of us wiggled under the mat, I suddenly remembered the day. "Merry Christmas!" I said, but my
greetings brought only derision: "Shuddup!" and "Go to sleep." During the long hours before dawn, a foot
hit me on the chin, an elbow knacked me in the groin, and a knee banged against my sore ribs. In a dark
corner of the pack, a girl groaned when Béka climbed upon her. Enduring their fitfulness, I waited for
morning, the letters pinned against my chest.
The rising sun reflected against a blanket of high cirrus clouds, coloring them in a spectrum that
began in brightness on the eastern edge and fanned out in soft pastels. Branches of the trees broke the
sky into fragments, like a kaleidoscope. When the red sun rose, the pattern shifted hues until it all
dis-sipated into blue and white. Up and out of bed, I savored the light growing strong enough for
drawing and writing. I took out my papers and pencil, put a cold flat stone in my lap, and folded the
mortgage statement into quarters. I drew a cross along the folds and made panels for four drawings. The
pencil was at once odd and familiar in my grasp. In the first panel, I created from memory my mother
and father, my two baby sisters, and myself, full-body portraits lined up in a straight row. When I
considered my work, they looked crude and uneven, and I was disappointed in myself. In the next panel,
I drew the road through the forest with the deer, the woman, the car, Smaolach and Luchóg in the same
perspective. Light, for example, was indicated by two straight lines emanating from a circle on the car
and extending outward to opposite corners of the frame. The deer looked more like a dog, and I dearly
wished for an eraser on the yellow pencil. In the third panel: a flattened Christmas tree, lavishly
decorated, a pile of gifts spread out on the floor. In the final panel, I drew a picture of a boy drowning.
Bound in spirals, he sinks be-low the wavy line.
When I showed my paper to Smaolach later that afternoon, he took me by the hand and made me
run with him to hide behind a wild riot of holly. He looked around in all directions to make sure we were
alone; then he care-fully folded the paper into quarters and handed it back to me.
"You must be more careful with what you draw in them pictures."
"What's the matter?"
"If Igel finds out, then you'll know what's the matter. You have to real-ize, Aniday, that he doesn't
accept any contact with the other side, and that woman ..."
"The one in the red coat?"
"He's a-scared of being found out." Smaolach grabbed the paper and tucked it into my coat
pocket. "Some things are better kept to yourself," he said, then winked at me and walked away,
whistling.
Writing proved more painful than drawing. Certain letters—B, G, R, W—caused my hand to
cramp. In those early writings, sometimes my K bent backward, S went astray, an F accidentally
became an E, and other errors that are amusing to me now as I look back on my early years, but at the
time, my handwriting caused me much shame and embarrassment. Worse than the alphabet, however,
were the words themselves. I could not spell for beans and lacked all punctuation. My vocabulary
annoyed me, not to mention style, diction, sentence structure, variety, adjectives and adverbs, and other
such mat-ters. The physical act of writing took forever. Sentences had to be assembled nail by nail, and
once complete, they stood no better than a crude approxima-tion of what I felt or wanted to say, a
woebegone fence across a white field. Yet I persisted through that morning, writing down all I could
remember in whatever words I had at my command. By midday, both blank sides of the paper
contained the story of my abduction and the adventures as well as the vaguest memories of life before
this place. I had already forgotten more than I remembered—my own name and the names of my sisters,
my dear bed, my school, my books, any notion of what I wanted to be when I grew up. All that would
be given back to me in due course, but without Luchóg's letters, I would have been lost forever. When I
had squeezed the final word in the last available space, I went to look for him. Out of paper, my mission
was to find more.
• C H A P T E R 7 •
At age ten, I began to perform in front of ordinary people. In appreciation of the nuns who allowed
me use of the school piano, I agreed to play as prelude to the annual Christmas show. My music would
usher the par-ents to their seats while their children shed coats and scarves for their elf and wise-man
costumes. My teacher, Mr. Martin, and I put together a program of Bach, Strauss, and Beethoven,
ending with part of "Six Little Piano Pieces" in honor of Arnold Schoenberg, who had passed away the