Day 18: The Autumn Dance

Ovid wrote that everything changes, and nothing is ever wholly lost.

Emil would not put it so grandly. He said, "The hall is the same. The floor is new."

Dear Grandmother,

There was a harvest supper in the village hall on Saturday, and afterwards the tables were pushed back, and an old man with an accordion and a girl with a fiddle played for anyone who wanted to dance. I did not dance. I sat by the door with Emil, who had come for the soup and stayed for the music, and somewhere between the second tune and the third, he began to tell me about your autumn dance. The hall smelled of wet coats and fried onions, and someone had put a jug of red leaves on the edge of the stage.

It was the same hall, he said, fifty-eight years ago, in October. Paper lanterns on strings, a barrel of cider, the whole town. You came with some of the mothers of your pupils, and you wore a green dress with a white collar, and everyone looked at you because you were new, and the teacher. You did not dance at first. You stood by the wall and talked to the mothers, very politely, holding a glass of cider that you did not drink.

"I asked her for the third dance," Emil said. "Not the first. The first is for showing off. The second is for your sister. The third is the one you mean." It was a waltz. You told him you did not know how, and he said that was all right, he would count, and you only had to listen.

I asked what you were like as a dancer. "Terrible," he said, "for the first minute." You stepped on his foot twice and said sorry both times, like a pupil who has blotted a clean page. Then, he said, you stopped looking down at your feet and looked over his shoulder at the lanterns instead, and after that you did not miss a step.

I asked him to show me how he counted. He looked at me for a moment as if he thought I might laugh at him, and then he tapped it out on the table with two fingers. One, two, three. "The one is long," he said. "You step big on the one and small on the two and three. Like rowing. Pull, then rest, rest." He hummed a few bars, very quietly, a slow tune that went up and turned over and came down. I did not know it.

At home that night I tried it in your kitchen, with the broom as my partner, which you would have found very funny. Big step, small, small. It works best, I discovered, if you think of stirring a pot: one long stroke around, then two little ones at the side. You could try it anywhere there is a little floor and a tune in threes. After a minute my feet had the shape of it, and I understood why he said it was like rowing.

The waltz was once thought a shocking dance, long ago, because couples held each other and turned together instead of standing apart in lines and touching only fingertips. Older people warned that it would make the young giddy and foolish. Then it became the dance of every wedding and every village hall, the one grandparents dance carefully at the end of the evening while the children watch. Many new things go that way, I think: first improper, then ordinary, then precious.

Emil said that after the third dance you danced the fifth with him too, and the eighth, and then the music stopped, and he walked you home along the lake path to the teacher's house, with the frost just beginning on the reeds. At your door you shook his hand. "Like a teacher," he said. "Very correct." And then, he said, you laughed, and went in.

That was all he told me. He finished his cider, stood up and said he had to be home for nothing in particular. The accordion was playing something fast, and the children were spinning each other round in the middle of the hall.

Ovid was right, I think. The lanterns are gone, and the cider barrel, and the green dress. The floor of the hall is new. But in an old man's two fingers on a table the count is still there, long, short, short, and tonight it is in my feet as well.

Your Vera

Day 19: A Waltz Hummed

Horace wrote: seize the day, and trust as little as you can in tomorrow.

The children like to shout the first half of that line. I have only lately understood the second.

Dear Grandmother,

I came to see you today on the early bus, with a jar of Mrs Varga's barley soup in my bag and no letters. Hanne met me at the door of Room Twelve and said you had had a good morning. You had eaten breakfast by the window and watched the birds on the feeder, and you had told her twice that it was going to snow, though it is not.

You were in your chair with the blue blanket over your knees. When I came in, you looked up with the polite smile you give to visitors and said, "Oh, good, Miss. Have the children gone home?" I said yes, they had all gone home. You said that was good, because the lane gets dark early now. Then you asked if I had remembered to bank the stove. I said I had.

Your room is small and clean, and your own things are on the shelf: the photograph of Grandfather in his good suit, a china dog that my mother brought from your old flat, a jug of dried lavender. By the door someone has written the day of the week on a little board, in large letters, and changes it every morning. You looked over at it several times while I was there, as if to make sure it had not moved.

I had planned a great many things to say. I had planned to tell you about the register, and Mrs Varga, and the plum cake. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed with the soup jar in my lap, and after a while I said only one word. I said, "Emil."

You did not answer. Your hands, which had been folding and unfolding the edge of the blanket, went still. You looked at the window for a long time. Then, very softly, you began to hum. It was a slow tune that went up and turned over and came down, and I knew it at once, because Emil had hummed it for me in the village hall and tapped it out on a table with two fingers. One, two, three. You hummed it through twice without a single wrong note, and while you hummed, you reached across and took my hand and held it firmly, in time.

When you stopped, you said, "That is a nice tune. Do you know it?" I said I was learning it. You said, "It is easy. The first step is the long one." Then Hanne came in with the tea trolley, and you asked her if it was going to snow.

Afterwards, in the corridor, Hanne told me that this happens often. Music, she said, is usually among the last things to go. Songs learned when we are young seem to be kept somewhere deeper and safer than names and dates, and the staff sing with the residents every afternoon for that reason. She said, "Bring her tunes, not questions. A question asks her to find something. A tune lets her go there on her own."

So that is the small thing I tried, and will try every time now, and that anyone could try with someone they love who is forgetting. Do not ask, "Do you remember?" Hum the first line of something old, and wait. If nothing comes, that is all right too. You have given them a minute of music, and that is not nothing.

I have been thinking about why old songs stay. A tune is not kept in one place, like a name on a card. It lives in the body as well, in breath and in the movement of hands and feet, the way a cook who has made the same bread for fifty years can knead it in the dark. The words may go. The count stays.

I left the soup with Hanne for your supper, and she promised to warm it in a pan and to tell you that it came from one of your pupils. I think you will like that, even if you do not know why. On the bus home, the lake town was already dark when we came over the hill, and the windows were yellow.

Horace told us to seize the day. I used to think that meant doing a great deal. Today it meant sitting on the edge of a bed for three minutes of a waltz, holding a hand that held mine back, and asking nothing more of tomorrow.

Your Vera