show us their faces.
That’s what the enemy wants them to do.
We’ve been walking down these streets for days without stopping until finally, we reach a place that looks familiar to me, and I think, “This must be it.” The front door is locked, but we manage to break it open easily with a few kicks. Inside, we find the place empty.
There are no beds. Some chairs stand near the window. In the middle of the room, a pile of broken bottles makes a circle, like an altar made with a dead body. At the center of the collection of broken wine cups and glasses and beer bottles lies something small and white. It isn’t moving anymore, but there’s still a faint flicker in its face. I pick up the thing. Its skin is cold as ice.
“What is it?” asks my friend. He reaches forward, as though he wants to touch the little corpse, but he stops himself.
I say, “A baby,” but that isn’t quite right. It’s something else, but I can’t put my finger on what it reminds me of. The child has a round head, like all human infants, except its hair is red rather than blond. Its limbs are thin, and its hands look small, like a girl’s fingers. And when I run my hand over its body, the thing feels soft as velvet.
“That’s not possible.” My friend shakes his head. “No way a human could have given birth to anything like that.”
There are three or four women among us; two of them are pregnant. Only one of them carries her stomach under the clothes. Most of us keep the truth to ourselves. If they found out you knew, you’d be punished as a traitor, even if it wasn’t true.
I’m the only one who has a chance at making it out alive, so I keep quiet. But my friends are different, they don’t care. We’ll fight together against whatever they throw at us. As we stand in the doorway, we watch the soldiers going in and out of the house below.
They have their own weapons, which they use to bash open the doors of other homes. Sometimes they set fire to the houses. It’s as if their orders are to burn away everything in sight as though it were nothing more than kindling.
I hear the shouts of men who are running ahead, calling out for others to join in. I see how excited they are. They want to be heroes, to prove once and for all that they aren’t cowards. One of the soldiers spots us as we’re trying to hide, and he laughs as though we’re a joke. We’re so frightened we hardly know what to do next.
My friends decide that we should try to escape while the enemy is distracted by the blaze that they’re creating. I agree with this, so we start making our way toward the main street. There are soldiers everywhere, so it takes a long time before we get anywhere at all.
But when we finally arrive at the street, the flames of the burning house catch hold of our clothes, and they begin to glow yellow instead of red. We have to turn back and run the other way because we are afraid it might draw attention from someone coming toward us.
After a short distance, we come upon another building. Our feet pound on the ground until we find a path that goes inside through the front door. A young woman is waiting for us in the foyer. She smiles at me.
“How nice, you’re just in time,” she says. “The food is ready now.”
She opens her mouth and shows me the food: a piece of meat on a slice of bread, with a sauce made of some sort of grain. When I sit down beside her, I tell her, “They’ve caught us.” But she only looks confused for a moment and then sits back with a satisfied smile. “Don’t worry,” she tells me. “I’ll make sure they won’t follow us in.”
We sit there eating as if we’ve done nothing wrong, pretending that it isn’t our responsibility whether the soldiers follow us or not, but the whole time I’m thinking, Don’t let them! I have to believe we can get away.
“It will be hard to get out again,” whispers my friend who was hiding in the cellar.
The woman sitting beside me is watching me eat. “You needn’t worry,” she says. Her voice sounds as though she means what she’s saying. “Everything here is safe. Come with me to my home.” She stands up and holds out her hand. I take it and am pulled gently along behind her. I feel as though I’m leaving everything important behind, but I’m powerless to change things, so I have no choice.
In the foyer, I see another man. He has been crying, although I cannot see him well enough to know why. His eyes are puffy and he’s shivering. I ask if he’s sick, and he nods his head slowly. I go to him, kneel beside him, and take his hands into mine.
“Are you hurt?” I whisper, and he shakes his head. So I kiss both of his hands, one after the other. This makes him laugh, and he thanks me. When I look up, the woman is gone. She has vanished without a sound.
We don’t understand where she has gone until later—that night or sometime early tomorrow morning, perhaps—when we come across a note on the floor of the kitchen. The words are barely legible as if the writer had hurriedly scribbled them down before disappearing herself: “If you come this way, you’ll see the light.”
I wonder how we are supposed to follow such a vague message, and what the woman is trying to tell us. We search the whole house for the woman but she was nowhere to be seen. All we can do is hope that somewhere in this place of darkness and despair something glimmers of hope.
And then we find the stairway that leads upstairs, and suddenly I remember the stories I’d heard about the upper regions of buildings being far more comfortable than those below. We climb the stairs, two at a time, and reach an open hallway with windows that look out over the rooftops.
It’s so bright that we almost fall back, but there is another corridor beyond, filled with bookshelves and benches where people read quietly. I look around to see if anyone is there, but there’s nobody to be seen.
My friends have come to a stop when I call them. They seem to be looking everywhere in vain. My hand falls on the door of a room that lies between us and the corridor. It has no window, but it seems like a good idea to check inside.
The door slides open, and I step inside, wondering if I am right to trust in this empty space when I hear my name called.
“Sister!”
When I stand up straight, I see myself standing in the center of a large room, which is lit by lamps. In front of me stands my friend from the cellar. There are four men in dark clothes behind him, all armed and staring at me with hostile expressions. Behind them, I see a figure I recognize: Sister Nivedita.
