Twenty years old. The year I first met you. I was thrown into the world with nothing. It was neither by my own will nor anyone else’s. Leaving the orphanage, becoming your piano teacher, all of it was like that. The adult world I was facing for the first time was so unfamiliar that I stood there hesitating, and by the time I looked up, everything had already been decided.

And yet you, a little girl who still had a runny nose, had the right to decide your own life from that very moment. Able to do what you wanted, able to have what you wanted. Danyu Astrid was a child born with that rare kind of fortune. 

That fortune was so considerable that if she wished, she could even buy a person. Someone might say that slavery had been abolished hundreds of years ago, but this was a world where a few contracts could still turn someone cleverly into a slave. Certain preconditions were required, of course. Money and power. And naturally, Danyu Astrid was a child with more than enough of both.

My memory circled around the edges of those memories from when I was twenty. Between each hesitant step, the image of a young you surfaced, and with each turn of my head, the small ordinary days I had spent with you flickered past. Somewhere in those scenes there is surely music I wrote for you. And yet, strangely, it is like listening to a scratched record, noise ringing out between the notes and driving the melody away.

The notes drifting through the air are just beyond my reach. It feels like stretching just a little further would be enough to touch them. But no matter how hard I try, the notes only flee further away. For me, who had always been able to grasp any note I wanted at will, it was a deeply unfamiliar and unsettling experience.

“Teacher! Are you still asleep?”

A familiar voice broke through the notes I couldn’t catch. It was a rough, male voice that had no business being anywhere near music, and the scenes drifting through my mind scattered in an instant. The notes I had barely managed to gather vanished without a trace, and a hollow feeling washed over me, as it had to.

“Peter Klose. I’m fairly certain I told you not to come barging into my house until after lunchtime.”

“When do you think lunchtime was? The sun is already at its peak, Teacher.”

I shot a displeased look at the young man who had just stepped inside, and he grinned shamelessly and pointed at the window where sunlight was streaming in. Following his finger and looking at the window, the sun was indeed already hanging at the top of the sky. I couldn’t very well get angry at something that was true, so I looked at Peter with a sour expression, and his brown eyes quickly filled with satisfaction.

“Wow, the smell of cigarettes is really something. Danyu must have come by again.”

I was about to open my mouth to say something about that smug look on his face when Peter’s mouth opened first. He was quick on the uptake as a rule, and it was a common occurrence for him to swiftly change the subject the moment he sensed I was about to scold him, so the situation itself wasn’t surprising. What was unexpected was the name that came out of his mouth.

Peter Klose had become my student on Astaire’s recommendation, and since he was also a university classmate of Danyu’s, her name came up between us from time to time. But cigarettes and Danyu. By experience or by logic, there was no obvious connection between the two.

“What on earth do cigarettes have to do with Danyu?”

I scratched my head, baffled, and asked, and Peter opened his eyes wide as though he couldn’t believe I hadn’t known.

“Every time Danyu comes by, the house is always full of cigarette smoke for days afterward. It would be stranger not to notice. Just how much does Danyu get under your skin that you smoke this much when you barely smoke otherwise? She’s a real model of propriety at school, you know. Especially toward the male students, she’s so cold it’s something else. So when word got out that she was engaged to Professor Werner, the whole school was turned upside down. Wow, that Danyu Astrid! That was the general mood. Honestly, I had my eye on her too, so when I heard the news I was pretty gutted. But then again, when the other person is Professor Werner, you don’t exactly feel motivated to compete.”

“Be careful that doesn’t reach Astaire’s ears. If he finds out you had your eye on Danyu, he’ll lose his mind.”

“Wow, I’m touched. Teacher actually worrying about me.”

It had been a sincere warning, not a joke, but Peter was still smiling as though he hadn’t grasped the seriousness of it. I knew he was a bit of a scatterbrain despite his decent looks, but this oblivious. Still, I was soon able to understand his reaction when I heard what Peter said next.

