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After green week ended, Magdalena washed the blankets thathad covered her windows. She was hanging them to dry when the composer reachedher house. While she fixed the blankets to her line with clothespins, thecomposer sat on a tree stump with his fiddle tucked underneath his arm. By nowhe had grown comfortable watching idly while she worked in the kitchen or theyard. He knew she would not want his help. He wasn’t made for that sort ofwork.
“You survived,” she said, and beckoned for him to follow herinside.
“Yes,” said the composer. He had been trained not tobelittle the superstitions of the rustics. Their mouths and doors would shut assoon as he did. “I thought today we might work on some more transposition ofthe ballads.”
“No,” said Magdalena. “Today I will sing for you.”
The composer reached for his wire recorder, trying not tolook as eager as he felt. He had seen how Sklep opened up when the threat ofgreen week ended. Sellers called out to passersby without taking care to keeptheir voices low. Children went to and from school in noisy, gleeful throngs.Men walked tree-shaded roads without looking nervously above them. ButMagdalena, the composer had feared, would stay closed.
The woman took a long sip of water and grunted to clear herthroat. Her arms hung at her sides and her chin pointed to the ceiling. Whenshe sang, she made no sound. The composer sat and listened, his wire recorderhumming uselessly in his lap. Triglav would have photographed the woman’s openmouth, her squinted-shut eyes, her flared nostrils. Triglav was dead on thefloor of the river. The composer remembered hearing the story of some Germanhack who wrote a piece made entirely of rests: four pages of silence.
Then, after a few minutes, sound began to come from the woman’sthroat. She sang in an undertone as thin as eggshell. The pitch of her voicewavered like an instrument being tuned. The composer could not have imitatedthe sound on his fiddle or pipe or piano. He could not have described it withmodern notation. He could only listen, holding the wire recorder to Magdalena’sopen mouth and wondering if the device would even catch the sounds she made.
“Did you hear me this time?” she said, when she wasfinished.
“A little,” he said. “Are you trained to produce such sounds?”
“I am too tired for questions,” said the woman. “Please, gobefore the rain comes.”
The composer packed up his belongings. As he reached thedoor, the sky opened and rain poured down.
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After green week, Triglav returned. He came out of the riverwith a wife and a lush, dark beard on his face. When he shaved, his skin wassmooth as a child’s underneath. He would say nothing of what happened on thefloor of the river. He moved like a sleepwalker.
Ewers of water rested on every flat surface in the smallhouse that Triglav shared with his new bride. The table, the bookcase, thestove top, the porch steps were all covered. Triglav’s wife did not offer thecomposer anything to drink when he came. The composer was accustomed by now tothe inhospitality of the people of Sklep, and took the liberty of filling hiscanteen from one of the kitchen table pitchers. He found the contents murky andsour, as if taken from still water.
“It’s not to drink,” said the wife.
The composer sat down and waited for Triglav to come home.His assistant’s wife sat down across from him. Occasionally she dipped adishrag in one of the pitchers and patted herself down with the swamp water,wetting her face and neck and hair. The composer lifted the camera from his lapand took photographs; the way the girl craned her neck, he could see that shewanted to be admired. After a while he asked if she liked to sing. She told himshe’d always thought songs were better left to people who didn’t have any inthem.
“Any songs?”
“Any blood,” she said.
Triglav came in the door humming. He asked the composer ifthey could go fishing soon. He said, “Alida tells me we won’t have raintomorrow.”
From beneath the wet rag draped across her face, Alida said,“There will be no rain until the stranger house is empty.”
Triglav said, “Does she think she can do that? Put us menunder siege that way?”
“She’s unmarried,” said Alida. “Of course she can.”
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At the side of the river, Triglav spoke in a low tone of whathappened during green week. He said he remembered those days as a dream. Hewatched while his existence swam above him. He had no power to stop things fromhappening on the floor of the river.
The girls could breathe, could swim. The girls’ limbs gotlonger, their incisors jutted out from their mouths; when they kissed the boyswho partnered them on the shore, it stung like salt rubbed in a wound.
He said the girls sang sometimes at night, the same ritualsongs they’d sung at Cemuk.
“You can only hear those sorts of songs properlyunderwater,” Triglav said to the composer. “They make so little sound above thesurface.”
The composer took out his notebook and made a note: damageto the inner ear necessary for ritual music to resonate as intended?
“I only wonder,” the composer said. “Why did you marry her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She almost killed you. She might still kill you.”
“Oh, that’s how things are in this town,” said Triglav.“Every woman sees her husband drowned before she marries him. All the girls aremade like that. They have to be, or they couldn’t make the rain come.”
His assistant believed in the power of the ritual now; thecomposer made a note.
“This power she has over you, you don’t mind it?” he said.
“Of course,” said Triglav. “They have us underneath for oneweek, just one week, and then we have them for the rest of their lives.”
“Or they have you,” the composer said.
The air was hot, for the sixth month had come and the summersolstice was close, yet still Triglav shivered. He said, “You shouldn’t