“Where did you take me?” I cry.
Naveda laughs. “You don’t understand anything yet. Sit down,” she says to me. “Have some tea.”
One of the armed men steps forward and offers me a cup. At first, I refuse to accept it, but then I realize that she wants me to drink. I lift the cup and take a sip. It tastes hot and bitter; I have never tasted anything like it, but it feels good going down my throat.
“Tell me,” I say.
“I think you should listen,” says Naveda. “I want you to hear what happened when my mother died.”
***
“You see,” says Sister Nivedita, “there was an order that came down to kill all the women. That meant you too. They sent for me because they knew I could be trusted not to betray them.” Naveda stares at me and smiles. “And I told them what you wanted to hear—”
She sits down beside me and continues: “They thought you were dead—you, and many others. But your friends found you, and they took you out of the country while the war raged and destroyed everything. And now, because you’ve come here, you’re part of history. You’ve come full circle—the end of the war, the beginning of peace.”
I stare at her in disbelief and horror. She is telling me that we were brought here because of the letter that arrived on a whim? That I didn’t die in the streets but was taken away from danger and put on display, and now that the conflict is over, it’s only fitting that someone should write a story about it? What kind of nonsense is this?
“You mean that there might be a book out there?” I gasp.
“It’s a good thing you asked,” says Sister Nivedita, laughing again. “There’s a new order that came down yesterday. The world has changed completely since the old one fell, and now there’s talk of permanent peace. The first step is to get rid of all our enemies. Our new allies will do the rest.”
Naveda looks at me expectantly, but I’m still speechless.
“Do you know who you are?” she asks. “You can tell the world, Sister! Tell them!” She claps her hands together in excitement. “You’re Sister Nivedita, the only real person in all history. You’re not human, nor beast, or angel—but you’re all three. Do you see?”
“No… no, I don’t…”
“Of course you do. Your eyes glow like the sun! It’s written in the stars that this must happen, just as surely as the sun rises and sets. And your friends, too. You have a destiny.”
But I don’t feel different. I look around me at these unfamiliar surroundings, and I feel like a stranger in the place where I used to live. The walls here are covered in pictures, and I remember how they looked before the war when every house had its own garden.
Now it’s a strange collection of rooms with no windows. One of the armed men walks in front of us to guide us further into the building. We follow him through narrow corridors and empty halls that smell of dust and mildew.
When they bring us to a room that appears to have once been a kitchen, it takes me a moment to realize why I find it so familiar. This is exactly the way my old room appeared; in fact, the walls seem almost identical, although the furniture is all different. Only the paintings are similar enough to set my heart racing.
“What did you expect?” cries Naveda, when she sees the look on my face. “This is where all the magic happens, my dear.”
A few moments later, a young man comes out of another corridor and walks toward me, carrying something heavy in his arms. It is hard to tell in this light, but his skin has the same golden color as Naveda’s. He has black hair and dark eyes, and he smiles at me. There is no fear or suspicion in his expression.
“Are you ready?” he asks me softly.
I nod.
The man sets the object down on a table, places his hand above it, and speaks a word. A spark jumps up suddenly between the tips of his fingers, and then he pulls me close, holding both my wrists against the back of his head.
His lips meet mine, and I feel a sudden heat rushing through my body. He smells like cinnamon and nutmeg. My eyes grow wide, and the next thing I know, I am falling through endless space.
“Welcome, Sister.”
When I come to myself, I am lying on the floor of an enormous room with hundreds of people sitting cross-legged on the ground. Their skin glows as if lit by lanterns. The air is scented like incense, and they’re all staring at me.
“Who are you?” cries someone in front. “Tell us what you are! Is it true that you really are Sister Nivedita?”
“Yes.”
“How wonderful!” says another voice. “Can you walk now?”
“Walk?”
Naveda laughs. “That’s not a real question, is it? But yes, Sister, you can stand up now. Come on. Don’t be shy.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Don’t worry, Sister! We’ll make it up to you, we promise! Just sit here for a while and take it easy.”
She leads me out of the chamber, and I am led down yet another corridor. Soon we arrive at a door guarded by two men wearing uniforms I’ve never seen before. They stop us, and I am shocked to find that they are looking at me suspiciously.
“Sister, what is your name?” one of them asks.
“Dhriti.”
He shakes his head at me. “You’re not from around here. Where did you come from?”
“From the other side.”
The man nods slowly. “And what does ‘other’ mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’d like you to stay behind. Please step outside.”
As soon as I’m allowed to pass, Naveda pushes me gently ahead of her. She tells me to wait in the entrance hall until someone comes out to talk to me. While waiting, I notice a painting on the wall that has an inscription underneath: “Our first Mother.”
I am so happy and relieved to see Naveda again, and after a time she comes down the stairs, accompanied by a woman who carries a small basket.
“It’s all right, Sister,” says Naveda. “I brought you some things.”
The woman looks at me with kind eyes.
“Thank you.”
Naveda gives me several changes of clothes and a pair of sandals made of leather. Then she takes a jar of honey out of the basket and offers me the comb. I put it to my lips without hesitation. Honey, I think, tastes just like home.
“They’ll be waiting for you upstairs, Sister,” says Naveda, turning away. “You needn’t worry about being bored – we have many interesting projects going on here at the House.”
The End