Elfrieda travels to Oslo to study at seventeen, leaving home for what Yolandi understands as the last time. The departure joins public achievement to private rupture: Elfrieda is bound for a recital and advanced piano study, while her younger sister is left with a promise to write, a final image of her sister turning away in tears, and a family journey home that ends upside down in a ditch. Remembered by Yolandi, the scene also exposes the pressure of inherited trauma and the cost of leaving a community that fears what lies beyond it.

The Departure and Its Stakes

Elfrieda does not ordinarily give interviews. She once made an exception for Yolandi’s class newspaper, when Yolandi was eleven and her sister was preparing to leave home again, this time for good. The interview takes place in the family car on the way to the Winnipeg airport. Their parents sit in front, their father driving; the sisters share the back seat. Yolandi asks, “You’re never coming back, are you?” Elfrieda calls the question stupid, but its fear gives the exchange its real subject: not the details of a recital, but whether the sisters can remain part of one another’s lives across distance.

At seventeen, Elfrieda has already finished high school early, at Christmas. She has earned honours in everything, six scholarships for piano study, and a Governor General of Canada prize for the highest marks. The elders respond to that distinction with rage and fear. Her departure is therefore more than the next stage in a gifted musician’s education: it carries her beyond the authority of a community unsettled by her distinction and ambition. She is headed to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she calls the Wizard of Oslo.

Family History and the Wider Journey

A few weeks before leaving, Elfrieda casually says that, while in Europe, she might as well go to Russia to explore her roots. Her father nearly stops breathing and forbids it; she answers, “Yeah, I might. Why not?” The possibility reveals the gulf between the sisters’ curiosity and their parents’ dread. Their grandparents came from a small Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, and terrible violence there made even the mention of Russia difficult for their parents.

That fear has a history carried in silence. Plautdietsch is described as the language of shame, and Mennonites have learned to shoulder pain without speaking of it. Elfrieda’s paternal great-grandparents were murdered in a field beside their barn. Her grandfather survived by burying himself in manure, was later taken by cattle car to Moscow with thousands of other Mennonites, and was sent on to Canada. When Elfrieda was born, he warned her parents not to teach their children Plautdietsch if they wanted them to survive. Yolandi’s mother, later trained as a therapist, understands suffering as something passed from one generation to the next. The threatened journey toward Russia thus points toward a buried family past, even as the actual journey takes Elfrieda away from home toward Norway.

The Airport Farewell

On the drive, the sisters look out at fields and snow. Elfrieda wears a white leather choker with a blue bead and an army jacket; the car travels over black ice. Before she disappears behind the airport’s frosted security doors, she and Yolandi play one last game of Concentration, with leg-slapping and hand-clapping. Elfrieda calls her Swivelhead, a nickname for her habit of looking around for clues to what is happening, and asks her to write letters. Yolandi says they will be boring because nothing happens in her life. Elfrieda answers, “Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.” Then she grips Yolandi’s arms and insists that she has to write; Elfrieda is counting on her.

When the flight is called, Elfrieda releases her hold and pulls away. Their parents stand stricken but try to look brave, smiling and dabbing their eyes with tissues. Yolandi promises to write and tries to lighten the moment. Elfrieda signs off with “Adieu, Arrividerci!” but turns her head at the last second so Yolandi will not see her crying. Yolandi recognizes that hidden gesture as something to record in a future letter, under “Observations of Things Meant to be Hidden.” The scene makes correspondence a practical bond between the sisters: Elfrieda does not merely ask for news, but makes Yolandi responsible for noticing and preserving the ordinary details of a life.

The Journey Home and Its Aftermath

On the way home, their mother drives while their father lies in the back seat with his eyes closed and Yolandi sits beside her mother in front. Snow fills the headlights; the family can see only the falling flakes and a small stretch of road. Yolandi imagines the flakes as notes and signatures swirling over a little stave, the road visible ahead becoming one measure of music. Her mother says she will tap the brake to test whether the road is still icy. Before she can stop her, the car spins out of control and lands upside down in the ditch.

The crash abruptly breaks the farewell’s fragile order: the sisters have separated, the family is trying to return through dangerous winter weather, and the image of music gives way to physical loss of control. The remembered scene does not explain the crash’s consequences, but its placement binds Elfrieda’s departure to the family’s exposed vulnerability. Her last request—to write, because life need not be eventful to deserve attention—also shapes the narrative itself. Yolandi preserves the departure through small, specific observations: the blue bead, the handclapping game, the concealed tears, and snow moving across the road like musical notation.