The Song

I hummed a song for most of my life that I could not place.

I do not remember learning it. I do not know its name. If it had lyrics I never knew them, or I knew them once and forgot. It was a small song, not long. It repeated with a slight variation on the second pass and then came back around to the beginning. I hummed it in the garden when I was weeding. I hummed it in the kitchen when I was waiting for something to finish cooking. I hummed it on the walk to the village when I was alone, and I did not hum it when I was not alone, though I did not know at the time that I was choosing not to.

Anja asked me once what I was humming. I said I don’t know. She said you’ve been humming it for years. I said I don’t know. She laughed and went back to her work, and I kept humming, and she did not ask again.

It came from somewhere I could not find. I have tried to find it, in the time I have had to try, and I have not been able to. It is not a song from my childhood, or if it is, I do not remember the room where I first heard it. It is not from the village, because I never heard anyone else hum it. It is not from my father. It is not from the radio. It came from somewhere. I do not know where.

I hummed it on the bench outside the village on the afternoons when the kitchen was too warm and the children were too loud and I needed to sit somewhere and do nothing for an hour. The bench was wood, and the seat sagged in the middle, and I had the middle worn smooth from the hours I had spent on it. I hummed the song there. Sometimes I hummed it while looking at nothing. Sometimes I hummed it while watching a particular kind of bird that came to the field in the afternoons. I never knew what the bird was called. It never mattered to me to know. The bird and the bench and the song were all the same thing at a certain point. They were mine.

I carried Pavel home once, from a place he had fallen asleep in when he was four or five. I did not realize until I was halfway home that I had been humming the song while I walked. He was asleep on my shoulder. He did not hear it. He would not have remembered it if he had. But I hummed it to him without meaning to, and the walking and the humming and the weight of him were one thing.

Here, in the room I do not want to describe, I tried to hum the song again. Not out loud. I hummed it in my head. I found the shape of it. I found the turn in the middle where the variation comes in. I found the way it comes back around to the beginning. It is still there. It is in me.

I was told, by the listeners, that the song was a condition of the making. That it did not exist outside the room I lived my life in. We do not know where the tune is from in our records, they said, but it is yours now, and it will stay with you, and no one here will recognize it if you hum it aloud.

I am not going to accept the telling.

A man who did not hum this song across the decades of his life is not me. A man who hummed a different song, or no song, or a song he could trace to a first hearing, is not me. The song came from nowhere. The nowhere was me. I was the place where this song existed and was hummed.

I have told you about the song because the song is the only part of me that did not come from a person, and I have been telling you about people, and if I only told you about people you might think that people are all I am. I am also a song that came from nowhere and was hummed for forty years by a man in a garden. The man was me. The humming was mine.