2027 Best Small Fictions Nominee: Letter About a Song by Brecht De Poortere

Letter About a Song

by Brecht De Poortere

from Issue 21

Dear Sir,

I am near the end of my wits. For seventy years, I have searched without finding. I have travelled the world several times over, I have spoken to many people but no one knows the answer to my question. My request is a very specific one and I was hoping you might be able to help. You are my last resort.

It all goes back to when we lived in Africa, in the Congo to be precise, and I was just a child. We led a simple life in a place hours removed by dirt road from the nearest city, inaccessible during the rainy season, on the edge of a forest. We grew our own food and kept chickens. A generator provided electricity from dusk until after supper.

When night had fallen and the table had been cleared, and kerosene fueled our lamps and fridge, my father would switch on the battery-powered radio, the reception terrible, and through the crackle and pop, the whistling and the fading, we’d listen to the Marche Lorraine—“Les Gaulois sont dans la plaine”—announcing the news from Leopoldville.

It left me cold. Cold as the translucent geckos glued to the windows, their beady eyes on the bugs that thumped against the glass, desperate in their search for that little bit of light to guide them through the thickness of the African night.

Then came the moment of enchantment I had been anticipating all day, that magical hour after the news when my father tuned into another station, when out of the speakers floated the soft voice of a woman introducing “Radio Brazzaville, poste national français” and, even though I was little, I imagined that woman more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen, than anyone I would ever see.

Listen, that voice seemed to say, listen, and so I did. There aren’t many times in life we truly listen. Some say we only listen once, as a child. Then for the rest of our lives all we do is remember, or try to.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter.

A piece of jazz in minor scale would come on after the woman had spoken, a song so sweet it embodied all the happiness of my childhood: the equatorial breeze blowing through the window screen, the smell of rain or ripe papaya—depending on the season—the flutter of the flying termites, the croaking of the frogs down by the river, the plink plonk of the night guard playing his psalms on the ikembe, the flicker of the Petromax, the faint radiance of the mosquito coil burning in a corner. No tune since has carried so much.

Yet I have no clue what it is: I know neither the title of the piece, nor its composer, nor the band that performed it. And I haven’t heard it since.

I am an old man now, it’s funny how that happens. You don’t notice change when you stare at it every day. Yet ageing is time passed at twice the speed, like turning the pages of a book: each one takes you not only further away from the beginning, but also nearer to the end.

Ever since leaving the Congo, I have searched for that tune, that melody, that part of me that’s been left behind. I dabble in music a little myself and I have a good ear. Sometimes I play a fragment I think I remember, but it’s like trying to peel moonlight off a lake: all I can muster is some plaintive notes that bear little resemblance to the original joy—painful reminders that what I seek is perhaps not to be had.

Sir, not only am I near the end of my wits, I am near the end of my life. A man my age has far more past than future. I am nothing but a dried flower, pressed hard between the pages of life, with only a little fragrance left.

I was hoping you might be able to help me find that song, point me in the right direction, give me a hint perhaps. Then maybe, before life fades, before the final curtain call, I might be able to travel to that place one last time, let out all the sorrow that is dammed up inside me, and finish on a beautiful note.

I thank you with all my heart.

The child inside a seventy-year-old body.