The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

Author:Marie Lu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

WHO DIRECTS THE ORCHESTRA?

Papa was pleased with how we performed in Frankfurt. Our purses were full again, our expenses for the trip covered. My father spent the night counting out the coins, nodding and smiling at Mama, and in the morning, he bought her a necklace hung with a sapphire teardrop at its base that shone like starlight. For Woferl he bought a tidy new notebook of paper, so that my brother could continue his relentless composing.

For me, he bought a new cap to match my dress.

He was so pleased that when a local count invited him to the opera, my father paid for us all to come with him.

Woferl and I had never been to an opera before. Papa had always been too worried that we could not sit through a performance without wriggling in our seats. So I tried to keep my composure and remember the lessons Mama had taught me. I needed to behave like a proper young lady. Still, my eyes wandered up to the opera house’s grand, arched entrances and white pillars, and down to its veined marble floors and rich velvet carpets. Gold banisters, curved stairways, and ceilings covered in rich paintings. The nobles attended these every week. I wondered if they still gaped in awe each time, and if the sights and sounds could still take their breaths away.

Woferl held my hand in earnest and stared so hard at the gentlemen and ladies we passed that I feared I would need to catch him if he fell. We settled with Papa and Mama in our own balcony. In a private box near us, a group of spectators had already taken out their playing cards and started a game, while down below, young men filed through the aisles to flirt with the ladies. They were all beautiful, I thought, women in wide, sweeping skirts and ruffled half-sleeves, their headdresses adorned with feathers, and gentlemen on their arms with shining jackets and bright, blinking canes.

As they flitted about below, I began to imagine that we were in the kingdom, and that I sat alone on a giant root of an upside-down tree, quietly looking on as the kingdom’s creatures—these colorful birds—gathered below me. I imagined them turned in my direction, staring back up at me, and smiling. I glanced at Woferl, who in turn watched the opera stage in anticipation. When I told him about my vision of the plumed birds, we grinned together at the absurdity of it and tried to think of strange names for them.

“Papageno,” Woferl declared one of the more ridiculous headdresses, and mouthed the name so comically, Pa-pa-pa-papageno, that he dissolved into giggles.

I hushed him even as we laughed conspiratorially. “You will get us kicked out.”

“No, I won’t,” he replied as we rose with the orchestra for the conductor. “I’ll be down there one day, and it will be me they clamor for.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will be before the orchestra,” he said, clapping along. “Someday I’ll write an aria, Nannerl—the most difficult aria ever written, and they’ll clap for me even louder than this.

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