Nocturne
A letter is finished by its sender and its recipient alone. The postman is nothing more than a go-between.
Neither the one who sends nor the one who receives knows his face. Young or old, of whatever birth, they look in the end only at the postbox and the letter box.
So the root of my present agony was, essentially, that I was not a postman.
I could not simply hand the letter over.
Mrs. Diemann—Ranya Diemann—had crossed into the Empire just before the war, and now that the war was over, an ordinary imperial subject had virtually no way to post a letter to the Federation.
In a word, this letter was as good as proof that I was a stowaway out of the Empire.
"……."
I had to be careful.
I was no postman, and though Werner did not know me through and through, he knew enough to make a report to the police and the courts.
So this was my plan.
A letter must never pass from person to person. It had to travel by some anonymous intermediary, or be slipped in secret among his things.
Today I meant to do the latter.
The room, as it happened, had gone quiet. Some were asleep; others were drawing smoke on the terrace a floor above, so few people remained in the hall.
I looked at Werner.
He sat in a single armchair with his legs crossed, the very picture of arrogance.
It looked ordinary enough at a glance, but whether the drink had risen in him a little, he had not stirred from that posture in some ten minutes.
Now was the moment.
I drew out the letter and approached him with care.
Behind the sofa sat a familiar bag—the same one I had seen on the day the entrance results were posted.
I shifted so he would not notice, and let the letter fall into the bag.
No larger than my palm, it slid neatly into the leather.
The job was done.
"……Hah."
A breath of relief escaped me of its own accord.
How to put it—it had ended far more easily than I expected.
When Werner found the letter someday, he might wonder who had done it, but at least that wonder would not grow into suspicion of where I came from.
And yet my heart was hammering over a thing like this.
I meant to leave with the feeling of a thief who had finished a perfect crime, then stopped short.
Come to think of it.
Did Werner even know that Mrs. Diemann existed?
"……."
Eight years.
Eight years since word of his mother had ceased. In that span the Empire's lands had been buried under the ravages of war; it would not have been strange if he had simply assumed she was dead.
And eight years ago he would still have been a boy in his early teens—not an age for fully grasping a war between nations, or the affairs of a house.
Then I could press the guess one step further.
Werner believed his mother lost, and perhaps did not even know she was of the Empire.
I narrowed my eyes.
If that were so, then by giving him this letter I would be branding him mixed blood of the Empire. That was a matter to reconsider.
I was still hovering there, irresolute, behind the armchair when Werner moved.
"Eugene!"
"Wh—what?"
"You. That hat. You said it was a gift, didn't you?"
I nodded slowly, and he went on with a grin.
"Looks rather like my mother's handiwork."
"……!"
"Ah. It doesn't mean anything. There's a clumsy shape peculiar to hats made by hand, and I feel it in that one too. I've got something similar myself. Wore it as a child, though, so there's no chance it fits my head now."
He laughed out loud, the wine clearly in him.
I wanted to laugh with him, but the corners of my mouth would not obey.
In the end I spoke with my face set hard.
"I'd say it's a coincidence. Speaking of which—is your mother well?"
"I don't know."
"What?"
"Mother's an imperial, you see. She crossed into the Empire a month or two before the war, of all times, and they say contact simply broke off."
"……I'm sorry."
"No apology needed. It's a surprisingly common story these days, isn't it?"
My guess had been wrong.
Werner knew all of it.
And he was someone who could say outright that he was of imperial mixed blood. Then again, people called him a wastrel often enough—what would he have to fear?
One thing was strange, though. His manner sounded less like something he had seen himself than like something he had been told.
That question resolved itself at once.
"Father died a few weeks after the war began as well. Unluckily, he was with a front-line unit in the very first days, when the losses were worst."
"……!"
"The ones who sat me down after I'd lost both parents overnight, made me understand what had happened, and took me in and raised me—those were the patrons of the Nocturne Club. Father was a founding member, they say. This place is as good as my house now."
Mrs. Diemann had said her husband was a soldier.
Yes. If anything, this had always been the more likely story.
"That I would never see Mother again. The news that Father had fallen. I had to hear all of it here, in the Nocturne Club."
Werner's face hardened by degrees. Cheap wine, it seemed, had not been enough.
When his mouth opened again, I wanted to cover my ears.
"Hahahaha!"
"Two violins out—anyone here who can play cello?"
Some time passed, and the room heated again as quickly as before.
No—if anything, it seemed livelier.
Those who had been debating with spit flying each took up an instrument, and even the ones who had dropped off woke to a bizarre quartet and roared with laughter.
That Werner played the viola was a mild surprise.
Even the composer they called Professor Mahler joined them, baton in hand.
By the time the painter, unable to bear the racket, finally went outside, I alone remained apart from the mood.
Around then I tried to pack a pipe.
Drink is not my taste. The pipe was all I had to lean on.
I hadn't brought any leaf, so I used what the Nocturne Club kept on hand, tamping it into the bowl with little taps and setting a flame to it bit by bit.
Of course I had no idea how tightly to pack it or how to light it, and going by feel alone, it would not take. Only after I had killed the fire four or five times did I surrender.
"Director Lovelace. If you were going to recommend the thing, you might at least have taught me how to use it……."
In the end I had no choice but to seize the bottle at my side and drink it down. Only then, I thought, could I forget what Werner had said and keep up with the room.
"Khh."
Still not to my taste.
