As in hemophilia (page 10)
Janosch A. Prufrock was walking with a much younger man along the beach. It was night, and the mews had settled into their sleeping places in the sand, among the dune grasses.
“The princess from Chang’an has asked for your help in taking her to the Edelstone,” Janosch A. Prufrock spoke, “and you have refused.”
The young man’s hands tightened into fists, and white spots appeared on his cheeks. His blond hair took on a silvery tone in the starlight.
“If you have refused her, then I can have no hope of persuading you,” Janosch A. Prufrock continued simply, “And yet…”
He paused, then went on, but seemingly on a different topic.
“Have you seen Ludwig’s Lust?”
Emil Hering shook his head.
“A veritable treasure of Mecklenburg! A country house, nay a palace, built by Herr van Beethoven for himself in his prime.”
He paused. And then, “I saw van Beethoven play the pianoforte when he was a boy still, in Bonn. I had stopped to get my clothes mended and shoes made, for three tailors and a shoemaker lived in the front of the house the van Beethovens rented rooms from on Bonngasse Alley.”
He paused again, while Emil listened intently.
“Van Beethoven the father had beaten young Ludwig again, and locked the boy in the basement. Finding Ludwig van Beethoven not talented enough as he was, the father lied about the boy’s age, revising it downward, to make the boy appear more a prodigy, more like Mozart, who had given concerts at an even younger age. The boy Ludwig was well-aware, locked in the basement, that his father didn’t find him good enough as he was.”
He didn’t look at Emil as the two of them walked in the darkness on the beach, their bare feet stepping through the moonlit waves, but his words were soft, “If even Ludwig van Beethoven was not good enough for his father, perhaps that gives the rest of us the perspective of letting our father’s opinions of us be washed away, gone with the wave.”
Emil felt as if tears would come, but he willed them back, instead swallowing the hotness down his pale, tight throat. He knew Janosch A. Prufrock was trying to get him to take him to where the meer-maids sing, each to each, but his words had ripped open a wound he long forced closed. Now the blood flowed again as in hemophilia.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~