“Well, it’s already too late anyway. I don’t know how he found out, but at some point that friendly professor started looking at me with the coldest eyes. I had no idea what was going on at first, but I figured it out later when I heard about the engagement. He knew I had my eye on Danyu. No wonder every single one of Professor Werner’s classes turned into a parade of C’s and D’s. I even got an F. And I thought I had perfect attendance and did reasonably well on the exams.”

Peter shuddered as though the memory still made his skin crawl. I looked at him with skeptical eyes, wondering whether Astaire would really stoop to something that petty, but he didn’t seem to be making it up. Well, thinking back to the look on Astaire’s face when he was watching Danyu just a few days ago, it wasn’t entirely impossible.

I gave a rough nod of reluctant acceptance, and Peter gave a light shrug.

“Well, it ended up making me give up on performing and turn to composition, so if anything I should be grateful. Trying it out, I found composition suited me better anyway. On top of that, he helped me study under Teacher, the greatest composer in the capital, so he’s a benefactor. A true benefactor.”

Just as Peter said, the reason I had taken him on as a student was entirely thanks to Astaire. The logic Astaire used to persuade me was peculiar: since I had once entrusted my student Danyu to him, it was only right that I now take in one of his students in return. 

I had no intention of taking on a student to begin with, since composition wasn’t really something that could be taught, and I tended to write pieces without much deliberate thought myself. So if it hadn’t been for Astaire’s persuasion, I never would have taken Peter in. In that sense, Astaire was indeed Peter’s benefactor. Assuming, of course, that becoming my student was a good thing.

“Anyway, could you at least air the place out? I’m going to suffocate in here. And the trash on the floor today as well. What is all this?”

Peter looked at the papers scattered across the floor with a disgusted expression. They were all sheets I had crumpled up after trying and failing to write a piece.

“Peter Klose. If you came here just to nag me, you can leave. I don’t have the energy to argue with you today. And those are trash, like you said, so throw them all away.”

The moment I saw the papers, the memory of the frustration of not being able to catch the notes came rushing back and my head began to ache. I scrunched my face in irritation and waved my hand, and Peter, looking at my face properly for the first time, startled and widened his eyes.

“You didn’t sleep? And now that I look, these empty bottles.”

Peter reached out and picked up the bottles that had been piled carelessly around the papers. He brought the mouth of one of the clear, completely empty bottles to his nose, and immediately frowned and pushed it aside. It had been a fairly strong liquor, so the smell must have been no joke. I gave him a casual grin, and Peter’s face quickly twisted into disbelief.

“Alcohol and cigarettes. You’re going to run yourself into the ground.”

It was the kind of muttering clearly meant to be overheard.

“Peter Klose.”

“Yes, yes. Understood. I’ll just clean up quietly.”

I called his name in an irritated voice and Peter immediately threw up both hands. Not wanting to risk being thrown out, he pressed his lips shut and swung the window wide open. Fresh air rushed in through the opening. 

As the clean air reached my foggy mind, the throbbing in my head seemed to ease somewhat. Maybe I’ll go for a walk, for the first time in a while. While I was turning that thought over, Peter was spreading out the crumpled papers on the floor and looking at them.

“Are you already writing a new piece? It’s been less than a month since you debuted the piece at Professor Werner’s recital. You’re moving a little faster than usual.”

“Ah, that one isn’t a piece for a recital.”

“That’s unexpected.”

I turned my gaze from the window back to Peter, and he was wearing a strange expression that said he genuinely found it unexpected.

“What’s unexpected about it?”

“I always thought you only made music to show people.”

“It’s not that I make music to show people. I just think there’s no particular point in making it if I’m not going to show it. Too much trouble.”

“Isn’t that the same thing in the end? And music being too much trouble. I always figured that for someone like Teacher, with music flowing out of your head so naturally, composing must be incredibly enjoyable.”

A dry laugh escaped me before I knew it at Peter’s guileless words. Enjoyable. Composing was something I could never define with a word like that.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Do you find talking enjoyable? Breathing?”

“To call it enjoyable is a bit much. I don’t really think about it. Who does something like talking or breathing because they find it enjoyable? You just do it because you need to in order to live.”