It was not merely that it tasted poor. I seemed weak to liquor itself, for two or three glasses' worth was enough to set my vision swimming. Unable to hold myself upright, I dropped onto the sofa as if falling into it.
"Hahaha!"
"Again! In four-four—"
I closed my eyes to a quartet whose time was a wreck and whose pitches were a wreck.
Thought sank.
Empire and Federation. Federation and Empire.
The stranger who had come from the Empire into the Federation was me.
I had drawn a great many looks in that time—glances from the side, stares with nothing hidden, and often enough a hatred that came with words and acts.
But I knew, and they knew, that such hatred was superficial. I was unpleasant for a moment and done with it; they filled a little of their superiority and were done with it. That was their limit, and the reason they could not, in essence, touch me at all.
Someone close was different.
Family, the greatest problem, had been settled somehow by the ocean-wide forbearance of the Oslos—but the bonds one makes in a life are not only that.
Friends.
A lover.
The household I would build anew.
I tried to imagine it: people carrying a painful memory, learning where I came from, looking at ash-gray hair, and letting fall words like these.
—Hateful.
"Ah."
No.
I hated that. I hated it very much.
Fraussen was no longer a stop along the way. It was where I had to live, the ground on which I would stack new ties.
Then was I simply going to hear words like that someday?
The playing stopped.
Tipsy as I was, thought spread without a shore. Reason insisted this was groundless fear, a thing I could well change by my own effort, but it was not enough to hold back notions rising like storm cloud.
I rose slowly from the sofa.
The young men who had stopped playing had gathered again at the table before me, so I walked over and stood in front of them.
I still had the minimum sense not to let a secret slip.
"All of you."
Even so, I took off my hat and spoke with a measure of honesty mixed in.
"Look at my hair. Ash left after a fire in the hearth. A color everyone loathes, calling it the Empire's blood—don't you find it hateful?"
Their eyes turned to me.
I closed mine and waited for whatever came next, ready to take any words that were thrown.
But.
"An old argument."
"That again? We've been over it dozens of times. I'm sick of it."
"Which is another way of saying it's interesting enough to go dozens of times."
Far from the mood sinking, or anyone looking startled, they grinned as one and began, slowly, to raise their voices.
Then Werner shot to his feet.
"Right! Our newest member—Eugene Oslo, first of the Magic University—has brought us a proposition!"
"Wh—what?"
"Where does the inherent worth of a human being lie!"
At Werner's shout, some fifteen pairs of eyes snapped around at once.
"Ability, obviously. I still can't stand the bastards who prattle on about barbaric blood. It's always the ones with no ability at all who talk that way."
"The world we live in is right here, isn't it? Born into it, a person has no choice but to be bound as a slave to greater things! I don't see the affairs of nations as any exception."
"Originality."
"What?"
"A man with no mind of his own and no originality in his life is a corpse."
And then they put those voices, raised as high as they would go, to a furious argument—so fierce that my first question had long since been forgotten.
The one who had caused it all, Werner, stood beside me watching the spectacle and laughing as if his sides would split.
"……What's so funny?"
"Heh heh heh. Eugene. You don't find this funny? Look at them."
Only then did I properly take in how the young men were dressed.
Hats on, ties off, buttons undone, so their shirts were a thorough mess. And every one of them in mismatched shoes, arguing as if they were tap-dancing—a sight so absurd that ash-gray hair was nothing beside it.
"Why does the Nocturne Club have such an outlandish dress code?"
Werner chuckled as he answered.
"Office, birth, honor, standing—throw them all away. The moment the door of the Nocturne Club opens, we are nothing but intellectual clowns! A troupe of clowns whose only work is to laugh, to talk, and to argue."
"……Ha."
"You seem to have been thinking hard over what I said earlier. That I hate the Empire means exactly that, and nothing more. My mother was an imperial to begin with. What's a little hair color?"
He looked at me and laughed without a shred of shame.
"Magic is challenge."
"What?"
"A man who doesn't challenge is worthless. That's the only measure I use to judge a person! Gray hair or otherwise, it doesn't matter in the least. You're a man I've acknowledged."
I stared at him, mouth hanging open.
Reckless to the bone.
I understood in a breath why they called Werner the wastrel of the Fourth School.
Even so.
"……You really are out of your mind."
"I'll take it as a compliment."
As he had acknowledged me, I at last acknowledged him.
The second floor of Bar Prelude is a terrace reserved for the Nocturne Club, closed to ordinary guests.
I called Werner out there.
"Why here?"
"Werner."
I drew a sheet of paper from inside my coat and held it out to him.
"Don't ask anything."
The same sheet I had taken back out of his bag.
After I gave him the letter, I stood at the terrace rail and said nothing.
Winter wind brushed my cheek.
I struck a match from the box I had brought and carefully set the leaf inside the pipe alight. After several tries it began at last to burn, giving off smoke.
With the flutter of paper beside me for accompaniment, I set the pipe between my teeth and drew.
"……Hack. Cough!"
Each time I coughed, smoke burst out with my breath in every direction. Harsh enough to sting tears into my eyes.
I put the fire out in a hurry.
Neither drink nor tobacco suited me. Director Lovelace's advice—that I ought to bring them along to the Nocturne Club—had missed its mark in fine style.
As I thought.
It seemed I was not an adult yet.
The day I hung the black muffler back upon the coat rack, the calendar was already announcing the start of the summer term at Fraussen Federal Magic University.